Conservation Criminology, Environmental Crime, and Risk

AbstractConservation criminology emerges from the environmental movement and the development of green criminology as a subfield within criminology. Conservation criminology builds on this foundation and calls for interdisciplinary theory and methods for addressing legally defined harms as well as risks to human health, wildlife, ecosystems, and the environment. Conservation criminology complements and contributes to the green criminology perspective by integrating theory and methods drawn from criminology, natural resource management, and risk and decision sciences. This essay reviews the development of green and conservation criminology and compares and contrasts the perspectives. The essay then applies these perspectives to the issue of climate change. Conservation criminology, grounded in criminology, natural resource management, and risk perception and decision making, offers systematic tools for assessing and characterizing harm; analyzing risks; weighing costs and benefits; integrating and balancing technical, scientific, and lay perspectives; and informing governance at local and global levels.