Ukraine: A War on Nature

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BBC Sounds, Music, Radio, Podcasts. Hello, I'm Tom Heap, and this is Costing the Earth from BBC Radio 4. Russian strategy is to shoot, shoot, shoot everywhere. And this war is going to have tremendous impact for this habit.

Today, we meet Bogdan Prots, leading Ukrainian conservationist, to find out about the country's wildlife and what war does to the environment. Bogdan is a winner of multiple international conservation awards. Most recently, his focus before the war was the area around Chernobyl. Abandoned since the nuclear accident there in nineteen eighty six. This area became a wilderness area. So we've got over 140 species of red data book. We've got European bison, we've got Pszevalsky horse.

we've got wolves, bears, so when humans abandoned this area and it is huge nature started to grow. and to return and nature slowly becoming very attractive, very interesting for studies and to understand better. how nature can restore back after such even a nuclear disaster. How can you help with this? Because uh Chernobyl is an example of how nature does well when humankind isn't involved. So uh what can you do to to help the situation of Chernobyl before the invasion? Uh restore that land.

Simple. Restore wetlands and then involve Some species like beaver who can stimulate further expansion of the of this wetlands. What did you think when the Russians came and came to Chernobyl itself? Russians troops you would not believe, but they have their maps before eighty six. Russian soldiers did not know what Chernobyl means. Sorry, that just to be clear, you mean the soldiers on the ground have maps that dated from before the nuclear disaster? Absolutely.

Really? Yeah you you would not believe we we did not believe for a long period of time. They built in the most polluted areas. We have this red forest. It's the highest level of radioactive pollution. It's advisory: you just pass with the car, you never stay there. And they built military station there. In this forest.

And do you know what has been the impact on the environment there? H has there been any impact on on nature and environment and your project, do you know that yet? All this radioactive pollution because they moved around. And they change completely location of this radiation in the area. Uh they switched off international monitoring in the area. They destroyed all uh and stolen and looted From protected areas, from nature reserve. They stole everything. All computers, cars.

Just everything. Something which they did not take destroyed. Just smashed everything. This area now is still full mines jap. So for us it's not possible to work for the moment. n new areas of radioactivity or spread radioactivity, the danger of mines and all your equipment has has been destroyed. Absolutely. And th this is um shocking.

Actually. Bogdan's work in Chernobyl was partly funded through an award from the Whitley Fund for Nature, a UK-based charity which supports international conservation projects. And he'd won previously for his protection of woodland on the western fringe of Ukraine, the enticingly named Transcarpathia Forest. Whitley's director is Danny Park. These forests are actually home to the biggest ash trees in the world, standing at forty six metres.

And the reason we funded this work was because despite the amazing biodiversity in this area. It actually didn't receive much conservation attention or funding. Yeah, these sound like the sort of ancient European fairy tale forests almost that have been lost from much of the continent, I guess. They're home to a plethora of wildlife, otters, beavers, lynx, salmon, and so really i from a biological perspective, incredibly important.

And and we don't sort of think of Ukraine particularly certainly from a British perspective as a particularly sort of lush or somewhere blessed with with great natural environment, but clearly it is. Exactly. And I think that's why it's been the victim of receiving little attention before. the economic growth in Ukraine was actually leading to growing pressure to exploit these forests and so making sure that they were protected was really key.

And so one of the main achievements coming of out of that award was the establishment of a landscape park protecting eleven thousand hectares of western Ukraine. So since then, Bogdan's received grants in twenty eighteen and most recently in twenty twenty one. And this recent project was one we were really excited about taking place in the Chernobyl exclusion zone, which

Since the nuclear accidents thirty six years ago had actually become a real sort of safe haven for wildlife. One of the key threats here before the war broke out was climate change and so twenty twenty had seen catastrophic fires burning twenty percent of the exclusion zone. And by doing that it it threatens to really spread the ra radioactive pollution that's currently being drawn down so effectively by these natural ecosystems.

So working with Bogdan and his teams, we were building firefighting capacity, but also helping him to restore this really important site. Ond, of course, mae'r proiect wedi cael ei wneud yn ôl gyda'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r ymwneud â'r hynny. but also to support the green recovery of Ukraine once the war ends.

Bogdan's priorities and day job have changed completely since that fateful night in February. It's happened at four o'clock morning. My son been shaking me and said we attacked. And you would still not believe it happening. I call all our people, staff, and we make a meeting. But we said okay, definitely nowadays you cannot work in nature conservation. We just need to change our activity to humanitarian support.

What kind of humanitarian work is your team doing now? The first our task is uh to raise money. We raised uh over fifty thousand pounds. And this money was going to buy vehicles, some of them being brought from Great Britain, because it's very important to have driver on the right side. In Ukraine, it's on the left side. Who would have thought the fact that British cars have their steering wheel on the other side would ever prove to be a tactical advantage?

It's a a live person, but real driver will be on the right side. So this is kind of tricks. It's used and and it's very important. And Bogdan doesn't see a conflict between his old profession and his new one. When you um fighting you automatically protecting nature. So this is something which is was very clear uh for us from the beginning. We've got just no choice.

as only to resist and to fight back. Nature is like about freedom and you always will support freedom because it provides a nature nature by themself is a freedom. What do you think will be the overall impact on the environment and and nature of of Ukraine from this war? It's a huge impact. Especially with the nature area close to the city. They are completely destroyed. Russian strategy is to shoot, shoot, shoot constantly to the human area everywhere.

And this war is going to have tremendous impact for these habitats. For some remote areas it's much less. because Russians was afraid to go too deep in some area More diverse nature it's a harder for any invader to occupy the country. So you feel that wild and rich nature was actually helping to defend Ukraine. More diverse nature Harder for any invader to occupy the country. More protected area, better to defend the country.

It's very, very clear. Wow. That's fascinating. I've never thought of that. Well, it's a peaceful life, you're never thinking about it. War wounds nature, and those wounds stretch far beyond glorious natural hotspots. It toxifies rivers, poisons the air, and pollutes the ground where people live. Doug Weir, research and policy director of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, knows these scars.

There's a long standing cliche that the environment is the silent victim of armed conflicts and in many ways that's true. When we look at the conflict in Ukraine and the atrocities in Butcher and elsewhere, understandably this grabs the attention and rightly so. Um but at the same time over the last couple of decades as new tools and methodologies have come online and as our societal concern about the environment has increased

There's now increasing visibility around the environmental dimensions of conflicts. So in what way is the environment suffering in the war in Ukraine? In the conflict in Ukraine we can see the environment being damaged uh in two ways essentially. One is the direct impacts caused by the fighting, so the bombing of industrial facilities or oil storage depots.

And then at the same time we're also seeing the environment being damaged through indirect ways. So for example through a collapse of governance or there's less monitoring being done by the government around environmental uh issues or projects designed to protect the environment have had to stop as a result of the conflict.

We see a lot happening in industrial areas, whether it's around the steel plant in Mariupol or the Donbass itself is an industrial area. So what's at stake there? So when we see damage to industrial sites, you know, many of these facilities contain dangerous substances, for example, which can be released, triggering an environmental emergency. In places like the Azovstal plant in Mariupol.

This plant is huge. It's been there for decades. And with every blast that comes in, that's releasing pollution and emissions. And at some point, if that plant is damaged beyond repair, which looks likely, that's a huge environmental task to actually address that pollution that's been left behind by it.

So are we talking air pollution, water pollution? Wha w what is the way in which if you like the chemicals that would normally be locked up there, uh are they kind of escaping into the environment? Is that it? Yeah, we've seen a lot of instances of quite severe air pollution, particularly from fuel storage depots which have been targeted, so we've seen enormous oil fires.

Um at some of these other industrial sites we've seen releases of toxic gases. And then in addition you've dealing with huge amounts of soil pollution which can then get into their groundwater supplies and into aquifers. And and this is stuff that could take years to clean up, I guess. It's inevitable that these are going to be long standing environmental problems. When the conflict comes to an end.

mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. Mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. Mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. Mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. Mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. Mae'r mewn gwirionedd yn ymwneud â phobl. What about the actual prosecution of of war itself? The tanks, the vehicles, the ordnance, the shells, do they have an an environmental impact?

Yeah, there are several ways of of looking at this. Um so pretty much everything that goes into weapons is toxic to some degree, whether it's heavy metals in the casings or the energetic materials, the explosives that go in them.

Some of those are destroyed and vaporized in the process of them being used, but you get a lot of residues left behind typically. Lauren Young, a research analyst at the Royal United Services Institute for Defence and Security, Says the very metal in the shells themselves poses a risk. There's a good chance that Russia is using some older style um tank shells, so these are you know, they maybe contain depleted uranium. The reason they use the uranium is it can penetrate heavy artillery.

It's depleted uranium, so it's not obviously radioactive um itself, but it it is highly toxic when it's burnt um or aridized on impact. So there's obviously huge sort of environmental impacts there. And it was something that was seen quite heavily, I think, in the Gulf War. um in environmental um surveys that were done afterwards that that was having quite bad impacts there.

Impact in terms of uh water and soil pollution. So it's really to get rid of that, you know, depleted uranium you need to scrape away the soil and to take it away like a contaminated waste. If it's left there, rain will cause it to run into rivers.

Um it'll also, you know, affect the soil for years to come in terms of growing crops and things as well. But there's also contaminants and things that can be found in, you know, the more residential areas that have been hit more recently. Everything from Um it generates a lot of rubble. There's also a risk of uh asbestos in old buildings, um, and even just down to sort of the dark. In this kind of war, what isn't contaminated is largely destroyed, leaving just a waste.

Doug Weir from the Conflict and Environment Observatory says we first saw this a little over a century ago.

The First World War is an interesting example, so it was the first truly industrialized conflict and since then we have been living through and observing industrialized conflicts and these conflicts leave huge scars on the environment. In the case of the First World War, You know, over a hundred years later there are still areas of northern France and Belgium where farmers can't till the soil because of unexploded ordnance.

Does it give you any discomfort talking about the environment, about suffering, if you like, to to nature when humans are actually dying? We don't tend to see the environment as separate from humans. We depend on clean air, we depend on clean water, we depend on clean soil to grow crops. We architect

profoundly connected with our environment, be on a cultural or economic or just a a health perspective. So when we see environmental damage and conflict, invariably we see it as a form of harm to civilians to the civilian population. But how do we know what's really happening to the environment as the fighting rages on? Can we peer through the toxic fog of war to see the truth? The Dutch peace organisation PAX tries to do just that. Their project leader is Wim Schweinenberg.

Basically, you know, over the last two decades more people have access to to internet, to smartphones, and in particular in the war in Syria since twenty twelve, this has been very essential for researchers to document human rights abuses. People are posting images on all kinds of social media. In particular in Syria there was a lot of use of Facebook.

and Twitter and people posting Vim images of like hey l there's an airstrike near my house and they put a picture online or a video and they sort of give an indication what might be hit. So what we do is we take those videos, we're trying to geolocate it. So where is it exactly? Can we find out the location? What is the angle and then potentially what has been hit? And then we use other open source data such as Google Maps, Wikimapia, which is a sort of uh

user generated information. It's a map of all over the world and as a user you can add sort of what kind of location is in your vicinity. So that is for us is very helpful because we can see oh you know uh this could be a chemical storage house or it's a paint factory or you know it's an oil refinery then we pull up satellite imagery to verify if this actually was the location hit and then we have an indication what has been damaged.

It's a sort of environmental detective work finding out exactly what is happening during the conflict. And this has been very essential for humanitarian responses. So humanitarian organizations in particular in Syria and Iraq where we have been helping them with information they they need this kind of information to understand like okay, if I set up a refugee camp, is it potentially downstream from a river that's polluted from a factory that has been hit upstream?

And so by by collecting all this information and sharing it with them, but also with local authorities, they can try to implement like mitigation efforts, but in the long term it's very essential for post conflict reconstruction. So it helps you prioritizing environmental hotspots that needs cleanup or something that can be dealt with in the longer term, but still it puts them on the radar of uh

Uh when you're in the midst of this detective work with all these different sources of information, obviously you're not there physically for real, but it must sometimes feel like you almost are. You're almost kind of picking through the weeds and ruins of these things just from the data you're getting. Yeah, it is also what helps is uh understanding the context itself, what priorities are for people.

We were looking into environmental issues and people often ask us like why do you look into environmental issues like you know it's it's raining bullets and grenades here. But other people understood also like if this huge chemical factory is being hit by an artillery shell, it basically makes this whole uh area unlivable for um at you know a couple of years up to decades, depending how much

Toxic waste or radioactive waste gets into the environment. We have now the opportunity to take all this information and to build a sort of environmental jigsaw of like where uh conflict pollution is happening.

and where long-term environmental damage should be addressed through remediation and reparation. The war is a massive trauma for Ukraine's environment, but it was far from perfect beforehand. Seeing natural marshes drained to make farmland was what triggered Bogdan Protsi's career in conservation. This is the worst pain in my life and disappointing to see these old swamps being drained.

Into agriculture field during my actual high school years. Water table being dropped by four-five métis. This was something very shocking, and uh it's influenced my life choice. Oh it's catastrophic. You can see the oil slicks, uh you can see clearly that there's going to be a very big impact um on what were already very degraded waterways. Vincent Mundy is a British photographer and journalist who's lived in Ukraine on and off for the last decade.

He spoke to me from Kiev with the river Libid gushing just behind him and said many waterways in the country have suffered for years. The Urpin River, for example, which um used to be a very large river, up to five to six meters deep, um up until the nineteen fifties, when it was dammed by the Soviets. Some of it was forced underground. and uh large areas were being cleared for construction. It it's been uh in a very sorry state for a long time, and just recently because of the war

it's become a lot worse. I know it's not uh a good time to criticize uh Ukraine. Um I love Ukraine and I fully support this uh the the Ukrainian army and the heroic defence of the Ukrainian lands. But the Ukrainian government before the war doesn't have a very good r environmental record. and um what few environmental laws there are are really insufficient and uh there was no enforcement either of environmental laws. So I don't have the greatest confidence

to be honest, that it will um radically change the policies of the government. You know, there's a strong capitalist kind of mentality here. It's quite an interesting reality check from you that although we're talking about the the damage this conflict does to the environment, that they weren't doing such a great job in Ukraine even before the war. I'm afraid so. I mean I've travelled um all over Ukraine, I've been to every city and um the the

isn't much evidence of a of any good environmental planning, I'm afraid. There's a lot of industrial uh pollution, there's m uh massive monocultures in terms of the uh agricultural side of the economy, um, you just see these endless fields of wheat or um corn or whatever they are. So it was a bad situation before and i it's just going to be much worse now. Vincent Mundy decided to stay in Kyiv, even as the Russian forces were advancing rapidly in the early days of the war.

And remember Bogdan saying earlier that nature could help defend the country? Well, that happened for real, just north of the city when Ukrainian defenders burst a dam on the river Irpin. It became like a moat, really. It it proved to be uh an invaluable barrier to slow down the Russian advance. The Russians were moving fast.

some of the elite battalions that were aiming to topple the governments. They were at the gates of Kiev and then suddenly, you know, the this huge torrent of water was uh let rip. A a lot of tanks and soldiers were swamped basically by by these rising, rapidly rising flood waters. So you've got this huge uh lake which is formed almost overnight. It's like a a rewilder's dream in a way. Um rewilding a huge area that would not have it just wouldn't have happened.

So what are the chances of this new wetland remaining when peace returns? Some homes were engulfed by the waters, and the area had been earmarked for development. Oleksi Vasiluk, head of the Ukrainian nature conservation group, wants to keep the new lake. We spoke through a translator. Wetlands can quickly form a new natural ecosystem. And if we let these territories stay flooded, in some years we will have four thousand hectares of new natural ecosystems.

But Olexi, like Vincent Mundy, knows that peace won't necessarily end the environmental assault. According to the economic crisis nowadays in our country because of the war, our government cancelled many ecological procedures. like an environmental impact assessment, so that in some time in the future it will be difficult to protect uh wildlife and nature.

We understand that the restoration of Ukrainian cities or infrastructure, villages will mean destruction of our Ukrainian uh wild nature. All the building materials like sand. Stone, uh, wood and so on will be taken from our nature. Everybody will Say that we need to restore the country and take materials uh from the ground, and we who just wanted to save nature will be like people who are against the restoration of the country.

Bogdan Protz is an internationally respected expert, with friends and colleagues working on conservation projects throughout the world. Messages of sympathy and support poured in from them when the Russians invaded, and here they've put some in their own words. And you will get all our support from people around the world. So please keep it strong and looking forward on today from all of us, please.

Keep the faith. What you're going through reminds us all how fragile our work for the world's biodiversity and habitats truly is. In the flash of an eye or a bomb, all we have strived, sacrificed, and struggled to protect for decades can be gone. We will keep thinking our very strongest thoughts for you and your team and your family. You are in our thoughts and prayers. Sending you lots of love, strength and peace from Assam in the Bodan.

I wish we could help somehow, and I wonder if the conservation community could issue joint statements to express our deep regret of what is happening. We are with you in spirit. Kind regards, Paula. Dear Bowden, my heart and thoughts are with you. May peace prevail. Massive hugs, massive, massive, massive hugs from Bolivia. For Bogdan, this human solidarity is priceless. It's someone wants to destroy your life, you need to feel others have another opinion.

It's giving you strength to fight. Bognan's new life is now lived between the city, with its occasional risk of attack, and a cottage in the mountains. like uh danger of ballistic missile uh in the city we need to go to the cellar. But in mountains. In some way you can be more relaxed because it's nowhere close

any military target or mm some kind of even bridges what they would target. So it's it's quite a remote area. So it's it's providing some kind of shelter and in this village it's staying s different refugees from different parts of Ukraine. As well, and we are trying to help them. But Bodin, does it seem quite strange in a way, being in the mountains with the natural beauty and the tranquility?

It must almost be like a different world to what you're seeing on your phone screen of what's happening in Mariupol or in Khaqiv. I can tell you it it's like surreal and sometimes you don't believe it. Now I see from my window is the blossoming of orchard. It's the apples, it's the plums, it's the apricot. And then I see s um part of the national park.

Wild cherries blossoming it's a period recovery and period of miracle in some way when everything in blossom and it's a special feeling for two weeks. And that feeling must be even more intense.

When you know what is happening in the rest of your country. Yeah, absolutely. It's it's giving you uh belief and it's giving you inspiration. We have the right like everybody in this world we have To live, continue to live with our freedom and with our independence, like every nation on the European continent.

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