You're listening to a stage talk titled Study and Conflicts Impact on the Environment. This week we were joined by Dr Owen Derbyshire from the UK charity, the Conflict and Environment Observatory. Owen spoke about the many different types of conflict pollution and environmental harm they've come across and how the organisation works to monitor it, sometimes for years after the initial fighting has stopped. You can find links to all the resources mentioned in the talk
in the podcast description. This talk was hosted by me, Charlotte Ma, on Thursday the 20th of November 2025 in the Bellingcat Discord server. Hello and welcome back to the Stage Talks series. This week we're exploring the impact of conflict on the environment. We all know the damaging effect of war on society, but the often overlooked toll of war is on the environment. Someone who works to cover this harm is Dr Owen Derbyshire, an environmental scientist working at the Conflict
Environment Observatory. The Conflict Environment Observatory is a UK charity with a mission of increasing awareness and understanding of the environmental and derived humanitarian consequences of conflicts and military activities. They also work with organisations to develop tools to improve data collection and sharing. Their reports focus on regions around the globe with their latest investigating ongoing conflicts from Ukraine
to Sudan. They're also about to release a new database showing the incidents in a searchable format. Hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll have an understanding of what can be measured when it comes to environmental damage caused by conflict and how those measurements could be used to enact change. As we talk, please make sure to add your questions in the chat box via the message bubble icon in the top right corner
of your screen. and please note within your question if you do not want me to read your username out. Okay, Owen, I'm going to mute my mic and pass it over to you. So yeah, hello everyone and thanks for having me. So environmental scientists, we often struggle to document harm and conflict zones. We can't get to sites, samples are dangerous to collect and information is tightly controlled. But with OSINT, we have opened doors that were
previously shut. So we now have satellite archives, we have underground footage, and we have community reporting. And so what we do is bring together environmental science and OSINT. And this allows us to understand wartime environmental harm in ways that simply were not possible a decade ago. But first of all, let's start with a big question. Why? Should we care about war and the environment given everything else that happens in war? Well, environmental harm and conflict translates directly
into harm to people. Pollution, destroyed ecosystems and collapsing services create immediate health risks and they also leave long shadows. You know, sometimes for generations, for example, the legacy of herbicides in South East Asia. Just one example
of how long these effects can linger. And once the war finishes, once the front lines move on, people remain and they're left to live amongst toxic residues, damaged infrastructure, chronic exposures to pollution and maybe more importantly governance vacuums where further environmental exploitation can flourish. We should also care because the environment has intrinsic value of its own. It's the only one we have. It's the
only one in the universe. But conflict accelerates harm to the biodiversity, to wildlife, exactly when ecosystems are already under lots of pressure. And so for as long as this damage continues, there's a real need for organizations like SeaOps to exist. So SeaOps, the Conflicts and Environmental Observatory, we have a simple goal, and that is to reduce environmental damage from armed
conflict and military activity. There are many ways to achieve that, but today I'm just going to focus on one of those, hopefully of most interest to the audience here, and that's monitoring and evidencing environmental harm in a robust and
at times systematic way. Now, if you haven't come across us before, we are a small UK charity formed in 2018 and that was building on earlier work around toxic remnants of war and in part we emerged because of the big potential of open source investigation to give a voice to the environment. 2018 now maybe seems a bit of a bygone age given how dramatically the world around us has shifted. Geopolitical fragmentation, climate stress, AI, disordered discourse and also the growing securitisation
of the environment. However, I think in that time the dial has shifted a bit. The environment is perhaps no longer the silent victim. as we used to say back in 2018, but we need to continue to work hard to ensure it's not a pyrrhic victory and that the environment does not now become the sidelined victim. So we need to sort of stick to our core values to keep on track. So that's solidarity, it's collaboration and it's expert
situated knowledge. And yeah, I think at this point it'd be nice before you see all the pictures and images and stuff to give full credit to my colleagues. So we are comprised of environmental scientists, remote sensing specialists, policy analysts, legal experts, and based in the UK,
the Ukraine and beyond. So for anyone in the audience thinking about Korea, maybe in investigative environmental work, it might seem very niche, but I think it's a growing field and there's lots of space to work in and lots of different paths. So what do we mean? What do I mean when I say environmental harm? and why is this so much different in war to in peacetime? Now, in conflict, environmental harm takes many forms. Some of this is really immediate and obvious,
big explosions. Other forms are slower or more systemic, polluted soils, damaged water systems, or a collapse in environmental governance. But let's start with something very clear and obvious and direct, which is air pollution. Often what we see in almost every war is that oil facilities are targeted and this is just one example from earlier this year in Tehran where there's a nice satellite image here with two fuel storage sites
that have been simultaneously attacked. This is one big difference to peacetime, you might have one of these incidents as a one -off. In war you get them simultaneously, very frequently. And whereas in peace time you have a big civil response to this, most of the time in conflict settings there is no civil response. There's no people, there's no bodies going out to measure air quality and provide PPE and safeguard health
and so on. The air quality impacts, now maybe we don't know anything much about what's going on in the stratosphere, mass missile launches, you know, they could be depleting ozone. So there's different interesting research angles to go in. But maybe bringing things back down to the ground is exposure to air pollution that is very linked to war, so energetic compounds and repellents that you wouldn't, civilians would not be exposed
to in peacetime. So this on screen here is an explosion of an ammunition storage site in a densely populated area. Sticking with this example, showing the damage from such an explosion in eastern Ukraine, you can also see how it may lead to widespread land contamination and energetic materials, for example, TNT. We know this is a possible carcinogen and exposure to even low concentrations can lead to long -term health impacts. You know, waste from these kind of explosions
can also pose serious health threats. So even from the very building materials themselves. So these, for example, the Asbestos Mountains in Gaza. You could have imagined a child surviving everything that's gone on there, only to grow up and die from asbestosis. Examples of complex land contamination in urban areas, especially when different types of facilities with different
pollution profiles are hit. So here's the area of about a kilometre by a kilometre in Bari Industrial, this area in Khartoum, which has destroyed plastic, pharmaceutical and food factories. Next to destroyed warehouses and car workshops, together this creates a very complex pollution mix. So land contamination, it's not just an urban problem. When the fighting is in fields it becomes a big problem for crops, both now and in the future. That speaks to food
security, it speaks to livelihoods. Soil is physically, biologically and chemically damaged. Explosives like RDX can bioaccumulate in crops and pose reverberating threats for many many years. On top of this is the risk from unexploded ordnance and other military litter. So particularly at the moment there's concern from the impact of fibre optic drones and the impact they will have
on wildlife in Ukraine especially. But there's also reports of them being used elsewhere now so we've seen this major change in material being used in war. which could have really significant long -term effects on wildlife. Even entire nature reserves have been transformed delicate ecosystems into military training grounds. This has happened a lot in Ukraine. So then we come to the very profound impact war has on water and its reverberating
impacts. Just one example would be the militarisation and draining of the Mesopotamian marshes in Iraq. starting back in the 80s, not only altering the entire hydrological system, but also an entire culture. Nowadays we're seeing this over -resurgence in using water as a military tactic. Huge events like the Kokovka Dam collapse, but in addition to those very large events, there's also thousands of small -scale damages to water and sanitation infrastructure, and this can release pollution
into both surface waters. but also down into groundwater where the impacts are stored for many years. Out of this thing called climate change and yes, wars and military activities contribute to this. We are really only just finding out the magnitude of these conflicts and military missions and more monitoring is urgently required and a big space to expand into for us into work,
I think. But really I could have taken you through dozens of examples of environmental harm and gone into way more depth for the more indirect and reverberating impacts. But I hope those slides gave you a brief taste of the range of harm that we see. One overarching feature of environmental harm in warfare is the convergence of vulnerabilities. So damage, stacks upon damage. This then compounds everything else. the human rights risks, the displacement, the food insecurity, public health
crises. And this all unfolds in places where data is scarce, governance is weak, and accountability can be contested. And this is exactly where OSINT methods come into their own. OSINT satellites, social media posts, eyewitness footage, and public dead sets. They give us a way into understanding how on the ground, I'm fairly sure everyone in this room and listening understands that. Now earlier in COB's work we carried out a lot of
ad hoc investigations. This could be verifying an oil spill clean up, could be assessing ammunition storage explosions, flooding events, so on. These snapshots were valuable, but they were just at snapshots. They told us what happened that day to that site, or maybe over a few days. However, as we've just found out, conflict -related environmental harm is anything but a series of isolated events. It's dynamic, it's cumulative, and it's all interconnected.
So this is why we've moved towards more systematic monitoring. OSINT remains absolutely central to this, and it's what led us to develop the approach I'll describe next. I'll bring you on to Wyzen. We'll soon be launching this formally, but today I'm going to give you a sneak peek of something we've spent the last few years developing. Wisen, the wartime incidents to environment database.
The idea is straightforward. Conflicts generate countless environmentally harmful incidents, but the evidence has been scattered, inconsistent or disappearing. Wisen brings that information together in a structured, verifiable remote analysis framework, and assesses each incident's environmental risk and harm from the local level to the national scale. So I'd like you to think of it as a sort of counterpart to what organizations like Air Wars and ACLID have done in their respective
domains. I think that's an outstanding idea, but it emerged in its earliest form in the early days of the full scale of invasion of Ukraine. when it was immediately obvious that the scale of environmental damage required systematic tracking. We had the tools, satellites, OSINT, environmental expertise, and why the Ukraine grew from there.
Now, there are really many other important ways of studying conflicts in the environment, like mapping burned areas, vegetation loss, crater detections, air quality time series, all of these things, very important, we call them continuous cohort approaches. They're essential and academics, especially now, are doing fantastic work in that space. But WISON is the counterpart to that. It focuses specifically on discrete incidents affecting specific facilities. It's built around
hierarchy. So at level zero, we have damaged facilities, but where we don't have enough temporal detail to define an incident. Level one is a wide ranging list of verified incidents. with calculated environmental risk scores. And level two is the big deep dive investigations into the highest risk incidents where we assess the
actual environmental harm. When we cast a wide net, we do systematic searches of social and mass media, emergency services updates, curated data sets, OSINT community outputs, and satellite driven findings. to generate a list of potential incidents. We then verify those, geo and chrono locate them. And if it meets our definition, we give it a score for the environmental risk. And that's calculated based on the theoretical risk. So what the type of facility is and where
it's situated. Is it near people? Is it near crops? Is it near ecologically important areas? And also an event magnitude score based on the the magnitude of what would have happened. We can see that these occur across Ukraine and Norway really escapes. This gives you a real sense of the breadth of incidents and the highest risk incidents we then promote up to level 2 analysis. Level 2 is where the serious OSINT work happens. For each priority incident, we build a structured
dossier. So we have a chronology of social and mass media posts, capturing the earliest posts, multiple viewpoints, testimony, screenshots, URLs, all of that business. So we have a reproducible search trail. We also generate a stack of annotated satellite imagery before, during, after, from all of the openly available satellite feed sources
and occasionally some commercial ones too. We then do more detailed geolocation of key footage even if we know it is definitely where it is it's good practice to do so and maybe a more unique element is we collect subsequent evidence from later imagery a month later two months later or from local reporting or from official assessments. And this means we can do an assessment of not only the immediate damage, but also the longer
term damage. And that's exactly what we do. We have a sort of structured environmental harm assessment, looking at hazards, affected media, loss of ecosystem services and local vulnerabilities. So this gives us then a scorecard record of harm. And if the same facility struck multiple times, we can add that together. and work out cumulatively the most impacted facilities. The result is a detailed, scalable and transparent picture of
environmental harm. We can see national patterns, we can see regional trends, individual facility histories. WISEN has already been used in our advocacy, media work and external investigations. and also for ground proofing with mine action teams. And because the methodology is transferable, we've also applied it in Khartoum and Al Jazeera
states in Sudan. Our in now is to partner up so we can scale up, develop it more and roll it out to other appropriate armed conflicts, employing local situated expertise and ultimately and eventually handing responsibility. over to those local partners. Now, Wisen isn't perfect. No data set is, but it gives us something we've never had before, which is a replicable way of understanding environmental harm of scale in conflicts. And so this sets up the question.
Now that we have this data, what can it help us change? So one is accountability. Once harm is documented clearly and consistently, we can use it for justice. This can be very simple in terms of recognition or for transitional justice. It could even extend as high up as international legal processes. What it does is it moves the conversation from we think this happens to here is the evidence and here is the scale. It can also support behavior change and norm development.
So we can work out all the time which actions are causing the greatest environmental harm, which tactics, and then we can make the argument, maybe some of these tactics are not appropriate. And then finally there's recovery. If we know where contamination and ecological damage are concentrated, we can prioritise those areas for remediation, for restoration and for resource and funding basically. And this is central to any green and just recovery process. And that's
something we're working on. actively in Ukraine at the moment. So to close I'd like to turn the question back to the audience actually. What are we missing? Are there other places OSINT can help? WISEM captures what we can observe but what are we not seeing? Could we be looking more at health impacts and assessments? More
at prevention and predictive analytics? More at supply chains, the militaries for example and all of this in the context of the information space which is shrinking is becoming more fragmented, more content is ephemeral and there's more this and misinformation and that is they also impact environmental narratives. So how do we go about keeping documentation trustworthy? So genuinely welcome your ideas, your questions. And thank you for being here today. Thank you. Thanks for
being patient as well with my clicking. Apologies about the tech issue there that prevented you from clicking yourself, but I really appreciate you taking us through that and actually taking us through some quite surprising to me anyway, impacts of war. Some of the things like air pollution, I'd not even thought about when we're covering conflict. Usually we look at fires. and deforestation as environmental impacts, but not necessarily
air pollution, which was super interesting. We have a bunch of questions in the chat, but just to respond initially to your question at the end there, a lot of people are saying, what are we missing? Somebody said my answer, volunteers, and they are ready to volunteer. I don't know if you have a volunteer program or a way that people can get involved. It's almost like a set
up question. So we previously have trialed volunteers like maybe like a couple of years ago and what we found was that we were probably asking too much of them in terms of like the there's the awesome knowledge but then there's like an extra bit of environmental like knowledge that's missing.
So we've been sort of learned from that and we've been thinking about it and I certainly do think there is a role for volunteers and At the moment, we're trialing out with some sort of, some students are working part time on the level zero part of the database, which is just damaged facilities. So we're going to see how that goes and maybe see if that is something that we can roll out as a, as a wider thing for volunteers as a citizen science thing perhaps. Could it be hosted somewhere
like Zooniverse? We're just, we're sort of, yeah. investigating these ideas, it would be good to know what's too much to ask of volunteers and what's the reasonable ask. That's maybe where we struggled before. Yeah, perhaps people can put their experience of volunteering in the chat. I know, for example, we have a volunteer group here at Bellingcat and it's always a learning process in terms of how much to ask for and how
much to get back. What I often find is that people are very willing to give a lot of time and actually it's up to you as the responsible organization to make sure that they're not overworking, which I think is a key point. We've got a few questions about the Wison map as you presented it. Saiba has asked, that Wison map of Ukraine, does that show overall environmental damage or is there a way or reason? to separate it into air, water,
ground and damage, et cetera. And somebody else has put, is there a correlation made between the WISEN findings and population health after an incident? For example, degradation in crops slash animal health, et cetera. So have you thought about breaking down the things mapped on the WISEN maps to show kind of the breakdown in different types of environmental damage? And also is it linked to population health as well? Absolutely fantastic questions. And yes, we can break down
that map. We could separate it out by the type of facility. So if we just wanted to look at water facilities, we could have the same map, just looking at water facilities, same for agriculture, industry, military even. And we could start to see how things look different for different sectors. It's important to say that wouldn't give you the whole story for like water in Ukraine. If you were just looking at our our database, it would give you a lot of information and a lot
of the detail. We also need to then be still looking at some of the more, I can mention the sort of like continuous cohort approaches. So looking at not incidents, but let's say water quality over a very long period of time in lots of different places, which is not something that would be picked up by Vyzen as an incident. You might see. the three, four years of the conflict, the change in water quality, which you could maybe attribute to the conflicts, but it's sort
of one of these more hidden sort of things. Absolutely breaking it down by sector, by domain is really important. We're trying to understand this in terms of health. That's the sort of next big frontier. That's where a present is. exceptionally hard to make the connection between environmental damage, some exposure to pollution and the health
impact. The sort of, even in peacetime in civilian settings, it's very hard to do that sort of epidemiological work because there's so many other confounding things happening. That's made even harder in conflicts because people's bodies are under more stress from the mental stress. physical stress,
there's everything else going on. Um, but it's definitely, I think that where if we keep pushing and keep trying, we will like uncover lots of, lots of connections, lots of important connections and connections that are not just acute and over a few days or weeks, but like chronic over a very long term. More just in the way What's with pageant orange and herbicide use in Southeast Asia? You mentioned a lot of the time in your talk about the cumulative effects that you're
monitoring. Where does your organization draw a line on monitoring? Are you monitoring these effects of conflict forever? When does it no longer become? When does conflict no longer become the causation and how long into the future are you monitoring this land and these pollution effects? I think that's an amazing question. And it depends what you're particularly interested
in, but the answer can be decades. Even now, there's fields that farmers can't use in Northern France because of contamination from World War I battlefields. So you do need to think on those time horizons. And I also think there's a lot of space to research into some of the wars in the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even into the 2000s of health impacts now. And there's been like the most work done around like US veterans who were exposed to burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan and
so on. where all of the outside the bases they were just burning everything and they now have elevated health risk let's say. What will happen to the local civilian populations in those places? We don't really know anything about that so we'd need more monitoring and more monitoring into the future. Where to draw the line? The line gets drawn for us I think by the resource we have. More hands on deck are needed by the sounds
of it. And I'm sure everyone listening is now really fascinated and interested in getting involved in this kind of work. One of my colleagues, Jake Godin, who has been working at looking at the land changes in Gaza for quite some time now is curious if you or your colleagues have tried messing around with hyperspectral imagery yet on observing environmental changes slash impact.
Perhaps you can give us an insight into some of the tools you mentioned, satellite imagery, but specific tools that you use on a regular basis to monitor this work. Yes. Okay. Let's start with hyperspectral because it's the most exciting. Um, it is, I think if we had access to hyperspectral data, so that's where you could have sort of the spectral fingerprint for every object. on the surface of earth basically. That would be really, really sort of transformative
in environmental monitoring conflicts. Environmental monitoring overall, but like especially in conflicts we could much more easily document change. We haven't actually played with hyperspectral, at least high resolution hyperspectral, high spatial resolution hyperspectral. that we would love to if there's any commercial companies out there who would like to take us on board to do case
studies with. What we are doing, otherwise, is pretty much the same as lots of people here, which is, you know, using the openly available stuff. So Sentinel -2, obviously, also Sentinel -1, Radar, Danger Detection, Muse. If we have to we use proprietary imagery so especially the planet scope stuff is good or we can buy some very high res imagery which we find we often need to do if we want to know if a certain like
chemical tank has been damaged. You just simply can't see that from a Sentinel -2 but you might be able to from a very high resolution image. I expect a lot of you are familiar with that sort of stuff in the room. Maybe what you're not so familiar with is all of the sort of open environmental data, which is out there. Now this will sort of vary between countries, but there's a lot of derived products, maybe from satellite
data, maybe from models. We see loads of value of combining the OSINT stuff with that open environmental data. And that's what helps us sort of be able to, to assess environmental health. I wonder if any of our listeners, and I'm speaking more directly to the Bellingcat staff members who are lurking in here, if they have any suggestions for satellite image tools or tools in general that might be useful to this group. I've got another question. Could you say more about the
verification process? Do your local partners verify the incident and impact assessment? How, how do your local partners get involved with the verification process? So the way we've, the way we've done that so far is have a, uh, bring in as a staff member working on the database with situated knowledge and, uh, contact with people who, who are there, even if they're not, they might be diaspora. but they have contacts for people who are there so they can have the
situator knowledge. They can tell us that's not a, that's not a farm, it's a military facility. But as to our eyes on satellite, it might just look like a farm, things like this. Um, it's something we need to be careful with, of course, from the ethics side, exposing people to things. Um, but generally that's how we get the the expert knowledge in for the situated knowledge and then for the rest of the verification it's always
the usual triage. So making sure that there is alignment between different satellite products, the satellite products and the social media. And yet having quite high bar for saying something that's happened. You talked about justice and accountability as a next step. This might be a silly question, but who is responsible for
protecting the environment during conflict? Are there international laws that you can appeal against and steps that you could take with evidence that you've collected to try and change things and make sure the environment is top? of the conversation when conflict happens. Ultimately the answer is basically no. There are provisions, you know, you could apply environmental damage as a Rome Statute war crime, but the thresholds which need to be met are severe, long -term and
widespread. The definitions for those thresholds are not clear when it comes to the environment. And so yeah, no, there's been no successful case, environmental case. That might change. There's guidance coming out very soon from the ICC on better prosecution for environmental crime. So we'll see what they come up with. There's also the movement towards having ecocide as an international
crime. which is something that may, may eventually come, but at the present moment and for what's recently happened in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, there's, there's nothing, but it's possible that will change, it's possible Ukraine will bring cases and there will be processes and the lawyers will lawyer and, and there will be sort of, yeah, maybe reparations, some sort of high level accountability.
Maybe you can tell I'm not a lawyer. Well, I'm hoping that your organization is already speaking to legal institutions, but if anyone's listening and thinks that they might be the right fit, perhaps they can reach out to you. I think it's great though that you're collecting this data in preparation for such a step as well. Speaking of Ukraine, I just put some Bellingcat resources in the chat. Back in 2023, we built a tool that shows what war has done to Ukraine's forests.
It's a deforestation tracker tool that you can use. And more recently, we've just had a guide written on visualising impact on the environment from conflict, including displacement data that's linking to the question about population health as well. We've actually had a question on the fibre optics waste that you mentioned briefly at the beginning. Someone's asked, can you talk a little bit more about the impact of fibre optics waste on the environment from the Ukrainian conflict.
I think this is quite a new concept for quite a few people in the audience. Yeah. So I'm guessing people have seen footage of these fibre optic drones. They have a little spool and that may have 10 to 40 kilometres worth of fibre optic cable on it. And there's thousands of these, well tens of thousands of these drones flying
around the front lines of Ukraine. They use fibre optics so that they can't get jammed from electro magnetic interference and what we then see is this, these fibre optic cables grouped across
trees, upland. It's really strange when you watch a lot of the footage from the conflict they kind of glisten and they look almost quite pretty, like quite Christmassy, but I think what we're going to find is that they have a sort of similar impact on wildlife, like, um, so fishing nets, um, for fisheries and so on, because they're, they end up in a tangle. Wildlife will get trapped, but wildlife were also using these. So there's like some images of like a bird's nest made out
of fibre optic cables rather than twigs. pretty devastating. Um, and yeah, these are, these are all draped over areas of frontline, which are heavily mined, inaccessible, and they're going to be there for, you know, maybe decades. They're not going to degrade very naturally, very quickly. It's going to be a very long -term problem I think. It actually brings me to my next question, which is what do you think is a long -term implication of conflict -related environmental degradation,
which is most underestimated. The thing that you are concerned is going to be unraveled in a couple of years time as a major issue. That's a really good question. I do not have an immediate answer for. I think that I don't know. I'm going to give an example. I'm not going to say this is the most, um, significant, it's just one that's immediately come to mind. So I'm thinking in, in Ukraine, we have Krakow -Kadan collapse. We
have the big flood. We also have the, the upstream area, which relied on the reservoir for all the irrigation. And that's now gone. There's severe drought. There's going to be probably, even if there is access in the future for farmers, civilians to return. It's going to be really hard to make a living there. There's going to be lots of soil erosion because of climate change. So actually southern Ukraine is going to be sort of very
severe impacts from climate change. And sort of there's a risk that areas like that will be because of the environmental impacts of war become very, very hard to live and survive in. that might be a very long -term consequence, like people move permanently. And I'm guessing that that impact isn't just isolated to Ukraine either. There's going to be other regions similarly affected in the same way. It's very, very difficult to think about positives. And I just wanted to remind
people that there's about 10 minutes left. So if you want to put your comments in, your last final questions, please do. And thank you to those who've been dropping links in the chat as well. I'll make sure that they're included in the description of the podcast. So if you do have any helpful links related to this field of work, please do pop them there. I was talking about trying to pull some positives from this.
What gives you hope in this field? If that's an impossible question, please respond as such. But is there any hope within this field that you've seen from your research? Yes, yeah, there's got to be hope. There's always hope. We're here today talking about this and that gives us hope, right? There's like people who are affected directly by environmental damage in conflict. They are a source of hope because they do things on the
ground to make their environment better. What we need to do is make sure they get the support. to do that in the right way, in the safe way, in a sustainable way. And I think that is possible. That might come. There are changes going on at a high level as well. You know, things like the move towards the eco side. These will help. Yeah, we always have to have help. It keeps us driving
forward at least at Bellingcat. As we're talking about that, you've mentioned within your talk that OSINT is kind of a hopeful method that's been helping advance this. What would be your advice to people who are listening to this, perhaps with open source research skill sets like satellite analysts and people who are very used to kind of looking at environmental degradation through
open source methods. What would be your advice to them in terms of getting involved in the kind of work that you do, not necessarily related to your organization, but within the same field? What would be your advice to them? Any tips or tricks or organizations that you might want to point out that people could reach out to as well?
try and learn as much as you can about the science of fires, the science of deforestation, ecology, like the more knowledge you have on a particular environmental topic, the better your analysis is going to be. So I think don't shy away from learning stuff as well. Don't just think that because you You can write a Google Earth engine script that detects burn areas you know about fires. Like go away, teach yourself, learn, there's
stuff out there. Get in contact with organisations like us, like we're always happy to answer an email. So please do. And then give it a try, yeah. See what you can do. Publish it. There's lots of, there's like, I can't like reiterate enough how much is not being reported and there is to report upon. So yeah. Where do you see
the biggest data gaps? Like if you were, if you were wishing on the spot right now for more researchers to dive into a certain area of what you've spoken about, where are the huge data gaps within this field? So I can point to like countries where there's massive gaps of information. So Sudan
is an obvious one. It's probably an answer you've heard in relation to not just the environment, but there's other places too, places that are maybe not so actively at war that just come out with fighting, places like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon, where there is so much that we could know and need to know, but you're not currently know and people are not researching. If I had to pick an environmental domain where we don't know very much, I would probably go with biodiversity.
And not on vegetation, not habitats, but more on actual wildlife itself. How particular species are affected by something like noise pollution from water. We don't know anything about that. Really. You mentioned Sudan. I've put the Sudanese Civil War link in the chat there for anybody who wants to chat, well, research, particularly that particular conflict. Don't be afraid to also put environmental damage in these conflict channels that we have in the server. It's absolutely...
It's absolutely something we want to talk about. It's absolutely fine to not focus so much on the immediate effects of war, but the long term effects of war. That's absolutely vital as well. Cyber's written, good grief. I forgot about noise pollution. Yeah. That's what I found through this talk is that more and more Owen, you're uncovering all these types of pollution that we may have overlooked over this time. Have you ever had the most surprising kind of effects
of war? What would you say in terms of environmental damage has surprised you when it's come to conflict? Did you always expect to, for example, find fibre optic cables being polluted via conflict? Has there been some surprising aspects that you've come across in different conflicts around the
world? It's a good one. That's a good one. I think the sort of conflict is maybe not directly conflict but what I maybe didn't have so much of an appreciation of before was to how much the oceans are like the Wild West and what happens in the oceans or dodgy dealings there are. We know a bit more about this now, like all the great work about ship to ship transfers and so on. I think that was quite surprising to me. Learning about the amount of marine pollution
basically. And linked to that is old marine pollution as well. So the amount of dumped unexploded ordnance from World War II in the Baltic. in the Irish Sea and how that's now degrading, corroding with warmer oceans and is potentially going to be a problem as things that are encased, TNT, et cetera, are released into the environment. So yeah, maybe, yeah, I'll go with marine pollution.
Yeah, if you're interested in looking more into maritime issues and ship -to -ship transfer, I mean, we've recently had a fantastic stage talk from Christine Panton, who's just an ocean hobbyist, has a full -time day job, but in his evenings creates a really amazing tool called Sketchy Boats, which looks at suspicious boats
doing suspicious things around the world. And we've also, Bellingcat created a tool, well, one of our contributors, Ollie Ballinger, who's a fantastic lecturer in London, he created a tool that's called the Ship Detection Tool, which also highlights using synthetic aperture radar imagery when ships are in port or doing ship -to -ship transfers in the middle of the sea.
So you can have a look at that as well. I put the link to that in our chat and I'm sure SettleKnife or any of the mods listening could also put the link to the last stage talk on suspicious boats in the chat as well. We are coming close to time. I just want to read a final few comments. Someone's put, what we are doing right now is actually a step in the right direction. Spreading awareness is a very real action you can take. By keeping
yourself informed, you can inform others. Yes, hopefully that's exactly what this stage talk has done for you guys listening in. And somebody else put, more on climate change, the amount of CO2 released from burning refineries and ammunition depots must be astounding, as well as local environmental effects and petroleum chemicals as well. Yeah, I think that was mentioned also within the talk. Right. Thank you so much, Owen, for your time
today. I've really appreciated you coming in and walking us through what is practically quite a depressing view of the impact of conflict on the environment, but a very important one and the work that your organization is doing is incredible. Just to finish off, how can people get in touch with you? Where is the best place to find information on the observatory. How can people reach out if they want to help or offer tools for your work? and yeah, happy to speak to people. Great.
If you want to continue this conversation, I mentioned the Sudan channel earlier up, but we also have a hashtag environment and wildlife as well as many conflict channels within the space. Please do jump in. To those, if you want to continue this conversation, highlight tools and resources that you can use to continue investigating this topic. But for now, thank you so much, Owen. And we'll be back in two weeks time with another stage talk. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for
listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to catch a stage talk live where you can ask the guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat. The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer Self and is courtesy of Artlist.