Creation of the Attached Biodiversity Project

The insurance firm has created a biodiversity project to attach to their newly-minted biodiversity offering. This project will consist of conducting investigations of rhino horn trafficking within and out of South Africa. Specifically, the firm's investigators will gather intelligence on rhino poaching events, rhino poachers, rhino horn shipments, and those traffickers who (1) buy rhino horns from poachers, (2) arrange transport of the ensuing shipments, and (3) arrange final retail sales of such shipments to Chinese and Vietnamese consumers. Such intelligence will be verified and then forwarded to wildlife protection agencies. Possession of such verified intelligence will enable these agencies to make arrests of traffickers and pursue convictions of these suspects.

The project will be implemented by leveraging current capabilities of the firm's SIU. Specifically,

1. Four SIU investigators will be assigned part-time to the project. They will each bill one-third of their time to this project.
2. The firm will purchase a secure hardware/software package to hold the project's wildlife trafficker database (see 2023 Journal of Cybersecurity)
3. The firm will hire and deploy a secure four-person team to Pretoria, South Africa. This team will consist of two investigators, an office manager, and an IT specialist. This team will provide evidence that can only be acquired by intelligence-gathering methods deployed within South Africa. They will feed such intelligence to the SIU's main office.