Environmental crime is a growing concern internationally. Interpol and the United Nations Environment Programme name environmental crime as the fourth largest criminal activity in the world after drug trafficking, human trafficking and counterfeiting (INTERPOL-UN Environment, 2016, 2). As Europol (2024) has addressed, organised crime groups are involved in different forms of environmental crime, activities finance terrorism and is as profitable as drug-trafficking. Further, environmental crime has linkages with corruption. As such, environmental crime is evident part of tackling HRCN. In addition, disrupting criminal networks involved in all forms of environmental crime is one of the EMPACT priorities (Europol, 2024) The presentation summarises the state-of-art academic research in the field of environmental crime and criminal enforcement highlighting linkages between environmental crime and high-risk criminal networks (e.g. Germani and Castaldo, 2024, Williams, 2024, Sollund, 2024, Faure and Lu, 2024, van Uhm, 2024). Further, it discusses the implications of the academic research to practitioners and develops a regulatory crime prevention framework in the context of environmental crime (Sahramäki, 2024).
environmental crime, regulatory crime prevention, green criminology, criminal enforcement, regulatory enforcement