Conference Agenda

Organized crime networks dominate the entire supply chain of wildlife trafficking, making the scale and operations of these illicit activities challenging to fully comprehend. Port seizures reveal that trafficking syndicates smuggle products from multiple endangered species by concealing them within shipments of legitimate goods. This study develops a unique ecological-economic model to generate insights into the planning and logistics of contraband shipments and examine the consequences for species’ populations. The model is applied to a case involving pangolin scales and elephant ivory smuggled from Africa to East Asia’s black markets. Given the clandestine nature of illicit trade, the model is couched in a partially-observable system setting to yield estimates of shipment frequency, contraband composition, and revenue streams. Results indicate that trafficking is largely immune to variations in shipping costs and black-market prices. Improving detection measures emerges as the most effective strategy to curtail trafficking. The model integrates species population dynamics and demonstrates that illicit trade can inflict a higher extinction risk on some species than others. These findings emphasize the need for holistic conservation strategies that address the trafficking of multiple species concurrently, rather than single-species approaches, to effectively mitigate the broader impacts of environmental crime.