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.

Big pharma is responsible for inventing and manufacturing hundreds of life-saving innovative drugs, but often those medications come with a hefty price tag. The Cancer Calculus is a global cross-border investigation into how Keytruda, a life-saving cancer drug, is unaffordable for millions across the world and how pharma giant Merck protects their billions in revenue from it.

This session will examine the different tools pharma companies use to protect their revenues, from creating an impenetrable fortress of patents around their drug, to promoting higher doses that boost revenues and wild variation in prices worldwide.

The speakers will walk you through how they approached this complex investigation, the difficulties in unraveling the pricing knots, and what they learned along the way.

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 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.