Ukraine's forests have become another serious casualty in the war with Russia. Shelling and fires have devastated vast areas, predominantly in the east of the country. This destruction is part of a larger environmental crisis affecting Ukraine's 10 million hectares of forest, with wildlife suffering habitat loss and areas riddled with mines. FRANCE 24's Sharon Gaffney speaks to Dr Eoghan Darbyshire, from the Conflict and Environment Observatory.
Read moreUkraine war passes half-year mark, leaving a ‘toxic environmental legacy’
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Read moreUkraine war passes half-year mark, leaving a ‘toxic environmental legacy’
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NewsTranscript
00:00Welcome to Apropos. While protecting the environment may not be the highest priority for a country
00:08at war, the devastation caused to the Ukrainian landscape is part of a broader trail of destruction.
00:15Much of the country's 10 million hectares of forest land have been destroyed. Repairing
00:20that damage could take decades and cost billions. Jean-Emile Jamin has the details.
00:28It was once called the Switzerland of Donetsk, but the former lush forests of Svyatihori
00:33National Park in eastern Ukraine are now charred and smouldering, ravaged by the war that has
00:38plagued the country for over 20 months. Before, a sanctuary for wildlife and a source of pride
00:44for locals. Now 80% of this national park is damaged or destroyed.
00:50This forest will not recover. The undergrowth is very thick, it was burning and it's going
00:55to smolder for a long time.
00:58In the heart of the park, forest rangers and firemen face a dual threat. The fires, often
01:03sparked by bombardment, are nearly impossible to extinguish quickly. The reason? The land
01:09is heavily mined, making every step a life-threatening risk. While tending to the forest last year,
01:15this ranger nearly lost his foot.
01:19I checked that my leg was still in place. I took off my boot. There was no blood, it
01:27was intact. I crawled back to the car and drove home using just one leg.
01:36Many others have been injured or killed by hidden mines and booby traps left behind by
01:40invading Russian forces. And all around, the scale of destruction is laid bare. Trees that
01:46stood for generations nurturing the land and providing habitats for animals now stand
01:51as blackened trunks.
01:53None of this exists anymore. Even locals cannot go into the forest to pick mushrooms or berries.
02:01What we've lost is enormous.
02:05Deminers however continue their work tirelessly, clearing dangerous explosives. It's a slow
02:10and painstaking process. The head of this demining squad says that on difficult days
02:15they might clear just five metres of forest.
02:19We've had days where we destroy 50 items.
02:24With 425,000 hectares of forest contaminated by mines and a further 3 million hectares
02:29to inspect, the task ahead seems almost insurmountable. And that's just the start. Ukraine's former
02:36Minister of Environmental Protection says the process of restoring forests will take
02:40up to seven decades and cost billions.
02:44We will need many, many years after our victory to assess the damages.
02:51Some experts though doubt this ever to be possible, citing similar damage caused by
02:55previous European wars. For reference, World Bank reports estimate that the war's environmental
03:01toll has exceeded $30 billion, including $3.3 billion in direct damage and $2.6 billion
03:07in repairs. In response, Ukraine says it's seeking to hold Russia legally accountable,
03:13pursuing around 40 individual criminal cases over the forest damage.
03:18To discuss, we're joined now by environmental scientist Dr Owen Derbyshire from the Conflict
03:24and Environment Observatory, which monitors and raises awareness about the environmental
03:29dimensions of armed conflicts. Owen, thank you so much for being with us on the programme
03:34this evening. It isn't the first thing we think about when we consider the impact of
03:39war, but it causes huge damage to the environment. And we're not just talking about, we saw some
03:45of it in the report there, air pollution, deforestation, rivers and soil are also contaminated.
03:52As an environmental scientist, what exactly are you seeing?
03:56Well, it's, firstly, thank you for having me on tonight. It's a very important topic
04:02and often doesn't get enough attention because what we see when we observe this, in many
04:09places, Ukraine, Sudan, Myanmar, Colombia, similar sort of stories emerging. And it's
04:16various and vast diversity of environmental impacts from war. Some of these are very direct
04:24and we can easily comprehend them. So you might have an individual shell in a farmer's
04:28field blowing up, that destroys some soil, it destroys the microbiota in the soil. On
04:35the other scale, you have a very large scale impact, such as destruction of whole landscapes
04:41from deforestation or catastrophic events, like the Kharkovka Dam collapse we've seen
04:47in Ukraine. So they're the very direct, obvious things we can see, but there are maybe more
04:54less visible direct or indirect long-term impacts. For example, elsewhere in Ukraine,
05:01we have protected areas, biodiversity hotspots, which are a long way from the front lines,
05:06but still impacted, either as refugees go through them, or as simply the people who
05:12work there, the scientists, are conscripted to fight. Then even at a global level, there's
05:20kind of impacts. So it might be how wars prevent progress on climate action. People are talking
05:27about war rather than reducing emissions, or it could even be the vast amounts of emissions
05:33which are generated through fighting wars and from militaries.
05:38And Owen, how is this type of pollution actually monitored in conflict zones when you can't
05:43always physically get to these areas? We saw drone footage there coming to us from Ukraine,
05:50but what kind of techniques do you use to actually observe what's happening?
05:56This is exactly what we do. We try to remotely assess environmental harm and conflict settings.
06:03This is quite difficult to do, as you might imagine, from a long distance, but it can
06:07be done. The way we do it is by looking at the footage from ordinary civilians that they
06:13might upload to social media. It can be looking at satellite imagery and satellite data. Sometimes
06:19occasionally we do get data from the ground. By combining that together, we can be able
06:25to tell a story about what's happened, about a pollution incident perhaps, and then understand,
06:31speculate a little bit on the magnitude of the harm, what the impacts might be on the
06:35people and the environment. But ultimately we are limited doing what we do remotely.
06:42Measurements are needed on the ground, but as I'm sure you can imagine, in conflict settings
06:46this is very difficult. In peacetime, you might have an explosion in a factory and you
06:53would expect to response lots of scientists, lots of politicians, trying to work out what's
06:59gone wrong and trying to fix it. Maybe people getting evacuated. Something like that simply
07:03doesn't happen in these war contexts. And it's all about what does. Sorry.
07:10Sorry for cutting across you there, but in that case, how can this kind of devastation
07:14be contained or slowed down and how do you regenerate these areas?
07:20So it's very difficult. The starting point is trying to understand what has happened
07:25and what the impacts are. But undoubtedly it takes a very long time. As was mentioned
07:32in the visual piece, there's still parts of France where you can't grow crops due to the
07:36munitions from World War I. In somewhere like Southeast Asia, we're still having birth defects
07:44generations after Agent Orange was dropped over the forests. So it's very difficult actually
07:50and what we need really is more monitoring, more research and I guess a higher priority
07:57for the environment when we're thinking about wars and conflicts.
08:02And wildlife of course, animals, fauna, flora, it's also really badly damaged. How do you
08:08gauge that kind of biodiversity loss? Again, it's exceptionally difficult. Things
08:17can be done. There's some quite exciting recent research which was tracking migratory
08:23birds as they were flying across Ukraine during the war and they actually found how the birds
08:30responded to all the explosions and diverted their flight paths. So we can look to some
08:35of these novel sort of ways to look into how nature is impacted, but really it can be challenging.
08:43And Owen, there are also consequences for human health here. Experts say if we look
08:48at some parts of Ukraine, there are forests, there are areas that will never be completely
08:52demined possibly following previous wars in Europe. Whole forests are no-go areas. So
08:58what kind of impact does all of this have on human health?
09:02I think this is a million dollar question. I think one thing particularly concerning
09:07to us is that a lot of modern wars are fought in urban environments and in Ukraine they're
09:13very industrial environments as well or it could be somewhere like Gaza where they're
09:16just very densely populated. So what we're seeing is populations exposed to lots of air
09:24pollution, water pollution and how people respond to that, how their bodies respond
09:30to that when they are also stressed through psychological stress or maybe they're malnourished
09:37is a real kind of ongoing research question and something we need to understand better
09:41actually.
09:42Owen, thank you so much for your time on the programme. That is Dr Owen Derbyshire from
09:47the Conflict and Environment Observatory.