Guarding the Unprotected: Enforcement Barriers in the Fight Against Wildlife Crime

DOI

10.2991/978-94-6239-725-5_9How to use a DOI?

Keywords

Wildlife Crime; Illegal Wildlife Trade; Enforcement Challenges; Conservation Policy; Transnational Crime

Abstract

The illegal trade in animals and plants, together with wildlife crimes, remains a persistent threat against global biodiversity and ecological systems, which environmental protection systems work to defend. International treaties and national laws fail to protect the environment because their different enforcement methods create various environmental impacts in different global regions. This research paper, thus, examines enforcement mechanisms to assess the validity of laws against wildlife crimes and why these crimes may occur at places governed by law to protect the environment. The research study investigates how three different factors, which include particular structural elements and, institutional research frameworks and economic development conditions, impact the capacity to enforce laws, which results in the evaluation of conservation projects and the creation of governmental policies. So, the current study reveals that there is an interconnection among the many underlying structures and regulatory stumbling blocks within enforcement systems. The study shows that low conviction rates, together with mild sentencing and inconsistent legal systems, create conditions that reduce deterrent effects while proving that criminal justice systems treat wildlife crimes as less serious than other offences. The paper establishes that, combined with several fundamental elements, a unified enforcement approach will effectively put a stop to wildlife crime.

Copyright

© 2026 The Author(s)

Open Access

Open Access This chapter is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits any noncommercial use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made.

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TY  - CONF
AU  - Aishwarya B. Patil
AU  - Kanika Arora
PY  - 2026
DA  - 2026/07/07
TI  - Guarding the Unprotected: Enforcement Barriers in the Fight Against Wildlife Crime
BT  - Proceedings of the International Conference on Conceptualizing Legal Framework and Policies for Domestic Animal and Wildlife Conservation: Issues and Challenges in Hybrid Mode (ICAR 2026)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 95
EP  - 107
SN  - 2667-128X
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/978-94-6239-725-5_9
DO  - 10.2991/978-94-6239-725-5_9
ID  - Patil2026
ER  -