DE-CLaSS: Developing Environmental Criminal Law – a Sociolegal Study

The DE-CLaSS project examines how environmental harm is addressed through criminal law and regulatory enforcement. A central focus is the relationship between environmental administrative law and criminal culpability, and how this relationship shapes the criminalisation of environmental harm. The research analyses how Danish law defines environmental offences and how it interacts with EU law concerning environmental protection and environmental crimes.

The project further examines which harms are prioritised and how enforcement mechanisms operate in practice. Particular attention is given to the way administrative law structures and mediates environmental criminal enforcement. The project examines the implications of this “administrative dependence” for the fundamental protections of criminal procedure and for the core  objective of  environmental criminal law – addressing contemporary ecological challenges such as pollution, climate change, and biodiversity loss. The project combines doctrinal legal analysis with socio-legal and criminological perspectives, drawing on scholarship in environmental criminal law, green criminology, and regulatory governance.

Through systematic doctrinal analysis of both the Danish Criminal Code and paradigmatic penal provisions in Danish environmental legislation, the project maps how environmental crimes are defined across administrative and criminal law regimes.

Criminal liability under Section 196 of the Danish Criminal Code requires a violation of existing environmental legislation, embedding criminal enforcement within administrative regulatory frameworks. It is also restricted to environmental legislation that regulates pollution prevention and waste disposal, meaning other environmental interests, such as nature protection, have no commensurate provision in the Danish Criminal Code. Moreover, the balance of Danish environmental criminal law is predominantly found in penal provisions within Danish administrative environmental law, rather than as independent criminal offences. Danish environmental criminal law appears to suffer from an administrative law dependence and the project examines the challenges that creates, including whether criminal procedural protections are effectively evaded by administrative agencies.

The way Section 196 is drafted also reflects a pre-existing penal hierarchy for environmental harms that emphasises pollution and waste offences by enacting higher sentencing regimes, while minimising other environmental interests – such as nature protection and biodiversity. The project expands this focus to examine whether Danish environmental criminal law fails to criminalise conduct that ought to be criminalized. This it does by focusing on recent changes in EU environmental criminal law for comparative study.

In all of this, the research assumes an important point of departure: environmental criminal law concerns protection of the environment, and “environmental protection” should include: pollution prevention; protection of the climate; and prevention of biodiversity loss (the triple planetary crisis).

Alongside doctrinal legal analysis, the project incorporates socio-legal and criminological perspectives to examine how environmental harm is conceptualised, regulated, and enforced. This work engages particularly with the interdisciplinary fields of green criminology, zemiology, and emerging scholarship on green penology, utilising these as theoretical frameworks.

• Green criminology examines how harmful environmental practices by corporations, states, and other actors may produce significant ecological damage even when they fall outside formal criminal law. This perspective helps situate environmental criminal law within broader debates about environmental justice, regulation, and the governance of ecological risk. Green criminology exposes “regulatory substitution”, where intent and responsibility are displaced, questioning why ecological harms are treated as administrative breaches rather than criminal offences.
• Zemiology, or the study of social harm, further expands this analytical lens by focusing on harms rather than crimes. From this perspective, environmental degradation, biodiversity loss, and climate change can be examined as forms of social harm that may not always be adequately captured by existing legal categories. Incorporating zemiological insights therefore allows the project to critically assess the extent to which environmental criminal law reflects or fails to reflect the full scope of environmental harm.
• Finally, the project engages with emerging discussions on green penology, which examine how criminal justice institutions respond to environmental offences and how punishment, enforcement, and regulatory practices operate in environmental contexts.

The DE-CLaSS project hosted a workshop on 29th January with expert legal and academic participants from Denmark, Iceland, Norway and Sweden to present the team’s early findings on integrating the doctrinal research with criminological theorisation