Green Criminology and Green Crime

Last Updated on September 25, 2026 by Karl Thompson

Green crime means harm done to the environment — and one of the first things you need to grasp is that a lot of it is perfectly legal. This post covers:

1. What green crime is, and why criminologists argue about the definition
2. Nigel South’s typology of primary, secondary and tertiary green crimes
3. Green criminology, and how it differs from traditional criminology
4. Ulrich Beck’s risk society and the Marxist response to it
5. The main types of environmental crime and harm
6. Why green crime is so difficult to control
7. Evaluations of green criminology, and a practice exam question

Green crime is taught towards the end of the crime and deviance module, usually alongside globalisation and crime and state crime. It comes up on Paper 3 (7192/3).

What is Green Crime?

A simple definition of green crime is crime committed against the environment.

That definition sounds straightforward and it isn’t, which is the whole reason this topic is on the specification. Laws protecting the environment are patchy and weakly enforced, so a great deal of serious environmental damage is technically legal. A company that pollutes a river within the terms of its permit has committed no crime at all. A country that fails to pass pollution laws in the first place has criminalised nothing.

This puts criminologists in an awkward position. If you only study what the law says is criminal, you end up ignoring some of the most damaging things human beings do to the planet — simply because governments have chosen not to prohibit them.

Green criminology is the response to that problem, and its central move is to study harm rather than crime. Hold on to that distinction — almost everything else in this topic follows from it.

Types of Green Crime: South’s Typology

Nigel South (1998) classifies green crimes into two types, primary and secondary. Potter (2014) later added a third.

Primary green crimes are those which involve harm inflicted directly on the environment — and, by extension, harm inflicted on people through that damage. These are the environmental victims: people who suffer health problems and worse when the land, water or air they depend on is polluted or destroyed.

There are four main categories of primary green crime:

• Crimes of air pollution
• Crimes of deforestation
• Crimes of species decline and animal rights
• Crimes of water pollution

Secondary, or symbiotic, green crimes grow out of the flouting of rules intended to regulate environmental harm, or out of exploiting the conditions that follow an environmental disaster (Carrabine et al., 2004). South gives two examples: state violence against environmental protest groups, and the involvement of organised crime in hazardous waste disposal.

Tertiary green crimes, in Potter’s extension, are offences committed by environmental victims — either as a direct response to environmental harm, or made more likely by the experience of it. Crimes committed by people forced to migrate by environmental change would fall into this category.

I would learn this typology properly. Most students can name some green crimes; far fewer can classify them, and classification is what separates a mid-band answer from a top-band one.

Traditional Criminology versus Green Criminology

This is the key debate in the topic, and examiners like to see it.

Traditional criminology argues that green crime should be defined narrowly: a green crime is any activity which breaches a law protecting the environment. The advantage of this position is precision — you can point at a statute and say whether it has been broken. The limitation is that traditional criminology can only see what governments have already chosen to criminalise, which in this field is not very much.

Green criminology argues that criminologists should study environmental harms whether or not legislation exists and whether or not any law has been broken. It takes an ecocentric (environment-centred) approach and criticises traditional criminology for being anthropocentric — human-centred, treating the natural world as significant only insofar as humans are affected.

The term was first used by Lynch (1990) in an essay called ‘The Greening of Criminology’, which argued for a criminology committed to environmentalism within a radical Marxist framework. The field has kept much of that radical outlook: it is largely concerned with green crimes committed by states and corporations, and with how capitalism tends to make victims of poor people and poor nations. Though not everyone working in green criminology today is a radical Marxist — the field has broadened considerably since.

White (2008) sets out three principles of green criminology:

• It is based on environmental rights and environmental justice
• It is ecocentric, rather than based on human domination over nature
• It should include animal rights and species justice

Green criminology is therefore a form of transgressive criminology — it crosses the boundaries of traditional criminology by focusing on harm rather than crime. Marxism does something similar when it points to the harms of corporate activity that never appear in the crime statistics.

Key term — zemiology: the study of social harms. Green criminology is zemiological.

The Late Modern View: Ulrich Beck and the Risk Society

Ulrich Beck (1992) explains environmental damage as a feature of what he calls the risk society. Modern industrial societies manufacture new risks — largely through new technologies — which were unknown in earlier periods.

These risks differ in kind from earlier hazards, not just in degree. The clearest example is nuclear power, which generates small quantities of waste that remain lethally radioactive for thousands of years. No pre-industrial society produced anything remotely like that.

Beck also argues that environmental problems are genuinely global. His phrase “smog is democratic” captures the claim that traditional social divisions — class, ethnicity, gender — matter relatively little when it comes to who suffers environmental harm. A cloud of polluted air does not check anyone’s bank balance.

Beck offers no solutions. His argument is that the problem is new in kind and that responding to it will require political innovation under conditions of deep uncertainty. Which is honest of him, if not enormously helpful to you.

The Marxist and Green Criminological Response

For Marxists, the single biggest cause of environmental crime is industrial capitalism.

Since the primary aim of most governments is economic growth, and growth is achieved by producing and consuming more, Marxists would not expect any meaningful global agreement to protect the environment while capitalism remains unconstrained. Companies are routinely given permission by governments to extract and to pollute.

Lynch and Stretesky (2014) put this in terms of the treadmill of production: intense consumerism drives the extraction of raw materials, which produces ecological disorganisation. On this view capitalism is simply not compatible with maintaining a healthy environment, and no amount of regulation at the margins changes that.

HOWEVER, the more important Marxist point is a direct challenge to Beck. Where Beck argues that environmental harm cuts across social divisions, Marxists argue those divisions are reinforced by it, with the poorest bearing the brunt.

The evidence supports the Marxist reading rather more than Beck’s. Bullard (1990) showed that environmental discrimination was a fact of life for Black communities in the United States, whose residential areas became dumping grounds for toxic materials. This is what is meant by eco-racism: polluting industry, waste disposal and contaminated land are disproportionately sited where ethnic minorities and poor people live, both within wealthy countries and internationally, where hazardous waste has long been exported from rich countries to poor ones.

O’Brien (2011) makes the same point at global level: the impoverishment of African and Asian populations follows from the over-exploitation of their natural resources, which is driven by consumerism elsewhere, and which produces desertification, economic migration and conflict.

Smog, in other words, is not especially democratic.

Types of Environmental Crime and Harm

Green criminologists have focused on four main areas.

Climate change

The central issue is inequality. Wealthy consumer societies and wealthy individuals contribute disproportionately to climate change, while the social and economic burden falls more heavily on poorer nations and individuals. Global data consistently show that richer countries have far higher CO2 emissions per capita.

[IMAGE: retain existing C02-emissions-2022.png — alt text “Map showing CO2 emissions per capita by country”]

Climate change may also generate more crime. As environmental destruction increases, people living on marginal land — more prone to flooding, drought or crop failure — become worse off relative to others. You can apply strain theory here, which is a neat synoptic link and the kind of thing examiners reward.

Kramer (2020) argues that climate change denial and regulatory failure together constitute state-corporate crime: by denying the process is happening, states and corporations fail to protect its victims.

Economy, consumption and waste

State-corporate crime. States and corporations are responsible for a great deal of environmental harm. Lynch and colleagues (2002) explored how the most toxic forms of pollution result from very large-scale corporate industrial processes. White (2002) argues that nation states sometimes deliberately under-regulate pollution because that is what a capitalist political economy requires — by not passing protective laws in the first place, by setting penalties low enough that corporations pay fines rather than executives going to jail, and by underfunding the agencies meant to do the regulating.

Organised crime. Organised crime reaches into waste disposal and construction, often producing corruption and pollution (Sergi and South, 2016). Ruggiero and South (2010) call these illegal services dirty collar crime. They flourish where rules are laxly enforced. The Naples garbage crisis of 2008 is the classic example, but many national and local governments have signed waste contracts with organised crime groups without realising it.

Food crimes. How food is grown, processed, marketed and sold attracts food fraud, violations of labelling laws, illegal pricing practices and labour exploitation. Walters (2004, 2006) examined the ecological and economic risks of genetically modified foods, including state-corporate collusion in food market control and the potential harms of corporate control of the food supply.

E-waste. Until relatively recently, electronic waste was largely shipped from rich countries and dumped, often illegally, in poorer ones. As the value of the materials inside old devices has been recognised, more is now recycled in India and China — but recycling workers are paid very low wages and the process releases toxic chemicals. There is also a question worth putting to students directly: do we really need new devices every two years? Beford et al. (2002) argue that planned obsolescence, and corporate obstruction of the right to repair, are environmentally damaging and encourage extractivism.

Non-human animal abuse

Criminology is anthropocentric by habit, and part of green criminology has been a call for greater awareness of the harm humans do to animals and ecosystems. Beirne (2009) and Sollund (2020) developed the concept of speciesism to describe the human devaluation and prejudicial treatment of non-human species.

Wildlife offences — poaching, trafficking and trading in animals and plants, on land and at sea — are generally treated as low priority compared with other crimes, which is itself evidence of an anthropocentric criminal justice system. The trade is increasingly international and often involves organised crime.

Why Green Crime is Difficult to Control

Traditional courts have tended to trivialise environmental crime, and green criminologists have argued for specialist environmental courts, an International Environmental Court, or a body of law based on Earth jurisprudence which would recognise legally enforceable rights for nature — not only for animals but for trees and rivers.

Arguments for an international law of ecocide have been gathering pace. The Stop Ecocide Foundation has drafted one: ecocide would mean unlawful or wanton acts committed in the knowledge that they carry a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term environmental damage.

There are two basic approaches to control. Compliance models seek conformity without policing and punishment, mainly by offering incentives to act sustainably. Deterrence models enforce the law and penalise offenders. Restorative justice sits between them, and there is an obvious application here: bringing polluters together with the communities their pollution has harmed.

HOWEVER, there are two structural reasons why none of this works especially well.

The first is power. Powerful offenders reject criminal definitions applied to them, and when found guilty they pass the costs on. Thames Water was fined more than £100 million in 2024 for pumping untreated sewage into rivers — and will recover the money through customer bills. The fine lands on the public, not the polluter. Corporate interests also lobby to dilute environmental legislation and to reconstruct what the public understands ‘green’ to mean.

Corporate interests also seek to dilute environmental protection legislation and reconstruct the public’s meaning of what ‘green’ is. 

The second is jurisdiction. Environmental harm crosses borders and enforcement does not. A corporation can relocate a polluting process to a country with weaker regulation, and no single national police force has authority over the result. This is the same problem that makes global crime hard to control generally.

There is also very little research on the agencies that do enforce environmental law, most probably because researchers cannot get access.

Positive Evaluations of Green Criminology

Green criminology draws attention to enormously harmful acts which are frequently legal, and which traditional criminology therefore cannot see at all. Lynch et al. (2013) note that green harms are more widespread and do more damage than street crime — and yet street crime absorbs almost all criminological attention.

It follows radical and critical criminology in asking the right question: why are some harmful acts (pollution, resource extraction) not labelled criminal, while other, less harmful acts are? That is a labelling theory question applied to a new field, and it exposes the role of corporate power in shaping the law.

South’s typology gives a usable classification of an extremely broad subject, which makes it teachable and examinable.

Beck’s risk society usefully connects environmental harm to the wider shift to late modernity, and to the idea that contemporary societies generate their own hazards.

The Marxist and eco-racism material identifies who actually suffers, which Beck’s account underplays badly, and it is supported by a substantial body of evidence.

Criticisms of Green Criminology

It is usual in A-level sociology to criticise one perspective using others, and green criminology attracts criticism from more traditional criminologists in particular.

The subject matter is not clearly defined. Where do we draw the line on what counts as harming the environment? Where does it end, and who decides? Almost all human economic activity harms the environment to some degree.

Defining crime by harm rather than by law means giving up an objective definition in favour of a value judgement. Traditional criminologists argue that this is not criminology at all, since no crime need have been committed for green criminologists to take an interest.

Marxists argue that Beck underestimates class. Environmental harm reinforces existing divisions rather than dissolving them, and “smog is democratic” does not survive contact with the evidence on where waste facilities get sited.

Green criminology offers analysis but very little in the way of practical solutions. Beck offers none at all, and explicitly says so. Ecocide law and environmental courts remain proposals rather than institutions.

Functionalists get very little airtime in this topic. A student asked in the comments below whether there is a Functionalist view of green crime, and the honest answer is that there isn’t much of one. You might argue that environmental regulation performs a boundary-maintenance function, but it is a stretch, and the topic is dominated by critical perspectives.

Contemporary Evidence to Evaluate Green Criminology (2026 update)

Environmental defenders are still being killed

Below I look at three pieces of current evidence, each usable in an exam answer.

Global Witness published Roots of Resistance in September 2025, covering 2024. It documented 146 land and environmental defenders killed or disappeared worldwide, bringing the total since 2012 to at least 2,253 — roughly three people a week for over a decade.

82% of the killings took place in Latin America. Colombia was the deadliest country for the third year running with 48, followed by Guatemala with 20 — up fivefold from four the previous year. Indigenous peoples were victims of around a third of lethal attacks, despite making up around 6% of the global population.

HOWEVER — and this is the part worth noting for the methods paper — the 2024 figure is lower than the 196 recorded in 2023, and Global Witness explicitly warns against reading that as improvement. They attribute the fall to chronic under-reporting, difficulty verifying cases in conflict zones, and a climate of fear that silences families. A falling figure that the people who produced it tell you not to trust is a very good example of why you always check how a statistic was constructed.

This is strong support for the secondary green crime category: state and corporate violence against those who oppose environmental damage.

The Thames Water fine

The £100 million-plus penalty imposed in 2024 for sewage discharges is the clearest recent illustration of the power problem. The company will recover the cost through bills. As an evaluation point it works in two directions: it shows regulation does exist and does bite, and it shows that corporate offenders can shift the punishment onto the public in a way individual offenders cannot.

Ecocide law

The campaign for an international law of ecocide has continued to gain support, and is worth following. If it succeeds it would be the first serious answer to the criticism that green criminology has no solutions — it would convert the harm-based approach into an enforceable law-based one.

Exam Practice: Green Crime Short Answer Questions

Two questions I have written in the AQA style, with answers. Green crime most often appears as part of a broader question on globalisation and crime, so being able to write about it briefly and precisely is worth more than being able to write about it at length.

Outline and explain two reasons why green crime might be difficult to control (10 marks)

Remember: there are no marks for evaluation on the 10-mark no-item questions. Two developed points, each explained properly, is what earns the marks.

One reason green crimes are difficult to control is that a great deal of environmental harm is not against the law.

Green criminologists such as South argue that criminology should study environmental harm rather than only environmental crime, precisely because laws protecting the environment are underdeveloped. A corporation operating within the terms of its permit commits no offence however much damage it does, and White argues that states sometimes under-regulate deliberately, because a capitalist political economy depends on cheap production. They do this by not legislating, by setting penalties low enough to be absorbed as a cost of doing business, and by underfunding the regulators. Control is therefore difficult not because enforcement fails, but because there is often nothing to enforce.

A second reason is that environmental harm crosses national borders while enforcement does not.

Pollution, deforestation and waste dumping have effects far beyond the country in which they happen, but policing and prosecution are organised nationally. A transnational corporation can relocate a polluting process to a country with weaker regulation, and no single national authority has jurisdiction over the outcome. E-waste illustrates this well: for years it was shipped from wealthy countries and dumped in poorer ones, which suited both the exporting corporations and the importing governments. Green criminologists have proposed international environmental courts and an international law of ecocide precisely because national law cannot reach these harms — but neither exists yet.

A third point you could use if you preferred it to either of the above: even where a fine is imposed, powerful offenders pass the cost on. Thames Water was fined more than £100 million in 2024 for sewage discharges and will recover the money through customer bills, so the penalty lands on the public rather than the polluter.

For more exam questions see my page on exams and past papers.

Crime and Deviance Revision Bundle

If you like this sort of thing, then you might like my crime and deviance revision bundle — [LINK NEEDED: Sellfy URL for the crime and deviance bundle] — which contains the following:

[IMAGE: retain existing Crime-Deviance-A-Level-Revision.png cover, linked to the Sellfy product]

1. 32 pages of revision notes covering the entire A-level sociology crime and deviance specification
2. Seven colour mind maps covering sociological perspectives on crime and deviance
3. 12 exam practice questions including short answer, 10-mark and essay exemplars

Written specifically for the AQA A-level sociology specification.

Sources used to write this post

• South, N. (1998) ‘A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective’, Theoretical Criminology 2(2): 211–233
• White, R. (2008) Crimes Against Nature: Environmental Criminology and Ecological Justice. Cullompton: Willan
• Carrabine, E., Iganski, P., Lee, M., Plummer, K. and South, N. (2004) Criminology: A Sociological Introduction. London: Routledge
• Beck, U. (1992) Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: SAGE
• Lynch, M. (1990) ‘The Greening of Criminology’
• Bullard, R. (1990) Dumping in Dixie: Race, Class and Environmental Quality
• Potter, G. (2014), on tertiary green crimes
• Global Witness, Roots of Resistance (September 2025), covering 2024
• South, N. and Brisman, A., green criminology chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Criminology (2023)

Signposting and Related Posts

This post has been written primarily for students studying the crime and deviance topic as part of the AQA’s A-Level Sociology course, where it appears on Paper 3 (7192/3).

Green crime is usually taught alongside two related topics. Globalisation and Crime covers the growth of global criminal networks and the global criminal economy, and shares the same problem of enforcement across borders. State Crime covers crimes committed by governments, and overlaps with green crime wherever a state permits or conceals environmental damage — you can see the connection clearly in these examples of state crimes.

For a specific case study you might like the dumping of plastic waste as a green crime, and for an example of environmental protest and the state’s response, the Extinction Rebellion protests.

Beck’s risk society is covered in more depth in post and late modern criminology, and the Marxist framework underpinning green criminology in the Marxist perspective on crime.

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