Vietnam

Famously, Vietnam occupies 1% of the world’s land area but is home to 10% of the world’s vertebrate species. This biodiversity is highly threatened by the illegal wildlife trade (IWT). A recent USAID-funded camera trap campaign in 21 protected areas shows that most large mammals have disappeared.

Poaching is primarily carried out using snares made of bike wire. Cheap to produce and easy to set, snares trap all ground-based wildlife, emptying the forest. Snares sustain the IWT by supplying wildlife restaurants with ungulates, civets, and other species that have survived in sufficient numbers to be worth hunting.

The loss of predators and ungulates in protected areas threatens the integrity of the ecosystem because 50%-80% of all tropical plants rely exclusively on animals for seed dispersal. Loss of predators also creates space for rodents, dogs, and other zoonotic disease vectors.

Meanwhile, improved law enforcement has increased the detection of trafficked wildlife. Huge volumes of stressed wildlife are transferred to rescue centers, which almost without exception do not have the equipment and protocols to quarantine and test these animals for diseases. Every year, thousands are dumped in the forest with no disease screening.

Under these conditions, there is a high and growing risk of zoonotic disease spillover. In September 2024, captive tigers started dying of bird flu. In the absence of any institutionalised response capacity for wildlife disease outbreaks, 40 tigers died.

Through the EOI launched in August 2022, Vietnam was selected as one of six recipient countries for the first phase of the N4H Initiative and IUCN was nominated to support state and non-state stakeholders prepare a proposal to address the public health threats posed by zoonotic spillover along the IWT supply chain.

The scoping phase started in January 2024 and included the preparation of a situation analysis of zoonotic disease risk with a focus on the IWT (The risks posed by wildlife farming have been relatively well studied.) Three national consultations were organised at which the results of the scoping were presented, and participants framed the key components of a N4H response to be included in the Implementation Project Document (IPD). Provisionally, these are:

• Test equitable models to reduce snaring in cooperation with IPLCs and local government.

• Design and test protocols in rescue centers to reduce disease risks and accelerate reintroduction of healthy animals back to the wild.

• Support Vietnam’s One Health Partnership (OHP) to strengthen N4H policy formulation and inter-agency coordination.

All three components include capacity building, training, and knowledge generation. GIZ will provide cofinancing for a zoonotic disease risk assessment along the IWT supply chain and a study of how to engage local communities to reduce snaring. If approved, the project will be implemented under the umbrella of OHP in Vietnam.