Created by Dr Paul-Enguerrand Fady for the Centre for Long-Term Resilience
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.
Three types of declared facility are shown as map markers:
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.
Hover over any country to see its name and BWC status. Click a blue country to open its detail panel.
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.
The coloured cells in each country's detail panel show submission status per year and form:
The "Submissions" column in the All Countries table and the comparison view counts the number of distinct years in which a country filed at least one CBM document. Countries that submit in multiple languages (e.g. Canada submits in both English and French) are counted once per year, not once per document.
The UN portal holds public CBM records from 1988 onwards, but coverage varies: most countries' earliest available submissions date from 2011 (when the revised template was adopted). Historical records before 2011 are available for some countries.
The transparency score (0–100) shown per country is a weighted composite of three factors:
This distinguishes procedural participation (submitting "nothing to declare" every year) from substantive transparency (detailed facility declarations with consistent reporting).
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.
Extraction accuracy has been verified by manual spot-check against source PDFs. Confidence scores (0–1) are shown per facility where available. Records with confidence below 0.5 should be treated with caution.
Facilities are matched across submission years using fuzzy name matching (85% similarity threshold). A canonical entity like “USA_001” may represent the same laboratory reported under slightly different names in different years.
Facility locations are geocoded using OpenStreetMap Nominatim from the address and city fields declared in each submission. Match confidence is rated:
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.
The underlying data is accessible via a REST API. Interactive documentation (including all endpoints and query parameters) is available at /api/docs.
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.
Ask any question about CBM submissions, facilities, legislation, or defence programmes. Examples: "When did Austria submit Form A1?", "BSL-4 labs in Europe", "Which countries lack biosafety laws?"