Story highlights Country is home to the world's largest ivory market

China had previously committed to a ban, but now it's put forward a timetable

Hong Kong (CNN) China has announced a plan to phase out all ivory processing and trade by the end of 2017, the government said on Friday, a move that conservationists hope will stymie the mass killing -- and threat of extinction -- of African elephants.

The country had already announced plans to ban the ivory trade, but it's now committed itself to a timetable to end the trade, something it said it would do this summer, according to the US State Department.

"China's announcement is a game changer for elephant conservation. The large-scale trade of ivory now faces its twilight years, and the future is brighter for wild elephants, said Carter Roberts, the president and CEO of WWF. "With the US also ending its domestic ivory trade earlier this year, two of the largest ivory markets have taken action that will reverberate around the world."

Before European colonization, scientists believe that Africa may have held as many as 20 million elephants; by 1979 only 1.3 million remained -- and the Great Elephant Census, an ambitious project to count all of Africa's savannah elephants from the sky, revealed this year that things have gotten far worse.

Read More