International criminal law (ICL), applied by international tribunals and national courts, holds persons accountable for the gravest international crimes. The core crimes recognized to date are genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and the crime of aggression (Cryer et al., 2019). The focus of ICL, up to the present, has been anthropocentric: the core crimes are primarily concerned with harms to humans or human society (Smith, 2013; Mwanza, 2018; Durney, 2018).
This traditional anthropocentric focus reflects the forces that shaped the field. International law evolves with the consent of states. As a result, progress is difficult in a field that seeks to hold ruling elites accountable, because those very elites must be convinced to agree to any new proposed restraints. Those enjoying governmental power are reluctant to give up immunities, allow extra-territorial jurisdiction, and accept duties to prosecute, for a system that does not serve immediate self-interest but aims to serve more idealistic aims. Thus, in order to build agreement on more robust enforcement rules, the crimes triggering these exceptional rules were kept narrow, with high thresholds, focusing on the gravest conduct that is condemned by widely shared moral consensus. International criminal law is concerned with ‘the most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole’. 1 The rapid, ongoing, anthropogenic destruction of our environment is one of the greatest threats to the health and survival of humans and other species (IPCC, 2021; UNEP, 2019a, 2019b, 2021; UNSG, 2018). The global public rightly identifies environmental degradation as one of the greatest global dangers (World Economic Forum, 2021). Even given ICL’s narrow focus–it deals only with most serious crimes of concern to the international community as a whole–the destruction of the environment, on which all life depends, clearly warrants such concern (Cho, 2000; Mégret, 2011; Jodoin & Saito, 2017). Of course, ICL is not a panacea (Gilbert, 2014); indeed, on the contrary, ICL is not even one of the main vehicles for the many sweeping social, cultural, and political reforms that are necessary for human societies to become sustainable. The main tools for a global green transition will be found in other social, political, cultural, and legal domains. But, as will be suggested below, ICL can potentially play a modest supporting role, by providing new avenues of enforcement for the gravest violations and strengthening social censure against environmentally irresponsible conduct (Kemp, 2013). Green criminologists have long explored the underutilized potential of criminal law to bolster environmental protection, correcting the tendency of criminal law to understate environmental harms and to overlook the types of massive harms typically inflicted by powerful