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A large proportion of children are at risk of food insecurity during school holidays in the UK. The government-funded Holiday Activities and Food (HAF) programme provides free holiday clubs offering at least one healthy meal/day to eligible children and adolescents. This study aims at evaluating the nutritional quality of food provision at HAF holiday clubs, particularly hot/cold and vegetarian/non-vegetarian meals. Menu variants (n = 2759) from 49 HAF holiday clubs were assessed for adherence to School Food Standards (SFS) and their notional compositional quality, which was scored utilising a novel nutrient-based meal quality index. The median adherence to SFS across all available menus was 70% (IQR 59–79%). Overall, hot variants scored statistically higher menu quality scores than cold variants for both 5–11y (92.3 (80.7–102.7) vs. 80.4 (69.3–90.6)) and 11–18y (73.5 (62.5–85.8) vs. 58.9 (50.0–70.7)) criteria. Cold and hot menu variants tended to score differentially for quality sub-components. These findings highlight areas for potential future improvement in HAF holiday club provision with a tendency for food provision to appear less ideal for attendees for those aged 11–18. Ensuring that children from low-income households have access to a healthy diet is crucial to reduce UK health inequalities.

IntroductionDuring military service, many household costs for both married and single service personnel are subsidised, and transition can leave veterans unprepared for the financial demands of civilian life. Armed Forces organisations such as Sailor, Soldier, Air Force Association (SSAFA) play a central role in understanding the financial challenges that UK veterans face and provide an insight into the financial hardship experienced by veterans. The aim of this study was to use SSAFA beneficiary data as a proxy to identify the nature of financial benefit, the spatial distribution of financial hardship in the Scottish SSAFA beneficiary community and explore factors that might predict where those recipients are located.MethodsUsing an anonymised data set of Scottish SSAFA financial beneficiaries between 2014 and 2019, this study used a geographical methodology to identify the geospatial distribution of SSAFA benefit recipients and exploratory regression analysis to explore factors to explain where SSAFA beneficiaries are located.ResultsOver half of benefit applicants (n=10 735) were concentrated in only 50 postcode districts, showing evidence of a clustered pattern, and modelling demonstrates association with area-level deprivation. The findings highlight strong association between older injured veterans and need for SSAFA beneficiary assistance.ConclusionThe findings demonstrate that beneficiaries were statistically clustered into areas of high deprivation, experiencing similar challenges to that of the wider population in these areas. Military service injury or disability was strongly associated with areas of high SSAFA benefit use and in those areas high unemployment was also a significant factor to consider.

This systematic review summarizes the relationship between shale gas development and crime. A comprehensive search uncovered 25 shale–crime quantitative studies published between 2005 and 2019. These outputs suggest the study of shale gas development and crime is multidisciplinary, increasing rapidly and mainly carried out in the United States. When considered in aggregate these studies provide clear evidence that shale gas development is likely to increase crime. A majority of studies find that shale gas development increases total crime, violent crime, property crime, social disorganization crimes and violence against women. We conclude by suggesting that these findings should be considered by policymakers and planners when determining whether and how shale development should be allowed.

Despite three decades of research into green/environmental crime, little is known about the enforcement activities of conservation officers (COs). What is known about CO behavior has been compiled ...

Holiday clubs—publicly or privately operated organizations that provide child care services and healthy food to disadvantaged children in the United Kingdom (UK) when schools are not in session—are increasing in number. We know a good deal about the effectiveness of the clubs in terms of nutrition-related outcomes, but little is known about the anti-poverty resources these holiday clubs may provide. The possibility that club funding may be centralized through the national government requires a better understanding of holiday club resources. This study describes the range of resources that holiday clubs deliver and reports on how these resources are acquired and brokered by club staff and volunteers. We use data from seventeen clubs operating in disadvantaged communities in North East England during the summer of 2017, and find that clubs deliver an assortment of anti-poverty resources that are often tied to staff (personal and professional) networks.

It has been argued that the temperature increase caused by anthropogenic climate change will produce a significant increase in violent crime. Support for that prediction is often based on statistical analyses of seasonal temperature and crime data cycles across days, months, and quarters and sometimes on large geographic areas. Within-year temperature changes are very large, however, relative to the 30-yr temperature increases employed to measure climate change. In addition, because temperature trends associated with climate change vary geographically, analyses should employ small geographic units for which temperature changes are measured over yearly intervals and for long periods of time. To address these conditions, this study examined the long-term temperature–crime association for homicides in New York and London for 1895–2015. Consistent with previous studies examining seasonal weather and crime patterns, we found a positive correlation between annual homicide rates and temperature, but only at the bivariate level. This relationship became statistically insignificant in both New York and London when gross domestic product is controlled. Moreover, the bivariate relationship between temperature and homicide is statistically insignificant when correcting for nonstationarity. Thus, it does not appear that climate change has led to higher rates of homicide in New York and London over the long term. These nonfindings are important because they suggest that studies of climate change and violence might do well to consider alternative mechanisms that mediate the relationship between climate change and violence.

Objectives:\ud This paper reports results of an evaluation of 17 holiday clubs located throughout North East England that ran during the summer of 2017, designed to reduced summertime food insecurity.\ud \ud Study design:\ud Questionnaire administed to parents/caregivers of children who attended a holiday club.\ud \ud Methods:\ud Ordinary Least Squares regression models were used to predict Warwick-Edinburg Mental Wellbeing scale scores measuring parental mental wellbeing.\ud \ud Results:\ud We find that after a summer of attending a holiday club, the most important factor associated with higher parental wellbeing scores is the reduction in social isolation and increased relationships that the parent and their children build while children attend holiday clubs.\ud \ud Conclusions:\ud Our results suggest that reducing social isolation for parents and families during summertime is a likely a latent function of holiday clubs. These are important findings in that the benefits of holiday club appear to extend beyond access to food and reductions in household food insecurity.

The decarbonization of energy systems to achieve net zero carbon emissions will likely see the rapid development of carbon capture and storage, energy storage in the subsurface and geothermal energy projects. Subsurface data, in particular seismic reflection surveys and borehole data are vital for geoscientists and engineers to carry out comprehensive assessments of both the opportunities and risks for these developments. Their cost of acquisition means that such legacy data are commonly the only mechanism for site selection so biased data distribution must be accommodated. Here, legacy subsurface data from United Kingdom onshore hydrocarbon and coal exploration in the United Kingdom are collated and reviewed for their suitability for geoenergy activities. We provide a description of the spatial coverage and a chronology of the acquisition of key seismic reflection and borehole data, as well as examine data resolution and limitations. We discuss the implications of spatial variability in subsurface datasets and the associated subsurface uncertainty as this is vitally important to understanding the suitability of data for decision making. We examine societal aspects of data uncertainty and discuss that when the same data are used to communicate subsurface uncertainty and risk, the source of the data should also be considered, especially where data are not easily publicly accessible. Understanding the provenance and quality criteria of data are vitally important for future geoenergy activities and public confidence in subsurface activities. Finally, we ask should there be minimum data collection criterion, such as resolution requirements, ahead of subsurface activities with potentially significant impacts to the environment, economy, and society?

The first discussion of green criminology appeared in 1990, when this area of research was proposed as a unique specialty within criminology (Lynch, 1990) and specifically as an extension of radical or Marxist criminology (for discussion see, Lynch & Michalowski, 2006) useful for constructing a political economic and class analysis of crime, law and justice related to environmental destruction. Today, nearly 30 years later, there is impressive diversity in green criminological studies. Here, we draw attention only to the political economic approach to green criminology. When necessary, however, we distinguish the political economic view from other green criminological approaches, referring to PEG-C or political economic green criminology.

Drawing on prior studies, green criminologists have hypothesized that climate change will both raise the mean temperature and the level of crime. We call this the “climate change-temperature-crime hypothesis” (“CC-T-C”). This hypothesis is an extension of research performed on temperature and crime at the individual level. Other research explores this relationship by testing for the relationship between seasonality and crime within a given period of time (i.e., within years). Climate change, however, produces small changes in temperature over long periods of time, and in this view, the effect of climate change on crime should be assessed across and not within years. In addition, prior CC-T-C studies sometimes employ large geographic aggregations (e.g., the entire whole United States), which masks the CC-T-C association that appears at lower levels of aggregation. Moreover, globally, crime has declined across nations since the early 1990s, during a period of rising mean global temperatures, suggesting that the CC-T-C hypothesis does not fit the general trends in temperature and crime over time. Addressing these issues, the present study assesses the CC-T-C relationship for a sample of 15 large ( N = 15) US cities over a 14-year period. Given the CC-T-C hypothesis parameters, we assessed this relationship using correlations between individual crime and temperature trends for each city. Crime trends were measured by both the number and rate of eight Uniform Crime Report (UCR) Part I crimes, so that for each city, there are 16 crime-temperature correlations. Using a liberal p value ( p = .10), the temperature-crime correlations were rejected as insignificant in 220 of the 234 tests (94%). We discuss the Implications of this finding and suggest that rather than focusing on the temperature-crime relationship, green criminologists interested in the deleterious effects of climate change draw attention to its larger social, economic, environmental and ecological justice implications.

This research examines psychosocial stress associated with shale gas development through the narratives of residents and the Revised Impact of Event Scale (IES-R). We carried out our research in three of England&rsquo, s communities impacted by shale gas development. To gather data, we conducted qualitative interviews and engaged in participant observation in all three communities and conducted a quantitative survey of residents. From our qualitative interviews it was apparent that the residents we spoke with experienced significant levels of stress associated with shale gas development in each community. Importantly, residents reported that stress was not only a reaction to development, but a consequence of interacting with industry and decision makers. Our quantitative findings suggest that a significant portion of residents 14.1% living near the shale gas sites reported high levels of stress (i.e., scoring 24 or more points) even while the mean IES-R score of residents living around the site is relatively low (i.e., 9.6, 95% CI 7.5&ndash, 11.7). We conclude that the experiences, of the three English communities, reported in the qualitative interviews and quantitative survey are consistent with the reports of stress in the United States for those residents who live in shale gas communities. We therefore suggest that psychosocial stress is an important negative externality, which needs to be taken seriously by local planning officers and local planning committees when considering exploration and development permits for shale gas.

Summer is a stressful time of year for many parents as they struggle to meet household expenses and feed children. The aim of the present study is to determine if there is an association between summertime food insecurity (i.e., holiday hunger) and parental stress among a sample of UK parents with school age children living in North East England. A cross-sectional sample of (n = 252) parents are analyzed using holiday hunger as the independent variable and a subjective measure of stress that treats summer as a &lsquo, stressful event&rsquo, as the dependent variable. Of the parents in the sample, 64.8% reported at least some level of holiday hunger. We find parents facing any holiday hunger scored substantively higher on the overall 75-point Impact of Event Scale (mean difference = 30.4, 95% confidence interval ((CI) 24.2&ndash, 36.6), the 35-point intrusion subscale (13.7, 95% CI 10.8&ndash, 16.5), and the 40-point avoidance subscale (16.7, 95% CI 13.3&ndash, 20.2). These findings are replicated in a regression analysis. In addition, we find that holiday hunger partially mediates the association between economic hardship (i.e., unemployment and poverty) and parental stress. We conclude by suggesting that government policies addressing economic hardship are not only likely to reduce holiday hunger, but also improve mental wellbeing.

Despite increased interest in green/environmental crimes, little is known about these offenses, perhaps because traditional criminological questions and methods are typically applied to study street crimes rather than green crimes. For example, while the geography of street crime has long been studied, the geographic distribution of green crimes has been ignored. The current study addresses this issue using US EPA Environmental Compliance History Online data to construct measures of environmental crimes across US states. The geographic over-lap between the distribution of green crime and street crime at the state level is then examined. In addition, an effort is made to discover correlates related to the geographic distribution of green crime. We found that the distribution of street and green/environmental crimes are unrelated. Moreover, we found that the best predictors of environmental crime rates across states is US EPA region, suggesting these crime rates are organizationally constructed. Our study also indicated that two other factors helped predict the geographic distribution of green crimes: welfare expenditures (states with high welfare expenditures have lower rates of environmental crime); and the black-white population ratio: states with high white populations have less environmental crime, indicating a potential environmental justice issue.

Treadmill of production (ToP) arguments have significant implications for the study of environmental crime. A current limitation of those arguments involves their application to environmental law and its enforcement. We argue that a treadmill of law (ToL) shapes and maintains production through lawmaking and enforcement practices, issues that have yet to receive significant attention in the ToP literature. To illustrate the connection between the ToL and ToP and to facilitate political economic analysis of this connection, we make and discuss three propositions. In particular, we suggest that the ToL will (1) oppose the enhancement of environmental regulation through acts of state corporate crime, if necessary; (2) fail to enforce criminal laws in ways that would alter production practices; and (3) define intense opposition to ToP interests and actors as criminal.

During the development of green criminology, little attention has been paid to how Indigenous/Native Peoples (INP) are victimized by green crime and how they employ environmental activism to resist externally imposed ecological destruction. In the past decade, news services and environmental interest groups have reported on the killing of INP environmental activists who have resisted ecological destruction across the world. Here, we begin to develop a green criminological view of INP victimization and resistance to ecological destruction within the context of the global capitalist treadmill of production, while drawing upon concepts of colonization, imperialism, genocide and ecocide. Our analysis suggests that in the contemporary capitalist world system, expansion of the treadmill of production’s ecological withdrawal process (i.e. the withdrawal of raw materials used in production) not only accelerates ecological disorganization in developing/underdeveloped nations, but may be harmful in nations where INP are dependent on access to nature for survival.

The present study examines the association between employment and offending for a sample of young offenders who are paid to work in a pilot programme known as the Skill Mill. First, we analyse a sample of 39 youths over a period of 10 years (40 quarters) to determine whether Skill Mill employed youth are more likely to desist from offending than a control group of youth who are not employed in the Skill Mill. Those youths employed by the Skill Mill committed 1.12 fewer offences per quarter than the control group (p

Studies that assess the impact of monetary penalties on environmental compliance have yielded mixed results. While some studies suggest fines deter future violations other studies find that fines do little to encourage compliance. This longitudinal study examines the impact of the dollar amount of fines on compliance with environmental laws among major facilities in the state of Michigan (n = 37). Results from a mediation analysis suggest that while noncompliance may slightly decrease immediately following a fine there are few changes to a firm’s long term compliance behavior. Furthermore, analyses of these data suggest that total fines levied prior to the most recent fine actually have a positive relationship with noncompliance. We suggest these results imply a decaying effect of deterrence that is perhaps connected to the organizational structure of the treadmill of production.

Biodiversity has become a topic of study in a variety of disciplines. Within criminology the study of biodiversity loss is often emphasised in the poaching literature. However, an alternative perspective on the political economy of biodiversity loss exists within criminology. While both approaches to biodiversity provide important information for the discipline of criminology, the implications of those approaches have very different implications for environmental discourse related to poverty and social justice. We suggest that poaching studies be viewed with caution as there is a possibility that those studies can be used to ‘;blame the poor’ for biodiversity loss.

Ecological disorganization stemming from conspicuous consumption practices is understudied in the social sciences. In this analysis, we study conspicuous consumption and its implications for environmental sociology, ecological footprint analysis, and green criminology. We examine the issue of conspicuous consumption through the study of items that increase the ecological footprint considerably, that is, through the consumption of “luxury commodities.” Specifically, we draw attention to assessing aspects of ecological footprints of super yachts, super homes, luxury vehicles, and private jets. Taken together, the construction and use of these items in the United States alone is likely to create a CO2 footprint that exceeds those from entire nations. These results are not necessarily surprising but suggest that excessive consumption practices of the wealthy may need to be reinterpreted as criminal when they disrupt the normal regeneration and reproduction of ecosystems by generating excessive ecological disorganization.

Green criminology, now more than 25 years old, has developed primarily through descriptive, theoretical discussions and qualitative assessments. That material is essential to any literature and can stimulate quantitative studies. Green criminology is less empirically orientated than conservation criminology. Quantitative studies are an essential aspect of research and add important information about a subject area that can also shape the kinds of knowledge generated about a topical area or issue. The present study reviews quantitative knowledge in green/conservation criminology from 117 studies organized into five areas: (1) environmental justice; (2) the distribution and consequences of pollution; (3) the social control of environmental crime; (4) environmental social movement research; and (5) harms against (nonhuman) animals. These quantitative studies are important not just for the information they produce, but also as a method for communicating with other disciplines and with other researchers within criminology who are partial to quantitative research over other forms of knowledge production.

Research has shown that neoliberal economic policies may increase violence. In this study we extend this logic to create a “neoliberalism-homicide hypothesis.” We test this hypothesis using two global measures of neoliberalism (the Economic Freedom of the World Index and the Index of Economic Freedom) and 2014 homicide rates for 142 nations. Regression analysis provides little support for the neoliberalism-homicide hypothesis using the global indexes. However, when examining factors that make up these indexes we discover that as size of government and tax burden become more neoliberal across nations, homicide rates increase. A post hoc exploratory analysis suggests that the association between government size, spending, taxes, and homicide is largely indirect and manifests through economic inequality and poverty. That is, neoliberal government policies appear to increase poverty and inequality which, in turn, lead to higher rates of homicide. We situate our findings within the broader literature on neoliberalism and violence and suggest directions for future research.

In the previous section we outlined an argument connecting unsustainable development to human social and ecological justice. In doing so, we provided summaries of several studies whose results support the notion that unsustainable development is differentially distributed across nations, that this differential in unsustainable development is related to the structure of global capitalism and results from the organization of the treadmill of production, and that the organizational structure of capitalism promotes unequal ecological exchange and ecological exploitation in ways that impair the ability of less-developed nations to access and control their own ecological resources. In short, drawing on prior literature, that these conditions, connected to the organization of the capitalist world system, cause social and ecological (in)justice to be unevenly distributed, and have particularly adverse consequences for less-developed nations with respect to equity issues related to access to and the use of ecological resources.

Ecological decline is an important contemporary issue on several different levels of analysis. In the biology and ecology literatures, ecological decline has extraordinary importance when it comes to ecosystem health. The more ecosystems are stressed, the less capable those systems become of supporting themselves and other forms of life. Moreover, as ecosystem stress increases, the ecosystem changes and natural resource adequacy issues emerge. As a result, various species begin to experience the effects of ecological decline on their health and well-being. This can, as scientific studies have illustrated, lead to increasing rates of species extinction as the rapid pace of ecological decline causes a larger and larger number of species to experience a disjunction between their existence requirements and the material structure of local ecosystem changes (see Chap. 5). Animal and plant species cannot easily adapt to the various ecological changes occurring in the world due to their lack of geographic mobility, which may be one of the factors contributing to the accelerated rates of species extinction scientists have discovered in the modern era (e.g., Zalasiewicz et al. 2010; Steffen et al. 2007; Steffen et al. 2011; Stork 2010). These accelerated rates of extinction demonstrate that ecological changes produced by human activity (e.g., anthropogenic climate change) are changing the world so dramatically and quickly that species do not have the necessary time to develop adaptive coping mechanisms that might normally occur if such changes occurred slowly and allowed species to evolve in “normal” ways over long periods of time.