Risk pathways

Wildlife crime as an environment-to-security risk: seven links, and the evidence for each

1,129 seizures in the news, 24,786 seized shipments reported to CITES, 19,346 imports seized at US ports, and 103 convictions. That last number is the story: nature is taken and moved at scale, and the record goes quiet where money and accountability begin.

Where the evidence runs out

The gaps are the research agenda. Open data cannot yet show who profits from wildlife crime, how much wildlife is taken rather than seized, or how removals cascade through ecosystems. Language technology can narrow some gaps: extracting several events from one report, telling a sale from a condemnation or a news story, and checking claims against evidence. Read the open research agenda and pick a question.

Security without militarisation

Calling wildlife crime a security threat can bring money and attention. It has also justified shoot-on-sight policies, the exclusion of local people from land they depend on, and "war by conservation" (Duffy 2015; Lunstrum 2014). WildTrace takes the security frame with three commitments: every claim carries its evidence and its limits; enforcement is counted, never glorified, and no accused person is named; and the harms to people who live alongside wildlife are part of the pathway, not a side effect.

What can be done

The research agenda sorts interventions into six kinds. For this pathway they look like this:

• Information and foresight: open observatories that grade evidence, like this one, and early warning for new species and routes.
• Regulation and standards: due diligence for timber and wildlife supply chains, and consistent seizure reporting by every CITES Party.
• Capacity-building: customs, port and postal inspection where routes converge, and forensic identification of seized products.
• Governance and coordination: environment, health and security departments reading the same evidence, not three silos.
• Incentives: livelihoods for the communities who live with wildlife, so that protection pays more than extraction.
• Communication: local cases linked to the system they belong to, uncertainty stated as a range, and public concern made visible.

Questions people ask

Is illegal wildlife trade a national security issue?

It reaches national security through several pathways: organised crime and corruption, disease risk, and the loss of species that ecosystems depend on. WildTrace maps seven links from nature to security and rates the open evidence for each: 3 are well evidenced in open data, and the link to crime revenue is the weakest. The 2026 Oxford research agenda on environment and national security names environmental crime as a revenue source for hostile actors (R1.37).

Does wildlife trafficking fund armed groups or terrorism?

Documented links exist for particular places and periods, such as ivory and armed groups in Central Africa (Douglas & Alie 2014). But open evidence on who profits and how much is thin, and researchers warn that overstating a poaching-terrorism nexus has been used to justify militarised conservation that harms local people (Duffy 2015; Massé et al. 2020).

How much wildlife is seized at borders?

CITES Parties reported 24,786 seized shipments of the species groups WildTrace follows since 2015, and US inspectors seized 19,346 wildlife import records between 2000 and 2022. The United States reports far more completely than most countries, so these numbers show inspection effort as much as trade.

Can wildlife trade cause pandemics?

Traded wildlife can carry viruses: 23 of the traded species groups have viruses confirmed in VIRION. A shared location between a seizure and an outbreak does not show that the trade caused it; WildTrace shows the two together as a shared map, not a cause.

Where can I get open data on wildlife seizures?

WildTrace publishes cases, CITES seizure flows and US port seizures as CSV at https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/data/, with a DOI on Zenodo (10.5281/zenodo.22902819). Case data are CC BY 4.0; CITES-derived files follow the CITES terms.

Sources

Agile Initiative (2026). Environment and National Security: Exploring the Risk Pathways. Forward-looking research agenda. Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford. The research question numbers (R1.37, R5.2 and others) refer to this report.

1. Carlson, C. J. et al. (2022). The Global Virome in One Network (VIRION). mBio 13, e02985-21. doi:10.1128/mbio.02985-21
2. Di Minin, E., Fink, C., Tenkanen, H. et al. (2018). Machine learning for tracking illegal wildlife trade on social media. Nature Ecology & Evolution 2, 406-407. doi:10.1038/s41559-018-0466-x
3. Douglas, L. R. & Alie, K. (2014). High-value natural resources: linking wildlife conservation to international conflict, insecurity, and development concerns. Biological Conservation 171, 270-277. doi:10.1016/j.biocon.2014.01.031
4. Duffy, R. (2015). War, by conservation. Geoforum 69, 238-248. doi:10.1016/j.geoforum.2015.09.014
5. Eskew, E. A. et al. (2020). United States wildlife and wildlife product imports from 2000-2014. Scientific Data 7, 22. doi:10.1038/s41597-020-0354-5
6. Kurland, J., Pires, S. F., McFann, S. C. & Moreto, W. D. (2017). Wildlife crime: a conceptual integration, literature review, and methodological critique. Crime Science 6, 4. doi:10.1186/s40163-017-0066-0
7. Lunstrum, E. (2014). Green militarization: anti-poaching efforts and the spatial contours of Kruger National Park. Annals of the Association of American Geographers 104, 816-832. doi:10.1080/00045608.2014.912545
8. Margulies, J. D. et al. (2019). Illegal wildlife trade and the persistence of "plant blindness". Plants, People, Planet 1, 173-182. doi:10.1002/ppp3.10053
9. Marshall, B. M. et al. (2025). Tracing trade: mapping the global dimensions of US wildlife imports. Current Biology 35, 3959-3972. doi:10.1016/j.cub.2025.07.012
10. Massé, F., Dickinson, H., Margulies, J. et al. (2020). Conservation and crime convergence? Situating the 2018 London Illegal Wildlife Trade Conference. Journal of Political Ecology 27, 23-42. doi:10.2458/v27i1.23543
11. Scheffers, B. R., Oliveira, B. F., Lamb, I. & Edwards, D. P. (2019). Global wildlife trade across the tree of life. Science 366, 71-76. doi:10.1126/science.aav5327
12. Stringham, O. C. et al. (2021). Dataset of seized wildlife and their intended uses. Data in Brief 39, 107531. doi:10.1016/j.dib.2021.107531
13. 't Sas-Rolfes, M., Challender, D. W. S., Hinsley, A., Veríssimo, D. & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2019). Illegal wildlife trade: scale, processes, and governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 44, 201-228. doi:10.1146/annurev-environ-101718-033253
14. Wittemyer, G. et al. (2014). Illegal killing for ivory drives global decline in African elephants. PNAS 111, 13117-13121. doi:10.1073/pnas.1403984111

Cite this page

Verma, T. K. (2026). Wildlife crime as an environment-to-security risk: seven links, and the evidence for each. WildTrace. https://tarunv13.github.io/wildtrace/pathways.html. Figures rebuilt daily from the WildTrace data (doi:10.5281/zenodo.22902819).