Innovative alliance between UN University & Asian Conservation Alliance to tackle wildlife crime
The UN University is partnering with the Asian Conservation Alliance (Asian civil society network comprised of grass root NGO’s in the Asian Region) to develop an innovative Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) to tackle wildlife crime.
Project Background:
Transnational organized wildlife crime poses a major challenge to conservation and protection of wild flora and fauna. United Nations, during its multilateral conventions, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), often come up with challenges on how to deal with illegal wildlife trade as there is no official record of the amount of illegal trade that is actually taking place. United Nations General Assembly resolution (document A/CONF.203/PM.1) states that, combating the trade in endangered species requires a comprehensive approach that builds on areas of success, remedies deficiencies and weakness in laws and enforcement efforts and goes beyond law enforcement to include educational campaigns and awareness-raising. It also states that, since violations of wildlife trade regulations are often deemed insignificant, appropriate sanctions are rarely applied and penalties mostly remain relatively low.
A meeting of the CITES Enforcement Expert Group in 2004 it highlighted the considerable frustration experienced by wildlife law enforcement officers resulting from a lack of support from their governments, policymakers and senior management from being unable to identify readily and make contact with other relevant national agencies responsible for wildlife law enforcement around the world. The group also discussed the subject of the submission of information relating to enforcement of CITES provisions and illicit trade to the relevant authorities by the public and non-governmental organizations, and prepared guidance on this matter.
Understanding the seriousness of the issue, in October 2004, CITES adopted a resolution (Resolution Conf. 11.3 (Rev.CoP13) ‘Enforcement matters’) at the 13th Meeting of the Conference of the Parties (CoP13) and recommended to the Parties to evaluate and utilize, for enforcement purposes, information from Non-governmental sources while maintaining standards of confidentiality. CITES CoP 13 also endorsed the guidance which guides the NGOs to use ‘Ecomessage’ format when they submit the law enforcement – related information.
Taking into consideration the importance of a monitoring system for tacking wildlife crime, the United Nations University, signed a joined initiative with the Asian Conservation Alliance to develop a model that will provide desktop information to the policy makers and enforcement authorities. The goal of the project will be achieved by collecting enforcement related information from enforcement authorities and media sources in each country and by compiling it into a database which will be in the format of an eco-message. This eco-message information, compiled from various sources, will be analysed in the WEMS unit in each country after verification of the data. It will be then transferred to United Nations University for dissemination to enforcement authorities and policy makers. A part of the information will also be distributed to the public for awareness-raising.
How the project works:
The information collected in the form of an eco-message is loaded into a Geodatabase and the analysis of data is done using GIS. The processed data is then disseminated using ARC IMS. There will also be a multimedia file produced using tracking analyst and it will describe the route event of a particular transboundary crime. A PDF report will also be generated in the form of an eco-message and this will be created using ‘crystal report’.
The project was presented at the 2nd Mekong Sub regional CITES implementation and Enforcement Workshop, 4-7 July, 2006, Kunming, China and, upon invitation at the 18th meeting of the INTERPOL Wildlife Working Group (IWWG) held in Beijing, China from 25-28th July 2006.
Acknowledgement:
The Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System project is supported by ESRI through its educational grants programme and financially supported by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW).
Contact: Mr. Remi Chandran, United Nations University
53-70, Jingumae 5-chome, Shibuya-ku, Tokyo 150-8925, Japan
Ph: ++81-3-3499 -2811
Fax:++81-3-3406 -7347
WEMS website: http://www.unu.edu/esd/wems/
WEMS in News: http://home.kyodo.co.jp/modules/fstStory/index.php?storyid=272256