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Support Earth Day with Microsoft and Bing Ads

For Earth Day, Microsoft is exploring how our technologies, platforms and partners can protect biodiversity around the globe.
 
Bing and Bing Ads can help because biodiversity isn’t just impacted by climate change and urban growth.  Wildlife are also facing threats from a different human source – the Internet. Wildlife poaching is a problem, and as the world grows more connected through technology, poachers are now able to serve a global demand for items like elephant tusks, rhino horns and pangolin scales. Rapid ecommerce growth has made it easier for buyers and sellers to reach each other, and that is true for wildlife traffickers, too.

Did you know that the global Bing Ads network has strict policies in place to prevent advertising for endangered and threatened animals and products? When you click on one of our ads, you can be confident it’s been reviewed to reflect our commitment to wildlife conservation and sustainability around the world.

Bing Ads has taken the below steps to make sure these commitments are turned into action across our whole network:
  • In August 2016, Bing Ads augmented its global policies against the most well-known wildlife trafficking with an even more restrictive set of policies to cover a much broader array of wildlife-related products.
  • In March 2018, Bing Ads took an even stronger stand against online wildlife trafficking by serving as a founding member of the Global Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. Organized by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), this Coalition includes some of the world’s biggest e-commerce, technology and social media companies, which have all committed to reducing wildlife trafficking online by 80 percent by 2020.
We’re excited to continue partnering with WWF and other Coalition members to prevent traffickers from profiting at the expense of some of the most vulnerable species. In fact, we’re exploring ways to leverage machine learning and AI to make these efforts even more impactful with Coalition members this Fall.

Already, we see immense potential for AI to help protect biodiversity. A team within Microsoft Research is helping the Snow Leopard Trust by working to save snow leopards using deep learning and computer vision on Spark.

The AI for Earth program – a $50 million investment by Microsoft to drive technology advancements in biodiversity, sustainability, and other environmental challenges – is developing AI and machine learning solutions to better monitor and protect wildlife in the years to come. Fei Fang, an AI for Earth grantee and professor at Carnegie Mellon, is doing research that incorporates AI, machine learning and game theory to detect poachers in real-time. Long Live the Kings, a nonprofit focused on salmon recovery in the Puget Sound, is using Microsoft Azure to create a more sophisticated model of the Sound and discover novel solutions to protect and preserve the native salmon population.

These innovative technologies can help increase our collective vigilance, as well as our understanding of the many human and environmental threats to Earth’s natural biodiversity.  

Microsoft is also making it easy for you to get involved and help species this Earth Day. Join Microsoft Rewards today and you can get a free $1 to donate to the cause of your choice. Earning additional Rewards is easy – simply search with Bing and earn Microsoft Rewards points, then donate them to select nonprofits. In honor of Earth Day, Microsoft is matching all point donations made to The Nature Conservancy and World Wildlife Fund, now through 4/30.
 
We’re proud that the global Bing Ads network can play a part in the conservation of our shared natural heritage, and we invite you to join us in celebrating biodiversity this Earth Week by reading more about how Microsoft is working with our global partners to protect native species around the world.   
 
At Bing Ads we value feedback from advertisers, partners, and consumers. If you see an ad for a wildlife or other product that you think we should look at more closely, we want to hear from you at the Bing Ads escalation form.