The Minimising the Illegal Killing of Elephants and other Endangered Species (MIKES) project builds on the Monitoring the Illegal Killing of Elephants (MIKE) Programme, which has been implemented together with African Elephant range States by the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora (CITES) with the support of the European Commission from 2001 until the present day. MIKE was designed to generate reliable and impartial data on the status and trends in African elephant populations, illegal killing and illegal trade in ivory, as a basis for international and range State decision making and action concerning elephant conservation. MIKES leverages the strong foundation established and successes that have been achieved by MIKE but with an expanded focus to include: a) other CITES-listed flagship species threatened by international trade; b) initiatives aimed at minimising the impact of poaching and the illegal trade on the target species, in particular through efforts to strengthen the capacity and capabilities of law enforcement agencies to combat poaching at both site and national levels; c) piloting of the MIKE Programme’s successful adaptive management and monitoring approaches in selected sites in the Caribbean and Pacific regions.
The MIKES Project was launched in 2014 and will conclude in 2018. MIKES is funded by the European Union's 10th European Development Fund through EuropeAid and with the support of the Africa, Caribbean and Pacific Group of States (ACP).
The project is divided into the following five results:
Result 1: MIKE sites are generating regular and reliable information on the status and threats to elephants and other flagship species and on key benchmarks of law enforcement and management effort, in order to support decision making on appropriate management, protection and enforcement needs.
Result 2: Law enforcement, adaptive management and monitoring systems, protocols and capacity are strengthened in high priority protected areas selected on the basis of their critical importance for protection of elephant or other flagship species and the severity of threats.
Result 3: National and subregional-level information, decision-making and inter-agency collaboration systems aimed at protecting elephants and other flagship species and combating the illegal trade in their products are developed and strengthened.
Result 4: International awareness, cooperation, and action in the conservation and protection of elephants and other flagship species are strengthened, including the establishment of an emergency response mechanism to assist sites experiencing sudden law enforcement crises.
Result 5: Law enforcement, adaptive management and monitoring systems, protocols and capacity building approaches supported by MIKES are piloted in selected protected area sites in the Caribbean and Pacific regions, to determine their usefulness and replicability in these regions.
MIKES is an Initiative of the ACP Secretarat, funded by the European Union under the 10th EDF