By Steven Broad

  Trade in wild animals and plants occurs in most countries of the world and involves a wide range of species and commodities. Over the past 50 years in particular, a considerable array of policy and legislative measures have been introduced to both address trade-related conservation harms and enhance wildlife resource use sustainability, largely by exerting conditionality on access and commerce. Nevertheless, wildlife trade remains a major element of the overexploitation of wild species, the second most significant driver of global biodiversity loss after land-use change. A 2019 World Bank review of the costs of this trade concluded that when financial and economic values are combined, illegal logging, fishing and other forms of wildlife trade have an estimated full global economic value of between US$1 trillion and US$2 trillion per year. One of the key reasons that efforts to counter wildlife overexploitation struggle to succeed, is the emergence of criminal activities that circumvent regulatory measures and drive significant levels of illegal wildlife trade. Such wildlife trafficking varies greatly in scale and impact from country to country and between different wildlife commodity sectors. In some cases, criminal activity runs through the whole trade chain: from poaching or illegal harvest, through wildlife smuggling, to black market sale of prohibited goods to consumers. In other cases, crime is focused on a particular step along the trade chain, such as illegal timber harvest, with resulting products later being infiltrated into ostensibly legal markets.  

  Wildlife trafficking has profoundly negative environmental and human impacts, threatening wild species and undermining their ecological roles, their value to human livelihoods and potentially contributing to the climate crisis through harm to ecosystem functionality.4 The criminality driving poaching, smuggling and sale of wildlife in contravention of local, national and international laws and treaties is a significant global security challenge, often converging with other sectors of the illicit economy. Five decades of increasing international cooperation between governments, the private sector and civil society to address the challenge of wildlife trafficking has to some extent moderated its potential impact, but overall, the environmental, economic and social harms arising from such crime persist. Significant investment by national governments, multilateral institutions and other funding agencies is being made to tackle this challenge. A 2016 World Bank analysis (currently being updated) documented US$1.3 billion of international donor funding between 2010 and 2016 to tackle illegal wildlife trade, in addition to substantial national investments domestically.5 Key questions for those making such investment decisions include: knowing where the most significant problems are; whether interventions implemented at national, regional and global levels are effective in reducing criminal and environmental harm; and whether, overall, the problem is getting better or worse. This paper aims to address the question of how the significance of such wildlife crime can be measured at a national level within the context of a global index of organized crime.6 It begins by considering issues of definition, i.e. what activities fall within the scope of wildlife crime, across both flora and fauna markets highlighted in the crime index. This is followed by a review of past and present efforts to measure these crime areas. Finally, the paper looks ahead to consider how methods of measuring wildlife crime might be enhanced in future and how such efforts may need to evolve as the market itself changes over time  

Geneva:  Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime. 2024.  31p.