In his February 14, 2018 presentation titled, Countering Wildlife Trafficking in Mozambique – What’s Working and What Hasn’t, Alastair Nelson, Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS), provided background regarding the current wildlife trafficking problem in Mozambique, and how it is situated within the region.

His presentation also illuminated some of the overlaps between wildlife trafficking and other illegal trades (e.g. narcotics, human trafficking), and for northern Mozambique in particular, it covered the breakdown in governance and the rule of law, and how this relates to recent insecurity. It addressed responses that have been tried, what has and has not worked, and what is being done now to tackle these problems going forward.

Featured Speaker

Alastair Nelson has 20+ years conservation experience in the Horn of Africa, east and southern Africa. His career started in South Africa in anti-poaching and moved to black rhino monitoring, Grevy’s Zebra surveys in northern Kenya and working for the Ethiopian Wolf Conservation Program. He then established Frankfurt Zoological Society’s Bale Mountains Conservation Project in Ethiopia before moving to their Africa headquarters to oversee six protected area and ecosystem management projects. In 2010, Alastair joined the WCS as an Assistant Director in the Africa program in New York. In 2012 he moved to establish WCS’s Mozambique country program – initially focusing on co-management of the Niassa Reserve, and strengthening the national protected area management framework. In 2017 he took on a new role supporting WCS’s counter wildlife trafficking work in east and southern Africa, and links to Asia.

Event Resources

Click here to view the webinar recording

Click here to view the presentation slides.

This event was hosted by The Africa Biodiversity Collaborative Group as a part of its Washington DC speaker series, which aims to foster information exchange and lessons sharing among cross-sector practitioners. To participate as a featured speaker, please contact Evelyn Namvua at enamvua@abcg.org and view the Guidelines to Speakers here.