The Black Sea Biosphere Reserve on the southern coast of Ukraine is a paradise for migratory birds. More than 120,000 of them spend the winter hovering on its shores, and a multicolored spectrum of rare species — the white-tailed eagle, the red-breasted merganser and the stilt or curlew, to name a few only a few—make their nests among the protected waters and swamps.
The reserve is also home to the endangered blind mole rat, the Black Sea bottlenose dolphin, rare flowers, countless molluscs, dozens of species of fish — and, in recent weeks, an invading army.
“Today the reserve territory is occupied by Russian troops,” Oleksandr Krasnolutskyi, Ukraine’s deputy minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources, said in an email last month. “Currently there is no information on environmental losses.”
But military activity in the area has sparked fires big enough to be seen from space, raising concerns about the destruction of critical habitats for the birds to breed.
“We’ve seen what’s happening in Ukraine,” said Thor Hanson, an independent conservation biologist and expert on the consequences of war on the environment. “And we’re shocked and horrified at the human cost in the first place, but also what’s happening to the environment there.”
Since Russian forces invaded Ukraine in February, the world’s attention has focused on the country’s heavily bombed cities. But Ukraine, in an ecological transition zone, is also home to vibrant swamps and forests and a large swath of virgin steppe. Russian troops have already entered or carried out military operations in more than a third of the country’s protected natural areas, Krasnolutskyi said: “Their ecosystems and species have become vulnerable.”
Site reports and research on past armed conflicts suggest that the ecological effect of conflict can be profound. Wars destroy habitats, kill wildlife, generate pollution and change ecosystems entirely, with consequences that spread over decades.
“The environment is the silent victim of conflict,” said Doug Weir, director of research and policy at the British-based nonprofit Observatory on Conflict and Environment.
There are exceptions. Wars can make landscapes so dangerous or inhospitable to humans — or create so many barriers to the exploitation of natural resources — that ecosystems have a rare opportunity to recover. It is a paradox that highlights the threat that human activity poses to the natural world in times of war and peace.
“Humans are often disruptive,” said Robert Pringle, a biologist at Princeton University, “and that includes their conflicts.”
marked landscapes
War is an act of destruction. And, as studies suggest, it disproportionately affects the most important ecosystems on the planet. From 1950 to 2000, more than 80% of the world’s largest armed conflicts took place in places of high biodiversity, areas rich in native but threatened species, Hanson and his colleagues found in a 2009 study.
The message to everyone, Hanson said, “was that if we’re concerned about biodiversity and conservation in the world, we also need to be concerned about conflict and patterns of conflict.”
There has been little large-scale research into the ecological effect of war, but in a 2018 study scientists found that armed conflict was correlated with declining wildlife in Africa’s protected areas. Animal populations tend to be stable in peacetime and decline during war, the researchers found, and the more frequent the conflicts, the steeper the declines.
In some cases, environmental destruction is an explicit military tactic. During the Vietnam War, the US military sprayed defoliants over large areas of the jungle to thin forests and deprive enemy forces of cover. And the military often exploits “lootable resources,” such as oil and timber, to fund its war efforts, Hanson said.
Ukraine is littered with chemical factories and storage facilities, oil depots, coal mines, gas pipelines and other industrial sites, which can release massive amounts of pollution if damaged. Some have already been hit.
“This really can be compared to using chemical weapons,” said Oleksii Vasyliuk, a biologist in Vasylkiv, Ukraine, and co-founder of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. The Russians “did not bring toxic substances here, but released those that were already on Ukraine’s territory into the environment.”
Then there is nuclear fear. Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors in four plants; the largest of them has already been the scene of intense fighting. “Military actions near nuclear plants could lead to large-scale radioactive contamination of areas not only in Ukraine but also far beyond its borders,” Deputy Minister Krasnolutskyi said. Damage to nuclear waste storage sites can also produce significant contamination.
Scientists have learned a lot about the long-term effects of radiation on animals and ecosystems from studies carried out in Ukraine’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which has been largely abandoned since the catastrophe at the eponymous nuclear power plant in 1986.
On-site research revealed that the radiation not only caused deformities in individual animals, it also affected entire populations. “We see dramatic declines in abundance and lower diversity of organisms in the most radioactive areas,” said Timothy Mousseau, a biologist at the University of South Carolina.
Russian military activity in the Chernobyl exclusion zone may have worsened conditions there, experts said. The fires may have released radioactive particles that were captured by local flora, and vehicular traffic through the most contaminated areas may have raised clouds of radioactive dust.
Military activity may also have threatened the recovery that wildlife has made in the exclusion zone. As humans kept their distance, “large species that don’t really have a close home in the region started coming back,” said Bruce Byers, an independent ecological consultant who led Ukraine’s biodiversity assessments for the US Agency for International Development (Usaid).
Gray wolves, red foxes, raccoon dogs, bobcats and wild boar reside in the exclusion zone, as do the endangered Przewalski’s horses, which were introduced to the area about two decades ago.
But the Russian takeover of the site created a huge disturbance, Mousseau said: “All this noise and activity will probably have driven the animals away.”
ecological waterfalls
Still, research suggests that war causes much of its ecological destruction in a less direct way. “The long-term environmental impacts of warfare are more driven by the associated social unrest,” said Kaitlyn Gaynor, an ecologist at the University of California at Santa Barbara.
Wars often cause economic and food insecurity, leading civilians to rely more on natural resources, such as wild game, to survive. Some militaries also rely on wild animals to feed their troops, or harvest valuable animal parts such as elephant tusks and rhino horns to fund their activities. This increased demand for wildlife is often accompanied by a weakening of environmental protections or enforcement, experts said.
During Mozambique’s civil war, which lasted from 1977 to 1992, the population density of nine large herbivores — including elephants, zebras, hippos and buffalo — declined by more than 90% in Gorongosa National Park.
Meanwhile, the collapse of carnivore populations — leopards and African wild dogs have disappeared from the park — has triggered behavioral changes in their prey. The shy forest deer, a species of antelope, spent more time on open plains, where it feasted on new plants, suppressing the growth of native fauna.
Food insecurity and economic instability can threaten even abundant animals. After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, leading to rising poverty rates in Russia, the population of moose, wild boar and brown bears declined, according to a study led by Eugenia Bragina, coordinator of scientific capacity development in the Arctic Beringia program. from the Wildlife Conservation Society.
None of these species were “even close to being vulnerable,” said Bragina, who grew up in the Soviet Union and remembers that her parents didn’t get paychecks for months after the crash. Wild boar in particular were plentiful, but between 1991 and 1995, their population declined by about 50%. “In Russia, we literally ate half of them,” she said. “Half the population is gone.”
The findings suggest that wildlife could be at risk anywhere war in Ukraine creates food insecurity, even outside areas of active hostility, Bragina said.
War also has opportunity costs, as funds and priorities shift from conservation to human survival. “We tend to focus on the straightforward kind of thing — the big fires and clouds of smoke, damaged oil infrastructure,” Weir said. “But actually it tends to be the breakdown of environmental governance that leads to this kind of death and so obviously has this lasting legacy.”
Refuge and reconstruction
For all the damage that war can cause, in isolated cases, human conflicts can serve as a shield for nature.
The most famous example is the Korean Demilitarized Zone, a narrow strip of land that serves as a buffer between North and South Korea. It’s totally off limits to humans, protected by guards, fences, and land mines. But in the absence of people, it provides refuge for rare flora and fauna, including red-crowned cranes, Asian black bears and possibly Siberian tigers — mines can pose a danger to larger land animals.
In some cases, war can also disrupt extractive industries. During World War II, commercial fishing in the North Sea ceased almost entirely because of the requisition of fishing boats, restrictions on their movement, and the recruitment of fishermen for war. The populations of many commercially harvested fish species have recovered.
But the gains can be temporary. In the early years of Nicaragua’s civil war, forests along the country’s Atlantic coast grew back as people fled, abandoning their farms. But with the end of the war, the residents returned and deforestation began again; nearly twice as much land was denuded during that period as had been reforested during the start of the war, the scientists found.
Such findings, experts say, speak to the urgent need to consider conservation immediately after a conflict, when the environment could be at risk, as countries try to rebuild infrastructure and economies.
Restoration is possible. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National Park, an intensive restoration project has been underway since the 2000s. It includes improved patrols against poaching, the development of a wildlife tourism industry, and efforts to improve economic and food security. of local communities.
Cutting-edge predators, including leopards and wild dogs, have been reintroduced. Large populations of herbivores are recovering and “re-establishing control over invasive plant species,” said Pringle, who served on the project’s advisory board. “Gorongosa is, I would say, the world’s leading model of ecological resilience after a devastating conflict,” he said.
Translated by Luiz Roberto M. Gonçalves
