Question to the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs:

To ask the Secretary of State for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, whether her Department is taking steps to help tackle the illegal wildlife trade.

The United Kingdom is taking steps to help protect endangered animals and plants from poaching and illegal trade to benefit wildlife, local communities and the economy, and protect global security.

HMG has committed over £46 million between 2014 and 2022 on work to directly counter illegal wildlife trade (IWT), including through the Illegal Wildlife Trade Challenge Fund. Our actions include: training border force agents and building capacity through the British military to train rangers and disrupt poaching in targeted African countries; developing behaviour change campaigns to discourage purchases of wildlife products; supporting legislative reform to increase penalties and conviction rates for wildlife crime; and helping communities to protect the wildlife they rely on for their livelihoods.

We are also contributing £250 million to the Global Environment Facility between 2018-2022, which includes the world's biggest fund for tackling IWT, the Global Wildlife Programme (GWP), supporting IWT projects across 32 countries in Africa, Asia, and Latin America. In June this year, at the Stockholm +50 meeting, Lord Goldsmith announced the UK Government’s pledge of £330m to the eighth replenishment of the Global Environment Facility (GEF8) covering the period 2022 – 2026. The GEF8 replenishment delivered a record breaking $5.33bn with a 46% increase in biodiversity funding. This includes the Wildlife Conservation for Development programme which will combat Illegal and High-Risk Wildlife Trade through a supply-chain approach to curbing poaching, disrupting trafficking, and reducing demand for illegal, unsustainable, and high zoonotic-risk wildlife within and between countries.