Enabling that goal is the objective behind the Business and Biodiversity Assessment report, a first-of-its-kind publication released on February 9 by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), an independent organization created in 2012.

A product of nearly three years’ work by 80 scientists and private-sector experts, the report was endorsed this month by representatives of the more than 150 IPBES member countries at a week-long plenary session in Manchester, United Kingdom. It is intended to serve as a key reference on nature-related risks for business – and how alleviating those risks hinges on policy change by governments.

“From my perspective, it plays a role for nature similar to what the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] has played for climate change,” says Thomas Walker, special projects lead at the Institute for Sustainable Finance at the Smith School of Business, Queen’s University, in an interview with Corporate Knights. “Canadian business leaders should pay attention because of Canada’s resource-based economy and because nature underpins the productive capacity of said economy.”

Stark warning

The report begins with a stark warning to businesses: they can either lead transformative change or “risk extinction.” The authors cite evidence of significant declines over the last 50 years in many categories of the natural “ecosystems services” on which business and economies depend. This includes things like raw materials from nature, pollination and seed dispersal, air and water quality, soil fertility, and amenities for tourism and recreation. Altogether, they underscore just how much business is at risk from nature’s collapse. The report presents a detailed guidebook of more than 130 actions that companies, along with policymakers and other enabling actors, can take to reverse it.

“What’s really fundamental here is that our experts looked at the methods and approaches that are available to understand what [risk from biodiversity loss] means in an individual business context. How you can, as a business, understand your exposure to that. How you measure your impacts and dependencies and therefore how you can understand your risks,” said Matt Jones, one of three report co-chairs and a senior officer at the UN Environment Programme, at the launch press conference.

The report’s release (for now, just the policy summary, with remaining chapters to follow in a few weeks) was well-timed, coming just one week before governments convened in Rome from February 16 to 19 to begin the first global review of nature action under the Kunming-Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework (GBF) since it was created in 2022. Mark Carney’s Liberal government is also expected to soon unveil its revised 2030 Nature Strategy, replacing the previous Nature Accountability Bill that failed to pass before the last election. The new strategy will spell out how Canada intends to meet its commitments under the GBF to halt and reverse biodiversity loss and protect 30% of lands and waters by 2030.

In an email to Corporate Knights, Samantha Bayard, a spokesperson for Environment and Climate Change Canada, emphasized the role of nature disclosure in addressing the role of business in biodiversity loss. “While adoption of nature-related disclosures is still at an early stage in Canada – hindered by, for example, capacity, expertise, and data limitations – a growing number of companies and municipalities have begun to address nature-related risks in their portfolios and integrate natural assets (e.g., wetlands) into their financial disclosures.”

Delivering transformative change

A core tenet of the GBF is that reversing biodiversity loss requires the “involvement of all society,” including companies. Significantly, among the GBF’s 23 targets is a call for government action to encourage and enable companies to better manage their impacts on nature and more accurately assess – and disclose – their risks and dependencies. Both sides of that equation are squarely addressed in the new IPBES report.

For businesses, it lays out actions at four decision-making levels: corporate, operational, value chain and portfolio. Asked to suggest some critical first steps, report co-chair Ximena Rueda, dean of the School of Management at Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá, Colombia, urged companies to choose their battles. “What is their highest dependency [on nature] or highest impact? Start from that.”

Government’s responsibility

However, the report also makes clear that voluntary efforts alone won’t be enough to deliver the kind of “transformative change that will halt and reverse biodiversity loss,” added co-chair Stephen Polasky, professor of ecological and environmental economics at the University of Minnesota. That will occur only if governments also step in “to change the set of conditions in which businesses operate.”

A key target here are the massive subsidies currently directed toward business activities that drive biodiversity loss. In 2023, according to the report, subsidies of US$2.4 trillion contributed to the estimated US$7.3 trillion in public and private finance flows that had direct negative impacts on nature. In contrast, just US$220 billion in private and public funds were directed to the conservation and restoration of biodiversity. “There is a big role here for governments and the financial system to provide incentives for business to do actions that are beneficial for biodiversity and to take away incentives to business to do actions which are harmful,” Polasky said.

The challenge of subsidy reform

According to the ISF’s Walker, the report’s concern about harmful subsidies “resonates” in Canada. Government fiscal and tax policies designed to encourage resource development and production have often failed to reflect environmental externalities or cumulative ecological impacts, he says.

While reforming subsidies will be “politically complex,” Walker says there is nothing to stop Canadian companies, which have “ample experience with climate disclosure frameworks,” to immediately start considering biodiversity in corporate decisions and disclosures. The disclosure framework established by the Task Force on Nature-Related Financial Disclosures in 2023, which is now being implemented through the work of the International Sustainability Standards Board, provides a blueprint for companies and their boards to follow.

“Structured disclosure can help integrate biodiversity into enterprise raisk management,” Walker explains. “Once nature dependencies are identified and quantified . . . they can be considered alongside climate, market and operational risks.”

Brian Banks is a writer in Cobourg, Ontario, who specializes in environment, business and sustainability.

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In the United States, there are now around 5,700 large-scale solar farms operating, according to data collected by the U.S. Geological Survey. Globally, there are more than 75,000. While the harm to wildlife inflicted by the petroleum industry has generated reams of research, the ecological effects of solar are poorly studied.

While comprehensive impact studies are lacking, it is clear that both migratory and resident birds are commonly killed or stunned by these novel features in their environment. One hypothesis suggests that the shimmering arrays of photovoltaic panels that most people envision when they think of a solar farm read as bodies of water to birds from the air.

Because of the so-called lake effect, birds may attempt to land on the panels or drink from them, either dying on impact or perishing on the ground after colliding with what appears to be a liquid surface. This is particularly concerning for migratory waterbirds passing over photovoltaic facilities, which could appear as tempting oases and not the fields of unyielding glass and silicon they really are.

Small, ground-dwelling birds may be disoriented by the panels as well, crashing into them as they forage the swarms of invertebrates attracted to the polarized light that they reflect.

Impacts on bird habitats

“Habitat loss is the greatest potential impact, obviously correlated to the size of a single project, and the cumulative effects of neighboring projects,” says Andrew Jenkins, owner of Avisense Consulting, a South African firm that conducts birdlife impact assessments for energy installations, in an email.

It often takes several years to get a solar installation up and running. Aside from regular human activity, vegetation is frequently shorn or removed entirely to create space for the structures, resulting in habitat destruction. “Utility-scale installations often replace native habitats such as grasslands, deserts or wetlands, disrupting breeding, foraging and nesting areas,” says Crystal Anderson, a wildlife biologist with the James C. Kennedy Waterfowl and Wetlands Conservation Center, in Georgetown, South Carolina, in an email. “This is particularly damaging for ground-nesting birds and area-sensitive species that require large, contiguous habitats.”

Non-native bird species and native species well adapted to man-made environments may move into the vacuums created by solar farms – though they too sometimes meet their ends cruising into glittering solar arrays. Both native house finches and non-native Eurasian collared doves quickly dominated the Macho Springs Solar Facility established in New Mexico in 2012, for example. These species are known for their adaptability to human disturbance.

Solutions are still being developed

A variety of bird deterrents have been proposed: chemical substances that create aversive scents or tastes, recorded predator sounds, flashing lights and objects to prevent birds from landing.

“Incorporating bird-friendly design features such as non-reflective panel coatings, reduced artificial lighting and buffers or corridors of native vegetation can mitigate some of the most pressing risks to avian species,” Anderson says.

“The disturbance impacts of construction are probably unavoidable, except by minimizing the durations of the construction period, timing the construction to avoid sensitive seasons and working to minimize noise and activity-related disturbance,” Jenkins adds.

Situating new solar plants on “brownfields” – sites such as former mines, landfills and fossil fuel facilities – may also be a way to avoid damage to vulnerable habitats. These sites are already wastelands. Placing solar plants there obviates the harms of development.

Special challenges at concentrating solar power sites

While photovoltaic systems are dominant in solar, another related technology is once again making inroads after years of skepticism. Concentrating solar power (CSP) sites use mirrors to direct solar energy toward towers that contain various substances that then generate electricity. Despite its high costs, CSP has the advantage of being able to store power overnight, helping it stage a comeback. Last year, for example, Botswana announced that it would build a 200-megawatt concentrated solar-thermal power plant. 

In 2014, the Associated Press published an alarming account of birds going up in smoke as they passed through beams of concentrated sunlight at a CSP facility in the Mojave Desert. These “streamers,” as they were called, plummeted to the ground after igniting. Later research suggested that the phenomenon was more likely attributable to insects passing through the beams rather than birds, though some observers contest this.

Surveys of similar CSP farms have turned up numerous dead birds with singed feathers. Birds may not be incinerated mid-air as the original report suggested, but they certainly get burned.

These beams may reach 1,000°C. “This can cause severe injuries or death, particularly among high-flying birds like raptors,” Anderson says.

Reducing the solar flux – the amount of solar energy reaching a certain location – for solar thermal energy systems has proven helpful in several cases. Both the Ivanpah and Crescent Dunes projects in California have reduced solar flux and seen reduced bird deaths.

Solar installations increase biodiversity, and some birds benefit

While solar facilities may pose a danger to birds, they can also be beneficial to other wildlife and even some types of birds.

Several studies have found increased species diversity at solar sites in comparison to nearby arable land, likely due to the way in which solar farms contribute to more diverse plant species and structures for shelter. These increases favour birds that forage on the ground and eat insects. Conversely, birds with more specific habitat requirements will be negatively affected. “Endangered species may suffer population-level consequences from even localized disturbances,” Anderson says.

As solar energy deployment grows – it will account for a majority of renewable growth capacity in the remainder of the decade per the International Energy Agency – examination of its unintended negative effects on wildlife will be crucial.

Richard Pallardy is a freelance writer based in Chicago. He has written for such publications as Science, Discover, Live Science and National Geographic.

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Then came news of a separate incident where an unknown amount of industrial wastewater has been leaking from an Imperial Oil tailings pond for the last 12 months. The leakage flows underground and then resurfaces to contaminate surface waters outside the Kearl Oil Sands Processing Plant and Mine.

These waters flow into the Athabasca River, which is part of an important waterway that supports communities in Alberta and the Northwest Territories. In addition to its significance to the Indigenous communities here, this waterway also provides crucial habitats for endangered wildlife species.

While Imperial Oil and Alberta’s energy regulator have reported no impacts on wildlife or waterways yet, the federal government believes the leaking waste is harmful to aquatic life, and has ordered Imperial Oil to take immediate action in preventing any further seepage of toxic water.

Scientists, including our group at Queen’s University, have been studying the chemicals in oilsand tailings ponds for decades to better understand their dangers and to protect wildlife from their effects.

Fish struggle to survive in contaminated waters

The mining and extraction of bitumen — a heavy crude oil with the consistency of cold molasses — produces industrial wastewater with high concentrations of several dangerous components, including salts, dissolved organic compounds and heavy metals like cadmium and lead.

Research and real-world incidents have found that oilsands wastewater is toxic to wildlife including mammals, fish, frogs and birds.

A group of organic compounds, referred to as naphthenic acids, are responsible for most of the toxicity of wastewater. These compounds exist naturally in the region, but accumulate to harmful, unnatural levels in wastewater during the mining process. Despite this, environmental guidelines for “safe” naphthenic acid concentrations do not exist.

The concentrations of these acids in wastewater are studied to determine the extent of the threats to wildlife, and in particular to aquatic species, as their habitats are extremely susceptible to accumulating harmful pollutants.

One of our studies found that exposure to these chemicals can also cause developing frogs to develop striking malformations, including kinked spines and missing toes.

 

Studies have found that fathead minnow, walleye and yellow perch experience increased mortality, physical deformities and reduced growth when exposed to naphthenic acids. These are all species commonly found in the oilsands region.

In one investigation, these chemicals altered hormone levels and reduced spawning success in fish. This effect could have population-level consequences in the wild. Meanwhile, in another study, the fish showed reduced survival and abnormal swimming behaviours, even after being held in clean lake water for one month following a week-long exposure to sublethal levels of naphthenic acids.

The science clearly suggests that fish are negatively impacted by wastewater contaminants and even short-term contact can have lasting effects on animals in the affected area.

Canada’s declining amphibians face new threats

Amphibians are one of the most rapidly disappearing groups of animals in Canada, as their wetland habitats often face the threat of pollution, among other stressors. Research on wood frogs and Northern leopard frogs has raised numerous concerns.

Like with fish, studies have found that exposure to wastewater and naphthenic acids can interfere with sexual development and impair breeding in adult frogs. Tadpoles exposed to these chemicals are more likely to die, behave abnormally when escaping predators and are less likely to develop into frogs.

One of our studies found that exposure to these chemicals can also cause developing frogs to develop striking malformations, including kinked spines and missing toes.

Science suggests that if pollutants reach dangerous levels due to spills, it could impair the survival and health of aquatic wildlife in affected areas. Over time, these impacts could cause wildlife population declines and even local species extinctions. Long-term monitoring will be crucial to determine the full impact of these spills.

A need for transparent oilsands waste management

In addition to wildlife, industrial activities in the oilsands region have affected the Indigenous communities over the years as well.

Indigenous Nations located downstream of recent oil spills in Alberta — including the Athabasca Chipewyan First Nation and Mikisew Cree First Nation — voiced their concern over this pollution and its impact on the plants and animals they harvest for food.

The lack of transparency and delayed responses surrounding these current spills raises questions about how many undocumented incidents could be taking place every year.

 

While these communities rely on the lands and waters near the spill, they were only notified of the contamination when the provincial regulator issued an environmental protection order in February.

The lack of transparency and delayed responses surrounding these current spills raises questions about how many undocumented incidents could be taking place every year.

In April, while Alberta continued to deal with the aftermath of these incidents, another 6 million litres of water spilled from a Suncor settling pond into the Athabasca River. The current method of managing wastewater is neither safe nor sustainable.

Change is needed to ensure that economic activities do not jeopardize the environment further. As government, industry and Indigenous partners begin the process of building new management and monitoring plans, which will likely include guidelines for treating and releasing oilsands wastewater back into waterways, it is important that the science is not forgotten.

Evidence-informed policies, built on what we know about the toxic extent of wastewater, have the potential to make accidental spills, and the environmental and social injustices they perpetuate, a thing of the past.

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The widespread floods exacerbated the already dire economic state of the Maasai Mara caused by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has gutted the tourism industry, says Brian Kearney-Grieve, executive director of the Sidekick Foundation, the primary funder of the Mara Elephant Project. MEP, as it is known, protects the region’s 2,400 pachyderms by mitigating poaching and human-elephant conflict and preserving habitat. As a keystone species, elephants are invaluable to the Maasai Mara, eating brush and trees and spreading seeds via their dung, keeping the Serengeti plains fertile and open for herds of grazing animals.

The Maasai Mara, which is part of the vast Serengeti plains, draws thousands of foreigners every year to watch the spectacular Great Migration, when more than two million animals – wildebeest, zebras and gazelles – undertake their annual odyssey from Tanzania north into Kenya, making the region the country’s most valuable tourism asset.

The threat to elephants lies with the revenue-base collapse, says Kearney-Grieve. The Maasai tribes people, renowned for their extravagant beadwork and tall stature, are the legal landowners of the Maasai Mara. Together with such stakeholders as ecotourism camp owners, they manage 14 areas, called “conservancies.” These are lease agreements worth about US$10 million a year that is derived from tourism. Payments are given to individual Maasai landowners in exchange for keeping their fields open to wildlife, rather than growing crops or grazing livestock.

This past spring, because of COVID-19, the conservancies were negotiating reduced lease rates with the Maasai landowners while scrambling to find emergency funds to pay the teams of rangers and related expenses, such as vehicles, used to keep a lid on poaching.

Their fears about a possible increase in poaching proved to be justified. In late April, Rhino Conservation Botswana reported that poachers had killed six rhino after the global pandemic shut down tourism in the southern African nation.

MEP’s conservation work includes a remarkably successful anti-poaching intelligence network. And while MEP hadn’t detected a rise in poaching as of late April, Kearney-Grieve fears that poachers from neighbouring Tanzania may take advantage of the absence of tourists and the reduced ranger numbers to venture into the Maasai to shoot elephants for their ivory.

Farmers will also be more protective of their crops in the upcoming months, because of the economic hardship, and therefore less tolerant of crop-raiding elephants, says Kearney-Grieve. “Communities are so under threat in terms of their income that they might be more aggressive in terms of how they protect their crops from elephants.”

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

Read Roberta Staley’s feature:

Banking on the wildlife trade

The finance sector could hold the key to stopping the trade that puts the health of millions of animals and humans at risk

The post Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick appeared first on Corporate Knights.

The illegal wildlife trade (IWT) goes beyond market stalls – it’s organized transnational crime that involves criminal trafficking syndicates. And it’s flourishing due to high demand, ineffective law enforcement and a lack of financial surveillance. Wild animals are in demand not only as culinary indulgences and traditional medicine, but as exotic pets and status symbols. The effect is devastating, with thousands of species of wild animals being pushed to the brink of extinction as a result. The weakening of ecosystems and the threat to biodiversity, as well as the enormous mounting threat to human life, compounds what many have been saying for years: IWT is an offence commensurate to terrorism financing and drug, human, and weapons trafficking and thus should be fought using the same resources afforded these illegal activities. As with other illegal activities with enormous profits, a key tactic is to “follow the money.”

And that’s where the bankers come in.

Black markets worth billions

The United Nations estimates IWT to be worth upwards of US$23 billion a year. Cash is only one form of currency facilitating the operation of wildlife black markets. Much of the profit is laundered via legitimate banking channels and online payment platforms, which are increasingly being used as an underground means of buying and selling animals, particularly with many legal wildlife markets being shuttered. Hence, the financial sector has a crucial role to play in the mitigation of IWT. According to the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation, IWT is the globe’s third-largest form of illegal trade after street drugs and weapons. A 2018 Interpol report, Global Wildlife Enforcement, states that the criminal kingpins involved in IWT are well organized and often involved in tax evasion, fraud, document falsification, money-laundering and firearms trafficking. IWT trafficking pipelines are commonly used to smuggle other illicit commodities, such as drugs and weapons, Interpol reports.

A key element making IWT as dangerous a crime as weapons trafficking is the link to pandemics like COVID-19, caused by the novel coronavirus SARS-CoV-2. COVID-19 is genetically similar to the SARS-related coronavirus (SARS is short for severe acute respiratory syndrome), which emerged in China in 2002/03, leaping, it’s suspected, from bats and wild Himalayan palm civets to humans, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). There are hundreds of coronaviruses circulating among animals, and seven are known to infect humans via a biological process called zoonosis, which is when viruses jump to another species, according to the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases in the United States. (Human encroachment into wild spaces, primarily because of agriculture, is another major factor facilitating zoonosis.)

Widespread theories suggested that ground zero for COVID-19 may have been the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan, China, where domestic, wild and illegally trafficked animals were often kept in deplorably cramped cages – conditions that act as ideal disease vectors. A recent Chinese study published in the journal Nature suggests the market wasn’t so much ground zero for the virus, but an early “superspreader” or amplifier event among humans.

Regardless, research has found that COVID-19 likely originated in bats and then moved to humans via an intermediate species. Some researchers have suggested the missing link to be the scaly, ant-eating pangolin, which carries coronaviruses related to SARS-CoV-2. As the Wall Street Journal noted in late May, “It is possible that another animal was involved in some way, with the virus bouncing between a farmer and his animals, or a wildlife smuggler and his poor pangolins.”

Whether or not endangered pangolins are the missing link, they remain the most trafficked animals in the world – and they are emblematic of how human encroachment on threatened habitats and species is putting all of us at risk.

Illegal wildlife trade as a financial crime

Before the outbreak threw the wildlife trade into the spotlight, financial institutions had already begun collaborating to crack down on IWT. Last fall, the Financial Action Task Force (FATF), which is headquartered in Paris and positions itself as the globe’s money-laundering and terrorist-financing watchdog, announced that it would be making IWT a key priority under its current president, Xiangmin Liu of the People’s Bank of China. In June, FATF will provide governments and the financial industry practical guidance on combatting money laundering linked to IWT, FATF’s media relations manager, Duncan Crawford, stated in an email to Corporate Knights. With a top priority being the stop of the financial flows and laundering of the proceeds of IWT, the tools are intended “to disrupt, dismantle and deter the flows of illicit financing,” Crawford wrote.

TRAFFIC, a U.K.-based NGO that focuses on biodiversity conservation for wild plants and animals, was one of the founding members of another task force: the United for Wildlife Financial Taskforce, a bank-led group of more than 30 global financial institutions committed to combatting IWT that was founded in 2018. TRAFFIC is set to imminently publish case studies for enforcement agencies revealing the various techniques used by criminal networks to funnel and launder ill-gotten gains from IWT, TRAFFIC spokesperson Richard Thomas says. “It’s long been known that following the money is a very effective way to bring down criminal networks. Everything you do, every transaction, has a financial record,” Thomas says.

Financial tools to hunt suspicious transactions

One of the most effective but underused weapons in fighting IWT is financial investigation, according to the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime and the Asia/Pacific Group on Money Laundering, which co-published a report in 2017, Enhancing the Detection, Investigation and Disruption of Illicit Financial Flows from Wildlife Crime. Among its many recommendations, the report states that financial asset forfeiture should be used as a deterrent by depriving perpetrators of ill-gotten gains from IWT. It also recommended that financial institutions develop better intelligence linkages to identify suspicious transactions. Extra due diligence must also be applied to legitimate businesses operating in sectors like trucking, the antique trade, traditional medicine, the fashion industry and wild animal breeding.

Legal breeding farms create enormous loopholes for IWT perpetrators, says Adam Peyman, the wildlife programs and operations manager for Humane Society International (HSI). “The legal wildlife trade acts as a cover for IWT, just as captive breeding farms act as a cover for laundering animals from the wild,” Peyman says. A huge loophole was created by China when it prohibited the sale and trade of non-aquatic wild animals for food but not medicine, fur or research, according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Online wildlife purchases on the rise

Another challenge to stopping IWT is that it’s being carried out via e-commerce. “Overall, there has been increased activity online by those who are trading in illegal wildlife,” says Ivonne Higuero, the secretary-general of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), from Geneva. She says CITES is developing a practical guideline to assist law enforcement authorities in combatting IWT internet crime.
Whether on the dark web or on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram, as well as apps like WhatsApp, buyers can order and purchase vast arrays of illegal animal products: live amphibians, tropical fish, exotic birds, tiger cubs or baby primates, as well as products like pangolin scales, rhino horn or ivory, with a few clicks of a computer mouse. Much of the online demand comes from European collectors willing to pay upwards of $100,000 for a particularly rare specimen, says Higuero.

The Coalition to End Wildlife Trafficking Online has been working with private companies like Facebook, eBay, Instagram and Google, as well as such Chinese companies as internet conglomerate Tencent Holdings, which are having some success policing and regulating online IWT. In a meeting with Tencent executives last November in China, Higuero was told that the company had detected more than one million IWT listings. As a result, Tencent closed 6,000 accounts, 128 arrests were made, and US$2.8 million worth of IWT products were seized, says Higuero.
Altogether, companies involved with the coalition reported removing or blocking more than three million listings for endangered or threatened species and associated products from their platforms. While these initiatives may catch collectors, Higuero warns that they’re insufficient to nab caches of tonnes of pangolin scales being spirited across porous borders, facilitated by bribing customs agents at busy ports, as well as lax monitoring and policing.

Rhino Impact Bond for the win

Additional financial tools for combatting IWT are being developed by the Coalition for Private Investment in Conservation (CPIC), a global initiative supporting the increase of private, return-seeking investment in conservation projects, thanks to enormous investor demand. One successful example was last year’s $50 million Rhino Impact Bond — response from investors was “off the charts,” according to the Zoological Society of London, which initiated the bond with the support of the finance company Conservation Capital. CPIC has begun channelling more private funds into conservation efforts that specifically reduce IWT.

A CPIC spokesperson stated in an email to Corporate Knights that “there is a huge gap in the finance we need for environmental and biodiversity conservation,” estimating that more than US$400 billion would be needed every year to reverse decades of declining populations. The urgency in halting IWT couldn’t be more dire. A 2019 report by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services predicts the extinction of one million animal and plant species in the next few decades.

Higuero says that enhanced financial diligence must be supported by harsher penalties. “Prosecution is, ultimately, the most important thing. That’s the only way that you’ll create disincentive.” TRAFFIC’s Thomas agrees, pointing out the minimal punishments currently meted out. One smuggler, Gilbert Khoo, convicted this year of smuggling more than £53 million of endangered live eels out of the U.K., received a two-year suspended sentence. Cases like this indicate to criminals that IWT is “a big return for a relatively small risk,” Thomas says.

Ultimately, says HSI’s Peyman, it’s crucial to change public perception of wildlife in the global community from things that are consumed to “something that should be conserved, protected and appreciated.” This, he says, will require a dedicated and determined international effort coordinating all aspects of government, as well as, crucially, the financial sector.

Roberta Staley is a Vancouver-based author, magazine editor and writer and filmmaker.

 Also by Roberta Staley:

Tourism collapse in Kenya raises fears of poaching uptick

Massive floods and COVID gutted the tourism industry in Kenya’s Maasai Mara, now poaching may be on the rise

The post Banking on the wildlife trade appeared first on Corporate Knights.

“There’s Ivy,” says Wall, who became MEP’s director of research and conservation early this year. He points to one icon with a long, meandering digital trail. The thread indicates the 35-year-old elephant’s movements, which are being recorded thanks to an inventive software platform called EarthRanger, which Wall helped develop while undertaking a PhD in elephant spatial behaviour at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. Since then, EarthRanger has gone on to become the gold standard for protected-area management initiatives throughout Africa.

“Delta Team is waiting,” Wall says. “They’ll wait until they get a geo-fence break from Ivy. That might happen at 10 pm, it might happen at 2 am. The elephants are more active at night because of people.”

In simple language, a “geo-fence break” means that Ivy is, once again, leading her herd into temptation — crop raiding. Her heavy Kevlar collar — with its lithium batteries, GPS software, very high frequency (VHF) beacon and Iridium satellite transmitter that connects data straight to EarthRanger for real-time, 24/7 tracking — gives her away. The software is equipped with analyzers that, when a new data point is registered — such as Ivy moving to within a kilometre of a village — an algorithm is triggered and sends an alert to MEP staff. Unbeknownst to Ivy, that’s lucky, as one of MEP’s six ranger teams, such as “Delta,” consisting of four to eight rangers, will receive the exact coordinates of Ivy’s nefarious activities on their phones via short message service (SMS). Because they live not only on MEP headquarters but in temporary camps scattered about the vast range MEP monitors, the rangers can react quickly to an alert, jumping in a Land Rover cruiser and motoring over rough, dirt roads to where the crop-raiders are. The rangers will then frighten the elephants away with non-lethal deterrents like chili bombs, which launch pepper spray at the animals, or fly drones over their heads. The high-pitched whining and diving sends pachyderms scurrying, possibly because the noise reminds them of bees.

Mara Elephant Project rangers try to spot a crop-raiding elephant on their drone flight controller.

The rangers, who are trained in conflict mitigation, will record every detail of the marauding: where the event was, what type of crops were damaged, were there preventions such as electric fences, what time did the event occur, how long did it take to shoo the animals away? “We’re hoping that data collection will help inform our conservation practices,” says Wall. These include determining patterns, such as the most likely time of night and time of year elephants raid crops. “One of the things we do is build up a picture. We want to move from conflict to coexistence.”

Easier said than done, with a cascade of social, economic, cultural, climate-change and deforestation factors at play, including a mushrooming human population that is putting enormous pressure on elephants’ range. Pachyderms traverse vast distances, up to 65 kilometres a day, through forest and over grasslands in order to consume the huge amounts of food they need — as much as 270 kilograms a day for a bigger animal. Increasing populations has meant more land is being fenced off, while forests that provide rich and varied food for elephants are being decimated by people clandestinely clear-cutting trees — even in protected areas — and burning them to make charcoal, which is then sold locally and to other African countries.

Elephants decimated

The world has changed dramatically for elephants since the turn of the 20th century. Kenya’s population has grown to 53 million from 2.8 million, and that number is projected to rise to 67 million by 2030. On the continent, the elephant population is now deemed “vulnerable,” plunging to just 415,000 today from 10 million in 1930, the World Wildlife Fund states. The population nosedived with the popularity of big-game and ivory hunting. More recently, from 2011 to 2015, African elephant poaching skyrocketed when the price of ivory tripled in China; 100 pachyderms a day met a violent end, according to World Elephant Day.

In the Maasai Mara, there are 2,400 elephants, their status as a keystone species making every single one of them invaluable. They are Africa’s gardeners, boosting plant biodiversity and spreading nutrients thanks to their seed-laden dung. Dung beetles also carry elephants’ plant-heavy manure underground, a sublime form of carbon sequestration, says Wall. Elephants uproot bushes, push over small trees and dig up soil. Such behaviour, rather than being destructive, is architectural, controlling bush overgrowth and keeping grasslands open and healthy for other animals like gazelles, antelopes, zebras and wildebeests.

A 2019 report by Nature Communications indicates that poaching has declined in the past few years, thanks to China’s ban on ivory in 2017. However, raw ivory is still in high demand in other Asian countries. In the Maasai Mara, poaching has diminished due largely to MEP’s intelligence operations, which the organization focused heavily on during its first full year of operations, in 2012, when 96 elephants were killed, says MEP CEO Marc Goss, a tall, Swahili-speaking, Errol Flynn type with a boisterous laugh. Goss flies MEP’s helicopter, which had been lent to the organization by the Karen Blixen Camp Trust, operated by a nearby eco-tourism safari facility of the same name. In those early years, says Goss, MEP’s intel unit set up sting operations with armed KWS officers to bust ivory dealers and confiscate their illicit caches of tusks. “It used to be very exciting,” Goss recalls. “Death threats, hiding in the bushes, jumping out.”

Mara Elephant Project’s CEO, Marc Goss, lands his helicopter on the edge of the Nyakweri Forest, accompanied by an armed member of the Kenya Wildlife Service. Photos by Tallulah.

Human-elephant conflict

Last year, poaching fatalities fell to four. The big worry today is what Wall calls human-elephant conflict, which killed 12 elephants in 2018. Wall points to another icon on the TV screen. “This is Fred,” he says. “He’s crossed the river. He’s on the other side.” Fred likes to tag-team with co-conspirator Kegol, another collared elephant, when he has mischief on his mind. “The two of them might be lining up to go crop raiding,” Wall says. It’s going to be a busy night for the MEP rangers.
Wall compares elephant crop raiding to human consumption of alcohol. There are the binge drinkers, the occasional tipplers and the teetotallers. Ivy — first collared by MEP in late 2011 — is a binger. Distinctive for having only one left tusk, Ivy has successfully raised two babies and is a much-admired as well as notorious elephant. Wall is a big fan. “She’s super smart. She’s an important elephant to be tracking. She keeps crop raiding, so we’re using her as a beacon for other elephants, as she’s not on her own; she’s with other elephants.”

Despite being attacked in the past with arrows, and in spite of MEP’s ranger teams regularly chasing her away from farmers’ maize and sorghum crops, Ivy continues plundering. It makes for uneasy relations with local Maasai villagers, although the creation of conservancies in regions like the Maasai Mara have made elephant raiding more tolerable to native Kenyans. There are 14 privately managed conservancies in the Maasai Mara region that are run for the benefit of tourists, wildlife and local Maasai tribespeople, who receive guaranteed revenue generated from lease fees in return for leaving their land open to wildlife. MEP’s headquarters, with its permanent housing for rangers, as well as brand-new accommodations and mess hall for visiting researchers, is located in the Lemek Conservancy. MEP operates across all 14 conservancies, which cover just 1,500 square kilometres of the vast area it monitors, including the unprotected areas where human-elephant conflict most commonly occurs.

But even in those areas where Maasai are receiving regular lease payments, human-elephant conflict inevitably arises, while villagers’ patience dwindles. This year, Goss, in order to save a young bull elephant who was running for his life from villagers who had peppered him with 24 arrows, landed the helicopter in between the attackers and the elephant to protect the terrified pachyderm. Goss then flew the helicopter to pick up the veterinarian. They managed to track down the still-fleeing elephant, even though he wasn’t collared. Goss, the vet and MEP rangers tranquilized the animal, pulled arrows out of both sides and treated the deadly wounds, any of which could have become infected, leading to septic shock and organ failure.

Ivy is now on her fourth collar (it costs MEP $26,000 to collar an elephant, which covers the hardware, helicopter and veterinary time, drugs and ongoing digital and field monitoring). Despite her roguish ways, Ivy is one of the elephants enriching the Maasai Mara and the tribal Maasai who inhabit the area, grazing their cattle and growing crops. That’s because elephants are a huge tourist draw. In the Maasai Mara, 600,000 people every year — mainly well-heeled Westerners — come to see the wildlife and especially the elephants. (Tourists also come to the area to see the famous Great Migration of more than two million zebras, wildebeests and gazelles that travel north 800 kilometres from the Serengeti plains in Tanzania into the Maasai Mara, starting each May.)

Each pachyderm brings from US$1.4 million to US$1.6 million in tourism dollars into Kenya in its lifetime, according to Kirsty Smith with the Sheldrick Wildlife Trust, which for 42 years has been rescuing baby elephants, orphaned by poachers, and rehabilitating them back into the wild. This huge figure compares to the comparatively paltry sum of $21,000 that organized traffickers receive — the poacher receives far less — for a set of tusks on the black market in Asia.

An elephant mother and her calf near the Mara River are among the pachyderms monitored by Mara Elephant Project’s six ranger teams. Photos by Tallulah.

Ivy goes raiding

Early the next day, Delta Team reports that its rangers have indeed spent the night chasing Ivy and an additional nine elephants from her herd out of a crop field. Several hours later, at 7 am, Delta Team responded to a call from a village just one kilometre away from their temporary camp. A big bull elephant was inside a maize, sorghum and bean field. Residents had tried to protect their village from elephants by installing an electric fence. The animal, however, crashed through the gate, the only portion that wasn’t electrified. He then panicked and couldn’t find his way out. The electricity had to be turned off, allowing him to run through the wire to safety. Sairowua takes out the MEP drone and does a flyover to see how far the rogue animal has fled. He is long gone. Says villager Johnson Moseti, “We love the elephants, but they are causing destruction all the time.”
Back at headquarters, Wall is apprised of the situation and says with a sigh that the big male will likely have to be collared. Sometimes, Wall admits, he’d love to return to pure research and start digging into the massive amount of data he’s accumulated, rather than reacting to such day-to-day concerns as protecting maize-munching elephants. Analyzing the data from EarthRanger will give answers to the big questions related to elephants’ future safety and welfare. Where are the important elephant migration corridors? How much rangeland do they need? What crop alternatives can villagers grow that elephants will find unpalatable, thus lessening human-elephant conflict? Driving all of this is Wall’s concern and deep respect for elephants like Ivy, who walk the earth with such dignity and intelligence. “The world is better with her in it,” he says.

Mara Elephant Project 2018 highlights

The Mara Elephant Project (MEP) has 57 rangers, who monitor the Maasai Mara, and an intelligence arm, which works with the Kenya Wildlife Service to nab poachers. Highlights from 2018 include:

• 46 total arrests
• 356 kilograms of ivory seized
• 324 snares removed
• 203 human-elephant conflicts
attended to
• 17,640 kilometres patrolled on foot
• 141,729 kilometres patrolled by
vehicle

Roberta Staley is an author and magazine editor and writer specializing in medical, science, gender and business reporting.

All photos by Tallulah Photography.

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In many ways, this swath of the Northern Great Plains looks strikingly similar to when Lewis and Clark first ventured across it more than 200 years ago. There’s no denying that the place has changed – departed are the bison herds that once numbered in the millions, and gone are the grizzlies and wolves that trailed them across the miles. But vestiges of humans are few and far between, and much of the flora and fauna remains as it always was. Because of this, the region has become the focus of a unique, ambitious and controversial conservation project.

“We’re essentially attempting to preserve the Great Plains ecosystem,” says Hilary Parker, spokesperson for the American Prairie Reserve (APR). “And in order to preserve grasslands on an ecosystem scale, you need between 3.2 and 3.5 million acres.” Put into perspective, that’s roughly the size of the state of Connecticut, or 50 per cent larger than Yellowstone National Park.

In the 1990s, the international conservation community realized that grasslands had largely been overlooked when it came to ecosystem-level protection. So overlooked, in fact, that there were only four major grasslands left in the world still intact enough to be viable candidates for large-scale conservation: a portion of both the Mongolian and Kazakh steppes, a slice of Patagonia and the North American Great Plains.

In 1999, the Nature Conservancy zeroed in on North America, and in particular this quiet, wild corner of Montana, and issued a report highlighting the area as a viable option for restoration. It had a lot going for it: Although the area had been homesteaded and grazed, more than 90 per cent of the acreage had never been tilled for crops, which meant it still boasted intact, native prairie. Additionally, the area included the Charles M. Russell National Wildlife Refuge, a 1.1-million-acre tract of preserved land. At the time there was talk of creating the Upper Missouri River Breaks National Monument (ultimately created in 2001), which protected another 375,000 adjacent acres. And around these two tracts lay a vast smattering of public lands, held and managed for multiple use by state and federal governments.

It seemed that if one could purchase 500,000 acres of private land in and amongst these private holdings, one just might be able to stitch together a 3.5-million-acre patchwork of prairie. And if that were possible, wouldn’t it also be possible to then open those lands to the public, and manage them for wildlife, recreation and ecosystem health? Conservation professionals began tossing around the idea of an “American Prairie Reserve.” It could be an ambitious new kind of park, managed collaboratively by state, federal and private stakeholders, where the people of the world could come to camp, fish, hunt, bike, horseback ride and immerse themselves in the beauty of the prairie.

In short order the World Wildlife Fund stepped in to get the ball rolling, as did the North Plains Conservation Network. In 2001, the American Prairie Foundation was formed as a nonprofit, with an eye toward acquiring land and guiding restoration projects. Within months it began purchasing private property in the region and leasing grazing lands on adjacent Bureau of Land Management (BLM) allotments.

In 2005, APR released 16 genetically pure American bison on its newly owned land, a homecoming that was a century in the making. The herd now numbers around 800, but the ultimate goal is far higher. “We’d like to get that herd to 10,000,” says Parker, “to offer the world a gold-standard preservation of that genome.”

With more than $90 million committed to the project (largely from private donors, including an impressive array of well-known philanthropic families) and more than 350,000 acres owned or leased, the vision of a preserved, intact wide-open prairie landscape now looks a lot more like a reality than a dream.

The only problem is, that landscape wasn’t empty when the APR herd got there.

“It does appear that as their bison population expands, they’ll continue to phase out livestock, and those grazing leases for cattle will ultimately shift over to bison,” says Jay Bodner, the natural resources director of the Montana Stockgrowers Association (MSA) and also a born-and-raised Montana rancher. MSA is the voice of ranching interests in the state and has been a vocal opponent of some of APR’s plans and tactics – and especially the notion that the landscape will be better off without cattle.

“The fact of the matter is that much of this ground is in such fantastic shape already because of the ranchers that are out on the landscape today,” Bodner says. “It’s a point of pride. We have about 4,000 grazing leases on BLM land in the state of Montana, and we’re meeting rangeland health standards on over 90 per cent of those.”

APR hopes to run bison on its grazing allotments with very minimal management, a stark contrast to the regimented approach area ranchers have historically taken on grazing land.  Although Montana requires that private bison herds be managed as livestock, APR’s goal is to allow its herds to behave as much like wildlife as possible. This raises questions for some area stockgrowers. Vicki Olson’s family has been ranching in the area for 100 years, and she’s concerned about APR’s hands-off practices. “Near and dear to our heart is land management, and we think this is a major step backward. We think in the end it’ll hurt the rangeland.”

Locals are keeping a wary eye on real estate prices as well. As APR purchases rangeland from willing buyers, there is concern that the price per acre will soon outpace what working ranchers can afford.  Olson worries not only about the future of the landscape, but also of a way of life. “Ranchers here want to buy land and expand so they can bring their children back,” she says. “I’ve heard people from elsewhere saying, ‘Oh, you’re all old, I bet you can’t wait to get the heck out of here.’ Well, I don’t want to! You’ll find people here with a love of the land that’s unsurpassed anywhere.”

APR is adamant that its goal is to create a reserve that makes room for everyone on the landscape – including ranchers. “We’re in no way anti-cow,” says Parker. “Right now, the public lands are fragmented under multi-use philosophy for ranching. Hey, there’s nothing in the world wrong with that. But, if we want to save our grasslands, we want to be able to restore all of the wildlife that used to be there, and that included pronghorn, prairie dogs, big horn sheep, elk, swift fox, black bear, coyote, wolf, grizzly.”

Ultimately, the long-range vision of APR is to build a fully functioning, intact prairie ecosystem that supports the flora and fauna that flourished here thousands of years ago. Parker posits that APR’s end goal isn’t simply a question of getting what it wants, but of making sure that the place itself is healthy and thriving. “The scale of this project absolutely requires collaboration in order to succeed. It’s not about APR succeeding, it’s about the ecosystem succeeding – and you don’t build an ecosystem, you support it.”

Olson tries to be optimistic, although she can’t help but feel that of everything living on the landscape, the ranchers may be the most endangered species of all: “They say we have to find common ground, but if their plan is to succeed, that means I have to leave. I don’t see much common ground there.”

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