Tencent, WWF team up to give green fight digital edge
Cooperation aims to enhance skills of practitioners in wildlife, raise public awareness
Chinese internet giant Tencent has partnered with the World Wildlife Fund to promote ecological conservation in the country by taking advantage of digital technology.
Under the partnership, the two will jointly carry out a range of digital technologybased ecological conservation projects, the first of which will be in the GuangdongHong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area.
The collaboration is part of a broader effort to build a “Beautiful China”.
The projects are aimed at raising public awareness of ecological conservation, enhancing professionalism among practitioners in the area and cracking down on illegal wildlife trade online.
Leon Guo, senior vicepresident of Tencent Group and chairman of Tencent Foundation, said digital technology has become an important force that can unleash huge potential in promoting sustainable development.
“Tencent has been paying attention to, and pouring resources into, the area, with the aim of promoting ecological conservation in a digital way,” Guo said at the TencentWWF strategic partnership signing ceremony in Shenzhen on April 20.
“We believe a Digital China is demonstrated not only in the digital economy or digital technology, but also in combining its capability in digital technology with ecology, nature and environmental protection.”
In one of the three projects that have been launched so far, augmented reality technology is used in displaying natural environment in the Greater Bay Area, helping people learn more about the nature, with a focus on raising the younger generation’s awareness of protecting the sea and endangered animals.
The second project focuses on providing online training to hundreds of thousands of ecological conservation practitioners in national parks to enhance their professionalism.
There are currently around 370,000 people serving as forest rangers in China, but since they are scattered across different parts of the country, and given the shortage of educators, it is difficult for them to receive professional training.
To solve the problem, Tencent’s online education platform will introduce content resources from the WWF to offer online training courses to the practitioners.
In addition, the Shenzhenbased company will expand cooperation with the WWF in combating illegal trade of wildlife animals online through a project called Digital Rescue.
Tencent launched a charity project in May 2015, taking advantage of millions of inter- net users on its social networking platforms QQ and WeChat to combat the illegal trade through a special tip-off channel.
As a partner of the program, the WWF will continue to support it and expand the cooperation to other areas, for example, on the application of digital technology in the study of species diversity.
Harmonious coexistence of humans and nature is a significant issue facing humanity and the WWF has been focusing on this topic since its establishment, said Marco Lambertini, director general of the WWF.
The WWF-Tencent cooperation will promote wider application of digital technology in environmental conservation, he said.
For its part, Tencent has made environmental protection one of its priorities. For instance, at the 2018 China “Internet +” Digital Economy Summit held this month, Tencent Chairman and CEO Pony Ma identified ecological conservation as one of the five key pillars of the company’s “Internet +” model.
The company worked with the country’s public security department to uncover the biggest ivory trade in history three years ago by using its internet security technology.
Tencent has been paying attention to, and pouring resources into, the area, with the aim of ecological conservation in a digital way.”
Leon Guo,