From pelicans to protected areas: the environmental fallout from the war in Ukraine

We have become horribly aware of the incalculable human suffering unleashed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, said Benji Jones on Vox (Washington). We hear less about the “staggering toll” it has taken on the environment.

Russian bombardment of Ukraine has been causing untold ecological damage – and it shows no signs of abating. “Rockets are polluting the soil and groundwater; fires threaten to expel radioactive particles”; explosions from attacks on oil and gas facilities are flooding the atmosphere with carbon dioxide.

In the eastern city of Sievierodonetsk, Russian strikes on tanks of nitric acid at chemical plants have sent plumes of toxic pink smoke into the air. In the northern town of Novoselytsya, residents are deprived of drinking water because the shelling of a fertiliser factory has caused an ammonia leak, which has contaminated the surrounding groundwater and soil.

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Ukrainian environmental groups have logged 300 such cases, from the bombing of power plants to the destruction of marine ecosystems. Armed conflict always causes environmental destruction and a huge increase in greenhouse gas emissions, but the ecological damage from this war is of a different order of magnitude, and will be felt “for decades after fighting stops”.

Impact on marine life

The most immediate impact has been on marine life, said Lesia Dubenko in the Kyiv Post. The Black Sea, to Ukraine’s south, is home to thousands of porpoises, bottlenose dolphins and short-beaked common dolphins, and last week conservationists sounded the alarm over thousands of dead dolphins washing up on beaches in Ukraine, Romania, Bulgaria and Turkey. Many had been burned by explosives – the sea is littered with mines; others are thought to have starved.

Even designated conservation sites have not been spared from destruction, said Ivana Kottasová on CNN (New York). Bombs, fires large enough to be seen from space, and pollution from explosives have “irreparably degraded” wetland areas, including 14 sites whose importance has been recognised by Unesco.

Water birds such as avocets and pelicans have been disturbed during key migration and nesting periods; forests and salt marshes are being destroyed. In all, more than a third of Ukraine’s protected areas are now occupied by Russian forces.

Rich in biodiversity

Ukraine is a highly industrialised country, said Benji Jones: it has hundreds of chemical plants, nearly 150 coal mines, and more than a dozen nuclear reactors. But it also contains “more than a third of the continent’s biodiversity”, even though it forms just 6% of Europe’s land area.

Sad to say, wars in ecologically significant areas are all too common, said Emily Anthes in The New York Times. “From 1950 to 2000, more than 80% of the world’s major armed conflicts took place in biodiversity hot spots.” Sometimes, as in the case of the Vietnam War, environmental destruction has been “an explicit military tactic”.

But even when unintended, the environmental harm caused by the conflict lasts for decades. In 2011, scientists found unusually high levels of lead and copper in the soil around Ypres in Belgium – a legacy of the First World War.

International law slow to catch up

International law has been painfully slow to confront this issue, said Dan Farber on Legal Planet (Berkeley). The Geneva Conventions that regulate wartime conduct make no mention of the environment, and the International Criminal Court (ICC) “sets a high hurdle” for any sort of environmental harm to be called a war crime: the damage must be shown to be “widespread, long-term and severe”.

The threshold for holding states to account for such crimes has been crossed just once – when the UN ordered Iraq to pay Kuwait $3bn after it set fire to hundreds of oil wells in the first Gulf War. Russia is unlikely to face similar punishment, said Federica Marsi on Al Jazeera (Doha). It doesn’t recognise the ICC, and as a veto-wielding member of the UN Security Council it could block any such move.

Nonetheless, campaigners are gathering evidence of its environmental atrocities. Even if Moscow isn’t held to account this time, the hope is that this conflict will bring about reform