GEF – COMBATTING ILLEGAL WILDLIFE TRADE (CIWT) | United Nations Development Programme

GEF – COMBATTING ILLEGAL WILDLIFE TRADE (CIWT)

The project aims to remove barriers in the key wildlife conservation species in Indonesia. It strengthens the policy and regulatory framework, monitoring capacity and information sharing to support the combating of IWT.

Background

The Combatting Illegal Wildlife Trade (CIWT) Project seeks to assist the government to reduce the volume of unsustainable wildlife trade and the rate of loss of globally significant biodiversity in Indonesia and East and South-East Asia.
Wildlife crime has reached critical proportions and is threatening numerous species with localized extinctions. The illegal trade of flora and fauna (other than fisheries and timber) has been estimated by different sources to be worth US$7-23 billion dollars annually and US$2.5 billion in East Asia and the Pacific alone. The value of the illegal trade in Indonesia alone is estimated at up to US$ 1 billion per year, in addition to enormous economic, environmental, and social losses. This trade has already caused the decline and local extinction of many species across SE Asia. Much of the trade is highly organized, benefits a relatively small criminal groups, whilst depriving developing economies of billions of dollars in lost revenues and development opportunities. Within SE Asia, a significant amount of this trade starts from Indonesia, one of the world’s top 10 ‘megadiverse’ countries and the largest supplier of wildlife products in Asia, both ‘legal’ and illegal.

Objectives

The GEF project aims to remove the barriers to accomplish the long-term solution to this challenge, namely, to conserve key wildlife species in Indonesia, by ensuring that the legal wildlife trade is ecologically and economically sustainable, while reducing the scale and impact of illegal wildlife trafficking, both from Indonesia and in transit through the country.

The key barriers are:

The weak policy and regulatory framework and insufficient information and tools to understand, regulate and combat illegal wildlife trade;
Suboptimal institutional capacity for compliance monitoring and enforcement;
Ineffective enforcement at the site and landscape levels;
Inadequate information sharing mechanisms to support responses to IWT.

These barriers will be removed through the implementation of the project’s four components leading to the following outcomes that will in turn contribute towards achievement of the Project Objective, which is to reduce the volume of unsustainable wildlife trade and the rate of loss of globally significant biodiversity in Indonesia and East and South-East Asia.

Gender and Social Inclusion Approach

The CIWT project is a GEN2 Marker project, intended to make a “significant contribution” to gender equality.

CIWT work with women has made an important contribution to SDG 5 (Gender Equality) and through community public awareness SDG 12 (Responsible Consumption and Production). The CIWT project has made a strong effort to engage and empower women through the following activities:

The CIWT project support to the Inspiring Women for Forest Rangers program empowered women to participate as volunteer forest rangers to work alongside the largely male dominated national park rangers on their monthly park boundary patrols. Inspiring Women for Forest Rangers, established in association with national parks in North Sulawesi and North Sumatra.
Community awareness raising of laws for protected species and IWT targeting women community groups, women teachers and scouts in North Sulawesi; and
The introduction of AIG activities for women-only programs in communities around Bogani Nani Wartabone (BNW) National Park, North Sulawesi.