Dr. Tim Wittig is an applied scientist and transformation and innovation expert with a unique background as a wildlife conservationist, professor of International Relations, and former defense intelligence analyst. He is a currently a fellow at Oxford University in the Department of Biology and Interdisciplinary Center for Conservation Science and also an associate fellow at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI) in London in the Organised Crime and Policing research group.
Tim has lived in 8 countries on 3 continents and worked in nearly 50 different countries. His professional background is in research & development (R&D) and applied sciences, especially relating to finance, security, and the environment/biodiversity.
Author of the book Understanding Terrorist Finance, Tim has extensive on-the-ground experience conducting and leading field investigations of illicit economic networks in Africa, Europe, and the Caucuses, including those involved in terrorist financing, nuclear smuggling, and environmental crime. Tim began his career in national security, and was one of the first people in the US Intelligence Community (IC) to treat biodiversity and ecosystem collapse as a threat to global security.
From 2016 to 2023, Tim played a central role in the United for Wildlife Transport and Financial Taskforces, a groundbreaking program of the Royal Foundation of the Prince & Princess of Wales to use data and intelligence, alongside high-level formal commitments, to mobilize 400+ of the worlds’ largest banks, maritime shipping companies, and airlines, along with governments and civil society, to take meaningful action against global wildlife trafficking. Tim conceived of and ran the central intelligence sharing system and primary operational component of the both Taskforces.
A former tenured professor of International Relations and Humanitarian Action, and a life-long environmentalist and outdoorsman, Tim, like many people today, believes reversing the current catastrophic extermination of nature is the single most important issue of our time - a literal life-and-death struggle for the future of our common planet and ultimately humanity itself.
He came to work professionally in conservation a decade ago after observing how the major threats to the environment today - species loss, climate change, pollution, et al - are all underpinned and driven often to a large extent by geopolitical competition, crime and corruption, illicit networks, and social injustices. And that rigorous, hard-hitting intelligence and data-led analysis of these dynamics, especially when done at scale, will be a game changer in how we confront threats to the world’s wildlife and ecosystems.
To learn more about Tim and his work, download some of his recent publications or feel free to reach out directly.
TIM IN THE NEWS
How Prince William helped U.S. agents bust a major wildlife and drug smuggling network CBS News
Prince William, already one of the most recognizable faces in the conservation world, recognized the need to go after the big fish, and last month he told a group of business, law enforcement and NGO leaders gathered in London that his Royal Foundation's initiative, United for Wildlife (UFW), had struck upon a winning formula.
UFW launched two "Taskforces," which, through partnerships with some of the world's biggest shipping, transport and financial companies, have helped law enforcement agencies to connect the dots between the people killing animals, moving the illicit goods to the black market, and then profiting from them. Crucially, they have also helped expose the deep links between those networks and the ones that move other illegal goods around the world, as evidenced by the indictments unsealed Thursday in New York.
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Integrating the efforts and information of the private sector, law enforcement and NGOs is the responsibility of the Taskforces' Head of Intelligence and Analysis, Dr. Tim Wittig. He came to United for Wildlife after years of work as an intelligence analyst and expert on terrorism and illicit finance for the U.S. government and various private organizations, as well as several years in Africa working as a field conservationist.
Wittig said conservation had been based for too long on strategies divorced from the complex realities of the wildlife trafficking problem, and he believed the Taskforces could help change the paradigm.
In his presentation to the gathering in London, Wittig described the Taskforces as the "neural network, the brain stem" which "act as a trusted conduit for information, that leads to action." The action being arrests, and the dismantling of organized criminal networks.
How to Stop Poaching and Protect Endangered Species? Forget the ‘Kingpins’ New York Times
In the West, “organized criminals live in a somewhat parallel society,” said Tim Wittig, a conservation scientist at the University of Groningen in the Netherlands. But among wildlife traffickers, “the big criminals are typically also big business people.”
“Usually, they’re involved in logistics-type businesses — trading or shipping companies, for example — or in commodity-based ones, which is why it’s easy for them to move things around,” he added.
These individuals are sometimes referred to as kingpins, a term that experts say is overused.
“Arresting a few alleged wildlife-trafficking ‘kingpins’ may be a useful symbolic tool for promoting the importance and feasibility of strong enforcement to the general public,” Dr. Wittig said. But “it is not likely to be effective in actually saving protected wildlife, especially if done in isolation.”
Changing this largely depends on changing the way the world addresses illegal wildlife trade.
Botswana lifts ban on elephant hunting CBS News
Wittig noted that the "human-wildlife conflict" cited by Botswana's government on Thursday is in fact "an important driver of involvement in poaching and wildlife trafficking. People living close to wildlife must feel they have a stake in protecting it."
"Organized criminal networks often prey on people in communities with unresolved human-wildlife conflict, offering them easy money to get involved in poaching or wildlife trafficking," Wittig said.
COVID-19: How anti-corruption tools and industry collaboration can help us win the fight against illegal wildlife trade (Basel Institute on Governance, Feb 2020)
Terrorism, Conflict, and Ivory Trafficking: Myth & Reality (Italian Institute for International Political Studies, 2018)
Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking, and Organized Crime (in Haenlein, Cathy, M. L. R. Smith, eds. Poaching, Wildlife Trafficking and Security in Africa: Myths and Realities. Whitehall Paper 86. London: Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security Studies, 2016.)
A Social Model of Conservation to Fight Wildlife Trafficking: What Conservationists Can Learn from Public Health (Working Paper (2015, minor updates 2017))
Threat Finance (in Hahn, Erin, ed. Special Topics in Irregular Warfare: Understanding Resistance. US Army Special Operations Command, 2016)