Failure of political will makes crimes affecting the environment a worsening threat - Environmental Investigation Agency

In our landmark 2008 report Environmental Crime – A Threat to Our Future, EIA was the first to analyse the combined impact of multiple environmental crime types and the coordinated global response they demanded.

Some 18 years later, that call for urgent action has gone substantially unheeded.

In our new report Crimes that Affect the Environment – STILL a critical threat to our future, we conclude that crime and abuse has actually grown more sophisticated, more lucrative and even more damaging to the planet and human society.

EIA Securing Criminal Justice Programme Lead Justin Gosling said: “As an organisation that has spent more than four decades investigating and combating environmental crime and abuse across all three pillars of the triple planetary crisis – climate change, pollution and biodiversity loss – EIA is uniquely positioned to speak to both the scale of the threat and the response required to address it.

“Many of the structural weaknesses identified in 2008 — fragmented legislation, weak deterrence, limited cross-border cooperation and insufficient political will — persist today, even as the consequences of inaction have become progressively harder and, in some cases, impossible to reverse.”