Green criminology is a branch of criminology that studies crimes and harms against the environment, non-human animals, and ecosystems. Unlike traditional criminology, which focuses on offenses like theft or assault, green criminology examines illegal logging, wildlife trafficking, pollution, and corporate environmental destruction. It also goes further than most legal frameworks by arguing that many environmentally destructive activities should be treated as harmful even when they’re technically legal.
The field is significant in scale. INTERPOL and the UN Environment Programme have estimated the value of global environmental crime at between $91 billion and $258 billion annually, making it one of the most profitable categories of crime in the world.
Where the Field Came From
The term “green criminology” was coined by criminologist Michael Lynch in 1990, but the study of environmental crime predates that label by decades. Scholars had already been examining pollution, corporate environmental violations, and the unequal distribution of environmental hazards long before the field had a formal name. What Lynch’s term did was give these scattered efforts a shared identity and intellectual home within criminology, helping researchers recognize they were working on related problems.
Since the 1990s, the field has expanded well beyond its early focus on pollution and toxic waste. Today it encompasses climate change, wildlife trafficking, food safety, deforestation, animal abuse in industrial agriculture, and the environmental consequences of war.
Harm, Not Just Law
One of the defining features of green criminology is its insistence that “crime” is too narrow a concept for environmental destruction. Many of the most damaging activities on the planet are perfectly legal: clearcutting old-growth forests with government permits, dumping carbon into the atmosphere within regulatory limits, or trading in wildlife under authorized quotas. Traditional criminology would ignore these because no law was broken.
Green criminologists argue the focus should be on harm. If an activity devastates an ecosystem, drives a species toward extinction, or poisons a community’s water supply, it deserves criminological attention regardless of its legal status. This “harm-based” approach is what separates green criminology from environmental law enforcement, which can only act within existing legal definitions of crime.
Three Ways to Think About Nature
Within the field, scholars approach environmental harm through three distinct philosophical lenses, and which one you adopt changes what counts as a problem and who counts as a victim.
Anthropocentrism puts humans at the center. Environmental damage matters because it hurts people: polluted drinking water causes cancer, deforestation displaces communities, climate change threatens food supplies. Most existing environmental law takes this approach, protecting nature primarily as a resource for human use. The limitation is that harm to animals or ecosystems that doesn’t directly affect people tends to be ignored.
Biocentrism flips the hierarchy entirely. It treats every species as equal in worth: a person, a tiger, a trout, and an oak tree all have the same intrinsic right to exist. Under this view, a pandemic that reduces the human population could be seen as a net positive for the planet because it lessens human impact on other species. Biocentrism draws attention to harms that anthropocentrism misses, like factory farming or habitat destruction in uninhabited areas, but it has a blind spot for social justice. The fact that environmental damage falls disproportionately on poor or minority communities is not a primary concern.
Ecocentrism tries to bridge the two. It recognizes that humans are part of nature, neither above nor below other species, and that we inevitably use natural resources to survive. But it adds a responsibility: those resources should be used in ways that minimize harm to the environment and other species. Crucially, ecocentrism also cares about social justice. It examines how environmental destruction intersects with racism and poverty, and it challenges cultural patterns like disposable consumer products and constant economic growth. Most contemporary green criminologists lean toward this perspective because it addresses both ecological and human harm simultaneously.
Who Counts as a Victim
Traditional criminology has a simple answer to “who is the victim?”: a person, or sometimes a business or institution. Green criminology expands this dramatically. The field recognizes three categories of victimhood. Environmental justice focuses on human victims, particularly communities harmed by pollution, toxic waste, or resource extraction. Ecological justice treats specific environments as victims: a river poisoned by industrial runoff, a forest destroyed by illegal logging, a coral reef bleached by warming oceans. Species justice extends victim status to animals and plants harmed or killed by human activity.
This broader definition of victimhood is not just philosophical. It has practical consequences for how laws are written, how penalties are set, and how enforcement agencies prioritize their resources. When a fish kill in a tributary of the Roanoke River results from illegal dumping, green criminology asks not just whether the company broke the law, but whether the fish, the river ecosystem, and the downstream communities all deserve recognition as victims with distinct claims to justice.
Corporate Environmental Crime
Some of the field’s sharpest analysis focuses on corporations. Green criminologists study how the pressure to produce and profit drives companies to cut environmental corners, and how the legal system responds (or fails to respond) when they’re caught.
The penalties often look trivial relative to the damage. In one illustrative case, a U.S. company called Crystal Extrusion Systems was fined $53,329 for violating the Clean Water Act after employees discharged used oil and wastewater into a Missouri creek over several days. That fine amounted to 0.56% of the company’s gross yearly revenue. Green criminologists point to cases like this to argue that environmental enforcement amounts to a cost of doing business rather than a genuine deterrent.
Research on federal environmental prosecutions has found that while the most serious violations do receive higher fines, the most harmful environmental crimes disproportionately occur in poor and minority communities. This pattern connects corporate environmental crime directly to questions of racial and economic justice, reinforcing the field’s argument that environmental harm and social inequality are deeply intertwined.
Wildlife Trade and International Law
Wildlife trafficking is one of the most studied topics in green criminology. The primary international framework for regulating it is CITES (the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species), which includes most countries in the world and controls the cross-border movement of thousands of species.
Green criminologists have been critical of CITES, arguing that it focuses too narrowly on regulating trade rather than questioning whether the trade should exist at all. Even legal wildlife trade, conducted within CITES quotas and permits, can cause severe harm to animal populations, ecosystems, and the individual animals involved. Recent scholarship has proposed a radical shift in the convention’s function: moving from trade regulation to conditional aid, where wealthy nations support biodiversity conservation in developing countries rather than simply managing how many animals can be bought and sold.
Climate Change as a Criminological Problem
The newest frontier in green criminology treats climate change itself as a subject for criminological study. This work moves in two directions. First, it examines how illegal and harmful activities contribute to environmental decline, from wildlife poaching that destabilizes ecosystems to corporate decisions that accelerate carbon emissions. Some scholars have framed global warming as a form of corporate crime, arguing that fossil fuel companies knowingly contributed to climate change while funding campaigns to obscure the science.
Second, it looks at how ecological distress produces new forms of crime and inequality. Climate-driven natural disasters displace communities, creating conditions for survival-related theft and social breakdown. These disasters also deepen existing inequalities: research in the field has documented how climate change impacts fall harder on women, Indigenous peoples, and communities in the Global South. Courts around the world are increasingly being asked to weigh in, with climate litigation growing in both the United States and internationally as affected communities seek legal accountability for environmental harm.