Urgent Policy Change Is Needed to Understand the Dimensions of Legal International Wildlife Trade to Enable Targeted Management

Wildlife trade is a key threat to global biodiversity, involving thousands of species and millions of individuals. Global research and policy attention on international wildlife trade has increased in recent years and is represented in key global policy frameworks (e.g., Kunming–Montreal Global Biodiversity Framework). Yet the dominant focus of research and discussion is on illegal wildlife trade and the use of CITES in managing trade for a subset of species, despite the fact that the majority of species in trade are legal and fall outside the remits of CITES. Furthermore, there is no global mechanism to record what species are traded; current systems only capture subsets of species and regions, with no consistent standards. This hampers our understanding of global trade patterns and limits any understanding of the wider sustainability of international wildlife trade. There is an urgent need to develop and implement policies that capture the full scope of international trade, tools that embed comprehensive and reproducible sustainability assessments, and funding that reflects the telecoupled nature of trade and the inherent wealth imbalance between exporting and importing nations. The adoption of these more holistic approaches is critical for a sustainable future for species in trade and the livelihoods reliant on them.