Conceptualising damage claims for harm to biodiversity
Our lab recent hosted a group of conservationists from Indonesia, USA (California, Washington DC), Brazil, India and Spain, for a workshop on the ways we conceptualise harm to biodiversity, and how this harm might be articula
ted into legal damage claims. The diverse group of ecologists, lawyers, economists and social scientists met for 5 days in the remote mountain village of Alston, as part of the WILDS Project, funded by the UK Government's Defra Illegal Wildlife (IWT) Challenge Fund. The following a summary from PhD student, Maribel Rodriguez.
Biodiversity loss is a leading, complex environmental challenge. Among the drivers of biodiversity loss, overexploitation of flora and fauna is intrinsically linked to the illegal wildlife trade (IWT), which involves hundreds of millions of wild-caught individuals annually and represents annual market values regularly estimated in the tens of billions of dollars.
The impacts of IWT are diverse, from cascading ecological effects to non-financial impacts such as cultural, scientific or historical impacts of species loss. It affects livelihoods by disturbing local harvests, access to resources and/or aggravating conflicts and risks (e.g., violence by poachers). IWT also yields lost taxes and imposes costs of increased public investments (e.g., additional monitoring, reintroductions, enforcement). But have you ever wondered who should pay for the harm produced by IWT? And most importantly: how much?
The magnitude of these impacts—on the public, government agencies and private citizens— is rarely reflected in the often small fines typically levied on perpetrators of IWT. Low sanctions fail to send clear deterrence signals to future perpetrators, recover money for conservation, or compensate victims.
The WILDS project proposes an alternative legal pathway to weak criminal sanctions by exploring the legal options of claiming liability for environmental harm caused by IWT. Based on the logic informing the "polluter pays principle", liability for environmental harm holds perpetrators responsible for the environmental harm they cause. This project explores how liability for environmental harm suits can be applied to IWT cases, and seeks to provide the conceptual and legal clarity and technical expertise and capacity-building needed to enable the world’s first liability for environmental harm suit involving IWT in Indonesia.
In the framework of WILDS, this April a group of ecologists, economists, lawyers and social scientists coming from the academia sector, NGOs and private entities met in Alston (UK) to discuss the answers to those questions.
During the first sessions, the group attempted to frame the necessary steps before forming a damage claim. Questions about the harms involved in trafficking with species and the remedies that could be sought were passionately debated with the valuable help of outstanding economists and ecologists.
The legal options and challenges to form a claim were discussed in further sessions with the support of lawyers with diverse backgrounds (civil liability, climate change, indigenous people, forest fires, IWT). The debate contributed to the creation of guidelines and a road map to introduce damage claims for harms caused by IWT in Indonesia.
