Challenge 9: Ending Marine Wildlife Trafficking

THE PROBLEM
Illicit wildlife trafficking is valued at billions of dollars a year. An important element of such trade has been the luxury market for products from the sea. This includes demand for pets, health products, and food. In East Asia, population growth and the burgeoning middle classes have led to rising demand for exotic and luxury products, as well as for greater production of protein. The supply chain for seafood products involves a complex web of middlemen that facilitate the entry of illegally caught and sourced seafood into the mainstream market. Challenges for illegal fishing include monitoring fishing activity at the source, creating more efficient tracking and enforcement mechanisms to prevent illegal fishing, increasing barriers to entry for illegal fish products into global markets, and influencing consumer demand through marketing and behavior change.

THE CHALLENGE
Dramatically reduce demand for endangered ocean products through demand reduction, data & enforcement, and substitute products.

This challenge focuses on understanding the extent of illegal trade and enforcement, addressing demand for illegal seafood products:

1. Consumer Demand Reduction Subchallenge. This subchallenge focuses on harnessing marketing and behavior change for oceans conservation through financial incentives, social pressure, marketing, competition and gamification, and identity. Under this subchallenge, we are seeking solutions to reduce demand by changing cultural and societal norms around the perceived social status of luxury wildlife products from the sea. Potential innovations could borrow from behavior change approaches implemented in global health, as well as from marketing of consumer products.

2. Enforcement Subchallenge. This subchallenge looks at technologies and innovations that can improve governance and enforcement of illegal fishing. This includes improving data for measurement of the extent of the trade, surveillance of flows of wildlife products from the seas, and enforcement of regulations.

3. Replacement Products. Finally, this challenge will focus on creating substitute products for existing illegal seafood products.

PROBLEM STATEMENT
Wildlife trafficking is not only decimating the wildlife populations of critical species with spillover effects that disrupt entire ecological communities, it is driving some species to extinction. The business of trafficking has undermined the rule of law and promoted corruption, compromised national security of nations, and hindered economic development. The trade of trafficked wildlife has become extremely lucrative, with certain wildlife products even exceeding the value of gold, platinum, or diamonds in end markets.

The emergence of the middle class in Asia and other places in the developing world has placed new demands on fisheries. First, rising wages have increased pressure for cheaper and higher quantities of seafood. At the same time, growing wealth and a desire to demonstrate status is also driving demand for luxury seafood delicacies such as shark fin, sea cucumber, sea urchins, and fish swim bladders, particularly in South East and East Asia. These twin pressures increase the incentive for illegal as well as over fishing. The developed world also contributes to marine wildlife trafficking and illegal fishing through the pet, curio, and food trade.

Globally, the expected financial loss due to unreported and illegal fishing ranges from $10 billion to 423.5 billion worldwide. Developing countries with poor governance records are more vulnerable to illegal activities, conducted by both their own fishers and vessels from distant nations. The solutions most often proposed to eliminate illegal fishing increase governance and the rule of law through better cooperation and data sharing between regional fishery management authorities, increased capacity for surveillance and enforcement, and reducing the economic incentives and demand to engage in illegal fishing.

Within the luxury seafood market, demand for one item—shark fins—is declining in China due to a series of successful campaigns focused on consumers. However, demand for other products, such as sea cucumber, marine turtles, sea urchins, manta gills, and swim bladders of the Totoaba macdonaldi (a species of fish endemic to the Gulf of California) is increasing. There is also a significant international trade in live marine animals. It is estimated that there are up to 30 million fish and 1.5 million coral colonies traded in any one year. Most of the demand comes from the United States, EU, and Japan, which account for over 80% of the trade.

Other species are also kept as holiday curios, such as sea horses, which are also collected for the medicinal trade. Sixty-four million sea horses are taken from the wild every year, although some organizations claim the number is as high as 150 million killed annually. Sea horse fisheries have reported a decline of 50% in the last five years. Dried sea horses are sold in shops as curios within England, the United States, and Australia, but most originate in Asia.

EMERGING SOLUTIONS
Demand Reduction: Conservation marketing, behavior, and psychology are new fields within conservation. They have become more prominent (along with other social sciences) in the evolution of conservation as a multidisciplinary science, following the pathway of global health. However, there are few examples of behavior change or marketing innovations within marine conservation. Emerging techniques from social marketing include using incentives and rewards as well as self- identity and social pressures to change behavior. Some approaches tap into the competitive nature of humans by creating competitions or gamification to change behavior. Some of the best examples of these principles are with regard to energy usage and health. Residents in Brighton, UK, living on Tidy Street, agreed to track their daily energy usage publicly on a website, and paint the street’s average energy use against the Brighton average in a graph on the road outside their homes. Open-source software specially designed for the project allows each household to compare their energy use not only with the Brighton average, but also with the national average or even that of other countries. Residents’ energy use has dropped by 15%, with some people cutting usage by as much as 30% in their households. Similarly, college campuses have demonstrated energy and water use reductions in dorms through competitions like “Do it in the Dark.” Health and fitness apps, like MyFitnessPal, harness peer pressure to encourage maintenance of daily exercise, or maintaining a diet.

Marketing is one of the most data driven industries in the developed world. By studying patterns of production and consumption and the correlations between consumption patterns, marketers have been able to micro- target products to individual consumers. In much the same way, data can be harnessed to identify cultural norms and demographics that will be responsive to specific messages about conservation. As an example, Wild Aid had significant success targeting young Chinese women who were planning to be married about the nature of serving shark fin soup at their weddings. By combining demographic understanding about the audience’s motivations and the nature of the consumption of shark fin soup as a traditional Chinese wedding meal, Wild Aid was able to reduce consumption significantly. Conventional methods of surveying people to gather information on opinions and consumption patterns can be expensive and time-consuming. However, social media and other large data sets gathered by online platforms are potential data sources that the conservation community can mine for information on consumption, attitudes, or opinions to provide insight into cultural norms and demographics. Energy producers are using Twitter and social analytics to track public opinion about their activities, and researchers have explored mining Twitter to track opinions on climate change. Researchers have used geotagged Flickr images to quantify nature-based tourism and recreation.

Financial incentives can also drive conservation behavior. Pay- for-performance in the field of conservation is a method where people or organizations are rewarded for meeting specific environmental conditions. The best-known example is that of RecycleBank, which harnessed technology that measured the amount of recycling for a specific residence, and then credits participants with reward points that can be used at local and national stores. The money came from avoidance of tip fees at landfills and through the sale of the recycled materials. The result was a dramatic uptake in recycling in cities that implemented the program. Similarly, direct payments for conservation programs have had some success. For example, the U.S. government pays farmers to set aside farmland to instead provide ecosystem benefits like wildlife habitat, enhanced water quality, or reduced soil erosion through the Conservation Reserve Program. Other investments can be made with the goal of capital protection through offsets or mitigation, such as wetlands and stream mitigation, bio banking, and conservation banking. Finally, eco-labels and certifications are intended as signals to consumers that purchases contribute to positive environmental outcomes. There are multiple marine eco-labels, including the Marine Stewardship Council, FishWise, and Salmon Safe, among others.

Surveillance and Enforcement: Improving capabilities of countries to monitor and enforce their waters can also help reduce wildlife trafficking and illegal fishing. As noted previously, SoarOcean and Conservation Drones are harnessing low-cost drone technology to improve conservation monitoring and enforcement for marine systems. Skytruth, working with Google’s Geo for Good and Oceana, is harnessing satellite imagery, ship-based Automated Information Systems (AIS), and Synthetic Aperture Radar, to detect illegal, unregulated, and unreported fishing activities. Similarly, Pew has been working with Satellite Applications Catapult through Project Eyes on the Sea to analyze multiple sources of live satellite tracking data, link to information about a ship’s ownership history and country of registration, and provide a dossier of up-to-the-minute data on vessels that can alert officials to suspicious behavior. Importantly for certifying legal behavior, WWF and navama created a vessel tracking tool and data sharing platform (TransparentSea.org) to offer good actors the ability to make their fishing activities transparent. With their registration, fisheries agree to share satellite-based AIS data, vessel monitoring systems (VMS) data or other location-based data for their vessels with independent experts from WWF, navama, other NGOs, governments, and science.

Not all of the efforts need to be highly technical or expensive. Moreover, they can harness the power of the crowd through citizen science. The Turtle Island Restoration Network has recently partnered with DigitalGlobe’s crowdsourcing platform Tomnod.com to create a crowd-sourced digital patrol of the Cocos Island Marine Protected Area. The Environmental Justice Foundation used low cost cell phones and GPS- enabled cameras to help artisanal West African fishermen to protect local fisheries against piracy.

Replacement Products: Replacements are substitutes for illicit products or products whose removal or creation come at considerable cost to the ecosystem. One of the best-known examples is synthetic rhino horn, which has sought to provide an alternative to real rhino horn. One such company is Rhinoceros Horn LLC, which in December 2012 planned to fund the marketing of a new, ethically sourced keratin protein product via the crowd-funding site, IndieGoGo.com. Another company working in this area is Pembient, which describes itself as “The De Beers of Synthetic Wildlife Products”. Pembient was quoted extensively in the media in January 2015, after it was chosen as one of 11 companies to benefit from an “accelerator class” held by IndieBio, after which each company will receive $50,000 in funding and access to the accelerator’s lab for an entire year. Another company focused on a replacement product is Stop Poaching Through Synthetic Rhino Horn. Artificial substitutes for shark fin also exist, commonly known as “mock shark’s fin”, which uses gelatin, soy, pig’s skin, and sometimes even cellophane noodles. The challenge of the replacement product approach is in the possibility of it not decreasing demand for the original, illicit wildlife product, but instead increasing consumer’s desires for the “real thing.”