Created by Dr Paul-Enguerrand Fady

This tool visualises structured data extracted from Biological Weapons Convention (BWC) Confidence-Building Measure (CBM) submissions, downloaded from the UN BWC portal (bwc-cbm.un.org), spanning 1988–2026. The database contains structured data from … documents representing … countries that have declared biological research facilities.

Layers

Three types of declared facility are shown as map markers:

• Research facilities (Form A1) — declared biological research centres and laboratories, coloured by highest biosafety level (BSL-1 through BSL-4)
• Defence facilities (Form A Part 2) — facilities supporting declared national biological defence programmes
• Vaccine facilities (Form G) — declared vaccine production facilities

Map background (choropleth)

Country shading encodes two things simultaneously: whether a country has submitted public CBMs, and — for those that have — the proportion of those submissions that included substantive Form A1 research facility declarations.

A country can submit a CBM without declaring any research facilities (e.g. submitting "nothing to declare" for Form A1, or omitting it entirely). The blue scale only measures A1 content, so a country with many submissions but no A1 declarations will appear near-white, not blue.

• Dark → light blue — has public CBM submissions; shade reflects the share of submissions containing substantive Form A1 data (100% = darkest blue)
• Grey — BWC state party (189 as of 2025) but no public CBM on record
• Gold — BWC signatory but not yet ratified (Egypt, Haiti, Somalia, Syria)
• Hatched — not a BWC member (Chad, Comoros, Djibouti, Eritrea, Israel, Micronesia, Namibia, South Sudan, Tuvalu)

Hover over any country to see its name and BWC status. Click a blue country to open its detail panel.

Restricted submissions purple on map

China, France, Russia, and India submit CBMs to the Implementation Support Unit (ISU) but these are designated confidential and not publicly available. Their absence from the facility data reflects a transparency designation, not non-participation.

Compliance grid

The coloured cells in each country's detail panel show submission status per year and form:

• Green — substantive data declared
• Orange — submitted but "nothing to declare" — active participation with no declared activity
• Dark — form absent from that submission

Data extraction

All structured information (facility names, locations, containment levels, organisational details) was extracted from PDF documents by a large language model (Anthropic Claude Sonnet). Extraction confidence scores (0–1) are shown per facility where available. Errors and omissions are possible, particularly for scanned or non-English submissions.

Geocoding

Facility locations are geocoded using OpenStreetMap Nominatim from the address and city fields declared in each submission. Match confidence is rated:

• High (importance > 0.6) — specific building or address match
• Medium (0.3–0.6) — neighbourhood or district match
• Low (< 0.3) — city-level or coarser; may be inaccurate by tens of kilometres

Facilities without a geocodable address or city are not shown on the map (~3% of records). Use the filter panel to hide low-confidence geocodes.

Programmatic access

The underlying data is accessible via a REST API. Interactive documentation (including all endpoints and query parameters) is available at /api/docs.

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Data extracted and processed as part of academic research on BWC transparency. Not an official UN or ISU product. All source documents are publicly available at bwc-cbm.un.org.