Daan van Uhm appointed professor of Environmental Crime

News item also on behalf of the Open Universiteit.

About the chair

Daan van Uhm will play a leading role in establishing an Open Universiteit/NSCR centre of expertise on Environmental Crime, in which other knowledge institutions can also participate. The aim of this centre is to develop and expand research and contract education in the field of empirical study of environmental crime.

Research within the chair

The research within the chair will focus on environmental crime, also known as “green crime”. Due to the global scarcity of natural resources, transnational criminal organisations are increasingly turning to environmental crime. Van Uhm will focus on the complexity of this environmental crime from the perspective of green criminology, in which the classic distinction between conventional and non-conventional criminals no longer applies. Van Uhm will focus on how international criminal organisations operate, the relationship between different types of crime and damage, and what changes in approach this requires. To this end, he will work closely with partners at home and abroad.

About Prof. Daan van Uhm

Prof. Daan van Uhm studied criminology at Utrecht University, where he obtained his PhD in 2016. Since then, he has worked at the same institution, first as a university lecturer and, from 2022, as an associate professor. His disciplinary basis is criminology, and his teaching and research activities focus on environmental crime. In his Veni project, which began in 2018, he used an innovative approach to investigate how and why transnational criminal organisations are increasingly focusing on the illegal trade in natural resources by examining the link between environmental crimes and other serious forms of crime. He is continuing this research with his prestigious ERC Starting Grant, in which he focuses on understanding how and why joint criminal enterprises launder natural resources and what the consequences are for the environment.

Prof. Daan van Uhm