New Methods to Enhance the Study of Environmental Crimes and New Instruments to Strengthen Crime Prevention

The special issue New Quantitative and Qualitative Methods to Investigate Environmental Crimes seeks to improve extant understanding of environmental crimes, advocate for the use of new methods through which to study this topic, and enhance the preventive measures to combat these crimes. I am pleased to introduce this special issue that comprises expert contributions from multiple countries (i.e., Australia, Italy, Sweden, the United States, and the United Kingdom). The articles included in this issue employ different methodological approaches (i.e., quantitative, qualitative, and mixed-methods) to analyze several types of environmental crime in different offline and online contexts around the world (e.g., the illegal harvesting of live corals in Indonesia and Fiji, environmental crimes in protected areas in Cambodia, online illegal trade in endangered plants, and illicit waste trafficking at the global level). Moreover, they present innovative methodological solutions to the study of environmental crimes and guide future researchers in how to construct databases to quantitatively investigate corporate environmental crimes.