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Environmental crime and the
harm prevention criminalist
Rob White*
School of Social Sciences, University of Tasmania, Hobart, TS, Australia
The role of the ‘pracademic’comes in the fore in the interface between
academia and environmental protection. This article explores the translation
of evidence-based research and theoretical innovation in environmental crime
prevention into ground level practice. Crime prevention as applied to illegal
fishing forms the initial focus of the discussions. This is followed by discussion
of pracademics and the importance of combining academic work and
practitioner experience as part of applied criminology. The paper then
discusses the potential role of a ‘harm prevention criminalist’in crime
prevention interventions. As something potentially at the frontier of future
work, this position involves a combination of skills including site and crime
assessment, interpersonal communication, collaborative engagement, and
horizon scanning.
KEYWORDS
collaboration, criminalist, crime prevention, environmental harm, horizon scanning,
Illegal fishing, pracademic
Introduction
Jobs for the future need to be created in the present. Environmental degradation,
threats to biodiversity, and climate change are the most important systemic issues facing
humanity. How we respond to these challenges is not only a matter of strategic planning
and marshalling of resources, but workforce development. Addressing environmental
crime requires agencies equipped with appropriate professional human resource
capabilities, both in responding to crime and preventing it.
This article explores links between academic research in environmental crime
prevention and ground level practice. Crime prevention as applied to illegal fishing
forms the initial focus of the discussions. As part of this, the article discusses the
knowledge and reception of academic literature on crime prevention in a government
authority tasked with stopping illegal fishing, a task made particularly complex given that
it occurs in a community that is highly culturally and linguistically diverse. Attention
Frontiers in Conservation Science frontiersin.org01
OPEN ACCESS
EDITED BY
Gohar A. Petrossian,
John Jay College of Criminal Justice,
United States
REVIEWED BY
Annette Hübschle,
University of Cape Town, South Africa
Jennifer Bond,
Charles Sturt University, Australia
*CORRESPONDENCE
Rob White
r.d.white@utas.edu.au
SPECIALTY SECTION
This article was submitted to
Human-Wildlife Interactions,
a section of the journal
Frontiers in Conservation Science
RECEIVED 20 September 2022
ACCEPTED 17 November 2022
PUBLISHED 01 December 2022
CITATION
White R (2022) Environmental crime
and the harm prevention criminalist.
Front. Conserv. Sci. 3:1049160.
doi: 10.3389/fcosc.2022.1049160
COPYRIGHT
© 2022 White. This is an open-access
article distributed under the terms of
the Creative Commons Attribution
License (CC BY). The use, distribution
or reproduction in other forums is
permitted, provided the original
author(s) and the copyright owner(s)
are credited and that the original
publication in this journal is cited, in
accordance with accepted academic
practice. No use, distribution or
reproduction is permitted which does
not comply with these terms.
TYPE Original Research
PUBLISHED 01 December 2022
DOI 10.3389/fcosc.2022.1049160
then turns to the role of a ‘harm prevention criminalist’in crime
prevention interventions. Being at the frontier of future work,
this potential position involves a combination of skills including
site and crime assessment, interpersonal communication,
collaborative engagement, and horizon scanning.
The article speaks to the necessity for both theoretical and
applied criminology and acknowledges the role of pracademics in
trying to ‘make a difference’with respect to real world policies,
programs, projects, and politics. The main orientation
of the discussion is toward the future –both in terms
of general environmental developments and a potential
role for criminologists as practitioners in responding to
environmental calamity.
The practice of prevention:
Illegal fishing
Environmental crime prevention as a specific type of crime
prevention encompasses a range of considerations. Different
kinds of harm require different kinds of responses. There is
now an extensive body of work that deals with preventing
environmental crime in different geographical locations, in
relation to different types of commodities and crimes, and
utilising many different techniques and approaches (see for
examples, Pires and Moreto, 2011;Lemieux, 2014;Sollund
et al., 2016;van Uhm, 2016;Cao, 2017;Moreto, 2018;Sollund,
2019;Wong, 2019;Wyatt, 2022). As these studies indicate,
general pronouncements about the nature of harm need to be
accompanied by analyses of specific sites and crimes. This
applies to illegal fishingasitdoestoothertypesof
environmental crimes and harms.
There are, for instance, major variations in illegal fishing as
this pertains to criminal activity and this in turn is shaped by
context and purpose, such as fishing for subsistence versus
money-making (White, 2008). Studies of specifictypesof
illegal fishing (e.g., abalone, crab, lobster and toothfish) show
marked differences in motives, techniques, local cultures, and
scale of operation (McMullan and Perrier, 2002;Tailby and
Gant, 2002;Smith and Anderson, 2004;Anderson and
McCusker, 2005;de Coning and Witbooi, 2015;Petrossian
et al., 2015;Petrossian et al., 2016). Within specificfishing
sectors, there may also be great variation. For example, abalone
theft includes organised poachers, licensed divers, shore-based
divers, extended family groups, and individuals, all of whom
differ in methods, motivation and use of the abalone catch
(Tailby and Gant, 2002). Moreover, different actors may be
involved at different points –harvesting, processing,
transporting, retailing, consuming –requiring different skills,
suchasdiving,canning,driving,selling,andcooking.
Environmental crime prevention, therefore, needs to be
tailored to fit circumstance.
Models and techniques of prevention
Accordingly, a range of crime prevention approaches have
been developed in relation to illegal fishing –that incorporate
social developmental and community measures as well as those
that are situational and techniques oriented (Sutton et al., 2021).
Recent methods and techniques of environmental crime
prevention, specifically as applied to illegal fishing, include:
•application of Situational Crime Prevention that features
increasing the effort of crime through target hardening,
increasing the risks through enhanced satellite
surveillance, reducing rewards by disrupting markets,
reducing provocations by neutralising peer pressure that
sustains a culture of offending, and removing excuses by
measures such as posting instructions about compliance
and enforcement regimes (Kurland et al., 2017).
•employment of the CRAVED Theft Model,which
refers to Concealable [size, overall catch load];
Removable [easy to catch]; Abundant/Accessible/
Available [hot spots]; Valuable [larger, scarce];
Enjoyable [found in recipes]; and Disposable [highly
commercial] (Petrossian and Clarke, 2014). Using this
model, investigators can provide analyses applied to
multiple illegally-caught species, make comparison
across species and locations; focus on methods,
perpetrators, consumers; and be informed by the
notion of ‘suitable targets of crime’.
•aCrime Script Analysis considers the variety of motives,
different sets of skills and knowledge, and different
modus operandi involved in criminality (Sahramaki
and Kankaanranta, 2017;Petrossian and Pezzella,
2018;Dehghannirir and Borrion, 2021). Crime is a
process, and the actual criminal event is only one of
the ‘events’in this process. Accordingly, the task is to lay
out a ‘script’and carefully scrutinise the sequential steps.
This leads to policy and programmatic responses built
upon the knowledge provided by script analyses. A
crime prevention response is based upon ‘reading’the
script based upon the responses and information
provided in investigation.
•aMarket Reduction Approach, as applied to the illicit
endangered species trade, seeks to identify the routine
patterns of those involved, such as poachers, handlers,
and consumers (Schneider, 2012) and is also relevant to
investigation of illegal fishing. Issues of seasonality, how
harvested, demand, and processing are all included in
such analyses. As applied to fishing, key agencies include
fisheries, customs, marine park authorities, port
authorities and the navy; key stakeholders include
commercial and recreational fishers, tourism operators,
local residents and biologists.
White 10.3389/fcosc.2022.1049160
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•afisheries Value-Chain Model refers to an abstract
rendition of typical progressions based on experience
and prior examinations of an industry (UNODC,
2019a). For instance, the fisheries ‘process value chain’
occurs on shore and at sea, and involves standard stages
including preparation, fishing, landing, processing, sales,
transport, and the consumer. Each of these stages
simultaneously reflects various social control processes
–for example, during ‘preparations’matters might
include licenses, quotas, crew, captain and vessel
registration, while ‘sales’involves things such as
invoice, accounting, product yields, bank transactions,
correspondence, and contracts. This is not a crime script
as such, but it does provide crime prevention
practitioners with a sense of ‘where to look’and ‘who
to watch’as part of the fisheries value chain model.
•Trade-related measures involve schemes that require
documentation to accompany the product to
authenticate its legitimacy (Lack, 2007). In regards illegal
fishing, vessel lists can be drawn up and used to identify
authorised vessels (‘white lists’) and vessels considered to
be fishing in breach of the law (‘black lists’). The lists are
then used to restrict the access of black listed vessels to
ports and port services. Such lists may also involve trade
bans on specific States that are considered to have failed to
co-operate in the implementation of regional conservation
and management measures.
•Community Crime Prevention measures include working
at the local level to address issues (Moreto, 2018). These
issues include the ambiguities surrounding fishing, given
that it is legal and it is only certain regulations that make
it illegal, and where local cultures view it as a ‘folk crime’
and not really that serious (McMullan and Perrier,
2002). Prevention involves encouraging citizen
engagement as guardians of nature and having local
tourism and other commercial interests as natural
resource managers (through initiatives such as ‘Fish
Watch’and confidential phone-in hot lines) and use of
relevant technology (GPS-linked photos; fish
identification). Coastal watch schemes and monitoring
programs, as well as Indi
genous coastal patrols, are also community-based
measures.
•Focusing on high-risk locations is common to crime
prevention approaches generally and this has also been
applied to identification of the places where illegal fishing
occurs (Weekers and Zahnow, 2018). For example,
detailed analyses show a distinctive spatial distribution
of poaching events within the no-take Marine National
Parks of the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park. Based on
these findings, that demonstrate most crimes of a
particular type occur in a small number of ‘risky’places,
tailored crime prevention measures can be applied, such
as random patrolling, deployment of surveillance
cameras, and GPS tracking of boats from nearby launch
sites, in these high-risk areas.
As with other types of environmental crime, illegal fishing
may stem from the exclusion of small-scale fishers from
traditional fishing spots or species, and reflect historical
inequalities and colonial experiences (Hubschle et al., 2021). A
holistic approach to crime prevention acknowledges that diverse
interests need to be accommodated as part of the crime
prevention problem-solving process (Sutton et al., 2021) and
that environmental restorative justice should likewise be
considered part of the crime prevention toolkit (Pali et al.,
2022). As applied here, such an approach attempts to foster
community-level compliance and engagement in guardianship,
the tackling of economic and cultural factors that legitimate
illegal fishing, uses the full suite of techniques and technologies
to monitor and address issues, and situates fish (and the
protection of fish) within the context of both ecological and
social environments.
Smaller scale interventions
and prevention
While sophisticated methods and models of environmental
crime intervention have been developed by criminologists,
policymakers and practitioners operating at high levels of
office, at the ground level the situation is somewhat different.
Here work tends to be much more constrained by circumstance
and limited resources.
For example, the main orientation of fisheries officers in the
State of Victoria in Australia is on ‘catching the bad guys’rather
than prevention as such. It is notable, therefore, that Fisheries
Victoria recently organised one of its first ever conferences and
related activities on crime prevention (2020-2021). The chief
organiser wanted to impress upon her colleagues the importance
of crime prevention (rather than focussing solely on reactive
investigation and prosecution). She, too, had to learn much
‘from scratch’as crime prevention had not been part of either
her training or her day-to-day job mandate.
Several criminologists, including myself, were invited to
present overarching explanatory papers at the conference.
Much of the work of Fisheries Victoria relates to freshwater
fishing and breaches of fisheries law. Two things immediate
stood out for me as a conference participant. First, it was
basically just the one person driving the ‘crime prevention’
White 10.3389/fcosc.2022.1049160
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agenda (most of the regulatory activity is reactive not proactive),
and she was trying to organise training and materials without
any previous exposure to criminology or crime prevention
literature. Second, a vital issue in the State of Victoria is
‘community crime prevention’insofar as the culturally and
linguistically diverse population means that there are
challenges in regards communication, expectations,
relationships to ‘authority’, and notions/knowledge of
acceptable behaviour. Practitioners were thus simultaneously
endeavoring to learn the essential concepts and models of
crime prevention, how best to achieve behaviour change and
prevent crime, and how to strengthen community engagement
to make prevention programs stronger.
The challenge for practitioners was to learn more about
prevention techniques that resonated with their own jobs and
experiences, as well as social crime prevention approaches to
address the diversity of the regulated communities. The
challenge for academics was to move from abstract models to
try to pinpoint specific tactics and techniques that would be seen
as useable by practitioners, relevant to policymakers, and
affordable from the viewpoint of those controlling the agency
purse strings. On either side, the problem of language is
formidable –since specific terms frequently mean quite
different things to different people (see Pink, 2021 on diverse
uses of terminology in regulation and law enforcement), and
there are varying degrees of understanding across the technical,
experiential, applied and intellectual domains. Practitioners in
Fisheries Victoria and agencies such as the Environmental
Protection Agency, for example, come from a variety of
backgrounds –including marine science, ichthyology,
economics, chemistry, and law enforcement –and this is
partly reflected in the variable ways in which they apply their
specific knowledge and skills in undertaking regulatory work.
Not everyone is on the same page when it comes to mission
and role.
As a result of this engagement with Fisheries Victoria, my
attention turned toward initiatives that could help to translate
academic knowledge into grounded practice. Part of this
involved interrogating the nature and role of ‘pracademics’in
environmental crime prevention. This was grounded in
experiences such as the previously mentioned conference and
has led to further consideration of the potential role of
criminologists in working with people at the coalface. The
emergence of new types of harms, such as those pertaining to
global warming, also propelled interest in how changing
‘harmscapes’(Mutongwizo et al., 2021) are rapidly shifting the
terrain of both conceptions of harm and practitioner responses.
For example, these profound changes have huge implications for
aquatic and marine life (e.g., migration of fish species in the
oceans, the impact of drought and algae blooms on fish
populations in freshwater systems). For environmental crime
generally, it points to larger issues of perspective and approach
that need further unpacking.
Pracademics and applied
criminology
The term ‘pracademic’is based on the words, ‘practitioner’
and ‘academic’. It alludes to persons who strive to combine
elements of applied, practical knowledge with the insights of
abstract research and/or scholarly knowledge.
Practitioners tend to be focussed on the tasks at hand,
drawing upon experience, expertise, and technical skills
to address matters such as, for example, crime scene
examination, criminal investigation, legal advocacy and DNA
analysis. There is a defined project, defined goal and defined
outcome, whether this relates to scientific analysis, police work,
regulatory compliance, or court adjudication. Academics carry
out studies and evaluations of policy and practice, and impacts
and risks, and less frequently engage directly in practical
interventions. Some concentrate on consolidating knowledge
in the form of developing theories and concepts, categorising
previous research into conceptual models, and summarising
existing findings and/or writing histories of knowledge
(White, 2023).
The role of the pracademic comes to the fore in the interface
between academia and environmental protection. It finds its best
purchase when evidence-based research and theoretical
innovation in environmental crime prevention is translated
into ground level regulatory and law enforcement practice.
This sort of ‘applied criminology’involves academic and
practitioner attempts to concretely address environmental
crimes and harms. That is, the emphasis is on action and
intervention. Rather than simply or solely studying an
environmental issue or problem (e.g., the causes of climate
change, the impact of city air pollution on children), the point
of applied criminology is to prevent, stop and/or deter
perpetrators as well as support environmental victims
(however defined). It is about (in)justice in the here and now,
occurring in specific places, and involving specific actors,
situations, commodities, and institutions. Academic interest
lies in how the stakeholders and institutions of criminal justice
perform their roles and how they might improve their strategic,
operational, and tactical capacities, based on comparative
research, practice evaluations, improvements in technology
and conceptual innovation.
Addressing environmental crime requires official state
agencies that are equipped with appropriate professional
human resource capabilities, in at least two areas. First, in the
global setting there is presently a lack of consistency in approach
to training environmental officers. This applies to services that
include ‘green police’through to environmental regulators
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whose task is to monitor compliance and enforce laws in areas
such as national parks, wildlife protection and pollution control.
International organisations such as the International Network
for Environmental Compliance (INECE), INTERPOL and the
United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime, and their
counterpart domestic organisations such as the Australasian
Environmental law and Regulators Network (AELERT)
provide increasing support for improved training and
capacity-building measures. In regards environmental crime,
for example, the UNODC has recently produced guides on
drafting legislation to combat wildlife crime and addressing
corruption in the fisheries sector (UNODC, 2019a;UNODC,
2019b). As part of its ‘Global Programme for Combatting
Wildlife and Forest Crime’, the UNODC is working to
enhance capacity-building and wildlife law enforcement
networks. Its work also includes the delivery of specific
technical assistance activities, such as coordinating the
implementation of the Wildlife and Forest Crime Analytic
Toolkit (UNODC, 2012).
As part of these developments, there is a need to develop
further a professionalised workforce with an appropriate and
recognised career structure. Academics can play an important
part in professional training and education by conveying
knowledge and skills in a structured work-relevant manner.
For instance, the ‘Education for Justice’[E4J] initiative seeks to
prevent crime and promote a culture of lawfulness through
education activities designed for primary, secondary, and
tertiary levels. The intention is that these activities will help
educators teach the next generation to better understand and
address problems, including actively engaging in their
communities and future professions to do so. The UNODC
has coordinated the preparation of E4J tertiary level materials,
consisting of peer-reviewed university modules. In the specific
area of environmental crime, the tertiary modules include
modules on wildlife, fisheries, and forestry crime. Module 5:
Sustainable livelihoods and community engagement (/34j/en/
wildlife-crime/module5/index.html) provides an exemplary
model of community crime prevention as applied to wildlife
crime including illegal fishing. These resources are ‘open access’
and thus not subject to copyright restrictions.
Second, there is the need for a new type of professional
whose specific function is to provide improved assessments of
environmental harm and collaborative methods of responding to
them. Such a position would be at the fulcrum of diverse
disciplines (for example, toxicology, marine science, biology,
law) and provide the organisational lever for the establishment
of multi-agency task forces. What is needed is a working model
of collaborative practice that from the very beginning is
organisedaroundspecific purpose and intended outcomes,
that would include investigation across the retrospective (past
harms) and prospective (future harms) continuum, inclusive of
different levels of scale (local, national, regional, transnational,
global), with a view to enhancing strategies for crime prevention,
environmental regulation, law enforcement, emergency services
planning, and crisis response.
The use of multidisciplinary teams ensures deployment of
skills that combine scientific and technical expertise, crime scene
expertise, and expertise in detection of illegality and criminality.
Likewise, the institutional culture surrounding regulation,
compliance and enforcement activities has a great bearing on
how work to monitor, investigate, prevent and prosecute
environmental crime is carried out in practice. The push for
professionalisation of environmental intervention is a move
which would help institutionalise a consistent approach to the
prevention and policing of environmental crime.
Clearly defined areas of expertise, supported by ongoing
training and education, can instil a strong sense of mission and
independent critical thinking. An example of this is the
FloraGuard project in the United Kingdom. This project set
out to develop a methodological approach that combines the
efficiency of Artificial Intelligence [AI] search algorithms with a
suitable level of human analysis (Whitehead et al., 2021). To
tackle the problem of online trading in illegally sourced wildlife,
several disciplines needed to be involved to combine expertise in
the fields of conservation science, criminology, law enforcement,
and information and communications technology (ICT). This,
in turn, required the creation of a novel socio-technical
workflow, one that involved the different disciplines at
different stages or steps in the investigation of Internet-
facilitated illegal wildlife trade. For example, at Step 1 the
concern is to identify species of interest. This involved
conservation scientists and law enforcement officers. Step 2 is
concerned with developing a lexicon suitable for the website
search. This step involved the conservation scientists, law
enforcement officers, ICT scientists and criminologists. Each
step therefore involved diverse participants depending upon the
expertise required and the insights needed.
Importantly, this methodological approach required an
intensely multidisciplinary approach that approached the
transdisciplinary. While each discipline performed specialist
tasks, a cross-disciplinary exchange of information was
frequently essential for the successful execution of those tasks.
Knowledge transfer occurred not only between disciplines at the
designated stages of the workflow (for example, Step 1) but also
more organically, as key inputs and outputs were produced. As
the project developed, therefore, knowledge sharing led
to deeper understanding across the team. Not only was
the workflow planning itself novel (and, effectively,
multidisciplinary), but the process likewise led to a greater
sense of interdisciplinary participation and experience.
Projects such as FloraGuard provide working tools whereby
forensic computing can be mobilised to assist conservation
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practitioners and law enforcement agencies in detecting
poachers online with the potential of disrupting their means of
profiting from illegally sourced specimens. Diverse skills and
knowledge are required for this to happen, including the use of
algorithms to direct searches for online posts, plant
identification, knowledge of trade names of the plants being
bought and sold (rather than formal scientific descriptors) of
sought-after plant species, and behavioural analysis associated
with online activity including evidence of illegal trade.
Environmental harm prevention
Fundamentally, discussion of pracademics and applied green
criminology point in the direction of ‘praxis’–the synthesis of
theory, research, and intervention. Praxis is the unity of ‘theory’
and ‘practice’in motion at the ground level of action. We learn
by ‘doing’; we learn by ‘reflecting’. How we act in preventing and
responding to environmental crimes and harms depends on the
sophistication of our understanding of the issues. It also depends
on the skilfulness of our interventions in communities and
across diverse social contexts. For pracademics the importance
of praxis is that it bridges artificial divisions between academic
study and grounded practice.
We stand at a pivotal point in human history, one that is
witnessing systematic destruction of the basic environmental
contours of our planet. The three greatest threats to humankind
and myriad other species, ecosystems and the Earth generally are
climate change, rapidly diminishing biodiversity, and pollution
and contamination of land, air and water. Social intervention to
counter these trends, and the implementation of suitable
mitigation and adaptation strategies, is urgently needed. The
field of criminology and its associated disciplines such as law,
sociology, psychology, political science, international relations,
and economics should and must play a part in the needed
institutional shake-up and system transformation. This requires
concerted activity around environmental issues. It also demands
creative thinking and innovative ways in which to construct
professional roles.
For instance, we can start by analysing environmental harm
as a crime scene. Some preliminary work along these lines has
already begun (Lam and Tegelberg, 2021). This kind of re-
imagining also suggests a new type of investigator: the harm
prevention criminalist. This position could have wide and
diverse applications including contributions to effective
disaster relief, policing, emergency service provision, and
more. There is urgent need to develop an integrated approach
to environmental harms. Creating this new occupational
category, informed by criminological theory and practice, is a
means by which to do this. The vision is of improved
assessments of environmental harm, and collaborative
methods of response. Courts, police, and environmental
protection agencies are crucial actors here, as are the emerging
environmental enforcement networks (Pink and Lehane, 2012;
Pink and White, 2016)–along with scientific experts, non-
government organisations, and citizen scientists.
Matters pertaining to social and environmental justice in the
context of present institutional arrangements are also of
concern. For instance, the environmental justice framework
seeks to prevent environmental threats and is premised upon a
series of interlinked propositions and principles (Bullard, 2005).
These principles emphasise values such as social equity (in
which all individuals should have a right to be protected from
environmental degradation) and harm prevention (that focuses
on eliminating a threat before harm occurs). Each of these areas
requires that considerable resources be devoted to measuring
things such as human exposure to environmental chemicals, and
sociological analysis of harm and risk distributions among
diverse population groups.
An important part of the environmental justice framework is
ideological and practical support for the adoption of the
precautionary principle. From a social movement perspective,
the preferred emphasis when it comes to precaution is to err on
the side of human safety and wellbeing, rather than industrial
development. As Bullard, (2005: 28) observes:
It asks “How little harm is possible?”rather than “How
much harm is allowable?”This principle demands that
decision makers set goals for safe environments and
examine all available alternatives for achieving the goals,
and it places the burden of proof of safety on those who
propose to use inherently dangerous and risky technologies.
Moreover, the environmental justice framework requires
that: ‘[those] parties applying for operating permits for
landfills, incinerators, smelters, refineries, chemical plants, and
similar operations must prove that their operations are not
harmful to human health, will not disproportionately affect
racial and ethnic minorities and other protected groups, and
are nondiscriminatory’Bullard (2005:28–9).
Taking precaution is not only about risk assessment. It is
about marshalling requisite expertise in order to best understand
the specific problem at hand. Science can and must be a major
tool in deliberations over human interventions and human
impacts. But this is only one sort of knowledge. Expertise is
also developed from the ground up, not simply on the basis of
experiment and scientific method. Farmers on the land, and
fishers of the sea, for example, have generations of expertise built
up over time and under varying environmental conditions.
Indigenous peoples frequently have knowledge and
understandings of their environments that go back to time
immemorial. The fact that some Indigenous people have
survived for thousands of years, and thrived, in extremely
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hostile environments (the frozen lands of the north, the deserts
of the dry continents) is testimony to human practices that are
positively connected to immediate environs (Robyn, 2002).
Discussions of conservation and wildlife protection in Africa
highlight the fundamental importance of local communities as
‘fulcrum institutions’which, accordingly, means they ought to
occupy centre stage in such efforts (Hubschle and Shearing,
2018). A public participatory process of deliberation needs to
incorporate all these kinds of voices. It also needs to be able to
challenge the ‘wisdom’and ‘truth’of each, without prejudice and
without fear.
The harm prevention criminalist
Today, a major consideration is how to translate future
projections, particularly around climate change, into the realm
of applied criminology. This is precisely the intent behind the
creation of the harm prevention criminalist position, which
would formally bridge the gap between disciplines and thus
constitute a practical demonstration of how cross-disciplinary,
multi-disciplinary and transdisciplinary research and practice
can be institutionalised (in this instance around the frame of
‘environmental harm’). This is not simply about sciences and
disciplines ‘talking with each other’. It presents a working model
of collaborative practice that from the very beginning is
organisedaroundspecific purpose and intended outcomes,
incorporating community collaborations and co-design as part
of its mandate.
The accompanying figure (Figure 1) provides a schematic
portrayal of the key dimensions of the proposed harm
prevention criminalist.
The specific skills and intellectual input associated with
forensic science/studies, environmental/social impact
assessment, and crime prevention are unique insofar these are
quite specific areas of endeavour (see for example, Burdge, 2004;
Elliot, 2014;Taylor et al., 2004;Peel, 2005;Morrison-Saunders,
2018;Julian et al., 2022). The harm prevention criminalist would
need to tap into each of these areas and apply relevant concepts,
techniques, technologies, and methods to specifictypesof
environmental harm, such as for example, legacy mining, eco-
damage stemming from salmon farms, plastic in oceans, water
theft, and bush fires (exploring each of these in terms of past,
present, and future harms). These examples of environmental
harm have temporal and geographical dimensions, with diverse
consequences and impacts on industries, human and non-
human species and environments depending on extreme
weather events, the cumulative build-up of risk, efficacy of
regulatory systems, and shifts in overarching climate conditions.
Applied investigation is needed across the retrospective (past
harms) and prospective (future harms) continuum, inclusive of
different levels of scale (local, national, regional, transnational,
global), with a view to enhancing strategies for crime prevention,
environmental regulation, law enforcement, emergency services
planning, and crisis response. Tasks of the harm prevention
criminalist include skills and knowledge audits in support of
forming relevant task forces; incorporation of eco-justice
considerations in analyses of harm (humans, ecosystems and
non-human entities as subjected to harms); modelling
collaboration (vertical, horizontal, diagonal) suited to the issue
at hand; comparative analyses (over time, and with respect to
different places); and horizon scanning oriented toward
identification of trends and issues into the future (and
applications of the precautionary principle). Issues of
intelligence gathering and forward planning are essential to
the tasks and duties of the harm prevention criminalist, as are
the soft skills of interpersonal communication.
The necessity for a harm prevention criminalist is
demonstrated in discussions surrounding the environment and
security. Hall (2013: 36) observes that definitions of
‘environmental security’differ, but generally the concept tends
to link environmental degradation and associated scarcity of
resources with human conflict at individual, group, and state
levels. Scarcity is tied to the over-exploitation of natural
resources. It is also increasingly linked to the consequences of
global warming (IPCC, 2014;White, 2018;IPCC, 2022).
Environmental harm is a contributor to and outcome of
human insecurities. Illegal and over-fishing, side-stepping of
hazardous waste disposal regulations, water and land theft,
rorting of alternative energy subsidies and policies, and
transference of toxicity and contaminated products across
national borders are driven by different motivations and
involve a wide range of actors. Yet, the consequence of such
activities contributes to even more ruthless exploitation of
rapidly vanishing natural resources, as well as the further
diminishment of air, soil and water quality, thereby
exacerbating the competition by individuals, groups and
nations for what is left.
Old crimes are presenting in new contexts (e.g., water theft),
and new crimes are emerging out of changing circumstances
(e.g., carbon emissions fraud). Crime prevention strategies and
rapid response efforts are needed for both kinds of crime.
This occupational proposal is fundamentally about
prediction and prevention, and therefore must include a
typology of environmental harms that reference diverse
situations, settings, offenders, and offences. For example,
consideration has to be given to crimes such as water theft for
family farm use related to basic survival (caused by lack of rain
and changes in temperatures), through to new opportunities for
organised crime networks to be involved in activities such as
illegal trade in water. A vital component is an orientation toward
building social resilience within and among communities, and as
part of this enhancing the capabilities of specific institutions and
agencies in dealing with the foreseeable and unanticipated
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DIMENTIONS OF THE ENVIRONMENTAL HARM CRIMINALIST
Significant Past and Present Future Harms
Environmental Harms Climate Change
Focus
Air, Land, Water, Energy
Scale
Local, National, Regional, Transnational, Global
HARM PREVENTION
CRIMINALIST
Task forces [skills and knowledge audit]
Justice orientation [humans, ecosystems, species]
Collaborations [vertical, horizontal, diagonal]
Comparative [over time, with respect to different places]
Horizon scanning [trends, issues, precautionary principle]
RETROSPECTIVE PROSPECTIVE
INVESTIGATION ------------------------------ INVESTIGATION
Forensic sciences Environmental impact assessment
Forensic studies Social impact assessment
Concepts
Techniques
Skills Sets
Technologies
Personnel
Intelligence
Examples of Environmental Harms
Toxic Towns Water Theft
legacy waste --------------------- farming
floods potable water
Plastic in Oceans
fishing, tourism, recreation
Bush Fires
residential, forestry, tourism
Salmon Farms
eco-health, competing industries, regulation
Regulation – Prevention – Enforcement – Emergency Services
FIGURE 1
Dimentions of the environmental harm criminalist.
White 10.3389/fcosc.2022.1049160
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consequences of environmental harms and climate change. This
parallels similar arguments with respect to the notion of
‘resilience policing’, which envisages a role for police in
enabling communities and other actors to develop strategies
for adapting and surviving broader societal shocks and harms
(Mutongwizo et al., 2021).
Diverse skills, knowledge and collaborations are required in
each instance of environmental harm, and it is the bringing
together of these that forms the basis of the harm prevention
criminalist role. This role is not conceived as ‘project
management’; rather, the intention is that it be a mid-range
position within a strategic hierarchy of intervention as this
pertains to specific kinds of environmental harms. Thus, for
example, the key administrator or organisational lead is dictated
by the nature of the environmental issue –for example,
environmental protection agency in regards fish farms, fire
services in relation to bush fires and arson, police with respect
to water theft and illegal waste disposal issues, and so on. The
role is envisaged as a professional officer position within the
context of investigation and response to specific environmental
harms. It would involve a sophisticated suite of and familiarity
with practice-relevant concepts, techniques, skills, technologies,
personnel, and intelligence gathering and analysis.
At the heart of the harm prevention criminalist role is
brokerage. This refers to the ability to know who to link up
with whom, which knowledge and techniques to be deployed in
which circumstance, and how to maximise the effective use of
material and human resources within existing fiscal limits and
community settings. One does not need to be a criminologist to
work as a criminalist, but criminology is an essential
foundational field (parenthetically, it can be added that not all
criminologists would wish to be criminalists –a diversity of
research, teaching, policy, and practice roles exist, and ‘applied
criminology’of this sort is only one option).
Earlier in this article, various models and approaches to
tackling illegal fishing were summarily outlined. Each of these, in
turn, rests upon a much more detailed series of processes and
procedures. Familiarity with this detail is vital to knowing the
best fit when it comes to intervention tactics and strategies
(including combinations of techniques and approaches) in
specific circumstances. The criminalist can be an organising
figure who assists in building the right kinds of teams,
community connections, and the necessary multidisciplinary
responses to specific kinds of environmental crime.
Collaborative practice
Collaboration not only involves work across areas of
professional and scientific expertise (such as the Floraguard
project). It is also central to practitioner engagement in
combatting environmental crime. The activities and collaborations
of environmental crime response agencies have tended to naturally
occur around networks which are geographically-based (for
example, known transit points and destinations), discipline-based
(for example, environmental regulators) and commodity-based (for
example, waste). Collaboration across these dimensions and
involving these networks can be predominantly horizontal,
vertical, or diagonal (see Figure 2).
Criminal groups and networks have the advantage
generally of flexibility and a good working knowledge of local
conditions and actors, which facilitate the crimes in question.
In some instances, they garner buy-in by local community
members and/or rely on community participation in illegal
economies (Hubschle and Shearing, 2018). A collaborative
response needs to mirror these attributes. For example, it can
mobilise a broad range of actors, with varying types and levels
of expertise, with local through to international connections,
around single-purpose interventions. It should have the
capacity to provide ‘eyes on the ground’as well as a ‘bird’s
eye’view of commodity chains and criminal networks. At the
core of collaboration activities is information sharing. If this is
accommodated and accomplished between and among the
various agencies and actors within a particular group, then it
opens the door to application of intelligence-led policing
initiatives (based on tactical, operational, and strategic
assessment of intelligence databases) as well as market
reduction approaches (that target disposal markets, including
handlers and consumers). These require systematic and
detailed analysis of specific information. Two-way sharing of
information demands that specific protocols be put into place.
Accountability to local people is essential as well.
What is most important in joint working arrangements,
however, is the human element. At an operational level, things
seem to work best when relationships are built upon trust.This
takes time. It also frequently involves informal as well as formal
contact. Relationships of trust can take years to build –between
individuals, teams/groups, agencies, and institutions. They can
also take seconds to unravel (one person betraying a
confidence; an event that goes pear-shaped). Resilience must
be built into the equation, in part by establishing protocols, but
also by ensuring that teams as well as individuals are highly
engaged. At a practical level, this means that the skills of
interpersonal communication are critically important (Pink
and White, 2016).
Anticipating change
There is increasing criminological interest in analysing and
understanding existing and future threats to environmental
wellbeing (see for example, Agnew, 2011). A recent innovation
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in this area has been work coupling the analytical framework of
eco-global criminology with the futures orientation of horizon
scanning (White, 2011;White and Heckenberg, 2011). The result
is an approach that provides a broad methodological framework
that can inform the study of specific environmental harms. The
various orientations in the model –substantive (that deals with
risk, harm, and causes), justice (environmental, ecological species),
and futures (based around concepts of intergenerational equity,
precautionary principle, transferences over time) –are intended to
provide direction and the conceptual building blocks for more
detailed analysis of specific issues and trends, including those
relating directly to criminality. Taken as a whole, these constitute
the basis for an environmental horizon scanning exercise.
For horizon scanning, the focus of analysis is on current
developments pertaining to the environment and extrapolating
from these potential harms and transgressions that may be
problematic in the future. Underpinning this process is the use
of a mixed-methods approach that draws upon a variety of
sources and data collecting strategies. The use and need for
horizon scanning as an intellectual exercise and planning tool is
related to the idea that many threats and opportunities are
presently poorly recognised (see Sutherland and Woodroof,
2009). Accordingly, a more systematic approach to
identification and solution of issues is required rather than
reliance upon ad hoc or reactive approaches. For example,
work around the implications of climate change for policing
has been undertaken by the Australian Strategic Policy Institute
(Bergin and Allen, 2008) and individual police practitioners
(Chambers, 2011), and more recently from a criminological
perspective (Mutongwizo et al., 2021). The process of horizon
scanning involves detailed study of the specific trends and issues
associated with environmental degradation and destruction
(White and Heckenberg, 2011).
One of the key lessons of conventional crime prevention is
that it ought to be based largely on a problem-solving, rather than
policy-prescribed, model of intervention (Sutton et al., 2021). For
this reason, future work should include discrete case studies of
environmental harm, in the process developing new and
innovative ways to investigate these via development of the
harm prevention criminalist position. In this regard, it would
parallel and build upon previous work on bushfire arson (Willis,
2004) and how to prevent it (Anderson, 2010). Different places
and people are vulnerable to different sorts of environmental
harms and crimes. A problem-solving approach to crime
prevention demands specificity. While grounded in the realities
of existing environmental harms today, intervention also needs to
have a clear future orientation and preventative focus.
Where to from here?
The implementation tasks associated with establishment of
HPC roles are interrelated and include endeavours such as:
•Constructing an inventory of the ideal attributes of a
harm prevention criminalist. In other words, what kinds
Dimensions of Collaborative Practice
Horizontal
xIssues relevant to a number of agencies
xEmphasis on ‘something is being done’
oFor example, Environmental Protection Agencies, Police, Customs, National
Security
Vertical
xAmong employees within an institutional hierarchy
xEmphasis on ‘how something is done’
oFor example, protocols for forensic environmental investigation processes
Diagonal
xCollaboration across the horizontal and vertical axis
xEmphasis on ‘the way something is done’
oFor example, agency interactions by species, by region, by type of agency
FIGURE 2
Dimensions of Collaborative Practice. Source: Pink and White, 2016.
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of skills and knowledge are required for the position of
harm prevention criminalist? This would involve the
construction of an inventory of techniques and
technologies, concepts and practices, associated with
relevant fields and disciplines (e.g., conservation
sciences, forensic studies, criminology, environmental
impact assessment, restorative justice).
•Analysing regulatory, investigatory, enforcement and
sanctioning practices in relation to environmental
harms. We need to know how different agencies are
responding to criminality and offending behaviour
associated with environmental harms. This involves
systematic identification of agencies involved in
environmental regulation and policing (e.g., water
theft), the changing legislative parameters within
which they work (e.g., laws introducing a general
‘environmental duty of care’), and the experiences and
exposure of special emergency services to crime and
harms arising from or related to environmental disasters
(e.g., pollution).
•Assessing crime prevention strategies and the role of the
harm prevention criminalist in responding to
environmental harms. For this we need to ask what
can be done proactively, utilising a harm prevention
criminalist, to prevent the negative consequences of
environmental harms? Work would be directed at
developing strategic crime prevention plans that
incorporate forward planning and training and
resource needs, based on assessments of existing and
projected environmental harms.
•The position of harm prevention criminalist is meant to
bring together diverse skills sets, knowledge, and
agencies in assessing and addressing specific kinds of
environmental harm. This process would be ongoing
and be informed by the accumulation of specific case
studies and the development of holistic expertise.
Conclusion
Preventing environmental crime is a complicated social
process. It involves bringing together different agencies (e.g.,
regulatory, enforcement, emergency services) and practitioners
(e.g., scientists, technicians, lawyers, police, NGOs) who
collaborate in various ways to address specific types of crime
such as illegal fishing and illegal waste disposal. It also needs to
be contextually specific in regards to geography and community.
To be effective, crime prevention must be forward looking,
planning oriented, and operationally ‘fit for purpose’.
Criminologists concerned with analysing and understanding
threats to the environment face one central question: How can
we best interpret, respond to, and prevent environmental harms
and crimes? To answer this, we need to seek innovative ways to
conceive these issues as well as measures that will address them,
according to our best appraisal of emerging needs.
Environmental degradation, pollution and climate change are
the most important issues humanity confronts. One response is
to establish a harm prevention criminalist position –a role that
can connect key stakeholders and knowledge holders so that
expertise and experience is directed in the most effective and
efficient manner.
Data availability statement
The original contributions presented in the study are
included in the article/supplementary material. Further
inquiries can be directed to the corresponding author.
Author contributions
The author confirms being the sole contributor of this work
and has approved it for publication.
Conflict of interest
The author declares that the research was conducted in the
absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could
be construed as a potential conflict of interest.
Publisher’s note
All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the
authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated
organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the
reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or
claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed
or endorsed by the publisher.
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