Daan van Uhm appointed Professor of Environmental Crime at Open University
Daan van Uhm has been appointed professor of environmental crime at the Open University (OU) effective March 1. The chair was established in collaboration with the Nederlands Institute for the Study of Crime and Law Enforcement (NSCR). Van Uhm studied criminology at Utrecht University, where he received his PhD in 2016 and has since worked as a lecturer and researcher, since 2022 as Associate Professor of Criminology, specializing in Green Criminology. In 2022, he received an ERC grant for research on 'green laundering', the laundering of illegally obtained tropical hardwood, protected species, metals and minerals.
Daan van Uhm will play a leading role at the Open University in the establishment of an Open University/NSCR Expert Center on Environmental Crime, in which other knowledge institutions may also participate. This center aims to build up and expand research and contract education in the field of the empirical study of environmental crime.
Research within the chair will focus on environmental crime, also known as 'green crime'. Due to the global scarcity of natural resources, transnational criminal organizations are increasingly turning to environmental crime. Van Uhm will focus his attention on the complexity of this type of environmental crime, how international criminal organizations operate here, what the relationship is between different types of crimes and damage, and what change in approach this requires. To this end, he will work closely with partners at home and abroad.
Previously, in the project The diversification of organized crime into the illegal trade in natural resources (for which he received a Veni grant in 2018) Van Uhm used an innovative approach to investigate how and why transnational criminal organizations are increasing their focus 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 since 2022 with an ERC Starting Grant in the project Green Crimes and Joint Crime Ventures: Laundering Natural Resources, in which he focuses on understanding how and why joint criminal enterprises launder natural resources and what the environmental consequences are. Van Uhm is also a board member of the Working Group Green Criminology, one of the working groups within the European Society of Criminology.