Industry leaders committed to tackling wildlife crime gathered at St. James's Palace today for a high-level joint meeting of the United for Wildlife Taskforces.

The UfW Transport and Financial Taskforces, an initiative of The Royal Foundation of The Duke and Duchess of Cambridge, bring together major transport companies and financial institutions from around the world with law enforcement and experts in illegal wildlife trade (IWT). 

Gold industry experts from across the private and non-profit sectors came together at Basel Gold Day on 9 October 2020 to explore perspectives on the challenges of ensuring responsible and sustainable gold supply chains.

Every day, an unknown number of elephant tusks, rhino horn, pangolin scales and other wildlife products – alive and dead – cross the oceans in container ships and cargo flights for use in traditional medicine, crafts and the illegal pet trade. Rare trees are felled in ancient forests and shipped out under false certificates.

They leave behind the butchered carcasses of the last remaining animals of many species, scarred and emptied landscapes, legal livelihoods undermined by corruption and criminal activity, and communities ravaged by organised crime networks.

Given the vast dimensions of the multibillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade (IWT), it may be surprising that until recently, global efforts to tackle IWT came mainly from the conservation sector. This has typically consisted of numerous donor-funded efforts to catch poachers and raise public awareness of the plight of endangered species.

Valuable as those efforts are, they do little to impact the organised crime networks, corruption and illicit financial flows that allow the lucrative illegal trade in wildlife products to continue.

High-profile law enforcement operations against illegal wildlife trade (IWT), such as Interpol’s Operation Thunderball in July 2019 and the arrest of notorious trafficker Moazu Kromah in Uganda in June, have drawn welcome attention to IWT as a financial and organised crime and not only a conservat

Our latest Working Paper on "Corruption and wildlife trafficking: exploring drivers, facilitators and networks behind illegal wildlife trade in East Africa" is part of a multi-disciplinary programme of work focused on intelligence-led action against financial crime in illegal wildlife trade (IWT).

Social network analysis (SNA) can help us to better understand and tackle the transnational organised crime and dark networks that sustain corruption, money laundering and illicit trafficking.