By Billy Kyte | Giulia Roncon

With the aim to support individuals in building resilient communities working to prevent, counter, and limit the damage of environmental crime, this handbook documents the challenges faced by defenders working in the environmental crime field and provides guidance to support their resilience.

The first section of the handbook analyzes definitional understandings of environmental crime and explores the impacts and harms it can perpetuate. The second section assesses the risks and challenges commonly faced by environmental defenders, including an assessment of their needs, and explores emergent regional issues that may play a part in such vulnerabilities. The final section presents a repository of best practices and tools that can help stakeholders to access available resources and to mitigate the potential risks they face.

The handbook draws from consultations involving nearly 100 prominent figures from civil society and media across Africa and Asia. Whilst findings are therefore geographically specific to some extent, our work confirms that the challenges experienced by environmental defenders in these regions were replicated globally as well. Although each country and regional context is different, the handbook outlines strategies that could be broadly implemented to support the community of stakeholders dedicated to tackling environmental crime worldwide.

Geneva, SWIT: Global Initiative Against Transnational Organized Crime (GI-TOC). 2023.

By The Environmental Investigation Agency (EIA)

West and Central Africa continues to raise concerns among Parties to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) as a significant hub for global wildlife trafficking. This briefing highlights the parallel responsibilities and shortcomings of both West and Central Africa and South-East Asia in implementing their commitments under CITES and outlines what needs to happen to tackle transnational wildlife crime more effectively. At SC74, EIA raised these concerns in our briefing document Joint Responsibilities: The Nigeria- Vietnam wildlife trafficking corridor and compliance with CITES, which similarly highlighted the need for urgent action.

London; Washington, DC: EIA, 2022. 12p.

By Dave Currey, Faith Doherty, Sam Lawson, Julian Newman, and A. Ruwindrijarto

A report into illegal logging in Indonesia and South-East Asia, and the international consumption of illegally sourced timber. For the past two decades, the international community has been aware of rampant logging of tropical forests and vanishing biodiversity. Yet even if you could track an illegally cut tree to a port in a timber consuming country, and supply conclusive evidence that it was illegally cut, none of them have legislation in place that would allow their enforcement authorities to seize the shipment.

London; Washington, Environment Protection Agency; Bogor, Indonesia: Telapak, 2001. 36p.

By Annette Hübschle-Finch

A multi-sectoral regime of protection including international treaties, conservation and security measures, demand reduction campaigns and quasi-military interventions has been established to protect rhinos. Despite these efforts, the poaching of rhinos and trafficking of rhino horn continue unabated. This dissertation asks why the illegal market in rhinoceros horn is so resilience in spite of the myriad measures employed to disrupt it. A theoretical approach grounded in the sociology of markets is applied to explain the structure and functioning of the illegal market. The project follows flows of rhino horn from the source in southern Africa to illegal markets in Southeast Asia.

Kohn, Germany: International Max Planck Research School on the Social and Political Constitution of the Economy, 2016. 424p.

By Vanda Felbab-Brown

Southeast Asia, with its linkages into the larger Asian market that includes China, Indonesia, and India, is one of the world’s biodiversity hotspots as well as one of the world’s hotspots for the illegal trade in wildlife and wildlife parts. Although demand markets for wildlife, including illegally traded wildlife are present throughout the world, China ranks as the world’s largest market for illegal trade in wildlife, and wildlife products, followed by the United States. Globally, the volume and diversity of traded and consumed species have increased to phenomenal and unprecedented levels, contributing to very intense species loss. In Southeast Asia alone, where the illegal trade in wildlife is estimated to be worth $8-10 billion per year, wildlife is harvested at many times the sustainable level, decimating ecosystems and driving species to extinction.

Washington, DC: Brookings Institute, 2011. 43p.

By Environmental Investigation Agency, Inc. (EIA).

The illegal trade in precious “rosewoods” is the world’s most valuable form of wildlife crime. Hundreds of people have been killed around the world trying to protect these rare trees from the gangs seeking to profit from the rapidly growing demand for luxury furniture in China. Having decimated most rosewood species in Southeastern Asia and Central America, this rapacious industry has now turned to Africa, and a dry forest species called “kosso” (Pterocarpus erinaceus) . EIA’s investigators have spent two years exploring this booming illegal trade, including undercover meetings with more than 30 actors in the supply chain, from the arid forests in Nigeria to the sophisticated retail shops in China. Our investigation reveals that almost all the kosso coming from and through Nigeria for the past three years has been illegal. Most shockingly, EIA’s investigation has revealed that thousands of documents from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) have been used in contravention of the core objectives of the Convention.

London: Environmental Investigation Agency, Inc. 2017. 40p.