This introduction aims to showcase the articles of the special issue and highlights the expansive field of environmental criminology, underscoring its role in understanding and preventing crime through situational and environmental strategies. This collection of articles covers a wide array of research from the USA, Sweden, Australia, New Zealand, and Uruguay, demonstrating the global application of environmental criminology principles. Contributions from various disciplines illustrate the field’s multidisciplinary approach to tackling crime, particularly in the face of challenges posed by climate change and the need for social and economic sustainability.

This article aims to provide insights regarding crime problems affecting the Australian and New Zealand (ANZ) retail sector, focusing primarily on the size and range of criminal behaviours. The research incorporated an online survey of retailers and police statistics. The study finds that the cost of retail crime increased by 28% over the last 4 years, against 25% growth in revenue. It also reveals that shoplifting remains the most significant and costly economic problem facing retailers, followed by employee theft. Additionally, fraud, notably in online channels, will remain a concern for the foreseeable future. We examine potential explanations and interpretations for retail crime through an environmental criminological lens. Increased research and involvement of researchers hold tremendous potential for reducing retail crime and preventing its growth in the future.

After sustained reductions in robberies and thefts in 2016, the city of Montevideo, Uruguay, experienced a sudden increase in these crimes in late 2017. Using interrupted time series regressions, and controlling for seasonality using ARIMA models, we investigated three potential explanations for this increase: (1) the failure of a hot spots policing program to maintain crime decreases; (2) improved crime recording by police patrols using tablet computers; and (3) the change from an inquisitorial to an adversarial criminal justice procedure. We found that the hot spots policing program that began in April 2016 continued to be associated with crime reductions during 2017, that the increases observed after November 2017 were strongly associated with the new criminal justice procedure, and that tablets had a positive, albeit negligible, effect. The findings illustrate that criminal justice reforms, desirable as such reforms may be, can have unintended consequences on crime levels.