In August 2017, Nature Needs More facilitated our first Conservation Lab. We were delighted to be able to contribute to a project being driven by Donalea Patman, Founder of For the Love of Wildlife, in her work to close the Australian domestic trade in elephant ivory and rhino horn. Little did we know at the time that this would start Nature Needs More investigating the lack of transparency and monitoring in the legal trade of animals and their body parts. It appears that it is not only the illegal trade that is huge problem, but also the lack of proper regulation, traceability, transparency and enforcement in the legal trade in wildlife creates no end of problems for threatened or endangered [...]

Introduction For some years now, the Nature Needs More has been monitoring the evolution of automation and its future impact on the global workforce. We have been encouraged by the growing acceptance of a basic income model as a way to help manage the change to a new global economic paradigm, but remain concerned that it appears to be emerging in a very ‘human-centric’ way. At the heart of our many failures to create a sustainable civilisation is the mistaken belief that humans are ‘above’ nature, including other animals. Despite the dreams of sci-fi, and some billionaires, we cannot exist outside the biosphere of this planet; at least not for quite some time. We equally can’t solve our social problems [...]

As the people who have followed Breaking The Brand and, now, Nature Needs More know, we have always openly shared our thinking, research, insights and ideas. This post explains why we created the Style Icon Afternoon Tea, introduced in the last blog, to raise funds for our next RhiNo demand reduction campaign in Viet Nam. In the coming months and years, Nature Needs More will be exploring if we have a better chance of reducing the demand for (illegal) luxury wildlife ‘products’ if we work to embed demand reduction into the ethical and sustainable fashion industry strategy. While the conservation sector does much good work, from a biological perspective, I have seen too little evidence that it can get its [...]

Interesting Facts Given the need to scale up and roll out our demand reduction campaigns, I decided to investigate who already donates to wildlife conservation and where donations go. Culturally the USA has a strong tradition of private individuals making donations, so it seemed the obvious place to look at the statistics on giving (who, what, where etc.). My starting point was the information collected by Charity Navigator , I used their published information to do a ‘back of the envelope’ calculation. In 2016, the last year that the full statistics were available, 3% of all donations went to Environment/Animals. When you drill down in to this, the 3% covers 960 organisations, of which 99 are classified as Wildlife Conservation. So [...]

Antique & Auction House Industry Response To Total Trade Ban Of Elephant Ivory And Rhino Horn The call for a total ban of the elephant ivory and rhino horn (of any age) trade is growing in Australia.  On World Wildlife Day, 3rd March 2018, Australian charity For the Love Of Wildlife is hosting a #MelbourneCrush of ivory and rhino horn items, that many people want #Gone4Good. Donalea Patman, the founder of For The Love Of Wildlife, has highlighted numerous examples of why Australia needs a total domestic trade ban. Some are documented in a recent Nature Needs More Blog: 5 (Alternative) Actions To Make A Difference For Wildlife In 2018. Given the decimation of elephant and rhino populations in both Africa and [...]

As we are approaching the end of our current RhiNo demand reduction campaign, Nature Need More would like to provide an update and an insight in to our plans for 2018. The current demand reduction campaign, will be the last one run under the Breaking The Brand (BTB) project. The BTB project has now become part of Nature Needs More. Nature Needs More Ltd (NNM) has been incorporated as a non-profit, public company in Australia and we have applied for registration as a charity in Australia. Demand reduction campaigns are a key pillar of NNM; it is our objective to be able to scale these campaigns up in 2018 and also to roll them out more broadly; our focus will [...]

On November 28, 2017 The World Bank posted an article titled: Act now to save wildlife: 5 actions that make a difference. The 5 actions suggested by The World Bank are: Engage with the conservation community. Visit a national park to support the wildlife economy, promote sustainable tourism and be touched and captivated by nature. Reduce demand for illegal wildlife parts and products by not purchasing products made from these items—as our partner WildAid says: “When the buying stops, the killing can too.” Commit to learning more about the risks to wildlife and their habitats and reducing your carbon footprint to keep forests, wildlife and oceans healthy and intact. Use the power of your network to inspire others to act by [...]

As many of Breaking The Brand’s long-term supporters and followers know, for the last few years, I have been very concerned about what is being written about the potential for a legal, international trade in rhino horn. While much has been written, very little has been said, by key conservation organisations or agencies, about what the current consumers are willing/not willing to buy. They just don’t appear to want to investigate this critical fact. I must again clarify, by rhino horn consumers I ONLY mean the people who have the personal wealth to buy ‘genuine’ rhino horn. It is this group driving the current rhino poaching crisis; it is their purchasing behaviours that need to be changed; it is [...]

There is a group of men in the world who have the potential to influence the primary users of rhino horn, driving the current rhino killing spree, to change their consuming behaviour. These men probably don’t know that they have the power to do this and, even if they do, it is critical that they understand how. In 2013, when I started interviewing the wealthy Vietnamese men living in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, who are considered the primary consumers of rhino horn, I asked them who the people are they like to read about and follow. The pattern that emerged was that they followed and were influenced by the same global male business and political celebrities that business [...]

A couple of weeks ago I posed this question at the Basic Income Congress in Lisbon, Portugal; as I work with Nature Needs More Co-Founder, Peter Lanius, to evolve a model to test this hypothesis. Breaking The Brand’s followers may remember in an August 2016 blog, I posed a similar question: Can a Tiered Basic Income Model Provide an Alternative to Sustainable Utilization? I asked this question because, while it is possible to tackle demand for wildlife ‘products’, any success will be short lived if there are groups of people who are so financially incentivised to supply that they are willing to re-manufacture the demand. Traffickers and people who want a legalised trade in wildlife products are reliant on impoverished people [...]