This workshop is a joint initiative of the European Space Agency (ESA), the Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission and of UNODC to foster a greater uptake of EO technology in environmental compliance assurance.

The Joint Research Centre (JRC) of the European Commission provides independent, science-based evidence and knowledge to inform European policy. Notably, it generates geospatial intelligence that enhances the European Commission’s capacity to implement and enforce EU environmental legislation. To promote environmental compliance assurance across EU Member States, the JRC actively identifies and disseminates best practices regarding the utilization of geospatial data. In this regard, the present workshop serves as a critical forum, uniting practitioners and the Earth Observation community to address key challenges in environmental compliance. Furthermore, the JRC hosts the Commission’s Knowledge Centre on Earth Observation (KCEO), which acts as the central focal point for integrating EO data into European Union policy.

The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC) supports Member States in preventing and countering crimes that affect the environment by strengthening criminal justice frameworks, enhancing investigative and analytical capacities, and fostering international cooperation. UNODC’s work covers a wide range of offences–including wildlife trafficking, forest crime, illegal mining and crimes in the fisheries sector and addresses their links with transnational organized crime, corruption, money-laundering and other enabling offences. Through this workshop, UNODC contributes a global law-enforcement and criminal justice perspective, together with extensive capacity building experience, to help integrate Earth Observation-based intelligence into operational workflows, cross-border investigations and evidence-based strategies to counter crimes that affect the environment.

Workshop Objectives

The workshop aims to:

• Identify and review methods enabled by geospatial data sources, and particularly EO, to support better detection and characterization of environmental crimes and their consequences;
• Enhance awareness of the latest developments in geospatial and open source intelligence in the context of multidisciplinary evidence collection to assure environmental compliance;
• Identify gaps in administrative capacity or expertise among enforcement authorities;
• Collect insights on priority areas to improve the integration of EO capabilities in intelligence workflows and protocols for environmental crime investigations;
• Aligning with stakeholders’ agenda, highlight the importance of developing crime-countering strategies that are evidence-based and data-driven, addressing both the root causes of crime and its environmental, societal and economic dimensions;
• Inform the definition of requirements for EO and other geospatial products and services supporting environmental crime investigations;
• Outline a way forward to implement new solutions for a wider uptake of EO into investigations of environmental crimes within the ESA-JRC cooperation activities.