Illicit Financial Flows
Illicit financial flows move illegally-acquired money — often from environmental crimes and corruption — across borders, and they constitute part of a global enabling environment that encourages these activities.
This page provides information, guidance, and tools for practitioners who seek to address the impact of illicit financial flows on conservation goals. The contents outline how money flows result from and contribute to corruption and environmental crimes, how corruption facilitates these crimes, and how anti-money laundering and other approaches can be integrated into conservation activities.
Inside this Topic
Read the Guide
- 1. How illicit financial flows affect conservation objectives
- 2. Preventing money laundering
- 3. Targeting IFFs through "follow the money" approaches
- 3.1 Conducting financial investigations beyond low-level offenders
- 3.2 Engaging financial institutions
- 3.3 Beneficial ownership transparency: a cornerstone of tackling IFFs
- 3.4 Confiscating the proceeds of crime and corruption
- 4. Politics and power: Assessing risks and constraints on financial approaches
Resources
Tools for Conservation Programming
- TNRC eCourse: Engaging the financial sector to reduce money-laundering and corruption linked to wildlife trade
- Technical Guidance on the Development Response to Organized Crime
Research Papers & Issue Analysis
- Pathways for targeting renewable resource corruption: A summary of evidence
- Targeting Profit: Non-Conviction Based Forfeiture in Environmental Crime
- Beneficial ownership transparency and natural resource corruption
- Beneficial ownership in the fishing sector and links to corruption
- Targeting corruption and its proceeds: Why we should mainstream an anti-corruption perspective into “follow the money” approaches to natural resource crime
- Trade-Based Money Laundering and Natural Resource Corruption
- Why is money laundering a critical issue in natural resource corruption?
Place-Specific Resources
- Convergence of wildlife crime and other forms of transnational organized crime in Eastern and Southern Africa
- The International Links of Peruvian Illegal Timber: A Trade Discrepancy Analysis
Expert Insights
- Mainstreaming anti-corruption in conservation: Dispelling myths and charting a path forward
- What shapes anti-corruption success and failure in renewable resource sectors?
- How to engage the finance industry in the fight against cross-border corruption: Tackling money laundering in the wildlife setting
- Using follow-the-money techniques to detect environmental crimes: Potential and challenges
- Environmental corruption: Building bridges across conservation and anti-corruption practice to stop environmental corruption from the ground up
- Good practices for communicating with the finance sector to combat corruption linked to illegal wildlife trade and money laundering
- Harnessing big data to uncover corruption in the forestry sector
- Making financial investigations into environmental crimes the norm
- Can conservation organizations use big data analytics to tackle corruption in the forestry sector?
- The anti-corruption potential of beneficial ownership transparency and implications for natural resources
- Trade Discrepancy Analysis: A Tool to Identify Environmental Corruption and Associated Illicit Financial Flows
- Collaboration Avenues: Bridging the anti-money laundering and conservation communities to better address conservation crime and corruption
- Lessons from research: Using trade data to expose illicit financial flows and corruption in natural resource commodities, and broader applications
- Mind the gap: Bridging the anti-money laundering (AML) and conservation communities to better address conservation crime and corruption
- Following the Money in Illicit Wildlife Trade
- Making the connection: Trade-based money laundering, corruption, and natural resources
- Dark Commerce: Undermining a Sustainable Future
Where to Start
Building Anti-Corruption into Conservation Work
Locate your conservation challenge and follow three steps to understand forms of corruption that impact conservation outcomes, analyze your situation, and identify programming approaches that could improve results.
© WWF
This content is made possible by the generous support of the American people through the United States Agency for International Development (USAID). The contents are the responsibility of World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and do not necessarily reflect the views of USAID, the United States Government, or individual TNRC consortium members.