Environmental protection increasingly depends on the ability to see what is actually happening. Illegal wildlife trade, unlawful waste activity, misleading environmental claims, and the sale of ecologically valuable land leave traces in the public domain, such as on marketplaces, classified ad platforms, public filings, or social media. Public institutions, researchers, and civil society organizations often lack the time or technical capacity to find, verify, and act on this information at scale.
The European Commission’s Green Deal Data Space recognizes that better data is the foundation on which credible environmental action depends. Because institutions enforcing environmental rules often work with fragmented signals scattered across many online sources, large-scale public web monitoring is a realistic way to leverage those signals.
While digital technologies account for 8-10% of energy consumption and 2-4% of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, technological innovation is the most promising way to address these side effects. Tools powered by digital innovations help institutions identify environmental harm earlier, focus human capacity more effectively, and make better decisions.
Publicly available data has become one of the largest real-time records of how economies and societies behave, increasingly framed as a digital public good. Environmental protection can benefit from this if the technology reaches the institutions that need it. For example, Oxylabs runs a pro bono initiative called Project 4β, providing free public web intelligence collection infrastructure to public institutions and NGOs.
In Lithuania, the Environmental Protection Department freely uses a custom web crawler to scan classified ad platforms for listings linked to environmental violations, allowing them to review around 400 ads per week while reducing manual work to about one hour. Similarly, the international investigative organization Global Witness used AI-assisted analysis and large-scale data collection to identify potential fossil fuel lobbyists among tens of thousands of attendees at the COP29 climate summit, accelerating accountability work without sidelining human judgment.
The collection and use of public web data must remain genuinely ethical, requiring clear governance, proportionality, transparency, and a firm line between public-interest applications and abuse. Environmental progress over the next decade will be shaped by how we empower research and how quickly institutions intervene before ecosystems pass the point of no return. Treating the open web as a shared resource will help turn the European environmental framework into an actionable plan.
Source Reference: Dataconomy - How Public Web Data Can Strengthen Environmental Protection by Urtė Karklienė (https://dataconomy.com/2026/06/10/how-public-web-data-can-strengthen-environmental-protection/).
