China’s legalisation of rhino horn trade: disaster or opportunity?

Hubert Cheung, The University of Queensland; Duan Biggs, Griffith University, and Yifu Wang, University of Cambridge

The Chinese government will be reopening the nation’s domestic rhino horn trade, overturning a ban that has stood since 1993. An outcry since the announcement has led to the postponement of the lifting of the ban, which currently remains in place.

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The case for introducing rhinos to Australia

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The directive, if instituted, would require that rhino horn be sourced sustainably from farmed animals and that its use is limited to traditional Chinese medicine, scientific and medical research, preserving antique cultural artefacts, and as educational materials.

The announcement has been widely condemned. The United Nations Environmental Program called it “alarming”. But done carefully and correctly, and with necessary international consultation, it doesn’t have to add to the threat to rhinos. Indeed, it could even support rhino conservation.

A legal trade of rhino horns, as seen here, could ensure income goes to legitimate conservation efforts as opposed to criminals.
Paul Fleet/Shutterstock

Rhino horns regrow and can be sustainably and humanely harvested from live animals. Those arguing for legalisation say that a well-regulated trade could be a source of funding for expensive rhino conservation. It could also help reduce poverty and support development around protected areas.

A legal trade could also provide an alternative supply of horns, where income goes to legitimate conservation and development efforts, rather than to criminals, which is currently the case.

Rhino horn for medicinal use

The directive from Beijing stipulates that rhino horn for medicinal use must come from rhinos bred specifically outside of zoos (such as at dedicated horn-farming facilities). The ground-up horn powder would then be certified under a scheme developed by a coalition of Chinese regulatory agencies.

These agencies should draw from China’s experience regulating the medicinal use of pangolin scales to make sure poached horn does not infiltrate the legal marketplace. Though strictly controlled since 2008, illegal pangolin products continue to be seized frequently throughout China.

According to the directive, the medicinal use of rhino horn will be restricted to treating urgent, serious and rare diseases. This is consistent with what traditional Chinese medicine practitioners see as the appropriate application of rhino horn. Strict guides for clinical application will be needed to prevent misuse and overuse, particularly given the length of time that rhino horn has been unavailable to law-abiding clinicians.

Existing rhino horn stocks

Beyond medicine, the directive stipulates that people who already own horns will be able to declare their stocks. The government will then issue identification and certification records. After this, the horns must be sealed and stored safely, and not traded under any circumstances, barring gift-giving and inheritance.

This part of the directive is particularly concerning, as such a scheme will be complex, potentially giving owners of poached rhino horns smuggled into China a get-out-of-jail-free card. Lessons should be learned from the ivory trade in Hong Kong, where poached ivory has been laundered into legal stocks thanks to inadequate record-keeping and lax enforcement.

This section of the directive also raises concerns about the development of a socially accepted practice of gifting rhino horn akin to that of Vietnam. There, rhino horn has been found to be given as a gift for terminally ill family members and in business settings, where horns are offered as bribes to government officials. Strict enforcement will essential if China is to make sure illegal trading under the guise of gifts is not to spread.

China will have to work with countries where the rhinos live in Asia and Africa.
Kevin Folk/Unsplash

Working with China

China will have to work with countries where rhinos live, including range states in both Asia and in Africa, as well as other rhino conservation stakeholders around the world. Swaziland and South Africa have previously proposed legalising the international trade in horn as a mechanism to fund and bolster conservation efforts.

Domestic trade in horn is legal in South Africa, and China and South Africa will have to coordinate to make sure their domestic marketplaces support rhino conservation and don’t enable transnational laundering and trade.

Beijing’s decision has certainly attracted immediate and fierce criticism from some conservation and animal welfare organisations. This criticism is exacerbated by different moral perspectives. Some people see the sale and consumption of rhino horn to fund conservation as morally repulsive. For others, it is legitimate and pragmatic.

Whichever side of the debate you stand on, the priority should be conservation outcomes and making sure that China’s newly legalised domestic horn trade strengthens rather than dangerously undermines rhino protection efforts. Rhino conservationists will need to find common ground with Beijing. This requires an appreciation of different cultural and moral values, and the use of evidence on how to minimise risks to rhino under the directive.

Responding to the widespread criticism, Chinese officials clarified that the implementation of the directive will be postponed. The government has also launched a short-term enforcement drive against illegal trading of rhino horn, which will run until the end of the year.

While heightened enforcement actions are welcome, it indicates that China can do much more to tackle illegal wildlife trade. China must strictly enforce its own regulations once its domestic horn trade has been opened.

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Read more:
The northern white rhino should not be brought back to life

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Postponing implementation gives Beijing time to develop a detailed and robust set of regulations. Now is the time for rhino range states, conservation scientists and concerned groups around the world to work with Beijing so that the impending domestic horn trade in China can be a positive for rhino conservation.

Hubert Cheung, PhD Candidate in Conservation Biology, The University of Queensland; Duan Biggs, Senior Research Fellow Social-Ecological Systems & Resilience, Griffith University, and Yifu Wang, PhD Candidate, Department of Geography, University of Cambridge

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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Climate change will reshape the world’s agricultural trade

Australia’s grain exports will suffer under climate change.
Alpha/Flickr, CC BY-NC

Luciana Porfirio, CSIRO; David Newth, CSIRO, and John Finnigan, CSIRO

Ending world hunger is a central aspiration of modern society. To address this challenge – along with expanding agricultural land and intensifying crop yields – we rely on global agricultural trade to meet the nutritional demands of a growing world population.

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Read more:
How many people can Australia feed?

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But standing in the way of this aspiration is human-induced climate change. It will continue to affect the issue of where in the world crops can be grown and, therefore, food supply and global markets.

In a paper published today in Nature Palgrave, we show that climate change will affect global markets by reshaping agricultural trading patterns.

Some regions may not be able to battle climate impacts on agriculture, in which case production of key commodities will decline or shift to new regions.

The challenge

The negative impacts of climate change on agricultural production are of great concern to farmers and decision-makers. The concern is increasingly shared by governments including those most hostile to the advancement of climate change mitigation.

Even the United States, which has opted out of the Paris Agreement, acknowledged at last year’s G7 summit that climate change was one of a number of threats to “our capacity to feed a growing population and need[ed] to be taken into serious consideration”.

The UN median population projection suggests that the world population will reach some 10 billion in 2050. Between 2000 and 2010, roughly 66% of the daily energy intake per person, about 7,322 kilojoules, was derived from four key commodities: wheat, rice, coarse grains and oilseeds. However, the most recent UN report on food security and nutrition shows that world hunger is on the rise again and scientists believe this is due to climate change.

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World hunger is increasing thanks to wars and climate change

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We must ask: what is the cost of adapting to climate change versus the cost of mitigating carbon emissions? And assuming that changes in climate and crop yields are here to stay, are we prepared for permanent agricultural shifts?

Disruptions and opportunities

Agricultural production is significantly affected by climate change. Our results suggest that global trade patterns of agricultural commodities may be significantly different from today’s reality – with or without carbon mitigation. This is because climate change and the implementation of a carbon mitigation policy have different effects on a regions’ agricultural production and economy.

Take the US, which in 2015 had 30% of the global market share of coarse grains, paddy rice, soybeans and wheat. We modelled production between 2050-59 under two scenarios: in a world 2℃ average temperature rise, and with a 1.5℃ increase. In both cases, the US market share would shrink to about 10%.

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Read more:
As global food demand rises, climate change is hitting our staple crops

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China is currently a net importer of these commodities. If temperature increases by 1.5℃, we expect to see an increase in exports of some products, like rice to the rest of Asia.

(However, it’s worth bearing in mind that limiting warming would be very expensive for China, as it would need to absorb a costly technological transition to a low carbon economy.)

China’s story is different in the 2℃ scenario. Our projections suggest that climate change will make China, as well as other regions in Asia, more suitable to produce different commodities.

China’s economy will keep expanding, whilst the new climatic conditions create opportunities to produce other food commodities at a greater scale and export to new regions.

Our results also suggest that, regardless of the carbon policy scenarios, Sub-Saharan Africa will become the greatest importer of coarse grains, rice, soybeans and wheat by 2050. This significant change in Sub-Saharan Africa imports is driven by the fact that the largest increase in human population by 2050 will occur in this region, with a significant increase in food demand.

In our research Australia was aggregated in “Oceania” with New Zealand. The exports from Oceania to the rest of the world comprised about 1.6% of the total in 2015, which is dominated by wheat exports from Australia.

Our projections suggest that carbon mitigation policies would favour the wheat industry in this region. The opposite occurs without carbon mitigation: the production and exports of wheat are projected to decline due to climate change impacts on agriculture.

The benefits of mitigation

A recent report published by the European Commission about the challenges of global agriculture in a climate change context by 2050 highlights that

…emission mitigation measures (i.e. carbon pricing) have a negative impact on primary agricultural production […] across all models.

However, the report does not mention the technological costs to buffer (or adapt to) the effect of climate change on agriculture.

Our results suggest that the cost paid by the agricultural sector to reduce carbon dioxide emissions is offset by the higher food prices projected in the non-mitigation scenario, where agricultural production is significantly affected by climate change. We found that there is a net economic benefit in transitioning to a low carbon economy. This is because agricultural systems are more productive under the mitigation scenario, and able to meet the demand for food imposed by a growing population.

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Read more:
Australian farmers are adapting to climate change

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Mitigating CO₂ emissions has the side benefit of creating a more stable agricultural trade system that may be better able to reduce food insecurity and increase welfare.

Changes in the agricultural system due to climate are inevitable. It is time to create a sense of urgency about our agricultural vulnerabilities to climate change, and begin seriously minimising risk.

Luciana Porfirio, Research Scientist, Agriculture & Food, CSIRO | Visiting fellow at the Fenner School of Enviroment & Society, CSIRO; David Newth, Team Leader, Australian And Global Carbon Assessments, CSIRO, and John Finnigan, Leader, Complex Systems Science, CSIRO

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

South Africa’s role in the trade in lion bones: a neglected story

Most lion bones in South Africa come from captive-bred lions.
Author supplied

Ross Harvey, South African Institute of International Affairs

Africa’s wild lion population is estimated to be between 20 000 and 30 000. Researchers have good reason to believe that the real number is closer to 20 000. This puts lions in the “vulnerable” category of threatened species.

The categorisation masks important realities. The only growing populations are those in fenced reserves with small wild managed populations. This is not only a species crisis. It’s also an ecological and economic crisis. Lions are apex predators, which means that entire food chains and ecological systems depend on healthy populations. Lions are also a significant tourism drawcard, and tourism is a significant employer.

South Africa, uniquely, also allows the breeding of lions in captivity, most of which have no conservation value. It has an estimated 7000 to 8000 lions in captivity across roughly 300 facilities. These lions are predominantly bred for canned hunting and the Asian predator bone market.

But, following a global campaign, the demand for canned hunting has plummeted in the last few years. Environmental lobby groups argue that lions are now increasingly being killed for the bone trade.

A report prepared by by EMS, an activist charity, and the lobby group Ban Animal Trading, shows that lion bones are sold on the black market as tiger bones. The bones are dropped into rice wine vats and sold as tiger bone wine which is promoted in Asian markets as a treatment for rheumatism and impotence. The bones are also used to produce tiger bone cakes, an exotic small bar of melted bones mixed with additives like turtle shell.

The report argues that most lion bones come from captive-bred lions in South Africa.

Captive breeding is perfectly legal, if distasteful. But there are limits on the trade of lion bones. In 2016 the 17th CITES Conference of the Parties decided that no bone exports should be allowed from wild lions. But the conference also agreed that South Africa should establish a quota for skeleton exports from captive-bred lions. Captive breeding only occurs at scale in South Africa, so no other country is permitted to export lion bones.

A year later the Department of Environmental Affairs set an annual lion skeleton export quota at 800. It raised this to 1500 in July 2018. It did so without public consultation or the support of research. Even an interim report prepared for the department by the South African National Biodiversity Institute did not specify grounds on which to establish, or expand, a quota.

On top of this, there’s poor regulation of lion breeding facilities. The department doesn’t have a working database so doesn’t know how many facilities there are, or what the total number of captive-bred predators is.

How it works

In my new report, I discuss how breeding facilities are linked to the trade in lion bones.

The facilities arrange hunts that cost in the region of $22 000 for a male and female combination. Wildlife researcher, Karl Amman, describes how trophy taxidermists then sell the lion skeletons (without the skull) on to buyers. These are usually in Asian countries. A skeleton can fetch $1500.

The importer then sells the bones on for between $700 and $800 per kg. A 100kg lion yields about 18kgs of bone, worth roughly $15 000 at this point in the supply chain. The bones are then imported into Vietnam, boiled down in large pots to yield 100g bars of cake which are sold for roughly $1000.

Conservationists are concerned that South Africa’s quota provides an incentive to breed lions not only for the bullet, but also for the bone trade.

The 2017 quota was fully subscribed within weeks while a newly released report prepared for CITES suggests that 3469 skeletons were exported that year, nearly double the allocated number.

This rise in the trade of lion bones shouldn’t come as a surprise. In 2016 the US banned the import of captive-origin lion trophies from South Africa. Breeding facilities began looking for alternative markets. Selling lion carcasses was an obvious option given that a lioness skeleton fetches roughly R30 000, and a male skeleton about R50 000, when sold to a trader.

The predator breeding industry in South Africa argues that captive lion populations serve as a buffer against wild lion poaching because it can satisfy the demand for bones.

But those who oppose the trade in lion bones cite evidence that suggests the opposite is true. If anything, the quota could fuel the demand for lion products and provide a laundering channel for illegally sourced wild lion parts. This may imperil already vulnerable wild lion populations elsewhere in Africa. It also makes law enforcement extremely challenging: officials cannot be expected to distinguish between legal and illegally sourced bone stock.

What is being done about it?

The public outcry over an apparently arbitrary quota has been notable. The backlash against canned hunting and the bone trade has been similarly vocal.

The arguments against the trade have been put on the table at a two-day colloquium in South Africa’s parliament. The question being asked is: does the captive lion breeding industry harm, or promote, South Africa’s conservation image?

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Ultimately, it is parliament’s job to hold the government to account. The colloquium may go some way towards doing so. It may even end the brutality of captive predator breeding.

Ross Harvey, Senior Researcher in Natural Resource Governance (Africa), South African Institute of International Affairs

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How the Wardian case revolutionised the plant trade – and Australian gardens

Melburnians admire the first primrose to arrive in the colony, transported by a Wardian case, in Edward Hopley’s A Primrose from England, circa 1855.
Bendigo Art Gallery, Gift of Mr and Mrs Leonard Lansell 1964.

Luke Keogh, Deakin University

The first journey of a Wardian case was an experiment. In 1829, the surgeon and amateur naturalist Nathanial Bagshaw Ward accidentally discovered that plants enclosed in airtight glass cases can survive for long periods without watering. Four years later he decided to test his invention by transporting two of his cases filled with a selection of ferns, mosses and grasses from London to Sydney, the longest sea journey then known.

On November 23 1833, Ward received a letter from Charles Mallard, the ship captain responsible for the two cases, telling him: “your experiment for the preservation of plants alive … has fully succeeded”.

Gleichenia microphylla.
Krzysztof Ziarnek, Kenraiz/Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

The next challenge was the return journey. In February 1834, the cases were replanted with specimens from Australia. Eight months later, when Ward and friend George Loddiges, a well-known nurseryman, went aboard the ship in London they inspected the healthy fronds of a delicate coral fern (Gleichenia microphylla), an Australian plant never before seen in Britain. The experiment was a success.

The Wardian case, as it would become known, revolutionised the movement of live plants around the globe. They were shaped like a miniature greenhouse, made of timber and had glass inserts in the roof. In the cases, plants had a greater chance of survival when in transit.

Wardian cases full of cycads from Rockhampton, Queensland, arrive at the Missouri Botanic Gardens after a long journey via London and New York, c.1920.
Missouri Botanic Gardens.

Often thought of as only a product of the gardening crazes of the Victorian era, the Wardian case was actually a notorious prime mover of plants. Some of the key uses of the case include moving tea from China to India to lay the foundations of the Assam and Darjeeling tea districts; helping move rubber from Brazil and transporting it via London to Asia, which is now the leading producer of the crop; and repeatedly moving bananas over many decades to the Pacific Islands, Central America and the Caribbean.

A tea plantation in India: the cases moved tea from China to India to lay the foundations of the Assam and Darjeeling tea districts.
Wikimedia Commons

The Wardian case resolved a major bottleneck in the transport of live plant species, but it also had major consequences for environmental relationships in the 19th and 20th centuries.

An untold story

Botanists and horticulturalists used this simple box for over a century to carry hundreds of thousands of plants around the globe, whether they were in England or the United States, France or India, Russia or Japan. The Australian story of the Wardian case is an important and untold one.

Wardian cases line the paths at the Adelaide Botanic Gardens.
Adelaide Botanic Gardens.

Each state has an important connection to it. New South Wales received the first plants from Ward himself. The Royal Botanic Gardens, Kew, sent its first Wardian cases, full of fruit trees and ornamental plants, to Western Australia. The Adelaide Botanic Gardens even had a path lined with Wardian cases. Tasmania was vital in the 19th-century fern trade. And Queensland used the Wardian case to transport the cactoblastis moth to help solve the prickly pear infestation.

Victoria’s connection to the case is unsurprisingly one of gardeners and ornamental plants. Today, Victoria is home to Australia’s largest nursery industry, by some reports worth more than $1.6 billion annually and employing more than 11,000 people. The industry today cannot be separated from the long global history of moving beautiful and useful plants to Australia more than a century ago. Two examples illuminate the thriving early trade in Victoria.

Preparing to send live plants in Wardian cases at the Jardin d’Agronomie Tropicale, Paris, c.1910.
Image courtesy Bibliothèque historique du CIRAD.

Published in 1855, Charles Mackay’s widely circulated poem The Primrose was about the landing in Melbourne of a beautiful rare flower and the procession from the docks to an exhibition location in the city. It read, in part:
“She has cross’d the stormy ocean/A pilgrim, to our shore/As fresh as Youth and Beauty/And dear as days of yore.”

By some reports, more than 3,000 people turned out to see the floral traveller. Police were called in to restore order to Melbourne’s streets during the procession. News of the fanfare was carried in major international newspapers including Harper’s Weekly and the Illustrated London News.

The British artist Edward Hopley painted the scene, A Primrose from England (1855), to memorialise both the moment of the plant arriving in Melbourne and, in typical Hopley style, the social milieu of the period.

The technology for moving the plant was not lost on either artist. The primrose that Mackay so eloquently lyricised and Hopley so captivatingly brought to life arrived in Melbourne in a specially designed Wardian case. It would not have arrived without this technology for moving plants. It was not just the primrose. In the decades following 1858, the Wardian case played a major role in shaping the aesthetics and species available in the Victorian landscape.

Melbourne, the Garden Capital of Victoria, Australia, by James Northfield.
State Library Victoria.

In early April 1862, three decades after Ward’s invention, the well-known Victorian nurseryman Thomas Lang delivered a lecture to the Ballarat Horticultural society titled “On Wardian, or Plant Cases”. Lang began by describing his first encounter with the cases in Edinburgh. He went on to detail the many useful plants, such as the giant Californian redwood, that he had introduced with the help of the case. By his own estimate, Lang transported nearly a million plants to Victoria in just one decade in the late 19th century, a staggering number by just one nurseryman.

Californian redwoods in Victoria’s Great Otway National Park.
Shutterstock

Now living in regional Victoria, after many years of travel researching a book on the Wardian case, I often think about Lang and the enthusiasm colonists had for bringing over beautiful plants. Lang proclaimed in his lecture of 1862: “The comfort, the pleasures, the commercial interests, the happiness of mankind are promoted by the use of Wardian cases.”

To move beautiful ornamental plants here was very much part of the home-making process for colonists.

But it was always a trade. While beautiful plants came into Australia, many useful ones went out. Often we forget that the beauty of our gardens is as much about moving plants, as it is about the hard work of tilling the soil.

Next time your hands are covered in soil, it might be good to wonder where that camellia or fuchsia or rose or apple or kiwi fruit or lemon originated – chances are it travelled in a Wardian case.

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Luke Keogh’s book The Wardian Case will be published next year by the University of Chicago Press. He delivers the Redmond Barry Fellowship Presentation at the University of Melbourne on July 25 2018.

Luke Keogh, Visiting Scholar, Deakin University

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

How trade policies can support global efforts to curb climate change

Eliminating trade barriers on green technologies could help countries to shift away from fossil fuels.
from www.shutterstock.com, CC BY-ND

Adrian Henry Macey, Victoria University of Wellington

Climate change will have a big impact on the global economy as nations seek to adapt to a warmer world and adopt policies to keep global warming below two degrees. In the wake of the US withdrawal from the Paris Agreement, it is important that policies around trade and investment support national efforts to adapt to global warming while trying to curb it. Four issues stand out:

1. Border tax adjustments

Border tax adjustments, or BTAs, refer to import taxes on goods from countries where companies do not have to pay for their emissions.

This is highly controversial and problematic for practical reasons and difficult to reconcile with World Trade Organisation (WTO) compliance requirements. The arguments in favour rest on punishing free riders and protecting the competitiveness of national firms subject to climate change costs in their home country. Such taxes are also held up as a way of avoiding “carbon leakage” caused by production shifting to countries with more lax climate change policies.

The latter two arguments are similar to those that have been applied in the past to environmental protection regulations. The problem with them is that there is very poor empirical evidence for either competitiveness risk or for carbon leakage.
They also rest on the assumption that combating climate change is always a net cost. This is being increasingly challenged.

The argument against BTAs centres on the potential of unilateral measures being used to coerce developing countries. The sensitivity of such measures is shown by the fact that, until very late in the negotiations of the Paris Agreement, developing countries insisted on including the following clause.

“Developed country parties shall not resort to any form of unilateral measures against goods and services from developing country parties on any grounds related to climate change.”

2. Trade liberalisation in climate-friendly goods and services

Eliminating trade barriers on solar panels and other green technologies could help countries to shift away from fossil fuels. This is fully within the scope of the WTO and indeed the mandate of the current Doha trade round. There are several work streams within the WTO covering this area, though progress is slow.

3.International carbon trading and offsets

The Kyoto Protocol includes several mechanisms (Clean Development Mechanism, Joint Implementation and Emissions Trading) that can be used by countries that have tabled a 2020 target (European countries and Australia).

International market mechanisms beyond 2020 have not yet been created under the Paris Agreement but its Article 6 foresees them. Such mechanisms are being developed bottom-up by groups of countries, which can make much faster progress than is possible within the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC).

However, any new mechanisms are likely to be linked in some way to the UNFCCC. There is no coverage of carbon trading under the WTO at present and there appears to be no appetite for bringing it within WTO disciplines.

4. Compatibility of climate measures and trade rules

One fear is that WTO rules will have a chilling effect on climate change measures such as subsidies, technical regulations or bans on certain products. However, Article 3.5 of the UNFCCC (which applies to the Paris Agreement as it does to the earlier Kyoto Protocol) is clear.

It uses WTO language to state that “measures taken to combat climate change, including unilateral ones, should not constitute a means of arbitrary or unjustifiable discrimination or a disguised restriction on international trade”. The UNFCCC, like the WTO, acknowledges the legitimate purpose of climate measures, including that they may involve restrictions on trade.

There is ample and growing WTO jurisprudence on measures taken for environmental purposes which confirms their legitimacy in WTO law. The jurisprudence is not static; it evolves with international thinking as expressed in treaties and less formal agreements.

Helpfully the WTO Treaty (1994) included an objective relating to protection and preservation of the environment that went further than the earlier General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT). This provision has already been used in interpretation by the highest WTO jurisdiction, the Appellate Body.

Conclusions

I expect that some carbon markets will develop amongst carbon clubs. Trading rules will be determined by those countries involved and will rest on the environmental integrity of the units traded.

Border tax adjustments (BTAs) are problematic. Some commentators have predicted a climate change trade war, arguing that countries are vulnerable if their climate measures are seen as inadequate.

This is now an improbable scenario. Any attempt to impose BTAs against countries which have signed up to the Paris Agreement would face enormous practical difficulties. It would also risk undoing the international consensus.

Transparency, peer review and naming and shaming of countries with inadequate pledges (Nationally Determined Contribution or NDCs), or countries that fail to implement an adequate one, may prove more effective than any of these unilateral measures. Evidence from the climate change negotiations is that countries do care about their reputation.

A further resource to encourage countries to act would be carbon clubs, where countries wanting to accelerate their transition to a low-carbon economy would link their climate measures through a common carbon price via their emissions trading schemes.

The threat of BTAs – clearly foreseen by major American companies after the Trump Administration’s decision to leave the Paris Agreement – may be a useful political lever to gain cooperation. But there are other ways of achieving similar ends.

One example is to require all goods, domestic or imported, to meet sustainability standards. This is potentially allowable under the WTO Technical Barriers to Trade agreement (TBT) as a type of processing and production method. But even if not, the existence of the Paris Agreement – a universal agreement with clear objectives and requirements on all parties to act on climate change – would be a useful reference in any dispute settlement proceedings.

Adrian Henry Macey, Senior Associate, Institute for Governance and Policy Studies; Adjunct Professor, New Zealand Climate Change Research Institute. , Victoria University of Wellington

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

South Africa and the Rhino Horn Trade

Illegal Wildlife Trade

Macau: Ivory Trade Surprise

The link below is to an article reporting on the discovery of chocolate-covered ivory in Macau.

For more visit:
http://www.livescience.com/38850-chocolate-covered-elephant-ivory-seized-macau.html

Asia: Cashmere Trade Threatening Wildlife with Extinction

The link below is to an article reporting on the threat to wildlife in Asia posed by the cashmere trade, which is displacing native wildlife.

For more visit:
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0725-gen-cashmere.html

India: Aquarium Trade a Threat to Fish

The link below is to an article reporting on the aquarium trade in India and the threat posed to its freshwater fish species.

For more visit:
http://news.mongabay.com/2013/0725-smith-aquarium-trade-india.html