Ecological harm and criminal thresholds: A pilot legal-ecological coding framework for environmental crime judgments

Environmental criminal law frequently relies on open-textured threshold concepts such as "substantial damage, " "serious harm, " and "serious risk" to distinguish administrative unlawfulness from criminally relevant conduct. Yet courts often apply these thresholds without a reproducible framework for structuring ecological seriousness across cases. This article introduces LEDAT ® (Legal-Ecological Damage Assessment Tool), a structured coding framework that combines legal and ecological variables into a Material Environmental Criminal Damage Index (IDPAm), while distinguishing material seriousness from procedural and evidential enforceability. IDPAm measures the material legal-ecological seriousness of a case as structured by the framework; it does not measure criminal liability, ecological damage alone, or the likelihood of conviction. The framework is piloted on 36 Spanish first-instance environmental crime judgments issued between 2020 and 2025, identified through a systematic search of a national jurisprudential database followed by qualitative screening. Cases were independently coded by two trained researchers using a shared coding manual and reconciled after comparison; pending formal agreement measures, coding convergence is reported as descriptive. IDPAm values ranged from 0.7 to 9.3. Most cases fell within predominantly administrative or intermediate grey-area bands, while four reached high material criminal significance. Convictions showed higher descriptive IDPAm values than acquittals, although distributions overlapped substantially and eleven of twenty convictions were conformity-based. Sensitivity checks indicate high ordinal stability under alternative legal/ecological weights, while trigger removal affects band classification. The article makes no predictive, causal, or inferential claims. Its contribution is methodological: LEDAT offers a transparent, contestable, and reproducible framework for empirical analysis of environmental criminal thresholds.