SEECODE · Sensing Ecocide: Advancing Accountability for Environmental Atrocity Crimes

The entanglement of climate change, extractive projects, and conflict has expanded environmental violence to a planetary scale, complicating causal chains between victims, perpetrators, sources, and impacts. SEECODE aims to address these challenges through artistic research, deepening our understanding of the representational and causal complexities of environmental violence. By focusing on both existing international crimes and the emerging crime of ecocide, or crimes against the environment, SEECODE seeks to advance accountability for environmental atrocity crimes. SEECODE critically and holistically examines the gravity of these crimes through three dimensions: scale (territorial scope and timescale), victims (entanglement of human and non-human victims), and impact (across ecosystems, cultures, and generations). Its four objectives are:1. Uncover marginalised histories of the environment as a legal subject.2. Develop techniques to identify patterns of environmental violence.3. Test the demonstrative power of environmental war crimes evidence.4. Lay foundations for inclusive documentation and justice frameworks.The unique challenges of environmental violence demand a novel methodology combining visual-cultural research, art-driven visual and spatial analyses, and socio-legal approaches, for SEECODE's multidisciplinary team to unravel patterns of harm with prosecutors and impacted communities in Cambodia, DRC, and Ukraine. By situating investigative practice of artistic research at the intersection of law, humanities, environmental sciences, and social sciences, SEECODE will create a robust conceptual framework, expanding the understanding of gravity beyond legal definitions. This will lay the groundwork for a new field of ecocide studies in the arts, sparking debate at a critical moment as efforts to criminalise ecocide as a fifth international crime gain momentum, delivering transformative insights for protecting the planet and its inhabitants.