Method

Each case is told from seven perspectives: what happened, what was said, how it looked, who gained, what nature saw, what is not known, and the sources. The perspectives sit side by side.

Facts are written in plain news language. Companies, agencies and officials are named as the documented record names them, with the role the record gives them.

Where a figure is our own arithmetic from cited numbers, it is marked estimate and the working is shown. Ratios compare figures from the same period.

Missing evidence is recorded as data: undisclosed earnings, the absence of an independent evaluation, a case no court has heard, deaths reported without verification. Each can be filtered.

Every case opens with nature's report, written in nature's first person and in data: harm on record, harm calculated by published methods from figures on record, and harm that no one recorded.

Each case carries sources from the parties themselves: the company's own statement, the government's announcement, the court's ruling, the press report, the community or civil-society account, and the researchers' findings. Where these accounts differ, they are set side by side with their sources.

The database asks one question of its own, from nature's side: did nature suffer? The answer is "harm on record" when the record holds a measurement of it, and "not measured" otherwise.

Case files are drafted from our research files and checked by an editor against the linked sources before publication. Every published fact carries a source link. Material that is reported but not verified is labelled as such.

Companies and institutions are named as the record names them. Individuals are named when they hold a public role, were charged, convicted or named in an official finding, or are defenders killed or disappeared in widely reported cases; others are described by their role. In criminal cases that are still open, people are described as charged or on trial.

Where a named organisation has responded in public, its response is shown with the case. Each case file carries the date of its last update.

Where a case records an input — an area of forest lost, a volume spilled — an established method can estimate a further consequence. These estimates are labelled, kept apart from the record, given as ranges and stated in physical units (tonnes, animals, hectares).