This year’s UN biodiversity conference (COP16) achieved important progress in recognizing and expanding the crucial roles of Indigenous Peoples and Local Communities (IPLCs), reflecting a growing agreement in the global conservation community about the need for inclusive and equitable approaches. Centering IPLCs and social justice is especially necessary now, as conservation is being scaled up to address the magnitude of the threats to biodiversity.
Read MoreEarlier this year, 109kg of pangolin scales were seized just south of the city of Pontianak by Kalimantan’s Environmental and Forestry Law Enforcement Agency (Gakkum) [Ref]. That represents 179 individual Sunda pangolins - if we go by Yang et al’s calculations [Ref] - poached from the wild and stripped of their scales for sale. This one seizure, in which 3 were arrested, follows a pattern of seizures, arrests, and prosecutions of pangolin traders in West Kalimantan over the last few years. In one of the largest cases from 2023, experts claimed up to 2000 pangolins could have been killed for the scales in just one seizure.
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