Transnational organized wildlife crime poses a major challenge to conservation and protection of wild flora and fauna. United Nations, during its multilateral conventions, Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and Convention on Biodiversity (CBD), often come up with issues on how to deal with illegal wildlife trade as there is no official record of the amount of illegal trade that is actually taking place. The reporting process regarding the compliance of the convention is also poor and incomplete (CoP14 Doc. 25, compliance and enforcement issues). A UN General Assembly document (document A/CONF.203/PM.1) states that, combating the trade in endangered species requires a comprehensive approach that builds on areas of success, remedies deficiencies and weakness in laws and enforcement efforts and goes beyond law enforcement to include educational campaigns and awareness-raising.

Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System is a GIS based model which will help in monitoring the effectiveness of enforcement and compliance of wildlife law at a regional level. The purpose of WEMS project is to monitor trafficking and illegal wildlife crime through a joint effort carried out through united nations bodies, national governments and research institutions by building up a common data collection and reporting mechanism at a National level.

The project plans to address this issue by bringing together various national institutions to a common information sharing platform and thereby building the capacity of the states to manage knowledge on wildlife crime trends and threat assessments. It will also bring together various agencies (Customs, Police, Forests ) within the national government in enhancing collection and sharing information on environmental crime. Hence the objective of the project can be summarised as;

• Strengthening Partnership of Public sector and Research Institutions in the implementing region to strengthen E-Governance with regard to information sharing on Environmental law enforcement.

• Develop an information-sharing portal for monitoring enforcement and compliance of national environmental law and feeding information through research and analysis to the WEMS model at a regional level.

• Produce a Global Wildlife Law Enforcement Governance Map depicting the illegal extractions at the range state and, seizures at the destination country with indicators identifying the actions taken by parties to the CITES convention in reducing the loss.

• 14th Conferance of the Parties of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora ( CITES ) which was held in the The Hague (Netherlands) from 3-15 June 2007.
• Meeting with the Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, New Delhi - 4th Jan. 2007
• Invited Lecture on Combatting wildlife Crime by Mr. John Sellar, Senior Enforcement Officer, CITES secretariat, held at United Nations University, Tokyo on 4th August 2006.
• Interpol Wildlife Working Group (IWWG) meeting, Beijing China, 25th -28th July 2006.
• Second Mekong Sub regional CITES implementation and enforcement workshop, Kunming, China, 4th -7th July 2006.

a) Reuters - New UN Database to Combat Wildlife Crime - June 4 -2007

b) Television New Zealand - Database to tackle wildlife crime - June 5 - 2007

c) Kyodo News Japan - UN university launches system to combat illegal wildlife trade - Sept 21 -2006

WEMS model has 5 components

a) Ecomessage – A comprehensive report recording each seizure and is developed electronicaly through the WEMS model in the format prescribed by INTERPOL in its ecomessage. The purpose of this electronic version is to speed up the process of communication exchange between national agencies and International organisations.

b) Wildlife Trafficking Atlas: An Atlas will be produced yearly defining the national seizure locations and its transboundary nature. The objective of bringing out an Atlas is to identify the areas most affected by illegal wildlife trade.

c) Data Clock- The data clock will show monthly record of wildlife seizure cases and the pattern of wildlife crime.

d) WEMS IMAP (demo) – web based GIS tool which law enforcement officers can use to query. This is useful in providing a common platform for customs, police, forest officers and policy makers in sharing information.

e) Tracking route (demo)- simulation model describing time series tracks of a transboundary case.

The advantage of WEMS model is that, it can be replicated to monitor other forms of environmental crimes (such as illegal trade in precious minerals or toxic waste dumping) using the same "ecomessage" format and can act as a decision support system for Multilateral Environmental agreements. Currently there is no common information sharing or reporting system to measure compliance to multilateral environmental agreements.

WEMS model can also be replicated to monitor other forms of crimes including drug trafficking, illegal arms trade and cross border terrorism. The fourth session of the Conferance of parties to the United Nations Convention against transnational organised crime will be discussing measures to gather information on organised crime and will be specifically looking into measures in collecting and analysing data.

Project Time Line

Pilot phase - Oct 2005- September - 2007 - WEMS prototype was developed

Phase I - Sept 2007 - Dec 2008 - Implementation phase.

Project schedule - to be written.

Project Team

Mr. Remi Chandran - Project Manager and Environmental Governance expert

Dr. Tomasz Janowski - Project Advisor

Mr. Khoi Nguyen - Researcher - IT infrastructure

Mr. Peter Eredics - ESRI

Project risks - to be written.

Conclusions and lessons learnt - to be written.