Vessel movement analysis to investigate forced labor at sea

Speaker: Dr. Rocío Joo, Senior data scientist on the research and innovation team, Global Fishing Watch

Forced labor and other human rights abuses in the fishing industry are a widespread and entrenched issue, affecting crews across regions, fleets, and Flag States. These abuses include deceptive recruitment practices, withholding of pay, debt bondage, excessive overtime, and abusive living and working conditions. However, the problem has been much neglected in fisheries management in part due to the limited availability of directly observed data on what happens onboard fishing vessels. In this presentation, Dr. Joo will show how movement analysis can shed a light on this problem. First, she will present a machine learning approach to identify fishing vessels associated with forced labor based on movement patterns and vessel characteristics. The second approach she will show is a network analysis of vessel encounters. Because forced labor on a vessel can be enabled by other vessels that provide food, fuel, receive catch or transfer crew to the former, we use data on encounters at sea to study the connections between vessels that could take part—directly or indirectly—on forced labor. Finally, Dr. Joo will touch on future work such as port analysis, as well as the data ethics and DEI components of this work.