Wildlife Trade in 2021: Still start with the consumer

The trade in and consumption of wildlife is indisputably a threat to both human health and global biodiversity (Can et al., 2019 and ‘t Sas-Rolfes et al., 2019). Consumer-focused demand reduction is one proposed family of strategies designed to mitigate trade and consumption through the application of robust wildlife consumer research, which is then used to design behavior change initiatives that (ideally) reduce consumer demand (e.g. Veríssimo, 't Sas-Rolfes, and Glikman, 2020). In 2012, Veríssimo et al. published a foundational editorial within this journal that was one of the first articles to explicitly call for consumer-focused demand reduction measures. Veríssimo et al. (2012) noted such positives as overcom-ing persistent failures in enforcement (e.g. Rasphone et al., 2019), and promoting greater inclusivity by bringing diverse stakeholders, such as indigenous peoples, into these efforts. Since that article, consumer-focused de-mand reduction has received growing attention and broader application (e.g. Davis et al., 2020, Veríssimo et al., 2020). Although it has been heartening to see an increase in robust, applied consumer research to reduce demand, the COVID-19 pandemic—which almost certainly originated due to wildlife trade and consumption (Roe et al., 2020)—underscores that there is still a long way to go, and meaningful, multipronged and collabora-tive steps must still be taken to address this threat to human health and global biodiversity (the “OneHealth” concept (El Zowalaty and Järhult, 2020). Measures that must be implemented include more well-defined laws in emerging infectious disease (EID) hotspots (Huang et al., 2020) and decentralized disease surveillance at known source sites, such as wet markets (Watsa et al., 2020). However, consumer-focused demand reduction efforts are arguably more powerful due to the nature of the wildlife trade chain. As the chain is marked by multiple entry-points for disease, from the initial poaching event to the final consumption of an infected animal (Watsa et al., 2020), removing the end point of consumption through demand reduction causes the entire chain to collapse, consequently removing those multiple EID points