9 - Remind and revise: the key takeaways

Summary

I often wish that authors would provide a concise distillation of their book to refer back to after reading the whole tome. A short version, highlighting the key takeaways, can be a helpful rapid remind and revise and point the reader back to specific chapters to reread in more detail. I’ve tried to do that here.

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) is estimated to be worth up to $20 billion per year and threatens the survival of thousands of species of flora and fauna. The trade is facilitated by organized criminal groups, many of which are involved in other illicit activities, utilizing the same networks and routes to move IWT products. IWT increases the risk of future pandemics due to the risk of zoonotic disease transfer from wildlife to humans, and also entrenches corruption throughout the supply chain.

The trade can be broken down into two component parts: the act of poaching, including the capture of live animals; and the subsequent trade in the wildlife products, such as ivory, from point of capture to point of sale. Most of the funds from IWT come at the point of sale, with poachers often receiving only a few cents on the dollar of the overall trade. This leads source countries and communities to lose the economic benefits from conservation and taxation of legal businesses, but it also offers an opportunity to intervene at the lowest level to stop poaching at source. I argue that these low-level interventions are the most effective interventions; “save the animal to kill the trade”.

To help understand what is driving the trade, I set out two frameworks: the economic equation and the poacher's equation. The economic equation identifies the asymmetry in the trade, with exploitation cheap and lucrative, while conservation is expensive and poorly-funded, leading organized criminal groups to view the trade as low-risk and high-reward. The poacher's equation focuses on why an individual or community would poach or not, setting the potential gain against the potential loss, divided by the perceived risk of getting caught. By solving both of these equations we can help bring an end to IWT.