April 20, 2026
Stone Center Junior Scholar and John Jay College of Criminal Justice Ph.D. Candidate Jim Riungu is an environmental lawyer who knows how to handle live snakes — brought in as evidence — in court. He has worked as a legal consultant for wildlife conservation organizations and is an adjunct lecturer at John Jay College, where he teaches criminal and environmental justice. Riungu earned his law degree from the University of Nairobi and later received a master’s degree in law from Lewis & Clark Law School. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
How did you first become interested in the field of environmental criminology?
Riungu: In law school, I encountered the question of: What kind of lawyer do I want to be? Most of my friends went into corporate law, some went into criminal law. At first, I tried a little bit of criminal law, and loved it, but I just didn’t enjoy getting criminals off the hook. I started working for a nonprofit, and I ended up falling in love with environmental law. The protection of the environment has a lot of elements of criminal law. I felt I could apply my law degree for good.
I worked at Wildlife Direct, a nonprofit in Kenya, where I started working on crimes related to elephants and rhinos. We were doing capacity-building interventions to support rangers, investigators, and judges to strengthen their response to wildlife crime. The more I was looking at poaching and trafficking, the more I realized that the existing answers and solutions were not good enough. Environmental criminology, which falls under current crime science, is very useful in helping us find some answers to some of these problems.
Before law school, did you feel any attachment to environmental issues?
Riungu: Yes, I think most Kenyans have a deep attachment to and connection with wildlife and nature, because it’s so close to us. I grew up close to Mount Kenya National Park. You grow up around nature and then over time you start seeing it get destroyed. You end up noticing that the benefits of tourism are going to a very select few. Meanwhile, the burdens of tourism are going to local communities who live within and along national parks. This, then, became an area that I could channel my entire career toward protecting — it was a natural, meant-to-be type of connection, with me working in environmental protection and then using my law degree in environmental protection.
You also research carbon credit fraud. Is that a completely different area of your work?
Riungu: Carbon credit fraud is related to my work. If you are going to look into environmental crime, then you realize crimes against the environment are crimes against nature, and nature has realms: air, water, and land. My supervisor, for example, does amazing work on fish and marine crime. I do a lot of research on terrestrial wildlife crime. Carbon credit fraud is now an emerging crime and it is heavily under-researched in the Global South, therefore worthy of study.
So I decided to take up the challenge of researching this area. I wanted to understand how these unscrupulous and predatory developers target local communities and, more importantly, how we can protect these local communities from this predation. My previous research building crime scripts on carbon credit crime shows how they take advantage of vulnerabilities in enforcement to perpetrate fraud. I have further used game theory to show the compliance gaps and market rewards that incentivize actors in carbon credit stakeholders to commit fraud. Studying these crimes is where I feel most useful and hopefully my work can inform and lead to some type of reform.
Before you started at John Jay, you worked for the nonprofit Wildlife Investigators Training Alliance. What kind of projects did you work on?
Riungu: Wildlife Investigators Training Alliance is an alliance of law enforcement professionals from all over the world who work with wildlife law enforcement. I was advising them on how to train rangers, prosecutors, and judges on how to handle wildlife crime issues. Not so many people know how to deal with wildlife as evidence. For example: How does one deal with chain of custody relating to ten snakes as live evidence in court? That was an incredible time for me, being able to travel all over Africa and do such impactful work.
Why did you decide to get a Ph.D. in criminal justice after earning two law degrees? And do you plan to keep doing research once you receive your degree?
Riungu: I took the bar in Kenya, and I’ve been a practicing attorney there. Most lawyers who go study further go the SJD [Doctor of Juridical Science] route, but here’s the thing: The SJD route makes you a better lawyer, but at this moment, I don’t need to be a better lawyer. I want to be a better crime scientist.
I will take up the consultancy route, which remains an amazing avenue to use these specialized skills that I know. But beyond that, I would love to get into academia. I genuinely fell in love with teaching at John Jay. I’m also interested in studying other areas of environmental crime, like fraud in other greenhouse emissions such as HFCs, PFCs — there seems to be a lot of fraud in reporting on this, as well as remaining an under-researched area. There’s a real need for more exploratory work there.
