The paper examines the phenomenon of extractivism from a theoretical-critical perspective, highlighting its environmental impacts, the forms of violence associated with it, and the neocolonial dynamics of domination and exploitation, with a particular focus on Latin America. By drawing on Southern green criminology perspective, the contribution emphasizes the importance of decolonizing knowledge and promoting socio-criminological research that amplifies the epistemologies of the Global South. It advocates for a critical reflection on the need to foster participatory action research that is closely aligned with marginalized and subaltern communities, which bear the most severe consequences of extractivism and, more broadly, of the contemporary ecological crisis.

By committing crimes against nature, we are effectively perpetrating ‘ecocide’. While there is a general awareness of the negative impact of environmental harm, the idea of “ecocide” within the field of criminology is rarely discussed. This study aims to introduce a green viewpoint for addressing environmental crimes. To date, the concept that environmental harm might be classified as a criminal act, with underlying socio-economic issues contributing to green crime, has not received the necessary level of attention. The paper explores the necessity of green criminology as a conceptual framework, the significance of discussing ‘green crime’ as a distinct concept within the field of criminology, the theoretical (criminological) perspectives that encompass green crimes, and how environmental justice can be achieved through the implementation of ‘green methods”. The researchers adopt an interdisciplinary approach since the article attempts to integrate the concepts of environmental harm and environmental crime to achieve environmental justice. Dhaka University Law Journal, 2025, 36 (1), 149-169

Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 15 seeks to protect terrestrial ecosystems, promote sustainable land use, and halt biodiversity loss; this commentary argues that green criminology provides one of the most valuable frameworks for achieving SDG 15 in the way it shifts the focus from legalistic definitions of crime to broader ecological ‘harms’ and a harm-based perspective. Criticisms of green criminology abound and highlight the need for nuanced and contextual application, which this commentary will suggest by addressing the environmental and humanitarian consequences of rare earth mining in Myanmar and how legal penalisation could be potentially ineffective in addressing ecological degradation under military-led governance. By integrating green criminology with regionally tailored policy and intervention, this essay suggests a pathway toward more effective environmental governance and sustainable development.

The silence within the criminological community on the genocide of Palestinian people in Gaza, and the ongoing apartheid, land dispossession and other human rights abuses of Palestinians in the Occupied Territory of East Jerusalem and the West Bank, and in Israel, is pronounced. This article sets out to unpack why these events should be seen as core to the work we undertake within the discipline. The article argues that the events in Palestine (including Gaza and the Occupied Territory) cut across many matters of widespread importance to criminology including, child protection, corporate crime, disability justice, discrimination and violence against women; ecocide and environmental criminology; global criminology; human rights; Indigenous knowledges and justice; green criminology; media; policing; settler colonialism and coloniality; state crime; teaching and research in criminology; war crimes and youth justice. It is also argued that there are strong ethical values underpinning the urgency of taking a committed position, including a responsibility to oppose genocide and apartheid, to uphold the values of preserving human life in various cultural forms and the non-human environment that sustains life, and opposition to racism, discrimination and oppression in all its manifestations.

This paper proposes to bridge the gap between traditional criminal law and environmental jurisprudence by redefining the harm principle proposed by Mill through the Environmental Harm and Human Risk Matrix. The Matrix classifies environmental harm and human risk as low, medium, and high impact, creating nine intersectional approaches to assess environmental harm based on its severity and irreversibility, the risk to human and non-human wellbeing, its intergenerational impact, and the ability to mitigate the impact. Through the Matrix, the paper identifies activities that should be assessed as violations with no criminal liability, harms that should have criminal liability and harms that are subject to interpretation by the executive and the judiciary thereby helping to understand environmental harm within the socioeconomic realities of the situation. The approach not only challenges anthropocentric legal paradigms but also the interpretation of the harm principle while treating the environment as a resource. The challenge to the anthropocentric legal paradigms integrates the socioeconomic realities, environmental harm to human and non-human beings and offers guidelines to differentiate violations requiring restorative approaches from crimes necessitating punitive action. The paper further argues that if environmental harm is purely perceived from the lens of the harm principle apportioning blameworthiness based on liability, culpability and accountability, then the entire human population commits environmental harm since the environment is a resource which is used/misused by all. The paper integrates both approaches while contextualizing the use/misuse of the environment as a resource and examines liability and culpability from the profit motive, wherein environmental harm is intergenerational, pervasive, long-term, and irreversible. However, social manifestations (order, disorder and strain in the society), behavior, culture and socioeconomic vulnerabilities on the utilization of the environment as a resource are imperative to understand environmental harm before affixing accountability. The paper develops a theoretical framework examining the relevant legal and criminological theories (deterrence, rational choice, etc.) and proposes a differential approach to assess environmental harm committed for profits and those committed by the marginalized and least advantaged members of society who invariably utilize environmental resources for survival and/or out of necessity. The paper further argues that sweeping punitive actions risk creating a ‘paradox of poverty’. The Matrix contributes to the current scholarship from the legal and sociological standpoint, arguing for a just, fair and equitable utilization of resources while ensuring an inclusive and sustainable policy to combat environmental violations and thus harm. The work contributes to global green criminology discourse urging transformative legal reforms to mitigate ecological violence and advance planetary justice.

This research focuses on the potential of molecular genetics as a tool that can complement the assessment and evaluation of environmental damage from the perspective of green criminology or ecocriminology. This would have an impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the mechanisms established for assessing the damage caused to ecosystems. We are facing a planetary crisis with the risk of ecosystem collapse, so it is proposed to overcome the limitations that we can identify in traditional criminal law by adopting an ecocentric approach reinforced with innovative mechanisms provided by science. This requires, among other things, recognising the intrinsic value of nature and committing to ecological justice. Molecular genetics methods, such as environmental DNA, metagenomics and population genetics, allow us to visualise the biological and ecological transformations induced by pollutants, even when these are invisible to the naked eye. These techniques provide objective and quantifiable data on biodiversity loss, changes in community composition and even possible genotoxic effects. Therefore, these molecular tests can complement preventive and restorative measures in environmental crimes. By fostering dialogue between science, law, and ethics, this study advocates for an integrated paradigm of environmental damage analysis in which molecular genetics enhances our ability to detect, understand, and legally address ecological damage. The convergence of green criminology, molecular genetics, and ecological justice reorients institutional responses toward restoring ecosystem integrity and defending the rights of nature.

This research focuses on the potential of molecular genetics as a tool that can complement the assessment and evaluation of environmental damage from the perspective of green criminology or ecocriminology. This would have an impact on the effectiveness and efficiency of the mechanisms established for assessing the damage caused to ecosystems. We are facing a planetary crisis with the risk of ecosystem collapse, so it is proposed to overcome the limitations that we can identify in traditional criminal law by adopting an ecocentric approach reinforced with innovative mechanisms provided by science. This requires, among other things, recognising the intrinsic value of nature and committing to ecological justice. Molecular genetics methods, such as environmental DNA, metagenomics and population genetics, allow us to visualise the biological and ecological transformations induced by pollutants, even when these are invisible to the naked eye. These techniques provide objective and quantifiable data on biodiversity loss, changes in community composition and even possible genotoxic effects. Therefore, these molecular tests can complement preventive and restorative measures in environmental crimes. By fostering dialogue between science, law, and ethics, this study advocates for an integrated paradigm of environmental damage analysis in which molecular genetics enhances our ability to detect, understand, and legally address ecological damage. The convergence of green criminology, molecular genetics, and ecological justice reorients institutional responses toward restoring ecosystem integrity and defending the rights of nature.

In May of 2025, four men were sentenced in a Kenyan court for the attempted smuggling of ants. This case underscores a largely overlooked dimension of global wildlife crime: the trafficking of insects. This article aims to discuss the nature of insect trafficking in legal, criminological, and conservation discourses and to argue for its inclusion in broader debates within environmental justice discourse. Exploring legal and policy dimensions of wildlife trafficking through a green criminological lens, this paper underscores the anthropocentric bias in wildlife protection, which marginalises noncharismatic species despite their ecological importance. It concludes that a shift toward ecological and species justice is necessary, advocating for more inclusive legal definitions, improved enforcement mechanisms, and interdisciplinary research. Recognising insects as victims of environmental harm is essential for developing holistic responses to wildlife crime and advancing the goals of green criminology.

Abstract Global biodiversity has declined rapidly in recent decades, and existing laws have proven insufficient to protect the environment from harm. There is no ‘silver bullet’ to remedying species population declines and extinctions and loss of ecosystems, but criminal law could be a crucial tool. We present an interdisciplinary perspective (conservation biology, criminal law, environmental law and green criminology) to propose that criminal law can and should be engaged more in protecting the environment. However, the criminal law is a captive of its own anthropocentric history. We must reconsider criminal law's core principles, informed by scientific methods and green criminological perspectives, to more effectively protect nature. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

Civil order is generally conceptualized as constructed by social institutional powers like law, and so it is fitting that civil order has received its most sustained consideration in the general areas of critical social and legal theory. At the same time, social order has emerged as a key concept for critical police studies in order to describe and analyze police power and the violences it produces. This article addresses police power and its long and elemental relationship with food by describing the ways in which civil order is formed and affirmed in the material fabrication of social order, a task that is in turn undertaken by a police power. Noting the absence of both order and police power in fields fundamentally concerned with the fabrication of material space including environmental studies, environmental justice, and green criminology, this article uses food and nutrition—and their role in spatial projects of police and order—as key concepts to describe the ways in which civil and social orders take shape in and as the material environments fabricated by police.

Abstract The purpose of this study is to analyze the phenomenon, identification of perpetrator subjects, consequences, and juridical actions of the deforestation of conservation forest areas as an environmental crime in Indonesia from the perspective of green criminology. The research conclusions: 1) the main phenomenon of deforestation in Indonesia is due to food estate projects, conversion, and forest degradation; 2) Based on the perspective of green criminology, deforestation of conservation forest areas can be categorized as an environmental crime with the perpetrators being natuur recht person, privaat recht person or corporation, and the government as the authority; and 3) The consequences and legal actions against perpetrators of deforestation of conservation forest areas include administrative sanctions, out-of-court dispute resolution, and through the courts. Research recommendations: 1) The government must conduct more intensive supervision and stricter law enforcement against perpetrators of deforestation of conservation forest areas; 2) The government must be selective in granting licenses for the management and exploitation of forest areas; and 3) There needs to be more comprehensive regulatory and policy support for forest conversion to preserve the environment and anticipate the risk of ecological disasters.

ABSTRACT This paper investigates a gold mining project in Türkiye's Mount Ida, ancestral lands of Indigenous ethnic groups such as the Tahtacı Alevis, to expose how environmental destruction intersects with the structural marginalisation of ethnic minority communities. Using qualitative, inductive analysis across academic literature, NGO reports, press releases, social media, and oral traditions, it demonstrates that the erasure of both ecosystems and cultures is not incidental but systemic. Framed through racial capitalism and Fanon's socio-ecological analysis of racism, this paper argues that mining-induced ecocide and ethnocide are mutually reinforcing outcomes of a capitalist logic that renders both land and people disposable. It contends that the Turkish state, in alliance with corporate interests, legitimises extractivism in the name of economic growth, while actively disregarding the sacred, historical, and cultural ties that connect ethnic minorities to their environments, ultimately reshaping their “socionatures” through violence and exploitation. This paper will contribute to fields such as green criminology, environmental justice, and Indigenous studies, offering an interdisciplinary framework for understanding how ecological and cultural harms are co-produced under racial capitalism.

This article examines the role of state actors in polluting activities across borders, focusing on a case study of Norway’s role in Norsk Hydro’s polluting activities in Barcarena, Brazil from 1967 to 2024. Foreign corporations have long exploited Brazil’s natural resources, with Norwegian enterprises increasingly involved. Norsk Hydro’s operations, particularly at the Alunorte alumina refinery, have caused severe ecological damage. Using state-corporate crime theory and Southern green criminology, this study analyses leaks, toxic waste disposal in rivers and asymmetrical mining standards. To assess environmental standards, this study conducted interviews, document analyses, site visits and literature reviews. Our findings indicate that Norwegian public and private interests are intertwined, with profit motives undermining environmental aspirations and stated policies. This tendency to subordinate environmental protection abroad to financial expediency domestically is generalized through the concept of polluters by proxy. This concept attempts to represent types of activities where state actors produce environmental harm abroad and benefit economically while distancing themselves from direct responsibility by taking advantage of corporate structures.

This research aims to explore the potential of molecular genetics in general, but in particular the use of environmental DNA (eDNA), as an innovative tool to complement the assessment and valuation of environmental harm from the perspective of green criminology or ecocriminology. In the face of the planetary crisis and the possible collapse of ecosystems, it proposes to overcome the limitations detected in traditional criminal law by adopting an ecocentric approach. This implies recognising the intrinsic value of nature and the need to commit to ecological justice. To this end, the use of eDNA makes it possible to visualise the biological and ecological transformations induced by pollutants, even when they are not visible to the naked eye. This provides objective, and even quantified, data on damage such as biodiversity loss, community alterations or possible genotoxic effects. It is presented as a complement to support preventive and restorative interventions in environmental crimes. Through dialogue between science, law and ethics, an integrated paradigm of environmental harm analysis is advocated, in which molecular genetics reinforces the ability to detect, understand and respond to ecological damage. The convergence between green criminology, eDNA and ecological justice allows us to refocus institutional responses towards restoring the integrity of ecosystems and defending the rights of nature.

Abstract Aquaculture is framed as a key contributor to global food security and sustainable food production. Yet, in its industrial form, it involves several harmful practices that negatively impact food security, marine ecosystems, farmed animals, and targeted wild species. Drawing on data from interviews and document analysis, this paper examines the strategies and discourses intensive aquaculture employs regarding the production and protection of Atlantic salmon and European eels. The study uncovers how aquaculture not only exploits the perceived divide between wild and farmed fish, but also manipulates sustainability narratives to maintain business as usual. While aquaculture is often presented as a solution to wildlife decline, this decline is simultaneously used to justify and consolidate intensive farming practices. Corporate actors play a key role in this process by shaping narratives that create an impression of sustainability, leading consumers to believe they are making environmentally responsible choices. By strategically presenting aquaculture as an eco-friendly alternative, they downplay and obscure its ecological harms and divert attention from its socio-economic negative impacts. Building on green criminology and political ecology, this paper critically examines the contradictory sustainability claims of aquaculture, revealing how it perpetuates environmental damage while maintaining an illusion of “sustainability”.

In this article, we examine how political ecology can benefit from greater engagement with green criminology's focus on harms. We do so by developing a harms-based political ecology, which is a useful lens through which to analyze global environmental change. It is essential to understand how harms are produced and sustained, and what impacts they have on people and wildlife. This article examines the wildlife trade in Europe focusing on brown bears, European eels and songbirds. In particular, the article analyzes how harms are produced in the context of global capitalism, unequal power relations and interconnected global crises. Through this analysis the article develops the field of political ecology by encouraging approaches that fully address harms to non-human animals. This harms-based approach builds on current justice perspectives within green criminology that emphasize anthropocentric, biocentric, and ecocentric concepts of justice to expand concepts of victimhood and harm.

This article explores the systematic exclusion of traditional mezcal producers in Mexico under current certification regimes, official standards, and global market demands, from a critical green criminology perspective. We argue that legal frameworks such as the Mezcal Denomination of Origin (DOM) and NOM-070 legitimize a form of structural violence by stripping ancestral producers of legal recognition, legitimacy, and market access. Through case studies and qualitative interviews in the mezcal-producing region of the State of Mexico, we show how legality operates as a tool of cultural, territorial, and ecological exclusion, and how these practices constitute forms of "green crime" by undermining the rights of communities to protect and continue their agro-food systems and traditional knowledge.

Abstract Grounded in a detailed local study of everyday security, in this paper we set out a path for bringing together environmental and green criminology. Revisiting an old research site, Macclesfield in north-west England, we encountered marked shifts in the local meanings of disorder that seem to have developed since we were last there in the mid-1990s. Residents described ‘chronic harms’ that focussed on various forms of ‘litter’ (e.g. drugs detritus, abandoned buildings, potholes) and the detrimental effects of local development (e.g. traffic congestion, air pollution, damage to the natural environment). We show how these harms matter because they are entangled with people’s sense of the liveability and sustainability of the places they care about and inhabit. We conclude by spelling out the implications of seeing local disorder, not through the received criminological lens of ‘broken windows’ policing, but as instances of environmental degradation that call for revised ecological ways of thinking and acting on questions of security.

On 4-5 March 2024, an international conference on ‘Green Criminology and Green Deal: Environment and climate protection – an unshiftable task for criminal law’ was held in Miskolc, Hungary, as part of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation- funded partnership project “On the systematization of criminal responsibility of and in companies”4 between the Universities of Heidelberg and Miskolc. The aim of the institute partnership is to systematise practical experience and knowledge on the criminal liability of companies and to discuss criminal policy responses to technological and social changes, involving academics and practitioners (legal profession, public administration and judiciary), doctoral students and law stu- dents, to analyse comparative legal and to develop new solution concepts. This conference was the fourth and final event in this partnership project. Academic and practitioner speakers came from Germany and from Hungary, which can look back on an environmentally-oriented tradition of their universities, especially in Miskolc, from Austria, which has repeatedly followed a particular path in the implementation of Union law requirements in criminal law, and from Liechten- stein, an EEA state. The fourth conference aimed to provide a framework for a knowledge-based inter- and intradisciplinary discourse on green criminology and he European Union’s Green Deal.

The purpose of this article is to introduce the achievements of green criminology in the context of combating transnational environmental crime. In addition, the Polish scientific contribution to the development of this new sub-discipline of criminology was highlighted by illustrating the main directions of research on transnational environmental crime. Then the tasks of the National Revenue Administration in the context of detecting and combating transnational crime against the environment were presented. Selected representative elements of the above phenomenon were also illustrated, such as crime related to illegal mining and smuggling of amber, illegal transportation of waste, illegal trade in endangered plants and animals (CITES), and illegal export or import of cultural monuments. The conclusions point out that environmental crime poses an increasingly significant threat to both the environment and the financial interests of the State Treasury. The authors note that environmental crime is more and more often taking on the character of economic crime. Given the above, it is necessary both for efficient operation of services in this area (the role of law enforcement agencies) and continuous monitoring of the problem from a scientific perspective (the role of green criminology).