Justice-based approaches to environmental harm - Environmental Harm: An Eco-justice Perspective - page 17

world. Part of the difficulty lies in determining which offences will be
dealt with via regulatory agencies such as licensing bodies and local
government authorities, and which through formal courts or specific
environmental protection tribunals. Moreover, depending upon how
cases are proceeded against, different agencies will keep different records,
have different types of follow-up procedures, and will vary in whether
or not the information is easily and publicly accessible.
Countries that have better reporting and tracking systems will be
those that are economically most developed, and that simultaneously
produce the most amounts of waste and pollution. Data on
environmental crime and harms, for example, is compiled by such
agencies as the US Environmental Protection Agency, the Environment
Agency in the UK, and similar bodies in other countries. Relevant
information, especially of a comparative and regional nature, can
also be garnered from organisations such as the United Nations
Environment Programme (UNEP) and the Organisation for Economic
Cooperation and Development (OECD). The quantity and quality of
data collected is determined by the capacity and resources available to
agencies and/or countries for its collection, as well as by the political
priority attached to the gathering and disseminating of such data.
Non-government organisations such as Traffick, the Environment
Investigation Agency and Greenpeace gather important data on a wide
range of illegal activities, as well as keeping the pressure on governments
and enforcement bodies to address environmental crime.
It is evident that detailed study of specific offences, particular types
of harm and individual agency responses is required in order to both
obtain a better picture of environmental harm, and to monitor how
institutionally the state and community is responding to this type of
harm. The problem of data collection is compounded by difficulties
in ascertaining the nature of the harm itself. In other words, the
definitions and experiences of environmental crime can also be linked
into different kinds of expertise and experience.
Key questions about harm
At a technical rather than strictly legalistic level, there are problems
associated with trying to ascertain the precise nature of harm.
Consider for example the matter of 'uncertainty'. This concept has
been used to both justify and critique potential policy responses
to perceived environmental issues, often defined in accordance
with the 'precautionary principle'. The terms of the precautionary
principle are likely to be contested across several dimensions when