Research database

Environmental crimes cause significant damage in Europe and the world, while providing very high profits for perpetrators. Criminal sanctions for the most serious environmental offences are needed for both preventing (dissuasive) and enforcement purposes (from investigation to actual sanction). Disparities in the sanctions/approaches applied in different MSs and between potential sanctions and profit margin coming from environmental crime breaches, cause the persistence of this phenomenon as well as the implication of organized criminal groups at cross-border level. According to a study recently published by Eurojust, a number of legal issues and practical difficulties have been identified in the investigation of environmental crime cases, namely: 1) Insufficient specialised knowledge and practical experience about the EU’s environmental criminal legal framework, 2) Existence in different jurisdictions of different investigative approaches, 3) Lack of recognition of environmental crime as organised crime, which hampers the initiation of cross-border environmental crime investigations, 4) Multidisciplinary nature of environmental investigations, requires coordination and information exchange among different type of experts, at both national and, potentially, cross-border level. The EMERITI project intends to address these challenges by providing authorities and stakeholders with new means, both technological and intelligence-based, to prevent and combat illegal environment-related activities, according to the expectation of the Horizon Europe FCT-01-09 call for proposal. Indeed, the aim of the project is to realize a protocol for effective environmental crime investigation, leveraging on the integration of innovative monitoring and analysis technologies (i.e. drones, satellite data, OSINT sources) in a singles Situational Awareness Platform, and implement a complementary training programme aimed at fostering Police Authorities environmental-crimes specific intelligence and investigation capabilities at both national level and cross-border level.