Abstract
Illegal trade in wildlife, illegal logging and timber trading, unregulated fishing, illegal coral harvesting, as well as the illicit trade of waste and smuggling of ozone-depleting substances are, along with other environmental crimes, detrimentally affecting the quality of air, water, and soil, threatening the survival of fauna and flora, causing irreparable damage to our planet, along with placing a heavy burden on both human health and the economic livelihood of billions of people across the globe. However, despite the nascent global awareness of environmental crimes, this area of scientific inquiry requires further investigation by means of rigorous methods to produce sound empirical knowledge that can inform law enforcement activities and criminal justice systems, and advise policy makers. More specifically, several scholars have highlighted the need to produce new solid empirical research on environmental crimes, and recommended utilizing quantitative methods that have hitherto been neglected in this field (Lynch et al., 2017; Lynch & Pires, 2019; Nobles, 2019).
The special issue New Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Investigate Environmental Crimes seeks to improve extant understanding of environmental crimes, advocate for the use of new methods through which to study this topic, and enhance the preventive measures to combat these crimes. I am pleased to introduce this special issue that comprises expert contributions from multiple countries (i.e., Australia, Italy, Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom). The articles included in this issue employ different methodological approaches (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) to analyze several types of environmental crime in different offline and online contexts around the world (e.g., the illegal harvesting of live corals in Indonesia and Fiji, environmental crimes in protected areas in Cambodia, online illegal trade in endangered plants, and illicit waste trafficking at the global level). Moreover, they present innovative methodological solutions to the study of environmental crimes and guide future researchers in how to construct databases to quantitatively investigate corporate environmental crimes.
The first article in this special issue introduces the use of counter-mapping and activist tools as both a new method through which to investigate environmental crimes and as a means to quantify and demonstrate environmental harm in Australia (Barnes & White, 2020). The second article applies risk terrain modeling (RTM) to study fauna and flora–related illegal activities (e.g., illegal logging, flora and fauna poaching) in two protected areas in Cambodia, for the purposes of highlighting the risk factors associated with these crimes (Cowan et al., 2020). The third article employs statistical modeling of social networks to both reconstruct a network comprising connections between those countries that illegally exchange waste and to investigate the correlates of this global trafficking network (Favarin & Aziani, 2020). Both RTM and the statistical modeling of social networks have already been employed to study several crime types and illicit transnational activities, such as urban crime and drug trafficking, but they have thus far not been applied to the study of environmental crimes. The fourth article applies crime script analysis, a well-known methodology in the field of green criminology, to investigate an understudied crime, namely, the illegal harvesting of live corals (Sosnowski et al., 2020). The fifth article uses a combination of complementary data sources (i.e., police crime records and newspaper articles) to both produce a spatiotemporal analysis of environmental and wildlife crime (EWC) in Sweden and to explain the causes of chronic EWC hotspots (Stassen & Ceccato, 2020). The sixth article utilizes a cross-disciplinary approach (i.e., computer science, criminology, conservation science, and law enforcement expertise) to analyze online marketplaces for the illegal trade of endangered plants and to explore strategies for developing digital resources to assist law enforcement in countering and disrupting this criminal market. The article discusses the conceptualization of a tool capable of automatically gathering relevant online information to be used for research, intelligence, and investigative purposes (Lavorgna et al., 2020). The seventh article emphasizes the importance of being creative when extracting data to study corporate environmental crimes. To this end, the authors document the attempts made by researchers to create broader data sets for corporate environmental crime analysis, with the hope that this will assist those researchers working to create useful bodies of data for analysis (Greife & Maume, 2020).
Environmental crimes are an area of scientific inquiry that deserve greater global attention from criminology and other disciplines. Simply put, we owe this to our planet and to future generations. Illegal activities related to the environment are a global issue, not only because these crimes often have a transnational dimension—illegal waste is trafficked from Global Northern countries (i.e., more developed) to Global Southern countries (i.e., less developed), while wildlife and timber trafficking routes follow the reverse path—but also because the contamination of air, water, and soil deleteriously affects people’s lives on a global scale. I am grateful to all the authors who decided to contribute to this special issue and, in so doing, increase extant knowledge on different types of environmental crimes and enhance our capacity to fight these crimes. I would like to thank Chris Eskridge and the Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice for welcoming the idea of this special issue in the first place and for making its development possible. I also thank the anonymous peer reviewers for kindly giving their time and for sharing their invaluable comments and suggestions.