Uncertainty, Precaution, and Adaptive Management in Wildlife Trade

Wildlife trade is big business. Legal international trade in just some of the wild animals and plants traded worldwide is estimated at $350 to$530 million per year. The United States is the primary importer of virtually every major taxon of these species, including mammals, reptiles, fish, and plants. When it comes to illegal trade, estimates of its value range from $7 to$23 billion annually, covering wild animals, fish, and timber. This illegal trade fuels organized crime and militia and terrorist groups. In the face of all this pressure, some wild species appear to be traded in sustainable amounts. Others are headed for extinction. In this high-stakes world, both uncertainty and value conflicts abound. With scientific and socioeconomic uncertainty, data, inferences, and predictions can all be contested. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) manages international trade in wild at-risk species and their parts through a combination of international decision-making and national and sub-national implementation, banning and regulating trade in species with the goal of avoiding extinction due to international trade. Every decision taken by CITES parties—whether on the floor of the regular meetings or by Scientific Authorities designated by the state—has to deal with uncertainty due to data gaps, the effect of human activity, and complexity, among other things. This Article addresses how the parties to CITES have dealt with uncertainty by analyzing their approach to precaution and adaptive management. The Article concludes that the parties have shied away from adopting the precautionary principle or approach and have instead incorporated any precautionary elements into monitoring and adaptive management. This way of implementing precaution emphasizes uncertainty arising from data gaps. However, uncertainty also arises from complexity and indeterminacy, and cannot always be resolved by more data. Thus, uncertainty is not always temporary. For the parties to ensure that international trade does not result in species extinction, they need to be informed by science and aware of its limitations. Incorporating precaution within adaptive management is therefore necessary for decision-making on wildlife trade, but it is not sufficient. The Article argues that fully acknowledging the range of sources of uncertainty requires both a first role for precaution within adaptive management approaches—as the parties are doing, albeit less explicitly—and a second role for precaution at the point of final decision-making

Threats posed to conservation by media misinformation

Media coverage of trophy hunting highlights the potential for misinformation to enter public and political debates on conservation issues. We argue that misinformation should be a major concern for all involved in conservation

Ecological Knowledge in Community Theater

In his article Ecological Knowledge in Community Theater Paul Brown presents a practitioner\u27s perspective on plays which celebrate and enhance community resilience while addressing complex environmental problems. Community plays can highlight environmental injustices and assist communities to find a voice. The article explores these functions by examining how nature moves center-stage in community plays, and the role of community arts, alongside scientific research, in developing and communicating shared understanding of environmental problems and their solutions. In his study Brown compares knowledge-making processes for science and community theater and explores the values expressed in eco-theater and the processes of producing and recording valuable ecological knowledge through community-based creative arts

Custodianship of wildlife on private land to support conservation-an Australian model

A large proportion of the world's extinctions have occurred in Australia, and threatened species lists continue to grow, notwithstanding government and philanthropic efforts. Most losses have been on private land, so relying on national parks and reserves is not enough to reverse trends and meet Australia's responsibilities. This paper proposes a model that could increase abundance and distribution of Australia's biodiversity, while providing financial incentives to private landholders to do so. It addresses the question, can landholder management of wildlife, and a form of private ownership, remedy shortfalls in government funding for biodiversity conservation and the resulting consequences of vast biodiversity losses? Landholders currently invest in propagating introduced livestock species, but they are prevented by current regulations from investing in a similar manner in threatened Australian native species. Market-based incentives could increase the distribution and abundance of species on private land and help protect the habitat of other biodiversity. The enabling changes would be contentious to some people but are consistent with the International Union for the Conservation of Nature's Sustainable Use policy. Different versions of wildlife privatisation have been successfully applied internationally: there is urgency for Australia to draw on these experiences and develop its own model to encourage and support wildlife on private freehold land. The model proposed in this paper focuses on: identifying locally overabundant populations or captive-bred populations as sources of supply; finding landholders and philanthropists who would like to have custodianship of species; enabling entrepreneurs to respond to demand; and bringing the two together where there is scope for a market-based sharing economy. Encouraging wildlife custodianship on private freehold land would be mutually beneficial, as it would not only result in an increase in biodiversity, but the economic value of wildlife could provide an income to landholders as well as enhancing Australia's conservation system

Precaution and Fairness: A Framework for Distributing Costs of Protection from Environmental Risks

While there is an extensive literature on how the precautionary principle should be interpreted and when precautions should be taken, relatively little discussion exists about the fair distribution of costs of taking precautions. We address this issue by proposing a general framework for deciding how costs of precautions should be shared, which consists of a series of default principles that are triggered according to desert, rights, and ability to pay. The framework is developed with close attention to the pragmatics of how distributions will affect actual behaviours. It is intended to help decision-makers think more systematically about distributional consequences of taking precautionary measures, thereby to improve decision-making. Two case studies—one about a ban on turtle fishing in Costa Rica, and one about a deep-sea mining project in Papua New Guinea—are given to show how the framework can be applied

International Deployment of Microbial Pest Control Agents: Falling Between the Cracks of the Convention on Biological Diversity and the Cartagena Biosafety Protocol?

This paper considers one tangled web of conflicting developments. It involves the popular desire to replace chemical pesticides with more “natural” biological control strategies, plus a slowly emerging awareness of a less benign side to microbial pest control agents, based on their potential invasiveness and sometimes striking similarities to agents of bioterrorism and biological warfare. This desire, however, is overshadowed by concerns about the environmental release of genetically engineered organisms. I argue that as some of the concerns about ecological diversity, as captured by the Convention on Biodiversity, were channeled into the subsequent Cartagena Protocol on Biosafety to the Convention on Biological Diversity (Cartagena Protocol) with its emphasis entirely on products of biotechnology, microbial pest control agents have “fallen through the cracks” of international environmental law

Song structure and syllable repertoires in the European sedge warbler, Acrocephalus schoenobaenus

Please read the abstract in the section 00front of this documentDissertation (MSc (Zoology))--University of Pretoria, 2006.Zoology and Entomologyunrestricte

Sustainable use and commercialisation of bushmeat in Colombia: Toward the operationalization of legal frameworks

Key points • Under Colombian law, the sale of game to cover basic needs (e.g. housing, health, education) or to buy other food items is not allowed, since this is considered commercial hunting and does not fall under provisions allowing for subsistence bushmeat hunting. • Law 611 (2000) opened the path to legal commercial use of wildlife. In practice, however, the requirements for obtaining legal permits for commercial hunting activities make it extremely challenging for rural communities to obtain them. • Aware of the role that bushmeat plays in food security, family economy and cultural identity among many rural communities, a number of high-profile Colombian environmental institutions participated in a workshop in 2015 to discuss the operationalisation of the legal framework for the trade in bushmeat by rural communities. • One of the main conclusions of the workshop was that commercial hunting regulations need to legally distinguish between large-scale commercial hunting and the sale of surplus game by subsistence hunters in rural communities. Indeed, these two types of commercial hunting differ in terms of the scale of action, the governance systems in place and the ways in which benefits are equitably distributed among different actors. • The main recommendation was that the regulatory framework should adopt flexible management processes for the local development of sustainable management rules (e.g. list of tradable species, quotas, open seasons, monitoring and evaluation systems). This would allow for the recognition of the specificities of each socio-ecological context, rather than imposing a national-level framework that would likely fail, given Colombia’s diverse biological and cultural characteristics