发布日期：2020-07-22
On July 17th, the International Fund for China’s Environment (IFCE) and the China Biodiversity Conservation, Green Development Foundation (CBCGDF) launched a Webinar entitled International Dialogue on Wildlife Trade: China and the World, which brought together both international and Chinese experts for an online dialogue to discuss about the current wildlife trading challenges around the world, and address the latest policy and legal responses on wildlife trade. The webinar was open to the public and approximately 150 people from all over the world participated. International Fun for Animal Welfare fully supports the webinar from organizing to promoting. Speakers called for urgent coordinated actions to be taken to prevent next pandemic happen.
Alice Hughes of CBCGDF/Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden of Chinese Academy of Sciences moderated the webinar. Science Counselor Zhongcheng Wang of Chinese Embassy in USA made opening remark.
The expert speakers included Jinfeng Zhou, CBCGDF Secretary General; John E. Scanlon, former UN CITES Secretary-General; Professor Tianbao Qin, Wuhan University; Grace Ge Gabriel, IFAW Asia Regional Director; Kang Wang, Director of Education Center in Beijing Botanical Garden; Daniel Mira-Salama, World Bank Senior Environmental Specialist; Ping He, IFCE President; Eric Solheim, Former UN Environment Program Executive Director.
Mr. Zhou was delivering his speech on the Webinar
Mr. Zhou spoken about these years CBCGDF working in advancing China’s wild animal trade law; public interest litigation and rescuing pangolin & wild release. Mr. Scanlon emphasized the importance of international laws and collaboration among countries. He pointed out that the downside of the current system which lacking multilateral collaboration between countries make the conservation working harder. Professor Qin, presented his perspective about precautionary approaches of protecting biodiversity. He expressed concerns on banning using wildlife for traditional Chinese medicine, which is an industry over $75 billion. Banning the industry may impact livelihood of many people. Mrs. Gabriel introduced the campaigns IFAW did in the past few decades. She shared IFAW’s success approaches of wildlife conservation which put emphasis on cooperating with the local governments and launched community education campaigns to reduce the wildlife poaching. These approached has been successfully applied in various places including Africa and China. Mr. Salama brought participants the concept of One Health approach: integrating environment, human and animal health as a whole. He illustrated that how deteriorating environment would hurt wildlife habitats and eventually transmitted the wildlife hosted virus to human beings. Protecting biodiversity will results in having a more sustainable planet in the long run. In the closing commentary, Ping He pointed out that the loss of human life and economic and social costs of the COVID-19 clearly indicate the necessity of the increasing investments in prevention measures and coordinated early responses to ensure we do everything possible to prevent this from happening again.
After the brief remarks, experts discussed questions raised by the moderator and audience.
Experts are answering questions during the webinar
Although the science is not yet conclusive, one thing seems beyond doubt: the Covid-9 virus originated in wildlife, from where the virus can now be easily managed to break the species barrier into humans. Plus our fragile prevention systems, human beings are now under high risks of the next pandemic. As a result, we can now strongly sense the urgency of protecting biodiversity and wildlife species and the need of much stronger international collaboration. Just as Mr. Scanlon commented during the webinar “there is always possible to make some difference, if we focus on common challenges, we can work together to resolve them!”
The webinar is the starting event of a series of activities on the theme of "A Dynamic Planet". Through launching these activities, IFCE and its partners hope to popularize biodiversity conservation knowledge and to further understand our relationship with wildlife and to promote stronger international collaboration
