WEMS Project Presentation during CITES CoP14 meeting, The Hague.

Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) is an environmental governance model defined in accordance with the Bali Strategic Plan for Technology Support and Capacity Development [1] and, will assist in monitoring the effectiveness of enforcement and compliance of wildlife law at a national level. The purpose of WEMS project 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.

[edit] Objectives

• Develop a common information-sharing portal for collection and compilation of violation of wildlife law at a grass root level and sharing the information to policy makers through research and analysis at national and International level.
• Strengthening partnership between, government, private and civil society organizations in the implementing region to strengthen information sharing on Environmental law enforcement.
• Produce a Global Wildlife Law Enforcement Governance Map depicting the illegal extractions at the range state and, seizures at the destination country with indicators identifying the actions taken by parties to the CITES convention in reducing the loss.
• Research on the trends and analysis of transboundary wildlife crime.

[edit] Deliverables

1) WEMS IT infrastructure with the following capabilities;

- Report generation (Ecomessage) enabled with Messaging gateway and security plug-in.
- Statistical analysis- Including spatial and non spatial time series analysis.
- Mapping functionalities enabled with WEMS-IMS (IP Multimedia Subsystem for mobile services).
- Simulation model- Spatial model describing time series movement of goods.
- WEMS user manual and Technical documents.
- Training kit for training the trainers.

2) Wildlife Crime Atlas – Atlas of various species involved and locations of the crime.
3) Research Report on the trends of wildlife crime including analysis from the WEMS database.
4) WEMS Data Clock – A chart defining the seasons of illegal trade in a calendar year.

[edit] Lead organization

United Nations University

[edit] Partners

Government
Ministry of Environment and Forests, Government of India, New Delhi - (Planned for 2009 implementation)
Research institutions
1. Center for International Earth Science Information Network, Earth Institute, Columbia University, New York
2. Wildlife Crime Control Bureau (WCCB), New Delhi, India
3. National Institute for Environmental Studies (NIES), Tsukuba, Japan
3. Bond University, Australia
4. Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China

Industry
Environmental Systems Research Institute ESRI
Civil Society
Center for Advanced Technology Strategy, - Washington D.C.

[edit] Project Manager

Remi Chandran - Senior Researcher, Center for Electronic Governance - UNU-IIST. [2]

[edit] Related work

• World Conservation Monitoring Centre
• Bonn Convention

[edit] See also

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

[edit] References

This article includes a list of references, related reading or external links, but its sources remain unclear because it lacks inline citations. Please improve this article by introducing more precise citations where appropriate. (February 2009)

1) New UN database to help combat wildlife crime - June 4 2007, Reuters [3]

2)UN University launches system to combat illegal wildlife trade -[4]

3) 国際連合大学が野生動物の違法取引監視システムをESRI社のGISを用いて構築 [5]

4)Will regional monitoring systems help in environmental governance? A case study on the WEMS model for monitoring enforcement of CITES Convention. [6]

[edit] External links

• Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System