An Unnatural Disaster
The fighting has caused water shortages, the loss of unique flora and fauna, damage to natural reserves and agricultural fields, and reduced fertilizer exports, among other harms. The consequences are global.
Ukrainian agriculture alone is a critical resource; around 400 million people worldwide rely on it for their well-being. For other species, Ukraine provides a unique habitat. The marbled polecat, the European bison, the Iberian wolf, the steppe marmot, and the gray crane are among the animals that inhabit the country. Some can be found only here. The threat to such biodiversity cannot be ignored. No ecosystem is isolated from all others.
This article provides an overview of Ukraine’s environmental status quo and explores the interconnections among the war’s impacts on the country’s agriculture, water, and soil, which have global ramifications.
The Impact on Water Supplies
A report from Gazeta Wyborcza BIQdata, a portal associated with the Polish daily, cites the destruction of 724 water management facilities in Ukraine from the war’s outbreak through November 2023. The estimated cost of the resulting water leakage and pollution, flooding, and infrastructure damage is $8.3 billion.
The impact permeates all sectors of the country’s economy and extends beyond its borders. Water intake in Ukraine is down while discharges of polluted return flows are up. Few resources have been devoted until now to repairing water and sewage systems. "Therefore, now, more than ever, it is time to use water more efficiently, and long-term planning of water supply should take into account both the impact of military operations on water resources and the risks of climate change," warned Sofia Sadogurska, a climate expert from Ecodia NGO, in an interview with Kmarochos Media.
Sadogurska believes that Ukraine’s southern and eastern regions consume more fresh water than others and are consequently more vulnerable to decreased reserves. A December 2022 UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report confirms this. It found that approximately 16 million people in southeastern Ukraine have limited access to clean water. War-related damage has left an additional 4.6 million people elsewhere in the country with inadequate supplies of drinking water.
Beyond that, military operations and the pollution they cause have destroyed coastlines and adulterated many ponds and small rivers with heavy metals and oil-based products. In and around reservoirs, fish are dying, and migration cycles of waterfowl are disrupted. Nature is losing its ability to recover.
All hope, however, is not lost. The World Wide Fund for Nature offers solutions to help waterways revive. One of them is restoring and protecting riparian buffers, or natural protective strips, by replanting native vegetation. This could be applied in areas of Ukraine where no fighting is occurring.
The Impact on Soil and Forests
Ukrainian lands are among the world’s most fertile. Research has shown that nature needs more than 10,000 years to create the black soil that is now the site of battlefields. It takes mere seconds, just one explosion of artillery, to ruin the entire soil structure, wiping out microflora and scorching the top, fertile layer. The chemical contamination alone ensures that many years must pass before such damaged land can again be used for crops.
More than 5 million hectares of Ukrainian agricultural land can no longer be sown because it is mined, contaminated with explosive residue, or the site of combat. The hardest-hit areas are forests and fields, though it is difficult to calculate and compare the damage. Ivan Moisienko, head of Kherson State University’s botany department, believes that entire ecosystems have been lost. Having visited the liberated territory of Holy Mountains National Park in the Donetsk region in May 2023, he notes that almost the entire forest there is mined, if not severely damaged or destroyed, despite its being protected by the Bern Convention.
Global Forest Watch, an international organization that uses satellite images to monitor forests, has found that Oleshkivski Piski National Nature Park lost half of its protective forest barrier in just a few months. According to Serhii Khlan, a Kherson regional official, Russian forces cut down the park’s forest to build fortifications. In the late 1970s and 1980s, a forest about 3.5 kilometers wide surrounded the reserve’s famous sand massifs, and the trees served to prevent sandstorms. Locals recall that, before the forest existed, their gardens used to be covered with a half-meter of sand after an overnight storm. That could happen again now that the war-related fires, shelling, felling, and Russia’s destruction of the nearby Kakhovka Dam in June 2023 have seriously damaged the forests in the park and throughout the Kherson region. The dam’s demolition alone flooded almost 55,000 hectares of forest.
The Impact on Food Security
The effects of the war—destruction, pollution, the inability to use land and water infrastructure, the deterioration of black soil quality due to shelling, and the mining of territory—have led to a significant reduction in Ukraine’s agricultural production. The Kyiv School of Economics‘ Center for Food and Land Use Research and the World Bank have calculated that the country’s agricultural sector has lost more than $80 billion due to Russia’s full-scale invasion. NASA’s Global Food Security and Agriculture Consortium estimates that the amount of abandoned cropland in Ukraine in 2023 was equivalent to about 7.5% of the country’s total.
Ukraine has, throughout its history, been a significant exporter of wheat, corn, sunflower seeds, oilseeds, and rapeseed. It has played a crucial role in securing global food security. The International Food Policy Research Institute, relying on the Trade Data Monitor, reports that Middle East and North Africa (MENA) countries remain large markets for Ukrainian wheat. However, the share of Ukrainian imports has dropped from 50% of the region’s total in 2021 to 29% in 2023. Ukraine has also lost ground in sub-Saharan Africa, which accounted for 11% of wheat exports in 2021 but only 3% in 2023, and in south and southeast Asia, which bought 32% of Ukrainian wheat exports in 2021 but only 16% in 2023. Similar trends are seen in corn exports. MENA countries accounted for 25% of exports in 2021 but only 20% in 2023. For exports to East Asia, the figures are 35% in 2021 and 22% for 2023. Higher grain exports to the EU have made up for some of these losses.
The link between the devastating environmental impact of Russia’s war in Ukraine and global food security is evident. According to the Food and Agricultural Organization, almost 600 million people will be chronically undernourished in 2030. Had the war not occurred, this figure would be about 23 million lower.
Russia's blockading of Ukrainian ports and its withdrawal from the Black Sea Grain Initiative added to the threats to global food security. Both factors led to price spikes for agricultural products, an insidious development for poor countries. But the EU has also suffered from the downturn in Ukrainian agricultural production. The bloc is a significant importer of products for which substitutes may be difficult to find. Animal feed and feed additives, fertilizers, and sunflower oil are just three examples. Shortages of such products raised their cost, a particularly severe blow to vulnerable populations or those with limited financial resources, even in the EU’s relatively wealthy member states.
The environmental and ecological impacts of conflict are not always a primary concern. But these consequences of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine have implications that affect millions of people worldwide. Ukrainians may not be able to grow as many crops as they once did, but many others suffer by losing access to the food that would have been produced from those crops. All, however, have forfeited a right to enjoy and benefit from a safe and thriving environment.