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.
