Peruvian news organisation Convoca has launched an interactive tool to enable citizens to access environmental information related to the behaviour of Peruvian mining companies.

The tool maps more than one thousand resolutions of sanctions made by a Peruvian supervisory body of the environment to penalise infractions committed by 132 enterprises.

It was produced by a team of data analysts, reporters, designers and developers. Aramis Castro, one of the team at Convoca behind the map, says:

“We wanted to show all the data related to some regions in which the mining companies were sanctioned and make all that information more understandable for the citizens.

“We think that these kind of tools can be a great complement for our data journalism stories. In this case we had a large amount of data from our first investigative works so we thought of showing it in a useful way for our readers.”

Besides making the data more accessible to the citizens, another aim is to involve journalists from different regions of Peru to work on issues that most affect people in their area.

“The tool has been designed to make queries and it offers the possibility of downloading all the resolutions we have gathered.

“In this way, journalists can reuse all the data and even create networks of researchers to produce different works based on the information they can get from it.

“We are on the way to reach that objective. In fact, there have been already some news organisations that have used our data to publish different stories in the local level.”

The team see the sanctions data as only the first stage in the map: developments planned in the near future include adding data from other sectors including hydrocarbons, electricity and fishing.

Antia Geada is a student on the MA in Online Journalism at Birmingham City University.