Triaging the Global Wildlife Trade

Story by Marina Wang

The Java mouse-deer (Tragulus javanicus) is neither a mouse nor a deer, though it resembles both. About the size of a hare, the mouse-deer carries its big ears, pointed snout, and relatively rotund body atop pencil-thin legs. The smallest ungulate in the world, the animal is more closely related to hippopotamuses and pigs than to either of its namesakes. The only thing the name really gets right is its origin: the Indonesian island of Java.

Scientists know very little about how Java’s mouse-deer are doing. Despite the animal’s off-the-charts cuteness, and the fact that it’s hunted for both food and fur, biologists have little sense of its vital statistics. The Java mouse-deer is listed as data deficient by the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN), which oversees the famous Red List of Threatened Species, an internationally recognized inventory that informs national and international conservation initiatives. And though the IUCN recognizes the mouse-deer as potentially threatened by hunting and trade, the lack of data means that the minuscule mammal is not regulated in any way by another biodiversity big dog: the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES), an international agreement intended to prevent the overexploitation of traded plants and animals. It’s a disconnect that recently caught the attention of Jia Hao Tow, an ecologist at the National University of Singapore.

In a new study, Tow and his colleagues critically examine how some species end up with CITES protection, how and why others fall through the cracks, and what we can do to potentially mend those fissures. “My paper targets the process in which parties choose what species to propose [for CITES protection],” says Tow. 

Created in 1973 and signed by 185 countries, CITES is the world’s largest agreement overseeing the international wildlife trade. According to a 2023 study, species listed by CITES can rebound by up to 66 percent over 20 years in countries with thorough enforcement. The convention accomplishes this through three levels of protection: an outright ban on trade for critically endangered species such as pangolins, tigers, and chimpanzees; a limited, highly regulated trade for less endangered animals like black bears, white sharks, and many kinds of parrots; and a framework that helps countries support each another’s national conservation efforts. 

But for an animal to get any CITES protection, it first needs to be sponsored. 

For that, representatives from member states—often conservationists with the government or an NGO—must put together a pitch arguing why a species needs protection from trade. This proposal has to pass through a national-level body, such as the United States’ Fish and Wildlife Service, before it can be considered internationally. If the national-level proposal is approved, a country must then collaborate with the governments of other countries where the species exists to see if they also support stronger protection.

Only once a proposal has cleared this bar can it be brought to the Conference of the Parties, an international meeting where other CITES member states will amend and vote on the listing. A species must win this vote by a two-thirds majority to finally be listed.

Adding new species to CITES is, obviously, an arduous and complicated process. But it’s also sporadic. Nominations are largely made one species at a time, and that’s assuming a member state steps forward to put together a proposal. And this slow, case-by-case process is leaving many at-risk species out in the cold, Tow says.

There are “hundreds, if not thousands, more species that should be listed,” says Chris Shepherd, an expert in the trade of little-known species with the Center for Biological Diversity. “But they’re not,” he says. Because “right now it relies on an NGO or government [to be] interested in a particular species. … There is no systematic way to do it.”

Shepherd, whose work involves researching threatened species and writing CITES proposals, says that which species get nominated for protections often hinges on the capacity of individual researchers. “The sad thing about CITES is it very often just boils down to researchers like myself to come up with enough evidence to show that something needs to be listed,” he says.

Though he tries to prioritize species that are traded at scale and are particularly vulnerable to extinction, his ability to put together a proposal sometimes depends on whether or not scientists can get funding to collect the data necessary to support a listing. And because a successful CITES proposal requires a strong case—including trade details and data on the species’ population, habitat, and reproductive rate—understudied animals like the Java mouse-deer get left behind.

“A lot of cryptic, smaller, or lesser-known species fall through,” Tow says. “It’s not that they’re not being traded—it’s just that there’s no data on them.”

This, Tow says, creates a chicken and egg problem. One of the reasons conservationists seek out a CITES listing is that it carries a requirement to collect data on animals and regulate their use. But if getting that protection requires already having good data, then many species—especially those from poorer countries where people might lack the resources to collect the necessary information—are likely to be overlooked. 

Another problem, Tow says, is that CITES is slow. CITES’s big Conference of the Parties meetings only happen every two to three years, while the wildlife trade can change rapidly. After Asian species of hornbill birds were granted CITES protection in 1992, for instance, the market pivoted to trading African hornbill species. Conservationists are only now scrambling to have some African hornbills listed at this year’s upcoming CITES meeting, which will take place in November 2025 in Uzbekistan.

CITES’s deliberative process also gives poachers and smugglers time to stockpile product, Tow says. Because a CITES proposal must be submitted 150 days ahead of the meeting, and because CITES regulations don’t actually take effect until 90 days after a species is accepted, poachers are given a prime window of opportunity. “The time delay can cause a surge in demand before the regulations are put into place,” says Tow. This is what happened to the earless monitor lizard (Lanthanotus borneensis), a highly prized exotic pet that first received CITES protection in 2016.

Both Tow and Shepherd think CITES’s proposal process needs to change, and they have ideas to streamline it. Specifically, Shepherd thinks animals should get CITES protection in groups, rather than one species at a time, because reptiles, songbirds, and many other animals are affected by the same pet-trading markets. Shepherd also says CITES should be more willing to extend lower levels of protection even if a species lacks some of the necessary data or paperwork.

Tow’s proposed reform takes a slightly different approach. Rather than slowly putting together proposals case by case, he says parties could instead use a standardized metric to systematically assess species.

In his new study, Tow and his colleagues used trade data going back 40 years, existing estimates of hunting or harvesting levels, and preexisting IUCN species assessments to create a scoring system. Calculating these scores for hundreds of tropical mammals, they identified several species—including the Java mouse-deer—with high scores and a lack of CITES protection.

Shepherd says that because Java mouse-deer aren’t the subjects of intense international trade he wouldn’t consider them the highest priority for CITES protection. But he says Tow’s scoring system, when applied to other animals like birds or reptiles, offers a way to highlight the swaths of species that are being overlooked. 

Samuel Lafontaine, a spokesperson for Environment Climate Change Canada, which oversees CITES in Canada, says that although there have been discussions on how to help members submit proposals, CITES is not currently considering changing its proposal process.

Around the world, species are going extinct at an unprecedented clip. With the next CITES meeting just a few months away, conservationists are hard at work preparing their proposals. Though Shepherd knows progress is incremental, the magnitude of what’s at stake weighs heavily on him. “I could talk for days on the problems with [CITES],” Shepherd says. “Yet I still think it’s a good convention. And it’s basically all we’ve got.”