Zoonotic diseases pose global public health threats, prompting various interventions to limit their emergence and spread. One increasingly common response by governments has been to ban wildlife hunting, trade and consumption. However, there is limited evidence of the effectiveness of wildlife trade bans.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThousands of species are threatened by overexploitation, often driven by a complex interplay of local and global demand for various products-a dynamic frequently overlooked in wildlife trade policies. African pangolins, regarded as the world's most trafficked wild mammals, are a heavily exploited group for different reasons across geographic scales. However, it remains unclear how far the burgeoning trafficking of their scales to Asia for medicine drives their exploitation compared with local meat demand.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFAlternative protein interventions are common in conservation. They aim to reduce the hunting or consumption of wildlife by promoting substitutes. However, selecting suitable meat substitutes is challenging because many factors drive wild meat consumption.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFHum Ecol Interdiscip J
January 2025
Unlabelled: Hunting wild animals for food and income, which is pervasive across tropical regions, drives biodiversity loss. Interventions to promote sustainable wild meat harvesting require information on hunter behavior. Here we monitored the hunting activities of 33 hunters in SE Nigeria over three years (1,106 hunter-months) to identify correlates of (a) the probability of initiating a hunting trip on any given day; (b) trip success - whether an animal was caught, and if so, how many; and (c) carcass price.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNat Clim Chang
September 2024
Extensive research highlights global and within-country inequality in personal carbon footprints. However, the extent to which people are aware of these inequalities remains unclear. Here we use an online survey distributed across four diverse countries: Denmark, India, Nigeria and the USA, to show widespread underestimation of carbon footprint inequality, irrespective of participants' country and income segment.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThe Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) prohibits commercial trans-national trade in pangolin specimens. However, African pangolins are continually trafficked to Asia for traditional medicine, with Nigeria considered a key hub. Using reported Nigeria-linked pangolin seizure data and interviews with Nigerian law enforcement officials, we a) characterised Nigeria's involvement in global pangolin trafficking January 2010-September 2021, particularly observing trafficking trends after pangolin's CITES Appendix I listing; b) estimated the minimum number of pangolins whose scales are in Nigeria-linked seizures January 2010-September 2021, and; c) assessed ongoing efforts within Nigeria to curb pangolin trafficking.
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