Green Criminology
Definition
A criminological perspective that studies crimes against the environment, including pollution, illegal wildlife trade, and resource exploitation, as well as the role of environmental harm in generating other criminal conduct. It challenges anthropocentric definitions of crime by including harms to ecosystems and non-human species.
- Focus
- Crimes and harms against the environment
- Includes
- Pollution, illegal wildlife trade, resource exploitation
- Framing
- Challenges anthropocentric definitions of crime
- Scope
- Harms to ecosystems and non-human species
Common questions
How does green criminology differ from conventional environmental law enforcement?+
Environmental law enforcement applies existing statutes to prosecute defined offences such as illegal dumping or poaching, while green criminology is a broader academic perspective that also studies environmentally harmful acts not currently criminalised, questioning why certain ecological harms fall outside legal definitions of crime at all.
Why does green criminology include harms to non-human species and ecosystems?+
It rejects the assumption that crime must be defined only by harm to humans, arguing that ecosystem and species-level damage from activities like habitat destruction or industrial pollution deserves criminological attention in its own right, even when it produces no measurable human victim.
Related terms
- AI-Enabled Crime
- Offences in which artificial intelligence tools are used to plan, execute, or conceal criminal acts. Includes deepfake fraud, AI-generated phishing, voice-cloning scams,...
- Development-Induced Displacement
- The forced removal of communities from their land to make way for dams, mines, plantations or other infrastructure projects.
- Ecocide
- Mass damage or destruction of ecosystems, proposed since the 2010s as a fifth international crime alongside genocide and crimes against humanity.
- Environmental Crime
- Conduct that breaches environmental statutes, such as illegal dumping, unlicensed logging, wildlife trafficking or discharging pollutants above a permitted limit.
- Environmental Justice
- The claim that environmental harm falls disproportionately on poor, minority and indigenous communities, and that this distribution is itself an injustice.
- Folk Devil
- The group or category of person cast as the source of the moral threat in a moral panic. The folk devil is...
- Mean World Syndrome
- George Gerbner's term for the phenomenon in which heavy television viewing produces inflated estimates of personal victimisation risk. Long-term viewers perceive the...
- Moral Panic
- A period of intense, media-driven public anxiety about a group or behaviour perceived as an exceptional threat to social order. Coined by...
- State-Corporate Crime
- Harm that arises when a government institution and a corporation pursue a shared goal together, a concept developed by Kramer and Michalowski...
- Transnational Organised Crime
- Criminal enterprises that operate across national borders, coordinating production, transit, and distribution of illegal goods or services in multiple jurisdictions simultaneously. Trafficking...
Explained in these topics
- Green Criminology: Environmental and Development-Induced CrimeA perspective, coined by Michael Lynch in 1990, that studies harm to environments, animals and communities as crime regardless of whether a statute has been br...
- Media, Crime, and Emerging Challenges