Overcoming the Acceleration of Illegal Online Wildlife Trade

By Marcus Griswold, PhD
CoActive and Eco Coach
Principal, Calm Waters Group
Founder, Little Green Myths

How Large is the Wildlife Trade Industry?

Overexploitation of wildlife through hunting and trapping for consumption and trade remains one of the main drivers of global biodiversity loss, with millions of products traded through legal and illegal channels every year. Animals or their parts are used for various purposes, including as food sources, in traditional medicine, in fashion, as ornaments, or as exotic pets.

For example, traditional medicine utilizes more than 50,000 plant species, 700 fungi, and over 500 animal species globally. While legal in many cases, traditional medicine poses significant threats to biodiversity. For instance, 53% of reptile species and approximately 15,000 plant species used in medicinal practices are threatened.

“Wildlife trade” refers to the sale and exchange of live wild animals, animal products, or plant resources. This illicit market is valued between 7 and 23 billion dollars annually, making it the fourth most lucrative illegal industry worldwide, following drug trafficking, human trafficking, and arms smuggling. This illegal activity encompasses poaching, transportation, and the sale of living animals for the exotic pet trade, as well as plants, including animal parts such as ivory, rhino horns, pangolin scales, and meat.

The most recent World Wildlife Crime Report found illegal wildlife trade in 162 countries between 2015 and 2021, impacting approximately 4,000 plant and animal species. Of these, around 3,250 species are listed in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Appendices. The European Union remains a major hub for global wildlife trafficking, with nearly 5,200 seizures reported in 2023 according to the wildlife trade monitoring organization TRAFFIC.

CITES is the main international agreement that identifies levels of protection for traded species. The legal trade of wildlife has been regulated by CITES since its adoption in 1973, as an international agreement among Member Parties. With 184 parties in the Convention and 38,700 species protected under its Appendices, CITES stands as the most extensive international treaty regarding the protection of endangered species from the international trade.

While the impacts of trade has been analyzed and accounted for charismatic species such as tigers, primates, and rhinoceros, other species that are present in the illegal markets may slip through the cracks of surveillance and conservation attention. Unfortunately, the absence of standardized global legal trade data makes it difficult and time-consuming to identify trends and draw reliable conclusions. The lack of compliance from parties, poor knowledge of threats and incomplete monitoring of listed species are among key factors underlying the failure of CITES in regulating the trade of sensitive species.

Online Trade is Accelerating Extinction Rates

The internet has facilitated the illegal trade in endangered species, creating innumerable new marketplaces and connected buyers and sellers around the world. Some wildlife trade occurs via the ‘dark’ web, the non-indexed portion of the web, but quite unique to illegal wildlife trade is that much of it occurs out in the open.

Social media has facilitated wildlife trafficking by publicizing new species and providing platforms for buying and selling illegally traded animals. A study in Mexico found that Facebook hosted the most wildlife-related content, with many people engaging in illegal sales under the assumption that authorities would not investigate. E-commerce and social media platforms provide anonymity to traffickers who often use multiple fake accounts, and use paid advertising and visual content for marketing. Even more challenging is that many of the marketplaces are in closed groups on Facebook, Telegram, and Whatsapp.

Researchers at the Center for Data Science at New York University recently looked at the impacts of online wildlife trade using automated web scraping of online shopping websites. Looking at only a four month period in 2018, they identified 10,699 unique listings selling body parts or eggs of threatened species, of which 4,131 contained a full species name. Species included tigers, sea otters, Siamese crocodile, spider tortoise, Java sparrow, Indian tarantulas, jaguar, cheetahs, komodo dragons, and more.

Just four websites hosted >95 % of these listings — Etsy, eBay, Gumtree and The Taxidermy Store (note that many of these stores now have policies on endangered species sales in place). In general, many listings are less than $50 making shopping for endangered species less than the cost of a meal for two in the United States.

Since many listings did not specify the products’ geographical origins or indicate whether they were wild-sourced or captive-bred, species protected in certain countries can enter the trade to be sold elsewhere. Additionally, CITES restricts and regulates only international commercial trade meaning CITES-listed species can still be legally sold domestically without permits.

Trade Bans Can Increase Illegal Wildlife Trade

We usually think that banning trade of endangered species is a solution to this problem. Governments commonly use trade bans at both the domestic and international levels to immediately manage wildlife trade. But often it creates a feedback loop, making the products more desirable. For example, trade bans often increase the perceived rarity of wildlife and its products on the market, increasing their value, and desirability which can stimulate illegal markets. This happened for black rhino horns and rosewood timber, increasing demand and leading to extinction in some cases.

Newer research is showing bans can also create new demand for other threatened and endangered species, called spillover. A recent study by researchers at Japan’s National Institute for Environmental Studies looked at the effects of spillover of illegal wildlife trade in online markets. They looked at the effects of Japan’s ban of online trade of giant water bugs, Tokyo salamanders and golden venus chub on the trade of similar species. The authors focused on Japan’s leading online auction platform Yahoo! Auction where they found sales of individuals for the nine years leading up to the ban of 385,713 for water bugs, 30,402 for salamanders, and 100,915 for golden venus chub and trade dropping to zero immediately after the ban.

While the ban worked for the focal species, it led to an increase in the trade volumes of non-banned species in each taxon for 1 year after the ban. For example, a substitute for the banned giant water bugs Cybister chinensis is designated as vulnerable in the Japanese Red List and is locally extinct in five regions. This spillover effect potentially harms conservation of many legally tradable threatened species by activating the trade of substitute species, which can boost wild harvest. The challenge is whether scientists and law enforcement agencies can accurately predict what those substitute species will be once a ban is in place.

When trade bans stimulate sales of non-banned species, it can trigger new regulations, and stimulate sales of other non-banned species, creating a self-perpetuating loop. To support this idea, the commercial trade of Cybister chinensis, was banned in 2023 following the spillover effects seen.

How Can We Reduce Illegal Wildlife Trade?

Promote substitute species

An initial goal of interventions should be to reduce the demand for the species to be banned, reducing the magnitude and the duration of any potential spillover. Demand management should focus on redirecting spillover demand towards legal and sustainable sources, either from well-managed wild populations, captive breeding, or synthetic alternatives. This requires an extensive outreach and education campaign that’s launched long before the actual ban. Such behavior change intervention would minimize any threats to biodiversity.

Monitor Banned and Proxy Species

When bans are put in place, often insufficient efforts and funds are put towards monitoring trade. Further efforts are needed to monitor the volume, composition, and prices of species being traded. Monitoring should be extended to include unregulated threatened species trade.

In the U.S., its Law Enforcement Management Information System (LEMIS) is one of the most comprehensive databases of legally traded plants and animals. Between 2000 and 2022, the number of individuals legally traded in the U.S. was a staggering 864 million spiders and their relatives, 600 million fish, and 551 million insects. A database for illegally traded plants and wildlife does not exist.

Fortunately advances in computer science can be used to identify traded species, including illegal ones. But species identification has been challenging, even on online trade platforms, since species are traded using not only species names but also common names and codified language designed to be understood only by those within specific pet owner and trader networks.

Technologies like natural language processing, machine learning, and computer vision methods can be used to identify advertisements across a wide range of endangered species on the open web. Some researchers have deployed automated detection to look for a single endangered species groups on a single website, such as cacti, elephant ivory, orchids, wild cats, turtles, saiga antelope horn, and pangolins, but this one at a time approach limits the ability to monitor illegal trade of thousands of vulnerable species.

Because trade spans across continents, a database comprising the banned and non-banned traded/tradable species with common names in multiple languages could help overcome language barriers in conservation science.

Create and Monitor Policies at Online Stores

Many of the online stores that were selling illegal plants and animals have now created policies that ban these sales, however, third parties should still continue to evaluate the effectiveness of these policies. That’s the intent of the EU’s Digital Services Act, which was adopted in October 2022, and aims to curb the illegal online wildlife trade. Under this law, watchdog groups including International Fund for Animal Welfare have been designated as “trusted flaggers,” allowing them to work directly with online platforms to identify and report illicit wildlife sales.

eBay is taking the lead of the online shops. eBay now prohibits the sale of products from endangered or threatened species listed on the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Environmental Conservation Online System (ECOS), and those listed in CITES Appendix 1. After taking this action in 2024, eBay blocked approximately 1 million potential violations for prohibited wildlife items such as ivory and others from endangered or threatened species. Etsy has similar policies that prohibit the sale of products from species designated as threatened or endangered by the U.S. Endangered Species Act or listed on CITES Appendix I.

Gumtree says it prohibits the sale of ivory and parts of “protected species,” but it does not define what constitutes a protected species.

The Taxidermy Store hasn’t publicly outlined its policies on the sale of wildlife parts, but it verifies that all taxidermy products are from non-endangered species by working with hunters, museums, educational centers and government agencies to confirm the legal status of each item being sold.

Led by World Wildlife Fund (WWF), TRAFFIC, and the International Fund for Animal Welfare, 47 companies, including eBay, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and TikTok are part of the the Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online. They are taking measures to seek out and remove illegal posts from their platforms. Strategies include training staff, blocking keywords, adjusting detection algorithms, and strengthening prohibited content policies. This has resulted in 24.1 million online posts selling prohibited wildlife being blocked or removed by the Coalition between 2018 and 2024.

Find out what they are up to by looking for the hashtag #OfflineAndInTheWild. If you see something suspicious, you can report it with their online form.

Pair Technology with Enforcement

WWF has created an Asia-Pacific Hub to combat illegal wildlife trade by bringing in AI, conservation organizations, and law enforcement. The Hub brings together civil society, law enforcement, and technical experts to create an integrated strategy that includes public awareness, machine learning tools, intelligence training and cross-border collaboration. They have launched a citizen science program called WWF’s Cyber Spotters to use machine learning and artificial intelligence to track down, identify, and report online illegal trade.

These technological advancements are being paired with local enforcement action. In one example, WWF is training officers from the Sabah Wildlife and Forestry Departments to utilize these tools in enforcement.

Author:

Marcus Griswold is an ecologist and climate adaptation expert with an interest in ground truthing the statements made in the sustainability world. To do this he launched Little Green Myths to help others navigate the art of sustainability and to advance our understanding of good actors.