Dear Alliance Members,
we would like to invite you to a special online event on August 27, 2025, at 12pm CET, hosted by the International Alliance against Health Risks in Wildlife Trade and IUCN, where experts will present new findings on the impact of snaring, livestock grazing, and illegal wildlife trade on biodiversity and zoonotic disease risks in Viet Nam. IUCN’s Jake Brunner and Nguyen Manh Hiep will share insights from a recent Alliance-funded study and discuss next steps for implementing Nature4Health (N4H) in the region.
About the event:
In October 2023, at a workshop in Hanoi, the Leibniz Institute for Zoo and Wildlife Research (IZW), presented the results of a camera-trapping campaign funded by USAID in 21 protected areas in the Annamites. The results showed that almost all large ground-dwelling animals had been removed, primarily by snaring.
At the same time, Vietnam’s protected areas were becoming the target of large-scale grazing of domestic livestock, which was transforming the vegetation structure, polluting waterways, and potentially spreading diseases to wild cattle.
The impact of snaring and livestock on wildlife and natural habitats was massive yet systematically ignored in the official discourse.
IUCN’s response to these threats has been to frame them withing the context of Nature 4Health (N4H), a global program to reduce zoonotic disease risk by investing in nature—or upstream prevention.
In November 2024, the Alliance awarded IUCN a contract to carry out two activities, a study of the impact of snaring and livestock in Muong Nhe National Park in northwest Viet Nam, and an assessment of zoonotic disease risks associated with the illegal wildlife trade using guidelines recently published by WOAH, the World Organisation for Animal Health.
IUCN’s Jake Brunner will present the results of the Alliance grant and his colleague Nguyen Manh Hiep will talk about next steps and implications for N4H implementation in Viet Nam.
About the Speakers:
Jake Brunner:
Based in Hanoi, Jake Brunner is Head of IUCN’s Lower Mekong Sub-region covering Vietnam, Cambodia, Lao PDR, Thailand, and Myanmar. Before joining IUCN in 2008, he spent eight years running Conservation International’s Indo-Burma Program based in Washington, DC and Phnom Penh. Previously, he spent eight years at World Resources Institute, an environmental policy research center in Washington, DC. He holds a BA in Geography from Oxford University and a MS in Remote Sensing/GIS from London University.
Nguyen Manh Hiep
Mr. Nguyen Manh Hiep – Biodiversity Programme Coordinator at IUCN Vietnam, is a well-known expert in the field of nature conservation. He graduated with a bachelor’s degree in biology, specializing in Zoology from the Faculty of Biology, Hanoi University of Science – Vietnam National University, and completed his Master of Science in Forest and Nature Conservation at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.
With over 20 years of experience working at the Ministry of Agriculture and Rural Development (now the Ministry of Agriculture and Environment), Mr. Hiep has made significant contributions in the fields of nature conservation and biodiversity, management of national parks and protected areas, as well as wildlife conservation. He has extensive experience in policy development, programs and projects related to conservation work in Vietnam