- Environmental crime used to be treated as a niche concern for park rangers, customs officers and a handful of conservation lawyers to tackle, but not anymore if recent intergovernmental initiatives are any indication.
- From the UNFCCC to UNTOC and governments like Brazil and Norway, to agencies like Interpol, a new international consensus on tackling environmental crime like illegal deforestation, mining and wildlife trafficking is forming.
- “Governments can allow environmental crime to remain a para-diplomatic side issue, or they can lock it into the core of crime, climate and biodiversity agreements, with concrete timelines, enforcement tools and financing. If they choose the latter, the emerging coalitions around UNTOC and COP30 could become the backbone of a global effort to dismantle nature-crime economies,” a new op-ed argues.
- This article is a commentary. The views expressed are those of the author, not necessarily of Mongabay.
Environmental crime used to be treated as a niche concern, a worry for park rangers, customs officers and a handful of conservation lawyers. Not anymore. From Vienna to Belém, a once technical debate about “crimes that affect the environment” is edging closer to the mainstream of multilateral diplomacy, and, more importantly, beginning to reshape enforcement and action on the ground.
Environmental crime is a catch-all term for illegal activities that harm nature and the people who depend on it. It covers illegal land grabbing and logging, illicit mining, illegal fishing, wildlife trafficking, and the dumping of toxic waste. Increasingly, it also encompasses newer frontiers such as illegal sand extraction, fraudulent “green” or carbon projects, infiltration of biofuel supply chains, and exploitation of critical minerals and rare earths.
From the Amazon to the Congo Basin and Southeast Asia, environmental crimes are anything but minor or opportunistic. They operate at industrial scale, generating hundreds of billions, perhaps trillions, of dollars annually, embedded in complex global supply chains and financial systems. These crimes are often tightly intertwined with other serious offenses including drug trafficking, extortion, corruption and money laundering, and are often enforced through violence and intimidation against Indigenous and local communities, environmental defenders and journalists.
Environmental crime is also getting worse. Even as governments and international organizations have strengthened laws and enforcement over the past decade, these illicit markets are expanding, not shrinking. The reasons are depressingly familiar.
On the one hand, profits are high: gold is trading near $4,000 an ounce and demand for critical minerals and rare earths is booming. On the other hand, the odds of being caught, prosecuted and jailed remain vanishingly low. Criminal networks are diversifying into new markets, laundering their proceeds, exploiting cryptocurrencies and other opaque payment systems, and thriving in areas where state authority is weak or compromised.
For several years, colleagues and I have been working with international organizations such as Interpol, the U.N. Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), the Inter-American Development Bank (IADB), and partners across all Amazon countries to map trends and build legal and operational responses. What is new is that environmental crime is no longer only the preserve of law enforcement, prosecution, financial crimes units and conservation agencies. It is now being written into the agendas of major diplomatic processes.
Several separate processes are beginning to hard-wire environmental crime into global governance. These include the U.N. Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the U.N. climate process, including the COP that just concluded in Belém, Brazil. Added to this are BRICS and G20 which have also referenced environmental crimes in recent outcome documents. Taken together, they signal an emerging convergence between public security, criminal justice, and climate and nature action, and highlight the scale of the work that still lies ahead.
A global protocol to tackle crimes against the environment
On the crime side, states and experts have long warned that large-scale environmental harms are driven by transnational organized crime, yet sit awkwardly across a patchwork of environmental treaties with weak enforcement teeth. That began to change when the Conference of the Parties to UNTOC formally recognized “crimes that affect the environment” as falling within the scope of the convention in resolutions adopted in 2020 and 2022.
The real inflection point came in October 2024, when states adopted a new resolution that urges “enhancing measures to prevent and combat crimes that affect the environment.” Championed by a cluster of countries including Brazil, France and Peru, the resolution calls on governments to strengthen and harmonize legislation, improve international cooperation, upgrade criminal justice responses and pursue asset recovery against environmental crime. Crucially, it also created an open-ended intergovernmental expert group to identify gaps and consider possible responses, explicitly including the feasibility of an additional protocol.
That expert group met for the first time in Vienna in mid-2025, reviewing real cases across wildlife, timber, mining, fisheries and waste. It will reconvene in 2026. The debate is no longer about whether environmental crime belongs under UNTOC; that question is largely settled. The issue now is how far states are prepared to go, and whether they will limit themselves to better implementation of the existing convention or move toward negotiating an additional fourth protocol on crimes that affect the environment.
Support for exploring a protocol is uneven but growing among Latin American, African and European countries, backed by U.N. agencies and civil society. Some governments remain cautious, invoking sovereignty and the risk of duplicating existing environmental agreements. Still, the door to a protocol is now open in a way it has never been before.
Environmental crime enters the climate conversation
On the climate side, environmental crime moved into the conversation around COP30, even if it only partially surfaced in the final U.N. climate decision. Politically, it was framed in Belém as a driver of deforestation, a threat to Indigenous peoples and environmental defenders, a public security challenge that has to be tackled alongside climate and biodiversity targets, and, crucially, as a climate solution.
The strongest language came not in the negotiated text, but in a leaders’ Call to Action on Integrated Fire Management and Wildfire Resilience, launched a few days before COP30 formally opened. The declaration explicitly links illegal burning to broader environmental crime and commits signatories to “strengthen coordinated efforts to prevent, monitor and combat illegal forest fires, as part of broader actions aimed at tackling environmental crime and halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation.” It also calls on states to reinforce institutional capacities, transparency and cooperation among law enforcement authorities to address “illegal activities that contribute to or profit from forest fires.”
Endorsed by dozens of countries and several U.N. agencies, and anchored in a Global Fire Management Hub, the call effectively treats illegal forest fires as a shared global security concern. It couples that framing with very practical tools: satellite monitoring, early-warning systems, joint training and supporting frontline forest guardians. It is not yet treaty law, but it marks a step change in how political leaders talk about the links between crime prevention, conservation and climate action.
The same practical approach that links tackling environmental crime to zero-deforestation commitments appears in the reinvigorated COP30 Action Agenda, which now includes a Plan to Accelerate Solutions (PAS) on Tackling Environmental Crime to Achieve Zero Deforestation. The plan, to be implemented at the next Global Stocktake in 2028, will convene state and non-state actors to enhance detection and state response to deforestation, bolster data systems to promote high-integrity deforestation-free supply chains, strengthen global and regional cooperation and frameworks to tackle transnational organized environmental crime, and promote active global coalitions to dismantle environmental crime in the Amazon Basin and across other tropical basins.
By contrast, the core UNFCCC package from COP30 is more cautious. The final text highlights the importance of conserving nature and “halting and reversing deforestation and forest degradation by 2030” and it calls for action on the drivers of deforestation. But it does not spell out environmental crime or illegal deforestation by name. In that sense, the most ambitious crime-related initiatives still sit in voluntary coalitions and national or regional plans rather than in the heart of the treaty.
The story does not end inside the negotiating halls. Before COP30, the Royal Foundation’s United for Wildlife Global Summit in Rio de Janeiro explicitly linked environmental crime to the climate agenda. Governments and businesses launched a joint track on crimes that affect the environment and adopted a Rio Declaration endorsed by 18 countries, signaling that these crimes are now viewed as central to economic and security debates, not just to conservation. A coalition of business leaders was also launched to redouble efforts to tighten controls along supply chains and financial flows.
From declarations to dismantling environmental crime networks
Beyond diplomatic forums, several law enforcement agencies, prosecutors and financial crimes units are ramping up operational responses. In practical terms, this shift is visible in law enforcement efforts such as Interpol, UNODC and Norway’s launch of Phase III of the LEAP program to dismantle illegal logging networks; major regional crackdowns like Operation Madre Tierra VII spanning nine Latin American countries; and Operation Green Shield in the Amazon Basin, backed by the United Arab Emirates (UAE), among others. A new international police cooperation center in Manaus, Brazil is also supporting the expansion of cross-border operations targeting illegal mining, logging and wildlife trafficking, all explicitly framed as contributions to climate and forest goals.
Looking ahead, Brazil has announced that it will present a Roadmap to Zero Deforestation. Work on that road map is underway and environmental crime is not an afterthought: it is the starting point. The idea is to treat “the ecosystem of environmental crime,” the mix of armed groups, local elites, corrupt brokers and corporate facilitators as central to any realistic plan to end illegal deforestation. That means building a dedicated workflow linking crime, illicit financial flows, supply-chain traceability, nature finance and bioeconomy solutions, and insisting that the 1.5° Celsius target under the Paris Agreement is unreachable without this crime-focused approach.
All of this matters because it signals a shift in how the world understands the problem. Environmental crime is moving from a peripheral policing issue to a visible pillar of the climate and sustainable development agenda. At UNTOC, states are formally debating whether to craft a global protocol. Through the wildfire Call to Action and other initiatives launched during COP30, growing recognition of the links between climate mitigation, adaptation, a just transition and environmental crime is helping to drive new coalitions, programs and policies that can, in principle, be scaled.
What happens next is a political choice, not an inevitability. Governments can allow environmental crime to remain a para-diplomatic side issue, or they can lock it into the core of crime, climate and biodiversity agreements, with concrete timelines, enforcement tools and financing. If they choose the latter, the emerging coalitions around UNTOC and COP30 could become the backbone of a global effort to dismantle nature-crime economies. If they do not, the burden will continue to fall on forests, rivers and the people who depend on them.
Robert Muggah is an expert on security, cities, climate action and digital transformation. He is chief innovation officer for the Rio de Janeiro-based Igarapé Institute, an independent “think and do tank” that he co-founded, which is focused on the areas of public, climate and digital security and their consequences for democracy.
Related audio from Mongabay’s podcast: Criminologist and author Julia Shaw discusses the psychology of and solutions for environmental crime, listen here:
See related commentaries by this author and others:
The world needs a new UN protocol to fight environmental crime (commentary)
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