Introduction

Abstract

Despite EFFACE being focused principally on environmental crime in the EU, in the book we look at non-EU states because they have extensive political, social, and/or economic ties with the EU and, therefore, environmental crime in these countries directly and indirectly affects the EU. This chapter introduces the topic of environmental crime in the EU and presents a discussion of the conceptual understanding of environmental crime from different disciplinary perspectives, such as criminology, economy, and law. Legal scholars often do not question the definition of an environmental crime but take the definitions, as given and defined by means of laws and regulations, as the point of departure. Within green criminology the concept of crime has been expanded beyond its legal definition. It encompasses even those harmful acts that are not legally defined as criminal, but yet are as harmful as any breach of a law or regulation. For economists, the harms of environmental crimes will often be assessed in economic terms, being valuable for what and by what it provides for humans. Economic estimations can also successfully be applied to assess dispersal of victimization, that is, the number of victims involved and the ways in which they are affected. Another approach is typological, listing different forms of environmental harms, for example, those types of environmental crimes that are also ‘transnational environmental crimes (…) undertaken by persons acting across national borders including illegal logging and timber smuggling, species smuggling, the black market in ozone depleting substances, the illegal movement of toxic and hazardous waste and other prohibited chemicals etc.’ The introduction thereafter provides a brief presentation of the anthology’s different chapters.