National and conservation leaders say the annihilation of nature is a dangerous ‘blight on humanity’, ahead of major summit
Damian Carrington Environment editor
Thu 4 Oct 2018 06.00 BSTLast modified on Thu 4 Oct 2018 10.28 BST
Humanity is waging a war of terror on wildlife across the globe, according to the head of a world-leading research institute who was previously a counter-terrorism expert for the UK government.
Dominic Jermey, director general of the Zoological Society of London (ZSL), also spent years in Afghanistan supporting the fight against terror, until leaving his post of UK ambassador in 2017. “Coming to ZSL, I have a front-row seat on a different kind of war: the war on wildlife,” he said in an article for the Guardian. “[It is] a war with catastrophic impacts on people and animals.”
“While war and terror atrocities make daily headlines, the horrors being waged on wildlife slide under the radar,” said Jermey, ahead of a global summit on tackling the illegal wildlife trade in London in October.
Other leaders are urging rapid action, with Gabon’s president, Ali Bongo, calling the crisis “a blight on humanity” and UK environment secretary Michael Gove saying the “massive global problem” needs the same scale of international response being taken to fight climate change.
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