Bolder steps to fight global wildlife illegal trade
2018; Wiley; Volume: 33; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1111/cobi.13245
ISSN1523-1739
AutoresRicardo J. Lopes, Juliana Machado Ferreira, Nadia Moraes‐Barros,
Tópico(s)Identification and Quantification in Food
ResumoConservation BiologyVolume 33, Issue 1 p. 7-8 EditorialFree Access Bolder steps to fight global wildlife illegal trade Ricardo Jorge Lopes, Corresponding Author Ricardo Jorge Lopes [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-2193-5107 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Universidade do Porto, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugalemail [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorJuliana Machado Ferreira, Juliana Machado Ferreira orcid.org/0000-0003-4305-6680 Freeland Brasil, Rua Serra Negra 119, 06343-260 Carapicuiba, BrazilSearch for more papers by this authorNadia Moraes-Barros, Nadia Moraes-Barros orcid.org/0000-0002-2829-5862 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Universidade do Porto, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal Freeland Brasil, Rua Serra Negra 119, 06343-260 Carapicuiba, BrazilSearch for more papers by this author Ricardo Jorge Lopes, Corresponding Author Ricardo Jorge Lopes [email protected] orcid.org/0000-0003-2193-5107 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Universidade do Porto, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugalemail [email protected]Search for more papers by this authorJuliana Machado Ferreira, Juliana Machado Ferreira orcid.org/0000-0003-4305-6680 Freeland Brasil, Rua Serra Negra 119, 06343-260 Carapicuiba, BrazilSearch for more papers by this authorNadia Moraes-Barros, Nadia Moraes-Barros orcid.org/0000-0002-2829-5862 CIBIO, Centro de Investigação em Biodiversidade e Recursos Genéticos, InBIO Laboratório Associado, Universidade do Porto, 4485-661 Vairão, Portugal Freeland Brasil, Rua Serra Negra 119, 06343-260 Carapicuiba, BrazilSearch for more papers by this author First published: 22 November 2018 https://doi.org/10.1111/cobi.13245Citations: 4AboutSectionsPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL In 2016, 183 countries committed to a coordinated compilation of data on confiscated wildlife, including their products and derivatives, from international illegal trade (CITES 2016). This is the most recent unfolding of a long process that started in 1975 with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which created rules and identified species of concern so that countries can ensure traceable, legal, and sustainable wildlife trade. Currently, open access to data on legal wildlife trade allows quick inferences (e.g., Heinrich et al. 2016; Reino et al. 2017; Vall-llosera & Cassey 2017), and when necessary compliance procedures may be activated. As a measure of last resort, the suspension of all trade of 1 or more species may be recommended. But, 43 years after the CITES agreement, illegal wildlife trade, along with illegal logging and illegal, unreported, and unregulated fishing, is still a growing, organized, transnational criminal activity. Illicit profits rank behind only profits from narcotics trafficking and counterfeiting (May 2017). Furthermore, a relevant share goes undetected masked as legal trade because it can be difficult to trace the origin of an individual or to identify species. Despite national and regional efforts, such as the European Union Trade in Wildlife Information Exchange (EU-TWIX) (Mundy-Taylor 2013), an international framework to enforce and define wildlife crimes is still lacking, although such a framework exists for other types of crimes (e.g., Single Convention on Narcotic Drugs of 1961 and Arms Trade Treaty of 2013). The reasons for this delay range from the priority of addressing crime that directly affects humans to the only recent development of environmental criminology (Schneider 2011). But this is changing as the result of the ongoing activities of several international agencies and the creation of the International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), a joint venture of CITES, the International Criminal Police Organization, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime, the World Bank, and the World Customs Organization. This consortium was formed in 2010 with an ambitious program to provide analytical tools to fight organized wildlife crime that includes legislation, improved law enforcement and prosecutorial and judicial capacities, and analysis of the factors that drive offences and the effectiveness of preventive measures (ICCWC 2012). Fighting international illegal wildlife trade also hinges on improving the availability of data relevant to wildlife and forest crimes. In a significant breakthrough, the CITES Standing Committee recently adopted a new annual illegal trade report (CITES 2016). At the end of October 2017, all CITES countries should have sent their first mandatory annual report, covering data from 2016. These reports should provide more accurate and global information on the patterns and flow of illegal wildlife trade (UNODC 2016). They will include data on the nature of the seizure event, origin of the item or items seized, destination of the seized materials, and offence information. However, countries are not subject to compliance procedures if a report is not submitted, and so far only 59 of 183 (32%) countries have submitted a report (enquiry to CITES Secretariat Scientific Services in September 2018). The CITES database on legal wildlife trade has multiple limitations (e.g., importers and exporters report different data for the same trade event), and scientists have made erroneous inferences due to the complexity of these data (Robinson & Sinovas 2018). It is thus understandable that reporting illegal wildlife trade is far more complicated than reporting legal trade because criminology data are required. For example, seizure data may not be released before a court decision, agencies responsible for the report may not have unrestricted access to all seizure records, and records may be scattered among many legal bodies. In some cases, legal authorities may be withholding data to accelerate domestic investigations. More importantly, some countries may not report at all due to inadequate mechanisms or lack of resources to start the process. Despite the size of this challenge, it is expected that ICCWC and other agencies will enhance each country's capacity to cope with this kind of data and optimize the data flow, but that may take some time to have an effect on the quantity and quality of seizure data. We urge a stronger commitment from all countries to provide this much-needed information, which is key to global efforts to enforce crimes against wildlife and to the development of compliance procedures similar to those adopted when the legal trade annual report is not submitted. Isolated seizure data are occasionally available, but they can be misinterpreted without a proper context. Countries with a strong commitment to fighting illegal wildlife trade may have more seizures than countries that are less committed, or a small number of seizures may represent an efficient illegal crime network that operates in countries with limited powers to enforce the law. Therefore, due to a lack of measures to enforce the report of seizures, countries in the latter situation may have the largest gaps in seizure data, the so-called “dark figure” (Coleman & Moynihan 1996). As small pieces in a large puzzle, data on a single seizure, when integrated into a larger set of global data, have the potential to reveal the most important nodes in an organized crime network or show where law enforcement is protecting biodiversity (Reeve 2002; van Uhm 2016). This set of big data is so complex that there is the need for new omics methods to analyze, visualize, and predict future patterns of spatial (origin, transit regions and markets), temporal, and magnitude (species, type and number of specimens, criminal networks) trends in a time frame short enough to impede rapidly evolving criminal activity (LeClerc & Savona 2017). Because these data are not freely available to the entire scientific community for various legal reasons, there is also the need to find procedures to access data or to release filtered data that can be used by scientists to further develop methods and to analyze these trends. This compilation of data and its analysis is the easiest task at hand in a long process to stop at least some of the important drivers of biodiversity loss on Earth. Over the long term, the effectiveness of all CITES and ICCWC initiatives relies on all countries providing this much-needed information because it will be more difficult to enforce regulations and promote judicial actions in countries where seizures are not reported. Here, teams of people with a broad range of skills (e.g., field biologists, ecologists, jurists, police, etc.) can help at different decision-making levels to achieve this goal, either within bottom-up (e.g., national or regional NGOs) or top-down approaches (e.g., European Commission and UN). Recent history shows that organized crime is not geographically bound, and significant progress relies on coordinated efforts between countries and agencies, from the source to the end user, to ultimately undermine the high profits and low risks that make illegal wildlife trade such an attractive business. Literature Cited CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora). 2016. Notification to the parties 2016/007. CITES, Geneva, Switzerland. Coleman C, Moynihan J. 1996. Understanding crime data: haunted by the dark figure. Open University Press, Buckingham, United Kingdom. Heinrich S, Wittmann TA, Prowse TAA, Ross JV, Delean, Shepherd SCR, Cassey P. 2016. Where did all the pangolins go? International CITES trade in pangolin species. Global Ecology and Conservation 8: 241– 253. ICCWC (The International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime). 2012. Wildlife and forest crime analytic toolkit. Revised edition. United Nations, New York. B LeClerc, EU Savona, editors. 2017. Crime Prevention in the 21st century: insightful approaches for crime prevention initiatives. Springer, Cham, Switzerland. May C. 2017. Transnational crime and the developing world. Global Financial Integrity, Washington, D.C. Mundy-Taylor V. 2013. Illegal wildlife trade and the European Union: an analysis of EU-TWIX seizure data for the period 2007–2011. Report. European Commission, Brussels. Reeve R. 2002. Policing international trade in endangered species: the CITES treaty and compliance. The Royal Institute of International Affairs and Earthscan, London. Reino L, Figueira R, Beja P, Araújo MB, Capinha C, Strubbe D. 2017. Networks of global bird invasion altered by regional trade ban. Science Advances 3: e1700783. Robinson JE, Sinovas P. 2018. Challenges of analyzing the global trade in CITES-listed wildlife. Conservation Biology 32: 1203– 1206. Schneider J. 2011. Endangered species markets a focus for criminology? Pages 207– 214 in M Natarajan, editor. International crime and justice. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, United Kingdom. UNODC (United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime). 2016. World wildlife crime report: trafficking in protected species. UN, New York. van Uhm DP. 2016. The illegal wildlife trade. Inside the world of poachers, smugglers and traders. Springer International Publishing, Cham, Switzerland. Vall-llosera M, Cassey P. 2017. ‘Do you come from a land down under?’ Characteristics of the international trade in Australian endemic parrots. Biological Conservation 207: 38– 46. Citing Literature Volume33, Issue1February 2019Pages 7-8 ReferencesRelatedInformation
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