Wildlife Crime

Serious wildlife crime is organised, transnational, is fuelled by corruption, and has a devastating impact on wildlife, local communities, national economies, security, public health and entire ecosystems. Of all the known threats to wildlife, the illegal taking, trade and consumption of wildlife is one of the most destructive and destabilising.

Despite the severe impacts of such crimes, we do not have a global agreement on wildlife crime and existing wildlife trade laws are not adequately enforced.

Wildlife trade

Scientific research indicates that COVID-19 was most likely transmitted to humans from its reservoir host, a horseshoe bat, via another intermediate host species, possibly a racoon dog or pangolin. We know that past pandemics have been caused by wildlife-related zoonotic diseases and the conditions that make spillover from animals to humans more likely.

Despite the risks to public health and animal health of high-risk wildlife trade, markets and consumption habits, current wildlife trade laws do not take account of public or animal health issues.

The Global Initiative to “End Wildlife Crime” aims to encourage States to fill serious gaps in international law by advocating for and offering technical support towards:

a) the creation of an additional protocol on wildlife crime under the UN Convention on Transnational Organised Crime; and,
b) the inclusion of public health and animal health criteria in relevant international conventions and processes, including through the development and implementation of a robust Pandemics agreement.

The two reforms are inter-related. New regulations on the trade in wildlife, including possible new trade bans on health grounds and bans on certain high-risk markets and consumption, will require a scaled up, cooperative global enforcement effort.