How small the harvest
for sustainability,
this cream-coloured gold.
Illegal poaching and the ivory trade have decimated African elephant populations, but could ivory be harvested sustainably at a level to both maintain the species and satisfy the trade?
By modelling a reference population of African elephants, Lusseau & Lee (2016) show that only a very small amount of ivory can be harvested sustainably without endangering the species and that this amount is well below the current demand. They comment that ‘any overexploitation very quickly runs the risk of driving elephants to extinction’.