In today’s episode of New Security Broadcast, ECSP’s Angus Soderberg breaks down a recent Wilson Center event against the backdrop of the 10th annual Conference of State Parties (COSP) to the UN Convention on Corruption, which is under way in Atlanta this week. On September 19, ECSP and the Wilson Center’s Global Europe Program, in partnership with the U.S. Department of State, the Embassy of the Principality of Liechtenstein, and the Basel Institute on Governance, hosted Combating Green Corruption: Fighting Financial Crime as a Driver of Environmental Degradation. The speakers discuss how corruption fuels wildlife trafficking and other environmental crimes, which finance illicit activities, hamper development, and erode efforts to combat biodiversity loss and climate change across the globe.

Basel Institute’s Juhani Grossman on the increasing international attention to green corruption

I think, at least in our sort of nerdy little world, we’re becoming quite mainstream. Four years ago, when the first resolution was adopted on this issue in Abu Dhabi in 2019, that was not the case. Those of us on the anti-corruption side struggle to understand these soft issues related to conservation, and I daresay that the conservation community was also a little bit apprehensive about talking about corruption. So, we’ve come a really long way in those four years.

U.S. Treasury Department FinCEN Director, Andrea Gacki, on environmental crime

Environmental crimes include a range of harmful activities, including wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, mining, and other forms of illegal resource extraction and illegal fishing. These crimes not only threaten fragile ecosystems, but they’re often related to other illicit activities, including corruption, terrorist financing, money laundering, human trafficking, or drug trafficking. The crimes are relatively low-risk activities that promise high rewards, largely because environmental efforts are so limited.

Former FinCEN Director, Himamauli Das, on the importance of partnerships in regulating environmental crime

The importance of collaboration and coordination across all of the actors within government is incredibly important. The private sector plays an incredibly important role from a financial institution’s perspective in terms of having resilient, strong, and effective AML/CFT [Anti-Money Laundering and Countering the Financing of Terrorism] compliance programs. NGOs also play a critical role in terms of their investigative efforts as well as their use of open source intelligence to be able to better understand the typologies, efforts, and actions going on by bad actors with respect to financial crimes as well as their link to nature crimes.

World Wildlife Fund’s Roberto Troya on WWF’s projects and partnerships in this space

The World Wildlife Fund has the privilege of engaging in a collaboration with the Basel Institute through our USAID-funded TNRC-targeting natural resource corruption project. The goal of that project has been to unearth and disseminate knowledge concerning the devastating impact of corruption on environmental and conservation endeavors and to equip our conservation practitioners with tools and guidance to integrate this knowledge into their work. We have successfully pursued these objectives by forging research partnerships and drawing insights from practical experiences.

Juhani Grossman on the effectiveness of anti-corruption tools, prevention efforts, and similarities between regulatory sectors

Wildlife agencies or forestry agencies have enforcement authorities that are interested, but the institution itself is focused on short-term, immediate conservation enforcement efforts. One of the things that we’ve done together with WWF and TRAFFIC is that we’ve created a practitioner forum for folks around the world working in this space. With the support of USAID and Liechtenstein, we try to bring together investigators and get [a few people] in each of these agencies that are keen to do it. The under-resourcing of environmental agencies is reflected exponentially in their ability to control their internal corruption risks. When we don’t allocate enough money to conservation and natural resource management, those agencies are chronically underfunded. And with those scarce resources that they have, they’re going to allocate even less to building robust internal corruption prevention systems. I’m not saying the sectors are the same, but the law enforcement tools are quite similar. So it’s one of the areas that’s rife for sort of siloed disruption because there isn’t really a lot of sense to have a financial investigator that only does a few IUU fishing cases and doesn’t do deforestation cases, for example.

Juhani Grossman on China’s Belt and Road Initiative

What we are seeing, I think, is the increased political pressure that comes along with BRI [China’s Belt and Road Initiative]. With businesses and state-owned enterprises typically moving in, the political heft of China becomes so significant in a country that law enforcement efforts against Chinese nationals involved in environmental crime as part of these engagements become very difficult. What I’m really, really watching with great fascination is the fact that the steam is running out of BRI—the amounts of money that were there before just aren’t there anymore. And so I’m watching with great interest how that will translate into the political power that China can wield in those countries.

Himamauli Das on the potential for diplomacy within the topic

On a broader geopolitical level, to the extent that there is an opening and an avenue for engagement on climate change or on broader biodiversity issues, the extent to which enforcement and financial crimes are linked to that conversation may provide a broader opening around that area as well.