Author: Dr. Caroline Sayuri Fukushima
Date: 06-01-2026
Wildlife trade refers to the sale and/or exchange of wild animals, plants or fungi, or their derivatives, across local, national, and international markets. Illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade continues to drive biodiversity loss worldwide, threatening species survival, undermining ecosystems, and fuelling illicit activities across borders. Estimates of the value of illegal wildlife trade vary, but reports including the World Bank (2019) and UNEP–INTERPOL (2016) suggest that the annual global value of illegal trade, when including illegal logging and fishing, may range from USD 69 billion to USD 199 billion (see https://files.ipbes.net/ipbes-web-prod-public-files/webform/impact_tracking_database/69099/2023-06%20LegalAndSustainableWildSpeciesTrade.pdf.
Wildlife trade, whether legal, poorly regulated, or illegal, operates many times through complex global supply chains in which limited governance, weak traceability, and uneven enforcement create opportunities for overexploitation and criminal activity.
To address these risks at the international level, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) serves as the principal global treaty governing trade in wildlife. Adopted in 1973, CITES aims to ensure that international trade in wild species does not threaten their survival. CITES relies on a system of Appendix listings, permits, and compliance mechanisms intended to regulate and monitor international trade (https://cites.org/eng). It is within this global regulatory framework that the 20th Conference of the Parties (CoP20) to the CITES was held from 24 November to 5 December 2025 in Samarkand, Uzbekistan (https://cites.org/eng/cop20). Convened every three to four years, the Conference brings together governments, scientists, enforcement authorities, and civil society organisations to assess how international wildlife trade is currently regulated and to consider how existing mechanisms can be strengthened to better support sustainable, legal, and traceable trade.
In CoP20, delegates from 185 nations worked through 114 agenda items, and reviewed 51 proposals to amend the CITES Appendices, resulting in many species receiving new or strengthened international protection (https://cites.org/eng/cop/20/amendment-proposals). Many researchers within the GLITSS consortium work directly on wildlife trade across different taxa, regions, and governance levels, and GLITSS members participated in the CoP process in various capacities, including as observers, scientific contributors, and participants in side events and technical discussions.
Decisions taken at CoP meetings affect how wildlife trade is regulated globally and influence national laws and enforcement priorities. However, the effectiveness of this global framework ultimately depends on how its provisions are implemented and complemented at regional and national levels. These challenges were central to discussions at a GLITSS workshop held in Lisbon in 2023 (https://glitss.eu/event/wildlife-trade-in-the-eu/), where participants highlighted that while CITES provides an essential global baseline, additional regional measures are often needed to address gaps in monitoring, enforcement, and data availability, particularly within the European Union (see https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/science.ado1142).
The European Union is one of the world’s largest markets and transit hubs for wildlife trade, yet significant portions of this trade remain weakly monitored or unregulated. Existing EU wildlife trade regulations largely mirror CITES listings, leaving substantial gaps for non-listed taxa. As a result, groups such as invertebrates are traded at scale with limited oversight, creating regulatory blind spots that facilitate illegal and unsustainable activities and undermine both conservation objectives and legitimate trade systems. These gaps are partly driven by limited scientific and trade data on species and addressing these gaps requires, among other measures, sustained support and funding for researchers to continue developing scientific work and generating the ecological and trade data needed to inform and improve wildlife trade policy and regulation.
As wildlife trade continues to evolve, both legally and illegally, international processes such as CITES CoP remain central to shaping the rules that govern global trade and to coordinating responses to illegal and unsustainable practices. Active and sustained engagement of researchers and initiatives such as GLITSS with these processes is essential to strengthen governance and address key knowledge and regulatory shortcomings, ensuring that policy decisions are grounded in robust scientific evidence, expertise, and diverse perspectives, and contributing to a more sustainable future for biodiversity and interconnected social and ecological systems.
_________________________________________________________________________
About the author:
Dr. Caroline Sayuri Fukushima is a postdoctoral researcher based at the Biodiversity and Sustainability Solutions Lab (https://sites.utu.fi/bisonslab/) at the Biodiversity Unit, University of Turku (Finland) and also affiliated with the Laboratory for Integrative Biodiversity Research (https://www.ce3c.pt/research/research-groups/ecology-and-conservation-across-scales/machine-learning-in-ecology) at the Centre for Ecology, Evolution and Environmental Changes (cE3c), University of Lisbon. Her research focuses on conservation topics such as wildlife trade, particularly involving invertebrates such as arachnids.
Read more about wildlife trade:
‘t Sas-Rolfes, M., Challender, D. W., Hinsley, A., Veríssimo, D., & Milner-Gulland, E. J. (2019). Illegal wildlife trade: Scale, processes, and governance. Annual Review of Environment and Resources 44(1), 201-228. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-environ-101718-033253
Andersson, A., Tilley, H.B., Lau, W., Dudgeon, D., Bonebrake T.C., & Dingle, C. (2018). CITES and Beyond: Illuminating 20 Years of Global, Legal Wildlife Trade. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment, Global Ecology and Conservation 16(1), 49-55. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.gecco.2021.e01455
Cardoso, P. et al. (2021) Scientists’ warning to humanity on illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade. Biological Conservation 263, 109341. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109341
Cardoso, P. et al. (2024). Reform wildlife trade in the European Union. Science 383,1066-1066. https://doi.org/10.1126/science.ado1142
Fukushima, C.S. et al. (2021). Challenges and perspectives on tackling illegal or unsustainable wildlife trade. Biological Conservation 263, 109342. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.biocon.2021.109342
Marshall, B.M. et al. (2025) The magnitude of legal wildlife trade and implications for species survival. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U.S.A. 122 (2) e241077412. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2410774121.
