Saving wildlife from trafficking on the new conservation frontier — the internet

By Crawford Allan (Senior Director, TRAFFIC at WWF US)

The current pandemic has brought into sharp view the difficult relationship between humans and wildlife, and the role that the trade in wildlife plays in the spread of zoonotic diseases. A major exacerbating factor that increases the risk of such spillover is the illegal and unregulated trade in wildlife, which has caused devastation to wildlife in recent decades to meet a surging demand for the rare and exotic as food, pets and medicine. The role of the internet in exponentially facilitating this trade and turning local markets into global ones online, has skyrocketed the scale of the illicit wildlife trade and encouraged greater consumer demand. Even the largest online platforms have been used by criminal groups to traffic wildlife globally, often to consumers who don’t realize the species, or their products, are illegal, facing risk of extinction in the wild or are high-risk for disease transmission. With trillions of items for sale daily, it is impossible for law enforcement to police the internet effectively for the range of illicit goods that are openly available.

After years of watching this challenge unfold in my role of catalyzing partnerships to tackle illegal wildlife trade, I recognized that the main way of addressing…