Assessing Environmental Harms: What Is the Right Benchmark and Why Does It Matter?

• In Event: Assessing Environmental Harms: Introducing a New Method and Exploring Recent Empirical Studies in Green Criminology

Abstract

In this paper, we explore how environmental harms can be assessed empirically and systematically in terms of “sustainability” and how defining and interpreting the term differently can affect the results. To do so, we modify and extend the “Harm Assessment Framework” (Greenfield and Paoli, 2022) to better capture the harms of crime and policy to the environment, by explicitly acknowledging variation within the environment and giving full standing to non-human species and the ecosystems in which they reside and interact. In past publications, we have employed “sustainability,” defined as the ability to persist, as a benchmark for gauging environmental harms, but without that acknowledgement. We explore both our approach to adapting the framework and the implications of viewing sustainability through different lenses. UN agencies, for example, have taken varied positions on sustainability, ranging from strictly anthropocentric to non-speciesist and eco-centric. We see similar tensions in green criminology, where scholars differ in their conceptualizations of environmental harms and in how they assess them. We conclude that adapting the framework can shed more light on the accrual and distribution of environmental harms, but only if the lens allows it.

Authors

• Victoria Greenfield, George Mason University

• Letizia Paoli, KU Leuven