Trouble under the trees
GEOINT helps fight a different kind of battle in Africa
By Michelle L. Hankins, Office of Corporate Communications
Under the heavy canopies of Africa’s national forests an unprecedented alliance is combating one of today’s most serious global security threats. According to the United Nations, wildlife trafficking is now one of the largest illegal trades in the world, along with the trafficking of drugs, arms and humans.
Nearly 180 nations, including the United States, have joined together in a battle that is about more than conservation. U.N. statistics indicate that 80 percent of major armed conflicts in the last 50 years have occurred in biodiversity hotspots and 40 percent of all intrastate conflicts in the last 60 years were linked to natural resources. Illegal poaching causes Africa to lose twice as much in illicit financial flows as it receives in international aid, and the illegal activity weakens government authority by compromising the rule of law and often putting local officials in physical jeopardy.
“This is not a victimless crime . . . lives are at risk, both human and wildlife,” said outgoing Director of National Intelligence James Clapper at a June 2016 symposium held at the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency.
The event was the first presidential task force symposium with the IC at the helm. It was cosponsored by the U.S. Departments of State, Interior and Justice.
The fight against wildlife trafficking has brought together strange bedfellows, including the intelligence community and the World Wildlife Fund, military strategists and endangered species experts, extreme liberals and staunch conservatives. The bipartisan Eliminate, Neutralize and Disrupt (END) Wildlife Trafficking Act, which became law in October 2016, was introduced in the Senate by Chris Coons (D-Del.) and Jeff Flake (R-Ariz.) and in the House by Congressmen Ed Royce (R-Calif.) and Eliot Engel (D-N.Y.). END incorporates provisions of an earlier bill, the Wildlife Trafficking Enforcement Act of 2015, which was cosponsored in the Senate by unlikely partners Dianne Feinstein (D-Calif.) and Lindsay Graham (R-S.C.). The new legislation elevates wildlife trafficking to a serious crime under U.S. law.
IC involvement in the effort stems from the whole-of-government approach outlined in the National Strategy for Combating Wildlife Trafficking adopted in 2014. To contribute to the IC’s role in implementing the strategy, NGA works with a large array of nontraditional partners, including nongovernmental organizations, industry and academia, to leverage relevant data and apply geospatial intelligence to better understand the connection between wildlife trafficking, other forms of illegal trafficking and the corresponding threats to national security.
Creating a community
NGA became part of the U.S. effort in January 2016, when DNI Clapper designated Odean Serrano, Ph.D., from NGA as the first IC lead to focus on IC contributions toward the issue, in support of Executive Order 13648. The agency created a Combating Wildlife Trafficking Community of Interest, which aims to create a common operating picture for decision-makers and law enforcement through cooperation and information sharing, and use of existing and emerging sources of data.
NGA and its IC partners, as part of the CWT COI information sharing initiative, are leveraging open-source data from international nongovernmental organizations whose grassroots efforts in Africa often yield vast amounts of previously untapped information. Team members believe that gaining access to this data and giving it geospatial context can help track illegal operations, the perpetrators of those operations and the patterns that exist between wildlife trafficking and other crimes related to human and national security.
Wildlife trafficking represents “a global criminal enterprise of epic proportions,” said Terrance Ford, national intelligence manager for Africa, Office of the DNI, at a congressional forum held on Capitol Hill in spring 2016.
The crime’s effects are most felt in sub-Saharan Africa, where the supply chain begins, according to Ford. Trafficking provides a source of revenue that undermines and destabilizes weak governments there, he says. Illicit activity spans the globe, however; Traffic, a WWF partner organization based in the United Kingdom, identifies numerous hotspots for illegal trade. Among them are China’s international borders; the eastern borders of the European Union; trade hubs in eastern and southern Africa; some markets in Mexico; parts of the Caribbean, Indonesia, New Guinea and the Solomon Islands; and even certain locations in the United States.
The United States is also a powerful ally in the fight against illicit wildlife trafficking, according to Judi W. Wakhungu, cabinet secretary for environment, water and natural resources for the Republic of Kenya, who also attended the spring congressional forum.
Left of kill
For the IC’s nontraditional partners, such as conservation and animal welfare groups, bringing an end to wildlife trafficking is about stopping the poaching before it happens, or getting ‘left of kill’ on the timeline.
“How do we gather information … to be able to move and respond, so we don’t have to count carcasses?” said Kelvin Alie, director of the wildlife trade program at the International Fund for Animal Welfare. Being able to characterize the networks responsible for poaching would help move the needle back, he says.
For national security experts there is an understanding that wildlife trafficking relates to more than animal welfare.
“Wildlife trafficking contributes billions of dollars to the illegal economy, fuels instability and undermines human security,” said NGA Director Robert Cardillo at the summer symposium.
David Luna, the State Department’s senior director of national security and diplomacy, went a step further in his testimony at the congressional forum. He said, “More and more terrorists are turning to the illicit trades to finance their operations.”
Other groups are more specific
“We’re not talking about the kind of traffickers we’ve had before,” said Andrea Crosta, executive director and co-founder of the Elephant Action League, which released a report in 2013 linking illegal ivory trade to both al-Shabaab in Somalia and Joseph Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army, known as the LRA, in the Democratic Republic of Congo.
New synergies
Not all of the CWT COI participants entered the group because of direct wildlife trafficking concerns. Some, like Lisa Dougan, president and chief executive officer of Invisible Children, did so because their cause is related to the trafficking. Dougan and her colleagues have been fighting for human security in underserved regions in central Africa since 2005. The group’s primary goal is to end conflict related to the LRA, and the organization’s operations in Africa include human security reporting and analysis. Dougan says that the CWT COI represents an opportunity for new partners to find synergies.
Faye Cuevas, chief of staff at IFAW, is another member of the CWT COI with an eye for synergies. An experienced military veteran, she brings several lessons learned from the war on terror to the fight against wildlife trafficking. One practice she carried forward is that of conducting community meetings. The IFAW calls these local community meetings in Africa “time under the trees.”
Time under the trees, Cuevas says, provides a view into what is happening on the ground. While the IC and the Department of Defense often look at events literally from the top down, using overhead sensors and satellite imagery to perform geospatial intelligence, NGOs such as IFAW come at it from below the triple-canopy forest to “inversely illuminate these networks from the ground up,” said Cuevas.
Robert Dreher, associate director, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, says this kind of community-based intelligence is vital. In Kenya, for example, he says a stranger cannot walk across the land without it being reported.
Invisible Child’s early warning network is another example of community action. Villages communicate via twice-daily conference calls to report incidents occurring in or around their communities. Trained Invisible Child staff members document the reports from each village. They perform the initial vetting on the incident reports, which are then sent to a team of analysts who assign verification ratings based on existing knowledge about LRA activity. They aggregate the data from all of the communities and send daily reports to key stakeholders.
That’s when GEOINT comes into play. Data with a high verification score is fed into an online mapping platform through which the organization is able to put geography to work to identify trends in the violence.
“We were able to see a correlation between the LRA poaching activity and violence against civilians in the region,” Dougan says, after the organization overlaid information from the community into the mapping tool.
“One elephant being killed means there are a host of communities being attacked,” said Dougan.
Human geography
By all accounts most poaching occurs among poor and subsistence communities, and Cuevas says, “We need to view it amongst the tapestry in which these killings occur.”
Typically these communities are under-governed, usually with very few jobs. Often their economies are based in eco-tourism, and so the impact of poaching threatens their stability even further. A new study released in November by a consortium of scientists from the University of Cambridge, University of Vermont and WWF found that African nations lose approximately $25 million in tourism revenue each year due to current levels of elephant poaching. The researchers found that poachers kill between 20,000 and 30,000 elephants each year for illegal ivory trade. In Tanzania’s Selous Game Reserve, the country’s largest protected area, poaching has reduced the elephant population by a whopping 90 percent.
Because wildlife poaching is intricately interconnected with security issues, members of the CWT COI believe it is crucial to have access to human geography foundation data and the ability to depict human interactions within the environment. In January 2016 Serrano worked with NGA experts to design and launch a public-facing website — the CWT Common Operating Picture — to provide stakeholders with foundation data. NGA provides data layers such as information about water sources, cellular telephone tower sites and roadways. Most other CWT COI members, whose primary jobs are not geospatial in nature, use the website to share service-enabled data that can be used to accomplish their disparate but related missions. Among the many organizations that share data on the site are the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, C4ADS Environmental Crimes Fusion Cell, the University of Washington, JCIC International and a National Geographic special investigative unit.
It takes a network
Before creation of the CWT COI, the wildlife security world had been very insular, according to IFAW’s Alie. Participant organizations now understand that leveraging the data analysis, technology, investigative tools and best practices from a variety of traditionally unrelated partners may be the solution to achieving both wildlife trafficking and national security missions. This new breed of shared intelligence gives Fish and Wildlife’s Dreher hope.
“There are a limited number of kingpins that are involved in this,” said Dreher. He believes illegal wildlife trafficking can be overcome as a result of analyzing the behavior of those committing the crimes.
Kenya’s Wakhungu agrees. She said she feels strongly that Kenya has seen illegal poaching decrease because the country has paid attention to the human networks rather than just to the animal slaughter.
Other countries have experienced success as well. In May 2016 Nepal announced it had gone two full years without a single rhino poaching. Among the tools in the country’s coordinated response to trafficking is a software system that helps rangers identify and monitor poaching hotspots.
Innovative use of technology and collaboration — often among very unconventional partners — are increasingly common themes in the battle against wildlife trafficking. Director Luna of the State Department perhaps summed it best in his congressional testimony: “It takes a network to fight a network.”
