TITLE: Emissions War Escalates—Pollution From World’s Militaries in Spotlight at UN Summit
https://thewarhorse.org/world-military-pollution-in-spotlight-at-un-climate-summit/
EXCERPT: [Lennard] de Klerk, a Dutch engineer who once ran a company that worked to reduce greenhouse gas emissions in Europe, decided that calculating the planet-warming emissions resulting from the war in Ukraine might motivate people who weren’t directly affected by the conflict to care more about it because greenhouse gases destroy “everyone’s climate,” he said. So he rounded up a group of former colleagues to calculate the emissions of everything from the fires triggered by bombing raids to the fuel consumed by Russian tanks to the tailpipe emissions of the cars of Ukrainians fleeing their homes.
Next month, de Klerk will lead a 90-minute panel discussion on wartime greenhouse gas emissions at the United Nations’ annual climate summit in Azerbaijan’s capital, Baku. It will be one of two panel discussions at the Nov. 11-22 conference during which a determined coalition of climate scientists, environmental groups and researchers hope to spotlight a controversy that has been simmering for more than a quarter of a century:
Should the world’s militaries be required to report the amount of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases they release into the atmosphere?
According to the de Klerk team’s study, the first two years of Russia’s war resulted in the emission of the equivalent of at least 175 million metric tons of carbon dioxide. That exceeds the annual emissions of 90 million gasoline-powered cars, or all of the Netherlands’ emissions in a year, the study said.
The figure included the emissions from the construction work that will eventually be needed to rebuild Ukrainian cities, roads and power plants. Those emissions accounted for nearly a third of the total emissions reported in the study, which was the first such study to include reconstruction costs.
Ruslan Strilets, Ukraine’s minister of environmental protection and natural resources, said in a statement that the ground-breaking work of de Klerk’s team would be “an essential plank in the reparations case we are building against Russia.”
[A] study by Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary University of London and his colleagues, released in June, estimated that the greenhouse gas emissions of the first 120 days of Israel’s ongoing war in Gaza generated the carbon equivalent of as much as 61 million metric tons.
The emissions from the intense bombing raids and rocket attacks in that time frame exceeded the annual emissions of 21 countries and territories, Neimark said. When war infrastructure such as the construction of Hamas’ tunnels and Israel’s Iron Wall was included, that number jumps to 32 countries and territories. If you include the projected emissions from the eventual reconstruction of Gaza, the figure soars to 127.
The [US] Defense Department in April 2023 issued a report that not only heralded its climate change strategies but also revealed its most comprehensive data ever on greenhouse emissions. In 2021, the report said, all branches of the military were responsible for the release of 51 million metric tons of carbon dioxide—about what Sweden emits in a year.
Sixty-three percent of those emissions came from “operational sources”—the term for military activity such as combat and training exercises. The other 37% came from providing power to bases and other military installations. Burning jet fuel accounted for 50% of the military’s total emissions.
It was her organization and the U.K.-based Scientists for Global Responsibility that in 2022 issued a report with the widely cited estimate that militaries contribute about 5.5% of the world’s greenhouse gases every year.
TITLE: The Israel-Hamas war has wiped out most of Gaza's farm land. The environmental costs are adding up
https://www.cbc.ca/news/world/israel-hamas-war-climate-1.7352749
EXCERPTS: Israel has dropped thousands of bombs, wiping out most of Gaza's tree cover and agricultural land in addition to buildings, while leaving behind toxic debris and destroying water and sanitation facilities. Greenhouse gas emissions are stacking up from explosions, military vehicles and overseas weapons shipments.
"The intensity of it is an order magnitude greater than we've seen before — because it has been ongoing for so long, because it has been this deliberate effort to cause very severe damage to Gaza," said Doug Weir, director at the U.K.-based Conflict and Environment Observatory, a group that works to increase awareness of the environmental consequences of war.
The environment cannot escape damage from wars around the world, which almost invariably cause significant pollution and destroy wildlife habitats, with consequences that last for generations. Scientists have expressed similar concerns over the ongoing war between Russia and Ukraine, which is taking place over a larger geographical area.
Agricultural damage in the Gaza Strip is one such example. He Yin, head of the Remote Sensing and Land Science Lab at Kent State University in Ohio, has been studying that impact in Gaza over the past year using satellite imagery. His images show Israel has destroyed 70 per cent of the strip's agricultural land and tree cover in the year since the war broke out.
"The damage rate is quite stunning. [According to the] Geneva Convention, agricultural fields shouldn't be the target during wartime," Yin said.
"The environmental damage, it's tremendous, and it affects everything."
Plants cool land surface temperature and also absorb carbon dioxide, so the destruction of vegetation can exacerbate the effects of climate change in a larger region that is already warming at twice the rate of the rest of the world.
Yin is concerned that damage to the land and vegetation will continue to spread as the war expands across the region and continues in Gaza.
"Some areas that have really unique flora and native plants … I'm worried that, if the war continues, sooner or later, they will be gone, as well," he said. "So we're also going to lose all these endemic plants, all these important ecosystems."
Mazin Qumsiyeh, director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University in the West Bank, says Israel is committing genocide and intentionally making Gaza unlivable — an accusation South Africa has brought in an ongoing case before the UN's top court.
Qumsiyeh said about one-third of the Wadi Gaza Nature Reserve has also been significantly damaged in the war, including by nearby attacks like the Israeli air assault on the Nuseirat refugee camp in June that Palestinian officials say killed at least 274 people and wounded 698
Although there is no way to currently measure the impact, he says there will likely be devastation for the animals living there, which include foxes, hyenas and endangered raptors and owls.
"Wars are catastrophic for the global environment, not just for the local environment," he said. "When we see the hurricanes that now are affecting the U.S., this is all related.
"These are not isolated things. We cannot afford wars anymore."
TITLE: Ukraine Rewilding: Will Nature Be Allowed to Revive When War Ends?
https://e360.yale.edu/features/ukraine-war-wilding
EXCERPT: It was a monumental disaster. The dynamiting of the Kakhovka dam on Ukraine’s Dnieper River just before dawn on June 6 last year rapidly emptied Europe’s largest hydroelectric reservoir. Some 14 million acre-feet of water hurtled downstream for more than 100 miles to the sea. Around 80 villages were flooded, more than 100 people died, and more than 40 nature reserves were engulfed. In the Black Sea, the flood delivered a flush of industrial toxins, land mines, agricultural chemicals, sediment, and freshwater that killed fish and unleashed swarms of algae along the coast.
Ukraine’s president, Volodymyr Zelensky, called it the “largest man-made environmental disaster in Europe in decades” — since the meltdown at the country’s Chernobyl nuclear plant in 1986. Within days, his government pledged to rebuild the dam.
But now the ecological consequences of this war crime — widely presumed to be perpetrated by the dam’s Russian occupiers — are being seen in a different light. The bed of the former reservoir is rapidly rewilding, with extensive thickets of native willow trees growing. The country’s ecologists are calling for plans for a new dam to be dropped, in favor of nurturing the ecological renewal. And they argue that some of Ukraine’s short-term wartime environmental catastrophes — on rivers, in forests, and across the country’s precious steppe grasslands — can be turned into long-term ecological gains.
The conflict in Ukraine has added a new term to the environmental vocabulary: war-wilding. It was coined by British academic Jasper Humphreys, who studies the impact of armed conflict on nature at the Department of War Studies in Kings College London. He says it came to him at the start of the Russian invasion in February 2022, when Ukraine halted the advance on Kyiv of hundreds of tanks by breaking the Kozarovychi dam on the Irpin River. Besides saving the nation’s capital, the inundation of some 6,000 acres of farmland downstream restored the river’s natural floodplain.
Now, like the Kakhovka dam, the fate of the Kozarovichy dam and the reborn Irpin floodplain hang in the balance. Irpin city authorities want to rebuild the old Soviet structure, redrain the floodplain, and revive prewar plans for a massive new housing development there. But Volodymyr Boreyko, director of the Kyiv Environmental and Cultural Center, has received strong support for his call for the Irpin to be declared a “River Hero” of the conflict, and kept natural, with beavers swimming its length and water buffalo grazing the floodplain.
While its wrecked hydroelectric dams have attracted the most headlines, Ukraine’s forests have also been in the front line of the war. They provide much-needed cover against drone surveillance. With much of the fighting happening in and around them, they are also vulnerable to fires ignited by munitions. But they can also benefit from war-wilding.
Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group’s scientists estimate that a quarter-million acres have burned during the conflict. That sounds bad, but according to Stanislav Viter, a forest ecologist at the National Academy of Sciences of Ukraine, the losses are “significantly smaller than those resulting from logging and various fires in peacetime.” In fact, the absence of loggers has meant that “some areas of frontline forests… are increasingly reminiscent of protected areas,” he says.
The forest war-wilding may continue long after the war is over, according to Valentyna Meshkova, head of Ukrainian government’s Laboratory for Forest Protection. Many forests on the front line are now dotted with minefields that could take decades to clear. Mines are bad news for large forest animals such as elk. But they keep away humans, preserving habitat for many smaller mammals, invertebrates, birds, and plants.
She likens the potential ecological benefits of the minefields to the large-scale regeneration of forests in the radioactive exclusion zone created in 1986 around the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in the far north of the country. In the absence of human activity, natural regeneration has increased forest cover there by almost 50 percent. With more than two-thirds of the exclusion zone now tree-covered, it has been designated a nature reserve, Europe’s third largest.
The EU is committed to achieving massive ecological restoration in the coming decades, but has not yet worked out how or where. As Oleksii Vasyliuk, head of the Ukraine Nature Conservation Group, notes, “the only place in Europe where we can see large-scale recovery of nature is the part of Ukraine which has suffered from military action.” With many areas likely to remain off-limits for decades after the war because of mines or munitions contamination, he says Ukraine could let nature deliver environmental gains on a scale that “until now had seemed pretty distant and unrealistic.”
But this is far from a given. While many of the country’s forests could be winners in the aftermath of the war, there is growing concern that the big ecological losers could be the country’s precious unfenced steppe grasslands.
Ukraine has many of Europe’s last surviving such steppe landscapes. They are home to a third of the nation’s endangered species, including the much-loved, endemic sandy blind mole-rat. Several of these areas are currently occupied by Russian military, including the country’s oldest protected area, the 128 square-mile Askania-Nova biosphere reserve on the east bank of the Dnieper River. Russian forces have dug extensive fortifications there and ignited large fires.
Fire is a natural phenomenon in steppe regions, says Viktor Shapoval, the exiled director of the reserve. So, he hopes that recovery can be swift. But arguably a bigger concern is that, even as the war continues, Ukraine’s foresters are planting trees on these rich steppe grasslands to make up for lost commercial forests in the war zone. Viter says almost 27,000 acres were planted in the 22 months prior to the end of 2023. He fears that, with minefields leaving many forests out of bounds for the foreseeable future, the cessation of hostilities will only accelerate the foresters’ annexation of steppe ecosystems.
The stakes are high for the ecological future of Europe’s second largest country, after Russia. From its revived river floodplains to the mined forests of the eastern war zone and its prized but perilously under-protected steppes, “the potential for war-wilding is huge,” says Humphreys. But much could go wrong. When the artillery finally falls silent, and the drones go home, the country will face a choice — whether to build back old Soviet infrastructure and carry on as before, or to become a beacon for a greener and more sustainable Europe.