Finally, some good news coming out of the CITES. In the days leading up to the start of CoP20, the map highlighting which countries are moving away from the obsolete 1970s paper permit system has been updated.

It would have been frankly ridiculous for the CITES to reach its 50th anniversary CoP event without the absolute minimum step to show it can evolve with the times being in place. But for a long while it was looking like this was going to be the case. But in the last few days there has been a mini revolution.

Firstly, for those of you who don’t know this map, it is useful to understand that for some reason the CITES inverted the normal project management, traffic light colours. In this map green signifies ‘in development’ and amber means some form of electric permit system has been ‘implemented’. Why the normal traffic light scheme wasn’t adopted is a bit of a mystery but there you go.

With the updates in the last few days, finally the CITES Map of Shame is no longer looking so shameful.

What Are The Biggest Changes?

  1. EU 27 has finally implemented the ‘EU CITES’ system it presented at CoP19. This is important because Europe combined is the biggest profiter from these species. Just a few months ago it wasn’t apparent that the EU27 would make this happen.
  2. Latin America – just over a year ago only Venezuela had implemented electronic permitting in Latin America. It is great to see more amber throughout Latin America, particularly given WWF’s Living Planet Report highlighted a 95% decline in the average size of monitored wildlife populations in just 50 years in the region.
  3. The Russian Federation and Central Asia have rapidly implemented eCITES, given the region came late to the table.
  4. Kenya now has eCITES, which is important given that the UNEP is headquartered in Kenya and it was ridiculous that the conservation darling of the world had not previously shown leadership on this, particularly since it wasn’t that long ago that Kenya nearly received a formal warning from the CITES Secretariat regarding the failure to implement the Convention to the required standard.

Who’s Gone Back Over?

Now this is interesting because on previous iterations of the map both the USA and South Korea were shown as having implemented e-permits and now they have gone back over to green/in development. This is a problem particularly with the USA as the country is the single biggest profiter (jointly with China) from the trade in wild species. After been one of the early adopters of eCITES it now looks like the USA and South Korea no longer reach the minimum standard for the CITES to consider their respective systems ‘implemented’, showing that no country can simply ‘set and forget’ their systems. 

Who Has Been Stuck In A 5+ Year Development & Planning Stage Holding Pattern?

The standouts are:

  1. The UK – while the UK did give funds to roll out the CITES TradeView website, for some reason the country has so far avoided modernised its CITES trade permit system. When we first spoke with DEFRA they blamed BREXIT. It is time to get UK eCITES done.
  2. Japan and India have both been stuck in development stage for years. Japan is in third place of countries profiting from the trade in wild species and India is in fourth place.
  3. Canada and New Zealand are stuck. New Zealand has been telling us for years they have implemented some form of eCITES but until it is acknowledged on the eCITES central map, who knows.
  4. Indonesia and Vietnam – these countries are interesting because they were two of the first countries to actually receive donations from other countries to implement eCITES, several years ago now. Yet they are still in the development stages.
  5. South Africa – a special mention to South Africa because they are the reason we asked for this map to be put on the CITES website. In 2019, at CoP18, representatives of the SA delegation told us they had implemented eCITES. We knew that they hadn’t but had no way of pushing back at the time. We asked for a central map on the CITES website, so this was transparent. And, it’s still not done South Africa!!

What Are The eCITES Priorities?

Just because some significant progress has been made does not mean we now have a functioning e-permit system in place. Key import countries (USA, Canada, the UK, India, Japan, South Korea) are laggards and too many exporting countries have not yet started implementing eCITES. Electronic permit exchange together with better and more timely quality trade data will only become viable when all signatory countries have moved to electronic permitting.

In particular:

  1. There is no excuse for wealthy countries such as the USA, UK, Canada, New Zealand, Japan, and India to not finalise their implementation of eCITES
  2. We continue to lobby the Australian Government to commit funds to Oceania to finalise the roll out of eCITES in the region. With only a US$1.7Million donation needed to roll eCITES out in PNG, Solomons Islands, Vanuatu, Fiji, Samoa, Tonga this could even be done with a private donation.
  3. Rolling out eCITES throughout continental Africa. Together without US based collaborative partner, Active for Animals, as a part of their Transparency Matters Project we continue to work on sourcing the US$12 Million donation to complete the modernisation of the CITES Management Authorities throughout continental Africa.

While not complete, the fact that the rollout has reached this stage means Nature Needs More now can invest more of our time into the next steps in modernising CITES, namely:

  1. A levy on business to pay the cost of regulation to address the ongoing funding crisis in CITES which affects monitoring, enforcement and is being used as an excuse to not have up-to-date NDFs in place for species being traded.
  2. Moving to a reverse listing model, first proposed in 1981, for all trade because until this is done the trade in wild species isn’t using the Precautionary Principle in conducting this exploitative and highly valuable trade.

Given the succession of missteps that have happened in recent years, and indeed recent weeks and months, the CITES reputation has been seriously undermined.

While moving to electronic permits was first discussed in 2002, can this final sense of urgency in driving the implementation of electronic permits in the weeks prior to the CoP20 be the first step on the CITES’ road to redemption? Only the next 12 months will tell.

What is clear is the next steps in modernising the CITES must be measured in months and not years or decades.

Only if this happens will it become clear if the CITES is worth resuscitating or not.