About saigas
Saiga policy & protection
The agreements, laws and enforcement that stand between the saiga and another collapse.
Protecting a species that crosses international borders means protection has to cross them too. Saiga conservation rests on a framework of national law, regional cooperation and international agreement — and on the enforcement capacity to make any of it real on the ground.
The framework
International agreements
Convention on Migratory Species (CMS)
The saiga is listed under the Convention on Migratory Species, the international treaty concerned with animals that cross national borders. Under it, range states have agreed a shared Memorandum of Understanding and a work programme for saiga conservation.
In practice this is what makes range-wide planning possible: it gives the countries involved a common set of objectives, a schedule for reporting against them, and a forum in which problems that cross borders can be raised as shared problems rather than someone else's.
Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (CITES)
CITES governs international trade in saiga products, principally horn. The species is listed on Appendix II, which means commercial international trade is permitted only under strict conditions and with export permits from the country of origin.
The listing matters because demand for horn is what drove the collapse of the 1990s and continues to drive illegal hunting today. CITES gives enforcement agencies a legal basis for acting on seizures, and gives range and consumer states a common vocabulary for the trade they are trying to control.
National protection
Each range state protects saigas in its own law. Hunting is banned outright across the range, protected areas cover key calving grounds and wintering areas, and penalties for possession and trafficking of horn have been strengthened in most range states over the past decade.
The binding constraint is rarely the law itself but the capacity to apply it: patrol coverage across enormous areas, evidence handling that stands up in court, coordination between agencies on either side of a border, and the resources available to the people responsible for all of it.
How the system fits together
International agreement sets the direction, national law makes it enforceable, and rangers make it real. Each layer depends on the one below it — which is why much of SCA’s policy work is translation: turning commitments made in meeting rooms into funded patrols, trained teams and equipment that actually arrives.
You may also be interested in
Support our work
Keep them moving
Saiga herds cross hundreds of kilometres of open steppe every year. Your support helps keep those routes open, protected and safe.