EMERITUS

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation program under grant agreement No 101073874.

EMERITUS is formed by a multidisciplinary consortium representing nine countries: Austria, Belgium, Greece, Italy, Moldova, Portugal, Romania, Spain, and the United Kingdom.

EMERITUS aims to lay the foundations of a new generation of technological tools orchestrated via a single-entry point platform at the service of Law Enforcement Authorities (LEA) and Border Guards (BG) to improve detection and proof collection capabilities against waste-related environmental crimes.

To do so, EMERITUS will create and implement a protocol for effective environmental crime investigation, mainly combining innovative monitoring and analysis technologies with a complementary training program to foster LEAs and BGs’ intelligence and investigation capabilities at the national and cross-border levels.

The goal of EMERITUS is to explore and demonstrate how these technologies and specialized training could improve the efficiency of environmental crime detection and intelligent risk profiling to optimize resources, reduce the risk for operators, and provide a deterrent for offenders.

To achieve these goals, the consortium will implement 4 coordinated workstreams each of which will correspond to one or more Work Packages

The workstream will leverage four selected highly relevant use cases (UCs)

• Water contaminant source detection
• Waste storage centers monitoring
• Cross-border illegal waste trafficking monitoring
• Identification of illegal waste discharge sites in broad areas

Some of the technologies, data, and analytic processes used in EMERITUS are: AI algorithms, computer vision, quality and hydraulic water sensors, virtual sensors based on commercial real-time sensors, drones, Very High and High-resolution imagery, GNSS, multispectral cameras, LIDAR, remote control software,