Yves here. This article intriguingly suggests that Ukraine might be well served to be far more selective about rebuilding than its government and backers see as desirable. Mind you, this piece skips over another big reason why this necessity (failure to fully redo due to lack of funds) is likely to be a virtue (depopulation greatly reducing the extent of reconstruction requirements). It also presupposes that there will be a meaningful Ukraine, as opposed to, say Greater Kiev being rebranded as Ukraine, when the conflict is over.
Interested readers might take a detour to the original post, since it contains an interactive image (by Flourish). Moving a slider back and forth shows the area below the Kakhovka dam before and after it was blown up.
By Fred Pearce, a freelance author and journalist based in the U.K. He is a contributing writer for Yale Environment 360 and is the author of numerous books, including The Land Grabbers, Earth Then and Now: Amazing Images of Our Changing World, and The Climate Files: The Battle for the Truth About Global Warming. Originally published at Yale Environment 360; cross posted from Undark
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.
After the war, Ukraine could secure its inadvertent ecological gains and ensure that reconstruction puts the environment at its heart.
“War-wilding” can benefit a country still chained to Soviet-era infrastructure, they say. After the war ends — which Zelensky said during a visit to the U.S. in September could be “closer… than we think” — Ukraine could secure its inadvertent ecological gains and ensure that reconstruction puts the environment at its heart.
There is no doubt that the breaching of the Kakhovka dam 16 months ago was a catastrophe for people living downstream. Many ecosystems were badly damaged. The question now is whether and how nature will recover. At least in the 155-mile lengths of the drained reservoir, the prognosis is remarkably positive.
Ecologists initially warned that the sediments exposed on the reservoir’s bed would either turn to desert and unleash dust storms laced with toxic detritus, or else be invaded by alien species. Neither has happened, according to Anna Kuzemko, a botanist at the M.G. Kholodny Institute of Botany in Kyiv, who has made three field trips to the reservoir bed, during one of which she was shelled by Russian mortars. The river has resumed its flow down old channels. Sturgeon have made it upstream to old spawning grounds near the dam. Nourished by rich sediment, native willows have grown across the reservoir floor, with reed beds fringing water courses.
During her most recent visit, in May, Kuzemko found that the new willow trees had reached an average height of three meters. “We were amazed. They are growing by a centimeter each day,” she said. “At an international symposium of vegetation science in September, we concluded that the young forest at the bottom of the former reservoir is now the largest floodplain forest in Europe.”
The situation downstream is less clear. The river below the dam site is on the war’s front line, with Ukraine’s forces on the west bank and Russia occupying the east bank. The toxic floodwaters here soon abated, but field trips to check out their longer-term impact on ecosystems are currently impossible. Even so, as the initial damage recedes, “downstream floodplains are likely to restore quickly, as they are adapted to flooding,” said Eugene Simonov, a freshwater ecologist and founder of the activist group Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group, or UWEC.
Satellite images of the Kakhovka Reservoir in June 2022 (left) and June 2023 (right), after the Kakhovka dam was destroyed. NASA
In any case, local ecologists are sufficiently enthusiastic about the rewilding of the extensive reservoir bed that they want the newly liberated river to remain free. It is “a unique chance to learn about the self-restoration capabilities of a major European river,” said Simonov, who is currently studying at the University of New South Wales in Australia. He anticipates the permanent return of what, before Soviet engineers arrived in the 1950s, was known as the Velykyi Luh, or Great Meadow, a region of steppe grassland and swamp previously prized for its archaeological remains and Cossack history, as well as its ecology.
“Ukraine has a chance to restore its natural and historical heritage,” said a conservationist. “We must not waste this chance.”
The restoration of the Velykyi Luh would be “the largest freshwater restoration project ever carried out in Europe,” said Oleksii Vasyliuk, head of the Ukraine Nature Conservation Group, which works to identify and establish protected areas across the country. “Ukraine has a chance to restore its natural and historical heritage,” said Kuzemko. “We must not waste this chance.”
The gains from eschewing a new dam would be economic and political, as much as ecological, the ecologists argue. In the Soviet era, which ended in 1991, Ukraine was a bastion for building inefficient infrastructure that took a heavy toll on nature. Engineers installed a cascade of six hydroelectric dams on the Dnieper, Europe’s fourth longest river. The last and largest of them, the Kakhovka dam, was constructed on a floodplain, with much of its reservoir often only a few feet deep.
Kakhovka took 830 square miles of flooded land to provide just 357 megawatts of generating capacity. That is more than three times the land take for America’s Hoover Dam, to deliver less than a fifth of the power. Simonov calculates that, rather than rebuilding this “Soviet monster,” the same energy capacity could be delivered by installing solar panels across fewer than 10 square miles, little more than 1 percent of the area flooded by the original dam.
A further reason for Ukraine not to rebuild large dams is that they would be vulnerable to future sabotage. By approving an aid package providing the country with small energy systems, including solar power, Germany’s minister for economic cooperation and development, Svenja Schulze, said in September that her government was supporting “a decentralized power supply infrastructure, as Russia will then not be able to destroy it so easily.”
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 said 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.
Ecologists argue that if Ukraine prioritizes nature in its reconstruction plans, that will help the country’s application to join the EU.
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.
UWEC’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 forested areas of the frontline “are increasingly reminiscent of protected areas,” he said.
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 frontline 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.
Nobody knows when the war will end, and whether it will result in Ukraine holding on to all its former territories. But plans for reconstruction are being laid, and many of the country’s ecologists argue that if those plans put nature first, that will be a valuable credential in the country’s application to join the European Union.
The EU is committed to achieving massive ecological restoration in the coming decades, but has not yet worked out how or where. As Vasyliuk 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 said Ukraine could let nature deliver environmental gains on a scale that “until now had seemed pretty distant and unrealistic.”
Several of Ukraine’s steppe grasslands, including the country’s oldest protected area, are currently occupied by the Russian military.
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, said 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 said 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 ecosystem.
43 comments
Comments are closed.
I recall the Kakhovka dam also supplied fresh water to Crimea. Russia may want that water restored.
They take about 2-3% of the average flow of Dniepr, so they’re good as it is. They also build water pipelines from Don system to Luhansk and Donetsk. One must remember that there has been practically no oversight or enforcing of the pollution regulation in Ukraine for decades – the rivers were in a very bad condition even before the war.
On the other hand, as the article says, the war has prevented illegal logging, so maybe the lack of energy and de-industrialization has prevented to worst of polluting, too.
And yet, the latest news regarding Ukraine’s ecology is that the uncontrolled expansion of graveyards is causing serious issues with unwanted stuff seeping into ground water and other surrounding water systems.
Not to mention the biggest nuclear plant in Europe, that was intentionally built next to a lake.
I am surprised the author didnt bring up the rewilding due to Chernobyl as a model. There are some nice documentaries.
Oh, oh, oh, and the wildfires fires in Spain or Italy (and soon Britain) are awesome! Cause, fires are great!*
And yet still tis a mystery why the Greens remain fringe!
Wait
Wait
Oh, oh, oh—I can imagine a super plot for a Marvel superhero movie where the archvillain is an environmentalist.
Meanwhile, this great plan seems to require Russia to lose. Hmmm.
* actually modern wildfires are highly destructive as they burn too hot and release too much CO2.
EXCERPT: “Good morning Chairman McInnis, Vice-Chairman Peterson, Congressman Inslee and Members of the Subcommittee. I am pleased to have the opportunity to appear before you and discuss the threat posed by eco-terrorism, as well as the measures being taken by the FBI and our law enforcement partners to address this threat.” (https://archives.fbi.gov/archives/news/testimony/the-threat-of-eco-terrorism)
Yes, and birdwatchers are an existential threat as well. Ditto the organic food movement.
This reminds me of the story of an artillery firing range in US Georgia or one of the other Benighted States of America. The Army took credit for the increase in the woodpecker population. Woodpeckers usually feed on the insects under the bark of dead standing lumber. By blasting that forest, the Army actually did an environmentally beneficial thing!
It also prevented any possible overpopulation by deer and rattlesnakes.
This article seems to suggest that Ukraine will have some say in either the re-wilding of the land, or the rebuilding of the dam. Kakhovka dam is in the Kherson Oblast of the Russian Federation.
Upstream ~200 km from the dam the river seems to be the border between the Dnepropetrovsk oblast, currently in Ukraine, and the Zaporozhye oblast.
I do like the idea of re-wilding. Reports from the DMZ between the two Koreas are fascinating.
As GramSci points out the issue may be Crimean water supplies plus, IIRC, cooling water for the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station.
I, also, wonder about water transportation up to Dnipro or even Kiev. Does anyone know if it is of serious importance?
Yes. Ukraine’s most valuable asset is its farmland; no way some of the world’s most fertile farmland will be allowed to revert to its natural steppe state by western and Ukrainian oligarch interests
even if Ukraine has apocalyptic losses of population, the extant farmland will remain as cash crops will be the country’s main revenue stream
Yes, entire villages likely be become abandoned, but the biggest population decline will be in the cities. and it is very unlikely that cities will “compact themselves” to occupy a smaller footprint.
IMO, in cities the effect will be more like post-1970-collapse Detroit. just look at any random address outside of Detroit’s central business district https://maps.app.goo.gl/XMpxvz7wfCP7v4Nb6
I at once thought that most of Ukraine’s most productive agricultural land has been handed over to foreign interests, a process which obviously does not jell with the author’s claims.
I used to think this man Pearce was quite interesting, but this is ecological gibberish and crude NATO propaganda which nobody with any self-respect would put his name to.
Please use a search engine.
https://voxukraine.org/en/ukraines-agriculture-and-farmland-market-the-impact-of-war
On the one hand, 10% is the low bound. On the other hand, big foreign interest are not going to want to hold lots of small plots.
Other sources report 28% but that conflates oligarch and foreign holdings.
And the “most productive” claim is that the corporate owners worked the land more efficiently, in fact that was the rationale for privatization. So they will say the big corporate owned land has been farmed more intensively whether that is true or not.
Ouch! My knuckles!
Notwithstanding my earlier exaggeration, however, it looks as if Ukraine has about 20 mn hectares of agricultural land, so 3,3 mn hectares is over 16% of that land. And Ukraine is very, very dependent on agriculture now that it has thrown away its industrial base.
I would also assume that the foreign investors are after the best land, because otherwise why take advantage of the stuff?
And if Europe is so committed to rewilding, why are they only interested in rewilding the bits of Ukraine occupied by Russia? Why not rewild Galicia? In fact, why not rewild big chunks of Europe?
Pearce deploys green attitudes only when they suit the interests of the EU’s militarists and oligarchs. I would once have expected better; it’s a typical green journalist surrender to power-politics.
Ukraine is extremely abundant in very high quality soil, yet the wheat that Ukraine sells on international markets is sold for livestock, not human consumption, which makes one wonder about agriculture practices. Investor calculations would include access to transport and ability to harvest efficiently (as in assembling a big parcel, as with US ag, might trump raw soil quality). Moreover, some of the big crops like sunflower seeds, for sunflower oils, and corn, do not require the best soils. So you’d need to look at all of that.
Again, the Internet is your friend. I suggest you use it more often to investigate.
This reports that Ukraine was not on the list of top appreciating farmland areas; indeed, not mentioned at all. By contrast, you’ll see Poland and Romania discussed as promising among central European countries.Infrastructure, legal regimes, rainfall, all matter. I assume the omission of Ukraine is due to corruption and poor agriculture infrastructure and maybe currency risk.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hi–3Vd55tw
“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.”
What a joke!!!
Putin and Shoigu placed the charges personally. Lavrov drove the getaway car.
“”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.””
They just can’t help themselves. ISTR that Ukr was shelling the dam or sending sea drones with explosives below the water line hoping to weaken the dam and have it collapse. Even the BBC concluded that it was impossible to determine exactly what happened.
I wonder why he didn’t comment on the tens of thousands of dead soldiers littering the landscape.
Some of those soldiers get repatriated to their hometown regional cemeteries. The others become a decomposing nutrient source for the ‘war-wilding’ flora and fauna; mostly micro-organisms.
It also should be noted that this landscape transformation also takes place in cities and towns across the globe when the human population leaves or infrastructure maintenance is diminished. Don’t need war.
Funny thing, when I read “re-wilding” I had another interpretation of that term.
Terror gangs of angry Ukrainians burning down European cities as they rage against being induced to rely on the West and their illusory promise of “Democracy” …
Good point, thanks
I had the same thought. Very likely both versions will come to pass – Ukraine will be depopulated and the rest of Europe will have to deal with the angry mobs.
That, along with feral Ukro-Nazi shakedowns and marauding in the Fatherland.
… or induced to serve in Armed Forces of Ukraine – a logical conclusion of the plan to fight to the last Ukrainian.
Most likely the solar is intermittent capacity, whereas the hydro was not.
I’ve noted previously the difficulty in having major rivers as national boundaries as it needs detailed co-operation to manage dams, flood defences, bridges, outfalls, abstractions, etc. It could be that they’ve accidentally discovered a solution to this – let the lower Dneiper (perhaps south of Dniepro?) restore itself to its former ecological glory as a series of interconnecting wetlands fed by a naturally braiding river – prior to the dams the estuary was something like the Camargue in France – a glorious area of nearly impenetrable wetlands, packed with wildlife. And conveniently nearly impossible to traverse with vehicles.
The other big issue of course is mines and cluster bombs. It will be enormously costly to clear out much of the contested area, especially with the smaller air-dispersed anti-personnel weapons. The Russian butterfly PFM-1 mine is a particularly nasty little thing and very difficult to clear. Huge areas of Laos and Cambodia are still uncultivated after Vietnam War cluster bombing and minefields laid during the Vietnam-Khmer Rouge conflict. Maybe future historians will be able to trace the main combat areas by way of the extended dense forest that may result.
Over time, the flourishing wildlife will eliminate the remaining cluster bombs and landmines.
Here in the United States it would be good to take down the dam that created Lake Powell and restore Glen Canyon. It will take at least a century, so the sooner it begins the better. The loss of Glen Canyon is a national tragedy.
Agreed. Taking the Glen Canyon dam down would also re-wild the water flowing through the Grand Canyon. Because the water that flows through the turbines is drawn from deep in the reservoir it is consistently considerably colder than the seasonably variable temperature than the wild river was, the dam has adversely affected the ecology of the stream in the canyon.
This is a bit similar to the explosion of wildlife in the Korean DMZ..
RE: “the explosion of wildlife in the Korean DMZ.”
Question: Is the DMZ mined?
If so, it gives an entirely different meaning to “the explosion of wildlife”.
Thank you! I’d read about this before, but it really is a lovely example of re-wilding. I didn’t even know there are Asian black bears, I thought they only had browns (grizzlies).
The DMZ is about 4 miles wide, from sea to shining sea, so it has a variety of connected habitats.
If it was 15 or 20 miles wide, it could support Amur tigers. That would be a hoot, and a fine reason to stay out of the DMZ.
I’ve always thought that when hostilities end in Korea, the DMZ should become a permanent nature reserve, with people excluded, and parks for people who are hiking and camping should be established abutting it.
That way you have nature preservation and a tourist attraction.
I confess that seeding ecological preserves with mines and cluster munitions to discourage human activity and return them to the wild isn’t an option I had given much thought to. It seems a little extreme.
Less extreme than irradiating the area like Chernobyl and Fukushima.
trinitrotoluening
Inefficient infrastructure, also known as robust infrastracture that won’t collapse on itself after first wind gust. Dnieper was a wild river tamed by those dams. Zaporozhie literally means beyond the rapids.
Fitting national symbol, especially when dressed in an olive green shirt.
Yeah, I have to say I find this line of reasoning somewhat troubling. What’s the headline in WaPo going to be the day after WW3 and every major city in the world is nuked? Bezos will come out of his bunker and declare that they’ve just war-wilded the whole world? Headline: Hallelujah, we saved the world! It’s right out of a Tom Clancey novel where the rich nut jobs tried to save the world by killing eveyone with a disease.
Count me out.
I fully agree. War-wilding is double-speak. War is devastating for ecosystems, it’s a natural disaster. This idea is nihilistic in a way that conservationists sometimes are, in wanting to clear the land of their populations for some artificial idea of what the pristine environment used to look like. It is never war-wilding but peace-wilding, the gains happen when war leaves a place. I’m a conservationist but find this a very disturbing attempt at green washing war.
When you read about the history of reintroducing European bison (once nearly extinct), you come across a lot of Nazis who promoted the effort–including Goering who wanted it to remain as a huntable big game. I could have sworn I read that Heinz Heck, the head scientist of the project, was also a Nazi, but his current wikipedia entry makes it seem like he was some kind of dissident–although it is undisputed that he became a favorite of Goering for his conservation effirts.
Of course, the historic range of the European bison is the Central and Eastern European plain, Eastern Germany, Poland, Belarus, Russia, and, yes, Ukraine. One of the lurid versions of ideas Heck sold to Goering that I (think I) came across was that how wide swaths of Ukraine and Belarus might be cleared of untermenschen so that herds of bison might roam again. This article made me think of that story.
Seems that I might have gotten the scientists mixed up: Goering’s favorite was Heinz’s brother, Lutz, who was also a Nazi. Heinz did work closely with his brother, though.
Link to an article on ghe topic here: https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/when-nazis-tried-bring-animals-back-extinction-180962739/
Long time ago, I did hear of their idea to make Eastern Europe into the hunting grounds, after removing population. It’s one of those things that’s hard to belive at first, just like many other things their kind thought of doing, or did, or still are thinking of doing, or actually doing.
As they say, modern problems require modern final solutions. So they had to give up on herds of bisons, and transition to something with smaller methane footprint and more appropriate for current day & age, like aforementioned endemic sandy blind mole-rat, Hoholus Bandericus.
P.S. It all sounds like a plot of a blockbuster movie. Some never made Lebensraum Park by Leni Riefenstahl, not to be confused with Jurassic Park made by Steven Spielberg. This current attempt of Netflix adaptation of fan-fiction (working title Zelenyy Park, Green Park), has went way over its buget, and is likely to be canceled.
Ha, I kinda forgot that Zelenski has the perfect name for appealing to the greenies.
All the mainstream reports of the dam’s collapse continue to maintain it was intentionally destroyed. Why then, in the videos of the collapse can we see the waters of the reservoir pouring over the top of the dam before it collapses. This fact alone indicates that it could reasonably have collapsed due to a combination of poor maintenance (not unlikely given it was on the front lines of a war/had been a target of continued Ukrainian artillery for months) combined with a surge of waters, most likely due to a release of water from upstream dams. Detonations on the dam’s structure would not cause the water of the reservoir to top the existing dam structures prior to their eventual breaking/collapse. I find it so frustrating that people can look at a video of something and not see what should be obvious right in front of their eyes.
Not mentioned but of interest may be that when a dam is destroyed the reservoir zone transitions from a methane source (from decomposition of organic materials destroyed in the original flooding of the reservoir) to a carbon sink (due to growth of trees and other organic biomass). The destruction of dams and subsequent rewilding may thus be a modest contribution to reducing emissions of high global warming potential gasses.
Then you should be interested in dynamitizing some dams in your neighbourhood, and earning some cabrón credits.