Failure of political will makes crimes affecting the environment a worsening threat

In our landmark 2008 report Environmental Crime – A Threat to Our Future, EIA was the first to analyse the combined impact of multiple environmental crime types and the coordinated global response they demanded.

Some 18 years later, that call for urgent action has gone substantially unheeded.

In our new report Crimes that Affect the Environment – STILL a critical threat to our future, we conclude that crime and abuse has actually grown more sophisticated, more lucrative and even more damaging to the planet and human society.

EIA Securing Criminal Justice Programme Lead Justin Gosling said: “As an organisation that has spent more than four decades investigating and combating environmental crime and abuse across all three pillars of the triple planetary crisis – climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss – EIA is uniquely positioned to speak to both the scale of the threat and the response required to address it.

“Many of the structural weaknesses identified in 2008 — fragmented legislation, weak deterrence, limited cross-border cooperation and insufficient political will — persist today, even as the consequences of inaction have become progressively harder and, in some cases, impossible to reverse.”

Crimes that Affect the Environment – STILL a critical threat to our future captures the breadth of not only environmental crime types but also associated crimes such as money laundering and corruption. We argue they must be treated not as isolated regulatory failures, but as interconnected expressions of transnational organised crime driving the triple planetary crisis.

Key crime types covered in the report include:

• Climate crime has emerged as a category of growing urgency; the illegal trade in hydrofluorocarbon (HFC) refrigerant gases involves sophisticated criminal networks evading customs duties and VAT across Europe and beyond, costing governments an estimated €77 million in lost VAT annually and industry more than €400 million in 2020
• Pollution crime is increasingly recognised, not as minor regulatory non-compliance but as serious criminality with irreversible consequences for ecosystems and public health
• Waste crime is among the fastest-growing categories of environmental crime, ranging from domestic fraudulent recycling schemes worth an estimated £50 million per year in the UK to transnational shipments of plastic waste falsely labelled as recyclable and processed in unlicensed facilities across the Global South
• Forest crimes such as illegal logging, forest conversion and illicit mining continue to be major drivers of deforestation and environmental degradation, often enabled by corruption and organised criminal networks; illicit mining in forests is now among the fastest growing drivers of deforestation, mercury contamination and violence against forest-dependent communities
• Illegal fishing is estimated to account for 15-30 per cent of global annual catches and is worth up to $23.5 billion a year, undermining fisheries management, depriving coastal states of revenue and fueling wider criminal networks linked to labour exploitation and human trafficking; bycatch from illegal operations continues to drive species, including the vaquita porpoise, the world’s most critically endangered marine mammal, towards extinction
• Wildlife crime remains a thriving global industry, with approximately 4,000 species recorded in trafficking data between 2015-21; beyond the ecological harm, it carries serious public health risks, with more than 70 per cent of emerging zoonotic diseases linked to wildlife; corruption and the persistent failure to pursue high-level prosecutions continue to make it a high-reward, low-risk enterprise.

Gosling added: “Across all of these crime types, common threads emerge – profit incentives that dwarf enforcement risks, corruption as a structural enabler, opaque supply chains allowing illegal commodities to enter legitimate markets and a systematic failure to treat environmental crime with the seriousness it warrants under existing frameworks, including the UN Convention against Transnational Organised Crime (UNTOC).

“This is not a failure of available tools — the legal frameworks and cooperation mechanisms needed to act already exist. The failure has been one of political will, resourcing and coordination.”

The report’s recommendations to address the mounting problem of environmental crime include operationalising UNTOC more effectively, strengthening cross-border enforcement and building the political commitment to treat environmental crime as the global security threat it has always been.