The Problem: Wildlife are being driven to extinction, often because of money spent on high-value illegal wildlife products.
The Solution: Create luxury goods that save wildlife by putting up bonds for their survival.
What if you could buy a Rolex watch that saved a rhino?
Rhino horn has been selling for between $60k-100k per kilo and the animals are being poached at an unprecedented rate to supply that demand from wealthy consumers; poaching is cheap and can generate huge sums of money, whereas conservation is expensive and struggles to raise funds, so rhinos inevitably suffer.
But what if we could change it, simply by changing the way the luxury industry functions?
If we take the Rolex example, they could release a new series of ultra-luxury watches, each costing $75,000, and each engraved with the name of one particular rhino living in the wild (each watch would therefore be unique). Within the purchase price would be a $50,000 bond that would pay out if, and only if, that rhino lived a full life and died of natural causes (i.e. it was not poached).
That watch would then create a simple and easy way to make money from the rhino without poaching, and indeed more money would be made from keeping the rhino alive than from killing it for its horn. Conservation organisations protecting the rhino along with the communities living around the rhino habitat would receive the money if the rhino survived.
That creates a huge economic incentive to protect the rhino and offers the opportunity for conservation to be funded by private investors, not just grant funding. If a national park had, say, 200 rhino, they could generate $10 million, so an investor could put up $4 million to provide a highly advanced conservation package for the park to prevent poaching and receive $5 million if the rhino survived (the other $5 million would be paid to local communities). That would provide immediate finance to fund counter-poaching operations and deliver benefits to local communities and get the message across that if they help keep the rhinos alive they will receive a pay-out.
The rhinos would then have world-leading counter-poaching protection to keep them safe and local communities would support conservation, feeding information about any poacher activity, making it too difficult for poachers to operate in the area.
Crucially, not only would this be a world-leading conservation effort in terms of its quality, it would all be financed from commercial sources and so would not require any donations, grant funding or tourism revenue.
The luxury market that is driving rhinos to extinction would instead be keeping them alive, and the sale of the watches would point the way to a wider effort to use luxury goods to save wildlife and create a commercial incentive for companies to make more such products. They could hire the world’s best advertising firms to drive the trend worldwide, so that wealthy people would not just want to be seen with a Rolex watch, they would want to be seen with a Rhino Rolex watch.
It could work for other products, too; perhaps a $150 million superyacht with a bond to keep a herd of elephant will one-day dock in a marina somewhere…
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