In a 2024 article, On Climate Week and Toxic Positivity, journalist Amy Westervelt, said, “the focus on positivity to the exclusion of anything else felt completely surreal and, if I’m being honest, a little scary….seeing so many climate leaders demand positivity, and only positivity, was more than a little unnerving”. In the world of conservation, phantom solutions and incrementalist actions to deal with biodiversity loss are even called ‘nature positive’, an equally surreal and completely meaningless term.
I don’t meet many conservationists who I would say can embrace and deal with conservation’s Stockdale Paradox. Inspired by Admiral James Stockdale’s survival of seven years in a North Vietnamese prisoner of war camp, the Stockdale Paradox combines the ability to confront the brutal facts of the current reality, even as you never doubt that you will prevail in the end. When Stockdale was asked who didn’t make it, his response was clear: “Oh, that’s easy. The optimists”.
The key message is, confront the brutal facts of the current reality, don’t lose sight of your endgame and never doubt that you will prevail in the end.
Never has it been clearer that the conservation sector cannot face its own Stockdale Paradox than with CITES CoP20, the event taking place in the 50th year of the CITES coming into force. The incrementalist approach of Appendix listing recommendations and proposals is akin to shuffling deckchairs on the Titanic. Where is the outcry from the conservation organisations that attend CITES CoP about the inability of CITES to fulfil its mandate and to achieve its vision for 2030? The utter silence and their unrelenting focus on irrelevant minutia speak volumes.
Taking a big step back, lets remind ourselves that when CITES was conceived in the 1960s the international trade in wild flora and fauna was small. Total global exports, for all trade, were worth US$318 billion in 1970 compared to US$32 trillion in 2024, up from US$22 trillion in the last 4 years. The poor quality of data for the legal global trade in wild species means a precise value is difficult to calculate. Conservative estimates put its worth at over US$350 billion annually, more than the overall value of all global trade when the CITES was conceived.
In recent years, the CITES annual budget has been around US$6.2 million, amounting to 0.00017% of the value of trade in wild species. The stark mismatch in the value of trade compared to the funds invested in its regulation explains why it is so easy for the illicit trade to flourish. In addition, there is no funding mechanism for signatory countries to help them monitor and enforce CITES provisions. That this is completely inequitable is obvious but never discussed.
To make matters worse, the current Trump administration has rescinded the funding for all MEAs that the US is part of. Specifically, CoP20 Doc. 7.1 prepared by the Secretariat, states, “On 24 July 2025, the United States Administration signed legislation to rescind the entire amount of federal funding from the account which funds the bulk of recurrent contributions for UNEP and UNEP-administered MEAs, including CITES. In view of the possibility of a loss of up to 22 percent of the core budget of the Secretariat, the CITES Secretary-General was compelled to take decisive action to reduce financial risks and mitigate the potential financial shortfall. Agreed termination proposals for six staff members were prepared and finalized with the support of UNEP”, and “In this context, the recruitment of some new posts will be deferred”.
Even without the dire funding situation, CITES in its current form can’t even run the Committee processes it is required to perform, anymore. A second document, CoP20 Doc. 14, submitted by the Chairs of the CITES Standing, Animals and Plants Committees, and the acting Chair of the Finance and Budget Sub-committee of the CITES Standing Committee, lays bare that, “The current mode of work is no longer viable”. This is the most important document submitted to CITES CoP20. It states, “The current situation [in the CITES] has brought us to a critical point, where addressing the increasing demands and expectations of every issue simultaneously has already gone beyond the capability of the Convention’s operational framework”.
If this is not addressed, the document states, “we may have expanded beyond capacity [to deliver] the official mandate of the convention, which is to regulate trade in species and focus on topics for which no other appropriate competent bodies exist.”, continuing, “Urgent action is therefore required to ensure that the essential function of the Convention remains effective into the future”.
This is tragic because, as the document points out, “that the CITES [focuses] on topics for which no other appropriate competent bodies exist”, which is true. It isn’t only international organisations, like the WTO or the CBD, who can’t do what the CITES can, neither can private entities. The fact that the CITES leadership have made this admission should be positive. It opens the door for those who have shown a deep discomfort in exposing the weaknesses of the current system to step up and help with the needed modernisation.
In this context Nature Needs More has published recommendations of what must be addressed at CITES CoP20. CITES is in existential crisis and the high likelihood that it will lose over a fifth of its funding must be addressed. Even before this potential loss, there was no chance of the CITES achieving its Strategic Vision 2030.
The CITES is a product of the 1960s and because it has had only one strategic review in its 50-year history, back in 1994, it is now completely unsuitable for the world we live in. Until the conservation world starts discussing this, their toxic denialism makes them all obsolete. Veterans of the CITES live by the mantra, “while CITES isn’t perfect, I can’t imagine where we would be if it hadn’t been there”. But tip this on its head, the fact that the CITES “is there” and that its veterans have refused to “confront the brutal facts of the current reality” of the CITES critical failures, has resulted in the convention being an enabler of wildlife crime and biodiversity loss, not the solution is needs to be.
Conservation organisations and academics have played into the hands of neoliberal governments worldwide and global corporations, ensuring their concerns have become easy to ignore. For governments and businesses today, conservation organisations are irrelevant. They know that they depend on government grants and corporate sponsorship, and so they will toe the line, no matter how much it is in conflict with their supposed mission.
It is the activists who have stepped into the void, who are going to jail; at the extreme end, it is the community based environmental defenders who are being killed. Activists and defenders are paying the price of the complicity of corporate conservation and academics.
With the ever-growing discussions about resilience, it’s time for conservation to tap into a mental image of the Stockdale Paradox. What would Stockdale say in response to confronting the brutal facts of the current reality? That phantom solutions and incremental actions won’t solve the existential crisis facing wild species and the natural world. He would likely say: “Toxic positivity is not an option; deal with it!”.