techUK Illegal Wildlife Roundtable - Outcomes and meeting note

22 Jun 2018 03:26 PM

Please see a write up of a workshop looking at how tech and digital solutions can be used to tackle illegal wildlife crime.

Last week techUK convened the tech sector, government, law enforcement and conservation experts in a roundtable looking at how digital solutions can be applied in the fight against wildlife crime. The UK is leading the world in this area and opening the event and has already convened a roundtable with the Foreign Secretary and the UK is hosting global summit on this issue in October.

The Head of the Foreign and Commonwealth Office Illegal Wildlife Trade Team Rachel Ash outlined the scope of the summit, the scale of the problem and that tech was a key enabler for helping end this crime type and Stephanie O’Donnell from Wilblabs (a community linking technologists with conservationists) took participants through some of the key challenges. These challenges were how the discussions will be framed and are:

• Education and training to build capacity around tech and digital tools.
• Sustained access to secure infrastructure & collaborative information networks, including cloud computing, Machine Learning/AI &, Satellite data.
• Open data and shared databases.
• Affordability of tech solutions.
• Accelerating ‘fit for purpose’ innovation.

Main points from the workshop:

• Tech firms work best when set a clear challenge to solve. Some felt that the best way forward is a narrower focus on specific issues (say species, country or trafficking route), though data can be used to help identify the priority problems.
• Access to sustained electrical power and broadband connectivity are vital.
• Getting buy in from local communities and the importance of ensuring local agencies are running tech projects.
• Devices in the field need to be appropriate, rugged, durable and easy to repair. This means easy access to spares and repair networks.
• Tech isn’t always the solution. ‘Technology’ is a suite of tools that needs to be leveraged appropriately to help conservationists. This means tech needs to be ready to use, easy to deploy and is accessible to those living in affected communities.
• What can be applied from all the tech work looking at modern slavery and human trafficking?
• A proposed new ‘peace park’ in West Africa could become a test case for much of the tech.
• Making datasets interoperable and maximising the opportunity of sharing data and tools that can be built around the data.
• Could regional centres of excellence be established to bring together local expertise, Governments, NGOs and tech sector operators?
• Accessing other indices of illegal wildlife crime such as payment data or sales through platforms.

What technologies can make a difference?

There was broad agreement that tech needs a clearly defined challenge to be effective, though the same tech tools did keep emerging during the discussion. Drones for surveillance and monitoring will have roles to play, as will Internet of Things enabled cameras and sensors. Big data, blockchain, AI and back-end/CRM software also came up frequently as well as the need for wider laptop and smartphone adoption (which is happening organically).

The deployment of tools to help fight illegal wildlife crime depends on what needs to happen along the criminal journey. For example, prevention means embedding tech in high risk poaching areas, but pursuing offenders means better forensic tools at poaching sites and interoperable datasets. These will help law enforcement make the right intervention at the right time and big data analytics to understand behaviour and using AI tools to ‘predict’ where and when traffickers will emerge.

What next?

A more detailed write up of the roundtable is being prepared and email craig.melson@techuk.org to request a copy or if you’d like to get involved more in this workstream. All those present were keen for more collaboration so we are now looking at how best to facilitate such a fora.

We also identified a number of scenarios to give a more specific focus and these were; treating poaching as a crime scene; seeing what can be applied from the modern slavery/human trafficking space; and collating/mapping other workstreams and we will be exploring these in more depth.

The FCO summit is also being finalised and we urge you to watch this space!