Over more than a decade of investigating wildlife trafficking networks around the world, the Wildlife Justice Commission has learned one lesson that has become impossible to ignore: environmental crime does not exist in isolation.
Environmental crime is one of the most lucrative forms of transnational organised crime, with illegal logging, fishing, and wildlife trade estimated to generate USD 1 trillion or more each year. Behind this industry lies a powerful, global criminal infrastructure driven by massive profits, low risks, and enabled by corruption at every level of the supply chain.
Through years of investigations, Wildlife Justice has repeatedly seen how environmental crime intersects with other forms of serious and organised crime. The same networks involved in wildlife trafficking are often also involved in drug trafficking, human trafficking, migrant smuggling, corruption, money laundering, tax offences, and fraud.
This is what we call crime convergence.
Criminal networks do not organise themselves according to government mandates or enforcement priorities. They diversify, adapt, and engage in multiple types of crime at the same time. Yet too often, environmental crime continues to be treated as a standalone issue, disconnected from the broader criminal ecosystem in which it operates.
Our investigations have repeatedly demonstrated why this approach falls short. The importance of understanding crime convergence was tragically reinforced on 3 June 2026, when Wildlife Justice supported a cross-border operation that led to the arrest of two suspects in Mozambique wanted in connection with the murder of two South African nationals in Kruger National Park.
The suspects crossed into Mozambique believing the border would shield them from accountability. It did not. Through coordinated action involving South African and Mozambican law enforcement authorities and park rangers, they were tracked down and arrested. A third suspect was subsequently arrested in Zimbabwe through cross-border cooperation between authorities in South Africa, Mozambique, and Zimbabwe.
Crucially, intelligence gathered through previous investigations involving converging criminal activities proved instrumental in locating the suspects arrested in Mozambique. It enabled investigators to draw on an established understanding of how criminal networks operate in the buffer zones surrounding the park, including their links to the stolen vehicle trade.
This is precisely why an intelligence-led, cross-border response is so important. Understanding the broader criminal ecosystem often provides the intelligence needed to address individual crimes and disrupt the networks behind them.
This case illustrates an important reality: criminal networks do not organise themselves according to government mandates, yet law enforcement responses often remain structured that way.
Regulatory and environmental authorities may not have the mandate, tools, or incentives to pursue corruption, money laundering, or other converging crimes. Even when referrals are made, those parallel offences can fall away amid competing enforcement priorities.
As a result, converging crimes remain unaddressed; high-level offenders, facilitators, and financial beneficiaries remain untouched, and criminal networks continue operating largely intact.
That is why crime convergence matters: It creates opportunities for law enforcement when the response is organised around the network, rather than the commodity.
- States should make crime convergence part of routine practice through joint investigations and task forces, organised crime group mapping, parallel financial and corruption investigations, and greater use of special investigative techniques to expose the wider criminal ecosystem.
- Investigators and prosecutors should be encouraged to go beyond the initial environmental offence to investigate and prosecute converging crimes and to use alternative legislation where it can deliver stronger penalties and greater impact.
- The international legal framework has a critical role to play. The United Nations Convention against Transnational Organized Crime (UNTOC) and the United Nations Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) already provide States with a comprehensive set of tools, including international cooperation, financial investigations, asset recovery, and action against organised criminal groups. The challenge is not the absence of tools, but their more consistent use in environmental crime cases.
Current discussions under UNTOC present an important opportunity to strengthen the global response to crimes that affect the environment. At present, whether environmental crimes trigger organised crime tools often depends on how they are classified nationally and whether they meet the UNTOC “serious crime” threshold. Where they do not, criminal networks exploit the gap.
States should seize the opportunity at the next UNTOC Conference of the Parties to support ambitious commitments, including progress towards an additional Protocol on crimes that affect the environment. This would help harmonise criminalisation frameworks, strengthen international cooperation, and enable more systematic use of organised crime tools against converging criminal networks.
Environmental crimes are still too often treated as niche conservation issues or low-priority regulatory offences, when in reality they are embedded within transnational organised crime economies.
If we want to dismantle criminal networks, we cannot treat environmental crimes in isolation.
The lesson is clear: to effectively tackle environmental crime, we must follow the network, not just the commodity.
