 I'm pleased to be joined today by Dewin Biggs of the Australian Research Council Centre of Excellence for Environmental Decisions at the University of Queensland. I've invited Dewin to join us here at the C4 campus in Bogor to have some disagreements with me. We've been debating for the past week issues around the illegal wildlife trade crisis. The record numbers of poaching of elephant and rhino, but also prevalent trade and thousands of other much smaller and often less charismatic species that has grabbed global headlines. To discuss the various policy solutions that may lie, recognizing though that enforcement based alone solutions are incomplete and often ineffective, but also that recent proposals, emerging proposals for supply side interventions to try and captive breed or wildlife farm many of these species are also not entirely satisfactory. Dewin has let us stir in parts of the conservation world recently with his proposals in the journal Science last year calling for a legalized trade in rhino horn, which has really faced a lot of resistance, including from myself. So welcome Dewin. Thank you Jacob, it's a pleasure to be here. So yes there was some resistance to the rhino horn trade. As I've explained to you before, the reasons why rhino horn may be quite different from any other species that are threatened by the legal wildlife trade are one you can harvest the horn from a live animal. So under the current trade ban, which is failing and which we're not meant to trade the horn at all, we're losing for every rhino poached there's only one horn going to the market. If we had a legal trade, a regulated trade, we could get up to 15 horns from an individual animal. Already there, there's a conservation gain. In addition to which rhino horn, if we had conservation areas essentially think national parks, think the expansion of national parks, but not necessarily national parks per se, but habitats for rhino or habitat for rhino, you expand that. You're having rhino on your property and the ability to sell horn from the rhinos on your savannah is probably well, evidence suggesting most parts of South African savannah it's your highest value land use. So we could have, with the legal trade in rhino horn, we could have a, we could provide horn to the market, we'd expand the area under conservation we'd be able to fund the, from the sale of horns we'd be able to fund enforcement around national parks, like the Kruger National Park, where we would not want rhino horn to be sold from because there we want the rhinos to be wild or completely wild and with horns. And we could fund enforcement there, which the moment enforcement in the Kruger National Park is taking money, then all the money going into enforcement tends to hundreds of millions of dollars that are being spent on trying to combat this poaching crisis. That money is being taken away from other conservation budgets. That means we're doing less community liaison, less community engagement, less sharing of invasive species, less monitoring of other aspects of biodiversity that are important for conservation. Well there you hit an interesting point which is that our policy responses are singular and I think that this is an important point to highlight because often we think well this is either an issue of sustainable use or wildlife farming and trade or restrictions and prohibition and enforcement. And already you've highlighted the fact that that's perhaps not a reality. Smart solutions are going to lie in a diversity of interventions across the value chain. So in this case you're calling for sustainable and legal use of a product that's currently banned, a wildlife product. But you're not saying that it comes at the exclusion of enforcement in fact you're highlighting a close relationship between them. That's a point that I think is often overlooked in this. No I think so and I think unfortunately debates on our policy response to the legal, or the crisis in legal trade of wildlife and when we say wildlife we're not only talking rhinos and elephants, we're talking a wide range of species and I know in your mind that includes forest products, that includes plants, orchids that you've worked on a lot. And yes and there are people that say well okay so enforcement's not working, legal trade will work but no that's not there are no panaceas, there are no silver bullets in dealing with this crisis. We need to work out which nuance of strategies, which nuance of policies will work and it's going to be different for every species. So let's play off of that then. We've been talking mostly about rhino which as you pointed out is unique, it can be harvested from a live individual, doesn't require killing the individual. But most cases of illegal wildlife trade involve killing the animal or killing the plant. Or removing it from the wild. Or removing it from the wild. And there's another distinction which is that the tax that you've focused on in your research principally are incredibly high value. But so many cases of illegal wildlife, harvest, trade use are for species that are considerably marginal whether it's bush meat or medicinal plants, NTFPs. How do these types of debates play out there? We've been talking here in Indonesia for example where there's a vibrant but environmentally very damaging trade in wild songbirds. How do these debates play out there? Well Jacob, that's a really good question. I was actually just at Gunungere over the weekend looking for birds. I'm a very keen bird watcher and enjoy getting out. One of the species I was looking for there, the Rufus fronted laughing thrush, it's got a very restricted range globally and one of its threats within that very narrow range aside from deforestation and so forth has actually been captured for the bird trade. And I'm not sure what the value is of that product of a Rufus fronted laughing thrush when you catch it but yes, it may well be marginal and it may well be that the people catching it are doing so more for, they're catching it not because it's not because they're getting thousands of dollars but rather because they enjoy going out there and catching it. Well and it's all also about relative incentives. It doesn't have to be tens of thousands of dollars per individual to still be economically very attractive especially in the context of poverty or relative poverty. But in a context like this how do we, you know, is there a wildlife farming or sustainable use strategy or do we really need to think more about traditional enforcement approaches for species conservation? I think one of the, I think there it's definitely look, the Rufus fronted laughing thrush and the southern white rhino are completely different cases as you've highlighted. And my so in the case of the southern white rhino, we have market-based property rights oriented solutions to rhino conservation that have been operating in South Africa for over a century. There were only 100 white rhino a century ago. There's now nearly 20,000. All right. We've seen in South America, camelot species of a Konya, their population went up from 1,000 individuals in the late 1960s to nearly half a million individuals today. Also a product that you can harvest sustainably from a live animal. And so that strategy worked. And it's high value. So people have the incentive to look after these animals and to make sure that there's an income flow coming in the future. So that is actually to me quite an obvious solution that yes has some complexities to deal with but that we need to try. And we need to experiment with rather than sticking with the policy strategy, the trade ban, backed with enforcement that we know has failed and has no sign of turning around. When we're talking about songbirds with very very restricted ranges that are already endangered, I think we're dealing with a very very different case. In that instance, I'd feel a lot more comfortable saying look what we need to do is we need to perhaps train some guards to provide some funding to that national park just to enforce along the main path that the people walk up. So some more enforcement there and that may well be a much better solution in that case. So what we see and I think what's come up from our discussion is as we move through different taxa and also different governance contexts, there really are no single solutions and maybe one of our critiques of the current policy environment is that we are seeing very strong calls for either this type of intervention or that type of intervention but fairly monolithically across species with very different life histories, across countries with very different governance capacities, abilities to for example regulate a sustainable trade in a responsible and reliable way versus other contexts where those realities unfortunately aren't in place. Different types of actors and the context in which they find themselves, whether they're communities with clear land rights versus outsiders entering and I think now where we find ourselves is challenged by policy solutions that are very singular and we're trying to apply them across geographies, across life histories, across actors and I think that that's maybe where some of our disagreements come from because we're thinking about similar issues but in very different contexts. Absolutely and I think also because this illegal, the crisis in illegal trade in wildlife is such a high profile issue, it does attract a lot of media attention and it's actually quite gory, it's quite visually disturbing when you see an image of a poached elephant or a poached rhino and often societal response to those sorts of issues oh this is terrible, we've got to stop this, alright yes more guns more drones, more helicopters and that's quite a natural human response and that's what a lot of the policy response and the tens of millions of dollars of funding that have become available that's reacting to and building on but it's not going to work and we need, yes we need nuanced policy solutions and critically and we've discussed this as well, you need to manage these adaptively over time it may well be that for the next in the current situation that we're in in the current context a regulated trade in the horns of white rhino is by far our best solution but we need to manage it adaptively, 20 years ago no one not one person in South Africa foresaw this crisis because the variables driving at the context was different, in 20 years time the context will be different again and we need to manage this adaptively this idea that we can come up with a perfect solution, the optimal solution and it's going to work for eternity, that does not exist we need to acknowledge that okay we're navigating this complex environment we need to do so adaptively and keep our eyes on the ball, monitor what's going on so that we can change policies as need be Well it's certainly been an exciting and engaging week having you here in Bogor and I look forward to thinking about how your lessons from Southern Africa we can start to think about these in other geographic contexts including here in Indonesia and across taxa and across governance regimes so welcome Dewin and we look forward to seeing you here again at C4