Indicator 15.c.1 - Proportion of traded wildlife that was poached or illicitly trafficked - Indicators For The Sustainable Development Goals

This table provides information on metadata for SDG indicators as defined by the UN Statistical Commission. Complete global metadata is provided by the UN Statistics Division.

Indicator	Proportion of traded wildlife that was poached or illicitly trafficked
Target	Take urgent action to end poaching and trafficking of protected species of flora and fauna and address both demand and supply of illegal wildlife products
Organisation	United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Definition and concepts	Definition: The share of all trade in wildlife detected as being illegal Concepts: “All trade in wildlife” is the sum of the values of legal and illegal trade “Legal trade” is the sum of the value of all shipments made in compliance with the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), using valid CITES permits and certificates. “Illegal trade” is the sum of the value of all CITES/listed specimens seized.
Unit of measure	Percent (%)
Data sources	The legal trade data are reported annually by Parties to Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) and stored in the CITES Trade Database, managed by the United Nations Environmental Programme (UNEP) World Conservation Monitoring Centre in Cambridge. The detected illegal trade data is collected through two main databases: a) the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) database called “World WISE”, which combines a variety of data sources on individual illicit wildlife seizures, and b) the CITES Illegal Trade Database, which contains data reported by CITES Parties through the Annual Illegal Trade Reports (see https://cites.org/eng/resources/reports/Annual_Illegal_trade_report). The US LEMIS price data for CITES-listed species are also provided to UNEP-WCMC within the U.S. annual report to CITES, and are used for valuation^[1]. ¹ See https://www.fws.gov/library/collections/office-law-enforcement-importexport-data ↑
Data providers	The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) Management Authority of each country provide data for both the CITES Legal and Illegal Trade Databases, through the Annual Reports and AITR. In addition, other sources are used for World WISE, such as the Environmental Investigation Agency, TRAFFIC, the World Customs Organization (WCO), amongst others.
Comment and limitations	- Seizures are an incomplete indicator of trafficking, and subject to considerable volatility, and depend on external factors that may not be directly linked to the volume of flows, such as law enforcement priorities. - Universal coverage is not presently available, although data are available for a growing number of countries (see section 5). - Since the indicator looks at the relationship between two values (legal vs illegal trade), changes in the relationship could be due to changes in either value.
Method of computation	The value of a species-product unit is derived from the median price declared for legal imports of analogous species product units, as acquired from United States Law Enforcement Monitoring and Information System of the Fish and Wildlife Service (US LEMIS). Particularly, the median values for each TAXON/DESCRIPTION OF SPECIMEN/UNIT OF MEASUREMENT possible combination were used to assign a value to each legal trade and seizure record. Some additional sources (for cases where US LEMIS data were not available or were unreliable) were used, such as estimates based on field research from UNEP-WCMC and UNODC. Also, median values of combinations that were outliers, based on small sample sizes or had high variability were excluded from the calculations. The value of legal trade is the sum of all species-product units documented in Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) export permits as reported in the CITES Annual Reports times the species-product unit prices as specified above. The value of illegal trade is the sum of all species-product units documented in the World WISE seizure and CITES Illegal Trade databases times the species-product unit prices as specified above. The indicator is defined as: $\frac{V a l u e o f i l l e g a l t r a d e}{V a l u e o f i l l e g a l t r a d e + V a l u e o f l e g a l t r a d e}$
Metadata update	2024-09-27
International organisations(s) responsible for global monitoring	United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC)
Related indicators	Not applicable
UN designated tier	2

This internet browser is no longer supported

Indicator 15.c.1 Proportion of traded wildlife that was poached or illicitly trafficked