Descrizione del progetto
Come il commercio illegale di flora e fauna selvatica finanzia la criminalità organizzata
Il commercio illegale di flora e fauna selvatica rappresenta una minaccia considerevole per la tutela della biodiversità e la sicurezza globale. Quest’attività illegale non solo contribuisce alla perdita di specie animali e vegetali, ma alimenta anche la corruzione, la criminalità organizzata e il terrorismo. Sebbene l’idea che il commercio illegale di flora e fauna selvatica rappresenti una notevole minaccia per la sicurezza abbia guadagnato terreno negli ambienti accademici e politici, è ancora poco conosciuta e scarsamente studiata. Il progetto BIOSEC, finanziato dal Consiglio europeo della ricerca, adotterà un approccio integrato per comprendere meglio il ruolo del commercio illegale di flora e fauna selvatica nel generare una «finanza della minaccia». Il progetto esaminerà i legami fra paesi di origine e paesi utilizzatori finali e analizzerà le risposte di ONG, agenzie governative e organizzazioni internazionali a queste sfide.
Obiettivo
The core intellectual aim of BIOSEC is to explore whether concerns about biodiversity protection and global security are becoming integrated, and if so, in what ways. It will do so via building new theoretical approaches for political ecology.
Achim Steiner, UN Under-Secretary General and Executive Director of UNEP recently stated ‘the scale and role of wildlife and forest crime in threat finance calls for much wider policy attention’. The argument that wildlife trafficking constitutes a significant source of ‘threat finance’ takes two forms: first as a lucrative business for organised crime networks in Europe and Asia, and second as a source of finance for militias and terrorist networks, most notably Al Shabaab, Lord’s Resistance Army and Janjaweed.
BIOSEC is a four year project designed to lead debates on these emerging challenges. It will build pioneering theoretical approaches and generate new empirical data. BIOSEC takes a fully integrated approach: it will produce a better conceptual understanding of the role of illegal wildlife trade in generating threat finance; it will examine the links between source and end user countries for wildlife products; and it will investigate and analyse the emerging responses of NGOs, government agencies and international organisations to these challenges.
BIOSEC goes beyond the ‘state-of-the art’ because biodiversity protection and global security currently inhabit distinctive intellectual ‘silos’; however, they need to be analysed via an interdisciplinary research agenda that cuts across human geography, politics and international relations, criminology and conservation biology. This research is timely because in the last two years, the idea that the illegal wildlife trade constitutes a major security threat has become more prevalent in academic and policy circles, yet it is an area that is under researched and poorly understood. These recent shifts demand urgent conceptual and empirical interrogation.
Campo scientifico
Programma(i)
Argomento(i)
Meccanismo di finanziamento
ERC-ADG - Advanced GrantIstituzione ospitante
S10 2TN Sheffield
Regno Unito