Leonardo DiCaprio’s foundation gave $1m to save elephants from ivory poaching

Illegal hunting and the ivory trade have reduced the populations of elephants in Africa drastically over the past century. Millions of these mammals once roamed the iconic jungles, but their long ivory tusks made them targets of big game hunters and poachers who have decimated their numbers by roughly 95% over the past 100 years. The ivory trade drives a brutal campaign of international poaching that killed 22,000 elephants in 2012 alone, despite a global ban on the sale of ivory.According to the World Wildlife Fund for Nature (WWF), there are an estimated 415,000 African elephants, but other organisations put their numbers even lower, claiming that those "may ultimately prove to be optimistic."In order to save the elephants, a joint initiative was launched by Save the Elephants and the Wildlife Conservation Network, titled the Elephant Crisis Fund.