Alex Baird & Morgan Burcher’s article on ‘The carbon footprint of crime in Victoria’ in Crime, Law and Social Change.
Abstract
Climate change mitigation should permeate all areas of government policy, however; the Criminal Justice System (CJS) currently remains absent from Australia’s means of climate change mitigation with exception to the legislative reporting of carbon emissions in the provision of governmental reports. Anthropogenic carbon emissions are the scientific drivers behind climate change and arise from the energy consumption and lifecycle of objects used in criminological contexts, potentially hindering climate change mitigation. Therefore, the aim of this study is to quantify the first carbon footprint of crime in Australia using the state of Victoria as a case study. In doing so, an Environmentally Extended Input-Output Analysis is undertaken to discern common criminal offence types and CJS expenditures release over 480,000 t of carbon emissions across Victoria. Homicide attributes the highest carbon footprint per-incident out of each criminal offence in Victoria. Whilst security, drug abuse and police activity attribute the three highest carbon footprints out of all criminal offence types and CJS expenditures in Victoria from 2016 to 2017. The CJS has currently been overlooked in terms of climate change mitigation, therefore, this article highlights various sources of carbon emissions and prospective pathways to target for climate change mitigation. Access the article here.