Article 4 - Harnessing technologies to combat environmental crimes: the potential of satellites, drones, water sensors and super-resolution imaging

Abstract

Preventing and tackling environmental crime is a global priority. The multiple risks this phenomenon poses, the high-profit margins, the low risk of detection and prosecution, and the notable lack of empirical research on specific investigative practices call for innovative approaches to evidence gathering and analysis to ultimately increase the effectiveness of the fight against waste-related environmental crime.
This article investigates the use of co-creation approaches to identify practitioners’ needs in the field of wasterelated environmental crimes, and it attempts to shed light on the range of solutions that technology can offer to improve environmental crime detection, investigation and prosecution. These include satellite, drone and sensor technology, as well as the integration of remote sensing (RS) technologies enhanced with machine learning (ML). The article concludes by arguing that the further employment of available super-resolution (SR) techniques can unlock the potential for more detailed environmental monitoring and analysis and is valuable for both image classification and segmentation tasks.