University of Nottingham
Slavery from space: using satellites to tackle modern slavery
There are an estimated 50 million people in forms of modern slavery, forced labour and human trafficking, and this exploitation is spread across the world’s 37 billion acres of habitable land.
In 2015, the UN and 193 countries set the Sustainable Development Goal of ending modern slavery, but a major obstacle to tackling slavery at scale has been an inability to see its location and extent.
To address this problem, the Rights Lab at the University of Nottingham uses satellite data to map, measure and understand slavery at scales never before attempted. Pioneering the anti-slavery sector’s first use of satellites, the world-leading team maps industries with high levels of slavery, from farms and factories to mines and brick kilns. Country by country, it invents new remote sensing, machine learning and citizen science approaches to analyse forms of exploitation that traditional methods cannot access.
It identifies slavery’s sites and risk markers, uncovers the links between forced labour and environmental destruction, and produces advanced explanatory models for slavery’s nature and extent.
The research has accelerated real-world action in multiple countries. It has supported civil society strategies through robust prevalence estimates with International Justice Mission, transformed business responses through a sector-leading forced labour risk tool with Moody’s, enabled survivor-led groups like Volunteers for Social Justice to liberate thousands of people using new mapping data, and strengthened the work of intergovernmental organisations and inspectorates.
The University embedded its research insights into work to become a slavery-free campus and a collaboration with Nottingham to become a slavery-free city.
Pixel by pixel, acre by acre, this research shines a light into slavery’s darkest corners. It advances our national and global capability to tackle what some considered an intractable problem. Launched during the 50th anniversary of the space race, this is the anti-slavery moon-shot.