It's World Elephant Day! (Mall for Africa)
Can AI Be A Game Changer for the Future of Elephants? (Microsoft)
With fewer than 500,000 elephants left on earth, both species – African and Asian – are in peril. Asian elephants are classified as endangered, with fewer than 40,000 remaining worldwide and African elephants are listed as vulnerable by the International Union for Conservation of Nature.
A Global Coalition Forms to Stop Online Wildlife Crime (WWF)
Set against snowcapped mountains near Draper, Utah, a gleaming glass building houses a growing cadre of frontline wildlife defenders. There are no camouflage clothes here, nor stealth tactics to avoid a poacher’s ambush; these are digital rangers, armed with algorithms and cyber skills to detect wildlife crime online. Here, at a service center of e-commerce multinational eBay, staff work to prevent, review, and remove illegal listings for animal products and live animals, including endangered species.
Leading Tech Companies Unite to Stop Online Wildlife Traffickers
The world’s leading e-commerce, technology and social media companies are joining forces with Google and World Wildlife Fund (WWF) to render online platforms and apps inoperable for wildlife traffickers to trade in endangered species.
Today, 21 tech companies from North America, Asia, Europe, and Africa came together as the first-ever Global Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. As members of this coalition, tech companies pledge to work together to collectively reduce wildlife trafficking across platforms by 80% by 2020. In collaboration with WWF, TRAFFIC, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW), each company will develop and implement policies and solutions to help end wildlife trafficking online.
“Bringing these industry giants together is the best shot at systematically closing the open web to wildlife traffickers,” said Crawford Allan, Senior Director of Wildlife Crime & TRAFFIC at WWF. “Criminals are making a killing from selling rare species and products made from their parts. Inconsistent policies and enforcement across the web invariably create a “whack-a-mole” effect, where ads may be removed from one site just to pop up somewhere else. These companies see the problem and are uniting to ensure an internet where traffickers have nowhere left to turn.”