Forced labour is a recognised issue in open ocean fishing, but historically the scale of this crime has been very hard to track. When a joint research team from Global Fishing Watch, emLab at UC Santa Barbara, and Liberty Shared was trying to find out more about the use of forced labour in fisheries, a breakthrough came when they asked a key question: What if vessels that use forced labour behave in fundamentally different observable ways from vessels that do not?

Based on this question, the researchers built a predictive model that can identify vessels that are highly likely to be using forced labour.

In this webinar, the research team explains how they developed a way in which to distinguish between vessels that use forced labour and those that do not – and the potential to use this model to build an actionable tool for practitioners in the future.