 Welcome. My name is Dillis Row. I am from the International Institute for Environment and Development, a research institute in London in the UK. I've got a brief presentation to give you some context about why we're discussing communities and illegal wildlife trade. But also to talk about the wider project in which this dialogue sits. Dw i chi'n amlif enzymes, gan beth o gyntaf ar y por excellen unionidol, ac mae'r Challenge Fund, a too supported by GIZ, the German Development Corporation Agency. It's running from 2018 until 2021 and implemented by my organization IID, together with the IUCN Sustainable use and likelihood specialist group TNRS here in Tanzania, the Zambian CBNRM Forum and the Nomebian Nature Foundation. The project has three key components. The first one is around building the evidence base on the effectiveness of community-based approaches to tackling illegal wildlife trade. The second one is about enhancing community engagement in national level policy and programmes. So we've got a specific focus here on Tanzania and Zambia at the national level. Then we're also working on the same thing, trying to enhance community engagement in international policy processes that deal with illegal wildlife trade. So including cites, but also the intergovernmental illegal wildlife trade conferences which have happened over the last few years. And then the third and final component is encouraging peer-to-peer learning between communities and between countries, so running multi-country learning events and exchanges. So just to give you a bit of detail on what that means, in terms of building the evidence base, we've established a database of case studies of how communities have been engaged in tackling illegal wildlife trade. You can see the website here, www.peoplenotpoaching.org, and I strongly encourage you to go and have a look at the wide variety of case studies that are there on that website. There are over 70 of them at the moment. And you can look for case studies by searching by country or searching by the type of species, or searching by the type of community engagement strategy. So that includes things like ranger patrols, but also community incentives for conservation, tackling human wildlife conflict, and so on. Thinking about the second component of the project, the national dialogues. So we've got the one here today in Tanzania, and another one planned in March next year in Zambia. And these national dialogues, as I said, are really to help explore how communities can be better engaged in tackling illegal wildlife trade either through improved policy provisions or through the programs and projects that are implemented in the country. So the dialogues are underpinned by baseline assessments which have been funded by the project. And I hope these are going to be presented to you today, but there have been a number of assessments that have been done. The first has been looking at the extent to which national illegal wildlife trade, conservation policy, species strategies such as African elephant, range state strategies, et cetera, what attention do they pay to community engagement? The second baseline has been looking at your existing illegal wildlife trade projects and programs and exploring what attention do they pay to community engagement. How important is it in those projects and what types of strategies are being employed? And then two other baseline assessments have looked at perceptions. So the first one has been a community survey looking at what communities feel about their level of engagement in tackling illegal wildlife trade. And the second one has been a survey of policymakers on their perceptions of the value of community engagement. So I hope TNRF will present these to you later in the dialogue process so that you can see the starting point against which we hope to measure progress as the project progresses over the next two years. The third component, the peer to peer learning and voice. This is how we've been trying to really promote community voices in international policy processes and regionally. So we organised a community voices event in London last year immediately prior to the London Intergovernmental Conference on Illegal Wildlife Trade and a statement that was produced at that community voices event was then presented to the plenary of the London conference and was the first and only time that communities have been directly present in one of these intergovernmental conferences on illegal wildlife trade. Similarly, the project has supported community representatives to participate in the IECN Regional Conservation Forum in South Africa earlier this year and also in the CITES Conference of Parties in Switzerland in August. At a regional level, we held our first African learning exchange in Kenya just last month. Colleagues from TNRF were present at that meeting, which was an exchange between Tanzania, Kenya, Mozambique, South Africa and Namibia. All sharing experiences of community engagement in tackling illegal wildlife trade. What's worked? What hasn't worked? What key policy messages can we generate from that? And then we have a final learning exchange planned to be hosted by Namibia towards the end of the project, so late 2020, early 2021. Here's an excerpt from the community statement that was agreed immediately before the London conference and then presented to the London conference, which emphasises the importance of communities in international and national policymaking processes. Stepping back a little bit from the project, why do we want to engage communities in tackling illegal wildlife trade in the first place? Well, there are a number of reasons. The first is if you look at any response to wildlife crime, illegal wildlife trade at the international level, all of the policy prescriptions that are out there, the various declarations, whether they're from the United Nations, the African Union or whoever, they tend to emphasise three key approaches. The first is law enforcement and strengthening that. The second is reducing demand for illegal products, so working in the countries that are using illegal wildlife products more so than the source countries. And then the third one is supporting communities and their livelihoods, those communities that live alongside wildlife. And what we've noticed is that there has been a huge amount of attention to and investment in law enforcement. A reasonable amount of attention to reducing demand for very little focus on how best to support communities who live with wildlife. So there's a problem with this. First of all, if we just rely on law enforcement to stop poaching, it's difficult, it's expensive and it's only very rarely effective, as we can tell from continued poaching going on across Africa and in other countries of the world. Important to remember is that a huge amount of wildlife is on community land, so it's not in government-controlled protected areas. One quarter of the earth's land is managed by communities. 40% of that is set aside as formal conservation areas. Community members who live with and near wildlife are often actually involved in poaching themselves. So even with the best way in the world, the best resourced law enforcement will struggle without community buy-in because the wildlife is on their land and because they have a vested interest in being involved. Another issue is that communities have long borne the costs of conservation and it's unfair and unjust for efforts to tackle illegal wildlife trade to make this worse. So there's been a historical record of dispossession and exclusion, particularly from protected areas. Anti-poaching efforts, particularly ranger controls, quite often target Indigenous peoples and local communities, quite often unjustly. They're usually not the key players, but they're quite often easy and vulnerable targets. Communities have lost lots of livelihood options through tightened access to resources that they've depended on. So if they're not allowed into protected areas, no longer able to access resources that they used to be able to access to meet daily needs, firewood, medicinal plants, et cetera, then it has a big impact on their livelihoods. And also if young people are caught and penalised for being involved in illegal wildlife trade, this has huge social repercussions associated with the killing and incarceration of young men in particular, but quite often of family breadwinners. So it loses the ability of that family to meet their day-to-day needs because they're paying high fines for illegal wildlife trade or because a key income earner is in prison and therefore no longer earning income. And finally, there's a long, lots of evidence of human rights abuses being meted out in the name of conservation and particularly in the name of tackling illegal wildlife trade and evidence of local people being beaten, raped, tortured, having their livestock killed, their houses burnt down. On a more positive note, communities can be very powerful and positive agents of change if they are engaged. So they know what's happening on the ground because they live near or with wildlife, so just as they can be easily involved in poaching because they know where to find wildlife, they can also be the eyes and ears of law enforcement agencies. They can be highly motivated when they've got stewardship rights over land and over wildlife or when they gain tangible benefits from conservation. And there are lots of examples of communities taking a lead themselves in tackling illegal wildlife trade or forming effective partnerships with law enforcement agencies to do so. And many of those case studies in the people not poaching database are examples of communities engaged in and supporting formal law enforcement efforts through community ranger patrols and so on. Finally, if we empower communities and increase the value of wildlife to them, it can have much broader conservation benefits than just simply the benefits from tackling illegal wildlife trade. So the biggest threat to wildlife is habitat loss and degradation, far more so than illegal wildlife trade. Another big threat is retaliatory killing for human wildlife conflict. Again, with some species and in some places this can account for far more deaths of wildlife than illegal wildlife trade. So if people value wildlife more and benefit from it more, they feel more incentive to maintain their land for wildlife and not to lose habitat and convert it to other uses such as agriculture and they also feel less inclined to engage in retaliatory killing and there's lots of evidence that backs up these conclusions. So community-based approaches to conservation more broadly and to illegal wildlife trade specifically can really help to build support for wildlife as a key land use and to build tolerance for the impact of wildlife and the impact of conservation on local livelihoods. So there have been a huge number of international meetings about illegal wildlife trade starting with the African Elephant Summit in 2013 and the most recent being the London Conference in 2018 and all of these have emphasised the need to engage local communities and support local communities' livelihoods. So the types of commitments that have been made in these policy statements can be grouped into seven clear categories. The first is the need to tackle the negative impacts of illegal wildlife trade on local people themselves. The second is to support sustainable livelihood opportunities, whether that's linked to wildlife or alternative livelihoods. The third is to support community-led conservation. The fourth is to recognise local people's rights to benefit from wildlife. The fifth is to involve local people as key law enforcement partners. The sixth is to reduce the costs of living with wildlife and quite often we think about the need to generate benefits for local people from wildlife but we forget about the fact that living close to dangerous animals also brings with it a high cost and we really need to find ways to reduce that cost. And the seventh is recognising this need to really support information sharing about community-based approaches. There's a resistance to engaging communities because there's no blueprint way to do it and you need different approaches in different contexts. So the more we can share information about that, the more we can learn from what's worked in different places and try and apply that in the context in which we're operating. So again our people not poaching database is very specifically intended to help support this. There has however, despite all these great commitments in these policy statements, been far less progress on the ground in countries where illegal wildlife trade is happening. So this graph shows you an analysis of funding for illegal wildlife trade between 2010 and 2016. It was compiled by the World Bank and it shows you that a huge amount of that, a huge proportion of that funding was allocated to law enforcement and protected area management and only a very small proportion to promoting sustainable livelihoods. So less than 13% of the total to date has gone to supporting communities and supporting sustainable livelihoods. Similarly, this graph shows you an analysis that IIAD did for the WWF just prior to the London Conference last year where we looked at projects which have been funded since this World Bank analysis was done in 2016 and we identified over 450 new projects globally and of those 380, 83% of them have a law enforcement component compared to only a third having a livelihoods component. So there is a real lack of balance between funding and the investment and the numbers of projects focusing on law enforcement compared to supporting communities despite all this policy rhetoric to the contrary. This is an analysis of commitments that have been made and progress that has been reported against them. So these were commitments that have been made at the various illegal wildlife trade conferences in London in 2014, in Botswana in 2015, in Vietnam in 2016 and then this report was compiled for the London Conference in 2018 and it shows you in the downward column the number of countries that have reported actions against each type of commitment and then anything coloured in orange is where progress has been made. Now you won't be able to see the detail of this table but this is the table for progress against law enforcement commitments and you can see that there are quite a lot of countries reporting progress and quite a lot of sales of the grid coloured in orange which indicates that progress has been made. By contrast these are the countries that are supporting progress against community commitments that have been made in those same conferences and you can immediately see that first of all fewer countries are reporting progress at all and then secondly this grid is far less orange than the law enforcement one. There's the law enforcement one, here's the community grid. So there's far less progress reported overall and the column which does have the most progress reported against it is surprise surprise the column that's about involving local people as law enforcement partners. So where community engagement has happened and communities have been supported again there's been much more emphasis on the law enforcement side of that rather than the other commitments around tackling negative impacts, supporting community led conservation, reducing the cost of living with wildlife and so on. So how do we engage communities in tackling illegal wildlife trade? It's actually a very simple equation in theory and essentially the equation just says that the net benefits of conserving wildlife have to be greater than the net benefits of poaching it which would seem very obvious. So net benefits we need to emphasise the net here so to work that out you've got to think about what are the benefits from conserving wildlife so that might come in the form of income, jobs, food, empowerment, cultural benefits but what are also the costs of conserving wildlife in the form of human wildlife conflict or loss of access to land and resources and you have to take away those costs from the benefits to work out the net benefits and then what are the benefits of poaching well first of all you've got income and then you quite often you've got social status associated with poaching but then the costs of poaching are the fines, the prison terms, the risk to life from the wildlife itself or from anti poaching patrols so quite high potential costs associated and again the net benefits of poaching are the gross benefits minus the costs so it's these four boxes which have to balance out with an overall favour towards the net benefits of conservation in order for community engagement to work. So there's four primary pathways by which you can engage communities this is an outline of a theory of change for engaging communities I won't go into the detail of it but it highlights these four key pathways which can be used in various combinations and through various steps through activities to outputs to outcomes all eventually leading to this impact that we're after of decreased pressure on species from illegal wildlife trade. So the pathways are first of all to increase the costs of participating in illegal wildlife trade so that is the fines, the increased law enforcement efforts using cultural taboos as well as conventional fines to really maximise the negative side of participating in illegal wildlife trade. The second one is to increase the incentives for wildlife stewardship through wildlife enterprises such as tourism and trophy hunting through other ways in which communities can generate tangible but also intangible benefits from wildlife. The third one is to decrease the costs of living with wildlife particularly through tackling human wildlife conflict and then the fourth one sort of slightly different is to actually reduce dependence on wildlife totally whether it's through conservation or through poaching and increase non wildlife based livelihoods so that people don't need to turn to poaching for their livelihoods. Each of these pathways seems similar but is progress along these pathways towards this ultimate impact of decreased pressure from illegal wildlife trade is underpinned by a huge number of assumptions that we quite you know we have to be clear where we're aware of and that we're tackling and that we're building into program design. So how do these pathways initially link to this equation that I first showed you? Well pathway A increase in the disincentives that links to the right side of the equation decreasing the net benefits of poaching. Pathways B and C which are about increasing the incentives for stewardship and decreasing the cost of living with wildlife link to the other side of the equation which is about increasing the net benefits of conserving and then finally as I said pathway D supporting non wildlife livelihoods reduces overall dependence on wildlife conservation and on illegal wildlife trade. Thank you very much so thanks for your attention I hope that was useful in setting this dialogue in context and I look forward to hearing the outcomes of your discussions. Thank you.