About Wild Trade Futures

In response to COVID-19, the world is clamping down on wildlife trade. Wildlife Trade Futures is examining how this global clampdown is affecting different groups of people in different places as well as what the implications are for future relationships between people and wildlife.

The aim of our work is to understand how COVID-19 is reshaping the global wildlife trade landscape. We wish to provide policymakers with evidence-based guidelines on how to mitigate the ecological and public health risks of wildlife trade in the (post)COVID-19 era in ways that are attentive to power relations, inequality and justice.

In our work, we use a range of social science perspectives to show how changing human-wildlife relationships, structural inequalities and power relations impact wildlife economies in a variety of ways, including heightening the risks of zoonotic disease.

Our research activities focus on three areas: (1) tracking global trends in policy responses to COVID-19 and wildlife trade; (2) assessing the impacts of COVID-19 on wildlife trade supply/value chains and livelihoods, focusing on Cameroon and DR Congo; and (3) collating insights into how critical social science perspectives can enhance our understanding of the relationship between wildlife economies and zoonosis.

These activities are being carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Centre for International Forestry Research (CIFOR). We are also hosting a seminar series that brings together researchers from around the world to discuss how they use critical perspectives on gender, racism, (post)colonialism, geopolitics, political ecology and more-than-human geographies to reveal the hidden impacts of COVID-19. Outputs from our work will be accessible through this website. For example, you can access recordings of our virtual seminar series here.

Wildlife Trade Futures is funded by a UKRI GCRF/Newton Fund grant (GCRF_NF94) managed by the University of Birmingham and implemented in collaboration with partners at the University of Manchester, Northumbria University, University of Sheffield and CIFOR.

Our Team

Brock Bersaglio
Principal Investigator
University of Birmingham

Charis Enns
Co-Investigator
University of Manchester

Francis Massé
Co-Investigator
Northumbria University

Rosaleen Duffy
Co-Investigator
University of Sheffield

Tanya Wyatt
Co-Investigator
Northumbria University

Fiona Nunan
Co-Investigator
University of Birmingham

Richard Eba’a Atyi
Co-Investigator
CIFOR

Paulo Cerutti
Co-Investigator
CIFOR

Nathalie van Vliet
Co-Investigator
CIFOR

Ekaterina Gladkova
Research Associate
Northumbria University

Maia Earnshaw
Research Associate
University of San Francisco

Joseph Mbane Ogoonoum
Research Associate
CIFOR, Cameroon

Jonas Kakule Muhindo
Research Associate
CIFOR, DR Congo

Jonas Kambale Nyumu
Research Associate
CIFOR, DR Congo