Environmental crime, and in particular organised environmental crime surrounding the illegal disposal, trafficking, and/or trade of different types of waste and refrigerants, causes significant harm to the environment, the climate, and human health, while it also breaches environmental legislation and regulations. Detecting and preventing such organised environmental crime is particularly challenging due to the range of items being illegally dumped, trafficked, and/or traded, the need to consider and correlate information and evidence obtained from heterogeneous sources, the different authorities involved in tackling such crimes and their cross-border nature, as well as the exploitation of legal business structures by criminal actors in this crime area.

To address these challenges, PERIVALLON aims to perform research and innovation activities towards:

1. An Environmental Crime Observatory aiming to provide an intelligence picture of organised environmental crime.
2. Tools and solutions for (i) detecting and preventing environmental crime and (ii) assessing their environmental impact based on remote sensing, scanning, online monitoring, and analysis technologies, by leveraging the latest advancements in AI-based multimodal analytics and computer vision. 
3. Enhanced investigation processes and methodologies.
4. Improved capacity building of security practitioners to help them tackle such criminal activities based on the advanced tools and solutions built and the innovative training curricula developed using physical and digital twins of environmental crime scenarios of interest.
5. Improved international cooperation through improved data sharing enabled by the developed technologies and improved regulation shaping by providing policy recommendations.

The project will achieve the objectives by developing an environmental crime detection and investigation platform at the forefront of technological innovation that will build upon the concept of multidimensional integration of heterogeneous multimodal sensor data, ranging from earth observation data (e.g., satellite images), video streams from cameras mounted on unmanned aerial vehicles, X-ray scans from fixed or portable devices, to information gathered from publicly available online sources and related administrative documentation.

The developed platform, tools, and technologies will be validated in a series of use cases, in which tests and demonstrations will be carried out through the active involvement of the LEAs, Border Guards, National Authorities, and International Stakeholders.