Technology and social media companies are joining forces with the World Wildlife Fund and Google to put a stop to wildlife trafficking. The plan is to make online trading platforms completely unworkable. This newfound group is known as the “Global Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking”, and plans to fight together to reduce online wildlife trafficking by 80% before 2020.

Currently, $20 billion is invested in wildlife trafficking each year. The traded items happens to be anything from elephant’s ivory, to lion and tiger cubs. Because of the unnecessary trafficking, innumerable species have been moved to the threatened or endangered species list, including rhinos, tigers, and elephants.

Crawford Allen, Senior Director of Wildlife Crime at WWF, says that “bringing these industry giants together is the best shot at systematically closing the open web to wildlife traffickers.” It is a critical time to ensure that as many online platforms are doing as much as they can to prevent traffickers from finding loopholes to commit their crimes.

Sources: stopwildlifetrafficking.org & World Wildlife Fund