Since 2012, World Pangolin Day has been celebrated on the third Saturday of February every year to raise awareness about pangolins and their plight as the world’s most trafficked mammal. I was recently contacted by founder of the event, Rhishja Cota, who shared about the early days of coordinating the involvement of pangolin enthusiasts and NGOs for this synergistic awareness drive. It is truly a ground-up event that has grown into a global movement with activities such as exhibitions, talks, and online information sharing.
species awareness days: do people care or are we preaching to the choir?
In a new study published in Biological Conservation by Audrey Tan from The Straits Times, Dr. Roman Carrasco from the National University of Singapore, and myself, it was found that species awareness days can raise awareness based on the increased internet search for species information on these days. Furthermore, these events could lead to a boost in donation for wildlife charities.
We also studied Twitter posts on species awareness days and found that tweets with a call to action had a positive relationship with the number of retweets—a sign of reader engagement.
A pleasant surprise was that World Pangolin Day stood out as being one of the top performing awareness days! And that is owing to the collective efforts of all organisations and individual participants of physical and online activities on that day over the years.
Interesting findings from the paper:
- World Pangolin Day was the top performing awareness day with 11.2% increase in Google search volume, and 208% increase in Wikipedia page views.
- Harrington et al. (2018) found that Google search trends for pangolins increased at a time in 2012 which corresponded with the reformation of the IUCN Pangolin Specialist Group and the first World Pangolin Day.
what you can do
Each of us can do our part for pangolins by being informed about conservation issues, sharing knowledge about them, and supporting an organisation that works to study and conserve pangolins. Remember to add a call for action message (e.g., find out more, drive carefully near nature areas, stop consuming pangolin products, support pangolin conservation) if you are posting a message about #WorldPangolinDay!
So why not join in the celebration this World Pangolin Day on Saturday, 20 February 2021 and do your bit to drum up support for these scaly mammals? Check out our webinar on Scaling up pangolin conservation in Singapore at 11am-12pm SGT too!
Singapore Pangolin Working Group 