INTRODUCTION ABOUT THE PROJECT

Fighting Wildlife Trafficking in the Golden Triangle is a project designed to reduce trafficking of wildlife within the Golden Triangle, in key target locations in the Lao PDR, Thailand and Myanmar. The Lower Mekong region is one of the global hubs of illegal wildlife trade in Southeast Asia – a perfect storm of source, transit route, and final destination for many of the world’s most valuable and threatened wildlife species.

Trade routes through and demand originating from the Mekong countries significantly threaten the continued persistence of important and iconic species including tigers, elephants, rhinos, pangolins, bears, and turtles, as well as other threatened species in the Southeast Asian region. The epicentre of this trade in the Greater Mekong is the Golden Triangle – where the Lao People's Democratic Republic (PDR), Myanmar and Thailand intersect, and which abuts directly with southern China.

The project has two objectives:

1. Enhance wildlife related law enforcement by improving guidelines and protocols for interagency collaboration.

2. Build capacity of civilian law enforcement authorities to prevent and investigate wildlife trafficking at the provincial level and across borders.

The innovative nature of this project lies in its holistic and targeted provincial-level approach, which can later be scaled up to other known problem areas and border crossings in the region.

The first phase of the project was to develop the capacity of law enforcement authorities and task forces by increasing their understanding of wildlife trafficking-related laws and regulations. Trainings for enforcement groups were led by TRAFFIC in collaboration with WWF’s trainer and country offices in two countries and by WWF-Lao in Lao PDR. Starting in 2019 with a Training of Trainers (ToT) workshop involving law enforcement officers from all three countries, the participants were taught soft skills to deliver training and then shown how to pass this knowledge on to others. Following the ToT, TRAFFIC and WWF jointly delivered three provincial workshops, one each in Chiang Khong (Thailand) and Tachileik and Kyaing Tong (Myanmar), with P-WEN members learning how to implement CITES and wildlife trade regulations, enforce wildlife trade laws at the local level, and identify and detect illegally traded species.

In the extension phase (which ends in 2022), refresher courses were conducted for members of the P-WENs trained under the first grant, while providing the impetus for these individuals to continue to train more officers in their districts and beyond The refresher courses included the use of species and product identification resources produced in the first phase of the project.

Refresher courses are key in ensure the sustainability of our knowledge transfer and capacity building activities conducted in the past. This also provided an opportunity to deliver training to new staff or recruits within the teams at the border areas. Responses from members of P-WENs indicated that more training need to be conducted on a regular basis in the future. A Training Toolkit that enables local authorities to train their own staff comes in handy.