- An attack on Upemba National Park that left seven dead reflects a broader pattern: rangers are increasingly exposed to violence across protected areas, often facing armed groups with limited support.
- The risks do not end with the attack itself. Many rangers work under sustained pressure, with repeated exposure to trauma, long absences from family, and little access to mental health care.
- Research shows these conditions can affect decision-making, performance, and retention, with implications not only for ranger wellbeing but for conservation outcomes.
- Some efforts are emerging—from counseling programs to support for rangers’ families—but they remain limited, raising a central question: whether the systems around rangers will change enough to sustain the people doing the work.
The gunfire began just before six in the morning.
At first, Christine Lain thought it might be a drill. Upemba National Park had run exercises like this before. Rangers had trained for the possibility that armed groups might one day come for the headquarters. The park had lived with that risk for years.
But the sound did not stop. It intensified.
“We immediately realized that the intensity of the firing was so high that it was certainly not a drill,” she later told Mongabay’s Ashoka Mukpo.
What followed lasted most of the day. By the end, three rangers and four civilian staff were dead. Survivors had hidden in a crawl space while armed men searched the building below them. Others ran through tall grass under fire, unsure who would make it out.
“Everybody got traumatized,” Lain said. “The whole station, everybody.”
The attack on Upemba in the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) was unusually large. It was also familiar.
Across the world’s protected areas, violence against rangers is no longer rare.
“214 of our colleagues have been killed in confrontations with militias intent on poaching and illegal invasions,” Emmanuel de Merode, the director of Virunga National Park in DRC, who was shot twice through the chest in an attack in 2014, told Mongabay last week.
In some places it is tied to organized poaching. In others, to insurgencies, land disputes, or politics that extend well beyond park boundaries. The details change. The pattern does not.
Rangers are often described as the first line of defense for wildlife. The phrase is accurate, but it leaves something out. It suggests a boundary between nature and threat. In practice, that boundary is not clear. Rangers work within it.
They patrol areas where armed groups move. They enforce rules that affect how people make a living. They carry out work that can place them in conflict with neighbors, former friends, or even family members. In some regions, they are asked to take on roles that look less like conservation and more like policing or security.
The nature of the work can change quickly.
At Upemba, the attackers were not the poorly equipped militia that rangers had dealt with before. They arrived in larger numbers, with heavier weapons, and with a level of coordination that surprised the park’s staff. Some wore uniforms. Some carried radios. Orders were relayed in real time.
There were 256 rangers assigned to the park, but only a fraction were present at the headquarters that morning. They were outnumbered. Some tried to hold their position. Others fled.
Two rangers were killed in the initial firefight. Another was executed after surrendering.
This is the part of the job most people see: the violence, the deaths, the headlines that follow. What is harder to see is what comes after.
In Virunga National Park, after a deadly attack in 2018, rangers returned to work the same day. There was no formal counseling. No structured support. “They had to go to work that afternoon, no counseling, just back to it,” Sean Willmore, founder of the Thin Green Line Foundation, which supports rangers worldwide, told Mongabay that year.
That pattern is not unusual.
Across regions, rangers describe a combination of risks that would be familiar in other high-risk professions: exposure to violence, long periods away from family, irregular schedules, and constant uncertainty. Many lack basic equipment. Some lack stable contracts. Pay is often low.
“The pressure is relentless, there is no respite,” Elise Serfontein, founding director of Stop Rhino Poaching, told Jan Tan for Mongabay.
Surveys suggest that a large majority of rangers have faced life-threatening situations on the job. Many have been threatened directly. Some have been attacked. Others have watched colleagues die.
“In Garamba, I lost 37 rangers to the LRA… in Zakouma, I lost 12 rangers,” Luis Arranz, the co-director of Salonga National Park, referring to the Lords Resistance Army. “This is part of the reality.”
These conditions are often treated as part of the work. In some cases, they are framed that way by the rangers themselves. Employment can be scarce and leaving is not always an option.
But treating it as normal does not reduce the cost.
A recent paper in Conservation Letters by Mahmood Soofi and colleagues argues that rangers face “extreme occupational and environmental stress,” placing them at high risk of psychological harm. The stress does not come only from violence. It also includes isolation, lack of institutional support, and the accumulation of responsibility without adequate resources.
Rangers often work in remote areas with limited access to healthcare or basic services. They may be tasked with duties that extend beyond conservation, including involvement in security operations or conflict situations. They operate in environments where decisions can have immediate consequences, and where mistakes can be fatal.
Over time, that exposure can affect how people think and respond.
Research on other professions shows that prolonged stress of this kind can affect decision-making, increase absenteeism, and reduce performance under pressure. The same mechanisms are likely at work here. The paper draws a direct line: poor mental health can weaken conservation outcomes.
This is not only about wellbeing. It impacts effectiveness as well.
And yet, formal support systems for ranger mental health remain limited. Counseling pathways are rare. Supervisors are often not trained to recognize psychological distress. In many countries, access to mental health professionals is already constrained, even outside the conservation sector.
In that context, what happened at Upemba does not end when the shooting stops.
Some of the staff saw colleagues killed at close range. Others spent hours hiding, waiting to be found. Many did not know if they would survive.
Those experiences do not resolve on their own. As Arranz put it in recent conversation with Mongabay: “For me, the hardest part of this job is not the logistics or the funding—it is having to take the body of a killed ranger back to his family.”
They can remain in the body and in memory, shaping how a person reacts to the next unexpected sound.
For some, the effects are immediate. For others, they surface later.
There is also a less visible form of strain that sits alongside the acute trauma.
Rangers often come from the same communities where enforcement takes place. This can create tension that follows them home. In some cases, they receive threats. In others, they are socially isolated because of their role.
They spend long stretches away from family. When they return, the transition is not always smooth. The work does not switch off.
The result is not always obvious. It can look like exhaustion, or irritability, or withdrawal. It can also look like resilience, at least on the surface.
Conservation discussions do not often include these experiences. They tend to focus on species, landscapes, and outcomes. The people doing the work appear as a category: rangers, guards, enforcement teams.
The details of their lives are often left out.
There are exceptions. Some programs have begun to address mental health more directly. At South Africa National Parks (SANParks), psychological support initiatives for rangers include counseling and training to recognize stress responses. Other organizations provide employment opportunities and financial assistance for widows, as well as peer networks such as those facilitated by the Game Rangers Association of Africa. These efforts are still limited in scale, but they show what is possible when the issue is taken seriously.
Even there, the gap between need and provision remains large.
Globally, most rangers do not have access to consistent psychological support. The systems that exist are often fragmented or dependent on external funding. Maintaining them over time requires sustained commitment.
“It’s one thing to implement a [psychological well-being] project,” Serfontein said. “It takes commitment to maintain it.”
Current conservation plans are moving in the opposite direction. International targets call for expanding protected areas, increasing coverage, and strengthening enforcement. These goals assume a workforce that can carry out the work.
The Soofi paper argues that expanding conservation without investing in ranger wellbeing will increase pressure on the workforce.
The risk is not only that rangers suffer. It is that the system becomes less stable.
High turnover, reduced morale, and impaired decision-making all affect how conservation plays out on the ground. Relationships with communities can erode. Mistakes become more likely. The work becomes harder to sustain.
Ranger welfare is not a secondary issue. It sits close to the center of whether conservation efforts hold.
The Soofi paper points to several practical steps that could address this.
Routine mental health monitoring can identify early signs of distress before they escalate. Peer support networks can provide spaces where people speak openly about what they are experiencing. Training for supervisors can change how organizations respond when someone is struggling.
These steps are straightforward. They require attention, resources, and a willingness to treat mental health as part of the job, not separate from it. They also require rethinking what the role entails.
Rangers are often compared to soldiers or police. The comparison is partly accurate. The risks can be similar. The expectations, in some places, have become similar as well.
But the support structures are not.
Other frontline professions have developed systems over time: debriefing protocols, counseling services, formal recognition of risk. Rangers rarely have the same level of institutional backing.
Closing that gap would not remove the danger. It would change how people carry it.
Back in Upemba, the survivors were evacuated. Counseling was arranged for those who needed it. The park continues to operate. Rangers are still patrolling.
That continuation is often overlooked.
After events like this, the story could end there. Instead, people return to the work.
The risks have not disappeared, and the outcome is uncertain. They return anyway.
For some, it is a sense of responsibility. For others, it is attachment to a place, or to the animals they have spent years protecting. For many, it is more practical. The job remains necessary. The alternatives are limited.
There is another factor.
People who have been through events like the one at Upemba know what is at stake in a direct way. They have seen what happens when control is lost.
“It takes 20 years to build a population and only a few months to destroy it,” said Arranz. “If we left tomorrow… in six months, there would be nothing left.”
That knowledge does not always lead people to step away. In some cases, it does the opposite.
It can sharpen the sense that the work matters, even if the conditions are difficult.
That is where the possibility of something better begins.
Not in denying the risks, or in asking people to absorb more than they can hold. But in recognizing that the people doing this work are part of the system that conservation depends on.
If that system is to last, it has to account for them.
Not as symbols. Not as abstractions. As individuals with limits.
The work will remain demanding. There is no version of conservation that removes uncertainty or danger entirely.
But there is a difference between a system that assumes people will endure, and one that is built to support them.
The events at Upemba make that distinction harder to ignore. Rangers continue to do the work. It is less clear whether the systems around them will change enough to sustain it.
This is part II of III. Part I.
Citations:
- Mukpo, A. (2026). Upemba National Park staff recount assault that left seven dead. Mongabay. 24 Mar 2026
- Jim Tan, J. (2018). Rangers face a ‘toxic mix’ of mental strain and lack of support. Mongabay. 24 May 2018
- Butler, R.A. (2026). A profession built on hope, strained by loss. Mongabay. 26 Mar 2026
- Soofi, M., Bergseth, B., Ingram, D. J., Mundy, E., Pienkowski, T., Fisher, J. C., Zielonka, N. B., Klarmann, S.-E., Bobo, K. S., Kuiper, T., Ervin, J., Singh, R., Sharma, S., Roberts, D. L., Ghoddousi, A., Durant, S. M., St John, F. A. V., Waltert, M., & Kuemmerle, T. (2026). Conservation rangers urgently need mental health provision. Conservation Letters, 19, e70036. https://doi.org/10.1111/con4.70036
- Montano, D., A.Reeske, F. Franke,and J. Hüffmeier (2017). “Leadership, Followers’ Mental Health and Job Performance in Organizations: A Comprehensive Meta Analysis From an Occupational Health Perspective. Journal of Organizational Behavior 38: 327–350. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2124
- Ward, N. (2019). ‘Ecosystem guardians’ remain passionate despite dicey conditions. Mongabay. 15 Jan 2019
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