Reach and messages of the world's largest ivory burn

Peadar Brehony -

This original research article was written by Alex Braczkowski et al. (full list of authors at the bottom of this post) and published in the journal Conservation Biology in August 2018. I only played a relatively minor role in helping to provide some of the data from East Africa and with the framing, writing and editing of the manuscript. I've pasted the abstract and a couple of figures below, but please get in touch if you'd like a full copy of the paper. The image you see above, linked to our article, did end up as the cover image of Conservation Biology August 2018 Volume 32, Issue 4.

The destruction of caches of confiscated ivory is intended to promote a taboo on ivory use and catalyze policy change. In the largest burn to date, Kenyan authorities destroyed over 105 tons of seized ivory. In Braczkowski et al. 2018 we analysed the media coverage of such events, to understand whether they can be an effective conservation tool.

Abstract

Recent increases in ivory poaching have depressed African elephant populations. Successful enforcement has led to ivory stockpiling. Stockpile destruction is becoming increasingly popular, and most destruction has occurred in the last 5 years. Ivory destruction is intended to send a strong message against ivory consumption, both in promoting a taboo on ivory use and catalyzing policy change. However, there has been no effort to establish the distribution and extent of media reporting on ivory destruction events globally. We analyzed media coverage of the largest ivory destruction event in history (Kenya, 30 April 2016) across 11 nation states connected to ivory trade. We used an online‐media crawling tool to search online media outlets and subjected 5 of the largest print newspapers (by circulation) in 5 nations of interest to content analysis. Most online news on the ivory burn came from the United States (81% of 1944 articles), whereas most of the print news articles came from Kenya (61% of 157 articles). Eighty‐six to 97% of all online articles reported the burn as a positive conservation action, whereas 4–50% discussed ivory burning as having a negative impact on elephant conservation. Most articles discussed law enforcement and trade bans as effective for elephant conservation. There was more relative search interest globally in the 2016 Kenyan ivory burn than any other burn in 5 years. Ours is the first attempt to track the reach of media coverage relative to an ivory burn and provides a case study in tracking the effects of a conservation‐marketing event.

And here are some of figures that were included as supplementary material but show some important findings.

Do get in touch if you're interested in reading the full paper and don't have access.

The full list of co-authors is given below. Not an easy task to pull so many people from across the globe together, but it was brilliantly led by Alex:

Alexander Braczkowski, Matthew H Holden, Christopher O'Bryan, Chi-Yeung Choi, Xiaojing Gan, Nicholas Beesley, Yufang Gao, James Allan, Peter Tyrrell, Daniel Stiles, Peadar Brehony, Revocatus Meney, Henry Brink, Nao Takashina, Ming-Ching Lin, Hsien-Yung Lin, Niki Rust, Severino G. Salmo, James EM Watson, Paula Kahumbu, Martine Maron, Hugh P Possingham, Duan Biggs. 2018. Reach and messages of the world's largest ivory burn. Conservation Biology, DOI: 10.1111/cobi.13097

For those interested in combatting the illegal-wildlife trade and elephants in particular, you might also be interested in this article I wrote about turning the tide on elephant poaching in Tanzania from back in 2016. It was written based on my experience working with Wayne Lotter (who was subsequently assassinated) and PAMS Foundation.

If you enjoyed this post, please consider sharing it with others who might be interested too. If you want to connect, I'm always happy to chat, so get in touch!

Here are some of my more recent publications:

  • Conserving Africa's wildlife and wildlands through the COVID-19 crisis and beyond. Nature Ecology & Evolution Lindsey, P. et al. 2020
  • Incorporating social-ecological complexities into conservation policy. Biological Conservation Brehony, P. et al. 2020
  • Conservation from the inside-out: winning space and a place for wildlife in working landscapes. People and Nature Western, D. et al. 2020