Project description
How criminals launder natural resources
The growing demand for natural resources has led crime groups to exploit the situation and launder illegal goods into legal markets. These groups turn illegally sourced gold, timber, or wildlife into products sold openly across the globe. This often involves corporations and state officials, which blurs the line between legitimate business and organised crime. The ERC-funded GREENLAUND project aims to explore how these collaborations function and the damage they cause, notably deforestation and species loss. An understanding of the causes and consequences will provide policymakers and law enforcement with the information and tools they need to stop environmental crime.
Objective
The high value and scarcity of natural resources increasingly attracts criminal entrepreneurs operating in the legal economy. The laundering of natural resources is a prime example where illegally obtained natural resources are converted into legal products. Consequently, consumers buy products, such as a gold wedding ring, a hardwood floor, or endangered species, as legitimate on the international market and unknowingly become part of a trade with devastating environmental effects. To facilitate laundering, crime groups interact with corporations and state actors, as joint crime ventures. The proposed research aims to understand how and why joint crime ventures launder natural resources and what the environmental impact is. Contemporary developments in environmental crime networks signal the expansion of grey areas of business where the separation between conventional and non-conventional criminals is no longer appropriate for understanding and dealing with the increasing complexities of environmental crime. Therefore, it is essential to develop an innovative approach to fill this theoretical and empirical gap. By analysing coercive, economic, and political interactions between crime groups, corporations, and state actors, this study will build a new line of research and reveal the causes, incentives, and environmental harms of laundering natural resources. The environmental impact of laundering is illustrated by rapidly disappearing rainforests, large-scale pollution, and the mass extinction of species. Yet, laundering natural resources has been the subject of rather limited study. This research introduces a novel combination of cluster analysis of environmental crime cases, multi-sited field research, and crime script analysis that ensures a unique mixed-method perspective. The insights will be crucial for scientists, policymakers, corporations, NGOs, and law enforcement to develop inventive solutions to prevent and tackle the laundering of natural resources.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
- social sciences political sciences political policies civil society civil society organisations nongovernmental organizations
- social sciences economics and business business and management entrepreneurship
- natural sciences earth and related environmental sciences environmental sciences pollution
- social sciences law criminology
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Keywords
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
Multi-annual funding programmes that define the EU’s priorities for research and innovation.
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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Topic(s)
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Calls for proposals are divided into topics. A topic defines a specific subject or area for which applicants can submit proposals. The description of a topic comprises its specific scope and the expected impact of the funded project.
Funding Scheme
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Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.
HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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Call for proposal
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
Procedure for inviting applicants to submit project proposals, with the aim of receiving EU funding.
(opens in new window) ERC-2022-STG
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Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.
3584 CS Utrecht
Netherlands
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