The western Hermann’s tortoise is one of Europe’s most threatened reptiles. Its counterpart, the eastern Hermann’s tortoise, is faring somewhat better. But analysis has shown that even its wild populations could be quickly driven to extinction through overexploitation.

When left to their own devices, these tortoises spend their time navigating complex and diverse wild landscapes in the Mediterranean. However, many of them are confined to households and gardens instead, as the tortoises are popular pets.

Commercial breeders produce these reptiles in their thousands for the pet market. The UK is among the top importers, with almost 25,000 Hermann’s tortoises exported to the country between 2018 and 2023, according to supplier nations.

Now, the UK government is planning to limit trade oversight for the Hermann’s tortoise and two others, the Spur-thighed tortoise and the Marginated tortoise, as part of wider reforms to wildlife trade governance. This is despite the existence of ample evidence that wild-living individuals of both Hermann’s tortoise subspecies face an ongoing risk of illegal capture.

Win-wins where Nature loses

The UK’s Wildlife Trade Regulations (WTR) are the vehicle through which the country implements its duties under the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which governs global trade in around 40,000 threatened wild species.

This treaty body lists species on one of three Appendices (I, II, III), each with different levels of trade regulation. Generally, the lower the Appendix number, the stricter trade controls are. The WTR Annexes (A-D), an EU framework that the UK retained after Brexit, largely reflect these CITES listings. But they are stricter in certain cases, such as Annex A including around two hundred Appendix II, III, and non-CITES listed species, alongside Appendix I species, due to the EU resolving that they need stricter measures.

In September, the government ran a consultation on WTR reforms as part of a wider deregulation drive to ‘rip out bureaucracy’ and promote growth. These sweeping changes have included makeovers of planning systems for housing and infrastructure developments and nuclear projects. Rules for health and safety and farming are also under review.

In these cases, a pattern has emerged: the government characterises reforms as a ‘win-win’ situation where both nature and industry will benefit. But when campaigners, politicians, and journalists pull back this rhetorical veil, they often conclude that the changes weaken protections for nature, posing a threat to the wildlife that remains in one of the most nature-depleted countries on Earth.

In the case of WTR reforms, this history is repeating. When the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (DEFRA) announced its proposed changes on 9 February, it portrayed them as a win-win that will both protect wildlife and support wildlife-trading businesses. But though nature advocates welcomed some aspects, they warn the bulk of proposals will only serve to make life easier for regulators and traders, and harder for wild species.

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Positives in the minority

Among the plans welcomed by the International Fund for Animal Welfare (IFAW) was DEFRA’s decision to retain welfare assessments for imported Annex B species, which are mostly CITES Appendix II species. Industry actors, such as zoos, had argued that other provisions render these checks irrelevant. DEFRA disagreed, concluding that ending the assessments risked creating gaps in welfare protection.

In another agreeable move, DEFRA confirmed that it will finally comply with a CITES rule it has breached for years. Under CITES, all captive breeding facilities involved in the commercial trade of Appendix I species – a list containing the most at risk species – must be registered with the treaty body. DEFRA’s commitment to now abide by this rule follows a 2023 CITES Standing Committee meeting, during which the body advised countries to reject exports from non-registered facilities in the UK and elsewhere.

Although having these facilities registered with CITES does not necessarily equate to better oversight, it does increase their visibility and therefore possible scrutiny. Studies have shown that wildlife farming needs more careful examination to stamp out illegal and unsustainable practices. For instance, laundering of wild birds is an ongoing issue in captive breeding of raptors for falconry – an industry in which the UK is a significant player.

In its response to DEFRA’s planned reforms, however, Born Free argued that positive moves like these are in the minority. It said the government has “clearly opted to prioritise reducing the burden” on officials and industry in many of its decisions.

Removing layers of scrutiny

DEFRA’s plan to categorise certain species as ‘low-risk’ and reduce oversight of their trade is among the concerns of nonprofits like Born Free and IFAW.

The department intends to eliminate import permit requirements for “low-risk” Annex B species, meaning imports it believes carry a low probability of conservation, enforcement, and compliance problems. Instead, trade in these ‘low-risk’ species will only require import notifications.

Requiring import permits for Annex B species is an EU-inherited measure that is stricter than CITES demands. It means the UK’s CITES authorities must verify that these imports are legal and sustainable. These checks include producing non-detriment findings (NDF) to determine whether trade will negatively impact species’ survival and their role in ecosystems. Under CITES rules, supplier countries are also required to create NDFs, alongside Legal Acquisition Findings (LAF), before licensing exports.

Put simply, DEFRA’s plan would remove a layer of scrutiny at the destination end of the trade chain for some as yet unidentified ‘low-risk’ species.

Similarly, the department intends to move certain “low-risk” Annex A species to Annex X, beginning with the three Mediterranean tortoises. Annex X currently contains a short list of Annex A bird species whose captive-bred populations are exempt from certain regulatory requirements. Traders do not have to secure a commercial use certificate (Article 10) for captive-bred individuals of Annex X species, which limits authorities’ oversight over their domestic commercial use.

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‘Low-risk’ species at risk of illegal trade

DEFRA’s initial choices of species to categorise as ‘low-risk’ – the Mediterranean tortoises – provide a worrying precedent for the others that may follow.

The department is planning to add these species to Annex X because they are commonly captive-bred and non-native to the UK, as outlined in the initial consultation. Yet, in that same document, DEFRA pointed to “risk of illegal trade” as being the primary justification for requiring Article 10 certificates.

These factors are not mutually exclusive, Born Free’s head of policy, Mark Jones, stresses. “High-volume captive breeding can mask illegal wild capture” and “facilitate laundering of wild specimens,” he says.

For Wildlife Conservation Society’s (WCS) vice president of international policy, Susan Lieberman, the illegality issue is key to whether species can be considered ‘low-risk’. She says an essential benchmark for determining which species qualify should be the risk that trade poses to their conservation in the wild.

By this measure, at least the most heavily traded of these tortoises – the Hermann’s tortoise – does not fit the bill. Several studies have warned that exploitation remains a threat to both western and eastern Hermann’s tortoises, despite regulations largely limiting trade to captive-bred individuals.

A 2019 paper about Serbia’s population of the eastern Hermann’s tortoise noted that illegal collection of wild individuals continues, albeit on a smaller scale than before legal protections were introduced. A paper published in 2021, meanwhile, pointed to the western tortoise’s vulnerability in France due to threats that include illegal exploitation.

In a 2020 paper, other researchers summarised the conclusions of a Mediterranean workshop on tortoise conservation that took place the previous year, which particularly focused on the Hermann’s tortoise and Spur-thighed tortoise. It delivered an unequivocal verdict on the threat posed by trade: “Tortoise trade should be banned because it threatens the conservation of wild populations of tortoises,” the researchers wrote.

From precautionary to passive

Jones also warns that DEFRA’s plan to eliminate import permit requirements for Annex B species it considers ‘low-risk’ would “shift the UK from precautionary importer to passive recipient.”

Worse still, prior revelations have shown that while the UK has a precautionary approach on paper, in practice these measures can fail to be prudent enough.

As The 4 Percent revealed last year, the UK’s NDF for long-tailed macaques from Mauritius – obtained through freedom of information requests in October 2023 – strongly depended on information provided by the country’s primate breeding companies to a parliamentary committee in 2009. Action for Primates co-founder Sarah Kite described the NDF as a “disgrace” due to its heavy reliance on “severely outdated” information from primate traders. UK CITES authorities insisted other sources were used in the assessment, which was reviewed in early 2025.

That investigation also showed that no sustainability assessment would have been produced for long-tailed macaque trades between the two countries without the UK’s NDF. Through enquiries to Mauritius’ CITES authorities, Action for Primates found that the country has apparently failed to produce an NDF for the species. Authorities determined that the assessment was “not warranted” because “the population is an exotic invasive species and that extraction has no incidence in the wild.”

Viewed alongside another example from South Africa, this situation demonstrates that NDFs on both ends of trade chains – and the regulatory architecture that surrounds them – require strengthening, not weakening further by limiting when they are necessary.

South Africa published a list of NDFs for certain CITES species on 9 March. It highlighted the many species of wild animals and plants that the country’s CITES authorities deem at “low risk” from international trade. These include critically endangered and endangered species that campaigners argue cannot be justifiably traded, as the Daily Maverick reported.

South Africa’s NDF for African lions also concludes that legal trade poses a “low to moderate, but non-detrimental risk” to the country’s population. Yet, recently published survey results from South Africa’s Kruger National Park show the lion population in part of this key stronghold to be under pressure, including from illegal killing, as Africa Geographic reported. These findings follow a 2025 Conservation Letters review warning that the illegal killing of lions for trade is increasing, including in South Africa, and “represents a potentially existential threat to the species.”

Linda Park, director of South Africa’s Voice4Lions, says findings like this “rather make a nonsense of the NDF.” With illegal trade escalating, alongside enduring issues like corruption, “countries should not be walking back on provisions,” she argues. Rather, existing loopholes in trade regulations must be closed, although she says whether the political will exists to achieve this is a “very difficult question.”

Important regulatory gaps remain

Born Free and IFAW have criticised other elements of DEFRA’s proposed changes, such as its plans to accept ‘semi-complete’ permits for certain species and subject some serious offences to civil rather than criminal sanctions.

WCS’ Lieberman also says “it needs to be illegal to import into the UK – or the EU – wildlife that is illegally exported from the country of origin.” She is referring to nationally protected yet non-CITES listed species that are stolen from the wild and traded internationally due to legal loopholes elsewhere.

But while DEFRA has committed to retaining and digitalising Annex D – a relatively short list of non-CITES listed species imported in large enough volumes to warrant monitoring – the reforms do not appear to include a plan to criminalise trade in wildlife which cannot have been exported legally.

DEFRA also failed to present a timeline for full implementation of an electronic permitting system for trade in CITES species in the WTR reforms. The CITES system still relies on paper-based permits, an archaic system that is prone to fraudulent use, such as forged documents, and makes timely monitoring, verification, and analysis of trade impossible.

The UK has been developing electronic permitting for years and the rollout apparently remains a work in progress. This slow pace of development makes the UK a laggard among European nations and has landed the country on a “Dirty Dozen” list created by Australian nonprofit Nature Needs More. This “list of shame” includes countries that “have no excuse” not to digitise trade permits.

The 4 Percent contacted DEFRA for comment on this story but received no response. However, when announcing the planned reforms, the department insisted that they would make the UK’s CITES framework “more efficient, proportionate and transparent,” while “maintaining strong environmental protections.”

On the contrary, limiting trade oversight further in a ramshackle regulatory landscape that already fails too many wild species does not make for “strong” protections. Instead, it will likely make navigating an already difficult terrain even more treacherous for the Hermann’s tortoise – and for the other misfortunate species that find themselves on the UK’s incoming ‘low risk’ species lists.

A seabird ‘wreck’ unfolded across Great Britain in early 2026. Hundreds of dead birds, mostly Atlantic puffins, washed up on beaches. Others arrived onshore just clinging to life.

An even worse situation has occurred along Europe’s Atlantic coast. Tens of thousands of birds stranded on beaches in France, Portugal and Spain.

Wrecks are mass mortality events, caused by factors like extreme weather, such as prolonged storm or heatwave conditions. As the University of Sheffield’s Professor Tim Birkhead has noted, these wrecks “have always occurred but they were once rare and seabirds have evolved to cope with them.” Now though, the events appear to be becoming more frequent due to the climate crisis.

Paul Reynolds, chair of the British Wildlife Rehabilitation Council and co-manager at Scotland’s New Arc Wildlife Rescue, also points out that these more frequent mass die-offs are impacting species like puffins that are already “vulnerable and in decline” due to other pressures.

Many birds perish at sea

In England, washed up seabirds were reported from the north-east to the south-west in early 2026. On the European continent, the scale of strandings has been far worse. On 19 February, the French bird protection charity Ligue pour la protection des oiseaux (LPO) reported that bird strandings in France, Spain, and Portugal totalled over 38,000.

LPO said wildlife rehabilitation centres were experiencing an “exceptional mobilisation,” taking in hundreds of puffins, guillemots, and little auks, due to the intensity of the event.

Reynolds says reports of strandings started coming into the New Arc Wildlife Rescue in North-east Scotland around late January. Among the many birds taken in by the centre was a puffin whose leg ring revealed them to be over 34 years old. Although the mature bird would have encountered many storms in their lifetime, this one was to be their last.

Reynolds explains why prolonged poor weather takes so many lives: it forces fish that puffins and other birds rely on to move deeper down in the ocean. Combined with increased water turbulence and decreased visibility, this makes it harder for the birds to access food. In turn, reduced feeding impacts their energy levels and resilience.

“All of it goes out of the window, and the animals end up floating in the ocean, losing their waterproofing, losing their body condition,” Reynolds says.

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A multitude of threats

Many birds perish in the ocean during these mass mortality events, with tidal conditions pushing some individuals – dead and alive – towards the shore. This means that strandings offer only a glimpse of the full extent of a wreck, due to many birds being lost at sea.

As the affected birds return to their breeding sites in the coming months, the impact will become more apparent. Prior experience shows that events of this scale can have a big impact on bird populations, says Reynolds. He points to the European shag as an example: Scotland’s Isle of May saw its shag population almost ‘disappear overnight’ following a severe storm in late 2023, the Guardian reported.

The University of Sheffield’s Birkhead has also warned that extreme weather during birds’ breeding seasons is on the rise, impacting their ability to produce offspring. In May 2022, for instance, guillemots on Skomer Island off the South-west coast of Wales lost many of their eggs from breeding ledges due to storms.

Wrecks can have repercussions beyond these direct impacts, highlights Reynolds. In the coming months, puffins will be getting ready for breeding. If the population is badly impacted by extreme weather now, it is “going to be difficult for them to recover well to be good breeding condition come summer,” he says.

Added to this, seabirds must contend with other pressures at the same time. The climate crisis is putting their nesting sites at risk and fishing gear poses an entanglement threat. Other pressures include the introduction of non-native species to their environments, hunting, and outbreaks of diseases like bird flu. Fossil fuel pollution of the ocean from spill disasters and chronic, routine discharges is a longstanding yet declining danger to seabirds too. Offshore infrastructure like wind farms also poses a collision risk where it overlaps with seabirds’ habitats.

Where varied threats compound or intersect with each other, it can really stack the odds against seabirds. For instance, many puffins now have to travel further to find food for their young because the climate crisis and overfishing have led to a reduction of prey in their traditional hunting grounds. Researchers have shown this limits their breeding success. Birds in a weakened state after surviving an extreme weather event may struggle more with the increased energy demands of these longer foraging trips, further stretching their ability to successfully raise a chick.

As Reynolds puts it, when threats collide, the birds are confronted with a “perfect storm.”

Impoverishing life itself

A 2024 report by BirdLife Europe & Central Asia highlighted that around 40% of seabird species are at risk globally. This rate is reflected in Europe, with 32% of its seabird species at risk. These percentages include birds that the International Union for Conservation of Nature has assessed as critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable and near threatened.

Meanwhile, a 2024 assessment published in the British Birds journal found that the majority of Great Britain’s currently occurring breeding seabird species – 18 out of 26 – have at least one population threatened with extinction from its shores. This is a dramatic increase from just 2017, when 10 species faced this threat.

It appears that seabirds’ resilience is wearing very thin in the face of a virtual avalanche of pressures. They are not alone. A 2024 report by Intergovernmental Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) highlighted that biodiversity is declining in all the world’s regions and at every level – global to local – due mainly to human activities.

Last year, meanwhile, a global analysis published in Nature found that human pressures are shifting the make-up of wild communities and reducing the local diversity of species. Numbers of species at sites impacted by pressures were 20% lower on average than at unaffected sites.

A study by researchers from Queen Mary University of London puts such declines into sobering context. Published in Nature Communications in February, it examined the turnover of species in ecosystems over the last century, meaning the speed at which species replace each other in natural spaces.

To do this, the researchers analysed a large database of biodiversity surveys that spanned freshwater, marine, and terrestrial habitats, covering fish, birds, mammals, invertebrates, and plants.

The study found that ecosystems are not static, with species replacing each other due to “internal interactions,” the university explained. Environmental conditions also drive change and it is generally presumed that global warming speeds up species turnover, with changing conditions causing more species to move in and out.

But the researchers found that species turnover – measured over intervals of 1-5 years – actually slowed after 1975, despite global temperatures rising more quickly since then. Co-author Professor Axel Rossberg said:

“We were surprised at how strong the effect is. Turnover rates typically declined by one third.”

They argued that this could be due to human activities degrading nature and shrinking the regional ‘pools’ of species left to replace each other.

Findings like these only add to the urgency of protecting the populations of wild species that remain.

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A grave threat

On 19 January, the UK government quietly released a delayed national security assessment on the threat posed by biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse, following a Freedom of Information request from the Green Alliance.

Although reportedly an abridged version of the full assessment, its conclusions were stark: “All countries are exposed to the risks of ecosystem collapse within and beyond their borders,” it read.

Healthy biodiversity underpins the “ecosystem services” that human societies depend on, such as water, food, and clean air, the report noted. To take seabirds as just one example, their behaviours and actions contribute to coastal protection and the productivity of fisheries. Their poop also combines with other substances to create atmospheric particles that seed clouds, which means the birds also help to cool the Earth and create rainfall.

The national security assessment warned that the impacts of biodiversity loss will be immense, ranging from “crop failures, intensified natural disasters and infectious disease outbreaks to conflict within and between states, political instability, and erosion of global economic prosperity.”

On the heels of that assessment, IPBES released a report that also outlined the grave economic threats posed by nature loss. Transform industry practices to better protect biodiversity or risk businesses going extinct was its central message to industry and policymakers.

These analyses are the latest of a long stream of warnings about the magnitude of the biodiversity crisis. Yet, as the Guardian’s Patrick Greenfield noted following the release of the IPBES report, most businesses are failing to act and politicians largely offer “weak leadership” on the emergency.

Batten down the hatches

Nonetheless, the visceral evidence of the plight of seabirds provided by the latest wreck spurred the RSPB to call on the UK authorities to urgently protect them, as Inside Ecology reported. The RSPB’s director of conservation, Katie-jo Luxton, said:

“Mass deaths like this underline just how fragile our seabirds are, as well as the urgent need to build resilience in their populations to be able to withstand exactly this type of unpredictable event.”

Luxton highlighted that governments across Great Britain have already agreed Seabird Conservation Strategies, but she said these need “actioning and resourcing.”

The UK has gone some way to addressing food shortages for birds like puffins by closing sandeel fisheries in all Scottish waters and in the North Sea’s English waters. But Luxton argued that other actions are needed, such as strengthening the marine protected areas network and deploying measures on fishing vessels to stop birds getting caught in their gear. The organisation is also is also calling on authorities to position new offshore wind developments away from the most important areas for seabirds.

Elsewhere, the RSPB has joined with 24 other nature organisations in writing to the government to demand it take action to tackle the risks spotlighted in its national security assessment, as ITV News reported. The broadcaster also revealed that it has seen extracts from the full report which apparently show that “some of the most worrying potential impacts of nature loss weren't disclosed to the public.”

The Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs told ITV News that “understanding the security risks arising from biodiversity loss is critical to strengthening the UK’s long-term resilience, and this assessment will inform our actions to prepare the UK for the future.” It also pointed to its investments in sustainable farming, flood defences, and protections for “vital habitats around the world” as evidence that it is committed to tackling nature loss.

This is an underwhelming response given the gravity of the situation. True leadership would be battening down every vulnerable hatch amid this perfect storm to strengthen the resilience of wildlife, including of the seabirds who are now heading to their cliffs and trying against the odds to bring new life into their communities.

If you encounter an injured or unwell bird or other wild animal, Reynolds advises that you contact your nearest wildlife rescue centre for advice. You can visit the British Wildlife Rehabilitation Council’s website to search for your nearest wildlife rescue centre. DEFRA’s advice upon finding a dead bird is not to touch them, but report the sighting to the department. You can also report these sightings to the British Trust for Ornithology, through its online tracking system BirdTrack.

At its latest triennial conference, the global wildlife trade body removed the Caribbean monk seal from its lists of species under trade regulation for a grim reason: the species has already been exploited to extinction.

The last recorded sighting of a Caribbean monk seal, one of only three seal species adapted to live in warm waters, occurred in 1952. Since the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora entered into force in 1975, it has recorded just a single trade in historical specimens.

The seal’s removal was therefore little more than housekeeping. In an almost clinical discussion lasting less than eight minutes, the Caribbean monk seal was quietly erased from CITES’ lists, just as it has vanished from the world.

Celebrated listing decisions

As a treaty body, CITES is meant to ensure that other wild species do not meet the same fate as the Caribbean monk seal, whose extinction is widely attributed to intensive hunting. Such excessive exploitation is not a relic of the past: a 2019 global assessment of biodiversity found that exploitation is the second biggest threat to land and freshwater species, and the leading threat to marine organisms.

During the two-week CoP20 conference in Uzbekistan, CITES parties, meaning countries signed up to the treaty, strengthened trade regulation for over 120 threatened species. Several species were brought under CITES’ umbrella for the first time. These included the school shark and guggul plant, both critically endangered, which were placed on the treaty’s Appendix II list. Other newly added species shot straight to an Appendix I listing, such as the endangered okapi and an endangered songbird, the great-billed seed finch.

CITES maintains three lists (the Appendices), each imposing different levels of trade regulation. Generally speaking, the lower the Appendix number, the stricter trade controls are. Appendix I listings are reserved for species that CITES parties agree are threatened with extinction and whose survival may be jeopardised by trade. Taking individuals of these species from the wild and trading them commercially is usually prohibited.

Appendix II, where most CITES-listed species sit, typically allows commercial trade subject to certain conditions, such as permitting requirements. In essence, its purpose is to prevent species reaching the point where Appendix I protections become necessary.

As nonprofit Pro Wildlife highlighted, parties adopted a record number of shark and ray listing decisions at the conference, covering over 70 species. “For 11 of them, a global trade ban will apply in the future,” explained Pro Wildlife’s Daniela Freyer, as those species were added to Appendix I.

The treaty body also added four water frogs exploited in the frog legs trade to Appendix II. Other species added to this Appendix include African hornbills, two-toed sloths, several seed-finch species, two gecko species, the dorcas gazelle, the rose hair tarantula, and ponytail palms.

No appetite for certain trades

“Together with conservationists from around the world we succeeded in achieving substantial gains and preventing serious harm,” remarked Freyer after the conference, a sentiment that was widely reflected in responses from other wildlife-focused organisations.

The avoided harm Freyer was referring to included CITES parties rejecting requests from Namibia to trade elephant ivory and rhino horn. As journalist Adam Cruise highlighted, the rejections confirmed that there is “no appetite for reopening markets” in these high-value body parts, which have long been subject to international bans.

Experience shows that creating legal markets “would almost certainly fuel trafficking, increase poaching pressure, and further endanger Africa’s rhinos and elephants,” says Tim Santel, a retired US Fish and Wildlife Service agent who now works with nonprofit Focused Conservation. Distinguishing legal from illegal products, especially carved and modified items, “remains virtually impossible in real time,” he adds.

A case in point: in 2008, CITES approved ‘one-off’ sales of certain ivory stockpiles. This was followed by a significant rise in illegal killings of African elephants, accelerating a gradual upward trend that occurred from 2002-2007, according to a September study published in Global Ecology and Conservation. Since then, various countries have introduced domestic ivory trade bans, including China, a dominant consumer of ivory products. The researchers found that these bans coincided with notable declines in the illegal killing of African elephants between 2016 and 2022, indicating that domestic prohibitions are vital complements to international restrictions.

Their findings were echoed in a further study, published in Biological Conservation, which found that China’s domestic ivory market closure corresponded with a 50% decrease in the illegal killing of elephants.

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Faith in sustainable use

The conference outcomes show that CITES can deliver wins for wildlife. But some results also illuminated tensions at the heart of the treaty, which shaped some of the conference’s more troubling decisions.

As a convention that sits at the intersection of trade and conservation, CITES is rooted in the belief that exploitation can benefit both people and wildlife if conducted sustainably. At CoP20, this faith in sustainable use was evident in a decision on Saiga antelopes, where lessons learned in the ivory and rhino horn trades appeared to fall by the wayside.

Parties agreed to allow extensive but time-limited international trade in saiga horn from Kazakhstan. Saiga were considered critically endangered until recently. But with populations in Kazakhstan now reportedly thriving, and smaller but recovering numbers elsewhere in its range, the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List reclassified the still “largely depleted” species as near threatened in 2023.

The Wildlife Conservation Society has warned that opening a legal trade in saiga horn when the species remains vulnerable, and without adequate provisions to prevent illegal trade, puts saiga across its range at risk, including a unique Mongolian species.

The treaty body’s deference to trade was apparent in other decisions at the conference too. Parties rejected a proposal to list all Anguillid eel species in Appendix II, for instance, even though the global trade in these eels is rampant, mired in illegality, and contributing to pushing several exploited species towards extinction.

A bid by Tajikistan to list the striped hyena in Appendix I also failed to gain the necessary support, although the species was ultimately added to Appendix II. As the Tajikistan Nature Foundation has highlighted, exploitation is among the significant threats to this species, with individuals traded to zoos, sold as pets, and its body parts utilised in traditional medicine. The animals are also targeted in trophy hunting in some countries.

Too little, too late

Many of the celebrated listing decisions also pointed to a sobering truth about CITES: it too often acts too little, too late.

Aside from the addition of species to Appendix II, most of which were previously unlisted in any Appendix, the largest bloc of proposals involved transferring species from Appendix II to Appendix I. These covered over 20 species and almost all were successful, including proposals for all manta and devil rays, the golden-bellied mangabey, two vulture species, four iguana species, Home’s hinged-back tortoise, the whale shark, and two succulents.

Parties also approved proposals to prohibit commercial exports of wild-caught wedgefishes and giant guitarfishes – 20 species already listed in Appendix II – and of wild-sourced Brazilwood, another Appendix II listed species.

As highlighted earlier, species are added to Appendix II precisely to ‘closely control’ trade so it doesn’t contribute to their extinction risk or lead them towards needing Appendix I protections. The number of species shifted from Appendix II to Appendix I at CoP20, along with new prohibitions on commercial trade for species that remain in Appendix II, illustrates that the system is not functioning as intended.

It is important to note that trade is often not the only threat faced by CITES-listed species, meaning that stronger protections from trade may not alone solve species’ predicament. The Democratic Republic of Congo’s golden-bellied mangabey is one example. Habitat destruction and hunting for its meat are dominant threats to this endangered primate, as Mongabay has reported. But the species is also threatened by the global exotic pet trade and its decades-long Appendix II listing has proved an insufficient safeguard against unsustainable and illegal trade, prompting the mangabey’s transfer to Appendix I.

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Late listings even in clear cut cases

In other cases, exploitation is the leading threat to species – making the case for swift and strict trade regulations more clear cut. The oceanic whitetip shark is an example, which was also transferred from Appendix II to Appendix I at CoP20.

As far back as 2006, the IUCN warned that conservation and management actions were “urgently required” to protect this shark from overfishing. Yet, CITES did not list the species until 2013, and then only in Appendix II, allowing international commercial trade to continue.

CITES records show that countries reported 32 metric tons of commercial exports involving the shark between its listing and 2021, almost exclusively fins, according to a 2023 analysis submitted by the Maldives to the treaty body. Moreover, the analysis presented evidence showing that trade occurred “at significantly higher volumes, and from a wider range of Parties, than reported to CITES.”

Only now have parties agreed to prohibit commercial trade in the oceanic whitetip shark by moving it to Appendix I – seven years after the IUCN classified the species as critically endangered following an estimated 98% global population decline over six decades.

These details show that while parties deserve credit for strengthening protections for certain species, they must also fix the systemic shortcomings that leave many species being protected too little and too late.

Treaty at breaking point

Another systemic weakness came to the fore at the conference – one that goes beyond species listings and relates to the health of the treaty itself.

The global legal trade in wildlife is estimated to be worth around $220bn annually. Yet, CITES is facing a resource crisis. Early on in the event, chair of one of CITES’ permanent committees, Mathias Lörtscher, explained that the treaty body’s workload roughly tripled between 2010 and 2022, while resources remained stagnant.

The expanded workload has “caused the parties and the committees – and inadvertently the Secretariat – to reach a breaking point where more work cannot be tackled with the current system,” he warned.

Although parties make decisions at conferences, the work they generate happens between these meetings and often falls to entities like the Secretariat, which oversees the working of the Convention, and the body’s permanent committees, such as the Plants and Animals committees.

The resource crisis influenced outcomes and parties’ positions throughout the conference. It was, for instance, a factor in parties deciding to scrap parts of proposed work on marine ornamental fishes, most of whom are not yet CITES-listed but would undoubtedly benefit from inclusion.

Objectors to the establishment of a Great Ape Task Force also cited resource constraints, as did parties pushing to fold work on the illegal trade in cheetahs into a broader task force for all big cats. To the relief of proponents, parties ultimately concluded that focused work on great apes and cheetahs should proceed – an important outcome considering the grave threats both face from the trafficking of young individuals for the exotic pet trade.

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Turbulent times ahead

Solutions to CITES’ resource crisis were also discussed during the event. Absent from the ideas were the sort of suggestions voiced by nonprofits and researchers outside of these conference halls: that those who profit most from this lucrative trade should be compelled to fund the cost of meaningful regulation.

Instead, the Secretariat floated the idea of extending the period between conferences from three to four years, which would reduce parties’ decision-making to just twice a decade. This appeared unpopular among parties, for reasons that WCS’ Susan Lieberman articulated well. “In today’s rapidly shifting context, with biodiversity crisis accelerating, that would carry irreversible risk for species,” she warned.

An idea that did secure support was the creation of a prioritisation matrix. This tool would help the committees and the Secretariat to systematically organise intersessional work arising from conference decisions according to how strongly each advances the Convention’s aims.

Work on the matrix is in development, but the potential drawbacks for species are already apparent. The example matrix circulated at the conference explicitly labelled non-CITES species as a “lower-priority item,” signalling that work on them would likely take a back seat to decisions involving listed species that score more favourably.

CITES’ work on non-listed species can expose important blind spots in the Appendices – pointing to species in need of listings that parties have simply overlooked, such as the aforementioned marine ornamental fishes and imperilled songbirds.

Parties also agreed to a gradual CITES budget increase over the next three years, from $6.5m to $7.5m. But given the body’s ever-growing workload, including new tasks generated at this conference, one delegate warned the increase “is insufficient to accomplish all the mandated work.”

At the start of CoP20, CITES’ secretary-general Ivonne Higuero said the event would “set the course for the Convention for the next 50 years.” Many of its outcomes have rightly been celebrated, but the systemic problems laid bare at the conference suggest the road ahead will be difficult — both for the treaty body and for the species that depend on it to save them from extinction.

Israel’s genocide in Gaza has decimated the trees, the birds, and once green landscapes, according to farmers. Still, they are successfully cultivating several crops in parcels of land there, even crops reliant on pollination.

Amid ecological devastation, the land – like its people – is proving to be resilient.

However, farmers’ ability to revive more land is being impeded by Israel, including through its prohibition on seeds entering the Gaza Strip and its military occupation of over half of the Strip’s land mass, warns the Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN), a Jordanian nonprofit supporting farmers there.

APN says it is imperative that global solidarity efforts include pushing for the entry of seeds and other measures that enable “the revival of local agricultural capacities” because “this is how Palestinians can remain steadfast on their land.”

Farmland destruction

Prior to October 2023, around 170 square kilometres of Gaza was dedicated to agriculture, according to Forensic Architecture. Arable farmers in this part of Palestine were producing a wide array of fruits and vegetables, despite production being suppressed by Israel’s decades-long blockade of the Strip.

The broader agricultural sector, comprising fishing and farmed animal production, alongside fruit and vegetable cultivation, contributed 11% to Gaza’s economy. It was a source of full or partial livelihoods for over half a million people.

The situation has changed dramatically since, as the Palestinian ambassador to Brazil, Ibrahim al-Zeben, highlighted at the COP30 climate summit in Belém. He said:

“It is no secret that Gaza is suffering because of the genocide that Israel continues to wage – a war that has created nearly a quarter of a million victims and produced more than 61 million tons of rubble, some of which is contaminated with hazardous materials.”

The ambassador further stressed that the genocide has “destroyed agricultural lands and vegetation cover, leaving the population in a state of severe food insecurity and famine, with hunger being used as a weapon.”

The level of farmland destruction is immense. In October, Kent State University’s He Yin, a geographer, told Yale Environment 360 that analysis shows 95% of Gaza’s cropland has been damaged in the last two years. This includes 98% of farmers’ tree crops and 89% of annual crops.

As al-Zeben noted, the destruction of farmland has contributed to famine unfolding in the Strip – a situation confirmed by an Integrated Food Security Phase Classification (IPC) report in August. Other aspects of Israel’s genocidal campaign that drove the famine include its obstruction of aid entering Gaza, relentless bombardment, and the repeated forced displacement of people, Al Jazeera reported at the time.

The level of humanitarian aid entering Gaza has increased since a ceasefire deal came into effect on 10 October and an important crossing that can supply aid to people in the devastated area of northern Gaza reopened on 12 November. However, as varied media reports have highlighted, Israel has continued to restrict aid flows to below what the UN and aid organisations say are needed, including limiting vital supplies of shelter materials for displaced people.

According to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs, over a million people in Gaza continue to live in makeshift sites and are “facing increasingly difficult conditions as winter approaches.”

Israel has also continued to attack Gaza militarily during the ceasefire, albeit mostly at a reduced intensity. According to the Gaza Ministry of Health, Israeli attacks since the ceasefire have killed at least 280 people, and wounded over 670, as Drop Site News reported.

Following a wave of Israeli air strikes on 19 November that killed dozens more people, including children, Al Jazeera’s Hani Mahmoud said, “The war is still taking place, and Palestinians are still dying due to the ongoing violence.”

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Land is supporting cultivation, despite devastation

Since March 2024, APN has been working with Palestinian farmers to restore farmland where possible. Its Revive Gaza’s Farmland project has supported farmers in cultivating 1,341 dunums – around 1.3 square kilometres – of farmland, with more dunums underway. Over seven million kilograms of vegetables have been produced on the revived farmland.

The project has also rehabilitated greenhouses, water wells, and provided fishing nets and poultry units to farmers. A further project has recently launched to plant 30,000 olive and fruit trees across Gaza.

Although the scale of cultivation is small compared to previous farming levels, the project has sought to maximise its impact. Through its ““From the Besieged Farmer to the Besieged Family” initiative, the project has distributed over 757 baskets of fresh vegetables to families in need.

Taken altogether, the project has so far worked with 790 farmers and supported over 12,000 individuals.

Farmers are cultivating a diversity of crops on their revived farmland, including courgettes (zucchini), pumpkin, cowpeas and corn. Some of the vegetables being grown self-pollinate, while others rely on – or at least benefit from – wind or insect pollination.

The devastation of open land in Gaza extends beyond farmland. By May, 95% of shrubland and 89% of grassland and fallow areas were damaged, according to a September report by the UN Environment Programme. It emphasised that open land “plays a crucial role in supporting Gaza’s biodiversity and ecological health, which in turn is important for food productivity of cultivated areas,” including through pollination.

Assessments will be needed to understand the full impacts on biodiversity, but farmers are seeing effects on the ground. “What we hear anecdotally from farmers is, ‘they’ve killed the trees, they’ve killed the birds – they’ve stripped the green, the life from our landscape’,” says Gabriella Neubert, APN Advocacy and Research Assistant.

The destruction has undoubtedly had “a huge cascading effect on the ecosystem,” Neubert continues, but “the land is allowing crops to be produced” nonetheless, even ones that require pollination.

“The farms are growing great harvests without chemical inputs, they’re just growing with what they have – so someone’s pollinating them,” adds Neubert.

Decades of degradation

The land’s resilience becomes even more impressive when you consider that Israel’s military activities have degraded ecosystems in Gaza – and elsewhere in Palestine – over decades, as outlined by Palestinian scientist Mazin Qumsiyeh in a 2024 article published in the International Journal of Environmental Studies.

Prior to the genocide, Israel had launched four major bombing campaigns in Gaza since 2006 – in 2008/9, 2014, 2020, and 2021 – as well as carrying out smaller bombing raids and incursions in between.

These military activities cause multiple environmental harms, including air, water, noise, and solid waste pollution, Qumsiyeh noted in his article. Additionally, Israel has repeatedly bulldozed open land, such as farmland, during its assaults. This leads to soil erosion and impacts on biodiversity, the environmentalist explained.

In comments to the Guardian last year, the Israeli military suggested that any harm to agricultural land is unintentional, adding that it “seeks to prevent environmental impact absent operational necessity.” However, investigations into Israel’s destruction of Gaza’s food production capabilities, including the effects of its aerial spraying of herbicides near Gaza’s border, have concluded that the damage is systematic and deliberate.

Neubert says Israel’s destruction of farmland is ‘“part of a long-standing strategy to dismantle Palestinian food systems and accelerate settler colonisation.”

Qumsiyeh warned that the status of the Palestinian environment – in Gaza and elsewhere in the occupied territories – is “catastrophic,” an outcome that is “directly related to decades of occupation and colonisation.”

“Militarized colonisation and nature conservation are not compatible,” he stressed.

In his comments at COP30, al-Zeben also pointed out that Palestine’s catastrophic environmental situation is “a significant factor contributing to global climate change, highlighting the urgent need for immediate international action to achieve climate justice and protect both humanity and the environment.”

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Seeds not permitted

Where farmland is successfully being revived, it owes as much to Palestinian farmers’ skill and resolve as to nature’s resilience.

Given Israel’s repeated bulldozing of farmland in Gaza and the West Bank, Palestinians have become adept at reinvigorating soils after this type of ecological damage, says Neubert, which she describes as a “phenomenal expression of sumud,” meaning steadfastness.

Their skill and determination is evident in the Revive Gaza’s Farmland project, with farmers cultivating crops on both undamaged and bulldozed land.

But there are several factors that limit farmers’ capacity to restore accessible land. “The farm is like a world in itself,” says Neubert, requiring various inputs – pipes for irrigation, solar panels to power water pumping, nylon for greenhouses – to make each of them whole. Where inputs remain available in Gaza, they are extremely expensive. Prior to the genocide, APN priced the cost of cultivating a dunum at $5,000. Now it costs around $25,000, Neubert says.

Many essential farm inputs are also impossible to get due to Israeli restrictions.

Israel began blockading Gaza in the early 1990s, at a time when it physically occupied the Strip. Israel withdrew its forces and settlers in 2005 but severely tightened the blockade in 2007 following Hamas’ election victory the previous year.

Through the blockade, Israel still exercises significant control over Gaza despite the 2005 withdrawal, as noted in a 2024 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). Accordingly, the ICJ concluded that Israel remains bound by the law of occupation in relation to Gaza, and ruled its occupation there and elsewhere in Palestine – the West Bank and East Jerusalem – to be unlawful.

As part of its control over the movement of goods into Gaza, Israel maintains extensive lists of restricted “dual-use” items that it argues could be repurposed for military uses, making it difficult or impossible to get them into the Strip. In a 2022 factsheet, Oxfam criticised Israel’s lists as “arbitrary” and “not transparent,” going beyond internationally accepted standards for what passes as dual-use items.

Seeds – the fundamental nexus of arable farming – are an example. Middle East Eye reports that Israel has branded seeds as dual-use items since 2007. Despite this, APN managed to get them into Gaza prior to the genocide. However, none have been allowed in since, so seeds are having to be sourced internally in the Revive Gaza’s Farmland project, says Neubert.

Gaza’s breadbasket

Neubert says APN has impressed on relevant actors, such as multilateral organisations and UN member states, the importance of securing the entry of seeds. She says it is important that increased flows of humanitarian aid happen in parallel with restoring agricultural production.

“We understand there is a priority for immediate humanitarian aid, but aid is not resilient to a blockade,” Neubert stresses.

A further major obstacle to farmland restoration is Israel’s military presence in the Strip.

During the genocide, the Israeli military has seized control of East Gaza – amounting to 58% of the Strip’s land – with all of the territory’s Palestinian citizens pushed into West Gaza. Under the ceasefire deal, Israel is supposed to gradually withdraw.

In late October, Gazan writer and political analyst Muhammad Shehada wrote in +972 magazine that Israeli forces in East Gaza appear to be “digging in, reinforcing the division with earthworks, fortifications, and barriers that suggest a move toward permanence.” Although East Gaza is now the site of explosions and demolitions under Israeli control, it was “once the enclave’s breadbasket,” Shehada highlighted.

Neubert says the area contains cultivatable land that could produce millions upon millions of kilograms of fresh vegetables, if freed from Israeli control. She emphasises that it is critical that farming here happens “by and for Palestinians, with the orientation to food sovereignty, and for Palestinians to live, tend their land, and feed their communities in freedom.”

Put simply, a lack of viable land is not the barrier to further farmland restoration and tentative steps towards reviving a food supply that is resilient to blockade. The scale of the environmental damage is undeniably immense, but land exists that can still be cultivated.

“It is through political decision-making, colonial occupation, and military violence, that this land cannot be cultivated now,” says Neubert.

Here is a story I wrote recently for The Revelator about proposed regulatory reforms to the exotic pet trade, a business that is associated with harms to wildlife, ecosystems, and public health.

By the time a sugar glider named Mango entered an animal sanctuary in the Netherlands in 2023, life as a pet had taken a terrible toll. Mango lost both his brothers and his right eye due to health issues, despite being kept by a veterinarian for seven years.

These days, Europeans keep tens of millions of exotic pets — as do people in other countries around the world. Although beloved by their owners, experts say most of these animals, like Mango, do not adapt well to life in captivity and often face health problems and premature death as a result of this legal trade.

Globally, the business involves an estimated 13,000 species, many unsuited to being companion animals, says Michèle Hamers, EU policy officer at the nonprofit AAP Animal Advocacy and Protection. The organization runs the sanctuary where 9-year-old Mango lived — alongside fellow sugar gliders Radagast, Didache, Duizeltje, and Sushi — until his sudden death on July 21, likely from a hematoma.

“Something needs to change,” says Hamers.

For her organization, that change would involve the introduction of an EU-wide “positive list” for exotic pets — a limited inventory of approved pet species suited to captivity.

They’re not the only ones asking for this. In recent years, momentum has grown toward making this a reality.

The Pet Trade in Europe

Sugar gliders are marsupials native to Australia, Indonesia, and Papua New Guinea named for their ability to “glide” through the air between trees on fleshy membranes connecting their front and back legs. Their arboreal, nocturnal lifestyles are among the traits that make them unsuitable for living in a cage in someone’s house, Animal Advocacy and Protection says.

By their very nature of being wild, many other species don’t do well in captivity. As a result, the nonprofit’s rescue centers in the Netherlands and Spain take in as many exotic pets as they can. It’s never enough: they typically have a waiting list in the hundreds.

Hamers says relinquished or seized animals typically arrive with behavioral and physical problems, including bone malformations, malnutrition, and stress-related issues like self-mutilation.

To tackle the root cause of the situation, the organization and other concerned NGOs are pushing for EU-wide legislative change, preferably a “preventative approach” to regulating the trade. Hamers says this would establish a selective list of animals who can be kept, with all others banned by default.

This type of system is known as positive, reverse, or whitelisting.

Only animals who “can thrive in captivity and are safe to be kept” should make the cut, explains Hamers.

Presently, the EU has no regulation designed to address the pet trade, although the market sometimes falls under laws concerning animal health, “invasive alien” species, and trade in threatened wildlife. Mostly, though, member states decide their own rules on exotic pets, which can vary greatly from country to country.

Some EU nations don’t regulate the exotic pet trade at all, while others use a negative list system, meaning they create lists of banned species. The remaining member states — 12 out of 27 — have some form of positive list in place or the legal basis to develop them, says Hamers.

In recent years European lawmakers have signaled support for an EU-wide positive list through varied resolutions and action plans. As a result the European Commission, which is the bloc’s executive body, commissioned a study on its feasibility in late 2023. The results are due later this year.

On June 19, as part of a proposed regulation on the trade in pet cats and dogs, the European Parliament also voted in favor of establishing an EU-wide positive list for exotic pets, providing that the feasibility study shows the measure to be valuable and legally possible.

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One Trade, Many Problems

In the proposed regulation, EU lawmakers warn that “the absence of a common Union framework” leads to “inconsistencies, gaps in enforcement, confusion for consumers and, often, to serious animal welfare consequences for species that are unsuitable to be kept as pets, as well as risks to biodiversity, human health and safety and nature conservation.”

This statement illustrates why support for a positive list is gaining steam: the exotic pet trade is associated with several problems, not solely animal welfare.

For Animal Advocacy and Protection, the welfare of kept animals is a priority. Whether captivity can meet animals’ physical and psychological needs should be the main criteria for considering who gets on the list, says Hamers.

But, she adds, the criteria should include other factors, such as risks to biodiversity and public health and safety.

A 2021 report by nonprofits Born Free and the RSPCA highlighted the potential risks exotic pets pose to public health. They include injuries and transmission of zoonotic pathogens: diseases like Covid-19 that can be passed between humans and other animals.

More than 85% of live animals traded globally are not native to the countries importing them, according to a 2023 analysis, which can pose a risk to environmental health. Hundreds of imported species have ended up being released into the wild, sometimes with dire consequences for native wildlife. For instance, scientists have implicated the trade in live amphibians for pets and meat in the global spread of the disease chytridiomycosis, which is linked to widespread amphibian population declines and 90 documented extinctions.

On the flip side, trade can pose a threat to exploited species themselves. Scientists have calculated that 25% of the over 800 amphibian species traded as pets are threatened. They said further regulation and other measures are “urgently needed to slow the decline of populations and loss of species as a consequence of unsustainable, and largely unmonitored trade in wildlife.”

Likewise, the industry is notorious for scooping up newly described species, often ones with limited ranges, to support collectors’ voracious desire for novelty. Positive lists could help to nip this unscrupulous inclination in the bud, because commerce in such species would be banned by default.

Exotic pets are both sourced from the wild and bred in captivity. Breeding operations can relieve pressure on wild populations. But they can also be associated with illicit activity, such as the laundering of wild-caught animals into the captive-bred trade.

In 2019, Belgium’s federal body for health, food chain safety, and environment, pointed to further links between captive breeding and illegality in a factsheet about the live amphibian trade. It stated, “illegal specimens are assumed to be the founding stock for many captive specimens, including within the European Union.”

Illegal trade is a significant issue in the exotic pet business. A report by Traffic highlighted that 28% of all animals seized by EU countries in 2023 were likely destined to be pets, amounting to some 3,500 individuals.

The lack of uniform regulation across the EU is a “massive problem” in this regard, says Hamers. Market fragmentation in a free trade bloc creates a ripe environment for illegal trade, she explains, because people can purchase animals banned in their own country from other EU states with relative ease.

The United States has the same issue. In a 2023 paper, researchers noted that state and local regulations govern much of the trade, despite federal rules having some bearing on it, such as the Lacey Act’s prohibitions on the importation of certain “injurious” species.

Differing and incomplete rules across states, alongside lackluster penalties for wrongdoing, have “facilitated continued possession of exotic pets in states where these animals are banned,” the researchers warned. They concluded the U.S. would benefit from a nationwide positive list system, too.

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Making Positive Lists Meaningful

Even with captive breeding, many exotic pets being traded across the EU and the U.S. originated from countries elsewhere, says Peter Lanius, director of the Australian nonprofit Nature Needs More.

Lanius’ organization released a report in June outlining how a global positive list for exotic pets could be introduced by the global wildlife trade treaty body, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora.

Alongside yardsticks like considering species’ welfare needs and mortality rates in captivity, it argues that a determining factor should include whether trade is easy to monitor.

This ties to the report’s broader theme: the importance of establishing a robust regulatory architecture around positive lists, which the authors say is generally lacking even for the few that already exist. Pet industry advocates have described existing lists in European countries and elsewhere as “unenforceable,” the report notes.

“If you stop at the point where you just list what can be traded, but there’s no infrastructure… it’s symbolic, not practical,” insists Lynn Johnson, Nature Needs More’s founder and CEO.

Positive lists must be accompanied by “dedicated monitoring and enforcement capacity,” according to the report. Nature Needs More also calls for businesses to be registered, licensed, and required to provide end-to-end traceability for the animals they trade.

Owners should be required to register exotic pets too, the report says, with the veterinary profession engaged in maintaining care standards.

Other outlined provisions include creating a listing authority to determine and perpetually review the positive list, as well as interventions to reduce consumer demand for banned species. The organization also calls for legislation to compel social media companies to police commerce on their sites by making them liable for traded animals.

The organization says financing these provisions should come from a business levy on traders.

None of these ideas are revolutionary, the nonprofit stresses. Nations have imposed similar regulatory measures on the pharmaceutical and chemical industries. But the model would be a massive step for the wildlife trade, which typically lacks adequate monitoring and enforcement.

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A Trivial Trade in Living Beings

This January the European Pet Organization — which bills itself as “the voice of the pet sector at European level” — released a position statement on positive lists. In contrast to ornamental fish trade veteran Tim Haywood, who told The Revelator last year that the number of species in the pet fish trade must shrink, the pet organization rejected the idea of “restrictive measures” such as positive lists.

The group suggested poor welfare and illegality in the trade are limited and could be dealt with through improved enforcement of existing legislation and education of consumers. It also argued that restricting petkeeping through positive lists wouldn’t stop determined owners from buying forbidden exotic animals.

However, a Finnish study found that many hobbyists are put off from buying exotic pets when the animals are subject to trade restrictions.

Hamers has further reason to doubt that a positive list system will lead to significant rises in illegal petkeeping. The trade is “hyper-commercialized,” she explains, and “many purchases are done on the whim,” often driven by popular culture trends like movies or social media.

“Once species aren’t for sale anymore through common channels, the possibility to buy an animal on an impulse also disappears,” says Hamers.

For Nature Needs More, the often-trivial nature of modern-day pet purchasing makes positive listing so necessary. Although the keeping of exotic pets has occurred for centuries, substantially more people can casually engage it now due to having the money, time, and access to animals in “our globalized, industrial society,” its report says.

“When a trade in living beings is allowed to function by the rules of the throw-away consumer society, then we have a serious problem,” the organization warns.

Here is a story I wrote this month for The Revelator about whether the frequently made claim that commercial trade in wildlife signficantly contributes to people's livelihoods holds up. Images changed from original story.

Wild beasts are often the stuff of legends, but narratives surrounding wildlife trade contain some tall tales, too.

One of the most frequently uttered statements in support of the wildlife trade is that many people depend on it for their livelihoods. But just because this claim is common, “does not necessarily make it true,” wildlife researchers Vincent Nijman and Chris Shepherd wrote in the journal Discover Animals earlier this year.

Taking these broad assertions — often made by researchers, government agencies, or others — at face value without further study has the potential to “pervert conservation efforts,” the paper warns.

Reptiles offer an example. Some conservationists have defended the trade in reptile skins, arguing that it supports livelihoods.

Nijman and Shepherd wanted to understand if this held true for an area in which they have significant expertise: the export of wild turtle meat from Indonesia. Their study reveals how many turtle collectors can make a basic living from the trade.

The answer? Surprisingly few.

One in a Million

Indonesia permits the harvest of four freshwater turtle species for consumption: Asiatic softshell, Southeast Asian box, Asian leaf, and Malayan softshell turtles. Almost all the meat from these species is exported. On average Indonesia permits around 50,000 turtles to be legally collected from the wild annually.

The researchers considered Indonesia’s quotas for catching and exporting turtles, the range of prices collectors get for turtles, and the recommended minimum wage in different areas.

They found the trade could generate a minimum wage for somewhere between 241 and 360 full-time collectors, or around one person in every million inhabitants.

If expanded to include people who supplement their income with occasional turtle collecting, the researchers estimate that the trade could support between 2,400 and 3,000 people.

“Very often, when we publish things on unsustainable reptile trade — the turtle trade in particular — we get hammered by people who believe it is an important component of livelihoods,” says Shepherd, who took a role as senior conservation advocate with the Center for Biological Diversity (publisher of The Revelator) after completing the paper.

Yet, the findings reveal that the turtle meat trade is hardly the economic engine that proponents claim.

Of course, other people also make money from the turtle meat business, such as exporters and sellers in importing countries. But wildlife trade chains like this have a pyramid structure, Nijman says, with many people at the base, such as the people who hunt or collect the animals from the wild, and fewer people involved further up. Livelihood claims usually refer to the often-impoverished people at the base of the pyramid.

Nijman emphasizes that the analysis focuses solely on Indonesia’s international trade in turtle meat because the regulations on harvest and exports mean that any legal domestic use and trade of these animals locally should be very limited.

Broadly speaking though, he says local use and trade of wildlife “clearly contributes to livelihoods” and is a fundamental aspect of many people’s lives in Indonesia.

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Time to Re-Evaluate?

All four turtle species traded internationally from Indonesia for meat are “experiencing population declines and two are considered globally threatened,” the researchers explained in their paper.

“If very few people actually make a living out of this [trade] … then perhaps you have to reevaluate and say, well, our justification of ‘it’s a livelihood issue’ may not be all that correct,” says Nijman.

This has wider ramifications. Asian turtles have faced an ongoing crisis for decades. Researchers began raising the alarm about populations of Asian tortoises and freshwater turtles in the 1990s and identified collection of the animals for trade — for their meat and as pets — as chief among the causes. At that point, researchers in the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s turtle-focused specialist groups determined that almost three-quarters of known species in the region were threatened.

The situation is even worse now. A 2018 assessment found that 83% of Asia’s turtle species were threatened.

And this crisis does not exist in a vacuum. Experts say diminishing populations of Asian species has led to increased trade on other turtle species around the world, including the United States.

The U.S. exports millions of turtles annually. The animals are often raised on farms but several states also permit commercial exploitation of wild populations.

“The legal and illegal trade of turtles has certainly taken a significant toll on certain populations across the United States,” says the University of Richmond’s Jennifer Sevin, who is co-founder of the Collaborative to Combat the Illegal Trade in Turtles.

However, she says state and federal agencies have taken steps to better safeguard wild populations over the past five years.

Around 40% of turtle species in the U.S. are threatened, according to the Association of Fish & Wildlife Agencies. Globally, researchers say over half of turtle and tortoise species are at risk of extinction, due to pressures like habitat destruction and exploitation.

Turtles Are Not Cut Out for Trade

“Turtles have evolved with traits like delayed sexual maturity, low reproductive rates, and high hatchling mortality which make them especially vulnerable to pressures like exploitation,” Sevin explains.

“Once a population begins to decline, it can be incredibly difficult for it to recover,” she warns.

This is especially true when it comes to commercial-scale exploitation, says Nijman. Although local use can impact targeted species’ populations, “the Asian turtle crisis really came about because of the large-scale commercial trade,” he says.

A 2021 study drew similar conclusions about the wildlife trade more broadly. It found that international and national trade significantly contributed to population declines of targeted animals, whereas local exploitation only had a “limited impact.”

The dynamics of the turtle meat trade makes matters worse.

For one thing, it targets bigger, mature turtles because they provide more meat. These are breeding age individuals who are important for producing future populations. On top of that, the turtle meat business is a “high volume, low value” trade, Nijman says. The income people get from selling turtles in the earlier stages of the chain is so low that the trade is “only commercially viable if it’s done at scale.”

In theory, Indonesia’s quotas and other restrictions should limit the volume of turtles traded. But as Nijman and Shepherd point out in the new study and several prior publications, poor management and other factors means overexploitation is rife.

For instance, research published in 2022 estimated that two traders in an Indonesian province received between 19,000 and 45,000 Southeast Asian box turtles a year from collectors when their combined quota was only 400 turtles.

Shockingly, Nijman says evidence like that suggests that up to 90% of the trade in turtle meat and carapaces out of Indonesia could be illegal.

In locations where a legal turtle trade exists, criminals can exploit the system to launder illegally collected animals by exporting or selling them alongside legal individuals.

Exceptions to the Rule

Another common claim about the merits of trading wildlife suggests it can benefit conservation. But Nijman says he can’t recall any instances where the Asian turtle trade has been shown to benefit targeted species.

Where “proper management” of wild species’ populations and their exploitation exists, trade can benefit conservation, Nijman says. But he stresses that these cases are the exception, not the rule.

Such cases include well-worn examples like the crocodile and alligator trade in Australia and the U.S., mainly for their skins. These trades are not without controversy though, particularly concerning animal welfare.

Another celebrated case comes from Peru — this one involving freshwater turtles. In certain managed basins in the country, Indigenous and local communities collect yellow-spotted river turtle eggs as part of a ranching program. After incubating and hatching the turtles, they release some back to the wild and sell others internationally as pets.

The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, the body that regulates global trade in threatened species, commissioned a case study on this program. It revealed that around two-thirds of supply-side earnings from the trade go to exporting companies, with communities taking the rest. When broken down, this income equated to around $14 per week for each involved family in 2017.

Monitoring efforts within the program have led to a significant rise in turtle numbers in some areas, such as the Pacaya Samiria Reserve, due to reduced poaching and illegal trade, according to the case study.

However, poaching of these turtles and their eggs in Peru overall remains a major problem, as Mongabay has reported. Official seizure data shows that the yellow-spotted river turtle was the third most trafficked species in the country between 2015 and 2020.

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A Lack of Evidence

CITES’ core mandate is ensuring that trade does not threaten species’ survival. But “CITES and Livelihoods” is an active area of work for the body and in recent years it has been gathering evidence on the benefits of trade to livelihoods. It also commissioned an independent review of 48 relevant case studies to produce guidance and strategies for countries on “maximizing the benefits” of trade in CITES-listed species for Indigenous peoples and local communities. The guidance includes suggestions like supporting these communities to seize trade opportunities and mounting campaigns that “sensitize” potential consumers to the wildlife trade to create an “enabling environment.”

There is little consensus among countries about whether embracing the guidance and strategies is appropriate, particularly amid concerns that they may promote expansion of the wildlife trade and could curtail states’ ability to adopt strict trade limitations to protect species.

Considering that CITES regulates the international trade in over 40,000 threatened species, it’s notable that only 48 studies were identified as “relevant” to the independent review. It suggests that substantive evidence of the wildlife trade’s contribution to livelihoods is thin on the ground, as Nijman and Shepherd argue in their study.

The researchers have urged people to stop promoting the wildlife trade as important to livelihoods “unless proven to be factual.”

Nijman stresses that this is not because they are opposed to trade or do not consider livelihoods important. Rather, he makes the point that discussions must be data-led and “realistic” so that involved actors can honestly weigh up whether the level of livelihood support provided by international trade justifies the continued decline in targeted wild species like turtles.

“This conversation is not being had presently, that is the major issue,” says Nijman.

Mauritius has supplied long-tailed macaques to the research industry since the 1980s. In recent years, the African island nation has taken a leading role in the lab monkey business as allegations of criminality in supply chains from Southeast Asian countries have led to increased demand elsewhere.

Now, the nonprofit Action for Primates has uncovered information that raises questions about the legitimacy of Mauritius’ trade in macaques.

In response to inquiries from Nedim Buyukmihci, Emeritus Professor of Veterinary Medicine at University of California-Davis and co-founder of Action for Primates, Mauritian officials indicated that sustainability assessments required under the regulatory regime for the macaque trade have not been done.

Failing to conduct these assessments would be a violation of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which regulates the trade in macaques. Considering this, Action for Primates has called on the treaty body to launch an investigation into the matter.

No NDF for Mauritius’ macaques?

The long-tailed macaque is an endangered species, according to a 2022 assessment by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List. It warned of a steep and rapid drop in the species’ global population, with a suspected decline of 40% in the last four decades.

Trade is among the drivers of the primate’s worsening predicament, the Red List assessors indicated. The long-tailed macaque is a heavily exploited species, primarily because they are used in research, including by companies testing the toxicity of drugs and other substances.

As I reported in The Ecologist, exporting countries reported over a million cross-border trades involving the primate between 2016 and 2021. These transactions included almost 259,000 live monkeys, as well as specimens of their body parts, such as blood and tissue.

The global macaque trade involves animals who are captured in the wild and individuals bred on farms. Monkeys originating from captive sources are most found in the trade. But reports and investigations indicate that laundering of wild-caught animals through captive facilities is a pressing issue in some Southeast Asian source countries.

Mauritius exports wild-caught and captive born or bred macaques. Captive born refers to monkeys who are born to wild parents in breeding farms, whereas captive bred means the offspring of individuals who were born in captivity.

Several companies have monkey farms on Mauritius and thousands of wild macaques are caught annually to use for breeding in these operations, the University of Mauritius’ Vincent Florens stated in 2022.

Mauritius has not carried out a comprehensive long-tailed macaque survey since the 1980s. Considering this and the species’ dire global conservation status, Action for Primates’ Buyukmihci has been seeking information about how the country determines that its lab monkey trade does not threaten the species’ wild population.

Mauritius is obliged to reckon with this question as a party to CITES. The treaty body regulates cross-border trade in around 40,000 threatened wild species of plants and animals, including the long-tailed macaque. Under its rules, countries should only approve exports of a species when trade will not negatively impact its survival in the wild. Moreover, where exports are approved, they must be “only in the volumes evidenced to be non-detrimental,” researchers highlighted in a 2022 paper.

To make this determination, countries are meant to carry out a sustainability assessment, known as a Non-Detriment Finding (NDF). CITES’ published guidance on NDFs specifies that these assessments are required for wild-sourced animals and plants, including individuals used as “parental stock” in breeding operations.

Yet, when Buyukmihci approached Mauritius’ CITES authorities – National Parks & Conservation Service (NPCS) – enquiring about NDFs for macaque exports, he was told they are not necessary.

“The Non Detriment Finding (NDF) for the wild monkeys in Mauritius is not warranted given that the population is an exotic invasive species and that extraction has no incidence in the wild,” wrote NPCS director Kevin Ruhomaun in an email on 23 May.

Call for investigation

Though macaques have lived in Mauritius for hundreds of years, they are considered an introduced species on the island. Colonialists displaced the primates from their native homes in Southeast Asia to Mauritius in the 1600s.

This impacts how they are viewed, according to Action for Primates’ co-founder Sarah Kite. Oftentimes, it’s assumed that “because long-tailed macaques are an introduced species in Mauritius, and they're labelled a pest, they don't deserve any conservation status,” she says.

But as far as NDFs are concerned, the primate’s introduced status is largely irrelevant, according to Sofie Flensborg, chief of the Legal Unit in the CITES Secretariat, which is the treaty’s administrative arm. In emailed comments to Buyukmihci, Flensborg said, “an NDF must be made for any export of a CITES-listed species, introduced or native.”

CITES is flexible about what NDFs consist of in practice, But the body has developed guidance that encourages countries to take a range of data into account when making NDFs, Flensborg explained in the email. This includes species’ population status, distribution and trends, and their conservation status.

Flensborg stressed that introduced species “pose specific challenges.” Accordingly, their NDFs consider factors like the role they play in local ecosystems, particularly if they are problematic. But the assessments for these species “must still determine that the export will not be detrimental to the survival of the species,” she said.

In his email to Buyukmihci, Ruhomaun stated that long-tailed macaques are “considered as a nuisance to the public,” resulting in hundreds of “monkey nuisance cases” lodged in recent years. The NPCS director also said studies show “wild monkey has been and is detrimental to the native fauna and flora in Mauritius,” including in the Black River Gorges National Park, where macaque numbers have considerably increased “during the past decades.”

Additionally, Ruhoman insisted that the country strictly regulates its macaque trade and has “set a clean record for the most humane export of monkeys.”

None of this gives Buyukmihci confidence that Mauritius is complying with its treaty obligations with regard to producing NDFs for the primate. So, he called on the CITES Secretariat to investigate the situation in an email on 2 June.

The Secretariat, whose duties include raising compliance issues with countries, is yet to respond to the request. I also contacted CITES but received no reply.

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Domestic opposition

Buyukmihci has urged the Secretariat to examine Mauritus’ compliance with CITES rules on animal welfare in transport too. He said the primates have been subject to “inhumane and lengthy transportation times” in recent exports.

For instance, Mauritius transported 800 macaques to Miami on 13 May in a journey that lasted over 43 hours and involved seven flights and stop-overs, according to Buyukmihci.

Mauritian officials are also facing pressure domestically over allegations of poor welfare in the trade. In March, Linley Moothien, president of the animal welfare organisation 4 Tilapat, lodged complaints with multiple authorities over what he described as cramped and lengthy transport conditions for exported monkeys, as reported in Le Mauricien.

On 26 July, citizens took to streets of the capital Port Louis protesting macaque exploitation, including apparent government plans to permit pre-clinical testing on them in the country. As lexpress.mu reported, Moothien spoke at the event, vowing that the march was “only a first step towards a broader resistance.”

In 2024, 4 Tilapat produced a report on Mauritius’ trade in the primates. It made the case that macaques are subject to “distress, pain or suffering” across the trade chain, which is an offence under Mauritius’ 2013 Animal Welfare Act. Speaking with me at the time, Moothien pointed to the capturing process as an example of where suffering occurs.

As Science has reported, macaques are trapped in metal cages in and around villages, with breeding companies paying residents to allow traps on their land. But Moothien says “artisanal” methods are used in more remote locations, such as mountainous areas, as outlined in audio testimony he secured from a former farm worker. Here, trappers catch macaques in nets and holes in the ground, which causes injuries and mortalities, Moothien said.

An undercover investigation by French nonprofit OneVoice in 2023 also reported that many monkeys are killed on farms after capture and during the breeding phase, due to ill health.

Moothien told me that anecdotal evidence suggests the trade is lowering the macaque’s wild population. “People who live near forests and not far from mountains and hills say that some five years ago it was a normal thing to meet monkeys everywhere,” he said. But these people say macaques have since disappeared in many areas.

Mauritius’ 1980s survey estimated a population of 25,000-35,000 macaques. A further census is now underway, conducted by university researchers in collaboration with NPCS and some of the island nation’s breeding firms.

In March, one of the researchers, Raphael Reinegger, told Science that they have identified more suitable habitat for macaques than expected. On this basis, new estimates could end up being higher than those in the 1980s, he said.

But with only 2% of the primate’s habitat surveyed by then, the status of macaque populations in Mauritius presently remains an open question.

I approached NPCS for comment but none was received.

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A disgrace

The fact that Mauritius has become a leading supplier of long-tailed macaques seemingly without the necessary NDFs conducted and a population census that dates to the 1980s is a stark illustration of where global wildlife trade regulation falls short.

Although NDFs are a CITES requirement, there is no routine scrutiny of them in the current system. Countries are not obliged to submit them to the Secretariat, although some states do voluntarily add them to a dedicated database that CITES maintains.

Due to this, Wildlife Conservation Society’s vice president of international policy, Susan Lieberman, suspects that NDFs are lacking in a “significant proportion” of cases, as I reported in The Revelator. Lieberman also told me that countries can ask to see exporting nations’ NDFs before allowing imports, although this is likely inconsistent too.

A case in point: the UK has not consulted Mauritius’ CITES authorities when making its own sustainability assessments about the African nation’s macaque trade in recent years.

The UK is a significant importer of long-tailed macaques, many of whom originate from Mauritius. It does its own NDFs for imports of the primate, which is a stricter measure than CITES provisions demand.

In October 2023, I obtained a copy of the UK’s “general” NDF for Mauritius’ macaques from the Joint Nature Conservation Committee (JNCC) through Freedom of Information requests. JNCC is the country’s CITES Scientific Authority for fauna and develops these assessments.

Produced in June 2020, this NDF remained a key piece of evidence relied on by JNCC in 2023 to inform its advice to the UK CITES Management Authority – the Animal and Plant Health Agency – about whether import applications met legal requirements for trade in the species. This was confirmed in other materials that JNCC provided to me in its responses, namely summaries of its advice.

The NDF contained information on the long-tailed macaque’s biology, distribution, and conservation status at a global level. It also contained a dedicated section about Mauritius’ population and the potential impact of trade on their numbers.

The overall document contained multiple references but only two in the Mauritius-focused section. One was for the CITES Trade Database, from which JNCC sourced figures for Mauritius’ exports of live long-tailed macaques.

The other cited source was a memorandum submitted to a UK parliamentary committee in 2009 by the Mauritian Cyno Breeders Association (CBA) and Noveprim, a primate breeding company. It characterised Mauritius’ macaque population as stable and unaffected by trapping for use in trade.

In 2009, the EU was revising a Directive on protecting animals in science and proposed to limit the bloc’s use of non-human primates to only captive-bred individuals.

Mauritius’ primate breeding companies were not in favour of the proposal and the submissions in the memorandum “were part of a lobbying attempt to persuade the European Union not to adopt a policy to move towards only allowing captive bred macaques,” says Action for Primate’s Kite.

She described the NDF as a “disgrace” due to its heavy reliance on “severely outdated” information from primate traders, rather than up-to-date sources and data, including material provided by the Mauritian government.

I approached the CBA for comment but none was received.

100% Mauritian

In emailed comments on 30 July, JNCC’s Directors of International Evidence and Advice, Beth Stoker and Natalie Askew, said the committee considers a variety of information when developing NDFs, such as scientific literature, consultations with experts and other CITES Authorities, and NDFs from source countries “where available.”

The 2009 memorandum “was treated by JNCC as important information to consider, provided by relevant stakeholders,” they said, adding “this was not the only source used and the NDF has been reviewed since, most recently in February 2025.”

“Given the information available to us, consultation with the Mauritian CITES Authorities was not considered necessary at the current time,” Stoker and Askew stated.

The level of consultation and period for review of NDFs varies depending on factors like species’ specific characteristics and their vulnerability, according to the JNCC staffers. The pair described NDFs as “living documents” that can be altered at any time “based on new evidence.”

“All applications referred to us are considered on a case-by-case basis taking into account existing NDFs and any new information,” they added.

New information that has come to light since JNCC’s 2020 NDF includes a “resurgence of the wild-caught trade” from Mauritius and an escalation in overall export numbers, up from 7,691 macaques in 2019 to 14,623 in 2024, says Kite.

These factors will “have an impact on the wild population,” she warns.

The long-tailed macaque’s worsening conservation status is another important development. However, Stoker and Askew stressed that while JNCC recognises the primate’s Endangered classification in the IUCN Red List, “its aim is to assess the risk of extinction of populations of wild species where they naturally occur.”

“Mauritius is not part of the species’ natural range,” they continued, with the primate being an “invasive alien species” there which has negative impacts on native biodiversity and commercial sectors, such as by foraging native plants and cultivated crops.

On the other hand, some researchers argue that though it is true that frameworks like the IUCN Red List largely ignore introduced populations of species, there is conservation value in adopting a more inclusive approach. Including these populations in global threat assessments can provide “a more accurate assessment of actual global extinction risk among species,” they wrote in 2023 paper.

The researchers made the point that conserving introduced populations could help to prevent extinctions, particularly where species are facing pressing threats in their native range. This is a salient point for the long-tailed macaque as a 2023 estimate found the species may have declined by 80% in Southeast Asia over the last 35 years – an even worse situation than the 2022 Red List assessment indicated.

“Accounting for migrant species in conservation is not to dismiss potential conflicts with resident taxa and broader ecosystem-level effects but to reveal the novel ecological processes and conservation opportunities of our time,” the researchers stressed.

Even if population control is necessary, Action for Primates insists that “humane and sustainable” alternative methods to the commercial exploitation of macaques should be developed in Mauritius.

Some non-exploitative alternatives already exist, such as the provision of predator-proof nesting boxes to limit predation of native bird eggs by macaques and other animals.

In his report, Moothien also suggested that behaviour change among people matters by stressing that most deforestation and biodiversity destruction on the island is a result of human intervention.

As for the idea that the primates are ‘aliens’, Moothien is adamant: after 400 years of residing on the island, long-tailed macaques are now 100% Mauritian.

Here is a story I wrote in February for The Revelator, which takes a deep dive into the trade in corals at this critical time for reefs. Images changed from orginal story.

On any given day, in shops around the world and online, customers can pay as little as a few dozen dollars to buy living corals for their aquariums. While some of these coveted, brightly colored pieces of coral are sourced from farms, others come directly from ecosystems that are dying, such as Australia’s Great Barrier Reef.

Reefs have endured intolerable conditions for decades now due to global warming. Since February 2023 over three-quarters of the world’s coral reefs have endured heat stress in an ongoing global mass bleaching event, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration told Reuters last October. Scientists from NOAA and the International Coral Reef Initiative declare these events when significant bleaching happens in all ocean basins where warm-water corals can be found. The current global mass bleaching event is the largest one on record.

“Every place I know is dying at different paces,” says Tom Goreau, president of the nonprofit Global Coral Reef Alliance. “We’re looking at the last survivors almost everywhere.”

Yet the commercial trade in live corals from the Great Barrier Reef continues — as it does from other reefs around the world — and in fact has increased dramatically over the past 20 years.

Remarkably, trade endures even during catastrophic bleaching events. The Great Barrier Reef suffered its worst bleaching event on record in 2024 as temperatures in the Coral Sea hit a 400-year high. Despite this historic event Fisheries Queensland — the agency that manages fishing activities there — neither temporarily closed its commercial coral fishery nor imposed emergency restrictions on extraction.

For Goreau the continued trade in corals at this juncture begs a question: “Should we be exploiting an ecosystem that’s going extinct in front of our eyes?”

Trade is not Goreau’s area of focus, but identifying and tackling threats to reefs certainly is. In the 1980s he developed the method for using satellite sea surface temperature data to predict coral bleaching. Goreau is also the co-creator of BioRock, a technology that facilitates the recovery of marine ecosystems like reefs.

Goreau acknowledges that global warming overwhelmingly poses the biggest threat to reefs. While he describes trade as a “small part of the problem,” he opposes commercial exploitation of corals at this critical time because these ecosystems are already so dangerously at risk.

Countries “shouldn’t be exporting corals in this day and age,” he insists.

A Presumption of Innocence, a Wide-Ranging Trade

Queensland, on the other hand, has long considered the coral trade to pose little threat to the Great Barrier Reef. The state’s coral fishery — the area where it permits corals and similar organisms like sea anemones to be fished — has operated under the principle that “impacts of harvesting are likely to be low,” as explained in a 2021 assessment of the fishery by Australia’s federal government.

Authorities have considered the exploitation to be low risk because fishers selectively target corals guaranteed to sell in the aquarium trade and extract them by hand, rather than using broader or more destructive methods that risk harming other marine species, among other reasons.

Marine conservation ecologist Morgan Pratchett has conducted extensive research into Queensland’s fishery. As he put it to me last year, the state government has “assumed” coral extraction on the Great Barrier Reef to be sustainable. However, with reefs at risk from escalating threats like climate-induced bleaching, he said the trade in corals from Australia and elsewhere is being subject to increased scrutiny and restrictions.

Some global bodies have recognized the trade as a threat to reefs for decades. Notably, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora has restricted commerce in stony corals, meaning corals with a skeleton, since 1990.

This treaty body regulates global trade in wild species where commerce itself is among the risks to their conservation. It lists species depending on their risk of extinction and the trade rules vary accordingly.

In the case of stony corals, CITES regulation does not forbid commercial trade but makes it subject to conditions such as permit requirements.

But even with that modicum of control, the global trade in corals has grown substantially in the past few decades, with Indonesia and Australia currently topping the list of exporters. “Harvesting” of corals in the Queensland Coral Fishery has increased by around 700% since 2006, reaching over 620,000 pieces in 2021. Meanwhile Indonesia permitted the harvesting of more than 411,000 live corals in 2021. Fisheries commonly target stony corals to supply the aquarium trade. But other reef materials like coral rock with soft corals or other live organisms attached are also traded.

In some countries corals are also targeted for the curio and jewelry trades. Some but not all of this trade is regulated by CITES. NOAA warns that the exploitation of Corallium corals — typically for jewelry — is often unsustainable and media reports show there is extensive illegality associated with it.

Some harvested corals don’t go to the end-consumer: They end up in coral aquaculture, which grows and breeds coral that will then end up on the market. Experts generally view this as a more sustainable form of exploitation. Around half of Indonesia’s exports originate from coral farms, according to its 2023 sustainability assessment of the trade, whereas Australia largely exports wild-sourced corals.

Altogether, this high level of exploitation makes corals the most traded marine animals covered by CITES.

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A Flaw in the System

Countries that are party to the international treaty meet every two to three years to consider at-risk species for new or additional protection, with interim meetings of its specialist committees happening in between. The process for listing and uplisting species in CITES’ Appendices is notoriously slow. This means the treaty often fails to adequately restrict trade in species prior to them becoming threatened.

There are exceptions to this. For instance, CITES has listed entire groups of species in the treaty at their taxonomic level — i.e., genus, family or above. These listings typically occur to safeguard groups that are particularly vulnerable to overexploitation or to protect at-risk species within “lookalike” groups, meaning species that are hard to distinguish from each other. This is how all stony corals came to be regulated by CITES, including species not yet officially recognized as threatened.

However, species like stony corals — which face sudden, sharp catastrophic events that ultimately contribute to their longer term declines — highlight a particular flaw in the CITES system: It does not have an “emergency brake” mechanism that could quickly prohibit trade entirely when a species faces an abrupt crisis, as has happened with corals in the past two years.

Conservation biologist Alice Hughes points out that individual countries can list species in CITES’ Appendix III — which requires permits for all trade — on an intersessional basis, meaning that this appendix offers a quicker route to trade prohibitions than typically happens within CITES. However, Appendix III is country-specific, so parties are able only to list and prohibit trade in their national populations of a species; populations from outside those countries remain unprotected unless they have their own listing.

But Hughes says this appendix is rarely applied as an emergency brake to safeguard species facing climate disasters, disease, or other crisis situations. Rather, countries tend to use Appendix III for listing endemic species where trade itself poses the risk.

That means CITES still lacks adequate mechanisms to prohibit trade in species that are hit by sudden crises. Instead, countries decide — slowly — whether to make changes in these circumstances. In some cases, that can take years.

Many experts worry that coral reefs don’t have that kind of time.

Managing the Coral Trade: Each Country Is on Its Own

On the national level, neither Indonesia nor Queensland mandates closure of its coral fisheries during bleaching events, according to email responses provided by Queensland’s Department of Primary Industries and Indonesia’s Director General of Marine Spatial Management Victor Gustaaf Manoppo.

Fisheries Queensland and Manoppo’s Ministry of Marine Affairs and Fisheries respond to bleaching in other ways, such as working with varied stakeholders to monitor, evaluate, and disseminate information on bleaching. Both departments say these findings inform long-term plans for reef management.

Additionally, the jurisdictions have management frameworks in place that protect certain corals from exploitation during bleaching events.

Manoppo tells me by email that fishing is prohibited in the core zones of Indonesia’s Marine Protected Areas. These areas are safeguarded for their “ecological value including resilience to climate change,” he explains, which means reefs here are “expected to have a higher chance of survival” in the event of bleaching. In other zones, Manoppo says, utilization is permitted but controlled, such as through restrictions on the scale of activities and fishing gear types.

The Indonesian government also sets a quota for the harvest of different genera or species in each province where extraction is permitted, according to its sustainability assessment.

Meanwhile coral extraction is prohibited in around 38% of Queensland’s Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. In emailed statements, DPI points out that harvesting is permitted only under license, with species-based catch limits in place that “ensure biomass levels are maintained at 60% for key stocks.” DPI insists that its management approach is “highly precautionary” and ensures targeted corals are resilient to pressures like fishing and bleaching.

Queensland has also worked with industry over the years to develop response plans for events like bleaching, which include a provision for emergency closures of fisheries. I asked DPI whether this provision has ever been utilized. I received no response.

The plans also contain voluntary recommendations for fishers, such as instructions to avoid targeting stressed corals, although this guidance is not subscribed to by all industry members, according to Australia’s federal Department of Climate Change, Energy, the Environment and Water.

Nonetheless, in its emailed statements DPI says coral fishing “does not occur in areas impacted by climate events” because “impacted and unhealthy corals are not commercially desirable or viable to harvest.”

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Troubling Findings

Despite the coral trade being subject to management and CITES oversight, Hughes argues that “with bleaching and acidification posing major risks to corals, stacking more risk from harvest seems unnecessary and irresponsible.”

She adds, “Even if the fisheries are purported to be precautionary, that does not mean they properly account for all risks.”

Accounting for all risks is impossible because there are many unknowns in the trade, according to Pratchett. He told me we lack robust information about the populations of targeted species, the level of exploitation they face, and how vulnerable they are to other stressors.

To address some of these information gaps, Australia’s climate and environment department commissioned Pratchett to carry out surveys of nine heavily targeted coral species — “key stocks” in the Queensland fishery — in 2023-24. This authority decides whether Queensland is permitted to export corals.

The department disclosed some of Pratchett’s findings in an assessment of the QCF in October. He found a “significant difference” in the abundance and biomass of several species in fished areas compared to unfished areas. In some fished areas, certain species had biomasses less than 60% of those in unexploited areas, while other species had similarly lower abundances than their counterparts in unfished areas.

Pratchett also found reductions in average sizes and color varieties in fished areas, presumably because fishers extract the bigger, more colorful corals.

Although the environment department acknowledged that the surveys pointed to “significant localized depletion” for some species, it approved coral exports for another three years in its assessment. The approval came with conditions, including a requirement that Queensland review information on coral species at risk from the fishery and change catch limits where necessary by August 2025.

The department also instructed the state to develop and implement a “Severe Event Response Plan” to formally guide fishery management in the event of emergencies like bleaching by October 2026. A spokesperson confirmed by email that Queensland is required to “adaptively manage” the fishery in the interim, too.

Asked about its plans for adaptive management, DPI sent this unattributed statement: “Fisheries Queensland will continue working in collaboration with key stakeholders during all future events in support of responsive, adaptive management, with a significant amount of work already underway and planned for responding to severe weather and disturbance events.”

Cascading Impacts

Countries like Belize and Thailand err on the side of caution by prohibiting commercial exports of live corals. However, the legal trade provides cover for illegal exploitation of reefs. This criminality blights several countries, including those that have banned trade in their corals.

Considering Pratchett’s findings, prohibiting exports seems a wise choice because the impacts he uncovered, such as lower abundances and reduced sizes of heavily targeted species, have implications for reef ecosystems.

For one thing, Goreau explains, corals’ reproductive capacity is “determined by size and not by age.” This means reduced coral sizes risks impacting spawning because “if corals are too small, they’re not reproducing,” he says.

Studies show that bleaching itself is reducing some corals’ reproductive output, including Acropora species that are popular in aquariums. Most traded corals belong to this genus, which Goreau points out is a group that is “super sensitive” to bleaching.

Simply put, trade reduces the abundance of some species at the very moment they need as many survivors around as possible for reproduction and recovery.

In turn, diminished populations of Acropora species risks inhibiting recovery of wider reef communities after bleaching because they are ecological engineers. Goreau describes Acropora as “the best corals of all.” As fast-growing, branching, reef-building corals, he says they provide high surface cover and dissipate waves that risk breaking other corals, while also providing the optimal habitat for fish.

Considering factors like this, trade seems to be an important block in the teetering Jenga tower of corals’ future survival.

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Business As Usual

While the coral trade offers a stark example of how wild organisms continue to be exploited while on the brink of disaster, there are many others.

Over 40% of amphibian species are globally threatened due to issues like habitat destruction, disease, and climate change. Yet a huge trade in these animals endures because, for example, some species’ legs are considered a delicacy or people want to keep them as pets. Regulation of this trade is limited, and few amphibians are listed in CITES. The treaty body is presently determining whether to regulate trade in other amphibian species in a process that takes years.

Hughes points to Asian songbirds as another example. They’re in crisis, threatened by both a loss of their homes and the wildlife trade. Even with trade as a known primary threat for this group, conservationists face a lengthy battle convincing CITES to regulate their trade, Hughes says. She explains that each species will have to assessed and listed separately, which is extremely challenging as countries do not collect robust data on the populations and exploitation levels of most wild species.

Hughes says CITES could take practical steps to protect species in crisis, such as working to better enable swift decisions on regulating trade in those species. But on a more fundamental level, Hughes believes a paradigm shift is necessary.

“We need to reconsider how we view wild species,” she argues, highlighting that they are often seen as commodities above all else.

For Goreau, the commodification of coral reefs and their inhabitants right up to the ecosystems’ bitter end is regrettable but not surprising.

“There are many factors killing reefs,” he says, and the determination of countries — particularly rich ones — to maintain business as usual for trade in nature’s “goods” is at the core of every reason he mentions, be it dredging, agricultural pollution, or fossil fuel production.

“We have pushed reefs past their capability for surviving,” he warns. “They really can’t take very much more.”

Here is a story I wrote in late 2024 for The Revelator, the second story in a two-parter about the trade in ornamental fishes.

“We’ve got to shrink the flavors of fishes available to hobbyists.”

This is not what I expected to hear from ornamental fish trade veteran Tim Haywood when we connected to discuss the aquarium industry. It’s rare to come across businessfolk calling for a constriction of their market.

Then again, Haywood is no ordinary industry insider. He’s a man determined to confront what he calls the aquarium trade’s “gray areas” so the hobby he loves can become fit for the 21st century.

Haywood comes across as someone who’s aware that the honesty required to fix his beloved hobby also risks causing damage by opening it up to criticism. So he speaks frankly but carefully when he tells me about these gray areas: the often hidden tolls of the trade, such as the negative effects of intensive captive breeding on fishes’ welfare, and the deaths of millions of fish and other aquarium organisms each year so people can enjoy watching the colorful survivors in their home tanks around the world.

These are problems few people see or understand, despite the aquarium trade’s massive scope and ubiquity around the world — and particularly in the United Kingdom.

An Ancient Hobby

Fishkeeping has been practiced for millennia, reportedly beginning with ornamental carp being displayed in China and other Asian countries. The practice made its way to Britain by the 17th century. One of the first documented accounts came from Samuel Pepys, the creator of the first English Dictionary, whose 1665 diaries reflect on his observing a “fine rarity: of fishes kept in a glass of water, that will live so for ever” — namely exotic fishes — while visiting a friend.

Fishkeeping in the United Kingdom has grown a lot since then. According to the Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association, the country’s aquarium market is worth £1 billion (about $1.3 billion) a year, with more than 100 million fishes— representing hundreds if not thousands of species — in tanks and ponds across the nation.

The UK plays an outsized role in the global aquarium trade, considering its small size. Trade figures collated by the World Bank’s World Integrated Trade Solution database show the country was among the top five importers of ornamental fishes by trade value in 2023. The other four leading importers were the United States, the European Union, China, and Malaysia.

Overall the industry operates in around 125 countries and is worth $15-30 billion a year, according to a 2019 paper co-authored by John Pinnegar, scientific advisor to the Centre for Environment, Fisheries & Aquaculture Science. This paper was based on a presentation by aquarist Hans-Georg Evers.

The number of UK fishkeepers has trended downwards in recent years, notwithstanding a Covid-19 lockdown-related spike in sales. But broadly speaking, Haywood says, the aquarium industry is expected to grow, as has been reported in research papers and market projections for the coming years.

Haywood, who has spent decades in the business after first being “bit” by the hobby at the tender age of 10, says he isn’t opposed to the trade flourishing. He believes fishkeeping is a “wonderful hobby” that allows people to get close to nature and inspires individuals to “take more care of the world around them.”

But he looks at the industry from two unique viewpoints: He’s the owner of an aquatic study and breeding center called OSAquatics, as well as the chair of the conservation nonprofit Seahorse Trust. With that combined perspective, he thinks the industry needs to change — quite drastically.

The problems — and solutions — that he points to center on the UK and the trade in freshwater fishes. Nonetheless, they provide insights into the wider global aquarium trade’s present state and its possible future.

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Gray Areas

Freshwater fishes, particularly tropical ones, dominate the ornamental trade. The CEFAS paper found that the hobby involves more than 5,000 freshwater species. Fish are typically exported from Asia and South America, and around 90% of tropical freshwater species in trade are captive bred, according to the paper.

Although breeding farm sizes can vary, intensive production is common and supply chains can be complex. As with intensive production of farmed food animals, the trade involves the use of products like pharmaceuticals, as well as other veterinary practices. Farmers use hormones to induce breeding and sometimes inject pituitary gland extract of other fish into fishes they want to breed, a practice that occurs in certain food fisheries too. Antibiotics are commonly employed to tackle diseases that fish experience at high levels due to poor water quality, crowding, handling and other stress factors from captivity. Studies suggest that the use of antibiotics in the industry may contribute to these fish experiencing problems from antimicrobial resistance.

As Haywood puts it, intensive production involves a lot of unhappy fish.

“If the fish are happy, they will breed. There’s no need to do the intensive side of things,” he insists.

Many species are also caught in the wild, which has implications for their conservation. This is particularly true for marine species exploited in the trade, which are generally taken from coral reefs in Asia, Africa, Oceania, Central and South America, and the Caribbean. However, the conservation impact of this exploitation is largely unknown because oversight of the trade is so poor.

Around 10% of traded tropical freshwater fishes are also wild caught, according to the CEFAS paper, which says wild fisheries can sometimes promote freshwater conservation by providing income to people who therefore have an incentive to keep fish populations healthy.

But overexploitation is an issue, the paper reports, as are destructive fishing practices and mortality linked to poor management.

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A Deadly Business

Mortality is a significant problem in the ornamental trade. As a 2016 paper highlighted, many wild fishes are captured but then discarded prior to export due to damaged fins, small size, or other issues that could render them unsellable.

“Losses” (to use the industry’s commerce-based language) also happen once imported fishes reach retailers. A 2014 analysis involving over a dozen UK stores, which was undertaken as part of a thesis, found mortality rates of 3-10%. The analysis assessed a range of factors that played a role in mortalities, such as the number and variety of fishes in tanks, and whether the fishes were wild caught or captive bred.

Haywood also says post-sale deaths after buyers bring fish home are likely significant, although they are not officially measured in the UK.

Deaths can occur during the transport of fishes between countries, too. According to Svein Fosså, vice president of the trade association Ornamental Fish International, traders aim to keep transport mortalities low and mostly succeed in doing so, due to the industry being professionalized over the past few decades. He says the bigger traders report to him that persistent mortalities over 0.5% would lead them to look for other suppliers. Keeping mortalities low is necessary for “the best possible welfare and health” of fishes, says Fosså, and for economic reasons, as the cost of logistics, such as air freight fees, is now very high.

Still, the transport-related body count can be significant with such a large trade. The UK, for instance, imported over 19 million live ornamental fishes from outside the EU in 2020, according to figures provided by the Animal and Plant Health Agency in response to Freedom of Information requests. That same year, the figures show that nearly 360,000 live ornamental fishes imported from non-EU countries were recorded as dead on arrival.

These figures exclude the millions of live trout imported for breeding purposes in 2020 — fishes that are both consumed and kept in ornamental ponds in the country — and their transport mortalities.

A 2017 paper asserted that across the global ornamental fish supply chain, mortality rates vary dramatically and can range from as low as 2% to as high as 73%, due to the stressors involved in handling, transport, and other factors.

Lessening the Aquarium Trade’s Harms

To address the trade’s “gray areas,” Haywood wants to see a future where more fishes are responsibly captive bred in the countries where they’re sold. To advance this vision, he’s put his money where his mouth is. Although he used to import fishes to sell, he now only trades the select aquatic organisms he breeds himself.

Haywood is not calling for an absolute end to imports and supports initiatives like the Amazon Research Center for Ornamental Fishes that seek to ensure sustainable production of ornamental fishes abroad. But he believes the UK market should mainly be limited to species that hobbyists can keep alive and happy, which are captive bred on British soil where possible.

To achieve this change, Haywood says, the government should limit the import licenses it issues to a smaller list of freshwater genera and species. “We don’t need as many flavors as we’ve got,” he argues.

Many governments, including the UK, maintain lists of permitted freshwater fishes to prohibit imports of fishes who could cause havoc if released into the natural environment (illicit dumping of fishes into waterways is a problem in the trade). The UK does not have a similar list for marine ornamental species, although there are some limits on imports of these animals due to global trade restrictions.

Haywood also stresses that reining in imports would limit the trade’s carbon-intensive air travel, as fishes are typically transported — in bags of water — on planes.

“It’s ridiculous that we’re flying water around the world” in the climate crisis, he says.

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Responsible Choices

Haywood sees education as key to any transformation in the trade. He says hobbyists’ knowledge of how the industry operates is very limited, giving them little understanding of how to make responsible choices.

He suggests that retailers worldwide could increase hobbyists’ awareness through the educational labelling of fishes. These labels should explain the “milestones” in the fishes’ lives, such as whether they were raised on farms or captured in the wild, and their International Union Conservation of Nature Red List status, says Haywood.

It’s important to note, however, that Red List assessments for many ornamental species in trade are dated. A study published earlier this year found that 14 of the top 20 marine ornamental species imported into the European Union between 2014 and 2021 have Red List assessments that are more than 10 years old. Other analysis has shown that the assessments often use old sources. So Red List information would need to be shared with the necessary context.

And before consumers can be educated, importers may need some knowledge-building too. Haywood says retailers rarely know the detailed backstory of imported fishes because traceability in the trade is “nonexistent.” Similarly, the CEFAS paper highlighted a need for “better traceability for both wild-caught and tank-reared fish” in the industry.

The changes that Haywood advocates for would likely lead to fishes being more expensive, due to the increased costs involved in less intensive and more sustainable production abroad or responsible captive-breeding at home.

This may be a tough pill to swallow for some, according to Fosså. He says consumers are “very price conscious” and often shop around for the “cheapest products.”

For Haywood, changing that mentality is part of the point. He insists that fishkeeping comes with responsibility. Just as people will pay more for goods that are considered sustainable or seek responsible breeders for their pet dogs and cats, the same should be true for ornamental fishes. Haywood tries to instill this message of responsibility in his customers.

“We are taking this planet over and making a bit of a mess,” he says. “If we can all put our heads up and make a little difference, that may get momentum going for everybody to make a difference.”

Here is a story I recently wrote for The Revelator about the huge yet under-regulated and often unmonitored trade in the ocean's living jewels, otherwise known as marine ornamental fishes.

Nothing fascinates Monica Biondo more than the animals often referred to as the ocean’s “living jewels” — the vividly colored little fishes who dance around in its waters.

Biondo, a Swiss marine biologist, became enamored with ocean life as a child after spending many summers snorkeling along the Italian coastline. Nowadays you’re more likely to find her deep-diving into trade records than marine waters. As the head of research and conservation at Fondation Franz Weber, she has spent the past decade searching through data on the marine ornamental fish trade.

These are the colorful fish you see in home aquariums or for sale at pet stores; Biondo wants to know where they came from, how they got there, and what happened to them along the way.

Compared to the clear waters around the coral reefs she’s explored, the records on these fish are frustratingly murky. Wading through them has though provided her with clarity on her calling: shining a light on the aquarium trade’s vast exploitation of these glamorous ocean dwellers.

Searching in the Dark

Her entry into the fray came in the form of a Banggai cardinalfish, a striking little fish endemic to an archipelago in Indonesia that first became known to science in the 1930s. A scientist redescribed the species in 1994, kickstarting a tragic surge in the fish’s popularity for aquariums. Within less than a decade, 90% of the population had disappeared, Biondo says.

After witnessing that rapid decline, along with the failure of countries to subsequently regulate global trade in the species, Biondo was hooked. “That really pushed me into looking into this trade,” she says.

In her search for information she has pored over paperwork in the Swiss Federal Food Safety and Veterinary Office’s records warehouse. She and her colleagues at Pro Coral Fish have also spent years rifling through a European Union-wide electronic database called the Trade Control and Expert System (TRACES), which collects information on animal imports.

Although the datasets varied, the questions have remained the same. How many marine ornamental fish are being imported? What species are they? Where did they originate?

These straightforward questions are hard to answer to because the trade — despite being worth billions annually — has no mandatory data-collection requirements. As a result, information gathered about trade in these fishes tends to be opaque and haphazard compared to information on live organisms like farmed food animals.

Biondo reckons this is because the fishes are perceived as “just ornamentals.” Everyone is used to seeing them in aquariums, so few people recognize they may be in trouble in the wild.

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Illuminating Findings

In a 2022 report for the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES), the UN Environment Programme’s World Conservation Monitoring Centre criticized the data on ornamental fish collected and reported by the major exporting regions and some importing countries. Revealingly, WCMC was unable to even estimate the number of marine fishes traded globally each year with the data at its disposal.

CITES is the global wildlife trade treaty body that regulates and monitors international trade in over 40,000 threatened animal and plant species.

In this landscape Biondo’s scrutiny of European imports offers key insights into the trade. She’s revealing where gaps exist in the data collection that does occur and, crucially, how they can be plugged.

For one thing, the origin of marine ornamental fishes in trade is often unclear. Biondo highlights an example: TRACES data points to Singapore as a key exporter to the European Union, but she says the country is a hub for exports rather than a source, meaning many of the fishes were originally caught elsewhere.

Biondo has also found that EU records often fail to identify the species in trade. Her latest research paper highlighted that the bloc imported around 26 million marine fishes from more than 60 countries between 2014 and 2021. But only two-thirds of the fishes — 17.5 million — were identified to species level.

Conservation biologist Alice Hughes says records can be even less specific in other places, with many datasets listing marine fishes simply as “tropical fish.” The Law Enforcement Management Information System, the U.S. wildlife trade database, is a case in point. Data collected in LEMIS and submitted to CITES shows the United States imports 5-9 million marine ornamental fishes annually, but most of that trade is reported generically as “tropical fish.”

The United States has long been the largest importer of ornamental fishes, both marine and freshwater, although Biondo’s research shows that the EU now leads in terms of import value for marine fishes. Overall, she says, existing evidence indicates the global aquarium trade involves at least 3,000 marine fish species — but the actual number is potentially even higher.

All 4,000 known coral reef fishes could be in trade, Biondo says. Without better data, it’s impossible to know for sure.

Strengthening Systems

To improve the situation, Biondo and others have called on the EU and United States to modify TRACES and LEMIS, respectively.

Biondo says both systems should be tweaked to ensure traders always provide species information. She also says they should collect data on whether fishes are sourced from farms or the wild, along with the place of capture of wild-sourced fishes.

While freshwater species are often farmed, relatively few marine fishes have been successfully bred in captivity in commercial numbers. This means that marine species are overwhelmingly wild caught, taken mainly from coral reefs.

These adaptations to the EU and U.S. systems would improve the data landscape dramatically. In turn, better data would help to ensure that the trade is sustainably managed. Hughes says that in the absence of robust information, sustainable management is presently “entirely dependent on good will of suppliers, and often a degree of guess work given the lack of population data for many species.”

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Safeguarding Fishes and Ecosystems

Considering that most marine fishes are taken from the wild, sustainable management is necessary to ensure that trade does not threaten species’ survival. This is particularly true at this juncture as coral reefs currently face a litany of threats, including marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, storm damage, pollution, and diseases. Biondo argues that “all coral fishes are endangered because their habitat is endangered.” That means it’s vital to ensure coral fish populations are not put at risk by additional pressures, such as trade.

Safeguarding fishes is crucial for coral ecosystems, too, because these environments originally flourished due to the interrelations and reciprocities between organisms that live in them. This is why marine fishes don’t breed well in captivity, says Biondo, as only natural coral ecosystems can offer what they need to thrive — and vice versa.

For instance, bluestreak cleaner wrasses are among the species who remove parasites from other fishes. Studies show that the cleaner wrasse’s services can benefit recipient fishes’ growth and size, as well as the abundance and diversity of fishes on reefs. Their services even improve the cognitive function of damselfishes who, in turn, consume algae on reefs, alongside parrotfishes and surgeonfishes. These fishes ensure that algae, which is also vital to reef ecosystems, does not become so abundant that it suffocates corals.

All these types of fishes are exploited in the aquarium trade to greater or lesser extents. But without adequate data and monitoring, whether their exploitation poses a threat to crisis-stricken reefs is anyone’s guess.

Running Against the Clock

If robust information existed, species potentially at risk could be identified and considered for inclusion in CITES, ideally before they became endangered. The trade in aquarium fishes has largely flown under the treaty body’s radar to date, with few ornamental fishes listed in CITES. The treaty body regulates international trade in seahorses, some sharks and rays that are exploited for larger aquaria, the clarion angelfish, and the humphead wrasse. But the thousands of small, colorful reef species found in aquariums are not covered.

However, thanks to Biondo’s doggedness, CITES has begun to review the marine ornamental fish trade in recent years.

In May the treaty body held a four-day workshop on the issue. Among other things, attendees discussed strategies for identifying potentially at-risk species.

Unsurprisingly, Biondo has some ideas on this. In her research, she has created “watchlists” that she says could be used to pinpoint species traded within the EU that would benefit from CITES listings. The watchlists, which were published in her latest paper this June in the journal Animals, spotlight species that warrant close monitoring due to various factors, such as trade levels and trends, vulnerability to fishing, and conservation status.

Biondo’s research — including her watchlists — fed into the outcomes of the May meeting, as did the work of other researchers and relevant parties. These outcomes, which included the creation of a “catalogue” of species in trade and various vulnerability analyses for some of those species, are now being considered by CITES’ Animals Committee.

Some common marine aquarium fishes feature in the watchlists. Indeed, the blue-green damselfish sits at the top of one of them — perhaps the most heavily traded marine ornamental fish of all. The fish’s watchlist position is due high levels of trade and an inexplicable 70% drop in imports to the EU between 2014 and 2021, which could indicate population declines.

The United Kingdom’s Ornamental Aquatic Trade Association says this “abundant” fish is safeguarded from overexploitation because extraction is spread out over “dozens of collection points.” Many millions of blue green damselfish have been taken from the ocean over the years, yet the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List only assessed the species’ conservation status in 2021. The IUCN categorized the fish as Least Concern but stressed that “quantified data” on populations is limited across most of its range. Overall, the IUCN found the species to be declining globally and strongly recommended monitoring of populations and trade, alongside improved regulation of exploitation.

Nonetheless, Biondo says fishes like the blue-green damselfish illustrate a persistent mentality that because the fish are abundant, they can’t be fished out.

She doesn’t agree.

“We’re running against the clock,” she warns, to safeguard coral reefs and the living jewels that call them home.

Switzerland fired the official starting gun on a five-month-long wolf cull on 1 September. Several cantons have applied to kill young wolves and their elders, as well as to wipe out numerous whole packs. If approved by the federal authorities, the cantons will be able to commence with the slaughter, thanks to controversial legislative changes that allow for a dramatic reduction of the country’s fragile wolf population.

Switzerland’s actions are illustrative of a wider trend. Previously hunted to near extinction in Europe, wolf populations have rebounded in recent decades. But as wolf numbers have crept up, the same demonisation and persecution that has plagued the species for eternity has crept back in.

However, there are now obstacles to killing the maligned canine, not least the legal protections that have helped to pull wolves back from the brink. So the current war on wolves is being fought on many fronts, with science, democracy, and the iconic canines, all getting hammered in the process.

Wolf protections

Switzerland’s wolf cull has been made possible through revisions to the country’s hunting law. The Swiss parliament’s primary rationale for the changes is to limit damage to Alpine farming, namely to tackle wolf predation of farmed animals, mainly sheep.

Among other things, the changes permit cantons to ‘preventively regulate’ the keystone species, where approved by the federal government. This means that targeted wolves have not necessarily shown themselves to pose any threat but they are being dispatched regardless. These preventive culls started last year and autopsy results of killed wolves in the canton Valais showed none of them had predated sheep, Blick reported.

Due to the pre-crime nature of the wolf persecution and its scale, Switzerland may be in danger of violating its obligations under several international agreements, including the Bern Convention. This risk was outlined in a consultation response endorsed by over 70 organisations after the government launched a consultation on the legislative changes.

The Bern Convention is a regional conservation agreement that most countries on the European continent are parties to, along with some African nations. It lists the wolf as an Appendix II species, meaning it is strictly protected. As a result, parties to the agreement – including EU countries and non-EU nations like Switzerland – should prohibit the deliberate disturbance, capture, and killing of wolves, as well as abide by other habitat-related prohibitions.

Persecution is permissible in some exceptional and conditional circumstances under the agreement. Most relevant to wolves, countries can use lethal measures to “prevent serious damage” to farmed animals. But this is only permissible where there are no satisfactory alternatives and the measures do not threaten the survival of the wolf population.

Downlist the wolf

Over the years, Switzerland has repeatedly tried to persuade Bern Convention parties to downgrade the wolf’s protection status from Appendix II to Appendix III, which would soften the rules on exploitation of the species.

The European badger offers an example of the level of protection afforded to Appendix III species. The UK is a party to the Bern Convention and it has been systemically killing badgers in England for over a decade now, ostensibly in the name of protecting farming. So far, successive governments have permitted the extermination of over 230,000 badgers. Wildlife organisations lodged a formal complaint with the Bern Convention about the mass slaughter in 2019. The case is currently on stand-by.

Towards the end of last year, Switzerland’s chances of achieving its goal to lower the wolf’s protection status to that of the European badger were boosted when a powerful entity called for the same.

In September 2023, the European Commission (EC) announced that it was preparing a proposal on modifying wolf protections. It said this was in response to the adoption of a 2022 resolution in the European Parliament, which contained an expression of support for downgrading the wolf’s protection status.

The EC is the executive body of the EU. Its responsibilities include proposing new laws and policies for member states to consider adopting. Ursula von der Leyen, who belongs to the centre-right European People’s Party, has held the position of EC president since 2019. As the Guardian reported, Von der Leyen’s pet pony was killed by a wolf in 2022, while being kept in a paddock that lacked the necessary fencing to safeguard her from wolves.

The EC called for input from communities, scientists, and other interested parties on its incoming wolf proposal. Although the commission intended this to be a data collection exercise about wolf populations and their impacts, people feel so strongly about the issue that they instead bombarded the EC with opinions. An overwhelming amount of respondents – over 70 percent – said they wanted existing strict protections for the apex predators to remain in place.

Despite this, the EC released its plan in December, calling for wolves to be downgraded from strictly protected (Appendix II) to protected (Appendix III) under the Bern Convention. Its apparent reasoning for this is that the wolf population has significantly grown in the last two decades and, in turn, the impact of wolves on human activities, such as farming, have increased too.

The Council of the EU is now considering whether to adopt the EC proposal. As Politico reported, a decision should be made this autumn as a Bern Convention meeting in December has “created a natural deadline” for the deliberations.

The publication also reported that Von der Leyen has lobbied hard for the EC proposal to be adopted, according to EU insiders it spoke to.

It’s all in the timing

In the EU, the wolf is protected under both the Bern Convention and legislation called the Habitats Directive. Simply put, EU countries implement what the Bern Convention demands through the Habitats Directive, in relation to protections for wildlife, with some variation due to each country’s circumstances.

The European Environmental Bureau’s (EEB) Sergiy Moroz tells The 4 Percent that the timing of the EC proposal to downgrade wolf protections was nonsensical because it came ahead of a scheduled Habitats Directive assessment of protected species, which is taking place in 2025.

Moroz says that countries have to report on their wolf populations as part of this assessment, so it would logically be the best time to consider whether changes to the species’ status are warranted.

But the proposal made sense in terms of politics as the EU was gearing up for its mid-2024 bloc-wide elections. Political groups on the right of the spectrum had pushed for the wolf to feature prominently in their election campaigns, according to Moroz.

Indeed, following the proposal’s release, Moroz described it as an “early Christmas present” from the EC to “von der Leyen’s political family as it seeks to position itself as a defender of farming and rural communities ahead of the European elections.”

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Proposal not supported by science

However, when it comes to wildlife conservation under the Bern Convention and the Habitats Directive, political priorities are not meant to dictate the direction of travel, science is.

To this end, the EC has carried out in-depth analysis on wolves in the EU. Although this informed the EC proposal, Von der Leyen called for such a probe within weeks of her pony being killed, according to Politico.

The analysis pointed to overall increased numbers of wolves across the EU, estimating their numbers at around 20,000 in 2023, compared to approximately 11,000 in 2012. But it warned that the precision of EU countries’ population estimates vary greatly, as does the quality of monitoring.

Furthermore, the analysis highlighted that the conservation status of the wolf in different countries varies, with the species facing enduring threats in many places. These threats include illegal killing, traffic accidents, and hybridisation due to interbreeding with dogs.

In other words, although the wolf could be said to be recovering in Europe, it does not appear to be on course to be securely recovered in the immediate or near future, certainly not on an EU-wide level.

Moroz says the analysis “provides no justification for lowering the protection status” of wolves. Similarly, several environment-focused nonprofits, including EEB, argued that the EC report and other evidence provides “no scientific basis” for lowering the wolf’s protection status in an open letter in May. They stressed that further efforts are required for the wolf “to reach a favourable conservation status across the region.“

Wolf killing doesn’t necessarily protect farmed animals

In their open letter, the organisations also said the EC analysis concluded that “allowing wolf hunting does not reduce depredations,” partly because other wolves take over the territory of slaughtered individuals.

The EC report indicated that the exception to this would be where wolves are killed with “such intensity,” they are barely present across vast ranges. Simply put, for wolf killing to have a chance of working, it appears the species has to pushed back towards extinction.

Doing this would contravene the Habitats Directive and is “socially rejected” by much of the European public, the analysis stressed. Needless to say, intensively killing wolves across large areas would also violate the Bern Convention rules regarding the species.

The report did highlight that targeting wolves who have a tendency to kill farmed animals may have some success at reducing predations. Nonetheless, it is difficult to target specific individuals and the impacts are uncertain.

In addition to all this, killing wolves to avoid predation of farmed animals appears to be disproportionate to the threat they pose. Wolf predation, for instance, affects 0.065 percent of the EU’s 60 million-strong sheep each year, the EC analysis said. It described the overall impact of predation on the bloc’s farmed animals as “very small.”

Similarly, sheep deaths due to large carnivores, mostly wolves, during the summer grazing period in Switzerland amount to around 6 percent of the total, according to a 2020 report by Kora, a carnivore ecology and wildlife management foundation. It says disease and accidents cause far more sheep fatalities, with wolves being a “factor of minor importance numerically.”

The aforementioned response to the Swiss consultation cited higher predation figures for the period 2020-2023, at around 20 percent of the total annual mortality for sheep. Still, it too argued that this pales in comparison to sheep deaths from other hazards.

Needless to say, humans are the biggest sheep killer in Europe. In the first quarter of 2022 alone, EU countries slaughtered some 6.5 million sheep, according to EuroMeat News.

Persecution is unnecessary

On a local level, the impact of wolf attacks on farmed animals can be higher than bloc-or country-wide figures indicate. But many European countries provide compensation or subsidies to farmers for such losses.

Additionally, there are various prevention methods that can be implemented to limit the problem of predation. These include installing predator-proof fencing or having guardian dogs and human shepherds watch over farmed animals.

Lucie Wuethrich is a prominent campaigner for wolves and forests who penned the consultation response to the Swiss government. She tells The 4 Percent that prevention methods have been used in the country, with good success. The impact of these alternatives is evident in the changing ratio of farmed animals killed per wolf, she says.

Each wolf was on average killing 42 farmed animals in Switzerland back in 2000. By 2023, this had been reduced to four farmed animals per wolf, despite the predator’s population increasing, as WWF has highlighted.

Wuethrich further stresses that “livestock predation correlates most strongly with the non-implementation of protection measures.” Indeed, newly released figures show that 65 percent of predation in one canton in 2023 was of inadequately protected farmed animals, she recently highlighted on LinkedIn.

Despite the success of prevention methods, however, the Swiss government made a “sudden and unintelligible” move in January, Wuethrich explains. The government announced it was terminating the Federal Office for the Environment’s (FOEN) farmed animal guardian dog breeding program and withdrawing federal funding.

In short, the evidence is clear that protection measures are more effective at safeguarding farmed animals than killing wolves. But the success of these measures depends on politicians and farmers embracing them, rather than undermining them.

Balancing different interests already possible

The EC analysis also pointed to another nonsensical aspect of the push for downgrading wolves’ protections by highlighting that countries already have significant wiggle room under the species’ existing status.

Some parties to the Bern Convention, for instance, entered reservations regarding the legal status of the wolf in their countries. As a result, they do not treat the species as strictly protected. Additionally, exactly how the Bern Convention requirements have been applied in EU countries, through the Habitats Directive, varies according to nations’ particular circumstances. Moreover, the rules of both the Bern Convention and the Habitats Directive come with exceptions, which can be utilised where necessary.

What this means in practice is that European countries are already able to ‘control’ wolves to varying extents. As the EC analysis put it, it is possible to “balance different interests” under the existing rules, including by member states utilising exceptions to “address the specific challenges they are currently facing in relation to the wolf population.”

Undoing decades of progress

The wolf’s strictly protected status does, however, set a relatively high bar for what persecution is permissible. Crucially, it also puts countries at risk of legal challenges when they fail to abide by the rules.

Recent judgments illustrate this, with the Court of Justice of the European Union determining that regional wolf hunting is not permissible in Austria and Spain due to the species’ national conservation status.

The Swedish Carnivore Association also has an ongoing complaint lodged with the EC over that country’s licensed hunting, i.e. trophy hunting, of wolves. Recently, Sweden has also come under fire for approving the trophy hunting of almost 500 bears, another species that is strictly protected under the Bern Convention. Although the hunt was due to run from 21 August to 15 October, it’s likely to last barely three weeks. This is because zealous hunters had killed around 420 bears by 2 September, according to Sweden’s Environmental Protection Agency.

As the carnivore protection project Sweden’s Big Five has highlighted, the Swedish government now appears keen to cut its wolf population in half. The Swedish Carnivore Association has warned that this would threaten the species’ long-term survival in the country.

Sweden’s Big Five summed up the situation, warning that “50 years of slow come-back progress of the wolf in Sweden is presently being undone at an alarming speed.”

Switzerland intends to go even further. As Environmental Rights Review has outlined, its plan permits reducing the wolf population by up to 70 percent.

More specifically, Wuethrich explains that the new hunting legislation allows for the country’s 35 wolf packs – a third of which are transboundary – to be whittled down to 12. This contradicts the “minimum viable population of 20 packs” that the FOEN itself set, she says.

The plan “risks being devastating and undoing decades of progress,” Wuethrich warns.

The International Union for Conservation of Nature Species Survival Commission’s (IUCN SSC) Canid Specialist Group agrees. In a letter to the Swiss government, the wolf experts objected to its “unscientific” management plan and said a reduction of wolf packs to 12 “is far below any estimates given for a minimum viable population of around 20 packs, and even this estimate should be considered as speculative.”

Sending the wrong message

The IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group implored the Swiss authorities to change tack. It called on the country to embrace a “science-based management approach that fosters coexistence between people and nature,” the implication being that the Swiss authorities are effectively rejecting coexistence currently.

Similarly, the message that the EC is sending out to the world through its proposal is that “coexistence is not working,” says Moroz. This risks damaging Europe’s credibility in international fora like the Convention of Biological Diversity, he warns, as it contravenes the aims of the agreement.

The EC declined to provide comment to The 4 Percent on the various controversies surrounding its proposal.

However, the push for relaxing restrictions on wolf persecution, rather than focusing on strengthening coexistence measures, is inkeeping with what is happening on the other side of the Atlantic.

US lawmakers passed the Trust the Science Act in the House in April, though it still needs to pass in the Senate. The Orwellian law would effectively circumvent the scientific process that the US’ Endangered Species Act (ESA) has for deciding whether to remove species’ protections and allow lawmakers to strip the gray wolf of its ESA protections instead.

Moroz says there are parallels between the US and Europe, in terms of how they are approaching the wolf issue and environmental matters more broadly.

“We've really seen in the last couple of years the return of almost Trump politics in the EU's decision making,” he says.

This is evident in how “the wolf has been made a symbol of culture wars” by the political right, Moroz explains, and in some of the moves made during the Council of the EU’s deliberations on the EC proposal.

For instance, some countries have tried to shoehorn farming interests into decision-making by calling for a group involving both environmental and agricultural officials to have competency in drawing conclusions on the issue. This was rejected by a majority of member states as species protection is the exclusive remit of environmental authorities to decide on.

In other words, there have been attempts to “change the character of discussions from technical to political” for an issue that is scientific, i.e. technical, at its core, says Moroz.

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Alternative facts

The Trumpian nature of the European debate over wolves is perhaps most apparent in the ‘alternative facts’ involved in it. Wuethrich says politicians and lobby groups for farming and hunting have “repeatedly spread falsehoods” about wolves in Switzerland, including by suggesting that the population is out of control, and a threat to people, tourism, and biodiversity.

Meanwhile, Switzerland’s largest party, the right wing Swiss People’s Party, has taken the popularisation of wolf persecution to a perverse level. It released an online video game for people to “stop the wolf!” by virtually slaughtering the predators to “protect children, farmers and livestock.”

The party paints a picture of the country’s mountain region being overrun with the predator. Like its video game, this characterisation is rather melodramatic. In 2023, monitoring of the Swiss wolf population detected just over 230 live individuals, in a country that is over 41,000 square kilometres in size.

Indeed, Wuethrich says the country could support many more wolf packs than it currently has. She also stresses that Switzerland serves as “a vital corridor for species dispersal and genetic exchange across the Alpine arc.” Considering this, the country’s persecution of wolves will be felt beyond its borders, as over 150 wildlife organisations highlighted in an open letter in 2023. They warned:

These radical, unilateral measures don’t just threaten Switzerland’s fragile wolf population, they negatively impact the entire Western-Central Alps wolf population.

Moreover, any suggestion that wolves are keen to attack children and other people is not grounded in fact. The EC analysis pointed out that wolves have not fatally wounded a person in Europe for at least 40 years. It said that compared to other large carnivores, “wolves are among the least dangerous species for their size and predatory potential.”

Meanwhile, a global report published in 2021 found that “the risks associated with a wolf attack are above zero, but far too low to calculate.”

Cows pose a considerably bigger threat to people in Europe than wolves. One study found them to be involved in over 200 human fatalities between 2000 and 2015, Rewilding Europe highlighted.

As Eurogroup for Animals’ Reineke Hameleers has put it:

The old tale of the bad wolf is exactly that: a tale. Wolves prefer predating wild ungulates over farm animals and, if unprovoked, are harmless towards humans.

Nonetheless, the notion of the big bad wolf attacking people has been brandished about in the debate. Indeed, EC president Von der Leyen has described the concentration of wolves in some European areas as a “real danger” for farmed animals “and potentially also humans.”

The Swiss authorities did not respond to a request for comment.

Huge public support for wolves

In Switzerland and elsewhere, the media has also been accused of playing a role in perpetuating fear and misinformation about the presence of wolves.

“Very little effort is made to even try to contextualise things“ in the media, says Wuethrich, because “sensationalism sells, scientific explanations don’t.”

However, despite efforts from politicians and interest groups to vilify the wolf, and the failure of the media to provide nuanced reporting, Wuethrich says polls consistently show that the Swiss public wants wildlife, including wolves, protected.

For instance, the public rejected a weakening of wolf protections in a 2020 referendum on the issue, albeit narrowly. Meanwhile, a YouGov poll in February measured support for the federal government’s preventative wolf killing policy. The poll found that people opposed to the policy outweighed those in support of it, with 46 percent against and a third in favour.

The Swiss are not alone. “Public support for strict protection of the wolf is incredibly high,” says Moroz. He points to a Europe-focused survey conducted in 2023 that found overwhelming support for the conservation and protection of large carnivores among respondents.

Interestingly, the survey targeted rural communities only, which are typically the stakeholders that media and political discourse suggests are most hostile to large carnivores.

In reality, the situation is more nuanced, with studies able to find mostly positive attitudes towards wolves even in locations where significant wolf-human conflict exists, such as central Portugal.

The Earth - and people - need wolves

There are several possible reasons why support for wolves endures. Their iconic status can be a tourism magnet in the places they inhabit, bringing both pleasure and income to the humans involved.

A recent US study highlighted the financial potential of wolf-driven tourism. It showed that the famed wolves of Yellowstone National Park bring in almost $83 million annually for the local economy there.

More broadly, the IUCN SSC Canid Specialist Group argued that human society is evolving. It said people are:

moving to a future where we embrace nature and cherish it as an important part of the solution to our global climate and biodiversity crisis, with added benefits to human wellbeing. Top predators such as wolves are an important part of that solution.

The experts highlighted that wolves play an invaluable role in ecosystems, including by reducing numbers of ungulates, such as deer and boars, and affecting their behaviour. This lowers the risk of overgrazing in ecosystems like forests, leaving them more resilient and healthy. In turn, this brings benefits such as enhanced carbon storage capacity and increased biodiversity in ecosystems. As wolves tend to prey on sick and infirm individuals, they can also reduce the risk of disease spread.

Moroz hopes that “common sense” and science-based decision-making prevails in the EU deliberations, which would enable wolves to continue fulfilling their important and iconic role in European landscapes.

This would clearly be in line with public opinion in Europe. It appears the vast majority of people reject the calls for repeating age-old patterns of persecution that have contributed to a planet in crisis.

Instead, they have their ears – and hearts – open to the call of the wild.

The main thing we know about the deep sea is that we don’t know enough about the deep sea.

Just last year, researchers reported that they found over 5,000 species on the seabed in a part of the Pacific. Most of the species were new to science, which isn’t surprising given that over 90 percent of the ocean’s lifeforms were estimated to be undescribed as of a decade ago.

More recently, scientists made the groundbreaking discovery that metal-bearing nodules on the seafloor could be a source of ‘dark oxygen’. Their research indicated that nodules carry high electric charges that may be spurring oxygen production in the depths via seawater electrolysis, meaning the splitting of seawater into oxygen and hydrogen. With sunlight usually required to produce oxygen, which is an element that enabled complex lifeforms to evolve, the findings reopen the question of how life began on Earth, according to the study’s lead author.

Simply put, the deep sea is the stuff that mind-blowing mysteries are made of. This is central to why a push for the onset of commercial deep-sea mining, whereby companies would scour the seabed for nodules and other compounds containing rare-earth elements, is facing significant opposition.

Proponents say deep-sea mining is necessary to source particular metals for low-carbon technologies. Meanwhile, critics argue that alternatives exist, such as technologies that do not rely on rare-earth metals and better recycling.

Critics include hundreds of scientists, who have warned that mining in these hidden depths risks causing irreversible harm to deep-sea ecosystems and adding to the multiple stressors that the ocean faces, such as the climate crisis, destructive fishing, and pollution.

In this fraught landscape, the International Seabed Authority (ISA) is drafting a code for deep-sea mining to govern the would-be extractive industry. The most recent round of mining code talks at the ISA, which was established by the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), ended on 2 August.

The small island nation of Nauru and its commercial partner The Metals Company (TMC) are at the centre of the push for deep-sea mining to begin. In 2021, Nauru triggered what is called the two-year rule at the ISA. This effectively bound the authority to consider applications for exploitation contracts following a two-year window.

Although the mining code’s rules, procedures, and regulations appear far from being completed, TMC told Reuters in July that it intends to apply for a license this year.

However, certain developments at the ISA meeting and beyond should give hope to scientists concerned about deep-sea mining that their pleas are resonating with some decision makers. Among them is confirmation from the new UK government, shared exclusively with The 4 Percent, that it backs a moratorium on commercial mining.

The last government announced its support for a moratorium in October 2023. In a statement, the Department for Business and Trade confirmed that this will continue, with a spokesperson saying:

The UK recognises the impacts of deep sea mining are not fully understood. That's why we support a moratorium on the granting of exploitation mining licences by the International Seabed Authority.

This will remain the case until sufficient scientific evidence is available to assess the potential impact of deep-sea mining activities on marine ecosystems and strong, environmental regulations are adopted by the ISA.

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Out with the old, in with the scientist

In a significant development, the ISA elected a new secretary-general during the recent meeting.

As The Guardian reported, the ISA has had the same secretary-general for eight years, Micheal Lodge. A British lawyer, Lodge has faced several accusations of acting with a pro-mining bias, all of which he has denied.

Lodge stood for re-election against Leticia Carvalho, a Brazilian oceanographer who works for the UN Environment Programme. Carvalho won the election, receiving 79 votes compared to 34 votes for Lodge, and will lead the ISA from January next year.

As secretary-general, Carvalho will head the ISA’s secretariat. Its core role is to implement the mandate of UNCLOS’ member states, all of which are members of the ISA. UNCLOS – and therefore the ISA – counts 168 states plus the EU as members.

Speaking with BenarNews following the vote, Carvalho summed up what she believes is expected of her in the position:

The winning margin reflects the appetite for change.

I see that transparency and accountability, broader participation, more focus on additional science, bridging knowledge gaps are the priority areas.

Julian Jackson, project director for The Pew Charitable Trusts’ ocean governance project, attended the latest ISA meeting. He tells The 4 Percent that Carvalho’s promise to work on behalf of all member states means that the concerns of states calling for a ban, pause, or moratorium on deep-sea mining “have to be properly addressed.”

Considering Carvalho’s stated commitment to transparency, accountability, and engagement with stakeholders, Jackson adds:

we have high hopes that the protection of the marine environment would not feature as an afterthought in the rush to start highly destructive mining of the seabed.

Pradeep Singh is an expert in ocean governance who also attended the ISA meeting. He agrees that the change of leadership offers hope for a wider range of views to be heard. The Research Institute for Sustainability fellow stresses that the secretariat’s role is administrative first and foremost. But he tells The 4 Percent that Carvalho’s scientific background means she will be able to facilitate in “bringing knowledge to the decision makers.”

“That’s what the member states need,” he adds, “to hear from all sides and alternative views, and to bring new science and other forms of knowledge (such as cultural, spiritual and traditional) into the process, that will be something to look forward to.”

New science gives pause for thought

The importance of ensuring that decision makers are aware of emerging science was evident at the meeting. According to Singh, quite a few states brought up the research on nodules and dark oxygen during their statements at the talks. It was a hot topic in the corridors too, he says, with many wondering what the implications of the findings might be.

Crucially, Singh says that sensational findings like this, which “alter our perception of how the deep sea works,” also open minds to the fact that other discoveries may be forthcoming.

An increasing number of decision makers are recognising a need for caution amid scientific uncertainty. Five countries joined the call for a moratorium or pause on commercial deep-sea mining at the meeting. Austria, Honduras, Tuvalu, Guatemala, and Malta added their backing for such measures, bringing the total number of countries calling for a precautionary halt to 32.

Tuvalu member of parliament Monise Laafai said:

The protection of a sacred ocean is not a technical mandate but rather a moral responsibility for us. Similar worldviews are shared by other Indigenous Peoples; the ocean is not just a resource but a foundation of life, culture, and sustenance that underpins and connects our relationship together.

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ISA’s environmental mandate

At the meeting, more countries also threw their weight behind a proposal for the ISA Assembly to develop a general policy on safeguarding the marine environment.

The Assembly is one of the “principle organs” of the ISA. Indeed, as it includes all ISA member states, the Assembly is considered the authority’s “supreme organ”, with all other principle organs of the ISA accountable to it. Alongside being empowered to establish general policies for the authority, the Assembly elects members of the ISA Council. This council, which involves 36 states, is responsible for negotiating and adopting the deep-sea mining regulations and related provisions.

As Singh highlighted in the blog of the European Journal of International Law, five countries proposed a debate on developing a general policy on conserving the marine environment at an ISA meeting in 2023. In their proposal, the countries included a draft decision for consideration that would have established a precautionary pause on approvals for commercial exploitation until all the relevant provisions are in place.

More broadly, Singh explains to The 4 Percent that the general policy would spell out the environmental mandate and strategy of the ISA clearly, which is effectively “missing” at present.

Ultimately, the Assembly did not include the proposal in the 2023 meeting’s agenda. This year, however, nine countries proposed inclusion of a debate on a general policy for the protection and preservation of the marine environment without explicitly mentioning a pause or moratorium. They succeeded in securing a discussion.

The Assembly did not manage to formally agree on whether to develop such a general policy at the meeting, due to opposition from some states. Nonetheless, countries can propose it again at the next meeting, which is in 2025.

Jackson says that the discussions on the general policy showed “there was widespread support for this policy in order to inform the wider work of the ISA and potentially address the concerns of those States calling for a moratorium or pause on deep sea mining.”

No room for moratorium

Currently, it appears those concerns are not being addressed because there is effectively no room being given at the ISA for discussion on a moratorium or pause. This is partially due to strong resistance from some states, according to Singh.

He also suggests the ISA has run a fairly closed shop so far when it comes to engaging with concerns raised in other relevant international forums. For instance, the Convention on Biological Diversity (CBD) has called for governments to ensure no mining happens until certain conditions are met, such as the environmental impacts being understood and appropriate regulations put in place. But these concerns are not adequately being taken on board by the ISA, Singh says.

Singh co-authored an essay in March that highlighted why a lack of cognizance at the ISA of concerns emanating from different international fora is problematic. Published in the American Journal of International Law, the essay stressed that:

The decision whether, and under what conditions, to mine the deep seafloor does not occur in a vacuum.

This is because most of the ISA member states are also party to other agreements, such as the CBD and the new High Seas Treaty. States have obligations within these regimes that could be undermined by deep seabed mining, the essay warned.

Singh hopes that the change in the ISA’s leadership could see the authority being more open to acknowledging and addressing the concerns raised in other fora and providing clarity on where states can talk about a moratorium or pause within the ISA. “That would certainly be a breath of fresh air,” he adds.

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Nothing is agreed until everything is agreed

Progress was made in some areas at the talks, according to Jackson. For instance, agreement has been reached that standards and guidelines must accompany the regulations, he says. These are important instruments that would effectively make the regulations operational, such as binding standards on permissible thresholds relating to environmental harm.

But many issues are still unresolved. Pew researchers were among the authors of a research paper published in the Marine Policy journal in January, which listed more than 30 major issues in the regulations. Despite what was achieved at the meeting, these major issues appear to “remain largely unchanged,” says Jackson.

Work on the standards and guidelines is also pending, with debate on these not yet undertaken, according to Singh. He explains that the current draft of exploitation regulations anticipates anywhere between 50-100 of such standards and guidelines.

Critically, the science and evidence needed for decision-making on regulating deep-sea mining is currently lacking, Pew pointed out in a statement made at the meeting. It stressed that scientists believe it will be several years to decades before properly informed decision-making is possible.

Duty to protect the marine environment

Considering all this and the fact that the ISA works to the principle that “nothing is agreed until everything is agreed,” neither Singh or Jackson believe the regulations and associated work will be completed by 2025.

2025 is the year that the Council aims to have the mining code ready for potential adoption by. However, Singh stresses that the Council has already decided that commercial exploitation should not start in the absence of regulations.

So what happens if the would-be commercial deep-sea mining company TMC applies for a license in this environment?

Singh predicts that the amount of states calling for a moratorium would grow quickly. In the absence of adopted regulations, he says its also possible that legal advice would be sought from the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS), which UNCLOS established to interpret and uphold its rules.

In the event that advice was sought, ITLOS would likely draw on existing jurisprudence, says Singh. It would not have to look far, as ITLOS itself delivered an advisory opinion in May regarding ocean pollution.

In the opinion, ITLOS determined that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions count as ocean pollutants. It further said that countries are obliged “to take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce, and control marine pollution” from these emissions.

Although ITLOS’ advice focused on greenhouse gases, UNCLOS states are obliged to prevent, reduce, and control pollution of the marine environment from any source. The convention considers marine pollution to be any substance or energy introduced into the ocean by humans – directly or indirectly – that “results or is likely to result in” various harmful effects.

Jackson believes the ITLOS opinion is relevant to the ISA’s work, although he stresses that he is not a lawyer. Considering the obligation it confirms states have regarding greenhouse gas pollution, he says this could – and should – mean states throughly consider the implications of greenhouse gases when negotiating regulations for deep-sea mining activities and ultimately enforcing those regulations.

Jackson also says that “because of the baked-in, cumulative impacts of climate change and reduced resilience of the marine environment,” the ISA and its states need to more carefully consider “other forms of harm to the marine environment such as the impacts of noise, light and sediments from mining activities.”

Singh also believes ITLOS’ advice is relevant to deep-sea mining. Explaining the tribunal’s advisory opinion further, he says that states “need to ensure that whatever activities they undertake have the backing of science, and the more risky the activity, the higher the demand for due diligence.”

“You could almost take all of this and apply it to deep sea mining,” adds Singh.

For now, exactly what would – rather than could – happen if TMC applies for a license ahead of the mining code’s completion is unknown. That remains a mystery, much like the deep sea itself and the harms that could befall its depths from this extractive industry.

“You’re killing them softly.” This is the message a group of wildlife NGOs sent out to lion cub petters ahead of 10 August, a day dedicated to the iconic cats.

The campaign released for World Lion Day seeks to raise awareness of the role that cub petting and other seemingly innocuous activities play in South Africa’s controversial captive predator industry.

Captive predator pipeline

As I have previously reported, South Africa has a large captive lion industry which exploits the predators from crade-to-grave.

In the industry, females are used as breeding machines, as happens in animal farming more broadly. Their cubs are exploited for petting experiences and cub raising ‘voluntourism’. Once they get bigger, the cubs then often move on to being the stars of ‘walking with lions’ tours.

Ultimately, many of the lions who pass through this pipeline end up being sold off for canned trophy hunts, meaning people pay to kill them in an enclosure. Others may end up being sold into the live trade, such as for zoo exhibits.

Exploitation does not necessarily end with the lions’ death either. Their body parts, such as bones, are commercially exploited too, particularly for use in traditional medicine.

The campaign draws attention to the relations between the varied uses of captive lions during their lives. Launched by Voice4Lions, Blood Lions, FOUR PAWS South Africa, and Humane Society International/Africa, it spotlights how people’s engagement with the ‘softer’ elements of the industry is fuelling the commercial captive predator industry overall. The group says:

However well-intentioned people’s actions are, these cubs are not orphans, they have no conservation value, they are purely bred to feed an unethical and insidious industry that commodifies these predators.

The NGOs further stress that the industry does not solely involve lions, but other big cats like cheetahs and tigers too. They point out that there are at least 8,000 lions and thousands of other big cats in the country’s approximately 350 lion farms.

Lion farming exit plan

In 2021, the South African government released and endorsed a report that recommended closing down the lion farming industry and putting an end to associated exploitative activities like canned hunting.

Earlier this year, the government confirmed that lion farms will be shuttered and released a report that laid out ways a “voluntary exit” can be achieved. The exit plan suggests a range of options for closing down facilities, including euthanising all lions, surrendering them to “lion safe havens”, and phasing out lion populations over a two-year period through “trade opportunities.”

The report said these options “can be used as building blocks to create a variety of voluntary exit strategies to suit a wide range of circumstances.”

The exit plan also offers options for dealing with farms’ lion bone stockpiles, namely a two-year-long period of domestic trade to deplete them and the surrendering of lion bones to the authorities.

As highlighted in a recent paper about the links between lion farms and the bone trade by researchers at World Animal Protection, domestic trade in lion bones is legal in South Africa. Exports outside of the country, however, have not been permitted since a 2019 court ruling found prior quotas for exports to be unlawful and “constitutionally invalid” due to a lack of consideration of welfare issues.

Probes into the lion bone industry, which have looked into trading before and after the 2019 ruling, have pointed to South Africa’s captive predator industry being mixed up with illegal activity, alongside documenting dire welfare conditions for the animals involved. For instance, lead researcher of the aforementioned World Animal Protection paper, Dr Angie Elwin, explained of its findings:

Our study highlights the troubling reality of South Africa's captive lion industry. Legal activities are being exploited to facilitate illegal trade, and this is compounded by serious animal welfare violations and unsafe conditions for workers. Urgent action is needed to protect lions and people.

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Concerns for other big cats and wild lions

The group of wildlife NGOs behind the ‘killing them softly’ campaign have commended the South African government for the progress it has made on ending lion farming. But there is much more to be done, they say.

They are calling on the Department of Forestry, Fisheries, and the Environment to publish “a detailed implementation plan with time-bound goals.” Other wildlife researchers called for similar after release of the voluntary exit report, as there is currently no deadline set for the industry’s closure.

The NGOs are also urging the authorities to widen the scope of prohibitions and “ensure the well-being of other predators by extending the ban to all captive big cats and prohibit their ownership as pets and playthings.”

Elsewhere, there are concerns about the government’s plans for wild lions and many other species.

As the Daily Maverick has reported, the government plans to create “mega-landscape conservation areas,” as detailed in its draft National Biodiversity Economy Strategy (NBES). In a nutshell, the strategy aims to massively increase the number of conservation landscapes in the country. It seeks to couple this expansion with extensive exploitation of wildlife in those areas.

The plan is in keeping with the country’s longstanding “model of commodifying wildlife, including lions,” says Adam Cruise, an investigative environmental journalist, author, and academic. This model has involved the ownership and commodification of wildlife on private lands, which the strategy intends to extend to traditional community areas, the Daily Maverick explained.

Some conservation scientists have welcomed the strategy as “a step in the right direction.” However, considering that South Africa’s wildlife commodification model has typically involved farming and ranching of wild animals, Cruise and others are concerned it conflicts with recommendations and efforts to close down captive breeding of some species, such as lions.

The plan involves “a huge expansion of trophy hunting and trade in animal products,” Cruise stresses. He has calculated that to achieve the NBES’ financial goals regarding increased ‘consumptive use of game from extensive wildlife systems’ by 2036, nearly a million animals would have to be trophy-hunted, including more than 10,000 wild lions, in the period up to then.

“It does not appear plausible that these increased numbers of animals will suddenly materialise in ‘extensive wildlife systems’, nor that the international demand for these exists,” he argues.

“While I applaud the decision to halt canned lion hunting,” says Cruise, “I am also not convinced that South Africa can realistically sustainably hunt wild-ranging or free-living lions. The NBES is silent on just how they will be able to do that.”

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Lions in decline

In a 2016 assessment, the South African National Biodiversity Institute and Endangered Wildlife Trust said the country’s wild lion populations “declined substantially in the 19th century but have been stable or increasing over the past 20–30 years.” They estimated South Africa’s wild population to be around 3,500 individuals at that point.

Meanwhile, the latest International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List assessment said an estimated 23,000 or so lions live in the wild globally, which represents a decline of 30 percent in less than two decades. The assessment stressed that it is “incredibly challenging” to determine lion numbers, due to a lack of surveys of most populations and existing data effectively being unreliable or outdated.

The assessment pointed to destruction and degradation of lions’ habitat as the leading cause of their predicament. Other drivers include the killing of lions, both indiscriminately and for their body parts, and a lack of food, according to the Red List.

While the exact numbers of remaining lions may be unclear, it is evident that lions are struggling massively in the wild and subject to intense exploitation in the captive predator industry.

To ease the suffering of the iconic cats in captivity, campaigners have one clear message for people on World Lion Day: Stop killing them softly.

It sucks being a bat in the Anthropocene, or as some would have it, the Capitalocene.

Climate crisis-fuelled extreme heat is killing bats in droves. The wind power infrastructure being built to limit global warming is causing bat mortality too, although there are ways to minimise this.

You name it, human-caused habitat loss, diseases, food shortages, bats are up against it all.

Exploitation is another threat to bats, including for the fashioning of their dead bodies into house décor. This trade is the focus of a recent study, which tracked listings of dead bat décor on three major e-commerce sites. The paper focused on the trading of Asia’s Painted Woolly Bat in particular.

The researchers found hundreds of listings, with dead bats sold as standalone taxidermied corpses and stuffed into picture frames. Perhaps the most macabre format they found was dead bats laid out in coffins. This may be the most grimly apt representation of the Painted Woolly Bat because without regulation of the trade, it could help to send the species to its grave.

A snapshot of trade

The European Journal of Wildlife Research published the study on 9 July. Authored by members of the International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Bat Trade Working Group, the paper offers the first comprehensive analysis of ornamental trade in a bat species. However, researchers have been voicing concerns about the bat curio trade since at least 2015.

The study’s focus species is Kerivoula picta, otherwise known as the Painted Woolly Bat. A small, solitary species with striking orange and black colouring, the bat lives in parts of South, East, and Southeast Asia. Like most bats, it only produces one offspring at a time, meaning the species is slow-growing and vulnerable to pressures, such as exploitation.

The researchers used data mining and manual searches to find ornamental bats on offer to US consumers on Amazon, Etsy, and eBay, between October and December 2022, before honing in on the Painted Woolly Bat.

They found 856 dead bat décor listings on the e-commerce platforms across the three-month period. Of these, 215 listings involved Painted Woolly Bats, which together amounted to at least 284 individual bats. US sellers accounted for 62 percent of the total dead bat listings, with vendors across some 30 states in all.

As Nistara Randhawa, co-lead on the paper and UC Davis data scientist and epidemiologist, stressed:

These bats are not from the United States, but they’re being sourced from across Asia and then brought here and used as décor.

The authors said that it was impossible to be exact in their count of individual bats for sale. The reasons for this included that sellers may have replenished stocks in between researchers’ searches of the sites and that the number of bats involved in listings was generally “unknowable.” They emphasised that the count undoubtedly “vastly underrepresents the volume of trade.”

Joanna Coleman, assistant professor at CUNY-Queens College and co-lead on the paper, commented:

We’re talking about 284 distinct individuals found over just a three-month period. That doesn’t include all the others sold on websites and physical shops year-round across the world.

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Trade may be devastating

The IUCN Red List assessed the Painted Woolly Bat as Near Threatened in 2019 because its population was suspected to have declined globally by around 25 percent over the preceding 15 years. The assessment pointed to hunting of the species to feed the demand for souvenirs and ornaments as a leading cause of its population decline and predicted further trade-related decreases in the coming years.

However, there is a lack of comprehensive population data available for the bat, the study highlighted. Indeed, although the Painted Woolly Bat is considered to be uncommon, it appears to be unknown whether this reflects the species’ rarity or just inadequate surveying of it, according to the Red List assessment.

Nonetheless, considering that these “bats are quite scarce on landscapes,” Coleman said the authors are concerned “hunters might be systematically going out and removing every individual they see.”

Just as the overall population picture for the species is unclear, so too is the scale of trade in their lives. Dr Chris R. Shepherd, executive director of Monitor Conservation Research Society and co-author of the paper, tells The 4 Percent:

The actual scale of the trade, and the damage it has done to the overall population of this species is unknown. However, given the species is already threatened by habitat loss and possibly other issues, trade may be devastating.

This situation, whereby no-one really knows enough about the status of a species or the scale of trade in their lives to understand the impact of exploitation, is not exclusive to the Painted Woolly Bat. It’s played out with countless species across the world, due to inadequate regulation.

Shepherd says that an absence of regulation is particularly common for trade in lesser known species. "It is these species that often are most threatened and in need of immediate protection," he warns.

Regulation needed

In theory, the Painted Woolly Bat does enjoy certain protections. Hunting the bat is effectively illegal across most of its range due to national laws and provisions, according to the study. This means that many of the curio trades are “likely illegal” too, the authors said.

But the origin of bats in the listings, meaning where they were hunted, was entirely unclear, according to the researchers. This is linked to the fact that international trade in the species is not currently regulated. In other words, this potentially devastating trade is presently free to operate in the dark.

The situation empowers sellers to make unsubstantiated claims to attract buyers, such as characterising bat curios as ethically and sustainably sourced. Some sellers, for instance, claimed that bats in their listings were bred in captivity, despite captive breeding of insectivorous bats, such as the Painted Woolly Bat, being unfeasible, the authors said.

They stressed that “bat farms are nonexistent,” meaning “these bats were hunted.”

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To bring some oversight to the trade, the authors recommended that the Painted Woolly Bat be included in the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES).

CITES is the treaty body tasked with protecting the species under its watch from overexploitation in global trade. It currently regulates international trade in some 40,900 wild species of threatened plants and animals,

The CITES regulatory system contains numerous inadequacies and is ripe for reform itself, as I reported in The Revelator earlier this year. However, it is the principal way for cross-border trade in species to be subject to at least some monitoring and controls.

"Putting in place measures to prevent the trade in importing countries, such as the US, is also critical," says Shepherd. To this end, Monitor Conservation Research Society teamed up with the Center for Biological Diversity in May to file a legal petition. It called on US officials to list the Painted Woolly Bat as threatened or endangered under the country’s Endangered Species Act, which would lead to prohibitions on trade in the species.

At the time, Dianne DuBois, a staff scientist at the Center, said:

Painted Woolly Bats should be flying free in their native forests, not nailed to a wall in the United States.

Likewise, the study stressed that though traditional practice within many cultures, including among Indigenous Peoples, involves “harvesting wildlife for ornamental uses,” the trading of bats to sell them online and elsewhere “exemplifies the modern commodification of wildlife,” not cultural use.

“We refute any assertion that the online bat trade is ethical,” the authors wrote.

Let the bats be

Exploitation of wild species is among the top threats to biodiversity, according to various reports and studies. Trade-related harms have ramifications beyond individual species’ survival because living organisms do not exist in a vacuum. Speaking about why protecting bats is important, Randhawa said:

Bat populations are declining worldwide, and K. picta is but one of the many unique bat species affected by ongoing global biodiversity loss.

They are incredibly important to protect, not least because of the vital ecosystem services bats provide.

The ecosystem services provided by bats include seed dispersal and pollination. Bats also contribute to disease control, by preying on organisms like mosquitos.

On the other hand, some wild animals, including bats, harbour zoonotic diseases. These are diseases that can be transmitted between humans and other animals. The wildlife trade increases the risk of zoonotic disease spread, the study highlighted. This is because the trade necessarily involves people and wildlife being in very close proximity with each other. Moreover, it subjects wild individuals to stressful situations where they may be more likely to shed pathogens.

Relatedly, other research published in April found that bat diversity is key to limiting the spread of zoonotic diseases like coronaviruses, meaning it’s beneficial for human health if the flying mammals are left to thrive undisturbed. 

Of the bat species assessed by the IUCN Red List, around a third are endangered or of unknown conservation status, due to a lack of data. Considering this and the host of worsening threats they face, bats could do with some relief.

Safeguarding them from unsustainable trade would allay some pressure from one of the key threats they are grappling with, namely exploitation. Without controls on trade, the ornaments displaying their tiny bodies in coffins could turn out to be harbingers of the grim fate that awaits species like the Painted Woolly Bat.

In a change to my usual wildlife-focused posts, here is a story about the Gaza solidarity student protests and their connections to climate activism. Although this content isn’t a typical offering from The 4 Percent, it does connect to the newsletter’s central focus, as war inflicts great harm on wild species too, due to the environmental damage it causes and other factors.

Campus protests began spreading around the world in April as students rose in solidarity with the people of Gaza. Columbia University started the wave of direct action, through which students aimed to compel their universities to divest and disassociate from industries and institutions linked to Israel’s actions in Gaza.

More than 38,000 people have been killed in Israel’s military assault on the strip since October last year, according to the latest figures from Gaza’s Health Ministry. The now nine-months-long offensive began after over 1,100 people were killed in a Hamas attack on Israel.

As Al Jazeera reported, Israel has launched five major wars on Gaza since 2005. This is when it technically withdrew from the strip after occupying the area, along with the West Bank and East Jerusalem, in 1967. Since 2007, Israel has imposed a blockade on the strip, however, which many argue amounts to a continued occupation of Gaza.

These occupations followed the violent expulsion of some 750,000 Palestinians from their homeland in 1948 during the establishment of Israel in historic Palestine.

Of Israel’s five major wars on Gaza, the current onslaught is by far the most deadly. According to the Gaza Government Media Office, the death toll included over 15,000 children as of mid-June.

A recent paper published in The Lancet estimated that the death toll in the strip could rise to 186,000 people or more. This figure takes indirect war-related deaths that may occur in the coming months and years into account. The paper explained:

The total death toll is expected to be large given the intensity of this conflict; destroyed health-care infrastructure; severe shortages of food, water, and shelter; the population's inability to flee to safe places; and the loss of funding to UNRWA, one of the very few humanitarian organisations still active in the Gaza Strip.

The death toll estimation was published just days before UN experts declared that famine had taken hold across the strip due to Israel’s “intentional and targeted starvation campaign against the Palestinian people.”

When student protests spread across campuses in solidarity with Gaza amid the onslaught, many universities responded militantly. This included Columbia University, where students faced suspensions, arrests, and police raids.

As Middle East Monitor recently highlighted, Thomas Reuters Foundation reports that disciplinary action by some US academic institutions against students involved in the protests appears to be ongoing. Meanwhile, several campus protests in the UK have endured for months, with students fighting legal battles to continue their encampments, as the Guardian reported on 7 July.

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The use of draconian measures by academic institutions was a gift to “enemies of a liveable climate,” said End Climate Silence founder Genevieve Guenther in May, who pulled out of a keynote speech at a Columbia symposium due to the university’s response to the protests.

Similarly, alumni of Columbia’s Climate School argued that the crackdown on dissent “pours fuel on the flames of a burning planet,” when announcing a boycott of the institution in an open letter in April.

These assertions point to the fact that though the Gaza solidarity and climate action movements are distinct, they are interconnected. For one thing, Columbia’s “authoritarian, militarized actions” against students moved the world closer to “universally criminalizing direct action,” Guenther wrote on X. She argued that the crackdowns benefited fossil fuel interests and authorities aligned with them by helping to ‘normalize’ repression of activism, which is critical in the fight for climate action.

Like Gaza solidarity student protestors, climate activists in many countries have faced draconian crackdowns. Indeed, the criminalization of environment-related protest is now so widespread, it is a global phenomenon, according to Mary Lawlor, the UN special rapporteur on human rights defenders. She told the Guardian:

Smearing defenders as lawbreakers or anti-development distracts from the cause and changes the narrative … What’s clear is that states learn from each other.

In their open letter, Columbia’s Climate School alumni pointed to another way that war and the climate crisis are “deeply intertwined,” namely that militarism is responsible for immense carbon emissions and ecological devastation. There are connections between war and food sovereignty struggles too, which is why some organizations’ statements expressing solidarity with Palestinians amid Israel’s assault have spotlighted food security.

The Arab Group for the Protection of Nature (APN) says Israel’s occupation of Palestine has involved systematic attacks on its agricultural sector, such as the uprooting of trees, and on its water and energy production. This impacts Palestine’s food production and climate vulnerability, APN told The 4 Percent, with land access restrictions due to the “Apartheid wall, settlements, military zones, and buffer zones” further undermining Palestinians’ food sovereignty.

For these reasons, APN says “it's crucial to recognize the significance of student movements and antiwar efforts in advocating for food sovereignty as a means of liberation and resistance.”

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The connections between anti-war efforts and other movements are wider still, according to activist and artist, Rafeef Ziadah. In April, she told Progressive International that “Palestine is central to anti-colonial, anti-racist and anti-imperialist struggles worldwide.”

Similarly, environmental activist and author, Nnimmo Bassey, says “ongoing wars emerge from many roots — racism, inequality, xenophobia, colonialism and others,” adding that “unity between different social movements does help to tackle the hydra headed monster.”

 “Solidarity always builds strength, consolidates resolve and empowers resistance to injustices,” Bassey tells The 4 Percent.

Such unity has been evident in the Gaza solidarity campus protests, with environmental defenders and others backing students in word and deed. As Jacobin noted, there were apparent efforts to weaponize shows of unity against protestors, by labelling non-student participants as ‘outside agitators’. In Columbia’s case, claims that the protest had been infiltrated were used as justification for a police raid, the Intercept reported.

This ‘outside agitator’ charge is not new, according to Campaign Against Arms Trade’s Emily Apple. For instance, she recalls that UK police regularly claimed the Climate Camp protests, which took place in the mid-2000s, had been infiltrated by known violent anarchists. The aim was to “divide the protesters and set the scene for an authoritarian state response,” she says.

This only reinforces the importance of collective solidarity, which is a powerful weapon “in fighting for social change,” Apple argues. It strengthens justice seekers’ resistance to ‘divide and rule’ traps and helps to “build truly intersectional movements with the power to both agitate and create credible alternatives,” she says.

For Bassey, the way forward for movements involves continually learning the roots of the crises they are tackling and denouncing “the narratives that enable repression”, while “at all times building and reinforcing the voices and forces of unity.”

“Movements have to learn that one person’s fight is everybody’s fight,” he says.

Update: This story was updated on 15 July at 1.50pm to include further details on the timeline of Israel’s occupation of different parts of Palestine, which replace a now deleted reference to a 50-year-long occupation.

A debate over the conservation status of the long-tailed macaque has raged in recent years, triggered by an International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) Red List assessment that found the species to be endangered.

An IUCN committee delivered a decision on the issue on 24 June, confirming that existing evidence suggests the species does have this dire conservation status.

The ruling came after recent analysis indicated that the overall population of long-tailed macaques in their native range may have dropped by 80 percent in the last few decades.

A heavily exploited species

The conservation status of long-tailed macaques (Macaca fascicularis) garnered attention in 2022 when the IUCN Red List reassessed the species and concluded that it is endangered. According to the evaluation, the destruction and degradation of the species’ habitat, along with persecution, have contributed to its predicament. Liberal exploitation of the non-human primate, including for use in medical research, has also played a significant role, it said.

As I previously reported in The Ecologist, long-tailed macaques are “the most heavily exploited mammals on Earth among species protected in global trade, in terms of sales of live individuals.” A review article published in Frontiers in Conservation Science on 19 June pointed to the scale of exploitation. It highlighted that over 287,000 live individuals were traded internationally between 2015 and 2021.

The authors sourced these figures from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), which is the treaty body that regulates global trade in threatened wild animals and plants.

Additionally, countries reported hundreds of thousands of other long-tailed macaque trades across those same years, such as specimens like blood and tissue.

Industry challenges

The US’ National Association for Biomedical Research (NABR) formally challenged the Red List assessment of the long-tailed macaque in 2023. Such challenges are possible for all Red List assessments, with the IUCN Red List Standards and Petitions Committee ultimately responsible for settling any disputes.

Among other criticisms, NABR contended that the long-tailed macaque’s assessment failed to reach “objective scientific conclusions” and didn’t have the evidence to back up its classification of the primate as endangered.

The European Animal Research Association’s (EARA) executive director, Kirk Leech, similarly criticised the assessment, arguing that it contained mistatements, mischaracterisations, and subjective views. “This is emotion, masquerading as conservation, subjectivity rather than science,” he told me last year.

Leech spoke at a CITES Animals Committee meeting in 2023 to express EARA’s opposition to a US proposal for a review of trade in long-tailed macaques reportedly produced in captivity.

Most globally traded macaques are alleged to be born or bred in captivity. However, concerns have long circulated about wild-caught individuals being laundered through captive-breeding operations and overexploitation of wild populations for use as breeding stock in the facilities.

Given such concerns, along with high levels of trade in the primate and its endangered conservation status, the proposed CITES review aimed to scrutinise trade in long-tailed macaques from captive sources.

A high profile case hit the headlines in 2022 that cast some light on the issue. That year, US authorities indicted eight individuals who they claimed were involved in a monkey smuggling ring, whereby wild long-tailed macaques were allegedly traded from Cambodia to the US under the pretense that they were bred in captivity.

As Radio Free Asia reported, a jury acquitted one of those charged in March, Cambodian forestry official Kry Masphal. The seven other individuals, which includes another Cambodian official and six people connected to the firm Vanny Bio Research, are currently regarded as fugitives under US law.

The aforementioned review article, titled Global wildlife trade and trafficking contribute to the world’s nonhuman primate conservation crisis, said the macaque smuggling ring case:

suggests that trafficking within the context of legal trade may be more widespread than previously acknowledged.

Probe goes ahead

As scientists have highlighted, the laundering of wild individuals into supply chains of captive-bred primates risks undermining research. Considering this, it would be reasonable to expect the biomedical industry to support CITES’ review of trade, as the probe could help to ensure that facilities claiming to breed long-tailed macaques are acting legitimately.

Asked why EARA instead opposed the proposal, Leech stressed that reviews of trade can take years to complete. They involve “a lot of back-and-forth” between CITES and the countries concerned, he said, with the latter having to provide information like sustainability assessments and population surveys to demonstrate the conservation status of the species. “We are not sure that this review will assist medical research,” stated Leech.

When I asked what the industry itself does to ensure that it sources legitimately captive-bred macaques, the EARA executive director said the European scientific community imports most primates from accredited breeding facilities in Africa.

Leech also pointed to a changed “international landscape” for long-tailed macaque supply chains due to increased demand and changes to China’s role in the trade post-Covid, which he said had led to a shortage of primates for research.

Despite EARA’s opposition to the probe, CITES parties, meaning signatory countries, ultimately decided that scrutiny was necessary. They moved forward with a review of trade in long-tailed macaques reportedly produced in captivity from the countries Cambodia, Indonesia, Vietnam, and the Philippines.

Initial findings from the review are due to be discussed at a CITES Animals Committee meeting in July.

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IUCN decision

The IUCN Red List Standards and Petitions Committee delivered its ruling on NABR’s challenge to the 2022 Red List assessment on 24 June. Contrary to the industry body’s assertions about the assessment lacking supportive evidence, the committee found that existing information does appear to indicate the long-tailed macaque is endangered. In relation to projected decreases in the species’ population, it said:

the available information appears to support suspected declines of at least 50% over the next three generations

The Red List assessment identified suspected declines of 40 percent over the last three generations and at least 50 percent in the next three generations. The projected declines were the basis for the species’ endangered classification.

However, the committee found that the assessment lacked “clear organization” of the available information and included emotive language that was inappropriate for the Red List. For these reasons and others, the committee requested a do-over of it, with the reassessment due in eight months’ time.

The long-tailed macaque’s endangered classification will remain in place until then, at which time the reassessment will be reviewed by the committee and the primate’s Red List category will be updated accordingly.

NABR welcomed the reassessment. Its president, Matthew R. Bailey, said:

NABR is pleased that the IUCN will reassess its designation of long-tailed macaques as ‘Endangered’.

The IUCN’s decision to uplist long tailed macaques to ‘Endangered’ in 2022 was not justified, nor supported by scientific information.

Action for Primates also responded to the committee’s decision. On behalf of the nonprofit, co-founder Sarah Kite commented:

We welcome this ruling by the IUCN, which has maintained the Endangered conservation status of the long-tailed macaque.

Rather than expressing concern for the serious negative impact their activities have had on wild populations, the research and toxicity testing industry is trying to downgrade the conservation status in order to obtain the monkeys as readily and cheaply as possible.

New research

The committee instructed the Red List Assessor who will carry out the reassessment to include newly available information and “information that contradicts the assessment conclusions” in their analysis.

This would presumably include a 2023 study that found long-tailed macaques to be among four “hyperabundant” species in Southeast Asian forested areas around palm oil plantations. It’s important to note, however, that this research grouped the long-tailed macaque with another species, the pig-tailed macaque, in its density estimates. Additionally, in some instances where the study conveyed data on the species separately, such as in bar charts showing the results of 117 published camera trapping studies, long-tailed macaques appeared to have distinctly low estimated abundances.

I reached out to various authors of the paper about their findings but did not receive a response.

Moreover, conservation biologist and primatologist Nadine Ruppert, who was not involved in the research, told Mongabay that overall populations of all four species spotlighted in the paper – long-tailed macaques, pig-tailed macaques, wild boar, and bearded pigs – are struggling due to the various threats they face.

NABR also commissioned an assessment of the long-tailed macaque’s conservation status, with the findings published in a commentary paper in the American Journal of Primatology in December 2023. This review challenged the idea that the primate is at risk of extinction and found evidence “to support a major decline in the abundance of long-tailed macaques” to be lacking.

Nevertheless, the paper stressed that the lack of data does not mean that macaques have not declined, only that “the extent of any decline or increase in abundance remains unknown.”

The long-tailed macaque is a synanthropic species, meaning it can live in close proximity to people and in landscapes altered by human behaviour.

Population assessments for synanthropic species like the long-tailed macaque can involve overestimations, as the 2022 Red List assessment highlighted. This is because the species’ visibility in places where humans are can make them seem more abundant than they are in reality. Indeed, accurately estimating populations of any free-ranging wild species can be difficult, particularly when aiming to do so in the least intrusive ways.

Considering these issues, a group of 37 researchers set about developing a new scientific model to estimate the highest likely populations of large-bodied and terrestrial, or semi-terrestrial, native wild animals who live in groups. To test whether their approach worked, the researchers applied it to the long-tailed macaque.

Adding to the body of new information available since the 2022 Red List assessment, Science Advances published the findings on 24 May.

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Drastic reductions

As the researchers explained, the model essentially combines scientific observations with citizen science and can be applied to many species. It utilises species-specific information, such as behaviour and habitat preference, alongside data sources, such as camera traps, direct sightings, and transect surveys, to determine population estimates.

When applied to long-tailed macaques, the model accurately reflected published data on populations in two protected areas, one in Cambodia and the other in Vietnam.

Overall, the researchers estimated a global population of approximately one million long-tailed macaques. This points to an 80 percent reduction in the macaques’ population over the last 35 years compared to a prior assessment that put their global numbers at five million individuals around 1990.

If accurate, this means the species is in even worse shape than the 2022 Red List assessment indicated.

The model’s estimate is for the long-tailed macaque’s native range in Southeast Asia, with introduced populations living in the wild elsewhere, such as in Mauritius, which were not included in the tally. 

True number could be lower

The analysis comes with some caveats. The researchers highlighted, for instance, that they sourced records about the presence of long-tailed macaques from various channels, including citizen science platforms, which “lack expert verification.” They also said the accuracy of estimates may differ between countries, from high to lower confidence, due to where the model derived its information from. The included data primarily came from Cambodia, Malaysia, Laos, and Vietnam.

However, they said the model would likely produce overestimates rather than underestimates, due to it being calibrated to a highly studied protected area, the Keo Seima Wildlife Sanctuary (KSWS) in Cambodia, where macaque populations are better safeguarded. In other words, the estimates may represent a best case scenario for long-tailed macaques.

In its ruling, the IUCN Red List Standards and Petitions Committee also highlighted that results of a 2022 survey of KSWS’ long-tailed macaque population have emerged since the last Red List assessment.

The committee pointed out that the 2022 survey result “increases the recent population decline trend” in KSWS, with the survey report highlighting that the primate’s population was down by 49-55 percent in the 12 years up to that year. The committee said adding this information into the reassessment would “strengthen support” for the assessment outcome.

Safeguarding measures

Action for Primates’ Kite says that concerns about the long-tailed macaque’s conservation status have been increasing for several years. Pointing to the value of IUCN assessments in protecting imperiled species, she adds:

The greater the conservation status, the more measures and policies will be put in place to try to secure the future of the species from over-exploitation.

There is no shortage of ideas about how to better safeguard long-tailed macaques and other primates from overexploitation in recently published papers.

The primate trade review article called for an end to the use of wild-caught primates by the biomedical industry and increased oversight of breeding farms. The paper further urged the industry to “actively promote the use of alternatives” to primate testing. Alternatives include research and testing involving human cells and data rather than non-human animals.

Such alternatives are gaining traction as a way forward on both ethical and public health grounds. This is because although testing on animals is deeply entrenched in the research industry, its results frequently fail to translate to humans, according to Pandora Pound, research director at Safer Medicines Trust. In her 2023 book RAT TRAP: The capture of medicine by animal research and how to break free, the researcher highlighted:

A shocking ninety per cent of all experimental drugs fail in human trials despite having first passed tests in animals, and in many fields the statistics are even worse.

Securing primates’ future

Another paper titled Perspectives on Conservation Impacts of the Global Primate Trade was published in the International Journal of Primatology in May. It also offered recommendations, such as improved documenting of the use of wild-caught primates in restocking breeding farms and more transparency in trade overall. It further suggested that one to five percent of research grant funding for experiments involving primates be put towards conservation of the utilised species.

The paper highlighted that trade in primates, whether it be for research, meat consumption, the pet trade, or traditional medicine, can pose a public health risk, including by diseases being spread through supply chains.

It also stressed that exploitation can impact the ecosystems that primates are removed from, with knock on effects for the climate too. Long-tailed macaques and other primates fulfil important ecological functions, including through their seed dispersal and roles as both predator and prey.

In some cases, predation by long-tailed macaques can be detrimental to other species. For instance, the introduced population living in Mauritius, which is also heavily exploited, is among the predators of the endangered Mauritian kestrel. Conservation efforts can, however, help to mitigate these issues, such as the provision of predator-proof nesting boxes.

Above all, overexploitation of primates puts the species themselves at risk, the perspectives paper said. It warned:

It is only by growing the free-ranging populations and protecting their natural habitats that we can ensure that primate species will survive past the end of this century.

A further months-long round of badger killing began in England on 1 June. Less than a week into the cull, controversy hit. Documents acquired through Freedom of Information (FOI) requests revealed that Natural England approved the cull licences against the advice of its own Director of Science.

The revelations have augmented long-standing concerns that the badger cull is a politically-driven policy, rather than being grounded in sound science. Born Free’s head of policy, Mark Jones, said:

By choosing to ignore the advice of its own Director of Science, those charged with issuing licences at Natural England have confirmed what we have always argued – that the mass slaughter of badgers is being used as a political tool to appease elements within the farming industry, rather than having a sound scientific basis.

Protected and persecuted

Badgers are a protected species in the UK. Despite this, they are subject to extensive legal and illegal persecution in the country.

In England, badgers have been killed as part of a bovine tuberculosis (bTB) policy since 2013. The cull has dramatically expanded over the years, including into the country’s nature reserves.

The policy is based on the hotly contested premise that killing badgers can help to lower bTB in cows and has been controversial since its inception. Amid enduring opposition, the government announced a phase-out of the existing cull in 2021, with the start of 2026 pinpointed as an end date.

New bTB policy proposals for 2026 onwards are currently under consultation, which include plans for continued culling.

In February, Natural England signalled that it was considering authorising further supplementary cull licenses in several counties. Supplementary culls take place in areas that have previously been subject to four-year-long ‘intensive’ culling.

Natural England is both the government’s nature conservation advisor and the wildlife licensing authority.

The documents acquired through FOI requests confirmed that the body ultimately authorised 26 supplementary cull licences for 2024. 17 of these were for areas that had existing supplementary culling licences and nine were for areas starting supplementary culls for the first time.

Under the government’s current policy, supplementary culls typically run for more than one year, although they have to be authorised annually.

Given that Natural England has been licensing culls for over a decade now – and the government plans for it to continue doing so up to January 2026 – these approvals are not particularly surprising.

However, the documents show that the body’s Director of Science, Dr Peter Brotherton, advised Natural England against approving these culls – but his advice wasn’t heeded.

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Culls are not justified

Natural England sought advice from Brotherton when considering whether to grant the licences. His conclusions were based on his own assessment of the evidential basis for issuing licences and input from Natural England’s specialist evidence review team, which Brotherton commissioned to do an appraisal of evidence relevant to the licensing decision.

Brotherton advised Natural England that authorisation of supplementary culls in 2024 would not be justified. He argued that the disease reduction benefits of steps already taken would likely be felt for years to come and pointed to alternative measures, such as badger vaccination, alongside continued cow-focused interventions, as the way to control bTB moving forward.

After seeing Brotherton’s conclusions, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra) wrote to Natural England to offer its own assessment. It struck a different tone, arguing that abrupt changes to the current policy, meaning continued intensive and supplementary culling up to January 2026, would “seriously undermine our ability to engage constructively with the [farming] industry on future disease control interventions,” such as badger vaccination.

The department also said that badger vaccination was not yet ready to scale up.

Stop culling immediately

Ultimately, Natural England proceeded with licensing the culls, against the advice of its own Director of Science. The body said this was partly because it could not conclude that alternative measures will be “operationally ready to maintain the reduced disease risk at the scale required.”

Approached for comment, a Defra spokesperson said:

Bovine TB is one of the most difficult and intractable animal health challenges the livestock sector in England faces today, causing considerable trauma for farmers and costing taxpayers over £100 million every year.

We have followed a holistic approach with badger vaccination, improved cattle testing, helping farmers improve biosecurity, and working towards deployment of a cattle vaccine, alongside the current badger control policy.

However, conservation ecologist Tom Langton, who obtained the documents in question, told the Guardian:

All badger culling should stop immediately until the chaos of wasted public funds and cruel badger killing methods are properly investigated.

Similarly, the Badger Trust called on Natural England to “stop this needless badger cull immediately” in a letter to the body following the revelations.

It’s not the badgers

Langton teamed up with Born Free’s Jones, who is a veterinarian, and veterinarian Iain McGill, to produce an in-depth study on bTB and the badger cull in 2022. It found that the most likely explanation for a reduction in bTB rates on farms over the last decade or so is an intensification of cow-focused measures, such as subjecting them to more bTB testing. The study found no evidence that badger killing has contributed to declines in the disease.

For this reason, Langton takes issue with the idea that widespread badger vaccination is necessary as an alternative measure to killing the wild animals. He tells The 4 Percent:

If badger culling doesn’t work, then there’s no reason why badger vaccination should work, because it’s not the badgers.

Nonetheless, Defra insists that badger culling is key to tackling bTB in cows. In the consultation document for its new policy proposals, the department’s secretary of state, Steve Barclay, told prospective consultees that the cull has been a “major element” of successful bTB reductions.

Citing a study from Defra’s Animal and Plant Health Agency, he wrote in a foreword:

The latest evidence from the first 52 cull areas shows that rates of bovine TB breakdowns in cattle are down on average by 56% after four years of culling.

However, this does not fully reflect the findings of the study in question, as Brotherton pointed out.

In his advice to Natural England, the Director of Science expressed disappointment that this study has been characterised as offering evidence that badger culling is responsible for a 56 percent reduction in bTB incidence. In reality, he said:

the study shows the overall impact of implementing a range of bTB control measures, not culling alone. Further research to establish the relative disease reduction contributions of the different control measures is needed.

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Another ‘must’ for Defra

In his foreword for the consultation, Barclay asserted that badger killing “must continue'“ in the future approach for tackling bTB in cows.

Conspicuous by its absence from Barclay’s comments is another ‘must’ for the government, namely that it must protect badgers due to its obligations under national law and the Bern Convention, an international agreement.

Badgers are a protected species under the Bern Convention and as a signatory, the UK has certain legal commitments. When it comes to lethal exploitation of badgers, such as the cull, this means that the government must not devise or take measures capable of causing serious disturbance to, or the local disappearance of, their populations.

Critics have regularly warned of the conservation impacts of the cull, for badgers and other species. Indeed, three nonprofits – Born Free, the Badger Trust, and Eurogroup for Animals – made a complaint to the Bureau of the Bern Convention in 2019, arguing that the cull policy risked local extinctions and a national population decline.

Defra insists that Natural England monitors the cull closely to ensure that local extinction is avoided.

The Bureau of the Bern Convention has put the complaint on stand-by, pending what direction the government ultimately takes with its new bTB strategy.

The government’s proposals are now effectively on hold, due to an upcoming general election. As outlined in the consultation document, Defra’s proposed way forward includes plans for ‘targeted’ badger killing in ‘cluster’ areas where “evidence suggests badgers are a part of the problem in the spread of disease,” followed by vaccination of remaining badgers.

Although the plans could change based on consultation responses, they currently do not set any limits to the number of clusters that may be licensed to kill badgers in any given year, nor do they point to a limit on the percentage of badger populations that can be killed in clusters. 

Natural England usually sets both minimum and maximum kill thresholds for cull areas. These are meant to ensure that 70 percent of the targeted badger populations are killed, while leaving enough badgers standing to ensure survival of the population.

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Used as a scapegoat for far too long

As Langton has pointed out, the new plans build on a trial that took place in Cumbria, which differed to culls elsewhere in that there was no cap on the number of badgers that Cumbria could kill.

Langton has described Cumbria’s strategy as “badger scorched earth,” adding that the plan there was to “remove them completely and that is what they did.”

Defra says its intention has always been to lower badger populations in culls, not to remove them entirely, and that this is also the case for the new proposed policy.

However, the cull policy has so far killed more than 230,000 badgers in England, which amounts to over half of the UK’s entire population, according to the most optimistic total population estimates.

Moreover, the government has permitted this large-scale persecution of a protected species without any scientific certainty that the killing serves its purported purpose. Indeed, there is ample and mounting evidence to the contrary, which points to cow-focused measures as the key to tackling bTB.

Considering all this, any attempt by an elected government after the election to continue down the path of badger culling will likely meet with substantial public and legal opposition.

After more than a decade of relentless killing, many believe, as Born Free’s Jones put it, that “badgers have been used as a scapegoat” for far too long.

On 3 June, South Africa’s Supreme Court of Appeal (SCA) dismissed Shell’s appeal against a Makhanda High Court ruling that stopped it from exploring for fossil fuels along the country’s Wild Coast.

However, the ruling is a bittersweet victory for Wild Coast communities, who have fought a years-long battle to stop the exploration. While the SCA upheld the high court judgement, it suspended one crucial aspect of it, which could put fossil fuel exploration along the pristine Wild Coast back on the table.

A victory against capitalist extraction

The SCA delivered its ruling after Shell and other parties appealed a 2022 ruling from the Makhanda High Court in a case brought by Wild Coast communities and supporting organisations in 2021. The appellants were Shell, the Minister of Mineral Resources and Energy, Impact Africa, and BG International, a wholly owned subsidiary of Shell.

The communities’ legal action sought a review of the Department of Mineral Resources and Energy’s (DMRE) decision to grant an exploration license to Shell and Impact Africa. The latter is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the UK’s Impact Oil & Gas.

The exploration license permitted the companies to carry out seismic testing along the Wild Coast, which involves repeatedly blasting the ocean with sound pulses over extensive periods to determine whether fossil fuels are present.

There are lots of unknowns about the impact of seismic testing on marine ecosystems, due to a lack of research. But available studies point to risks of harm for various ocean-dwelling lifeforms, including some mammals, turtles, fishes, crustaceans, mollusks, and organisms like plankton, which are integral to oceanic food webs.

Moreover, Ricky Stone, a Cullinan & Associates attorney who is involved in the case, has argued:

Seismic blasting poses an immediate threat to South Africa’s rich marine life, but the eventual extraction and use of oil and gas likely to follow such exploration will have even more profound impacts. 

The case was brought by multiple parties, including Wild Coast communities and small-scale fishers, along with nonprofits Sustaining the Wild Coast and All Rise Attorneys for Climate and the Environment, which were represented by the Legal Resources Centre and Richard Spoor Incorporated. Natural Justice and Greenpeace Africa also joined the case, represented by Cullinan & Associates.

They argued that a review of the exploration license was necessary for several reasons, such as a lack of consultation with affected communities and insufficient consideration given to the potential harms that the exploration could cause to people, their rights, and wildlife.

On 1 September 2022, the Makhanda High Court found in favour of the communities, ruling that the exploration right was granted unlawfully. Seen as a major victory, that judgement set aside the companies’ exploration right.

At the time, Amadiba Crisis Committee’s Nonhle Mbuthuma said:

This victory is not just a victory for Wild Coast communities and making our voices heard. This is a victory against capitalist extraction and destruction of our future. This victory is not just about protecting the ocean upon which rural coastal communities depend. This is about protecting the planet and the whole of humanity.

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Trumping the rights of people and wildlife

The hearing for the appeal of the Makhanda High Court judgement took place on 17 May. Delivering its ruling on 3 June, the SCA agreed that the exploration right was granted unlawfully. As such, it dismissed the appeal brought by DMRE and the fossil fuel companies.

But the court found the judgement to be lacking in its consideration of “just and equitable relief.” It described the setting aside of the exploration right as ‘harsh’ and said this “can and should be ameliorated.”

The court chose to remedy the situation by suspending the setting aside of the exploration right and its subsequent renewals, pending the outcome of an application for a further renewal of the right.

DMRE originally granted the exploration right to Impact Africa in 2014, with Shell acquiring an interest in the exploration through a farm-out transaction in 2021. The South African government has twice renewed the right since 2014.

In July 2023, the companies applied to renew the right for a third time. The court said that a public participation process should be “part and parcel of a proper consideration” of this renewal to “cure the identified defects in the process already undertaken.”

As Reuters reported, a Shell spokesperson said it welcomed the court’s direction on the exploration right and respected its decision to dismiss the appeal. Shell is “examining the ruling in detail and considering our next steps,” according to the spokesperson.

Although the court’s decision to dismiss the appeal was welcomed by community members and supporting organisations, its choice to suspend the setting aside of the exploration right was not.

Sustaining the Wild Coast’s Sinegugu Zukulu, who recently won the Goldman Environmental Prize along with Mbuthuma, commented:

This judgment trumps the constitutional environmental rights of people to a safe and healthy environment. It disregards the rights of current and future generations to a climate crisis-free life. It pushes the profiteering by the few over the majority. It overlooks the rights of marine life.

Natural Justice’s Melissa Groenink-Groves also said:

It is a peculiar decision of the Supreme Court of Appeal. Firstly, it reaffirms that the decisions to grant the Exploration Right and the renewals were procedurally unfair and failed to take into account numerous important factors.

Yet, it finds that these deficiencies can be cured through a new renewal decision, a decade later, by a Department whose Minister has already “nailed his colours to Shell’s mast”. 

The communities and supporting organisations are considering whether to appeal to the Constitutional Court, which is the country’s highest court.

In comments to Reuters, Cullinan & Associates’ Stone warned “if the right is renewed, then we're back to square one.”

Small island states secured an ocean-related climate win on 21 May. Thanks to a request lodged by the Commission of Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law (COSIS), a global maritime court laid out what countries are legally required to do to protect the ocean from the climate crisis.

As Verfassungsblog reported, the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) determined that human-caused greenhouse gas emissions count as ocean pollutants. It further said that countries are obliged “to take all necessary measures to prevent, reduce, and control marine pollution” from these emissions.

This is because states that are party to the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) are required to tackle pollution of the ocean under the provisions of the treaty. UNCLOS has 169 state parties and established ITLOS to interpret and uphold its rules.

The climate crisis poses a real and present danger to marine ecosystems. Indeed, a 2022 study warned that accelerating emissions, which drive global warming, risk bringing about a mass extinction event in the ocean.

Nevertheless, emissions of carbon dioxide and some other greenhouse gases continue to increase.

Holding polluters accountable

In early May, the Scripps Institution of Oceanography revealed the latest record-breaking rise in levels of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Scripps is a department of UC San Diego that records CO2 levels daily at the Mauna Loa Observatory.

The monthly average concentration of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere in March was 4.7 parts per million higher than in March 2023, according to Scripps’ observations. This is the largest increase ever recorded over a 12-month period.

Moreover, a study published on 13 May warned that CO2 levels are currently rising 10 times faster than they have in the last 50,000 years.

A periodic weather event called El Niño played a role in the latest year-over-year rise recorded by Scripps. But as Ralph Keeling pointed out, who is the director of its CO2 program, the primary reason why CO2 levels are increasing is “continued global growth in the consumption of fossil fuels.”

The world’s countries are not equally culpable for emissions from fossil fuel production and consumption. When taking historic emissions into account, richer nations overwhelmingly bear the most responsibility.

In its advisory opinion, ITLOS said that countries with greater resources are expected to do more to tackle emissions pollution than states with less capacity to take action. It also advised that countries’ efforts under the Paris climate agreement do not automatically suffice to satisfy their legal duties under UNCLOS.

Responding to the opinion, Tuvalu’s high commissioner to Fiji, Eselealofa Apinelu, said:

This is a historic moment for small island developing nations in their quest for climate justice; an important first step in holding the major polluters accountable, for the sake of all humankind.

The climate crisis poses a severe risk to Tuvalu and other island nations as it is leading to rising sea levels, which threaten to swallow some of them whole. Island nations are also grappling with extreme coastal weather events, marine biodiversity loss, and other issues.

Although advisory opinions are non-binding, ITLOS’ determination sets precedents for climate legal cases. It may also influence other forthcoming climate-related opinions from international courts and strengthen global climate negotiations. ClientEarth lawyer Lea Main-Klingst commented:

This outcome can be instrumental to push countries most responsible for the climate crisis to ramp up their ambition.

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Unchartered waters

The ocean absorbs some 90 percent of the excess heat in the atmosphere, according to scientists, along with around 25 percent of the carbon emissions we produce each year. In other words, the climate crisis places a heavy burden on the deep blue part of the planet - and those who call it home.

Alongside ocean acidification, global warming is bringing more regular marine heatwaves. In a 2021 report, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change said that the frequency of marine heatwaves has doubled since the 1980s. It further found that they have increased in length and intensity.

Weather events like El Niño also heat up parts of the ocean. The combination of such weather patterns and climate crisis-driven high ocean temperatures is “pushing the world into uncharted waters,” researchers have warned.

Heatwaves can devastate marine-dwelling lifeforms, as illustrated by the enduring global coral bleaching event that has been happening since early 2023. Bleaching occurs when corals evict symbiotic algae from their tissues due to stressors like increased temperatures, which turns them white.

Reef ecosystems support around a quarter of known marine species, while providing people with a buffer against coastal weather extremes.

Cold waters fatal too

Demonstrating the extreme danger that reefs now face from heat stress, the US’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration added three new threat levels to its Coral Reef Watch alert system in December. The highest of the new levels warns of a risk of ‘near complete mortality’, meaning that over 80 percent of corals in the identified area may perish.

As Inside Climate News has reported, marine heatwaves are causing mass die-offs of all kinds of sealife, including fishes, birds, mammals, and plants. In comments to the publication, Ben Noll, a meteorologist at New Zealand’s National Institute of Water & Atmospheric Research, said:

The impact of these warm seas may be difficult to grasp and comprehend, but the undersea world seems to be suffocating.

According to a paper published in April, it’s not only warmer waters that are proving fatal to marine wildlife. The study found that the climate crisis is driving “increasingly intense upwells of cold water from the depths,” due to the impact it has on ocean currents and pressure systems, the Guardian reported. In some instances, these upwellings are killing marine animals as they migrate to evade warming waters in the tropics.

Far-reaching consequences

Wild species play important roles in ecosystems, meaning their loss can have ramifications for the wider environment. As ecologist and author of Wildlife in the Balance, Simon Mustoe, has pointed out, for instance, ammonia from seabird poop combines with other substances to create atmospheric particles that seed clouds, which can help to cool the Earth and create rainfall.

One study also found that corals can benefit greatly from the presence of seabirds, with reef growth rates more than doubling when colonies are close by. This means that when seabirds are their neighbours, corals can bounce back quicker from bleaching events. Again, it’s the seabirds’ poop that offers these benefits, as the nutrients contained in their droppings fertilise corals.

Seabirds are impacted by the climate crisis in a variety of ways and can face mass mortality events in the wake of marine heatwaves.

Mustoe points to the blue whale as another species that contributes to “cooling the planet” by “stirring and fertilising the ocean”. The blue whale’s future is also in jeopardy due to global warming, as polar ice melting may impact its diet and migration.

In his book, Mustoe outlined how the behaviours of countless wild animals – on land and at sea – shape and influence the wider environment. Others have highlighted these synergies too, with a 2023 paper detailing the important role of wild animals in limiting global warming specifically.

Due to these interconnections, Mustoe wrote in his book:

We have to stop thinking about animals and ecosystems as one thing or the other and realise they are one and the same.

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Boot and braces approach needed

Writing on X, earth system scientist Aaron Thierry emphasised that ecosystems respond slowly to climate crisis-driven changes. This means that the impact on nature of climate change that has already occurred “will play out over generations,” he warned.

To limit harms to nature now and in the future, concerted action to reduce emissions is needed, as the ITLOS opinion makes clear.

Tackling other threats to biodiversity is also imperative, as this helps to strengthen species’ resilience in the face of climate shocks. For the ocean’s lifeforms, pollution from sewage, plastics, and other chemicals, pose a grave threat. Disease does too, such as the bird flu that is currently proving fatal to many marine animals.

But the biggest menace to marine life is unsustainable exploitation. In an interview with Mongabay, the renowned oceanographer Sylvia Earle explained:

Life in the sea is in trouble because we’re the most aggressive predators, taking far more than the systems can replenish. And that’s not just harming them — it’s harming us because the ocean and the planet are living systems. It’s held together by every element that has a role to play.

This particular menace has an obvious solution, she said:

We do know what to do now … it’s to show some restraint to stop the killing, start the caring, and watch for good things to happen.

A year ago, I set out on a journey to vigorously report on the legal trade in wildlife. Why? Because this gigantic trade is a relentless driver of the world’s biodiversity crisis.

Figures from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) – the global wildlife trade treaty body – help to illustrate the scale of exploitation.

Its records show that specimens of species like American alligators, tokay geckos, Asian water monitors, brown sea cucumbers, reticulated pythons, queen conch, Red tegu lizards, lake sturgeon, and Black-and-white tegu lizards, along with corals, just to name a few, were traded by the millions from the wild between 2012 and 2021.

Within CITES, specimen is a term used to describe both live individuals and animal-derived products like skins, meats, and blood samples.

In total, countries reported exporting over 68 million specimens from thousands of different animal species across that decade, along with more than 60 million kilos of live or dead animals and their body parts. These numbers are solely for animals sourced from the wild, with many more traded from captivity-based sources.

Countries also report trade using other measures, such as litres and metres, so these figures do not represent the entirety of trade in wild-sourced animals during the period.

Although some transactions under CITES are for purposes like science and conservation, many of the trades relate to commercial industries, such as luxury goods made of exotic leathers, the pet trade and traditional medicine.

CITES currently regulates global trade in some 40,900 species of threatened plants and animals, with the trade in many other wild species falling outside its scope. A 2020 study, for example, analysed online sales of reptiles in the pet trade, finding that three-quarters of the species involved were not covered by CITES.

In other words, the examples here are just the tip of a very big iceberg that appears to be playing a major role in wildlife declines. 

Key driver of wildlife losses

According to a 2019 assessment by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent body established by nation states, direct exploitation of organisms is the second biggest driver of biodiversity loss and change in terrestrial and freshwater environments. In marine ecosystems, it’s the biggest driver.

The Living Planet Index (LPI) – created by WWF and the Zoological Society of London – offers another measure of exploitation’s impact. Its mainstay is a metric that assesses vertebrate species abundance, which indicates that “global wildlife populations have plummeted by 69% on average since 1970.” But the LPI team has also created a Utilised Species Index. This refers to species that are exploited, i.e. ‘used’ by people, either for subsistence purposes or trade, with the latter happening on local, national, and international levels.

The Index for utilised species shows that their populations “declined on average by 50% between 1970 and 2016,” compared to just 3% for non-utilised ones.

Simply put, these findings and other research suggest that although examples of sustainable wildlife trade exist, the commercial exploitation of species is happening at wildly unsustainable levels.

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Poor management

Meaningful oversight of trade is key to ensuring that it doesn’t harm species’ survival. Indeed, the LPI’s Utilised Species Index found that populations of species subject to exploitation “fared better” if they were managed. Yet robust management is lacking in the wildlife trade, including for CITES species.

Take the nine named examples above, starting with the two invertebrates. Both the brown sea cucumber and queen conch are in peril, according to assessments by the International Union for Conservation of Nature and the US’ National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, respectively. The bodies pointed to exploitation as the leading cause of these species’ predicaments.

The other seven named species are vertebrates. Despite this, the LPI only includes data from two of them – the American alligator and lake sturgeon – in its core Index. Why is that important?

As the LPI explains on its website, in order to assess how wildlife populations are faring globally, the Index will include data on any vertebrate species as long as there is “robust population trend data available.” It states:

The LPI includes data for threatened and non-threatened species – if it’s monitored consistently over time, it goes in!

This suggests that populations of the five other named vertebrate species are not ‘monitored consistently over time’, at least not enough to meet the Index’s standards. Indeed, researchers say that a lack of robust data on exploited species’ populations is a widespread issue in trade.

Naturally, muscular oversight of trade is vital to ensure it is sustainable. But good management is also necessary to guarantee that trade is carried out in accordance with the relevant rules and, critically, isn’t being used as a cover for wildlife crime.

As a 2023 paper highlighted, for instance, when researchers tested samples of ostensibly legal caviar products from Eastern European countries, they found that around half of them were in fact illegal. Likewise, there are widespread concerns about illicit laundering of wild-caught animals through facilities that claim to be legally selling captive-bred individuals or products derived from them. These concerns relate to animals such as macaques, great apes, birds of prey, and reptiles, to name just a few.

To sum up, oversight of the legal wildlife trade is presently insufficient, even for species subject to CITES’ regulation. This is evident in the fact that some species continue to be considered threatened by exploitation, despite enjoying CITES’ protections. It’s also apparent in the lack of available data about exploited species’ populations, as monitoring is a necessary element of robust oversight. Moreover, the enduring concerns and evidence about links between legal and illegal trade point to insufficient safeguards to eliminate this risk.

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Proof of concept

When it comes to press coverage of wildlife exploitation, the illegal trade dominates. Despite its gigantic size, lack of adequate oversight, and profound potential impacts, there is limited media reporting on the legal trade in wild species.

I became an environmental journalist in 2020, after entering the media industry some years earlier and slowly but surely gravitating towards my ultimate ‘beat’. As a staffer at a publication called The Canary, I reported on some legal wildlife trade issues. Then in April 2023, I became the Earth Journalism Network’s (EJN) inaugural fellow for the CITES Legal Trade Journalism Fellowship.

It is this project that I set out on a year ago, aiming to report on the legal trade in earnest.

Within the fellowship, I have been trying to place stories in publications on a freelance basis. Although I have succeeded in some instances, the pickup by media outlets was much less than I and EJN had hoped it would be.

Every freelance journalist knows there is always a certain level of rejection involved in pitching stories. This is particularly true when it comes to wildlife stories that aim to delve into regulatory loopholes and gaps, or focus on less charismatic headline-grabbing species. But the rate of knock-backs surpassed what would normally be expected.

This outcome, then, served as proof of concept. Launched due to a dearth of media coverage on the legal trade in wildlife, the fellowship has shown how entrenched this lack of attention is among publishers.

“You can’t solve a problem by ignoring it”

I cannot help but be reminded of a similar situation with the climate crisis. For years, both the quantity and quality of media reporting on this existentially important issue has been found lacking. For instance, Media Matters probed coverage of a landmark UN climate report in 2018, finding that most of the US’ top newspapers failed to mention it on their homepages the day after release.

There have been some improvements more recently. Nonetheless, during the hottest year on record – 2023 – US corporate broadcast networks reduced their climate coverage by 25%.

This is why organisations like End Climate Silence were established – to demand that the media adequately report on the crisis. Covering Climate Now (CCN) is another initiative that was launched in 2019 by the Columbia Journalism Review and The Nation to encourage better reporting on the issue.

As CCN’s co-founders Mark Hertsgaard and Kyle Pope wrote ahead of the launch, the media has a responsibility “to awaken, inform, and rouse the people to action” rather than “sleepwalking us toward disaster” in the face of the climate emergency. “You can’t solve a problem by ignoring it,” they added.

The exact same is true of the extinction crisis and its primary drivers, including the wildlife trade. Public awareness of these issues is key. Nonetheless, reporting on biodiversity loss lags even behind climate coverage. For instance, one 2017 study found that media coverage of climate change from the US, Canada, and the UK, even if lacking, was as much as eight times higher compared to biodiversity issues between 1991 and 2016.

Biodiversity is the bedrock of a functional planet and the risks of staying on the current trajectory are grave indeed. As IPBES has warned, the decline of the planet’s “essential variety of life forms” is a danger to “economies, livelihoods, food security and the quality of life of people everywhere.”  

Further losses can be stymied if policymakers, businesses, and citizens embrace change – and act with the urgency this crisis demands. But media attention is necessary to help spur all those actors to action.

In short, alongside ending climate silence, we must end extinction silence.

Here are the stories published under the fellowship. Many thanks to the editors and publications involved for offering a platform for these articles:

Enforcing horn trade ban — the world needs to channel its inner rhino mom

Opportunity knocks for wildlife trade body to step up for great apes

The UK is failing macaques

Western exceptionalism in the trade of gods

It will take a village to save the world’s wild travellers

Out-of-Control Wildlife Trade Is Shackling a Key Climate Solution

Calls for change as tonnes of coral taken from Great Barrier Reef

Conserving Arowanas Needs More Than Releasing Fish – Part One (co-writer)

Conserving Arowanas Needs More Than Releasing Fish - Part Two (co-writer)

Can the sad tale of the Asian arowana have a happy ending?

Alarm over trophy hunters taking aim at Amboseli’s ‘iconic giants’ (co-writer)

UK sportswear firm ditches kangaroo leather over sustainability concerns