Environmental dimensions of the conflict in Ukraine
One of our members the Institution of Environmental Sciences (IES) is hosting this webinar to discuss the significant environmental components of the destruction and human suffering following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
This webinar will first provide an overview of findings from a civil-society database of environmental pollution incidents. It will also look at the curation methodology – searches of social media to isolate environmentally relevant incidents, then verifying, documenting, archiving and assessing environmental risk via crowd-sourced open-source intelligence. It will be explained how such independent and verified databases can support further data collection missions from the UN Environment Programme, and remediation and legal activities by the Ukrainian Government. Next will be an exploration of key incidents from the database, including those at industrial and infrastructural facilities, or ecologically sensitive habitats, assessing the environmental and health impacts.
A brief review of how 8 years of fighting has impacted the environment in Donbas will help illustrate possible longer-term impacts. Finally, there will be a consideration of some of the more indirect and reverberating environmental impacts of conflict, both inside and outside Ukraine, and in particular, the climate connotations of this war.
Date
26.05.22
Hosted by
Institution of Environmental Sciences