Article 5 - Applying remote sensing and data science techniques to enhance the monitoring and detection of environmental crime: examples from the NarcoView project

Abstract

The Netherlands has gained an international reputation as a centre for the production and export of synthetic drugs such as MDMA and amphetamine. The number of synthetic drug production laboratories and chemical waste dump sites discovered in recent years is a cause for concern. Dumping and discharging synthetic drug waste is a serious environmental crime, since synthetic drug waste contains various harmful chemicals. Such waste is being disposed of unsafely, in a number of illicit ways, causing environmental harm and risking public health and safety. This was highlighted as a growing problem by reports published in 2016 and 2019 by the European Monitoring Centre for Drugs and Drug Addiction (EMCDDA), now the European Union Drugs Agency (EUDA), and Europol. The main regions in the EU facing the drug waste dumping problem are the southern part of the Netherlands and the northern part of Belgium. The research presented in this article was conducted in the framework of the project NarcoView, with the main objective being to enhance the monitoring and detection of the environmental crime of illegal dumping of chemical waste from synthetic drug production. This is accomplished by gathering and processing intelligence through the use of RS, data science and ML algorithms. This article thus presents the results from formulating and testing methodologies for selected use cases with the aim of more efficiently and effectively detecting locations used for waste dumping. The main scenarios outlined here include (1) the detection of ‘classic’ dump sites and (2) the detection of chemically treated crop fields. The methods and resulting analytical products developed for the two aforementioned scenarios will be further integrated into a web-based platform for end users, such as law enforcement and other state agencies.