Network Features of Organized Environmental Crime
Lunch Seminar with Aske Schytt Meineche, ph.d. student, IT University of Copenhagen.
Environmental crime remains an understudied yet substantial profit-generating criminal activity. Counterintuitively, stricter environmental protection can lead to increased profit for criminals, as compliance becomes more resource intensive. Reports consistently characterize environmental crime as highly organized, often embedded within broader criminal networks. Graph and network science has become a common analytical tool for studying organized crime, given the inherent structural complexity of these schemes.
This study applies metrics, features, and representations derived from network science to model environmental crime, with a particular focus on identifying actor overlap with other profit-generating criminal activities such as fraud, tax evasion, and money laundering. By mapping these intersections, the study aims to shed light on the structural position of environmental crime within the broader landscape of organized financial crime.