Where do we work?

Our Climate work engages with the European Union and major retailers to phase out climate-harming refrigerants. With Forests we actively seek enforcement of the EU Timber Regulation to bar stolen wood from the bloc’s markets. Our Ocean team campaigns against Icelandic and Norwegian whaling as well as advocating to curb plastic pollution. Finally, our Wildlife teams push governments to enact and enforce illegal trade bans to curtail demand.

The Montreal Protocol is based in Canada, making the area a key focus of our Climate work. Our Forests team are actively engaged on working with the USA’s Lacey Act as a tool to keep illegal logged timber off the market. Finally, our Ocean team is active on the illegal trade in dried totoaba fish maws from Mexico and the US to China.

Africa is the ground zero of our Elephant Campaign where our investigators have worked for decades to expose and neutralise major poaching and ivory trafficking syndicates. More recently, our Tiger Campaign has been monitoring South Africa’s legal trade in the bones of captive-bred lions, with a particular concern for its knock-on impacts on wild tiger populations. Our Forests team has also investigated illegal timber trade from Mozambique.

It is here our Forests team investigate illegal forest conversion for cash crops such as palm oil, illegal logging across Asia and the major role played by China as the world’s biggest importer of stolen timber. India, China and other South-East Asian countries are the primary focus of our Tiger Campaign, while our Elephants Campaign has been particularly active in the ivory markets of China and Hong Kong. Our Ocean campaigns focusses on Japanese whaling, both the smaller-scale coastal hunts of whales, dolphins and porpoises and its ‘scientific’ whaling in the Southern Ocean. Lastly, our Climate investigators monitors ozone-damaging CFC emissions in China.