Dataharvest 2026 - the European Investigative Journalism Conference

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.

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