The Demand For Endangered Species

In May 2019, the first IPBES report confirmed that the trade in flora and fauna is the second biggest threat to species survival and stated that up to 1 million species are potentially facing extinction. Currently, over 40,000 endangered species are listed for trade restrictions under CITES; undoubtedly there will be a lot more to come.

As a species becomes rare, then sadly as a result it becomes more valuable. Some of the most endangered species in the world are legally traded in the most lucrative and exclusive industries. According to Bain & Company, the overall luxury market remained flat in 2024, at an estimated value of US$1.5 trillion.

Endangered species contribute to this mindboggling value of the luxury market, including:

  • Personal luxury (clothing, accessories, Jewellery, beauty, wellbeing etc) which use species such as crocodiles, snakes, lizards, ostrich, mink, fox, rays, corals, agarwood and many others
  • High-end furniture and housewares which uses tropical hardwoods and skins/furs from many endangered species
  • Luxury hospitality, fine dining and gourmet food, which uses rare marine species such as sharks, tuna, abalone, sea cucumber and many others
  • The exotic pet industry, which ranges from parrots, song birds, reptiles and turtles all the way to big cats
  • Trophy hunting and other luxury travel, which kills elephants, rhinos and other ‘big game’

Nature Needs More was delighted to be part of a collaboration exploring the concerns associated with the current, destructive luxury market. In November 2018, a month long exhibition in Venice was launched with a symposium. For the event Nature Needs More explored the concept – Extinction: The Vulgarity of Desire.

It is difficult to get a real sense of the massive scale of the trade in wild species, as the only data source that has sufficient breadth (the UN Comtrade database) was designed for customs use to levy duties. The CITES trade database ignores non-CITES listed species and does not contain any value data. Nevertheless, we can get at least an idea of the value of the trade in ‘raw’ products (skins, logs, fish, plants, fur etc.).

The global wildlife trade is dominated by seafood, which dwarfs all other trades with a value of around US$250 Billion pa. The images on the left show both the seafood trade and the other wildlife trade categories by trade value for the years 2010 – 2020 (for the methodology please see: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01455). After seafood, furniture made from tropical hardwood is the next biggest category, followed by TCM and then fashion (which only covers fur and exotic leather). The trade values reflect raw material values as declared at customs, not the completed retail products, which can be sold at prices several orders of magnitude above the price of say, the raw pyhton skins used in a luxury handbag. This disparity also explains the apparent decline in the fashion category, which is purely a result of falling prices for raw fur in recent years, not of a change in trade volume.

The trade in exotic pets (live birds, reptiles and ornamental fish) is worth nearly 1 billion US dollars. It should be seen together with the ‘Exhibitions’ category, which covers the trade in live mammals and is worth about the same. The live mammals trade includes pets (primates, large cats etc.), medicals research (primates) and the trade between zoos (private and public).

The scale of these trades shows how much we have commoditised nature and how our insatiable demand for these products leads to either unsustainable extraction or unsustainable captive breeding operations (like salmon farming).

In addition, questions need to be asked about the traditional Asian medicine industry that according to the IBIS World Market Research Report was valued at US$45 Billion to China alone in 2019, as is uses many plant and animal species that are endangered.

There is much here to be interrogated, but we must also explore:

  1. Why luxury brands make no contribution to the cost of regulation, other than the token cost of their CITES permits. Due to a lack of funding CITES is so impoverished it still uses a 1970s paper-based system to facilitate and manage the global trade in endangered species. There has been no industry contribution to modernise the CITES system for the 21st century and the growing value and volume of trade.‌
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  2. The scale of marketing and social psychology these luxury brands use to drive up desire. A lot of money and energy invested in to telling & selling us that we need to be seen as successful. Currently, opting out of this consumption addiction requires both a secure identity and massive willpower to NOT conform. This is evidenced by the evolving term and now legal defence of “Affluenza”, defined in 2001 (John de Graaf, David Wann, Thomas Naylor) to be:
    a painful, contagious, socially transmitted condition of overload, debt, anxiety and waste resulting from the dogged pursuit of more.

To make matters worse, the huge size of the legal wildlife trade has created an illegal trade of similar magnitude (commonly estimated at US$100-250 billion pa). There are two major reasons for the illegal trade. The first is that the little regulations that have been put in place, such as CITES and fishing quota, impede the demand for products. Given how easy it is to launder illegally harvested specimen into legal supply chains, it shouldn’t come as a surprise that the illegal trade is massive and growing. 

The second reason is the desire for legal luxury can morph into a desire for illegal wildlife products. During interviews with consumers of illegal wildlife starting in 2013, it became apparent that an evolution occurred in their consumer behaviour. Once they had purchased more mainstream legal manufactured luxuries, they evolved to legal rare luxury products, often associated with endangered species. For some individuals illegal wildlife luxuries were next step to achieve status differentiation. This evolution drives up desire and while systemic change is needed in industry regulation, we must also provide breathing space for some species by creating demand reduction campaigns.

Implementing stronger, well-resourced, mandatory regulations for any industry that uses wild species is necessary, but unlikely to solve the problem of overextraction and the illegal trade on its own. We must also address the demand and the fact that luxury consumption is about gaining status and differentiating from ‘lower’ classes. Outlawing advertising for endangered species and demand reduction campaigns can help, but there needs to be a shift in what the elites use to differentiate themselves.

This is becoming more important given how quickly fashion trends travel through social media, such as Instagram, among elite groups. There is a real danger that unsustainable trends are triggered, including for illegal wildlife products. For example, who could have predicted the illegal trade for fennec foxes in the wake of the release of Disney’s Zootopia or the recent trend for otters as pets in Japan because of ‘cuddle party’.

Hence the final step in driving down demand for luxury wildlife products is redirecting desire away from consumption. We cannot re-direct these users to ‘other luxury consumption’, they are already consuming those luxury products anyway. This is why Nature Needs More has been researching a way of re-inventing magnificence, a concept steeped in history but subverted by luxury in recent centuries.

This new magnificence could be a motivation to contribute to the natural world rather than consume its ‘products’. We accept that the motivations to contribute will be a way to provide these elites an alternative to fulfil their self-image needs and a way to ‘win’ in the social comparison stakes. Therefore, the language of magnificence will have to include elite differentiation, status and prestige, but also bring back the commons and common good, which was lost by a self-serving luxury lifestyle.