Environmental Crime
Our cutting-edge global research on environmental crime focuses on environmental security, wildlife crime, illegal fishing, corruption and illicit finance.
Our research seeks to promote a step-change in current efforts to address organised criminal activity that is systematically depleting irreplaceable flora and fauna, driving key species to extinction and irreversibly damaging vital ecosystems worldwide. We seek to chart the shifting dynamics of environmental crime, while identifying opportunities to bolster a global response that all too often fails to treat this activity as large-scale transnational organised crime. Our focus is on enhancing the response to critical enabling activities of environmental crime, such as corruption and money laundering, whilst highlighting areas of convergence across multiple crime types.
Our experts
Cathy Haenlein
Director, Organised Crime and Policing (on maternity leave)
Organised Crime and Policing
Alexandria Reid
Associate Fellow
Organised Crime and Policing
Lauren Young
Research Analyst
Organised Crime and Policing
Tom Keatinge
Director, CFCS
Centre for Financial Crime and Security Studies
Mark Williams
Outreach and Implementation Coordinator
Organised Crime and Policing
Related projects
Access related research projects on this topic area.
Commissioned by the Home Office, RUSI is leading an independent assessment of the UK’s performance on tackling financial crime related to illegal wildlife trade (IWT).
Strengthening enforcement capacities and improving synergies to combat international and trans-border wildlife trafficking in and between Peru and Ecuador.
This project aims to strengthen key Ugandan stakeholders’ capacity to detect, deter and prosecute wildlife crime, working with security and law-enforcement agencies in the country.
This project conducted the first regional knowledge and capacity assessment on illicit financial flows connected to the illegal wildlife trade (IWT) in West and Central Africa.
The programme investigates the evolving impact of global warming on the criminogenic dynamics behind large-scale environmental crime.
This project piloted a strategic threat- and needs-assessment around the financial dimensions of wildlife trafficking, to inform tailored, multi-agency and cross-sectoral capacity building in East Africa.
This project delivered tailored cross-sector capacity-building information on disrupting wildlife-linked illicit financial flows in East and Southern Africa, accompanied by rapid-reference guides and an e-learning resource.
RUSI contributed to the establishment of the United for Wildlife IWT Financial Taskforce, which – through high-level commitments and actionable intelligence sharing – has mobilised over 40 global banks against wildlife trafficking.
This project generated new financial intelligence and investigative opportunities by reviewing two closed ivory trafficking cases in Lao PDR.
Primary research in Kenya, Tanzania, Uganda and Zambia calls for anti-corruption efforts to be placed front-and-centre of our collective response to wildlife trafficking.
