Do environmental crimes contribute to air pollution? Empirical evidence and effects on health

This paper investigates the effect of environmental crimes on ambient air pollution in Italy, using annual provincial data over the period 2010–2016. While the impact of ambient air pollution on health has been the focus of a significant amount of literature, a nascent body of works is focusing on the impact of illegal behavior on environmental quality. Our work is ideally divided in two steps: firstly, we identify and assess empirically the potential correlation between environmental crimes and four different kinds of ambient air pollution. Secondly, we identify the health impacts that may be triggered by environmentally harmful illegal activities, through their impact on ambient air pollution, by linking them to existing contributions. Our findings suggest that the existence of such an “indirect” link may indeed be confirmed. We find that higher levels of PM2.5, PM10, and O3 concentration are associated with higher levels of environmental crimes related to forest fires and landscape violations (except for PM10 in the latter case), while NO2 concentration is not significantly associated with any environmental crime. On the other hand, we also find non-linearities in the estimated correlations. We conclude our analysis by providing a straightforward quantification of health-related impacts of ambient air pollution changes potentially triggered by criminal environmental behaviors. We hope that our findings could contribute to a more accurate evaluation of environmental crime impacts and, subsequently, inform future criminal environmental enforcement and environmental policies.