The role of regional environmental criminology in the digital age

Aim: To highlight the increasing importance of environmental criminology in addressing environmental safety challenges in the digital age.Discussion. In the digital age, it is important to shape environmental consciousness and culture through the system of countering environmental crime. To achieve this goal, the foundations of environmental safety should be promoted by attracting new technologies from the digital world. Content analysis of electronic mass media showed that in some regions of the Russian Federation there are environmental crowdsourcing projects, network communities and virtual civil platforms as a corollary of offline (traditional) civil participation. The republics of the North Caucasus need to take into account the positive experience of key regions of Russia, for example, Moscow, in creating digital databases for environmental supervision. Crimes in the field of ecology should be singled out in an independent section of the Special Part of the Criminal Code of the Russian Federation as a priority area of criminal law policy. The authors propose the improvement of the system of execution of punishments for committing crimes in the field of environmental protection by creating specialised correctional centres for the implementation of punishment against persons who have committed environmental crimes directed at their resocialization.Conclusion. Strengthening state control over the use of the digital space in the regions of the Russian Federation will be facilitated by the formation of environmental justice as an element of improving the general system of combating crime. The effectiveness of such an environmental protection countermeasure system also depends on the quality of research in the field of protecting the natural world, which increases the importance of environmental criminology in the digital age