Garam­ba Nation­al Park spans 5,133 km², with 9,662 km² of adja­cent domaines de chas­se, and is sit­u­at­ed in the north-east­­ern Demo­c­ra­t­ic Repub­lic of Con­go (DRC) bor­der­ing South Sudan. It is one of Africa’s old­est nation­al parks, des­ig­nat­ed in 1938, and in 1980 was declared a World Her­itage Site. But this crit­i­cal­ly impor­tant land­scape has had a trag­ic past and is often referred to as ground zero in the ele­phant poach­ing wars in Africa.

Once home to 22,000 ele­phants in the 1970s, mil­i­tarised poach­ers reduced the pop­u­la­tion to few­er than 1,200 today; and the north­ern white rhi­nos were poached to local extinc­tion in the ear­ly 2000s. Dur­ing three decades from the 1980s to 2000s, Garam­ba was over­run with rebel forces and heav­i­ly mil­i­tarised poach­ers, leav­ing human and envi­ron­men­tal dev­as­ta­tion in their wake.