The Working Paper Saplings of hope presents an updated overview of emerging and promising prevention and enforcement actions, initiatives and measures implemented by States Parties to the UN Convention against Corruption (UNCAC) to combat corruption related to crimes that have an impact on the environment. It focuses specifically on initiatives from 2024 and 2025.

This Case Study highlights how investigators of Indonesia’s Ministry of Environment and Forestry achieved their first conviction for money laundering linked to forestry offences, leveraging institutional and legal changes in financial investigation procedures.

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The article analyses drivers and determinants of illicit wildlife trade (IWT), targeting those factors that support the participation of individuals in poaching and transportation of wildlife goods.

Environmental criminals and their corrupt facilitators get rich by destroying our planet and its natural resources. This publication for the Targeting Natural Resource Corruption (TNRC) project explains how and why to confiscate their illicit assets – with or without a criminal conviction.

The paper investigates the role of criminal networks in fostering illegal wildlife trade (IWT), and how these relational structures interact with transnational organized crime. The paper frames these topics within the debate around the opportunistic or organized nature of IWT. The aim is to understand how chaotic behaviors can transform into an ordered and organized strategy.

This collection of insights on corruption, the environment and illicit trade emerges from the monthly Corrupting the Environment webinar series between December 2020 and August 2021. 

Published under our Green Corruption programme, this is a case study about a South African fishing company, Hout Bay Fishing Industries, that overfished lobster and other protected fish in deliberate breach of government-established quotas. The case study contains numerous important lessons for those seeking to follow the money in large wildlife trafficking cases.