Southeast Asia accounts for less than 3% of the world’s land mass but 25% of the global trade in wildlife. It’s a supplier, consumer and transit hub for the booming black market, where endangered animals are illegally caught, sold, eaten and shipped to customers around the world. So how do we bring this destructive trade to an end? Read the full report on Inside Over >
As the coronavirus crisis spreads further afield and claims casualties all over the world, many are asking what lessons we can learn from yet another case of deadly zoonotic disease. This could be exactly the conversation that conservationists working to stop wildlife trafficking need.
At a tech fair in Lembata, a volcano-sprinkled island near the eastern tip of Flores, Indonesia, 62-year-old subsistence farmer Daprosa and her friends Maria and Yuliana are checking out a water filter. It’s a simple $15 contraption, made of two plastic tanks with a ceramic-and-silver dome connecting them. The top tank is filled with river water and left overnight, with harmful chemicals and parasites removed as it trickles through. These women aren’t the only ones wondering about its success; local officials are interested, too — they want to know whether a giant version could be used to create a centralized water supply for villages.
Of the 260 million cluster bombs dropped on Laos’s three million people, nearly a third failed to explode. Four decades later, most lay where they fell, claiming hundreds of lives and limbs each year in a country where the GDP per capita is just USD $1,660 — a fraction of the cost of Western-made prostheses.
Lindsey Kennedy 