Rising illegal wildlife trade across Himalayan countries threatens the mountain ecosystem

In February this year, 45 people headed towards jewellery shops in Rohru, a town in Himachal Pradesh. But shopping was not their agenda. The group was a squad of forest rangers, guards and van mitras, on a mission, Operation Clawing Back, to raid shops to seize jewellery allegedly made from claws and teeth of leopards and feathers of protected birds. This raid illustrates a wider phenomenon in the Himalayas.

Illegal wildlife trade is happening across eight countries in the Hindu Kush Himalaya (HKH) region and has doubled from 2019 onwards compared to 2018 and previous years, found a study published in January 2026. The research was conducted by Babar Khan and Kesang Wangchuk at the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development (ICIMOD) in Kathmandu, Nepal.

India and China recorded thousands of seizure incidents, with carnivores, elephants, pangolins, and various endangered animals trafficked for live trade, body parts, and traditional medicine, according to the research. Illegal wildlife trade is the fourth largest illicit transnational activity in the world. It remains an attractive business for poachers and smugglers, with Southeast Asia at the epicentre of much of this crime. Over 12,000 species of animals and plants have been traded internationally in recent years.

A threat to biodiversity and the mountain ecosystem

The HKH stretches over 3,500 kilometres from west to east, spanning either all or part of these eight countries — Afghanistan, Bangladesh, Bhutan, China, India, Myanmar, Nepal, and Pakistan. The region hosts four global biodiversity hotspots — Himalaya, Indo-Burma, and the Mountains of Central Asia and the Mountains of Southwest China. It is home to rare and endemic species such as red pandas, snow leopards, one-horned rhinos, Asian elephants, and Bengal tigers.

There is also a link between illegal wildlife trade and zoonotic diseases, where more than 75% of pandemics can be traced back to wildlife. The increase in wildlife trade from 2019-21 has been linked to the COVID-19 pandemic, revealed the study. Due to lockdowns, there was less law enforcement and surveillance. People also faced economic hardship and the food supply chains were disrupted, which pushed communities towards poaching. For instance, the study showed that India reported a 151% increase in poaching during the pandemic and Nepal and Bangladesh also recorded a rise in such incidents.

“It’s not about a few species being killed, taken away from their habitats or trafficked to another place. Actually, it’s a big threat and menace to the mountain ecosystem, which unfortunately is very fragile,” said Babar Khan, regional lead at ICIMOD. Wildlife being sold within the HKH region and across its borders also has high human stakes — 1.8 billion people living in the high mountain systems and downstream Asia depend on this biodiversity for their livelihoods and other ecosystem goods and services, Khan told Mongabay-India.

Drivers of wildlife trade

The foremost driver of this illicit trade is the consumer demand for wildlife products, according to the study. People acquire wildlife as luxury and fashion items, speciality foods and exotic pets. There is also a growing demand for traditional Chinese and Tibetan medicines and folk remedies, which use wildlife derivatives. “As far as Tibetan and Chinese traditional medicine are concerned, we cannot just paint them with a broad brush. We have to look at the nuances,” said Tsewang Namgail, a wildlife biologist and director at the nonprofit Snow Leopard Conservancy India Trust. He pointed out that other traditional healing systems in the Himalayas such as Ayurveda also use biological materials and should be considered in the bigger picture to avoid bias.

To meet consumer demand, a large variety of species is taken from the wild. The study lists carnivores, elephants, pangolins, testudines, antelopes, snakes, birds, lizards, amphibians, crabs, insects, and flowering plants as trafficked species. While live animals made up the largest trafficked group to be sold, the commodities included specimens, skins, ivory artefacts, roundwood, scales, horns, tusks, bones, claws, teeth, meat, shells, gall bladders, skulls, feathers, and furs.

These species then become a part of crossborder trade, found the study. “The illegal goods were taken through porous borders and also high mountain passes that were poorly monitored. Because of difficult terrain and complex geography, monitoring has been difficult,” said Kesang Wangchuk, who works as intervention manager for human-wildlife coexistence at ICIMOD.

Socio-economic inequalities in the Himalayan countries also lead people to engage in poaching, according to the researchers. “The poachers lure the communities that are low income, often poor, with fewer economic opportunities and trap them into this huge business, for which they take a huge risk, but get very little return,” explained Khan.

What is also driving this trade is weak law enforcement and corruption, according to the study. The extreme climate of the mountains limits vigilance by law enforcement authorities and traffickers also frequently bribe officials at rural checkpoints. The HKH region lacks sufficient wildlife crime enforcement personnel and technology. Non-wildlife officials on duty at checkpoints often struggle to identify wildlife derivatives in processed forms, noted Khan.

Khan notes that he was also surprised by the scale of digital wildlife trade. In recent years, social media platforms such as Facebook, Instagram, X and WhatsApp have emerged as marketplaces for wildlife trading. “We came to know that there are huge syndicates of illegal wildlife trade operating through digital platforms. They were not selling or buying these products in their common names. They were using coded names and codes for different products,” he said.

The need for greater regional cooperation

For this study, the researchers conducted a systematic literature review in 2022, using specific keywords across Scopus, Google Scholar, and ResearchGate. They screened 125 articles and reviewed 96 of them closely. They also analysed wildlife trade and seizure data for the region spanning 2001 to 2020 from the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES) and the Trade Records Analysis of Flora and Fauna in Commerce (TRAFFIC) databases for the 20-year period. Namgail described the study as a valuable snapshot of the region that gives a bigger picture, achieved through triangulating multiple data sources.

A review of this nature also has its limitations. For instance, the search was restricted to English-language publications and the search terms were not broadened to include the names of all eight HKH countries, which may have missed national and local literature. Namgail also noted that searching by individual country names could have yielded a much richer body of literature. Wangchuk acknowledged that the true volume of illegal wildlife trafficking in HKH is likely much higher than the data reflects, since the study depended largely on seizure data, which only captures crimes that were detected.

The study recommends strengthening institutional capacities for legislation and enforcement. It also calls for greater regional cooperation. “Every country in the Himalaya knows that illegal wildlife trade is a threat to biodiversity conservation but to have a strong check on this trade, the regional cooperation is not strong. They haven’t come forward and made a very strong transnational decision to control the trade,” Wangchuk told Mongabay-India. There is the South Asia Wildlife Enforcement Network (SAWEN), a regional intergovernmental wildlife law enforcement support body of eight South Asian countries, but it is not effective enough, so the HKH countries need to strengthen regional collaboration to tackle this challenge effectively, said Khan. Namgail emphasised that a greater cross-border collaboration is key apart from building awareness, especially in India and China, which make up a third of the world’s population.

Wangchuk suggested mapping trafficking supply chains using satellite imagery and GPS tracking to identify poaching hotspots and trading routes and called for deeper investigation into which digital platforms are being used and how. “In the future, researchers can focus on the illegal trade of keystone species and animals that are critical to the HKH ecosystem,” suggested Namgail.

Khan emphasised that wildlife trade is a risk for zoonotic diseases, citing the example of a 2003 incident when a shipment of exotic African rodents to a pet store in Illinois sparked the United States’ first Mpox outbreak. He suggested adopting a One Health approach to address the risk of zoonotic disease linked to illegal wildlife trade – one that treats the health of humans, animals, plants and the ecosystem as inseparable, ensuring the protection of all.

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Banner image: Rhinos bathe in a river at Chitwan National Park in Nepal. Image by Jitendra Raj Bajracharya/ICIMOD.