Join Wild for Life partner, the Ivory Alliance 2024, today!
In 1979, well over 1 million elephants roamed across the African continent.
By 2016, a huge surge in poaching meant that the number of African elephants had fallen by over 50% to just 415,000. A global, Interpol-led operation to tackle IWT resulted in the seizure of 1.3 tonnes of ivory during May 2018. Everyday 55 elephants are killed – that’s equivalent to one elephant every 26 minutes.
If we allow this to continue, we face the real possibility that within our lifetimes we will see the African elephant poached to extinction. We cannot allow this iconic and beautiful species to die.
The UK Government has publicly committed to leading global efforts to defeat the illegal ivory trade in 2018, starting by putting in place the UK’s own domestic ivory ban. We want the 2018 IWT Conference to be the moment when the world came together to say that enough is enough. We want to see an end to this illegal trade. This requires a concerted global effort.
That’s why the UK Government is launching the Ivory Alliance 2024, a coalition of global leaders and influencers committed to fighting the illegal trade and trafficking of ivory, led by the UK Environment Secretary, Michael Gove.
The overall ambition of the Ivory Alliance 2024 is to reduce the illegal killing of African elephants for ivory by at least one third by 2020, and to further halve this rate by 2024. The Alliance will achieve this by going straight to the root cause – tackling demand and lobbying for domestic market closure.
Alliance members will work with partners globally to increase the number of countries committed to domestic ivory bans to more than 30 by 2020 and to put in place tougher enforcement against those caught breaking the law.
By uniting across the globe, we can increase our chances of overcoming this appalling and illegal trade and saving the elephant from extinction.