Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System

The Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) is an environmental governance project developed to assist in monitoring the effectiveness of enforcement and compliance of wildlife law at a national level. It was created by environment policy researcher Remi Chandran.

WEMS Project Presentation during CITES CoP14 meeting, The Hague.

Function

The purpose of WEMS initiative is to monitor trafficking and illegal wildlife crime through a joint effort carried out by United Nations bodies, national governments, private industries, civil society and research institutions, by building a common data collection and reporting mechanism at a national level. The project plans to bring together various national institutions to a common information sharing platform and thereby building the capacity of the states to manage knowledge on wildlife crime trends and threat assessments. The compiled data will be then analyzed and selected non nominal information will be made available online through the WEMS website. WEMS will also help in providing analysed information electronically to all the national enforcement agencies and international policy makers including Interpol and CITES Secretariat. Selected information will be shared with the public for bringing awareness about wildlife Crime.

The WEMS initiative works by bringing together Customs, Police, and Forest (all these agencies belong to different ministries) to a common information sharing mechanism within the national government and this will improve inter agency cooperation in tackling environmental crime holistically. Research and analysis of the crime data will be carried out through a designated national research Institute which will also carry out policy analysis identifying the trends and reasons for non compliance. It will also attempt to analyse the legal decisions on wildlife crimes from data obtained from local courts and will be able to identify weakness in legislation if any. Apart from this, the carriers (example Shipping or Airline company) involved in the illegal trade will also be recorded.

Partners

Lead institutions

United Nations University - Institute for Advanced Studies

Government

United Nations University - Campus Computing Centre

ICT for Development

Lusaka Agreement Task Force

Research institutions

• Center for Geographic Analysis, Harvard University, United States
• Faculty of Geo-Information Science and Earth Observation (ITC), University of Twente, Netherlands
  

  

  International Institute for Geo-information Science and Earth Observation

• Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Earth Institute, Columbia University, United States
• Bond University, Australia
• United Nations University, Japan
• Remote Sensing Technology Center of Japan, Japan

Industry

Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)

Related work

• Bonn Convention
• World Conservation Monitoring Centre

See also

• Wildlife conservation
• Wildlife management
• CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora)
• Environmental agreements