Grant to fight illegal wildlife trade in court
Our group is lead on a successful UK Defra's Illegal Wildlife Challenge Grant that will explore liability for environmental harm in the context of illegal wildlife trade. It is a unique action-research project that will explore concepts of environmental harm in the context of illegal wildlife trade in Indonesia, and then work with lawyers at the NGO, Auriga, to litigate a case--the first-of-its-kind in the world.
This is a project includes lawyers, conservationists, applied researchers and government partners to explore different criminal, administrative and civil sanctions applied to illegal wildlife trade (IWT) cases. We know that IWT yields profound impacts on the environment and society. For example, IWT impacts livelihoods, where it affects local harvests (e.g., reduced fish stocks) and harms tourism (e.g., degraded reefs, loss of charismatic species); restricts local access (e.g., tightened forest regulations), or presents physical risks to local residents. It yields lost tax revenues (e.g., from legal timber and fisheries trade); cascading ecological impacts (e.g., removing keystone species); non-economic impacts (e.g., cultural, scientific or historical impacts of species loss), and the costs of increased public investment into additional conservation measures (e.g., reintroductions, restoration, monitoring). The magnitude of these impacts—on the public and on private citizens—is rarely reflected in the sanctions that perpetrators receive. This fails to send clear deterrence signals to perpetrators or to communicate the scale of IWT harm to the public. Moreover, it does not recover money for conservation (restoration, reintroduction, monitoring), or compensate public and private victims of IWT. The project explores legal recourses for re-balancing sanctions through the application of civil liability for environmental harm.
The project is part of £4.5 million in new funding from the UK, announced by Environment Secretary Michael Gove to tackle the criminals trafficking endangered species.
Dr. Jacob Phelps, Lancaster University, said:
This new funding from the UK Government will help the Lancaster Environment Centre to tackle the real-world challenges of taking legal action against illegal wildlife trade. In collaboration with lawyers and conservationists across a dozen countries, we will explore new legal responses to wildlife trade–focused on Indonesia, but with global implications. When an oil spill devastates a coast line, we pursue the perpetrators not only with fines and jail sentences, but also with orders to restore the environment, issue apologies and compensate victims. In contrast, the perpetrators of large-scale, commercial illegal wildlife trade are rarely held accountable for the broad impacts they impose on the environment and society. In this project, we will explore new strategies to hold large-scale perpetrators legally responsible for the environmental harm they cause, including impacts on livelihoods, biodiversity and culture.
