Protecting the environment with intelligence
Understandably, environmental crime can be an emotive and infuriating issue. The spectacle of magnificent, endangered creatures such as tigers, elephants and rhinos reduced to broken, bleeding carcasses, plundered for illegal trades in home decór, trinkets and fake ‘traditional’ medicines, can be all but impossible to view without provoking distress and fury in equal measure. [...]
Blakeney Marshes, North Norfolk, is a paradise. It is a haven for seals, migrating and breeding birds, shell fish, marsh grasses, shrubs and other vegetation – and has loads of lovely mud and sand! It is simply a huge, gorgeous and vital ecosystem that also provides enormous economic benefit for the local community. A beautiful [...]
“For a tiny charity, it packs an almighty punch.” As descriptions of EIA go, they don’t get much pithier that this one from The Guardian in 2008. And if 2012 has shown anything, it’s that we’re still small and that our concise reports anchored in hard documentary evidence – often obtained undercover in potentially dangerous [...]
Last month, the President of Indonesia did the international investment equivalent of, shall we say, showing a bit of leg in the US. At an event specially organised at the New York Stock Exchange, in Wall Street, Susilo Bambang Yudhoyono boasted to the assembled businessmen of the abundant natural resources on offer to potential investors. [...]
The international community is finally recognising that environmental crime is not some small-scale criminal activity taking place deep in the jungles of Africa or Asia but is serious, growing, transnational and, shockingly, highly organised through the involvement of notorious criminal syndicates and terrorist groups. This week, during the ongoing 67th session of the UN General [...]
I joined EIA at the start of the year and have been struck by the vast range of different environmental issues we have worked on during the past three decades. Since our very first investigation into the Faroe Islands’ pilot whale hunt in 1984, we have investigated and campaigned on the global ivory trade, [...]