Here's What China's Ivory Ban Will Actually Mean for the World's Elephants
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Here's What China's Ivory Ban Will Actually Mean for the World's Elephants

We crunched the numbers: China's promise to end the domestic ivory trade would make a huge impact.

Late last week, as 1,450 pounds of illegal ivory was symbolically crushed, the Chinese government unexpectedly announced plans to end the ivory trade outright in the country.

"We will strictly control ivory processing and trade until the commercial processing and sale of ivory and its products are eventually halted," Zhao Shucong, head of China's State Forestry Administration, said, according to The Guardian.

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Conservationists were stunned and elated by the plans, which would see China phasing out the ivory trade through tighter and tighter restrictions until it was illegal to buy and sell ivory in the country at all.

Poached ivory is already illegal to buy and sell in China, as it is in most of the world thanks to the 1990 Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species ban on the international trade of ivory. The legal, domestic market allows for people to buy and sell ivory products that were already in the country before the ban: ostensibly antiques and family heirlooms. The problem is that these legal markets around the world often mask the trade of new, illegal, freshly-poached ivory. It's very difficult to tell the difference between old and new ivory, and it's rarely sold with proper documentation.

This is a global problem that contributes to the ongoing slaughter of endangered African elephants, but it's particularly bad in China, where ivory has high cultural significance.

"It would be hard to overstate how significant this announcement may turn out to be," Cristián Samper, the president and CEO of the Wildlife Conservation Society, wrote in a blog post for the Huffington Post. "Its potential impact could be critical to the fate of Africa's declining elephant populations."

But just how big of an impact would ending the domestic ivory trade in China really have? We scoured studies and reports from conservationists, researchers, and journalists around the globe to quantify exactly what a ban on ivory in China would mean: