It occurs in flat, arid, mostly open country such as grassland, karoo, bushveld, thornveld, scrubland and savanna but also including modified habitats such as wheat fields and firebreaks (del Hoyo et al. 1996). In Kenya, at least, birds may move into woodland in the dry season. The diet includes a wide range of plants and animals including insects, reptiles, small rodents, birds, carrion, seeds, berries and roots (del Hoyo et al. 1996). It may be sedentary in parts of its range but local nomadic movements of up to 130 km are known. Diurnal (Mmassy et al. 2022).
Bush encroachment transforms preferred open habitat to densely vegetated habitat and is widespread in the Namibia and Botswana parts of the Kori distribution, which are stronghold areas for the species (J. Pallett in litt. 2025). It is however unclear whether there is a continuing decline in habitat area, extent or quality across the whole range.

This species has an extremely large but disjunct range in sub-Saharan Africa, occurring from South Sudan, Ethiopia and Somalia south to Tanzania, and from southern Angola, Namibia, south-west Zambia and Zimbabwe and Botswana, south to South Africa. Declines in its overall range over the past century appear to have been relatively modest, but it has apparently undergone considerable population declines in all range states except Zambia (few records) and Angola (Senyatso et al. 2013).
A specimen record from Sudan actually referred to A. arabs (Senyatso et al. 2013) and the country is now not thought to be part of the natural range of Kori Bustard. Several small isolated outposts are suspected to have become extinct (Senyatso et al. 2013); in southern Somalia, southwest Uganda, Eswatini and KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa. This is inferred to have caused a decline in the species' extent of occurrence (EOO), though it is unclear that there is continuing reduction and the recent observation of two in far northeast Somalia (Garcia-Hall 2010) maintains the EOO at near maximum. A range-wide effort to collate records produced a value for occupied area of 3,420,000 km² (Senyatso et al. 2013). This value was not produced by scaling occurrence across the whole range to a 2 km x 2 km grid as much of the data was available at only at a much coarser scale.

Conservation and research actions underway
CITES Appendix II. The species is legally protected in many range states. A large-scale experiment in the eastern Karoo tested the deployment of markers on power lines but found no reduction in bustard collision rates (Shaw et al. 2021).

Conservation and research actions proposed
Continue to raise awareness to stop hunting for bushmeat and traditional medicine, and to encourage the public to report mortality from power lines. All new infrastructure (power lines, wind turbines) should be sited with special care, and mitigation measures implemented. This is the most cost-effective phase in any infrastructure planning to reduce collision rates; after power line routes are fixed and the lines are operational it is much more expensive and logistically difficult to implement mitigations. Therefore pre-construction monitoring of bustard occurrence and mortalities on nearby existing powerlines should be carried out, to inform the routing and design of new lines. On existing power lines,  dangerous sections of line should be retrofitted with appropriate mitigation; effectiveness of mitigation should be monitored/assessed. Carry out further research into mitigation measures for power line collisions. Systematic surveys of mortality along powerlines are needed to quantify the impact and direct mitigation. Build trusting and working relationships with power utilities to bring both engineering and ecological expertise into finding solutions. Assess the continuing presence outside of protected areas through surveys. Development proposals for wind energy facilities should be required to include policies and guidelines to mitigate impacts on the species (M. Kessler in litt. 2025). Local and regional species action plans should be developed to address declines.