And the other is that pretty much anything that causes people to clear out from an area can be beneficial for wildlife.” “One is that war is just a disaster for everything, including environments. “There are really two alternative hypotheses you can imagine,” he added. “We show that war is bad, but not as bad as you might assume,” said Robert Pringle, an ecologist at Princeton University and an author of the new study. War rarely leads to extinction, a finding that underscores the importance of post-conflict restoration efforts. Yet the northern white rhino is the exception. Compared to all other measured factors, conflict is the most consistent predictor of species declines. The findings, published in Nature, are both surprising and encouraging. Now researchers have published a quantitative study of war’s consequences for African animals - the first multi-decade, continentwide analysis. But the research is mixed: In some cases, conflict actually seems to aid animals. Many case studies have demonstrated that war can affect the survival of local populations, sometimes threatening entire species. That the rhinos’ habitat included a part of Africa plagued by human conflict was “desperately unfortunate,” said Kes Hillman-Smith, a Nairobi-based conservationist and author of “Garamba: Conservation in Peace and War.” “The endless wars there have taken their toll on all the wildlife in the region.” Today, after a succession of armed clashes, only three northern white rhinos survive - all transplants from a zoo in the Czech Republic, and all confined to a single Kenyan conservancy.

Poaching of northern white rhinos also resumed, despite conservationists’ best efforts. Armed militias reached the park less than a year later, and half of the park’s elephants, two-thirds of its buffalos and three-quarters of its hippos disappeared in three short months.

In 1996, when war broke out in what is now the Democratic Republic of Congo, just 31 northern white rhinos remained in Garamba National Park, the last stronghold of this endangered species.

Zone wars