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 

TBC

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.

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 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 in advance for this session to gain 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. Those who sign up will receive free access to the tool 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.

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.

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/ 

“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/

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

Want to see change from space and turn it into an interactive story? In this hands-on session, participants will use Copernicus Browser to locate areas of interest, upload their borders, and export high-resolution images. These images will then be turned into interactive sliders in Flourish to clearly show environmental changes, infrastructure expansion, or land-use transformations over time.

Using a real investigative example from a mountain area in Greece that was untouched in 2022 and became an active wind farm construction zone by 2025, participants will see how this workflow avoids common challenges, simplifies the process, and produces accurate visual comparisons.

The session also shows how before-and-after sliders can guide field reporting and support verification, helping journalists confirm that what is observed on the ground matches remote analysis. By the end of the session, participants will have learned a practical, reproducible workflow to turn satellite imagery into accurate visual comparisons that strengthen investigative storytelling and field verification, without requiring complex satellite analysis skills.

Prerequisites:

- To attend this session, no prior knowledge is required. Familiarity with QGIS, Copernicus Browser, or Flourish is helpful but not necessary.

- Tools: Participants should create a free Copernicus Browser account: https://www.copernicus.eu/en

- Participants should create a free Flourish account: https://app.flourish.studio/login

Optional: install QGIS for further exploration of satellite imagery (not required for the workflow demonstrated): https://qgis.org/download/