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Nature as Witness: Environmental Forensics and Scientific Responses to Ecological Crime
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This review paper summarizes existing research on how scientists investigate environmental crimes, including pollution, illegal mining, wildlife crime, oil spills and plastic contamination. It describes methods like chemical fingerprinting, DNA analysis and remote sensing, and discusses new technologies such as artificial intelligence that could aid investigations, with a focus on challenges in India.
Environmental crimes are grave threats to the ecosystem, biodiversity, public health and sustainable development and require strong scientific methods to investigate and prevent. Environmental forensics has become an interdisciplinary science that brings together chemistry, biology, geology, toxicology, molecular science and geospatial technologies to determine sources, characterize and track environmental contaminants, and provide legally defensible evidence. This review addresses the concept of the "Nature as Witness" focusing on the natural elements that include soil, water, air, sediments, vegetation and wildlife, which maintain physical, chemical and biological evidence of disturbances to the environment. The paper addresses pollution investigations, illegal mining, investigations of wildlife crime, oil spills, and plastic contamination investigations, as they relate to environmental crime scene investigation and evidence collection, as well as some of the analytical processes used, such as chemical fingerprinting, stable isotope analysis, environmental DNA, chromatography, spectroscopy, and remote sensing. It also emphasises on legal, regulatory and scientific problems in the Indian scenario and discusses new technologies like Artificial Intelligence, IoT-based monitoring, portable forensic instruments and climate forensics. The review highlights that the adoption of cutting-edge scientific approaches alongside good environmental governance measures can reinforce environmental justice, enhance environmental criminal investigations, and facilitate sustainable natural resource conservation.
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Nanoplastics—tiny plastic particles too small to see—are showing up everywhere in our environment, but figuring out where they came from and how much we're exposed to has been really hard to pin down. This paper reviews new tools that combine lab techniques (like chemical testing) with AI to better detect these particles and trace them back to their source. This matters because better tracking could eventually help scientists understand our real-world exposure to nanoplastics and assess the health risks they might pose, though this research focuses on building the detection tools rather than proving specific health harms yet.
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When a large batch of papers lands in the Atlas, we read through it and send a short write-up of what stood out.