WISEN: A tool for post-war environmental accountability?

Context

Armed conflict routinely devastates the environment but such harm is rarely a priority. During the past decade, the historical cliché of the environment as a ‘silent victim’ of armed conflict has increasingly been challenged, with growing awareness of the scale and complexity of wartime environmental damage. Despite this, documenting conflict-related environmental harm remains fragmented, with no consistent methodology for remote or local assessments. A 2024 effort to begin to address this gap through a UN Environment Assembly resolution has generated little to date.

The lack of systematic data collection not only limits visibility and understanding of damage, in turn undermining response, it also hampers efforts to seek justice for affected communities, hold perpetrators accountable, and remedy harm done to the environment. This gap, coupled with the urgency to document the unprecedented scale of environmentally harmful incidents triggered by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, spurred the creation of WISEN.

What is WISEN and how does it work?

WISEN is an innovative approach that captures the ‘breadth and depth of environmentally-relevant incidents, with a systematic and detailed characterisation of environmental harm.’ At its core, the methodology structures incident data across three tiers. Level 0 records environmental damage at facilities without linking it to specific conflict incidents, creating a baseline of potential risks. Level 1 documents verified incidents where environmental harm can be linked to conflict activity and assigns risk scores that combine the inherent danger of the facility with the magnitude of the incident. Level 2 provides in-depth qualitative assessments of the most serious cases, offering detailed analysis of the type and extent of harm, its environmental consequences, and its potential impact on communities and ecosystems. Continuous Special Cases, such as long-term industrial hazards, are tracked separately using a streamlined approach to capture their cumulative impacts.

Verification and transparency are central to the methodology. WISEN relies on open-source intelligence (OSINT) including social and mass media reports, satellite imagery, and geolocation techniques, all of which are subject to peer review where possible. To ensure integrity and admissibility, all digital sources are archived using cryptographic hashes, providing a secure, tamper-proof record. Entries are also assessed for uncertainty and bias, with analysts noting the strengths and limitations of the available evidence. This tiered and transparent approach allows WISEN not only to capture the breadth of environmental harm in conflicts like Ukraine, Sudan, and most recently Iran, but also to prioritise the most severe and consequential cases for deeper analysis.

Pathways to accountability

Proving intent, knowledge, and the threshold of severity demanded by international law is often extraordinarily difficult, not least because environmental damage tends to emerge gradually, accumulate over time, and extend across borders and generations, making both attribution and responsibility diffuse.

These difficulties are compounded by the frequent absence or unreliability of baseline environmental data, which undermines efforts to establish causation or measure the true scale of harm. Even where evidence is available, existing legal frameworks, such as the Rome Statute, provide only narrow avenues for redress, as they generally address environmental destruction only when it can be linked to war crimes.

The Statute’s sole dedicated environmental provision, Article 8(2)(b)(iv), criminalises attacks causing “widespread, long-term and severe” damage to the natural environment, yet its conjunctive threshold sets the bar so high that it has never formed the basis of a prosecution. Underlying all of this is a deeper political and economic problem: the states, corporations, and elites most implicated in large-scale environmental destruction are often those best positioned to resist accountability or to shape the very international norms meant to constrain them.

Against this backdrop, WISEN’s contribution is to cut through some of these evidentiary and political obstacles by systematically documenting incidents in near real time, archiving them securely, and highlighting patterns of harm that might otherwise remain invisible. By providing structured, verifiable data, WISEN creates an evidentiary foundation that can be adapted for different accountability processes at local, national, and international levels.

Local level

At the local level, accountability often takes the form of community-led claims, reparations processes, or civil litigation rather than criminal prosecutions. The challenge is that affected communities frequently lack reliable, accessible evidence to substantiate harm, particularly where baseline data is weak or absent. However, WISEN can help close this gap in two ways.

First, by systematically documenting environmental harm in a transparent and verifiable format, WISEN creates a resource that communities and NGOs could use to substantiate claims for clean-up, compensation, or health interventions. For example, UNEP’s 2011 Ogoniland Environmental Assessment, which investigated the effects of oil operations in the Ogoniland area of the Niger Delta, became a cornerstone of local litigation and advocacy, much as WISEN data could underpin community claims in conflict zones.

Second, WISEN’s risk scores and qualitative assessments provide not just evidence of potential harm, but a way to prioritise the issues that matter most for communities, such as contaminated water sources or damaged agricultural land. By highlighting the most urgent hazards, this data could give communities leverage in negotiations with governments and companies over remediation and empower affected populations in conflict zones.

National level

At the national level, accountability often takes the form of domestic litigation, regulatory enforcement, parliamentary inquiries, or state-led damage assessments. These processes require structured, credible evidence that links environmental harm to specific actors or failures of state duty. WISEN is well-placed to support such measures by providing systematic, verifiable incident data that can be adapted to national legal frameworks.

WISEN could play a direct role in supporting domestic litigation and prosecutions by providing prosecutors and courts with structured data that links specific incidents, such as strikes on chemical facilities or damage to water infrastructure, to resulting environmental harm. Its risk scores and qualitative assessments offer a systematic means of determining severity, while archived evidence helps strengthen admissibility. In doing so, WISEN could allow courts and agencies to move beyond ad hoc or anecdotal accounts and instead frame environmental damage in a transparent, replicable way.

Beyond the courtroom, WISEN’s database could support national accountability by informing environmental departments in prioritising clean-up and remediation, and by providing parliamentary commissions with credible evidence when examining state or corporate responsibility for conflict-related harm. Ministries responsible for the environment or natural resources could draw on WISEN outputs to guide remediation efforts, regulatory enforcement, and public health responses, while parliamentary inquiries could cite the database as an independent evidentiary source. A comparable precedent can be found in Japan’s Minamata case, where systematic monitoring of mercury contamination provided the evidentiary foundation for regulatory reforms and accountability for corporate polluters at the national level.

Finally, WISEN could help strengthen national governments’ claims for damages or reparations arising from conflict-related environmental harm. By providing a transparent, third-party dataset and linking incidents to quantifiable impacts, WISEN could give further weight to state-led claims both domestically and internationally. Its independent dataset could serve as a valuable complement to such national initiatives, offering external verification that enhances credibility in both legal and diplomatic fora.

International level

At the international level, accountability mechanisms include international courts and tribunals, human rights bodies, UN fact-finding missions, and reparations commissions. These fora require evidence that is not only highly credible but also capable of showing patterns of conduct, foreseeability of harm, and cross-border or systemic impacts. WISEN’s structured, verifiable data can contribute to these processes by documenting incidents consistently across conflicts, archiving sources for integrity, and aggregating findings to demonstrate broader trends.

In terms of international criminal accountability, WISEN could help strengthen cases before the ICC by demonstrating patterns of attacks on environmentally sensitive facilities and showing that the resulting harm was both foreseeable and avoidable. Its systematic documentation and archiving could assist prosecutors in arguing that environmental destruction meets thresholds for war crimes or support emerging debates around the recognition of ecocide. The ICC’s Al Mahdi case illustrates the potential: satellite imagery was accepted as proof of cultural heritage destruction, a precedent that WISEN’s geospatial incident data could replicate for environmental harm when validated by experts.

While the ICC Prosecutor has pledged to “systematically address environmental crimes,” significant hurdles remain, particularly the high threshold requiring damage to be “widespread, long-term and severe.” An interesting development, however, is the Office of the Prosecutor’s 2025 Policy on Addressing Environmental Damage Through the Rome Statute, which sets out how the Office will prosecute the existing core crimes (genocide, crimes against humanity, war crimes, and aggression) where they are committed by means of, or result in, environmental harm. Its value to international accountability is essentially that it operationalises a provision long treated as a dead letter and signals that environmental harm need not be confined to that single clause but can be prosecuted across the full range of Rome Statute crimes.

WISEN’s outputs could also underpin claims before the International Court of Justice or before future reparations commissions by linking incidents to quantifiable environmental damage. Its ability to aggregate incidents into patterns is particularly valuable for establishing systematic state conduct. The UN Compensation Commission, established after Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait, relied heavily on satellite imagery and environmental monitoring to award reparations for oil spills and fires. WISEN could play a similar role in supporting Ukraine’s potential claims for environmental damages against Russia, offering a transparent, independent evidentiary base.

Regional and international human rights bodies are increasingly receptive to environmental evidence where it relates to fundamental rights such as life, health, or culture. WISEN’s datasets could illustrate how conflict-driven environmental destruction undermines these rights. In its Advisory Opinion OC-23/17, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights affirmed that states have obligations to prevent transboundary environmental harm as part of their human rights duties. WISEN’s capacity to track cross-border impacts, such as water or air pollution, aligns closely with this jurisprudence and could enhance rights-based accountability claims.

The future of WISEN

WISEN is a pioneering initiative in the systematic documentation of conflict-related environmental harm. By providing structured, verifiable incident data across multiple conflicts, it has created a foundation for awareness, advocacy, and the pursuit of accountability. Looking ahead, CEOBS’ challenge and opportunity is to consolidate WISEN’s role as not just a monitoring tool but a recognised evidentiary resource for justice processes at all levels.

One critical step would be the integration of evidentiary standards into its methodology. At present, WISEN is advocacy-ready; to become litigation-ready, it will need to embed practices such as chain of custody, certified archiving, and expert validation. Developing standing partnerships with legal practitioners and expert witnesses could ensure that its outputs are admissible in courtrooms, reparations commissions, and human rights petitions. In this way, WISEN could evolve into an evidentiary pipeline between the field of environmental monitoring and formal accountability fora.

The expansion of WISEN’s scope is another key frontier. Future iterations could incorporate quantification of economic loss, cross-border harm modelling, spatial and temporal analysis of environmental trends, and integration with public health and displacement data, allowing it to capture both environmental and human consequences of conflict. Such multidimensional analysis would make WISEN directly relevant not only to environmental accountability but also to international human rights and humanitarian law processes.

Equally important is the need for localisation and partnerships. WISEN’s effectiveness will grow if it works closely with local NGOs, scientists, and affected communities, particularly in data-poor environments such as Sudan. By combining global verification methods with local knowledge and testimony, WISEN could strengthen both the accuracy of its data and its resonance with those most affected by environmental harm. This would also enhance its role in supporting community-level claims and national accountability processes.

Finally, sustainability will be vital. Long-term funding, a diverse analyst pool, collaboration with other research centres and interoperability with other datasets, ranging from climate monitoring to humanitarian assessments, would all be necessary to ensure that WISEN becomes a permanent component of what CEOBS calls the “conflict environmental data commons”.

 

 

Lydia Millar is a PhD candidate at Queen’s University Belfast. Her thesis is on the usefulness of open source information in documenting conflict-related environmental harm for the purposes of transitional justice. Follow her on Linkedin here. If you find our work useful, please consider making a donation so that we can continue it.