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The vision for this conference came from seeing the need to bring multiple disciplines together that were working on illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade (IUWT) issues across Hong Kong, and internationally on Hong Kong-IUWT-related topics. As researchers and practitioners, we’re often hesitant to collaborate with different disciplines to enhance our work creatively, so we wanted to create a space to foster those interactions in a meaningful way that was memorable, international, and high-quality.

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The Hong Kong SAR is a global hub in wildlife trade, as such it is essential every effort is made to ensure the trade here is not unsustainable or illegal. Conferences like this provide a unique and essential forum for interdisciplinary discussions, bringing together academics, NGOs, forensic specialists, policymakers, UN entities to unify our efforts.

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I have always wanted to make my research more practical, realistic and applicable, and ICWT helped me achieve that by understanding the field of illegal and unsustainable trade from a more holistic point of view. By engaging in interdisciplinary conversations with NGOs, enforcement parties and academics from across study fields, I learned a lot about wildlife trade from other perspectives. I believe that the key in IUWT is to collaborate among disciplines, and ICWT was a good first step in Hong Kong. Also – this was probably one of the best conferences I’ve been to in terms of organisation and network.

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