Knowledge Case studies
Way Kambas: how snaring fell 85% in a year.
1,300 km² of Sumatran rainforest, and a threat that costs a few cents: a wire snare. Recorded snaring fell 85% in the year after the park changed its approach.
Snares are silent, cheap, and indiscriminate. A patrol can pull hundreds from the forest and feel productive — and still find hundreds more the next week, because lifting wire never touches the reason it was set. Activity was high; the pattern wasn’t changing.
Asking a different question
The breakthrough came from a different question. Instead of only asking how many snares can we remove, the teams asked why are they being set, and by whom. This is the preventive tier of Integrated Threat Reduction (ITR) in action: understand the people and conditions behind a threat, then change those conditions rather than chasing the symptom.
That meant talking to hunters — learning their motivations, their constraints, and the drivers that made snaring worthwhile — and then designing an intervention aimed squarely at those drivers. Less wire in the forest wasn’t the goal; fewer reasons to set it was.
fall in snaring, within one year
of protected rainforest
Herman Goldstein Award winner
Recognised by the field
The work was led on the ground by Indonesia’s Ministry of Forestry and Environment with their partner WCS-Indonesia, applying the problem-oriented approach that ITR is built on. In 2024, the project won the Herman Goldstein Award for Excellence in Problem-Oriented Policing — the field’s highest international recognition — for exactly this: solving a conservation problem by understanding it first.
Lifting wire treats the symptom. Understanding the hunter treats the cause.
Why it matters beyond Way Kambas
Way Kambas is the clearest illustration of the case the whole standard makes: that prevention outperforms reaction when teams are equipped to think, not just to patrol. The same logic — scan the problem, analyse the drivers, design a response, measure what changes — travels to any landscape, any threat. It’s the difference between being busy and being effective.
This is the preventive tier of our doctrine at work. Read the Standard, see the wider evidence, or explore partnership.
Photograph: wire snares recovered from the forest, Way Kambas National Park.