Illegal wildlife trade and other organised crime: A scoping review

Abstract

The global illegal wildlife trade has been anecdotally linked to other serious crimes, such as fraud, corruption, and money laundering, as well as the cross-border trafficking of drugs, arms, counterfeit goods, and persons. As research on this topic is scarce and sporadic, we conducted a scoping literature review to gather information across multiple disciplines and evidence types on crime convergences in the illegal wildlife trade. We reviewed 150 papers published between 2000 and 2020. We found that the illegal trade in many of the most frequently trafficked species have reportedly converged with numerous other serious and organised crimes, most commonly drug trafficking. Convergences can occur in a variety of ways, although the diversification of organised crime groups, parallel trafficking of contraband, and use of enabling crimes (such as corruption and violence) were the most frequently described. Possible explanations for our results and future research directions are discussed.

Keywords: Conservation; Corruption; Crime convergence; Environmental crime; Organised crime; Wildlife trafficking.

Fig. 1

Modified PRISMA flow diagram of our systematic scoping review (Moher et al. 2009)

Fig. 2

Evolution of research interest on the topic of crime convergence and the illegal wildlife trade over the past two decades, and the disparities between peer-reviewed and grey literature reporting

Fig. 3

a–h Visualisation of reported crime convergences in the illegal trade of: ivory (a), rhino horn (b), fish (c), reptiles and amphibians (d), abalone (e), birds (f), big cats (g), and pangolins (h). The nodes on the left represent the taxa or product, the middle nodes represent the type of crime convergence, and the end nodes represent the other crime types. The width of the arcs are proportional to the number of times the convergence was reported in the literature

Fig. 3

a–h Visualisation of reported crime convergences in the illegal trade of: ivory (a), rhino horn (b), fish (c), reptiles and amphibians (d), abalone (e), birds (f), big cats (g), and pangolins (h). The nodes on the left represent the taxa or product, the middle nodes represent the type of crime convergence, and the end nodes represent the other crime types. The width of the arcs are proportional to the number of times the convergence was reported in the literature

Fig. 3

a–h Visualisation of reported crime convergences in the illegal trade of: ivory (a), rhino horn (b), fish (c), reptiles and amphibians (d), abalone (e), birds (f), big cats (g), and pangolins (h). The nodes on the left represent the taxa or product, the middle nodes represent the type of crime convergence, and the end nodes represent the other crime types. The width of the arcs are proportional to the number of times the convergence was reported in the literature

Fig. 4

Choropleth map indicating the frequency of reported convergences between illegal wildlife trade and other serious and transnational organised crime according to the literature. Note: This map includes data on convergences at the regional-level, in addition to country-level data. For instance, while South Africa was specified 63 times, this map also displays the data from regional observations such as “Sub-Saharan Africa,” and “Southern Africa,” which brings the total count for South Africa to a total of 87