Illegal logging, fishing and wildlife trade rob the world of precious natural resources — and ultimately of development benefits and livelihoods, the World Bank said.

The statistics are grim: an elephant is poached for its tusks about every 30 minutes, an African rhino for its horn every 8 hours, one in five fish is caught illegally, and in certain countries, particularly in Africa and South America, 50 percent to 90 percent of timber is harvested and traded illegally. As much as 35 percent of the value of all illegal trade is estimated to come from rosewood.

Just last week the World Bank issued a new report — Illegal Logging, Fishing and Wildlife Trade: The Costs and How to Combat It — that tallied the annual cost of these illegal activities at a staggering $1 trillion to $2 trillion.

More than 90 percent of these losses are from ecosystem services that forests, wildlife and coastal resources provide, and that are not currently priced by the market, such as carbon storage, biodiversity, water filtration and flood retention.

This market failure poses a major policy challenge for global biodiversity conservation efforts. Governments in source countries must capture financial benefits for conserving global ecosystems, and promote legal and sustainable logging and forest management, legal fishing, and wildlife trade to improve local livelihoods and increase their fiscal revenues.

Conserving these services is critical for advancing the Sustainable Development Goals (SDG). Illegal activities undermine the member country’s ability to achieve many of the SDG — especially those goals dependent on conserving biodiversity and limiting climate change.

This includes goals on poverty, hunger, health, water and sanitation, sustainable cities and communities, climate action, life below water and life on land. This is especially the case in low-income countries where livelihoods disproportionately depend on natural capital. In these countries, governments forego an estimated $7 billion to $12 billion in potential fiscal revenues per year, according to the latest report.

Besides the market failure problem, illegal logging, fishing and wildlife trade is facilitated by systematic corruption and weak governance across the public and private sectors.

This multibillion-dollar transnational illegal trade is operated by international criminal organizations and is on par — in scope and revenue — with human and drug trafficking. Despite targeted and often successful efforts, initiatives to combat these activities pale in comparison to efforts to fight other transnational crimes.

For example, a 2019 World Bank study found that roughly $260 million a year is spent to combat illegal wildlife trade in 67 African and Asian countries whereas the US federal government alone spent $30 billion on drug control efforts in 2017.