Blog

Over the past 12 months Nature Needs More has tried to interest the mainstream media (MSM) in the story of how the flaws in the regulation of the legal trade in endangered species are enabling the illicit trade to thrive. Several angles have been tried, when contacting investigative, environmental and business journalists through to editors and editors-in-chiefs. Whilst conservation media does some great investigative pieces, these stories don’t reach the general public. And, we cannot rely on social media, which in the first instance was simply too noisy and is now not trusted, given the levels of fake news and orchestrated disinformation campaigns aided by algorithms which take the echo-chamber effect to new orders of magnitude. We could [...]

In 2020, Nature Needs More has a big program of work. This year, while we continue the projects pushing for the modernisation of CITES and our work on consumer demand reduction, we will also ramp up our challenge to business; specifically, industries making vast profits from the legal trade in endangered species. As a reminder, this legal trade was valued at US$320 billion annually as long ago as 2012 in a UK Parliament Report and a 2016 European Parliament Report the legal trade in wildlife into the EU alone is worth EUR 100 billion annually (US$112 billion annually). To explain why this issue will get greater focus, let me start with an example: [...]

As we come to the end of NNM's biggest year to-date, I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for your support and for the continued encouragement of our approach to conservation. 2019 Summary   I finish this year with a review, but first a would also like to acknowledge and thank the fantastic Nature Needs More team, Peter Lanius and David McPherson, our collaborative partner on several projects Donalea Patman, founder of For the Love of Wildlife (FLOW) and also Nicholas Duncan, of the SAVE African Rhino Foundation (and the SARF Committee) who has supported my conservation education regarding Southern Africa since I first met him in 2012. I feel very privileged [...]

Periodically, a spark reminds people what has been tolerated for far too long. Perhaps there is no better recent example than Greta Thunberg. The Swedish teenager sat alone at the Stockholm parliament building for the first time in August 2018, holding up a self-painted sign with the words School Strike for Climate. Just over 12 months later she was joined by more than 6 million people, across 185 countries, for the Global School Strike for Climate. Before going any further, I must also acknowledge the Extinction Rebellion’s 'crusties' (as Boris Johnson called them) at the other end of the age spectrum for taking action for the planet. But, in the main, it is young people who have stepped [...]

In March 2018, I wrote a blog Sustainable Fashion & Wildlife where I stated that we would have a better chance of reducing the unchecked demand for (illegal) luxury wildlife ‘products’ if work was being done to embed reducing the desire for endangered species into the newly evolving ethical and sustainable fashion industry strategy. Since then I have expanded my research into the claims of the sustainable fashion and luxury industries, and it is clear that they are a long way from genuinely taking wildlife into account when looking at their supply chains and more. I would like to outline just some examples in this blog and also make a case for a number of key steps that [...]

Having just recently sat through two weeks of CITES CoP18 in Geneva, I can say that, during that time together with all the research done searching for a way to modernise CITES, no key organisation pushing the sustainable use model can provide relevant data and evidence it is working. Whilst any organisation that wants to reduce trade volumes or stop a trade in a particular species is challenged to provide evidence-upon-evidence-upon-evidence to back up their concerns and requests, CITES, IUCN SULi (Sustainable Use and Livelihoods Specialist Group) and others aren’t held to the same standards to provide proof that trade via the sustainable use model is working. And they can’t, because there are no useful or reliable trade analytics [...]

Imagine we live in a world that when a pharmaceutical company creates a new drug it doesn’t have to test it in the lab, it doesn’t need to do human trials and it doesn’t need regulatory approval; it is simply manufactured and then legally sold. Once on the market the drug appears to have some terrible side effects and consequences. The groups concerned about the negative effects of this new drug on human lives must scrape together funding, from donors, to undertake research to show their concerns are valid. Each year data is collected from all regions of the world highlighting the negative side effects of the drug together with the number of direct and indirect deaths associated [...]

While much of 2019 has been dedicated to the research and works on the need for CITES modernisation project, with just 2 days to go before heading to CITES CoP18, I would like to update our supporters on another Nature Needs More project, Extinction: The Vulgarity of Desire. In an October 2018 blog, I introduced an event Rhinoceros: Luxury’s Fragile Frontier, a collaboration of academics, conservationists, artists and business, organised and curated by Dr Catherine Kovesi of the University of Melbourne, to present a symposium and exhibition highlighting the need to tackle the destructive pseudo-luxury market.This unrestrained luxury consumption is not only impacting the worlds endangered species but also its unique history, as a growing consumer class desire [...]