End Wildlife Crime Event, House of Lords, London UK, 3 March 2020, UN World Wildlife Day

Good morning and sincere thanks Lord Randall for so generously hosting us here in the House of Lords, to ADM Capital Foundation and Born Free for inviting me to speak, and to everyone who has joined us today, on UN World Wildlife Day. As mentioned by Lord Randall, I’m here in a personal capacity.

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Over the next few decades we could see over 1 million species go extinct, unless we change course. So says a global assessment on biodiversity and ecosystem services released last year by the UN IPBES, which is for biodiversity and ecosystems what the UN IPCC is for climate change.

IPBES shows that despite 50 years of global efforts, dating back to the 1972 Stockholm Conference on the Human Environment, we have failed to stop the loss of biodiversity. The latest WWF Living Planet Report found we have lost 60% of wild animals (vertebrates) over the past 40 years. The biodiversity targets agreed under the Convention on Biological Diversity for 2010 or 2020 have not been met, nor did they manage to interrupt the steady decline in wildlife over this period. 

Something is clearly not working and IPBES tells us that incremental change will not be enough. Transformational change is needed to avert a global catastrophe for nature, and for ourselves.

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IPBES describes five major threats to nature, amongst them over exploitation, which is seriously impacting wildlife, including fish and timber species. This overexploitation includes the illegal, unregulated, and poorly regulated legal use of wildlife.

Of all the known threats, the illegal taking, trade and consumption of wildlife is one of the most destructive and destabilising, and how we can end it is the focus of today’s event.

Before doing so, it’s important to stress that we are not talking of local subsistence poaching, which is a separate and distinct issue to be resolved locally.

It’s also important to note that saving wildlife requires a multifaceted approach, including scaling up efforts to protect wildlife at its source, by working with local communities to protect biodiverse rich places, which is the focus of the UK’s Biodiversity Landscape Fund and the Legacy Landscapes Fund. 

But we will not succeed in our endeavours unless we can stop the industrial scale, organised, transnational wildlife crime that is shifting thousands of tonnes of contraband, worth billions of dollars, and leaving death, destruction and instability in its wake. The people behind these crimes are not influenced by anything other than risk and profit, and to stop them they need to feel the long arm of the law.

Yet, remarkably, there is no global legal agreement on wildlife crime, and by default we have turned to CITES, a trade-related conservation convention from the 1970’s, to serve as the de facto legal instrument for combating serious wildlife crimes.

The problem is that CITES was not designed for this purpose. It was meant to regulate wildlife trade to avoid overexploitation of a species through international trade. It serves a very important purpose in doing so but it was not intended to fight crime.

CITES is a remarkable trade-related instrument but it has limitations. It only applies to those species listed in its appendices, being 36,000 of the world’s 8 million species, and to the cross-border movement of specimens. It does not require illegal trade to be criminalized, nor does it apply to poaching, and it is not a natural forum for police or other enforcement officials.

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However, in the absence of any alternative, for the eight years that I served CITES, we worked with Parties and many stakeholders, including several who are here today here today, to use the Convention to crank up the fight against illegal wildlife trade. We stretched the mandate of the Convention, and in doing so we had some good success.

We created ICCWC (International Consortium on Combating Wildlife Crime), saw the first ever UN General Assembly Resolution on illegal wildlife trade (IWT), the first UN World Wildlife Crime Report, and generated a lot of public, political and financial support, as well as much deeper engagement of the enforcement community in the fight against IWT. We also launched UN World Wildlife Day!

And we saw wonderful initiatives take off, like the Duke of Cambridge’s United for Wildlife Transport Taskforce on IWT, with the transport sector signing off on the Buckingham Place Declaration against IWT, and through the efforts of the World Travel and Tourism Council, the travel and tourism sector also came on board. Due to this collective effort we are today much better placed to confront serious wildlife crimes than we were a decade ago.

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Yet, one serious underlying problem remains unresolved, and we are paying a heavy price for it.

We have not fully embedded fighting serious wildlife crime into the international criminal law framework, yet these crimes can only be dealt with by police, prosecutors and the judiciary, not by conservationists or rangers acting alone.

This failure reverberates throughout the system, right down to the local level.

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Colleagues, we will not end serious wildlife crime if we stick with this half-way house approach and the evidence increasingly points to the pressing need to take the next big step forward in the fight against serious wildlife crime.

We have known for some time now that serious wildlife crime is organised and transnational, is fuelled by corruption, and has a devastating impact on wildlife, local communities, national economies, security, public health and entire ecosystems, but this is now increasingly obvious.

First and foremost, the public health implications, which are high in our consciousness today. Reports that the current corona virus could be linked to consuming illegally sourced wildlife follows on from other serious outbreaks, including HIV Aids, Ebola, SARS and MERS, all of which were linked to wildlife. The human and economic costs of such outbreaks are massive.

Pangolins may be a source of the spread of the corona virus. Pangolins were up listed to CITES Appendix I in 2016, often called CITES highest level of protection. Yet, from 2016-2019, we saw a record 206 tonnes of pangolin scales seized and confiscated, showing us that up listing did not result in better protection of this magnificent animal, with illegal exploitation surging. The pangolin is today the world’s most heavily trafficked mammal.

The figure of up to USD20 billion has been used for many years to estimate the value of CITES listed species in illegal trade. Yet, a recent report from the World Bank puts this number at up to USD200 billion, when one includes all wildlife, including fish and timber not listed under CITES.

And this raises the question of why do we only protect a species when it’s almost gone extinct? This emergency ward approach to global conservation may have been sound in the 1970’s, when CITES was adopted, but the world has changed dramatically since then, as has the globalised nature of wildlife crime.

In 2020, with the benefit of the IPBES Global Assessment, we must look beyond CITES listed species and use the law to help countries stop the theft of all their wildlife, not just those species that are on the brink of extinction. With 1 million species said to be at risk of extinction over the coming decades, a species by species approach does not look feasible.

The same World Bank report shows that governments are losing between USD7-12 billion a year in tax revenue. It values the impact on ecosystems in the order of USD1-2 trillion a year, as the theft of wildlife diminishes ecosystems, including their ability to mitigate climate change. Recent scientific reports show that intact ecosystems are better at sequestering carbon than degraded ones.

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Colleagues, the conservation community is good at conservation, and some conservation-minded organisations are good at gathering intelligence. But only the police and other enforcement officials can take on transnational, organised criminals. They need an unequivocal political message, supported by the right legal framework, that organised, transnational wildlife crimes are serious crimes deserving their attention and deployment of their resources.

The time has come for a new global agreement on wildlife crime. One that is placed under the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime, as has been done for other serious crimes such as human trafficking. What is needed is an agreement that obliges countries to criminalise importing illegally sourced wildlife – as we already see in some country’s domestic laws, such as in the US under the Lacey Act, and several countries for timber imports, and to criminalise serious wildlife crimes. The UK can play a leadership role in making it happen.

Colleagues, we need transformational change. The status quo won’t cut it; nor will incremental changes. It’s abundantly clear that we need to scale up the fight against the transnational, organised criminals who are stripping countries bare of their precious wildlife. To stop them we need to get police and prosecutors hot on their trail. 

Local communities should be the ones who benefit from their wildlife, not organised criminals.

It is only by taking bold actions that we can hope to end wildlife crime and now, 2020, the super year for biodiversity, is the time to act.