The International Consortium on Combatting Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), at the request of Sri Lanka, deployed its first Wildlife Incident Support Team (WIST), with the goal of collecting DNA samples from 359 elephant tusks seized by local customs authorities.
25 July 2013: The International Consortium on Combatting Wildlife Crime (ICCWC), at the request of Sri Lanka, deployed its first Wildlife Incident Support Team (WIST), with the goal of collecting DNA samples from 359 elephant tusks seized by local customs authorities.
The intervention was in response to a Decision adopted by the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES CoP16), which called for the establishment of WISTs to be dispatched at the request of a country that has been affected by significant poaching of CITES specimens, or that has made a large-scale seizure of such specimens.
The DNA samples have been sent for analysis to the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington in the US to identify the origin of the ivory and to the German Federal Agency for Nature Conservation for stable isotope analysis, to determine the age of the ivory. The deployment of the WIST was funded by the European Commission under a project managed by INTERPOL on behalf of ICCWC.
The ICCWC comprises the CITES Secretariat, INTERPOL, the United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the World Bank and the World Customs Organization (WCO), with the CITES Secretariat chairing the alliance. [CITES News]