Graduate Environmental Program

The Centre for Resources, Energy and Environmental Law (CREEL) and the Office for Environmental Programs (OEP) are pleased to invite you to a lunch time seminar by

Chris Turton, TRAFFIC South-East Asia
on
Breeding Asian Tigers: The Shifting Regulation of Wildlife Trade in Southeast Asia

Chris works for TRAFFIC, an international wildlife trade monitoring organisation established as a joint project of WWF and the IUCN. Based in Vietnam, he has been working on improving the enforcement of international and domestic wildlife and timber trade regulations across the Greater Mekong region. He completed his masters in environmental policy at the University of Melbourne in 2007.

Seminar Details:
The growth of Asian economies over the past twenty years has given rise to an expansion in the production and consumption of wildlife from across Southeast Asia. The Convention on the International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora, one of the oldest multilateral environmental agreements, continues to be applied as the primary mechanism for regulating much of this trade in wildlife. The poor domestic application of the Convention, however, has allowed such trade to become one of the most significant threats to biodiversity in the region.
In this context, the seminar takes the recently passed Biodiversity Law in Vietnam as a starting point for understanding the Convention’s historical failure to protect the region’s unique biodiversity. As a political tool, the Law can also be seen as the institutionalization of cultural interpretations of international law that have questioned the direction for wildlife trade regulation and which will shape the future of conservation efforts in the region.

DATE: Tuesday 25 August 2009
TIME: 1 pm – 2 pm
VENUE: Room G29, Ground Floor, Melbourne Law School
185 Pelham Street, Carlton

A location map can be found at http://www.law.unimelb.edu.au/LawSchoolStreetPlan.jpg

RSVP: Anne Kallies by Monday 17 August 2009
(03) 8344 6938 or law-creel@unimelb.edu.au

A light lunch will be provided.