New data indicates that the species occupied only 2.2 acres during the 2023-2024 winter season, 59% less than the previous year when scientists observed 5.5 acres.

The Snow Leopard Population Assessment in India sampled over 10 million acres, deploying about 2,000 cameras that produced thousands of photos. Skilled scientists in India completed this first-ever rigorous examination of the country’s snow leopard population, estimating that 718 of these iconic big cats live within the country’s borders.

The African Nature-Based Tourism Platform worked with partners to conduct surveys assessing the impact of COVID-19 on communities and small to medium enterprises (SMEs) within the nature-based tourism sector.

Does your work focus on combating wildlife trafficking? Is corruption enabling illicit trade and undermining your results? This guide outlines three steps to start building anti-corruption approaches into your conservation programming.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

This guide is a high-level “how-to” for carrying out a corruption risk assessment in a conservation law enforcement context, using the Map, Characterize, Assess, and Recommend (MCAR) approach designed by the Basel Institute on Governance. The first section covers planning: the resources, timing, and other considerations for setting up the assessment. The second section lays out each step of the assessment, with tips, basic instructions, and implementation recommendations for each stage. Finally, the annexes provide sample supporting materials, including a simplified process diagram and map, a sample questionnaire for interviews, and a basic confidentiality agreement.

This TNRC Guide shares practical knowledge for program designers and implementers to reduce corruption’s impact on conservation.

A color-changing lizard, a thick-thumbed bat, a venomous snake named after a Chinese mythological goddess, an orchid that looks like a Muppet, and a tree frog with skin that resembles thick moss are five of the 380 new species described by scientists in the Greater Mekong region of Southeast Asia in 2021 and 2022, according to a new report releasing soon by WWF.

A corruption-oriented situation analysis can help conservation and natural resource management (NRM) practitioners understand and respond to the threats that corruption poses to conservation and NRM outcomes. As part of the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project, WWF teams in different countries conducted situation analyses to inform both small-scale pilot projects and large-scale investments, in each case aiming to get a better idea of the ways that corruption may impact NRM activities and how they could design projects that would respond more effectively to those threats. Part I of this guide collects lessons from their experience and provides insights on implementing this type of analysis. Part II shares three case studies and analysis tools for doing corruption-oriented situation analysis.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

Zero Wild Meat was an innovative campaign launched by WWF between October and December 2022 that spotlighted two serious threats—risks to public health and risks to nature—in order to reduce the consumption of wild meat in Viet Nam, Cambodia, and Lao PDR.

This brief highlights the importance and potential of robust internal controls in helping achieve the objectives of agencies tasked with protecting wildlife and the environment by identifying performance gaps and opportunities for improvement, enabling oversight, and fostering accountability. However, in some countries, internal controls are not always applied to wildlife-related corruption or even natural resource management. Conservation or anticorruption partners can help government institutions strengthen their systems of internal controls, building on procedures already in place. Well-designed systems of internal controls can discourage corrupt behavior and mitigate other risks to wildlife and natural resources. While no system can completely eliminate the potential for corrupt behavior, enhancing internal controls can help close the implementation gap between agency objectives and what happens in practice.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

There are challenges facing the preservation and management of protected natural areas in Serbia, despite the country's positive regulations and commitments. Illegal construction and large capital projects have endangered these areas due to limited management opportunities and insufficient government action and civil society organizations have limited standing to act in procedures related to the protection of these areas, which further hinders their active participation. This manual helps Serbian civil society organizations understand rules of spatial and urban planning, opportunities for public participation, key illegal practices in the management and implementation of activities within protected areas, legal procedures, and how to improve citizen participation to combat corruption.

This manual was created as part of the "Systematic and early engagement as a cure for policy capture and a key instrument for prevention of corruption in policy planning" project implemented by WWF Adria in Serbia, funded by the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

The Open Government Partnership (OGP) is a collaboration of over 150 national and local governments and more than 1000 civil society partners working to promote transparent, participatory, inclusive, and accountable governance. OGP offers a promising opportunity to bring transparency, participation, and accountability to the governance of natural resources, as participating governments collaborate with their civil societies to commit to concrete, impactful reforms to bring transparency, accountability, and participation to bear on the most relevant and important challenges those publics face. This guidance shows how conservation organizations can start taking advantage of OGP as a possible key platform for accomplishing conservation priorities.

Visit the TNRC Knowledge Hub for more resources.

This practice note is based on interviews with 18 people who worked in or with justice systems in Africa, Asia, and South America, to understand their perception of the effect case monitoring can have on corruption in the justice system. Monitoring cases can help identify and highlight weaknesses in the justice system and reduce corruption vulnerabilities related to wildlife crime cases. But projects must be designed with appropriate scope and resources, as impact takes time and is difficult to measure. Monitoring is likely most effective when monitors use multiple cases to identify patterns of red flags that indicate systematic failures. This note recommends several good practices, based on the interviewees' and authors' experiences. However, these practices must always be tailored to a specific context. 

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

The rhino horn trade represents one of the four largest illegal wildlife trade flows by value and corruption is a key facilitator. Visualizing how corruption manifests along the supply chain can help conservation practitioners and wildlife management agencies better understand both the specific risks and the potential responses to combat illegal rhino horn and other illicit wildlife trades. This guide includes an infographic and accompanying text that maps the areas along the rhino horn supply chain that are most vulnerable to corruption and identifies feasible entry points for different anti-corruption approaches.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

The Basel Institute on Governance undertook targeted sector-level political economy analyses (PEAs) in three countries to understand why corruption risks may emerge in investigations and prosecutions of illegal wildlife trade (IWT) cases. The experience showed that PEAs can help practitioners better understand corruption risks in a specific context, complementing data from other analyses like corruption risk assessments (CRAs). Using these two analytic approaches together helps design and implement mitigation measures that take prevailing political and power dynamics into account, identifying windows of opportunity for addressing corruption risks and highlighting strategically important stakeholders that may support or oppose the intervention.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

On International Anti-Corruption Day 2022, we recognize the determination of women who are taking remarkable steps to address corruption through conservation programming. Nicola Okes represents TRAFFIC International, based in Southern Africa. She currently works across the global TRAFFIC network to coordinate engagement on issues relating to the illegal wildlife trade, with a focus on rhinos and elephants. She has previously worked on marine conservation and trade, analyzing both legal and illegal trade with the purpose of providing sustainable solutions to environmental concerns.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

On International Anti-Corruption Day 2022, we recognize the determination of women who are taking remarkable steps to address corruption through conservation programming. Daniela Gomel is a public policy and governance specialist at Fundación Vida Silvestre, a WWF partner organization in Argentina. She manages the policy and governance dimensions of several projects related to forests, protected areas, plastics and climate change. Daniela also coordinates a Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) pilot project that focuses on promoting transparency and sharing learning to address corruption that undermines effective governance in the fisheries sector, particularly at the capture stage.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

On International Anti-Corruption Day 2022, we recognize the determination of women who are taking remarkable steps to address corruption through conservation programming. Renata Cao's work focuses on supporting World Wildlife Fund (WWF) offices in the Latin America region to advance their counter wildlife trafficking agendas and to facilitate coordinated responses, build regional technical capacities, and forge strategic partnerships.

For more resources and tools, visit TNRCproject.org.

A new briefing from WWF and TRAFFIC finds distressing evidence of documented snaring cases involving a minimum of 387 big cats (tigers, leopards, snow leopards, and Asiatic lions) across seven Asian countries between 2012-2021, with a majority of cases documented outside protected areas.

This document is a printable version of the introductory guide on the Illicit Financial Flows topic page of the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) Knowledge Hub. It outlines the impact of illicit financial flows on conservation goals and approaches that can help conservation and natural resource management practitioners to strengthen their programming and related responses.

The Living with Tigers report is in many respects a direct response to a considerable conservation success story, which is that wild tiger populations are on the rise following a 2010 agreement by tiger range countries and their partners to double the global population of the species by 2022. This recovery has been highly uneven though, with South Asia accounting for the vast majority of this increase.

This paper presents three case studies that portray how Free Trade Zones (FTZ) and Special Economic Zones (SEZ) characteristics contribute both to Illegal wildlife trade and corruption, while also demonstrating that wildlife trafficking is merely an expression of the multiple illicit economies that can take place in FTZs/SEZs in the absence of adequate controls. These cases also demonstrate that the corrupt practices within these areas do not necessarily differ from other forms of corruption happening elsewhere in the country, region, or trade chain. Rather, what makes FTZs/SEZs particularly interesting for illicit trade is the additional layer of opaqueness and complexity that they pose for local authorities.

Visit the TNRC Knowledge Hub for more resources.

Challenges and solutions for migratory whales navigating national and international seas.

A "game-changing" ban on commercial processing and trade in elephant ivory was implemented by the State Council, China's Cabinet, on December 31, 2017. TRAFFIC and WWF commissioned GlobeScan before the ban became effective in 2017 to conduct the largest-ever ivory consumer research in China. This research has been conducted annually using the same methodology and surveying consumers in the same 15 cities. We believe this to be the most in-depth, longest-running research effort into consumer demand for ivory to date.

This report explains the complexity of human-wildlife conflict and its underlying drivers; illustrates the direct impacts of human-wildlife conflict at various levels; highlights the need for more attention to this subject; describes ways to address it by unlocking solutions and moving towards coexistence, and provides an outlook on the future of coexistence between people and wildlife.