SF Project

Environmental Impact Assessments — the EU's primary tool for evaluating infrastructure projects before approval — are written by humans, for humans. The ecosystems, species, and communities of life that will bear the consequences have no voice in the process. Our project asked: what would it look like to read these documents through the eyes of the living world?

We built the More-than-Human Policy Reader, a web application that takes any EIA as a PDF and analyses it through six structured lenses: the values of nature present in the document, the knowledge systems cited and absent, the temporal and spatial scales of attention, the webs of ecological interdependency, the cultural memory of the landscape, and a relational reframing of the core problem statement. Each lens is powered by AI analysis of the document itself, enriched where with live data from four external databases — iNaturalist and GBIF for biodiversity records, GloBI for species interaction networks, and Europeana for cultural heritage archives.

The result is a fuller, multispecies picture made visible to decision-makers: not a replacement for expert ecological or legal assessment, but a different lens — one that surfaces what is systematically left out of the frame, and opens a different way of relating to the living world, grounded in reciprocity rather than compliance alone.