Crimes that Affect the Environment and Climate Change

The document examines the nexus between environmental crime and climate change, arguing that illegal activities such as deforestation, marine pollution, and waste trafficking impair the ability of natural ecosystems to sequester carbon and withstand climate impacts. It highlights a gap where climate change is largely absent from criminal justice systems, and environmental crime is missing from the climate agenda. The paper proposes using the concept of 'public harm' and 'aggravating circumstances' to integrate climate impacts into prosecutorial and judicial decision-making. It also warns that climate change acts as a 'threat multiplier' that may drive new forms of criminality and increase pressure on justice infrastructure.

• Environmental crimes, including deforestation, marine pollution, wildlife trafficking, poaching, fishery crimes, and waste trafficking, impair the resilience of natural ecosystems and facilitate the release of carbon dioxide and other harmful gases into the atmosphere.
• Marine ecosystems are critical for climate regulation, absorbing a third of anthropogenic CO2 and 90% of global warming heat, but are threatened by crimes such as land-based pollution, bilge water dumping via 'magic pipes', and bottom trawling, which releases stored seabed carbon into the atmosphere.
• Forest-related crimes, particularly illegal logging and deforestation for agricultural expansion, significantly reduce carbon sequestration; in some tropical areas, illegal logging accounts for 50-90% of all forestry activities.
• Waste trafficking undermines the circular economy and increases greenhouse gas emissions through illegal landfills and open burning, which releases black carbon with a warming potential thousands of times greater than CO2.
• While climate-related litigation has doubled between 2015 and 2021, the vast majority of cases rely on constitutional, administrative, or human rights law, with almost no cases utilizing criminal law.
• Criminal law offers a comparative advantage over civil litigation for deterring repeat corporate offenders because prison sentences cannot be passed on to consumers as a business cost.
• The paper proposes integrating climate change into the legal concept of 'public harm' and using it as an aggravating factor in sentencing, noting that climate impacts are often irreversible and affect future generations.
• Establishing legal causality for climate crimes requires 'scientific prediction-based causality' and metrics like Global Warming Potential (GWP) to quantify the damage of direct and indirect emissions.
• Climate change is identified as a 'driver of crime' and a 'threat multiplier' that may increase migrant smuggling, alter shipping-related crimes as ice sheets melt, and create new illicit markets for carbon credits and battery waste.

APA

WWF International (n.d.). Crimes that Affect the Environment and Climate Change. https://www.worldwildlife.org/documents/498/8mie6esklg_Crimes_that_Affect_the_Environment_and_Climate_Change.pdf

Chicago

WWF International. Crimes that Affect the Environment and Climate Change. n.d. https://www.worldwildlife.org/documents/498/8mie6esklg_Crimes_that_Affect_the_Environment_and_Climate_Change.pdf.

Wikipedia

{{cite report |author=WWF International |title=Crimes that Affect the Environment and Climate Change |url=https://www.worldwildlife.org/documents/498/8mie6esklg_Crimes_that_Affect_the_Environment_and_Climate_Change.pdf |access-date=23 October 2026 |via=Climate Insights Directory}}

BibTeX

@techreport{wwfinternationalndcrimes, author = {{WWF International}}, title = {{Crimes that Affect the Environment and Climate Change}}, institution = {WWF International}, url = {https://www.worldwildlife.org/documents/498/8mie6esklg_Crimes_that_Affect_the_Environment_and_Climate_Change.pdf}, urldate = {2026-10-23}, note = {Indexed by Climate Insights Directory} }