Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System

 
The Wildlife Enforcement Monitoring System (WEMS) Initiative, brainchild of environment policy researcher Remi Chandran, is an environmental governance project developed for assisting in monitoring the effectiveness of enforcement and compliance of wildlife law at a national level. The purpose of WEMS initiative is to monitor trafficking and illegal wildlife crime through a joint effort carried out by United Nations bodies, national governments, private industries, civil society and research institutions, by building a common data collection and reporting mechanism at a national level. The project plans to bring together various national institutions to a common information sharing platform and thereby building the capacity of the states to manage knowledge on wildlife crime trends and threat assessments. The compiled data will be then analyzed and selected non nominal information will be made available online through the WEMS website. WEMS will also help in providing analysed information electronically to all the national enforcement agencies and international policy makers including Interpol and CITES Secretariat. Selected information will be shared with the public for bringing awareness about wildlife Crime. The WEMS initiative works by bringing together Customs, Police, and Forest (all these agencies belong to different ministries) to a common information sharing mechanism within the national government and this will improve inter agency cooperation in tackling environmental crime holistically. Research and analysis of the crime data will be carried out through a designated national research Institute which will also carry out policy analysis identifying the trends and reasons for non compliance. It will also attempt to analyse the legal decisions on wildlife crimes from data obtained from local courts and will be able to identify weakness in legislation if any. Apart from this, the carriers (example Shipping or Airline company) involved in the illegal trade will also be recorded.
Partners.
United Nations University - Institute for Advanced Studies 
United Nations University - Campus Computing Centre 
Lusaka Agreement Task Force 
Environmental Systems Research Institute (ESRI)