A ‘Silent Victim’: How Nature Becomes a Casualty of War
By Emily Anthes, April 13, 2022

“Humans are generally disruptive,” said Robert Pringle, a
biologist at Princeton, “and that includes their conflicts.”
Waging war is an act of destruction. And, studies suggest,
it’s one that disproportionately affects the planet’s most
important ecosystems. From 1950-2000, over 80% of the world’s
major armed conflicts took place in biodiversity hot spots,
areas that are rich in native species but under threat,
Dr. Hanson and his colleagues found in a 2009 study.

The take-home message, Dr. Hanson said, “was that if we were
concerned about biodiversity and conservation in the world,
we need to be worried also about conflict & patterns of conflict.”

There's been little large-scale research on the ecological
impact of warfare, but in one 2018 study, scientists found
that armed conflict was correlated with declines in wildlife
across protected areas of Africa. Wildlife populations tended
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 U.S. military sprayed defoliants
over wide swaths of jungle to thin out forests and deprive enemy
forces of cover. And armed forces often exploit “lootable resources,”
such as oil and timber, to fund their war efforts, Dr. Hanson said.

But even when environmental destruction is not deliberate, war can
cause deep damage. Soldiers dig trenches, tanks flatten vegetation,
bombs scar landscapes and explosives ignite fires. Weapons spew toxic
gases & particulates into the air & leak heavy metals into soil & water.

“In many conflict areas, that stuff doesn’t get cleaned up,” Mr. Weir said. “So when we see damage, it’s long-term damage.” In 2011, scientists
reported that levels of lead and copper were still elevated in the soil
in certain areas around Ypres, a major WWI battlefield in Belgium.

Environmental pollution is an especially acute concern in Ukraine.
“You have a high-intensity shooting war in a country with a lot of industrial risks,” Mr. Weir said.

Ukraine is replete with chemical plants and storage facilities,
oil depots, coal mines, gas lines and other industrial sites, which
could release enormous amounts of pollution if damaged. Some have
already been hit.

“This could really be compared to using chemical weapons,” said
Oleksii Vasyliuk, a biologist in Vasylkiv, Ukraine, and a co-founder
of the Ukrainian Nature Conservation Group. The Russians “didn’t bring toxic substances here, but they have released ones that were already
on the territory of Ukraine into the environment.”

And then there's the nuclear fear. Ukraine has 15 nuclear reactors
at four power plants; the largest has already been the site of
intense fighting. “Military actions near the nuclear power plants
can lead to the large-scale radioactive contamination of vast areas
not only in Ukraine but also far beyond its borders,” said
Mr. Krasnolutskyi, the deputy minister. Damage to nuclear waste
storage sites could also produce significant contamination.

Scientists have learned a lot about the long-term effects of
radiation on animals and ecosystems from studies conducted in
Ukraine’s Chernobyl Exclusion Zone, which has been largely
abandoned since the catastrophe at the Chernobyl nuclear power
plant in 1986.

Research at the site revealed that not only did radiation cause
deformities in individual animals, it affected entire populations.
“We see dramatic declines in abundances and lower diversity of
organisms in the more radioactive areas,” said Timothy Mousseau,
a biologist at the University of South Carolina.

The Russian military activity in the Chernobyl exclusion zone
may have worsened conditions there, experts said. Fires may have
released radioactive particles that had been captured in the local
flora, and driving through the most contaminated areas might have
kicked up clouds of radioactive dust.

The military activity may have also threatened the recovery that
wildlife has made in the exclusion zone. As humans have largely
kept their distance, “large species that don’t really have a home
nearby in the region have started to come back,” said Bruce Byers,
an independent ecological consultant who has led biodiversity
assessments of Ukraine for the United States Agency for
International Development.

Gray wolves, red foxes, raccoon dogs, lynx and boars all reside
in the exclusion zone, as do endangered Przewalski’s horses,
which were introduced to the area about two decades ago.

But the Russian takeover of the site created an enormous
disturbance, Dr. Mousseau said: “All of this noise and activity
likely would have pushed the animals away.”

Ecological Cascades
------------------
Still, research suggests that war wreaks much of its ecological
havoc less directly. “The long-term environmental impacts of war
are more driven by the associated societal upheaval,” said Kaitlyn
Gaynor, an ecologist at UC Santa Barbara.

Wars often cause economic and food insecurity, driving civilians
to rely more on natural resources, such as wild game, to survive.
Some armed forces also depend on wild animals to feed their troops,
or they harvest valuable animal parts, like elephant tusks and
rhinoceros horns, to finance their activities. This increased
demand for wildlife is often accompanied by a weakening of
environmental protections or enforcement, experts said.

After civil war broke out in Angola in 1975, the country
suspended antipoaching patrols. At the same time, the conflict
increased access to automatic weapons, said Franciany Braga-
Pereira, a biologist at the University of Barcelona who studied
the effects of the war. The result was a drastic increase in
hunting that reduced the number of buffaloes, antelopes and
other target species.

Wartime hunting takes a disproportionate toll on large mammals,
many of which play critical roles in shaping their ecosystems.

During Mozambique’s civil war, which lasted from 1977-92, the
population densities of nine large herbivores — including
elephants, zebras, hippopotamuses and buffaloes — declined by
over 90% in Gorongosa National Park.

One downstream effect: A highly invasive shrub spread through
the landscape.

Meanwhile, the collapse of carnivore populations — leopards
and African wild dogs vanished from the park — prompted
behavioral changes in their prey. The shy, forest-dwelling
bushbuck, a type of antelope, began spending more time in
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 Soviet Union collapsed in 1991,
leading to soaring poverty rates in Russia, the population of
moose, wild boars and brown bears declined, according to a
study led by Eugenia Bragina, coordinator of scientific
capacity development at the Wildlife Conservation Society’s
Arctic Beringia program.

None of these species were “even close to being vulnerable,”
said Dr. Bragina, who grew up in the Soviet Union and remembers
that her parents did not receive paychecks for months after it
fell. Wild boars, in particular, were plentiful, but between
1991-95, their population plummeted by about 50%. “In Russia,
we literally ate half of them,” she said. “Half of the population
went poof.”

The findings suggest that wildlife could be at risk anywhere
that the war in Ukraine creates food insecurity, even outside
the areas of active hostility, Dr. Bragina said.

Mr. Vasyliuk, the Ukrainian biologist, said that he had not
personally heard reports of poaching in his nation’s nature
preserves but remained concerned about the animals. Herds of
herbivores, including endangered saiga antelopes & Przewalski’s
horses, roam in the Askania-Nova preserve, which is currently
occupied by Russian forces, he said. Many of the animals in
the preserve, which also includes a zoo, require supplemental
feeding by humans in winter and early spring, he added.

But the government may not be able to safely move funds or
supplies into reserves in occupied areas, leaving the animals
at risk of starvation, Mr. Vasyliuk said. His conservation
group has been raising money for the reserves, including paying
local grain farmers to feed the animals in Askania-Nova, he said.

Some of the administrative offices of occupied reserves have
been looted, Mr. Vasyliuk said, and many staff members have
been evacuated. His organization has been working to provide
food, water and medicine to workers in occupied areas and help
displaced workers find housing, he said, adding that some members
of his own conservation group had become refugees.

War also has opportunity costs as funds and priorities shift
from conservation to human survival. “We tend to focus on the
kind of direct stuff — the big fires and smoke plumes, damaged
oil infrastructure,” Mr. Weir said. “But, actually, it tends to
be the collapse of environmental governance which leads to this
kind of death of a thousand cuts and then, obviously, has this
lasting legacy.”

Refuge and Reconstruction
---------------------------
For all the damage that war can do, in isolated cases, human
conflicts can provide a shield for nature.

The most famous example is Korea’s Demilitarized Zone, a thin
ribbon of land that serves as a buffer between North and South
Korea. It is entirely 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 and white-
naped cranes, Asian black bears and possibly Siberian tigers.
(The mines can pose a danger to the larger land animals.)

In some instances, war can also disrupt extractive industries.
During WWII, commercial fishing in the North Sea ceased almost
entirely because of the requisitioning of fishing boats,
restrictions on their movement and the drafting of fishermen
for the war. The populations of many commercially harvested
fish species rebounded.

But the gains can be temporary. In the early years of Nicaragua’s
civil war, forests along the nation’s Atlantic coast regrew as
people fled, abandoning their farms. But as the war wound down,
residents returned and deforestation resumed; nearly twice as
much land was denuded during that period as had been reforested
during the early war, scientists found.

Such findings, experts said, speak to the urgent need to
consider conservation immediately after a conflict, when the
environment can be at risk as nations seek to rebuild infra-
structure and economies.

That's likely to be true in Ukraine, too. “All of this all-
encompassing construction that will start after the end of
the war will be our sand, our rock, our wood,” Mr. Vasyliuk
said, and that activity is likely to take a further toll on
the environment. “Our main role will be to ensure, as much as
possible, that the restoration of Ukraine doesn’t mean the
destruction of its nature.”

Policymakers can use the post-conflict period to strengthen
environmental protections and even incorporate conservation
into the peacemaking process, turning contested territories
into nature reserves. “Environmental degradation in the wake
of conflict can cause further harm to already vulnerable people
that rely on having healthy environments for their livelihoods
and their well-being,” Dr. Gaynor said.

Restoration is possible. In Mozambique’s Gorongosa National
Park, an intensive recovery project has been underway since
the 2000s. It includes enhanced anti-poaching patrols, the
development of a wildlife tourism industry and efforts to
improve economic and food security in local communities.

Apex predators, including leopards and wild dogs, have been
reintroduced. Large herbivore populations are recovering and “re-establishing control over invasive plant species,” said
Dr. Pringle, who was on the advisory board for the project.
“Gorongosa is, I’d say, the world’s leading flagship model of
ecological resilience in the wake of a devastating conflict,”
he said.

Recovery remains incomplete, but the park’s collapse and
ongoing restoration shows how human and ecological well-being
are intertwined.

“When people are doing well, that’s when you have the greatest opportunities to secure a future for biodiversity,” Dr. Pringle
said. “And when people are suffering and struggling, I think
that’s when things tend to fall apart.”

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/04/13/science/war-environmental-impact-ukraine.html

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