Introduction to a new idea to terminate Ivory trade

With the rate of losing 1 African elephants per minute, due to poaching for their tusk, we are risking the entire spices to extinct within a few years, it seems the most effective way of decreasing the poaching is to decrease the demand of ivory, rather than fighting to decrease the poaching.
Introduction to a new idea to terminate Ivory trade
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I am passionate about wildlife conservation, and I started to pay attention to the cruelty and poaching done to the elephants in Africa. Some statistics shows there is 1 elephant being poached/killed every minute in Africa. The elephants are hunt down and cruelly murdered for their tusks/ivory. Sometimes the poachers hack off the elephants' head while they are still alive, sometimes the poachers cut the elephants' spine so that they cannot fight back, sometimes the poachers even poison the elephants meat so that they won’t discovered by the swirling vultures and alert the anti-poaching park rangers, and the baby elephants left to die because they will not be accepted by other herds once their parents are gone.  Even with the current rate of poaching, the elephants will be extinct in <10 years.  This will forever alter the ego system in Africa surrounding the elephants, and has many downstream impacts on other wildlife and nature. 

Demand vs Supply:

I thought about this long and hard, the easiest way is to reduce demand rather than decrease supply.  Reducing the supply without reducing the demand will simply cause the demand with a higher price, and the desire to provide the supply will go even higher. The anti-poaching laws and the current major wildlife conservation programs do not seem to be effective, since they are not addressing how to reduce the demand, and fighting the armed poachers with armed anti-poaching force will not solve the problem. It will just continue to escalate further into violence and armed wars.

Ivory has no other benefits to humans other than its vanity value. Most of the ivory demand come from China. Being a Chinese myself, I have deep understanding of the Chinese culture, owing "real" ivory has always been a status symbol for a Chinese, and ivory carving has always been a prided art in my culture.  The Chinese middle class (700 million people) is becoming wealthier so the demand of ivory is greatly increasing over last few years and will continue to grow as the middle class continue to expand. That means the Ivory demand will continue to grow if nothing is changed. 
Therefore,  I think the better way to reduce demand is to change this aspect of the Chinese culture, the average Chinese thinking is also want to obtain the social image of westernized and modernized, especially to the younger generation, what's so called 'rich second generation' (i.e. Chinese people born into families of high socioeconomic status, who inherited their wealth but did not create it). If we can amplify being a modern human means caring and wanting to protect wildlife (rather than killing it), this will change the desire to own ivory.   The strength of this model is also to increase social capital to a point that the world cannot ignore this problem. Just like Cecil the lion killed in 2015 created a chained reaction which eventually influenced the law changed in Namibia. If we can amplify the social capital, i.e. when world famous celebrities, sports players, politicians has established personal connection with these animals, they will participate and expand this movement, ultimately expanding to China.  This will also create other possibilities to solve this problem.  We need to turn this into a social war and change our culture, and dissolve the current armed war. 

Potential Solutions and Model: 
There needs to be innovative ideas and new disruptive solutions. Myself and friends are creating a new model to counter poaching of elephants, rhinos and other species in Africa. We are using the Lean Startup approach to create and refine this new model, i.e. hypothesis, build, measure, learn, refine/pivot.  This new model is targeted to create personal connection from the donators/advocators to the animal being protected, they will be able to see the animals they donated to protected. When personal attachment created, they will be deeply engaged, and therefore motivated to participate further and also bring their friends and family into this movement.   This model will also leverage social media platforms to create greater awareness of the reality in Africa. This model is also aimed to deliver most of the donated funds securely (using technology like cryto currency) to the local communities to enable them to protect the wildlife around them, rather than participating in poaching, and donators have full visibility into where their funding spent. 

However, me and my friends cannot accomplish this alone and this is an uphill battle. I am reaching out and ask you, as a world leader, as a conservationist, or as an individual who care for preserving wildlife, to help with any of the following:

  • Be part of our team and think tank, contribute to making this model a reality
  • If you are conservationist in Africa, help us in exploring these assumptions and solutions
  • Broker this initiative with other large organization with your partners and network
  • Increase the wildlife conservation and anti-poaching awareness across the world

Thank you for your considerations!

A bit of background of myself:

I have been in IT for 30 years, in the last few years I have been a transformation coach, my expertise is to help companies finding their obstacles and transform their ways of working into a collaborative, respectful, integration of diversity and human centric culture.  I often serve as a strategist to the executive in how to make these cultural changes into reality and build a path to implement these large scale changes. Most my agile transformations were in complex domains (see Cynefin framework), where there is no direct cause and effect and there are no right answers, cause and effect can only be deduced in continuous retrospection.   These transformations are cultural and mindset shifts, which requires human behavioral changes. The solutions often required experimentation and redefining solutions based on introspections and continuous feedbacks.  The magnitude of these transformation ranges from 4000 to 40,000 people in a organization.  

Similarly I believe the wildlife conservation effort is also a complex domain, so I may be able to use my experience in large scale cultural transformation in this domain.  

Monica Yap

Transformation Coach

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Go to the profile of Lize Gibson-Hall
over 1 year ago

Thank you for sharing this Monica. How are you finding implementing the model? @Adam Barlow @Kate  very interesting concept thought you would enjoy reading as well. 

Go to the profile of Monica Yap
over 1 year ago

Hi all, 

We have been developing the model, will like for you to review and share any insight/feedback

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1UNaxfWLBtUCZwIs5hHK3nOuEH2XTIw1X/view?usp=sharing 

Go to the profile of Lize Gibson-Hall
over 1 year ago

Amazing thank you Monica I will do!