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DATA IDENTIFICATION


Name
Proportion of traded wildlife that was poached or illicitly trafficked
Indicator purpose

Share of all trade in wildlife detected as being illegal.

Abstract

There are over 35,000 species under international protection, so it is impossible to monitor all poaching. Illegal trade, however, is an indirect indicator of poaching. Wildlife seizures represent concrete instances of illegal trade, but the share of overall wildlife crime they represent is unknown and variable. In addition, the number of species under international protection continues to grow. Legal international trade in protected species, by definition, is 100% captured in the CITES Trade Database, which now contains over 16 million records of trade in CITES-listed species. To ground the illegal trade data in a complete indicator, the ratio of aggregated seizures to total trade is estimated. An increase in the share of total wildlife trade that is illegal would be interpreted as a negative indicator, and a decrease as a positive one.

Data source

Forest Department

DATA CHARACTERISTICS



Contact organization person

Forest Department

Date last updated
17-OCT-2019
Periodicity

Annual

Unit of measure

Percentage (%)

Other characteristics

The illegal wildlife trade represents thousands of distinct products, a means of aggregation is necessary. The legal trade value does not represent the true black-market value of the items seized, nor the true value of the legal shipments, because it is derived from a single market source (US LEMIS). It does, however, present a logical and consistent means of aggregating unlike products.

DATA CONCEPTS and CLASSIFICATIONS



Classification used

“All trade in wildlife” is the sum of the values of legal and illegal trade.

“Legal trade” is the sum of the value of all shipments made in compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), using valid CITES permits and certificates.

“Illegal trade” is the sum of the value of all CITES/listed specimens seized.

Disaggregation

by national level.

Key statistical concepts

The value of a species-product unit is derived from the weighted average of prices declared for legal imports of analogous species product units, as acquired from United States Law Enforcement Monitoring and Information System of the Fish and Wildlife Service.

The value of legal trade is the sum of all species-product units documented in CITES export permits as reported in the CITES Annual Reports times the species-product unit prices as specified above.

The value of illegal trade is the sum of all species-product units documented in the World WISE seizure database times the species-product unit prices as specified above.

The indicator is value of illegal trade/(value of legal trade + value of illegal trade).

Formula
-
OTHER ASPECTS



Recommended uses

This indicator is used by Forest Department to measure the proportion of all trade in wildlife detected as being illegal.

Limitations
  • Seizures are an incomplete indicator of trafficking, and subject to considerable volatility.
  • Universal coverage is not presently available, although 120 countries are represented in the present database.
  • Since the indicator looks at the relationship between two values, changes in the relationship could be due to changes in either value.
Other comments

All the metadata shown in this document was gathered from United Nation Statistics Division. The metadata was extracted from https://unstats.un.org/sdgs/metadata/.