Protecting Our Planet by Saving Animals From Smuggling and Poaching

International poaching and smuggling crimes may seem distant to people who live in California, but the consequences of these illegal activities impact us all. More than 20,000 elephants are killed each year for their tusks and $157 billion worth of timber is smuggled internationally. The estimated $1 trillion a year in damages from international poaching increases the risk of climate change, by destroying wildlife and carbon-capturing forests. 

Sam Wasser is a professor, a researcher, an animal wildlife conservationist, a biologist, and an explorer. Even more importantly, he is Executive Director of the Center for Environmental Forensic Science (CEFS), whose research is improving how U.S. and international law enforcement agencies investigate global environmental smuggling operations. 

Work by the Center for Environmental Forensic Science at the University of Washington has contributed to the conviction of criminal kingpins for smuggling ivory, timber, and even pangolins, an armidillo-like mammal sought for its scales and acknowledged to be the most heavily poached animal in the world. 

“Poaching is having a huge impact on the biodiversity of the world,” Wasser says. “Transnational criminals are destroying environments, increasing corruption, damaging economic and national security on a global scale, making travel less safe, and contributing to the spread of emergent diseases – COVID is a perfect example.”

Wasser has been conducting this work for over 20 years, but only recently transformed the program from a small academic lab into the Center for Environmental Forensic Science – a fully functioning, collaborative forensic operation that includes senior scientists, law enforcement agencies and NGO. This transition began in 2021 when the University of Washington and Washington State Legislature committed funding to establish the Center and support its efforts to thwart environmental crimes.

To help catch these international criminals, CEFS uses an assortment of innovative scientific tools to track contraband shipments around the globe. CEFS developed genetic tests that can determine where large shipments of plants or animals were poached, identify smuggling routes, and link multiple shipments to certain smuggling organizations. This information helps focus law enforcement efforts and provides a basis to link physical evidence from cases thought to be independent. Such information strengthens criminal investigations, prosecutions, and financial crime analysis that can lead to asset forfeiture. CEFS has also developed other proprietary state-of-the-art methods to detect smuggling, which include inexpensive hand-held devices that can rapidly “capture” contraband odor in shipping containers for presentation to highly trained detection dogs.

Today, CEFS collaborates with national law enforcement agencies including Homeland Security Investigations and U.S. Forest Service-International Programs, as well as many law enforcement agencies and non-government organizations around the globe, to dismantle transnational criminal organizations engaged in environmental smuggling. 

The state, country, and world are impacted in so many ways by transnational environmental crimes, as we all depend on the climate of the world to survive, Wasser says. That makes the crimes of smuggling and poaching ever more critical to our local communities.