Each year roughly 30,000 African elephants are poached, and many of those deaths have served to provide ivory for the world’s largest market: China.
But starting tomorrow, the sale of almost all ivory will be illegal in China. Ivory carvers and sellers will be permanently closed for business. According to National Geographic, a large-scale public education campaign will also work to inform Chinese citizens that harvesting ivory requires that elephants be killed. A 2007 survey found that 70 percent of Chinese didn’t know ivory harvesting killed elephants.
Get Data Sheet, Fortune’s technology newsletter.
Hunting elephants is illegal across much of Africa, and importing ivory has been outlawed worldwide for nearly three decades, but illegal poaching continues on a large scale. According to NatGeo, that has been attributed to a one-time 2008 purchase of legal ivory for China and Japan’s domestic markets. Research has since shown that supply provided cover for a sharp rise in the flow of illegal ivory.
Representatives of international conservation groups have praised the ban, which was negotiated bilaterally with the United States in 2015. Though ivory is a status symbol for some wealthy Chinese, a survey by the World Wildlife Fund found that 86 percent of Chinese people supported the ban.
