Tracking the wildlife trade: Usability of shipment identifiers in the CITES Trade Database

Abstract

To improve the usability of the CITES Trade Database, UNEP-WCMC recently released data on trade in CITES species in a new shipment-by-shipment format. The aims of this study were to determine the extent to which the shipments of CITES Appendix I species reported by exporters and importers can be matched with respect to individual identifiers and the reported volume of individual combinations of terms and units. The CITES Trade Database contains 618,750 rows (with 373,031 individual identifiers (IDs)) on the trade in animals listed in CITES Appendix I for the period 1996–2018. Only 18.1% of IDs were usable for tracing the movement of CITES samples and appeared in 216,041 (34.9%) rows. Almost two-thirds of IDs appeared only once in the dataset and are therefore not usable in terms of trade tracing. Although another 63,603 IDs appeared more than once in the dataset, they always appeared in only one of the identifier fields and at the same time only as either a reporter type E (exporters) or type I (importers) and therefore also have zero value for trade tracing. Furthermore, no identifier was assigned to shipments in 35,395 rows (5.7%). For the highest number of combinations of terms and units, the matchable volume represented a maximum of 10% of the total volume of trades. Importantly, for the most traded combination of term and unit, i.e., live animals reported in the number of individuals, more than half of the traded volume (56.3%) was in matchable shipments.

Keywords

• CITES Appendix I
• CITES Trade Database
• Shipment-by-shipment format
• Volume calculation
• Wildlife trade