Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

Every human inhales 14 kg of air per day, and air pollution caused by human (e.g., road traffic, industrial process, agriculture) and natural (e.g., wildfires, dust storms) processes affects everybody on the planet, contributing to a growing list of health impacts. The composition of the atmosphere also plays a critical role in the climate system. A wide range of observational and model data are available for analysing the distribution and timing of air pollution episodes and their possible impacts. Yet navigating these datasets and understanding what they can reliably show is not always straightforward.

The Copernicus Atmosphere Monitoring Service (CAMS) provides a wide range of open datasets on emission sources, atmospheric composition, and air pollution covering past, present, and future conditions, that can support your air quality reporting.

In this session, you will be guided through the CAMS data landscape: where to find key datasets, how they are built, what they can (and cannot) tell you, and common pitfalls to avoid.

This panel explores why biodiversity stories often struggle to find a place in general newsrooms and how to pitch them more effectively.

Two experienced journalists will share practical, replicable strategies, including reframing biodiversity as political, economic, or investigative stories; grounding pitches in data, regulation, and accountability; and targeting beyond environmental desks.

If you have had difficulty getting your biodiversity or environmental stories published, this session offers a chance to exchange experiences, ask questions, and learn from journalists who have successfully persuaded editors of the importance of these stories.

This is a hands-on workshop introducing the practical use of Earth Index, a tool that uses AI to search for user-defined patterns in satellite imagery across large areas, anywhere on the planet. It is a game-changer for environmental journalism, opening up major possibilities: from spotting hotspots of illegal mining, to quantifying industrial farming in a region, or mapping new roads pushing into forested areas.

During the session, we will do a guided walkthrough of the platform and work through step-by-step exercises to explore its core features: how to create a project, define an area of interest, generate positive and negative labels, run predictions, refine the results, and export findings. We will also share practical tips and best practices based on the Pulitzer Center’s methodology for successfully integrating Earth Index into an environmental investigation, including how to audit results, reduce false positives, and inform field reporting.

By the end of the workshop, participants will have a clear understanding of Earth Index’s strengths and limitations, and how to add it to their investigative toolbox.

IMPORTANT!

1. You must register with your email address in advance for this session to gain full access to Earth Index. Please use this form to register:  https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSe0CXmCcA3SZyVfDMHO3l9suLK_RwCJUqz_IU-oymMRAFVSuQ/viewform
2. Please bring a laptop with Google Earth Pro installed. You can download it here: https://maps.google.com/intl/es/earth/download/gep/agree.html

No previous experience or coding skills are required, although some familiarity with satellite imagery or geospatial data will help participants get the most out of the workshop. Those who register will receive free access to the Deep Search version of the tool, which is not directly available in the open version, and will be able to keep it afterwards.

You don't necessarily have to be a data journalist to report on climate change using data. As data journalists, we will explain options available to non-coders. This session is intended to give you a feeling for what you can do yourself with temperature measurement data, emissions figures, and tables showing the damage caused by extreme weather events, and to overcome your fear that working with data is “too complicated.”

In the session, we will discuss existing databases, some of which already have built-in filtering and visualization options. Where they don't, we will explain what the first steps might look like if you can't or don't want to code yourself. We also will address the questions that are important for assessing the quality of a data set.

This session is explicitly not aimed at data journalists, but at climate journalists who have little or no experience with data but want to know what is possible and what they can do themselves.

Behind headlines about record-breaking temperatures, extreme events affecting millions, and long-term climate trends reshaping ecosystems and our environment lies a wealth of datasets used to track how our planet is changing and better make sense of these events. Yet navigating these datasets and understanding what they can reliably show is not always straightforward.

The Copernicus Climate Change Service (C3S) provides a wide range of open climate datasets covering past, present, and future conditions that can support your climate reporting.

In this session, you will be guided through the C3S data landscape: where to find key datasets, how they are built, what they can (and cannot) tell you, and common pitfalls to avoid.

As environmental and climate crises grow more complex, journalists are evolving to meet the challenge. Across Europe, reporters are increasingly working alongside scientists - not just as sources but as collaborators- to strengthen their investigations, boost their methodologies, and create more impact. This shift is the core of “expert-reviewed journalism” and this panel will explore how it actually works in practice. 

Drawing from investigative projects they were part of, three seasoned journalists will share how journalism-scientist partnerships are built, how trust is established, and how the roles are defined so the day-to-day work is fruitful and dream projects are done. The speakers will discuss practical realities, nerdy secrets and their lessons learned: how they managed data and workflows, navigated tensions between disciplines, and developed shared work practices where both sides work to reach the finish line while respecting each other’s professional lanes. 

Some of the projects that will be mentioned in this talk: 

The Forever Lobbying Project: https://foreverpollution.eu/lobbying/ 
The Green to Grey Project: https://greentogrey.eu/ 
Swampower: https://facta.eu/focus-on/swampower/ 

As wildfires become more frequent and intense across Europe, attracting growing public and media attention, journalists need solid methods to analyze fire data over time. But building a dataset is only the beginning. This session goes beyond the story to explore how to sustain and adapt a data project over more than a decade, using Civio’s Spain in Flames as a case study.

In this session, we'll share best practices for long-term data journalism: designing datasets that can evolve, working with fragmented official sources, handling changes in definitions, revising past data responsibly, and deciding what comparisons remain valid over time. The talk covers both data processing workflows and visualization strategies that hold up as your project grows.

In the context of increasingly severe wildfire seasons, this session offers replicable methods and tips for building climate data projects that last and that can inform responsible reporting for years to come.

We can all agree that Europe’s green energy transition is critical. But the transition has to be fair and not leave anyone behind. Therefore, the EU’s €26.7 billion Just Transition Fund – which is intended to support communities shift away from fossil fuel industries, such as coal mining, to greener economies – is hugely important. But, surprise, surprise, those crucial billions do not appear to be going where the EU promised they would. In this presentation, we will explain how our cross-border team dug into the fund – FOIs, sources in the European Parliament, following the money – with the aim of helping you to do exactly the same and find your own exclusives.

In this session, we’ll show you how we approached a sensitive topic: mapping the potential exposure of all schools to the use of pesticides from surrounding agricultural activities. We will explain  how - working with scientists - we came up with a robust methodology,  found the data we needed and then crunched it to tell us where to go to make truly data-driven reporting on the ground.  

This investigation, published in Le Monde in December 2025, has sparked a lot of national and local interest thanks to its interactive map. Attendees will leave the session with a clear step-by-step guide to get started and adapt the ambition of the investigation to their own capacity. Feel free to bring with you any datasets that would help to map similar issues in your country.

You can read the main story in English here
Free access to the map in French here