Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

This session will introduce the regulatory framework of the EU emission trading systems (EU ETS) and its potentially serious shortcomings. Participants will learn the basics of anomaly analysis and how to reverse-engineer CO2 ‘emission factors’ from various European public databases. The speakers will also explore other potential investigation pathways based on their learnings - including identifying suspicious verifiers, finding expert sources, and using environmental FOIs to obtain company emission reports.

The basis of this panel is a series of investigations published between 2021 and 2025 by OCCRP, IRPI, Investigace.cz, and RISE Project. To learn more, you can go here: https://www.journalismfund.eu/carbon-deceit-ets 

This is a networking session focusing on animal welfare and the importance of working across borders.  If you're interested in the topic, join the session to share experiences, story ideas, and potentially team up with other journalists. 

Comparing the size of glacier 100 years ago to today is a strong message on the impact of climate change without many words. This idea – to visualize gradual changes by contrasting the world some decades ago with today – can be a powerful way to engage new audiences for climate stories. Sources for this kind of structural analysis are often available but untapped: Old guide books, maps and other materials existing only in print.

Through an example on the industrialization of ski resorts, we will show how old guide books and other analog materials can be a treasure trove for climate journalists and how they can use it efficiently, even if the amount of paper seems intimidating.

In the session we will discuss potential story leads and which guide books (or similar) to look out for. In the second part, we will discuss strategies and tools to extract information and organize data, and tools that might be useful for extraction. We will also demonstrate how AI tools might help, where manual work is needed and which non-AI tools might speed up the work, even if you don’t consider yourself a data journalist.

This session will focus on one of the most underreported actors in climate reporting: the billion-dollar shipping industry. We bring together two investigations into pollution from shipping to show how journalists can follow the environmental harm caused by this global industry.

From illegal fuel practices in the North Sea to the hidden ecological costs of scrubber systems in the Mediterranean, the session will focus on how maritime pollution remains largely unpunished and how the industry keeps on avoiding consequences. The journalists will walk you through their methodologies; combining OSINT, data journalism, and FOIA requests with scientific research and regulatory analysis. They will show you how to track emissions, identify regulatory loopholes, and connect datasets.

The session also offers practical insights into building cross-border environmental investigations, working with technical data, and collaborating with scientists to uncover complex pollution systems. The journalists will discuss how a holistic approach —following pollutants across sectors and geographies— can reveal accountability gaps and expose the true environmental cost of global shipping.

Italian non-profit newsroom IRPI published a year-long investigation into the supply chain behind the famous red shrimp of Mazara del Vallo, which is a premium 'Made in Italy' seafood product concealing a trail of illicit practices that threaten both marine ecosystems and market transparency.

Red shrimp is harvested through deep-sea bottom trawling in the Central Mediterranean, where a huge regulatory gap between EU fleets and largely unsupervised North African vessels has created a hotspot for overfishing and illegal transshipments. The investigation documents how Italian operators source shrimp caught by non-EU vessels through informal and often illegal channels, using vessel tracking data, ownership structures, and Global Fishing Watch's open AIS database to identify suspicious transhipment operations and anomalous fishing patterns.

The session will walk journalists through the methods, datasets, and investigative approaches behind the story -from detecting AIS signal shutdowns to mapping opaque supply chains- offering replicable tools for reporting on illegal fishing and environmental crimes in the Mediterranean and beyond.

“Fueling Ecocide” is a cross-border, collaborative data investigation coordinated by EIC (European Investigative Collaborations) and EIF (Environmental Investigative Forum). Over the course of a year, 13 media outlets across four continents joined forces, asking a simple but crucial question: how much protected land and sea have we lost globally to oil and gas extraction?

To answer this question, we embarked on a mapping exercise of epic proportions. Using QGIS and Post-QGIS, we compared 315,000 protected areas from all over the world with 15,000 extraction blocks, spanning 120 countries.

For the first time, this work provides a clear global picture of the damage: 7,021 protected areas in 99 countries overlap with oil and gas projects. This represents a surface of approximately 690,000 km², just over the size of France, most of it under internationally recognized protection statuses. Through extensive reporting, they also identified 763 oil and gas companies involved, with the largest contributors headquartered in Europe.

In this session, the reporters involved in the project will take you through the makings of a data-driven global investigation. They will talk you through the trial-and-error process of handling and harmonising an immense geospatial dataset: which tools they used, which methodological choices they made, and which obstacles proved the hardest to overcome. They will explain how the team turned this data into impactful stories, collaborated across the globe, and what lessons they learned.

 To read more on the project and the story, go here: https://ecocide.reportersunited.gr/