Making Environmental Harm Visible: Open Source Methodologies and the WISEN Framework for Conflict Accountability

Lydia Millar

Documenting ecological damage in war has historically been ad hoc and politically sensitive, yet new technologies and open access to satellite imagery, social media content, and digital archives have transformed the field. This paper explores how open source methodologies can make conflict-related environmental harm visible and usable for accountability, with a focus on the Conflict and Environment Observatory’s Wartime IncidentS to ENvironment (WISEN) Database as a potential model. The WISEN framework represents one of the most advanced attempts to systematically capture conflict-induced environmental harm, combining risk scoring of facilities with qualitative assessments of incident magnitude, cumulative impacts, and environmental media affected. The paper situates WISEN within a broader Open Source Environmental Harm Analysis approach, assessing its methodological robustness, evidentiary value, and potential contribution to accountability processes. It argues that WISEN’s layered system, spanning facility-level data, Level 1 and Level 2 incident documentation, and “Special Cases”, is well suited to generating outputs that could be mapped against legal thresholds in international criminal law, humanitarian law, and human rights law. While challenges remain, including uneven geographic coverage and the need for stronger evidentiary standards, WISEN offers a promising foundation for expanding transitional justice and related fields to recognise environmental harm as a form of conflict victimisation.