Combatting Wildlife Crime & Reducing the Transmission of Zoonotic Diseases

The Stimson Centre with ICCF Group

Combatting Wildlife Crime and Reducing the Transmission of Zoonotic Diseases

Introduction to the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime 

John E Scanlon AO, Chair, Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime

Recording of the full event available here

25 January 2021

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Good morning all, and thank you Sally and Susan and many thanks to the Stimson Centre and the ICCF Group for hosting today’s very timely event. We are also most grateful to Senator Chris Coons for his wonderful keynote address.

We are all experiencing this COVID-19 pandemic together, and it has reminded us in a devastating way of the interconnected nature of things, most particularly between economies, the environment, human and wildlife health and welfare.

It has also reminded us of what the world’s best scientists have been telling us for some time now – how we interact with wildlife is not just conservation issue, it is also about public and animal health and welfare, and if we get it wrong, it can have massive global implications.

David Quammen, who you will hear from shortly, has been sounding the alarm bells for decades – and the fact that viruses can spillover from certain wild animals to people through wildlife trade, markets and consumption is now very high in our collective consciousness.

Late last year the IPBES told us that 1.7 million undiscovered viruses are thought to exist in wild animals, of which about half could spillover to people.

We need to take heed of what scientists are telling us and as we battle this current pandemic, we also need to take steps to prevent the next one, as Senator Coons said, which could be even worse. This includes considering whether our current international legal framework is fit for purpose.

The Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime has done just that and concluded that our current international regime for regulating wildlife trade and combating wildlife crime, including illegal wildlife trade, is inadequate both for regulating the trade, markets, and consumption that pose a risk to public health, as well as for ending wildlife crime. 

We have identified two serious gaps in our international legal framework that must be filled if we are to give ourselves the best chance of avoiding future wildlife-related pandemics and to end wildlife crime.

Our Initiative, which launched on 5 June last year, was established to encourage and support States to fill these gaps through two inter-related but not inter-dependent reforms:

– firstly, to amend international wildlife trade laws to build public and animal health criteria into decision making, and

- secondly, to create a new global agreement on wildlife crime.

Our Initiative is made up of a large and diverse group of people and organisations coming from across every region. We work through a Steering group, with International Champions and supporters coming from across all sectors, and well as with special advisors.

The 25 organisations currently supporting our Initiative, have very disparate views on many issues, but we all converge on the need to make these two critical reforms to our international laws.

I will briefly introduce these proposed reforms, which our panels will address in much greater detail.

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Looking first at legal, regulated, and unregulated wildlife trade.

CITES, the global wildlife trade regulator, was negotiated and signed in the early 1970s. It was designed to address the over-exploitation of wildlife through international trade and it developed a robust international regime to ensure that trade in a listed species did not threaten its survival. It is not perfect, but it does this quite well.

But CITES was never designed to address the public and animal health aspects of wildlife trade. It addresses the impact of trade on the survival of a listed species at its source, not its potential impacts on human and animal health once taken and transported to other countries.

Today we need to take a ‘One Health’ approach to wildlife trade.

States can do this by adopting amendments to CITES that build public and animal health criteria into its decision-making processes, thereby making CITES a contemporary and relevant Convention for a post-COVID-19 world.

Today you will hear from to Craig Hoover and Professor Christina Voigt on how CITES could be amended to achieve this objective and of the process for doing so. We are most grateful to Craig for leading the international team that has drafted a set of possible amendments.

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Now, turning to wildlife trafficking.

These are crimes that deprive governments of revenue, degrade ecosystems and their ability to sequester carbon, and exacerbate corruption, insecurity, and poverty and pose a threat to public and animal health.

Illegal trade in CITES-listed species is valued at about $20 billion annually. But CITES covers just 38,000 of the world’s eight million species. If we consider all species, including fish and timber species, that are being trafficked, and its impacts on ecosystems, the World Bank puts this figure at a staggering $1-2 trillion a year.

And as more restrictions are placed on wildlife trade, markets, and consumption that could pose a risk to public health, we will need to scale up our enforcement efforts to ensure such activities do not simply move underground.

However, notwithstanding these massive and highly destructive crimes, there is no global agreement on wildlife crime, as there is for example on human trafficking.

CITES has been heavily relied upon but it was not designed to deal with wildlife crime. It is a trade-related convention, not a crime-related convention and we have stretched its mandate to the limit. We clearly need to do more.

We need to consider all species being trafficked, not just the species protected under CITES, and to embed combating wildlife crime where it belongs, namely into the international criminal law framework.

States can do this by developing a fourth Protocol on wildlife crime under the UN Convention Against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC).

Today we will hear from Marcus Asner and Dr. Meredith Gore on a draft Protocol on wildlife crime to combat and prevent illicit wildlife trafficking. We are most grateful to Marcus and his law firm, Arnold & Porter, for leading the international team that prepared this draft Protocol. We are also grateful to Christine Dawson from the Department of State for joining this panel. Christine is a longstanding champion in the fight against wildlife trafficking.

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Colleagues, left as it is, our system is not going to prevent the next pandemic. It could, in fact, be raising our potential exposure to zoonotic diseases that can spill over from wild animals to people.

CITES was ground-breaking in its day and our predecessors showed great ambition and courage to negotiate such an agreement in Washington DC in the 1970s.

But it’s now 2021 – almost 50 years later. We live in a post-COVID-19 world – and we simply cannot allow a wildlife trade regime to prevail that fails to include public and animal health criteria into its decision making, nor can we stand by and watch wildlife crimes continue to escalate without scaling up our international response.

The time, effort and resources needed to make our international legal framework fit for purpose in a post COVID-19 world is infinitesimal when compared to the impacts of a future pandemic and of wildlife crime.

The youth of this world is taking a massive hit from this pandemic. We owe it to them to pass on a legal framework that is fit for purpose, one that gives us our best chance of avoiding future wildlife-related pandemics and of ending these highly destructive wildlife crimes.

In doing so, we will need to show the same level of ambition and courage as our predecessors did back in the 1970s – and our Initiative exists to encourage and offer our support to States to consider and move ahead with these much-needed reforms.

Thank you.