Event Title: What is Sustainable in Wildlife Trade

Dates: 22 Nov 2022

Time: 12:15-14:00 （GMT-5）

Organizer: China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF)

Type: Global

Kind: Official

Status: Confirmed

Languages: English

Country: The Republic of Panama

City: Panama City

Venue: Salon 3, Panama Convention Center (PCC)

Contact: Ms. Yanjun Xu v90@cbcgdf.org ; +86 18910282583

Description:
The 19th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to CITES (CoP19) will be held from 14 to 25 November 2022 in Panama City, Panama. As an official event, “What is Sustainable in Wildlife Trade” will take place on 22 November 2022 in Panama. The meeting will be hosted by the China Biodiversity Conservation and Green Development Foundation, in Salon 3, Panama Convention Center. 

Wildlife trade is known to represent one of the major drivers of species losses, yet whilst illegal trade is frequently discussed, legal trade and its potential impacts are frequently overlooked. Legal trade is worth an estimated $320 Billion annually, yet whilst legality and sustainability are frequently conflated, evidence of sustainability is rarely required for wildlife trade to be legal, even when traded under a framework of “sustainable livelihoods”.

Here we discuss what is known on legal wildlife trade, systematically going through the trade of a number of taxa and forms of trade, including for pets, medicines, consumption, and fashion, as well as the broader framework of legal trade. In each case we discuss the current status and the limits of knowledge, we discuss what evidence there is to suggest that components of trade is sustainable, and what data is actually necessary to demonstrate that trade is genuinely sustainable. We then discuss the gap between current practice and what is needed to genuinely ensure wildlife trade does not undermine the viability of wild populations.

Given the central mission of CITES is to ensure that trade does not present a risk to the future survival of species we feel this is a crucial discussion to ensuring that CITES can continue to fulfil its remit in a world that is vastly different from the world that CITES was initially developed for. We discuss how modern tools and technologies could viably and affordably be streamlined into processes, and how by modernising CITES we could actually enable it to meet the challenges presented by trade today.

Each speaker will speak for 10 minutes on their topic before we have a panel discussion on sustainability in trade, and what is needed moving forwards.