Enviro journalist & researcher, think tanker @ The Stimson Center, @ Center for Climate & Security, @ECDPM. Author of 'The Heat and the Fury: On the Frontlines of Climate Violence'
published on UNICRI on Oct 28, 2026
Economic transformations have often been prone to criminal exploitation. The green and other sustainability transitions may prove similarly vulnerable. Across the world, criminal and corrupt actors, many of them politically or economically invested in the status quo, are manipulating, undermining or otherwise disrupting shifts to more environmentally friendly practices. Given the potential of such conduct to obstruct essential sustainability transitions and undermine public safety, security and the rule of law, there is a pressing need to document and better understand these risks.
This report is among the first to examine these forms of criminal and corrupt activity together under a single analytical framework. To do so, it pursues three interrelated objectives.
First, by illustrating the extent of sustainability transition-related crime (see box: Sustainability Transition-Related Crime Defined), the report is designed to bolster awareness of a kind of lawbreaking that appears to have surged in scale and consequence as these economic transformations have gathered pace. Between 2020 and 2024, global investment in the energy transition more than doubled, reaching approximately $2.1 trillion in 2024. That uptick in investment and political commitment has brought both increased opportunity for criminality, given the degree of disruption, and increased incentive for these actors to break the law, given the amounts of money involved and the range of interests at stake.
Second, this report maps the wide array of offences connected to sustainability transitions. Unsurprisingly, these transitions may ultimately leave few people, places or industries untouched. The actors involved in such forms of crime range from individuals engaged in opportunistic or low-level offending to transnational criminal groups implicated in globally significant instability. At up to $1 trillion a year in immediate and long-term economic damage, according to a 2019 study, illegal logging, fishing, and wildlife trade are as big a business as they are a peril to natural landscapes.
(To read the full report, please visit the UNICRI website)