A window into what we’re reading at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program

Fukushima Nuclear Clean-up Begins (The Diplomat) 

It has been over 13 years since a massive 9.0 earthquake near the coastline of Japan in 2011 triggered a tsunami that irreversibly damaged the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant. Failing cooling systems within the plant led to the melting of its radioactive core reactor, which dripped toxic fallout across the plant and in the larger ecosystem. Since that catastrophe, Japan has been devising ways to responsibly clean the waste in Fukushima—and it might be getting closer to a final answer. 

UN World Wildlife Crime Report Reveals Harm of Wildlife Trafficking (UN Office on Drugs and Crime)

In the third World Wildlife Crime Report, the UN Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) discussed trends in illicit trafficking of protected species, analyzed wildlife crime harms and impacts, and took stock of all current knowledge on intervention effectiveness. This report is more comprehensive than its predecessors in 2016 and 2020 due to increased reporting. Despite 20 years of effort, wildlife trafficking persists and is connected with powerful organized crime groups operating in fragile ecosystems. This has implications not only for the spread of organized crime, but also for biodiversity loss and subsequent impacts on climatic fragility.

Today’s celebration of World Wildlife Day is a perfect time to focus greater attention on the rapidly growing Latin America-to-Asia wildlife trade. It now has reached crisis proportions, with both illegal and legal shipments rising in tandem with China’s economic investment in the region.

Experts link this mushrooming trans-Pacific animal trade to large-scale development projects by Chinese companies. Over the past 15 years, two state-owned Chinese banks have loaned more than $140 billion for infrastructure, road, railway and mining projects in Latin America.

On August 18, 2021, we witnessed a potential game-changer in the fight against international wildlife crime (IWT). One of the world’s leading wildlife trafficking hubs, Hong Kong, voted to change its laws to treat wildlife Crime as “Organized and Serious Crime.” From 2010 to 2020, local authorities valued wildlife seizures in the city at more than HK$1 billion (USD128.5 million), but the scale of the illicit trade passing through Hong Kong has likely been many times larger.

“This COVID-19 pandemic has reminded us, albeit in a devastating way, of the interconnected nature of things, most particularly between economies, the environment, human and wildlife health and welfare,” said John Scanlon AO, the former Secretary-General of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and Chair of the Global Initiative to End Wildlife Crime, at a recent Wilson Center event on wildlife crime’s connection to human health and security. Despite its serious implications for a broad swath of issue areas, wildlife crime and trafficking remain under-studied and under-regulated. At the event, experts from diverse fields in defense, global health, and conservation highlighted the need for international cooperation to mitigate wildlife crime’s impact on environmental degradation, the spread of zoonotic disease, and transnational security threats. 

Nearly a year ago, somewhere in China, a previously unknown virus made its way from a wild animal into a human host. There it found not only a hospitable home, but also an opportunity to spread trillions of copies of itself, eventually replicating to become the global Covid-19 pandemic.

That outbreak, now having infected more than 46 million people around the world, has been the impetus for a series of actions taken by the Chinese government to — in theory — get a handle on zoonotic disease outbreaks now and in the future.