There is a difference between climate scientists and conservation scientists. The vast majority of actively publishing climate scientists – 97% – agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change. Even for those among us who, after decades, challenge the 97% claim, and undertake their own ‘fact check’, they found the consensus is “shared by 90%–100% of publishing climate scientists” in one survey, while another found it to be 84%. So, let’s say the ‘overwhelming majority’ of climate scientist agree that humans are causing global warming and climate change and as such they challenge the fossil fuel industry. The biodiversity equivalent to ‘climate scientists and the fossil fuel industry’ is ‘conservation scientists and the industrial extraction of [...]

In a book published recently, Future of Denial, the author Tad DeLay explores the question, “Why do we continue to squander the short time we have left to deal with climate change?” DeLay isn’t the first to lay bare that “capitalism is an ecocidal engine constantly regenerating climate change denial”. Interviewed by The Guardian, he says, “You can’t admit, as a capitalist subject, that there’s little you as an individual can do, and neither can you imagine the end of capitalism”. If you can’t imagine the end of capitalism the options are either deny reality or accept it but deny personal moral culpability – namely reject the science or commit to pseudo-solutions, gimmicks and greenwashing. Supporting pseudo/phantom solutions [...]

Anyone reading about Australia’s bungled Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act 1999 (EPBC Act) reform will no doubt have seen the well-worn phrase ‘once in a generation’. The EPBC Act is stated to be Australia’s central piece of national environmental law, covering the Commonwealth’s role in environmental protection matters of national significance. After a scathing statutory review of the EPBC Act’s effectiveness, undertaken in 2019/20, Australia supposedly has a ‘once in a generation’ opportunity to ensure the country’s environment laws are working and this ‘once in a generation’ reform can’t be rushed. This ‘once in a generation’ statement is music to the ears of the stakeholders who want to maintain the status quo. They can lobby hard to [...]

This week saw Nancy González, a Colombian designer whose customers are the likes of Victoria Beckham and whose products have been featured in The Devil Wears Prada, receive an 18-month prison sentence in the USA for smuggling.  The maximum sentence available for González for illegally importing designer handbags made from caiman and python skin was 25 years. The indictment charged Gonzalez, her company Gzuniga Ltd and two employees with one count of conspiracy and two counts of illegally importing reptile skin handbags between February 2016 to April 2019. Gzuniga was ordered to forfeit all handbags and other previously seized product and banned for three years from any activities involving commercial trade in wildlife. The indictment detailed that the [...]

For World Wildlife Day, 2024, CITES hosted an event with the theme, “Connecting People and Planet: Exploring Digital Innovation in Wildlife Conservation". The event profiled some of the latest applications of digital technologies in wildlife conservation and ecosystems mapping and monitoring. Just over an hour into the event, Ivonne Higuero, CITES Secretary-General, introduced the ASYCUDA eCITES system, saying, “In our next segment we are going to look into the future. I would like to introduce you to yet another one of CITES digital efforts. The electronic CITES permitting system or eCITES. Something close to my heart. When I started working with CITES some six years ago, I thought we need to move into the future, and [...]

In 2019, I attended CITES CoP18 in Geneva, two weeks of watching how decisions are made about which endangered and exotic species can be legally traded. During the mid-conference break, my colleagues and I took the 4-hour drive to Milan, to take a look at what was on sale in one of the top fashion destinations in the world. After seafood, fashion and furniture are the are the two biggest users of wild species. The first thing we noted from Milan’s luxury retail sector was how difficult it was to pass a store that didn’t contain fur, exotic leathers or feathers. Posing as a customer who wanted to take something ‘special’ back to Australia from her Italian holiday [...]

The 2023 BBC investigation, The Monkey Haters, which exposed the torture of baby macaques for the online viewing pleasure of sadistic people worldwide, provides a window on a world which profits from a trade in wild species and its light-touch regulation. The legal wildlife trade has been called one of the most lucrative trades in the world, yet most trade has no regulation at all. Only for around 40,000 species is trade regulated, on paper at least. But with the CITES trade permit processes stuck in the 1970s, the reality is this trade is managed with the technological equivalent of the 3M Post-It Note launched in 1977 (CITES launched in 1975). CITES trade regulation can’t cope with a [...]

In the final days of 2023, a tip-off to the South African Directorate for Priority Crime Investigation resulted in a 16-hour raid on Derek Lewitton’s South African ranch. Twenty-six rhino carcasses were located during the raid and it was suggested by officers that there could be more, “From the helicopter the place looked like a slaughterhouse,” Provincial Commissioner of Police Major General Jan Scheepers told ABC News when describing the scene. “Everywhere you looked, rhinos were lying there dead”. South African authorities must be informed about the death of a rhino, even if it dies of natural causes. Rhino horn was also found at the property without the necessary government documentation. Lewitton’s website, Black Rock Rhino Conservation, says, [...]

One of the key arguments used for not moving to a reverse-listing (positive-listing, white-listing) regulatory system for the trade in wild species is that CITES already has a mechanism for implementing the precautionary principle - the Non-Detriment Findings (NDFs). In theory, the convention directs signatory counties to only issue export permits for Appendix I and II listed species when the national Scientific Authority of the State of export has advised that such export will not be detrimental to the survival of the species. Yet, as with the CITES regulator more broadly, ample evidence has been provided over the years that NDFs are unfit-for-purpose. The concerns about the quality and trustworthiness of NDFs are completely justifiable, given the lack [...]

Having just returned from Washington DC and meetings with political representatives and advisors from both side of the aisle, what is evident is how little they know about the international commercial legal trade in wild species. The pattern of the meetings was them bringing up elephants and rhinos, hunting trophies and zoos and poverty alleviation. This isn’t unique to the USA, we have found the same situation in meetings with political and trade representatives from Australia to Europe, Asia to Latin America. But it begs the question, how have the government policy people in the global conservation organisations, who do have access to government, left political representatives so ignorant of the scale of this industrial commercial trade? They [...]