“We don’t only want to put people in jail. We want to change behaviours.”
Data is an important factor in designing strategies to prevent environmental crimes, prosecute offenders, protect victims and prepare capacities of relevant institutions. Questions raised in this workshop were: Where does the most useful data come from? Who collects it, and how? How does it get shared, stored and analysed? And how do you turn it into action? What information would be useful that we don’t currently have?
To improve knowledge management and data sharing, participants highlighted the need to increase the quality of data sources, how information is collected, stored and analysed. New trends in data management can allow decision-makers to access analytical models that “follow the money”, can detect financers of illicit economies, and trace mineral resources that enter supply chains. This includes data to monitor key inputs of the supply chain such as gas, movement of herds, explosives, among others.
Another starting point is to have focal points in different countries, that can facilitate “shadow analysis” among institutions such as financial investigation units (FIU), when there are transnational operations. Also, organisations such as FIU can be benefited by institutional arrangements like being part of the Superintendence of Banks and Financial Institutions, which is the case in Peru. This allows for a certain level of authority and access to information, which is easier to request. Some important challenges persist, however, in terms of trade-based money laundering, or the use of cash to clean proceeds.
The convergence of illicit and licit business underscores the importance of other types of interventions, such as raising penalties for facilitators of criminal activities (e.g., banks, accounting firms, and law firms), strengthening legislation on financial disclosure and banks’ due diligence, improving linkages between banks and regulatory authorities, and improving monitoring of permitting and certification processes in regulated markets.
It is crucial to use data to understand how illegal, grey and legal markets merge at certain points in production chains, and to not only focus law enforcement’s efforts on the first nodes of the illicit supply chains (local producers, for example), which in many cases don’t account for much of the earnings of the criminal markets.
Understanding the illicit political economy is crucial for interrupting the relationships between criminal actors and their protectors and strengthening points of weakness in the accountability system. Moreover, sharing information among law enforcement, financial intelligence units, civil society, and the private sector to identify criminal actors and behaviours across criminal markets may reduce the number of individuals who fall through the cracks and reveal those who operate in multiple markets1.