Best Practices to Confront Pandemics at the Source

The international community must agree to end deforestation, close live-wildlife markets, and embrace a treaty to prevent future outbreaks.

Best Practices to Confront Pandemics at the Source

see also: Coronaviruses and the Human Meat Market

Jane's Traffic Stop:The Fight to End Illegal Wildlife Trafficking | #JanesTrafficStop

People are selling and exchanging wild animal parts – including food, pets, leather, ornaments, “trophies,” or “medicine,” at a crisis level illegally and unsustainably. This is not a simple issue, but one filled with examples of the intense pressures of poverty, lack of training in enforcement, governmental corruption, and the careless demand for wildlife products by global consumers. Poachers, the pawns of a much larger international game of illegal trade, enter protected areas or target endangered species prized for their “parts” (worth hefty sums in black markets), armed with weapons like grenades and AK-47s to create devastation. They are markers of economic desperation, fueled by the prospect of payouts from buyers, kingpins and smugglers from domestic and foreign markets demanding those rare commodities or “trophies” like ivory, horns, skins, pets and meat. Defeating just individual poachers is not the answer, but part of a much larger puzzle of international trade and demand. And it is a problem which is only growing...

more: Jane's Traffic Stop:The Fight to End Illegal Wildlife Trafficking

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Report: 86% of North America's Bird Species Struggling or in Crisis - 33% Facing Extinction - EnviroNews | The Environmental News Specialists

(EnviroNews Nature) — One in three North American bird species are of “high concern” to conservationists with an additional 50% struggling badly, according to the North American Bird Conservation Initiative (NABCI). The group’s annual report The State of North America’s Birds 2016 makes for grim reading by suggesting a mere 14% of bird species in the USA, Canada and Mexico are doing well. Sea birds are the biggest losers according to the study, which covers 1,154 species and contains contributions from over 40 conservation groups. More than half of the continent’s 54 sea species are “in crisis” with bird numbers declining by more than 70% since the 1950s. The research concludes that already-small sea populations are “severely threatened” by invasive predators on nesting islands as well as “accidental bycatch” by commercial fishing vessels. Pollution and climate change are also cited as contributory factors...

more: Report: 86% of North America's Bird Species Struggling or in Crisis - 33% Facing Extinction - EnviroNews | The Environmental News Specialists