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Follow the commodity, then follow money: uncovering stories through commodity and supply chain data.

8 March 2024

Christopher Lambin, Senior Data Investigations Advisor, Global Witness

Hello, my name is Christopher Lambin, I’m a senior data investigator at Global Witness. We are an investigative and campaigning NGO that focuses on corruption and environmental and human rights abuses around the world,

First of all, thank you for selecting my talk. As you might be able to see by my blue sticker, this is my first NICAR, and I was not aware that I would be speaking to nearly the entire conference, so please bear with me.

I’m here to earn the cost of my flight and hotel by giving a five minute advertisement for Global Witness -

But this is the work we do;

- We investigate and expose the harms associated with a supply chain – environmental damage, violations of workers rights, sanctions evasion, human rights abuses, funding authoritarian regimes

- We uncover the individual’s or organisation’s involvement in a supply chain

- And we campaign to do something about it

So why talk about supply chain data at all?

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Data about commodities wasn’t always easy to find…

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…now, there’s plenty of it

Shipping and freight�
Import/export records�
Satellite imagery�
Govt. contracts and procurement

Regulators and govt. Agencies

Corporate reports and capital expenditure

Nowadays there are an enormous amount of source of data relating to the flow of physical commodities - and it is much more accessible, and that’s why I work behind a desk instead of driving around conflict zones

Doing things with physical goods makes data, from building infrastructure, extracting, refining, transporting, importing, exporting, selling, getting licenses, applying for planning.

All of these things produce data - either through physically moving things around, or the paper trail.

We can access this data either from:

Public databases
Leaks, FOIs,
Or commercial data sets, often set up for actors within the trade, but us investigators can use to just as well.

We at Global Witness are very fortunate to be well resourced and able to afford a lot of these data sources that really drive these investigations.

We’re happy to share this data when we can, so if you think your investigation could be helped by some of this data, speak to me after the talk.

So there’s a lot of data out there, here are some examples of how we use it

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Link to article: French cash, Russian fuel, Ukrainian blood | Global Witness

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Link to article: The Cerrado crisis: Brazil’s deforestation frontline

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Link to article: Myanmar's poisoned mountains | Global Witness

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Link to article: Forbidden Russian oil flows into Pentagon supply chain

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Thank you!

For more investigations visit:

www.globalwitness.org