5 takeaways from United for Wildlife’s World Wildlife Day celebration

First, there were plants. While the spotlight often falls on charismatic megafauna like elephants or tigers, it’s important to remember that plants have always—and continue to—sustain us. They were our first form of nourishment, our first medicines, and our connection to the land we live in.

Today, plants continue to be essential for human health and ecosystem balance. Along with medicinal uses, wild plants play an important role in a range of other sectors, including cosmetics, food, and luxury products. Globally, an estimated 50,000 to 70,000 medicinal and aromatic plant species are harvested, with roughly 1,500 believed to be included in the CITES Appendices.

Despite their importance, plants remain undervalued, so much so that our cognitive bias against them has been given a name: “plant blindness”—when we neglect to notice, appreciate, or acknowledge the significance of plants within their environment.

The seriousness of environmental crime is often overlooked. In fact, it is the third largest global criminal activity, with ties to organized crime groups, bribery, corruption, tax evasion, and fraud. It is also linked to human rights violations, with indigenous peoples and local communities suffering the most.

Medicinal and aromatic plant cultivation and harvesting provide essential resources for households worldwide, with one in five people depending on wild plants, algae, and fungi for both food and income. Wildlife crime degrades the ecosystems in which these plants grow, destroying livelihoods and atrophying cultural practices.

One solution to this problem is to strengthen the capacity of financial institutions to detect operations linked to environmental and financial crimes. World Wildlife Fund, in collaboration with HSBC Bank and other leading partners, developed the Environmental Crimes Financial Toolkit, an online platform that assists financial institutions in monitoring risks related to environmental crimes like deforestation and land conversion. The toolkit raises awareness among financial institutions about crimes in commodity supply chains and their links to predicate offences such as financial crimes and human rights abuses. It also helps improve risk‑control procedures and protocols related to deforestation, land conversion, mining, and other environmental crimes.

Talk surrounding nature can often feel overwhelming today, weighed down by technical jargon, dire warnings, and daunting statistics. Art offers an alternative lens through which to understand conservation, providing an emotional, embodied interpretation of our relationship with nature.

Organizations at United for Wildlife’s event harnessed the power of art in conservation messaging, providing a needed fresh perspective. Vildwerk, a non-profit organization dedicated to inspiring environmental conservation awareness through dance, put on a stirring performance, where dancers mimicked the ebb and flow of natural systems and captured the movements of different animals. Similarly, the Behaviour Change Renaissance combines oil painting with behavior change science to fight the illegal wildlife trade. It uses art to try to influence consumers of rhino horn.

These art pieces remind us that nature is beautiful, and that we, products of nature, are also beautiful. Isn’t that worth fighting for?

Ms. Higuero of CITES underscored the event’s core message: conservation is only effective through collaboration. Just as plants depend on animals to spread their seeds and animals depend on plants for food and shelter, conservation relies on partnerships to address the illegal wildlife trade from every angle. Enforcement alone cannot succeed without behavior change, which in turn is ineffective without supportive policy—and so on.

The late, great Dr. Jane Goodall was right when she described “the tapestry of life.”  As the Jane Goodall Institute reminded us in their closing remarks, we are all threads woven together—pull one or two and the pattern may seem unchanged but pull too many and the entire image begins to disappear.

Hope remains. It is so easy to feel powerless in the face of such big environmental problems. But World Wildlife Day offers an antidote to pessimism. Success stories—of enforcement crackdowns, of sustainable wild harvests, of cross-sector collaboration, of indigenous knowledge finally being brought to the forefront of conservation conversations—reminded us that we are not working alone. Reminded us that there is so much wildlife to celebrate and to protect.