Putting an end to poaching is no easy feat, in part because the illegal wildlife trade weaves in and out of so many different parts of the world. A rhinoceros may be slaughtered in South Africa and its tusk can wind up in in Vietnam, but it’s not a direct path from one to the other. For every shipment of illegal wildlife parts, stops are made in various countries along the way to reroute, divvy up the goods, or just confuse authorities.
But these intricate webs of trade are also a vulnerability of the poaching industry. If conservation measures were able to choke out the illegal wildlife trade in six key areas, 98 percent of the tiger poaching trade could be eliminated, according to a new paper published today in PNAS.
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A crackdown on six key countries could likewise put the kibosh on 90 percent and 92 percent of the illegal markets for elephants and rhinoceros, respectively, the study found.
Researchers gathered poaching data from HealthMap.org’s wildlife trade map, which was developed in part by the Wildlife Conservation Society. The map automatically combs the internet for reports on poaching from media and wildlife groups, and plots the data according to location. For this study, researchers focused on all the data collected from August 2010 to December 2013.
Using the data from HealthMap, the researchers then analyzed the movement of illegal wildlife trade to identify poaching networks around the world, including key exporter, intermediary, and importer countries.
“That was based on looking at the number of connections that a country has to another country as well as the number of shipments that departed from and arrived in that country,” Nikkita Gunvant Patel, lead author of the study and a recent graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, said. Patel graduated in May with a veterinary medical degree and a PhD in epidemiology, and this research was part of her graduate studies.
Patel and her colleagues then ran the key countries through analytics software that compared how the poacher networks would break down if any four countries were removed from the trade industry. This enabled them to identify which six countries would most effectively break down the whole system if they were suddenly removed from the network using a measure called flow betweenness.
These charts show the illegal wildlife trade networks before (A–C) and after removal (D–F) of trading by the six key player countries (underlined in blue). Tick marks indicate the number of shipments. Trade flow ribbons adjacent to a country indicate outflow and ribbons with a gap next to a country indicate inflow (see arrows). Countries underlined in red are ones where information campaigns might also have an effective impact. Source: PNAS
“Flow betweenness is just the formal measurement that I was using to determine how good of an intermediary or a go-between a country is between an exporter and an importer country,” Patel said.
By eliminating countries with a high level of flow betweenness, the web of trade is broken down and other countries are isolated from one another, Patel explained. Suddenly countries that would export a lot of ivory can’t find a route and countries that would import a lot of ivory can’t get access to it.
With the elephant trade, for example, eliminating the United States, China, Vietnam, Hong Kong, Thailand, and Kenya from the trade network would stifle 90 percent of the poaching industry. For rhinoceros, eliminating the United Kingdom, Thailand, Vietnam, Mozambique, South Africa, and China from the network would have the greatest impact. For tigers, the greatest disruption would come from removing Myanmar, India, South Africa, China, Thailand, and Laos from the chain.
“Our aim wasn’t to point fingers at any particular countries,” Patel said. “In the case of China, for example, there are strong cultural factors. There are a wide variety of drivers to what we see here, so it’s important to take that into consideration.”
But completely wiping out the illegal wildlife trade in any country is not exactly simple, and cracking down in six different countries is an especially daunting task. Patel said there’s no single prescription that would eliminate the poaching industry in any of the countries, but a multi-pronged approach that would include more manpower and better technology at ports of entry to identify illegal goods, as well as education efforts to reduce the demand for ivory and other poached products.
China recently pledged to phase out its legal ivory trade—which many experts believe provides a convenient cover for the illegal trade—but Patel said the jury is still out on what effect that might have. Some conservationists hope that ending the legal trade will mean fewer avenues for the illegal trade, but others argue that it will only increase the demand and push consumers to obtain ivory only from illegal sources.
Patel also noted that there are limits to how precisely we can make estimates about the impacts of certain efforts on the wildlife trade. While HealthMaps served as a good resource for getting poaching data, Patel noted that conclusive data on any illegal trade is almost impossible to get.
“It’s just hard to find ways of collecting data and having it be reliable just because of the illicit nature of the activity,” Patel said. “The groups involved are always trying to evade monitoring or law enforcement, so they’re continuously changing their paths. They’re probably changing their ways as we speak.”
Still, she hopes this “snapshot” of the illegal wildlife trade might provide a general guideline for where conservation groups can most effectively focus their efforts. The World Wildlife Fund says poaching is worse now than its ever been, with poaching the biggest threat to endangered species other than habitat loss. The WCS says 96 elephants are killed every day by poachers. Conservation group Save the Rhinos says rhino poaching is on the rise, with 1,215 rhinos poached in 2014 (and fewer than 30,000 rhinos left in the wild at all). Tigers are in just as much trouble, with just 3,200 left in the wild today, according to the WWF.
When you’re dealing with such a huge issue than spans dozens of countries around the globe, any kind of guidance is helpful.
