Climate Change and Green Criminology

Climate change and green criminology intersect through sustained scholarly attention to greenhouse gas emissions, state and corporate responsibility for atmospheric harm, and the criminological consequences of a warming climate for crime patterns and victimization worldwide. Climate change occupies a distinctive position within green criminology because it represents perhaps the clearest example of harm produced substantially through legal activity, since the great majority of greenhouse gas emissions driving global warming result from lawful industrial production, energy generation, and transportation rather than from any conventionally defined criminal conduct. The discussion that follows examines climate change as a criminological object of study, state and corporate responsibility for climate harm, the relationship between climate change and crime patterns more broadly, and the theoretical accounts and current research directions shaping this rapidly developing subfield.

Introduction

Green criminology’s engagement with climate change developed relatively late within the field’s broader development, gaining substantial momentum only as scientific consensus regarding anthropogenic climate change solidified and as its consequences became increasingly documented across multiple domains of human and ecological welfare. Rob White’s scholarship on climate change criminology argues that the phenomenon demands sustained criminological attention precisely because its primary drivers, fossil fuel extraction and combustion, remain overwhelmingly lawful activities, forcing green criminology to extend its harm-based analytical framework to its most consequential test case (White, 2018).

Robert Agnew’s influential theoretical model connecting climate change to crime represents a significant point of connection between green criminology and mainstream criminological theory, since Agnew, previously known primarily for his general strain theory of conventional crime, extended strain-based reasoning to predict how climate change’s social and economic disruptions might generate conditions conducive to increased conventional crime independent of any direct environmental criminal offending (Agnew, 2012). This cross-pollination between green criminology and mainstream criminological theory illustrates how climate change has drawn attention from scholars not otherwise primarily identified with the green criminology tradition.

Climate Change as a Criminological Object

Green criminology’s harm-based analytical framework provides a natural foundation for treating climate change as criminologically significant despite its predominantly lawful causal mechanisms, since the field’s foundational commitment to prioritizing harm over legal status was developed specifically to address exactly this kind of gap between formal legality and substantial documented harm. Rob White’s climate change criminology scholarship argues that this framing positions climate change not as an exception to green criminology’s usual subject matter but as its most fully realized expression, since few other environmental harms so clearly demonstrate how legally sanctioned economic activity can generate consequences of civilization-scale significance (White, 2018).

The scale and temporal structure of climate harm distinguishes it from most other environmental crime categories examined throughout this discussion, since greenhouse gas emissions accumulate in the atmosphere over decades and generate consequences distributed unevenly across both geography and time, affecting regions and populations that contributed minimally to the emissions now driving the harm they experience. This temporal and geographic displacement between cause and consequence complicates conventional criminological frameworks built around comparatively immediate and geographically proximate relationships between offender and victim.

Attribution challenges specific to climate change further complicate its criminological treatment, since any individual emission source contributes only a minute fraction of the cumulative atmospheric greenhouse gas concentration driving observed warming, making it analytically difficult to establish the kind of direct causal relationship between a specific offender’s conduct and a specific harm that conventional criminal law typically requires. Green criminology scholars have responded to this challenge by emphasizing aggregate and structural responsibility rather than attempting to establish individual causal contribution for specific climate-related harms.

Michael Lynch, Paul Stretesky, and Michael Long’s broader critique of how criminology defines crime has argued that climate change exposes fundamental limitations in criminology’s traditional reliance on formal legal categories to determine what counts as criminologically significant, since a phenomenon capable of generating civilization-scale harm falls almost entirely outside conventional criminal law despite arguably representing among the most consequential harms criminology could study (Lynch, Stretesky, & Long, 2015).

State and Corporate Responsibility for Climate Harm

Corporate responsibility for climate change has received particular scholarly attention given research documenting that a comparatively small number of major fossil fuel producing corporations account for a disproportionate share of cumulative historical greenhouse gas emissions, research that has informed a growing body of climate litigation seeking to establish corporate liability for climate-related harm through tort and consumer protection legal theories distinct from conventional environmental criminal statutes. Ronald Kramer’s analysis of climate change as state-corporate crime argues that the coordinated relationship between fossil fuel corporations and the state institutions that have historically supported continued fossil fuel extraction constitutes a form of state-corporate crime comparable to other documented instances of coordinated state and corporate harm production (Kramer, 2013).

State responsibility for climate change extends beyond direct regulatory failure to encompass active promotion of fossil fuel extraction through subsidies, permitting, and infrastructure development, a pattern Ronald Kramer’s state-corporate crime framework treats as analytically continuous with more conventionally recognized forms of state-facilitated corporate harm documented across other environmental crime categories examined throughout this discussion (Kramer, 2013). This framing positions climate change not as a diffuse collective action failure but as the product of identifiable institutional decisions made by specific state and corporate actors over an extended historical period.

Documented corporate knowledge of climate change’s likely consequences, in some cases predating public scientific consensus by decades, has become a particular focus of climate accountability scholarship and litigation, since evidence that specific corporations understood the climate consequences of their products while continuing to publicly question climate science raises questions of knowing misrepresentation distinct from the underlying emissions themselves. This knowledge-based accountability framework parallels the knowing-violation standard central to criminal liability across other corporate environmental crime categories, even though climate-specific criminal statutes comparable to conventional pollution law remain largely absent from current legal frameworks.

Climate Change, Crime, and Victimization

Robert Agnew’s theoretical model connecting climate change to conventional crime argues that climate-driven disruptions, including resource scarcity, displacement, and economic hardship, are likely to generate strain conditions that general strain theory identifies as criminogenic, potentially increasing rates of conventional crime in regions experiencing severe climate impacts independent of any direct environmental criminal offending (Agnew, 2012). This theoretical extension connects green criminology’s climate change scholarship to mainstream criminological theory in ways that few other green criminology topics have achieved, given general strain theory’s established position within conventional criminological research.

Climate displacement and migration, driven by sea level rise, extreme weather events, and agricultural disruption in climate-vulnerable regions, has generated growing scholarly attention to how population movement driven by climate change may generate secondary criminal justice consequences, including strain on receiving communities and potential exploitation of displaced populations by traffickers and other criminal actors seeking to profit from displacement-driven vulnerability. Rob White’s eco-global criminology situates this displacement dimension within a broader environmental justice framework, emphasizing that climate victims are disproportionately concentrated among populations that contributed minimally to the emissions driving their displacement (White, 2011).

Climate change’s victimization patterns extend the environmental justice concerns documented across other green criminology domains examined throughout this discussion, since the populations facing the most severe climate impacts, including low-lying island nations and agriculturally dependent developing regions, typically bear minimal responsibility for the cumulative historical emissions driving the harm they experience, a mismatch between contribution and consequence that green criminology scholars have argued represents one of the clearest contemporary examples of global environmental injustice.

Theoretical Explanations and Current Directions

Treadmill of production theory, associated with Paul Stretesky, Michael Long, and Michael Lynch, provides climate change scholarship’s most direct structural explanation, situating greenhouse gas emissions within the theory’s broader account of how continuous economic growth pressure systematically generates environmental harm as an inherent rather than incidental feature of contemporary economic organization, with fossil fuel combustion representing perhaps the clearest contemporary instantiation of this growth-driven harm production (Stretesky, Long, & Lynch, 2013).

State-corporate crime frameworks, extended to climate change through Ronald Kramer’s analysis, position climate harm as the product of coordinated institutional decision-making rather than diffuse collective failure, a framing with significant implications for how accountability efforts should be structured going forward, since it identifies specific institutional actors as appropriate targets for legal and political accountability rather than treating climate change as a harm without identifiable responsible parties (Kramer, 2013).

Current research directions within climate change criminology increasingly examine the criminal justice implications of climate adaptation and mitigation policy itself, including questions regarding how carbon offset and emissions trading programs may generate new categories of environmental crime through fraud and misrepresentation, and how climate-driven resource scarcity may reshape existing patterns of environmental crime examined throughout this discussion, including land grabbing, water conflict, and resource-driven displacement, suggesting that climate change’s criminological significance will likely continue expanding as its physical consequences become more pronounced.

Conclusion

Climate change and green criminology together represent perhaps the field’s most consequential contemporary intersection, extending green criminology’s foundational harm-based framework to a phenomenon whose primary drivers remain overwhelmingly lawful even as their cumulative consequences approach civilizational scale. The scholarship examined throughout this discussion, spanning state-corporate crime analysis, general strain theory extension, and treadmill of production theory, demonstrates how climate change has drawn together previously distinct strands of green criminology and mainstream criminological theory around a shared concern with humanity’s most significant contemporary environmental challenge.

Continued development of climate change criminology as a distinct research program seems likely given the phenomenon’s expanding documented consequences and the ongoing development of climate accountability litigation seeking to establish corporate and state responsibility through legal theories that continue to evolve. The environmental justice dimensions of climate victimization, in which populations contributing least to cumulative emissions bear the most severe consequences, will likely remain a central concern for green criminology scholarship in this domain going forward.

References and Further Reading

Agnew, R. (2012). Dire forecast: A theoretical model of the impact of climate change on crime. Theoretical Criminology, 16(1), 21–42.
Beirne, P., & South, N. (Eds.). (2007). Issues in green criminology: Confronting harms against environments, humanity and other animals. Willan Publishing.
Boekhout van Solinge, T. (2010). Equatorial deforestation as a harmful practice and a criminological issue. In R. White (Ed.), Global environmental harm: Criminological perspectives (pp. 20–36). Willan Publishing.
Brisman, A. (2008). Crime-environment relationships and environmental justice. Seattle Journal for Social Justice, 6(2), 727–817.
Brisman, A., & South, N. (2014). Green cultural criminology: Constructions of environmental harm, consumerism, and resistance to ecocide. Routledge.
Burns, R. G., Lynch, M. J., & Stretesky, P. B. (2008). Environmental law, crime, and justice. LFB Scholarly Publishing.
Faber, D. (1998). The struggle for ecological democracy: Environmental justice movements in the United States. Guilford Press.
Kramer, R. C. (2013). Carbon in the atmosphere and power in America: Climate change as state-corporate crime. Journal of Crime and Justice, 36(2), 153–170.
Lynch, M. J., Long, M. A., Stretesky, P. B., & Barrett, K. L. (2017). Green criminology: Crime, justice, and the environment. University of California Press.
Lynch, M. J., Stretesky, P. B., & Long, M. A. (2015). Defining crime: A critique of the concept and its alternatives. Palgrave Macmillan.
Pellow, D. N. (2007). Resisting global toxics: Transnational movements for environmental justice. MIT Press.
Ruggiero, V. (2013). The crimes of the economy: A criminological analysis of economic thought. Routledge.
Ruggiero, V., & South, N. (2013). Green criminology and crimes of the economy: Theory, research and praxis. Critical Criminology, 21(3), 359–373.
Skinnider, E. (2011). Victims of environmental crime: Mapping the issues. International Centre for Criminal Law Reform and Criminal Justice Policy.
South, N. (1998). A green field for criminology? A proposal for a perspective. Theoretical Criminology, 2(2), 211–233.
Stretesky, P. B., Long, M. A., & Lynch, M. J. (2013). The treadmill of crime: Political economy and green criminology. Routledge.
Taylor, D. E. (2014). Toxic communities: Environmental racism, industrial pollution, and residential mobility. New York University Press.
Uhlmann, D. M. (2009). Prosecuting crimes against the earth. Trends in Organized Crime, 12(2), 130–140.
Walters, R. (2006). Crime, bio-agriculture and the exploitation of hunger. British Journal of Criminology, 46(1), 26–45.
White, R. (2011). Transnational environmental crime: Toward an eco-global criminology. Routledge.
White, R. (2013). Environmental harm: An eco-justice perspective. Policy Press.
White, R. (2018). Climate change criminology. Bristol University Press.