CRACKING THE CODE

While the vast majority of wildlife trade is legal, the illegal or unsustainable trade of wildlife can have dire effects on the survival of species and deplete essential ecosystems like forests and oceans that are vital to capture carbon in the atmosphere. Despite the importance of sustainable ecosystem management as a nature-based solution to address climate issues, there is a lack of accessible and detailed data to monitor the impacts or sustainability of reportedly legal wildlife trade.

TRAFFIC’s Cracking the Code report recommends that by developing wildlife-specific HS codes and taking advantage of the UN Comtrade Database¹, conservation and trade authorities can gain better insights into the international wildlife trade.

Evolving HS codes and making use of trade statistics have the potential to uncover patterns in legal trade, revolutionise conservation efforts, and prevent the devastating decline of wild species.”

Thomasina Oldfield, TRAFFIC Director of Programmes and Research

Harmonized System (HS) Codes² are made up of six digits and categorise all types of goods in global trade, which are housed in the openly-accessible UN Comtrade Database. The report suggests that UN Comtrade data could provide an early warning system for sustainability or conservation concerns through studying trends.

“Monitoring of global export patterns by governments, NGOs and academia can provide insights into decreasing or increasing exports. While further investigation into any emerging trends would be necessary to understand why changes are happening, ultimately, any changes to trade volumes or routes could indicate population declines of native wild species or increased demand for particular wildlife commodities and, subsequently, reveal where conservation efforts need to be focused,” advises Dr Eleanor Drinkwater, TRAFFIC Research and Analysis Support Officer.

Currently, most wildlife relevant-HS codes are broad and vague; many animal or plant codes combine different species, and different countries report the same product using different codes. From this analysis, TRAFFIC has identified a set of HS codes that could be made more species or product-specific to improve trade reporting, enhance conservation monitoring capacity, and build on nature-based solutions.

The report found a lack of consistency with current HS code reporting, leading to irregularities in trade data between exporting and importing countries.

Not only could looking at discrepancies between importer and exporter reported trade aid the detection of reporting issues like inconsistent code use, but it could also identify trade routes and wildlife commodities vulnerable to overexploitation and could impact on essential ecosystems.”

Dr Eleanor Drinkwater, TRAFFIC Research and Analysis Support Officer

Typically, organisations studying wildlife trade turn to the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Trade Database. Although highly beneficial, this information only provides trade data for CITES-listed animal and plant species.

“The majority of species, particularly timber and fish species, are not listed in CITES. Data from the UN Comtrade Database can be invaluable in providing insights into the trade of these species, including before trade reaches unsustainable levels,” said Willow Outhwaite, TRAFFIC Senior Programme Officer.

TRAFFIC calls on trade authorities to review and improve national and international customs reporting to better monitor and regulate wildlife commodities in trade. By doing this, governments will be working towards safeguarding sustainable trade for socio-economic development across the globe and tackling climate change.

“We call for increased capacity building to improve reporting by national authorities and greater use of this vital dataset so the legal and sustainable trade of wildlife can support the communities that depend on these worldwide resources,” said Thomasina Oldfield.

From this study of legal wildlife trade between Africa and Asia, TRAFFIC has developed an interactive tool that highlights different wildlife commodities, key importing countries/territories and how these are typically represented within existing HS Codes. It is hoped that these case studies will demonstrate the breadth of wildlife trade that can be monitored using this data, as well as some of the current limitations to using the HS code system to monitor wildlife trade to prevent catastrophic losses in biodiversity and ecosystems.

Cracking the Code Platform