CITES as a Tool for Sustainable Development (Treaty Implementation for Sustainable Development)

Saving endangered species presents a critical and increasingly pressing challenge for conservation and sustainability movements, and is also matter of survival and livelihoods for the world's poorest and vulnerable communities. In 1973, a global Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) was adopted to stem the extinction of many species. In 2015, as part of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG 15) the United Nations called for urgent action to protect endangered species and their natural habitats. This volume focuses on the legal implementation of CITES to achieve the global SDGs. Activating interdisciplinary analysis and case studies across jurisdictions, the contributors analyse the potential for CITES to promote more sustainable development, proposing international and national regulatory innovations for implementing CITES. They consider recent innovations and key intervention points along flora and fauna value chains, advancing coherent recommendations to strengthen CITES implementation, including through the regulation of trade in endangered species globally and locally.

Marie-Claire Cordonier Segger is Leverhulme Trust Visiting Professor in the University of Cambridge, and Full Professor of Law at the University of Waterloo, Canada. She serves as Senior Director of the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law, also a founding Fellow of the Centre for Environment, Energy and Natural Resources Governance, Fellow of the Lauterpacht Centre for International Law, and Director of Studies and Law Fellow in Lucy Cavendish College, University of Cambridge. Author or editor of over twenty books and 120 papers, she edits the Treaty Implementation for Sustainable Development series and advises countries and international organizations on treaty commitments on climate change, biodiversity, trade and investment, and other Sustainable Development Goals.

David Andrew Wardell has over forty years of experience working on natural resource governance, capacity development and finance issues in over twenty South-East Asia and Sub-Saharan Africa countries. He is a Principal Scientist at CIFOR-ICRAF with the Value Chains, Finance and Investment team based in Montpellier. He was formerly a Visiting Research Fellow at the Centre for World Environment History at the University of Sussex, and a Danish diplomat. He has published three books and edited collections, over fifty peer-reviewed articles and book chapters and seventy technical publications.

Alexandra R. Harrington is Lecturer in Law (Environment) at Lancaster University Law School, Research Director for the Centre for International Sustainable Development Law and Fulbright Canada Special Foundation Fellow at the Balsillie School of International Affairs in Waterloo, Canada. She was the 2018–2019 Fulbright Canada Research Chair in Global Governance, based at the Balsillie School of International Affairs. Her other publications include International Organizations and the Law (2018) and International Law and Global Governance: Treaty Regimes and Sustainable Development Goals Interpretation (2021).