How the Clintons are Stopping Traffic

This article appeared in the June, 2014 issue of Outside Magazine. Read the digital version here. It’s no secret that Africa’s elephants are in danger. Widespread poaching, fueled by demand for ivory in China and ineffective regulation, have led to alarming population losses, from 1.2 million in 1980 to only 500,000 this year. Today, approximately 96 African elephants are killed by poachers every 24 hours.

Last September, the Clinton Global Initiative (CGI)—a project of the Clinton Foundation—launched an $80 million effort to bring together foreign governments and NGOs to help protect the seven-ton mammals, in part by capitalizing on former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s diplomatic experience. Millie Kerr sat down with Chelsea Clinton, the 34-year-old vice chairwoman of the family foundation, to check in on the early progress.

OUTSIDE: How did this issue hit your radar? Clinton: In 2012, we realized that we’d been unaware of the crisis—similar to what it had been in the 1980s—and we were both sheepish about that, because we think we’re pretty plugged-in people. When my mom was secretary of state, one of the things that drew her attention to this was the fact that the Lord’s Resistance Army and Joseph Kony, the Al-Shabaab and the janjaweed in West Africa, Al Qaeda in North Africa, and many of the rebel and terrorist groups in Central Africa are trafficking not only in guns and humans, but in ivory.

And that prompted the initiative? When my mom left the government, we knew this was one of the areas we wanted to work on together. She had relationships with many of the leaders who impact the demand or trafficking. We thought that, through CGI, we could bring together those people—governments, NGOs on the ground, foundations that can help fund the work—to really make a coherent, coordinated effort. For the first time in recent history, it became clear what the governments, NGOs, and academic partners were committing to in order to stop the killing, traffic, and demand.

Have you seen any progress? There’s been tremendous progress, especially on the demand side, though we certainly don’t deserve credit for much of it. In China, influential CEOs pledged to no longer give ivory as gifts, and [former NBA star] Yao Ming has been a tremendous champion in his work with WildAid, which has run a number of campaigns in China that seem to be making a difference. Most of the ivory in the world is sold in China and Vietnam, though also here in the United States. We worked with the president’s task force on wildlife trafficking, and we’re thrilled with the policy that emerged from that, which is to ban all commercial imports of African ivory into this country. I think that’s an important step—not only in helping stop the demand, but also for our moral authority.

You were in Tanzania, Rwanda, and Zambia last year. Did you see  an impact on the ground? I saw an SMS platform that lets local villagers report poachers. That’s been successful—not necessarily in stopping the poaching, but in limiting and deterring it. They used to find multiple carcasses of elephants that had been poached by the same group. Now, with this early-alert system, the rangers are able to deploy. They may not be able to save that first elephant, but they can save the second or third.