Community-Led Approaches to Tackling Illegal Wildlife Trade

2019 Report

The scale of illegal wildlife trade (IWT) internationally is a conservation crisis and tackling it is seen as a race against time. As a quarter of the world’s land is owned or managed by communities, they must be central to conservation efforts – and community engagement is already internationally recognised as important to the global effort to tackle IWT. But because community engagement strategies are complex and take time to implement, not enough initiatives are being supported.

This compilation of case studies seeks to address this problem. Prepared to coincide with the regional conference on IWT in Peru in October 2019, it showcases a wide range of successful initiatives from Latin America that have engaged communities in tackling IWT in different ways. However, these need to be scaled up and scaled out, learning from experience and adapting approaches to fit specific contexts and to meet specific challenges.