Wildlife Trafficking and its Impacts on Animal and Human Health: Where Do We Go From Here?

Association of Zoos and Aquariums (AZA)

2020 Annual Conference - Virtual

'Wildlife Trafficking and its Impacts on Animal and Human Health: Where Do We Go From Here?'

General Session

17 September 2020

Chinese translation available here (thanks to China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation)

-----

What is the role of international agreements in combating wildlife trafficking, and what changes are needed to could help address the threat of zoonotic diseases?

-----

Thank you Cristián, and thanks for the wonderful opening remarks, and thank you also to Dan and his good team at the AZA for including this really timely and topical discussion on the agenda.

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

This observation applies equally to wildlife trade – be it legal, illegal, regulated, or unregulated. This pandemic has reminded us of what the world’s best scientists have been telling us for some time now – wildlife issues are not just about conservation – they are also about public and animal health, and if we get it wrong, it can have massive global implications.

Others will discuss how viruses can spillover from certain wild animals to people through wildlife trade, markets and consumption. As Chelsea said, it’s an issue that is now very high in our collective consciousness.

And we have already seen some countries moving ahead to take stricter measures to address these risks, which is great but to be effective we need a global response. These wildlife-related health risks must be addressed through international cooperation and international laws. So, are our current international laws fit for purpose in a post-COVID-19 world?

Sort answer, no.

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. They do not reflect the interconnected nature of things. Rather, they reflect the siloed approach of the 1970s.

Looking first at legal, regulated trade.

CITES, which you are all familiar with is the global wildlife trade regulator. It was negotiated and signed in the early 1970s, and it was designed to address the over-exploitation of wildlife through international trade. 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.

Its narrow focus on overexploitation was sound when the Convention was signed in 1973, but it cannot be sustained in a post-COVID-19 world. Today we need to take a ‘One Health’ approach to wildlife trade.

We 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.

Now, turning to the illegal wildlife trade.

Over the years, in particular the past decades, concerns shifted from not just being about over-exploitation through trade, but with illegal trade. Illegal trade in CITES-listed species is valued at about USD20B annually, but if we add all species in illegal trade it balloons out to about USD200B. These crimes also deprive governments of revenue, degrade ecosystems and their ability to sequester carbon, and exacerbate corruption, insecurity, and poverty.

Further, 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 trade does 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. However, in the absence of any other instrument, and facing a surge in trafficking, we made the best possible use we could of it. And we did well – and Chelsea, Cristián and Dan and others, all played a big part in this effort. 

But we have stretched CITES mandate to the limit – we need more if we are to win this fight. We need to look to all species in illegal trade and to embed combatting wildlife crime where it belongs, namely into the international criminal law framework.

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

Looked at overall, 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.

CITES was groundbreaking in its day and our predecessors showed great ambition and courage to negotiate such an agreement in the 1970s.

But it’s now 2020. 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 into its decision making, nor can we stand by and watch wildlife crimes continue to escalate without scaling up our international response.

Colleagues, 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 and that gives us the best chance of avoiding future wildlife-related pandemics and all of the misery that comes with it.

In doing so, we will need to show the same level of ambition and courage as our predecessors did back in the 1970s.

I would like to conclude by congratulating and thanking AZA for being a Founding Champion of the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, which I an honored chair, and for promoting both of these vital law reforms through its sphere of influence, as well as Dan Ashe for his personal leadership in working to advance them. 

Thank you.

-----

Reference materials

Webinars

‘International Dialogue on Wildlife Trade: China and the World’ Remarks at the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) International Dialogue event, July 2020

‘Tackling the Conservation Crisis Triggered by COVID’ Remarks at Africa Tomorrow event, July 2020 (video only)

‘Nature is sending us a message: Biodiversity loss and wildlife trade as causes of pandemics’ Remarks at the German Ministry for the Environment (BMU) International Event, June 2020 (video available here)

‘Wildlife Trade, Origins of COVID-19, and Preventing Future Pandemics’ Oral testimony to the ASEAN Inter-Parliamentary Assembly (AIPA), Virtual Caucus Hearing, June 2020 (video available here)

'Giant Conversations: Preventing Wildlife and Wildlife Parts Reaching Consumer Markets' Space for Giants Panel Session (no written paper), June 2020 (video available here)

‘Wildlife Trade, Origins of COVID-19, and Preventing Future Pandemics’, Oral testimony to the U.K. All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) on International Conservation Virtual Caucus Hearing, June 2020 (video available here)

‘A fresh look at Global wildlife trade law: can CITES help prevent pandemics?’, Is CITES enough or do we need more? Remarks at the IUCN Commission on Environmental Law Webinar Series, May 2020 (video and summary of the event available here)

‘End Pandemics: Global Webinar’, April, 2020 (video available here)

‘Wildlife Trade, Origins of COVID-19, and Preventing Future Pandemics’, Oral and written testimony to the U.S. Congressional International Conservation Caucus Virtual Caucus Hearing, April 2020 (full set of proceedings and video available here)

Opeds, interviews and media articles

‘Illegal wildlife trade, poaching, hunting and the role of tourism’, World Tourism Forum Lucerne, August 2020 (video only)

‘What is the impact of the coronavirus pandemic? Global experts answer the big questions’, Financial Times interview, July 2020

‘A Crucial Step Toward Preventing Wildlife-Related Pandemics’, Scientific American Joint Op-Ed, June 2020

‘Connecting human and wildlife health key to stave off the next pandemic’, Article on personal LinkedIn page, April 2020

‘Confront illegal wildlife trafficking with international criminal laws, former global trade chief says’, The Independent, June 2020

 ‘Conservation must not be a COVID victim’, The Independent, May 2020

 ‘Time to end the scourge of wildlife crime’, The Independent, March 2020

Articles

‘Connecting human and wildlife health key to stave off the next pandemic’, Article on personal LinkedIn page, April 2020

‘To end wildlife crime global responses must move with the times’, Article on personal LinkedIn page, March 2020

 ‘End Wildlife Crime Event’ (House of Lords, London UK, UN World Wildlife Day), Article on personal LinkedIn page, March 2020

‘A salute to the rangers of Garamba National Park, DRC’, Article on personal LinkedIn page, April 2019

‘The tail does not wag the dog – the post 2020 biodiversity framework’, Article on personal LinkedIn page, February 2019

 ‘Do we need a wildlife crime convention?’ Article on personal LinkedIn page, February 2019