What We Do

After years of researching and working on the demand for illegal wildlife ‘products’, in 2017 we concluded that the illegal trade cannot be tackled until the loopholes in the legal trade in endangered species are closed.

At present, given the glaring loopholes in the international trade regulator (CITES) any claims about sustainability or legality are nothing more than wishful thinking and greenwashing.

Nature Needs More has three primary objectives:

1. Conduct reality checks on the claims made by governments, businesses, conservation organisations, academics and CITES about the sustainability and legality of the legal trade in wild species.
2. Investigate the ‘real world’ performance of the regulatory system in practice, not what’s on paper.
3. Propose real solutions to tackle biodiversity loss resulting from the international commercial trade, while calling out the plethora of phantom solutions.

While Nature Needs More’s preference is that there is no trade in endangered and exotic species, we acknowledge that the primary model accepted by the conservation sector is sustainable use. However, after years of research we see no evidence that the sustainable use model is fulfilling its objective of conserving wild species by trading them.

We believe that any of the stakeholders – business, industry groups, investors, government, IGOs or academics, conservation NGOs – who want the sustainable use model to remain must commit to validating it. The big problem is that conservation scientists are not actively publishing any proof that extraction is sustainable.

Decades of incrementalism posing as genuine solutions has enabled overexploitation to accelerate, as has the conservation world’s support of phantom solutions. There is very little accountability when it comes to the overexploitation of wild species, on the few occasions business is caught out consequences are sorely lacking.

Maybe when the 2030 target 5 of the CBD KMGBF – that all wildlife trade is sustainable and legal – comes and goes without being achieved will the conscious avoidance of the legal trade as a key enabler of illegal exploitation be finally accepted and dealt with. Until this happens the greenwashed legal trade in wild species will continue with virtual impunity, all the problems with it being deliberately and clinically sidestepped.

Nature Needs More works on holding all the stakeholders that are complicit in maintaining the illusion of a ‘well-managed legal trade’ to account.

A significant part of our time is spent lobbying and in advocacy work to governments and other stakeholders worldwide to modernise the system that manages the international trade in wild species.   

The Need To Modernise The CITES

We have conducted a major investigation into the CITES convention and its real-life effectiveness in protecting wild species from overexploitation through international trade. As a result, we had to conclude that the current CITES model of blacklisting for species protection is not fit for purpose given the scale of global trade compared to 50 years ago.

All the problems of the CITES model were already predicted in 1981, when Australia submitted a proposal to change CITES to a ‘reverse listing’ model, meaning that the default would be no trade for a species unless it can be established that trade will be sustainable. The proposal was rejected and all the adverse consequences predicted then came to pass.

In addition to the flawed listing model, CITES has no funding mechanism, no mandatory enforcement and no useful monitoring system for the legal trade it regulates. It does not directly regulate the businesses that conduct the trade, everything is left to national governments. This model is not only ineffective, but also deeply inequitable to the mainly poor and developing countries exporting CITES listed species.

We further established that any claims about sustainability of trade under the CITES are hollow, as no evidence to support them exists. CITES endlessly rehashes the trade in crocodiles and vicunas as ‘evidence’ but has no data that can support sustainability claims for any of the other 41,000 species it lists.

Even the IPBES was forced to conclude from a review of all available research that the international trade in wild species is linked to overextraction, not local trade or traditional use.

Business & Industry

Nature Needs More investigates the sustainability claims made by businesses about their use of wild species or the lack of any mention of such use in sustainability reports.

Under the current regulatory model for the international wildlife trade there are no legal obligations for businesses that trade in wild species listed by CITES beyond the need to get a CITES export (and sometimes import) permit. Businesses are not directly subject to any mandatory regulations in relation to the use of wild species, the maxim that ‘nature is free for humans to rule and exploit’ underlies this thinking.

Businesses are not bothered about the sustainability of the species they use because they don’t have to be. On the contrary, they are allowed to use marketing and advertising to drive up demand without taking any responsibility for the implications of doing so.

Businesses happily accept green crime in their supply chain to not jeopardise revenue and profit. In a 2020 global business survey regarding green crime in their supply chains associated with third-party relationships:

1. A substantial 65% of respondents know or suspect that the third parties they conduct business with may have been involved in a range of illegal, environmentally damaging activities.
2. Only 16% of global respondents said that they would report a third-party breach externally.
3. Furthermore, 63% of respondents agreed that the economic climate encouraged organisations to take regulatory risks in order to win new business.

The report again confirms why it is so easy to launder illegal product into the legal supply chain and marketplace, and why voluntary governance doesn’t work. 

Businesses are not inclined to question possibly fake or altered CITES permits, it is in their best interest to pretend their supply chains are entirely legal. Alternatively, they pretend their supply chain ends at the business they directly buy from and abdicate responsibility for anything that happens prior. 

Time after time, companies act as if they are too big to fail, too big to jail and too big to care. Mandatory government regulation needs to be accepted and strengthened. Companies that allowed illegal product to enter their supply chains are avoiding punishment, which should include criminal charges and fines (linked to company turnover).

Governments

In our dealings with governments of many CITES signatory countries we have learned that on the whole governments are not interested in CITES or in improving the regulation of the legal trade in wild species.

Lawmakers are usually completely ignorant about the scale of the trade and only know the usual mainstream media stories about rhinos, elephants, hunting, poaching, zoos and poverty alleviation. They are unaware of the scale of both the legal and illegal trade and that the trade is mostly for luxury goods consumed in high-income countries.

National CITES authorities tend to be tiny, sit in environment departments and are busy with issuing permits, not investigating the legality and sustainability of trade. Scientific authorities are often outsourced to academic institutions or even zoos. In practically all cases (primary) industry has much more power than environment departments, so curtailing trade is seen as contrary to government policy of increasing trade.

To hide this basic neglect and preference towards overexploitation, governments team up with business and compliant NGOs to create phantom solutions: nature positive, green finance, biodiversity offsets, biodiversity credits, payments for ecosystem services and all the other scams that are put in place in lieu of real regulation.

Media

The poor quality monitoring and enforcement of the legal trade in wild species is a global business scandal. Our attempts to get the mainstream media interested in stories about the failings and flaws in the legal trade under CITES have been met with complete silence. The fact that the 2019 IPBES report established that trade is the biggest extinction risk for marine species and the second biggest risk for terrestrial and freshwater species is rarely mentioned in the MSM. 

The MSM both ignore and clinically sidestep legal trade in wild species altogether. If they do any stories on the wildlife trade, it tends to be on the exclusively about the illegal trade and the heroes and victims in relation to an individual (usually iconic) species.

The MSM are not interested in examining the legal system and the global business scandal of unchecked overexploitation and systematic bypassing of existing regulations. This can probably be best understood as not biting the hand that feeds you – as it would be exposing companies they rely on for their (dwindling) advertising revenue, like luxury brands.

With massive cuts in newsrooms across the board of the MSM, biodiversity loss is either conflated with climate change or ignored altogether and never given the same status as climate issues. As in other areas of reporting, they have a small set of ‘go-to’ experts who will reliably toe the neoliberal line and pretend that the sixth mass extinction event has nothing to do with the overexploitation for international commercial trade.

Given the lack of exposure of all the problems associated with the legal trade in wild species Nature Needs More has created a number of channels to bring these issues to a broader public.

The reason behind having a number of channels is the diverse range of knowledge about the issues of the target readership.  Nature Needs More was also delighted to help raise the funds to launch the The CITES Legal Trade Journalism Fellowship, a project hosted by the Earth Journalism Network.

The media/communication channels launch by Nature Needs More: 

In depth coverage of NNM’s work, including the failings of CITES, the implications of the lack of monitoring and enforcement in the legal trade and the problems associated with industries from fashion to exotic pets. 

Launched to draw together the links between biodiversity loss, business, investing, law, politics, history ad geopolitics etc. The Fly (It’s time to see clearly) quickly gained an interested reader base. As a result, NNM spun this off to a separate website, and The Fly became GlobalBreakdown.News 

Short and highly visual articles targeting luxury consumers and industry highlighting the unsustainable and questionable use of endangered and exotic species. 

The aim of the investigations and articles published in GlobalBreakdown.News is to help answer some of the questions about our changing world and what needs to be done to manage how deeply we all fall.

As Nature Needs More’s work is all conducted on a volunteer basis, there are sometimes gaps when not much is published. At these times, we are generally doing the research and investigations for our in-depth reports. 

We also test demand reduction, mindset change and behaviour change campaigns and advertising, as a part of our media and communication strategy. We hope campaigns and advertisements will help our readers make conscious and informed decisions about how you shop, eat, vote, invest, where you work and the entertainment you choose, including where and how you travel.

We can’t promise that these messages will be always painless. Sometimes we will certainly point to greed, selfishness, or apathy. There is a belief in many circles that all messages should be positive, don’t upset people, people only learn and change when they feel positive, are having fun and are engaged. This mindset is pervasive, naïve and just plain wrong.

Conservation Organisations & Academics 

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 who feel compelled to 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 scientists 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 wild species for profit’, known as the ‘sustainable use’ of wild species. But here is where the comparison ends. When it comes to conservation scientists, the overwhelming majority support ‘sustainable’ use. The big problem is that this is an act of faith, conservation scientists are not actively publishing any proof that this extraction is sustainable. 

Despite regurgitating their mantra of an evidence-based approach, decades of unquestioned acceptance of the sustainable use model by the corporate conservation NGOs and conservation academics has resulted in them having very limited commercial acumen or insight into regulation in other industries.

Yet, the trade in wild species is conservatively estimated to be worth US$360 billion annually, with some governments acknowledging that, “The wildlife trade is one of the most lucrative trades in the world”. This trade is BIG business. 

The lack of willingness to overcome this knowledge gap has left the conservation sector even more powerless in any negotiations to protect wild species. 

In the last few years, since Nature Needs More started publishing reports and articles on the problems of the legal trade in 2018, the conservation sector has conducted a handful of investigations that involve analysing the impact of the sustainable use model on protecting wild species. For example:  

1. In a 2024 study, The Positive Impact Of Conservation Action, 33 authors conducted a meta-analysis of scientific studies on the impact of conservation interventions. Starting with a scan of over 30,000 potentially relevant publications, the finding on the impact of sustainable use interventions was ‘inconclusive’ because the meta-analysis could find only 5 publications related to the sustainable use of species they could use.
2. A 2021 publication, Impacts Of Wildlife Trade On Terrestrial Biodiversity found a large negative effect of trade on species populations, stating, “We examined 1,807 peer-reviewed articles and >200 TRAFFIC reports yet found no support for a quantified, existing sustainable trade”.
3. The CITES itself instigated a massive IPBES report, Assessment Report on the Sustainable Use of Wild Species, which analysed over 6,000 studies. Unfortunately for the CITES this report found the same problem – international trade is linked to overexploitation and the massive growth in international trade has driven the increase in unsustainable use.

As corporate conservation NGOs and conservation academics have aligned themselves with business and governments for fundraising purposes, they celebrate new species listings under the CITES as success when they are clearly a failure of the system of trade. The also collaborate on phantom solutions from ESGs, to green bonds to biodiversity credits etc.   

Most worryingly is that because these organisations still maintain a relatively high level of public trust, the general public don’t yet see conservation’s blind faith in the unproven sustainable use model is just another form of greenwashing. 

The conservation sector has enabled the legal trade in wildlife has been allowed to fly under the radar, resulting in decades of delay in dealing with the consequences of the legal trade on biodiversity loss. Nature Needs More’s work will continue to expose the the part the conservation sector plays in greenwashing the trade in wild species.

Reigning Ideology

It is impossible to address the overexploitation of nature (through trade or otherwise) without challenging the reigning ideology of never-ending economic growth and our right to exploit nature for human ‘needs’. This ideology is typically presented as being without alternative and is deeply embedded in all media, education, public discourse and academia. It has been linked in the public’s mind to a vague notion of ‘progress’ (which is never defined).

The truth, that endless growth is impossible on a limited planet, is not palatable and therefore remains ‘fringe science’ and has been completely excluded from economic thought. Academia has aligned itself with power and has bought into neoliberal ideology and altered the academic environment to conform to the ideology.

Research and research outcomes can now be easily tailored to government and business desires, as those willing to play along get more status, more publications, more conferences etc. This is very prevalent in the area of the wildlife trade as evidenced by the complete lack of rigorous studies into ‘sustainable use’.

Collectively the world is heading towards tipping points relating to the loss of biodiversity and planetary bio-integrity. It is a fact that wild species and planetary resources are being continuously overexploited to fuel unnecessary consumption and unneeded development to maintain profits for the few. The wasted decades mean that it is getting too late to leave it just to regulation, even if it is good quality, mandated, well funded regulation. Attention must be turned to the other components of late stage capitalism, to close them down. It is time to remember that:

1. Shareholder primacy didn’t really enter business boardrooms until the 1970s. Capitalists were making plenty of money before shareholder primacy became the accepted model.
2. Limited Liability, which in a modern sense only became a uniform attribute of all corporations in the 20th century. As those who have dived into the Limited Liability business structure remind us, “corporations, stock markets and the corporate economy enjoyed a long and prosperous history well before limited liability in its modern sense became established and dominant”.
3. Secrecy Jurisdictions, Shell Companies and Corporate Tax havens, which again only really took off after WWII, because capitalists were making money before this. Today they represent a mega pool of unproductive money in a world that needs funds to tackle multiple existential crises, including biodiversity loss and climate change.

In a follow up to Nature Needs More’s report, The BU$IN€$$ of Nature, in 2026 we will publish Unsellable: The impossibility of selling solutions to the biodiversity and climate crisis.

We are accelerating to a point where the CITES, CBD and conservation world’s ineffectiveness will become irrelevant.