WILD EARTH WATCHUnderstanding Nature Through Evidence
Home / Threats / Wildlife Trade
Threat Profile

Wildlife Trade

Legal and illegal trade in animals, plants and their parts — a global market worth billions, and one that two decades of enforcement have yet to shrink.

Published May 2026 Last reviewed July 2026 Evidence level Strong Reading time 6 min

Overview

Wildlife trade spans a legal, regulated market alongside a large illegal one — live animals, exotic pets, timber, ivory, traditional medicine ingredients and more. The two are hard to fully separate: illegal products routinely move through legal supply chains via false permits and laundering, which is part of what makes the problem so persistent.

Established fact

Between 2015 and 2021, illegal wildlife trade was documented across 162 countries and territories, affecting around 4,000 plant and animal species — 3,250 of them listed under CITES. Enforcement bodies confiscated 13 million items weighing more than 16,000 tons in that period.

Source: UNODC, World Wildlife Crime Report 2024

Scale of the Market

$1.8Bestimated value of illegal CITES-listed animal trade, 2016–2020
$9.3Bestimated value of illegal CITES-listed plant trade, 2016–2020

Taking the broader illegal wildlife trade as a whole — not limited to CITES-listed species — annual criminal profits are estimated at around $20 billion, in some regions exceeding proceeds from drug trafficking.

Established fact

Despite two decades of concerted international action, the UNODC's 2024 report concludes that wildlife trafficking shows no clear sign of decline and persists at scale worldwide.

Source: UNODC, May 2024

Documented Impacts

Direct population declineRemoval of individuals for trade — particularly of slow-reproducing species like elephants, pangolins and many reptiles — compounds pressure from habitat loss.
Laundering through legal marketsTraffickers exploit gaps in permitting systems — falsified CITES export permits and captive-breeding claims allow illegally sourced animals to enter legal trade channels.
Disease and biosecurity riskLive animal trade routes create pathways for zoonotic disease transmission, an added risk beyond direct conservation harm.
Editorial analysis

The documented case of Spix's macaws — a species extinct in the wild — being imported into the EU despite a commercial trade ban illustrates the core enforcement problem: CITES sets strong rules on paper, but unregulated breeders and document fraud create room to move even the most protected species through nominally legal channels. This suggests the binding constraint on progress is enforcement capacity and financial-crime tracing, not the strength of the rules themselves.

Regulatory Status

1975CITES (Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species) enters into force, now covering roughly 40,000+ species across three protection appendices.
2024UNODC publishes its World Wildlife Crime Report, documenting persistent trafficking across 162 countries with no clear sign of decline.
2025–26Enforcement focus shifts toward financial-crime tools — tracing money laundering tied to wildlife trafficking networks — alongside continued permit-system reform.

Uncertainty & Evidence Gaps

Seizure data is high-confidence for what it directly measures, but seizures are a lower bound, not a full picture — they reflect enforcement activity as much as underlying trade volume, so true trade volumes are likely higher than recorded figures. Financial estimates (the $20 billion figure in particular) vary significantly by methodology, since illegal markets are, by nature, not directly observable.