A Technology-Based Business Plan for Profitably Curbing Wildlife Trafficking

Biodiversity conservation projects that are tied to profitable products or services can conserve biodiversity over the long-term. This article gives an example of this approach to biodiversity conservation. This example involves a hypothetical private insurance firm marketing a profitable line of auto insurance policies whose revenue funds a wildlife trafficking investigations project. This project consists of the firm’s investigators sharing their criminal intelligence within a peer-to-peer distributed database. These peers are wildlife crime investigation professionals working within agencies across the world. Sustainable technologies are developed herein that deliver (1) a software implementation of this distributed database; (2) a protocol for protecting the database from insider threats; (3) marketing analytics tools for maintaining the profitability of the insurance policy offering; (4) a model of the political-ecological system that contains the Bengal tiger population that the insurance firm is conserving – along with a social network model of the wildlife trafficking syndicate being investigated; and (5) an Internet of Things system that displays to policy purchasers, Bengal tiger abundance along with the number of trafficker prosecutions that the project has been able to achieve.