China Wildlife Trafficking Assessment

China is the top destination country for known wildlife air trafficking routes and appeared in 42% of known Asian air trafficking instances.

Approximately half of trafficking instances along Chinese air routes involved worked ivory product. While the number of known Chinese air trafficking instances involving ivory increased significantly over the five years of data (including quadrupling between 2018 and 2019), the average weight per seizure decreased from over 30 kg in 2015 to fewer than 1 kg in 2019. For known ivory air trafficking instances along Chinese air routes, Ethiopia was the most common origin country, followed by Japan and Laos. After ivory, marine products were the most prevalent species category for Chinese air trafficking instances (13%). These shipments most commonly originated from Mexico, followed by the Philippines and Hong Kong. Chinese customs authorities should be commended for releasing press statements on seizures—a valuable next step would be the inclusion of the mode of transportation of a seized shipment (not reported in over 30% of instances).

application/pdf ROUTES_Assessment_China.pdf — 263 KB