One of the most effective tools in promoting compliance is public awareness, particularly through the news media. In an increasingly globalised economy, information is one of the most important tools that states, organizations, and individuals can employ to effect change, particularly where individual purchasing and life-style decisions can drive illegal markets or shape legal markets. Accordingly, public awareness can be important for everything from trade in protected species to ozone-depleting substances, to life-style decisions with implications for climate change, to planning decisions affecting wetlands and habitats for migratory species.
A variety of MEAs have relied on education and publicity to promote compliance. For example, the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) has had success in improving compliance through public awareness. Publicity and education have helped to increase public awareness and thereby decrease the demand for commercial trade in species that are threatened with extinction. Public awareness about such wildlife species assists CITES compliance and enforcement efforts in diminishing the demand for those species. The success in reducing illegal trade in ivory serves as one example of the effectiveness of education and publicity in decreasing the demand for an illegally acquired wildlife product.
Education programmes are important in addressing shaping the decisions of individual and institutional consumers. Such programmes can help consumers to understand the environmental and social implications of their decisions to buy a particular product, live in a particular place, or utlise certain services. Educational and public awareness programmes, which are discussed more in Guideline 44
, include education about the effects of the particular decisions as well as available alternatives. For example, in the context of CITES, this would include information on the impacts of using products from species that are threatened with extinction (such as certain traditional medicines) as well as indicating the availability of specific alternatives that do not threaten the future of those species (such as other medicines that are derived from species that are not threatened with extinction, commonplace substances, or synthetic medicines). Many organisations and the CITES Secretariat have engaged in publicity and education campaigns.