Sustainability through a Conservation Criminology Lens

• In Event: Improving Understanding of Environmental Harms, Crimes and Sustainability

Abstract

In the coming decades the world’s population is expected to increase by three billion people. The vast majority of these people will reside in large urban areas located in developing countries. In response to this predicted population growth trend there has been considerable effort in the academy to examine the opportunities and barriers to the development of sustainable urban growth processes. Sustainability in this context refers to the inter-locking goals of improving human well-being, the resilience of Earth’s biological systems and the relationship between human social systems and the natural systems they rely upon. Traditionally, sustainability science has been the province of ecologists, geographers and political scientists. However, we believe that criminology, both theoretically and in practice, can significantly contribute to the development of sustainable processes in urban areas. In particular, questions about human well-being in complex urban systems would benefit from insights provided by criminology. In this paper we propose to build on the links between urban sustainability and criminology by using a conservation criminology framework. We believe that the framework’s integration of concepts and methodologies from criminology, natural resource disciplines and risk and decision sciences make it the perfect tool for examining urban sustainability in an inter-disciplinary fashion.

Author

• Louie Rivers, North Carolina State University