Organised environmental crime is the third most lucrative criminal business in the world and the largest source of financing for non-state armed groups, as reported by INTERPOL. Its transnational dimension, involving legal and illegal business from multiple jurisdictions, the large range of waste products as well as the limited financial, technological and human resources allocated to law enforcement make it a high-profit-low-risk crime. Consequences involve devastating effects on society, reducing market opportunities for legitimate businesses, lowering people’s quality of life in cities and towns affected, and destroying natural habitats.
The ambition of PERIVALLON is to combat environmental crime by: (i) Delivering an Environmental Crime Observatory aiming to provide an improved and comprehensive intelligence picture of organised environmental crime, (ii) Developing an environmental crime detection and investigation platform at the forefront of technological innovation. This will improve the capacities of Police Authorities, Border Guards, and National and Regional Authorities by means of extensive training, hands-on experience, joint exercises, and testing of key technologies in relevant environments, boosting the uptake of PERIVALLON results and ultimately assisting Member States with the implementation of the new Environmental Crime Directive.
The project specifically tackles waste-related crimes as the top priority concern of practitioners. Intentional dumping of polluting substances, illegal disposal of (hazardous) waste, (cross-border) illegal trafficking of waste, and illegal trade of hydrofluorocarbons (HFCs) are examples of criminal activities prioritised by the end-users. Such forms of crime can be challenging to detect and difficult to investigate by conventional means, highlighting the need for more sophisticated solutions enabling remote identification, evidence collection, analysis and correlation of the information obtained. To this aim, the PERIVALLON platform integrates a collection of components to a single-entry point delivered to end-users that exploits the latest advancements in Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the fields of geospatial intelligence, remote sensing, online monitoring of marketplaces and open data sources, and multimodal analytics.
