Gove: UK wildlife crisis fuels my war with ivory traders
MICHAEL Gove pledged yesterday to step up the fight to save endangered species around the world, after seeing the damage to Britain’s environment.
The Environment Secretary, who will host a 1,000-delegate conference to help combat the £17billion illegal trade in wildlife, praised the heroism of rangers in the front line of the war against elephant and rhino poachers.
At the conference in London next month, Britain will announce more cash for the fight to protect threatened species.
British troops are training rangers in African countries such as Malawi and Gabon. In recent years many rangers have died in shootouts with poachers.
Mr Gove said: “I have been moved by the heroism of people who have been engaged on the front line in dealing with this. But I am also affected by the fact that the countryside that I grew up with as a child, and that I now have responsibility for environmentally, has changed during my lifetime.
“We have seen a decline in a number of farmland birds, we have seen a reduction in special habitats and a retreat from nature in so many people’s lives.” Michael Gove yesterday Describing the conference as a “critical moment” for the world, he said: “We are losing species at a rate that is tragic and when you lose a species, you lose something irreplaceable.” Mr Gove urged world leaders to show the same commitment to protecting wildlife as they do to tackling climate change. He said: “The world has taken action to set ambitious goals to deal with climate change and we need to show a similar level of ambition when it comes to making sure we safeguard wildlife and biodiversity.” Tory MP and environmentalist Zac Goldsmith said: “In my lifetime, 60 per cent of wild animals have gone and in more or less the same time frame we have reached a point where half of the world’s land is degraded and a third of all the world’s fisheries are at the point of no return, fished beyond their biological limits.
“If you wipe out an eco-system, you plunge people into desperate poverty.”
Yesterday researchers in the United States said DNA tests on seized ivory linked most illegal shipments to a small number of cartels operating out of Mombasa in Kenya, Entebbe, in Uganda, and Lome in Togo.
The Washington University team said their findings should help to track networks and build criminal cases against traders.