The critical link between resource plunder, poaching

Members of the Kruger National Park Veterinary Wildlife Services in South Africa check on a darted white rhino in October. The park darted four rhinos for relocation to a secret safe area in order to protect the animals against poaching. PHOTO | AFP 

By IBRAHIM THIAW

Illegal trade in wildlife is no longer an abstract issue. Organised transnational as well as trans-regional environmental crimes are rapidly rising threats to the environment, to revenues from natural resources, to state security and to global sustainable development.

The scale and nature of this harsh reality is widely known. The current United Nations Environmental Programme (Unep) environmental crime report pinpoints a number of international conventions and national initiatives that seek to address this reality.

At stake is the financial loss running into billions of dollars that these environmental crimes cause, the ecosystem disruption, loss of biodiversity and crippling ecosystem services that underpin human wellbeing to build resilience economies and adapt to climate change.

Globally, the cumulative monetary value of different forms of transnational organised environmental crimes is between $70 billion and $213 billion annually. At the heart of these activities is a network of crime spanning Africa, the Amazon, Western Central Pacific, Indonesia and South East Asia with China, Japan, Western European countries and North America being the main destination countries.

Forests and savannahs are home to some of the world’s most majestic species but they are also home to intricate webs of illegal trade in wildlife worth $10 billion annually.

To put this loss into perspective, crime on elephants alone could financially cost Africa $1.9 billion each year. This is separate from the environmental loss in terms of numbers and the related impacts on ecosystem stability.

The number of elephants killed in Africa is in the range of 20,000–25,000 every year. This is out of an already low population of 420,000–650,000.

For the forest elephant, the population size has been estimated to have declined by about 62 per cent between 2002 and 2011.

In Asia, the poached African ivory may represent an end-user street value of an estimated $165 million to $188 million, in addition to ivory from Asian sources.

Ecosystems throughout Africa are threatened by many factors, besides illegal trade in wildlife and climate change. In 2012, Africa earned about $43.6 billion from tourism. At the same time illegal poaching and trade in wildlife earned about a quarter of that amount.

Moreover, climate change is expected to reduce the size of habitats for some 81-97 per cent of the 5,197 species, according to the Africa Adaptation Gap Report.

These compounding affects must be addressed in tandem if the world is to see its wildlife, fisheries, forests (and tourism) continue to prosper.

In addition to wildlife, additional losses due to crime are being experienced in the fisheries and forestry sectors.

On forests, illegal logging costs timber-producing countries an annual loss in revenue of between $10 billion and $15 billion, accounting for over a tenth of the total timber trade worldwide, estimated to be worth more than $150 billion annually.

Other estimates show that illegal logging costs the global economy between $30 and $100 billion per year. Africa accounts for 17 per cent of this plunder at an annual cost of $17 billion.