1 December 2025
Ahead of the 11th session of the Conference of the States Parties (CoSP11) to the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) in December 2025, the UNCAC Coalition’s Environmental Crime and Corruption Working Group (ECC WG) called on States Parties to prioritise preventing and addressing corruption that enables crimes that affect the environment (CAE) and undermines environmental and climate action as a central pillar of UNCAC implementation. It further urged States Parties to take decisive action at CoSP11 in this regard.
To support this aim, the ECC WG developed this compendium to address existing knowledge gaps, provide evidence-based justification, and highlight relevant examples and good practices that can inform action on preventing and combating corruption driving CAE and impacting climate action.
A comprehensive review and deeper understanding of how UNCAC is implemented in relation to CAE and climate-related corruption is essential to ensure that commitments made at CoSP11 translate into meaningful action on the ground. This Working Group compendium presents insights and feedback gathered from individual Working Group members, reflecting their experiences and observations across diverse national contexts. The views presented do not necessarily represent the official position of all Working Group members or of the UNCAC Coalition as a whole.
The recommendations put forward aim to build on CoSP Resolution 8/12 (2019) on Preventing and combating corruption as it relates to crimes that have an impact on the environment, which marked an important milestone acknowledging the linkages between corruption and CAE.
Since then, threats have intensified: organised crime groups have expanded their illegal environmental operations, and the scale of climate-related finance has grown significantly, bringing both new opportunities for protection and heightened risks of misuse. Gaps remain in key areas, including climate impacts, beneficial ownership transparency, oversight mechanisms for climate finance, procurement integrity and transparency, enforcement, international cooperation, and civil society participation and protection. The compendium presents two categories of examples:
• Gaps and challenges — instances where current frameworks reveal weaknesses, shortcomings, or insufficient implementation.
• Good practices — examples of effective anti-corruption policies, measures, and initiatives demonstrating positive results.
All examples are based on verifiable information, referencing publicly available sources, authoritative publications, and documentation from the work of Working Group member organisations and other reputable entities. Hyperlinks to original sources are provided wherever possible.
Recommendations
The compendium puts forward 26 recommendations to strengthen efforts and to prevent and combat corruption linked to CAE and impacting climate action.
The recommendations aim to build on existing UNCAC commitments and strengthen prevention, enforcement, international cooperation, asset recovery, technical assistance, and information exchange in relation to corruption linked to CAE and climate action.
