Nidhi Subbaraman reports in the Wall Street Journal:
The war in Ukraine is poisoning air, water and soil, (as) pollutants released by the assault could take years to clean up while raising the risk of cancer and respiratory ailments and developmental delays in children (due to) the health effects of exposure to heavy metals, toxic gases, particulates from explosions, fires and building collapses. The potential health impacts could reach beyond Ukraine’s borders, as the pollutants are carried downwind and downstream. Emissions from tanks, military aircraft and trucks could amount to “as much as a small or medium-sized country in an entire year.”The war in Ukraine is poisoning the nation’s air, water and soil, with environmental-health experts saying pollutants released by the continuing assault could take years to clean up while raising the risk of cancer and respiratory ailments as well as developmental delays in children.
On top of the crushing toll of thousands of lives lost in the conflict, experts are concerned about the health effects of exposure to heavy metals, and to toxic gases and particulates from explosions, fires and building collapses. The potential health impacts could reach beyond Ukraine’s borders, as the pollutants are carried downwind and downstream, according to the experts.
“We’re facing a huge environmental problem,” said Stefan Smith, program coordinator for disasters and conflict at the United Nations Environment Program.
About 100 inspectors working for the Ukraine government are sampling soil and water at sites of concern, said Iryna Stavchuk, Ukraine’s deputy minister of environmental protection and natural resources. The full scale of the harm to the environment is difficult to assess because inspectors lack access to many regions of the country, she said.
Contamination sites are also being identified by nongovernmental organizations, including PAX, a Dutch nonprofit that documented pollution in Syria and other conflict zones; the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a U.K. charity; and Ecoaction, a Ukraine-based environmental group. By combing through eyewitness posts on social media and messaging platforms such as Telegram, and cross-referencing those with satellite images and Google Earth maps, the groups have each documented damage at more than 100 sites, ranging from power plants to military installations and water-treatment plants.
“What we’re seeing is really a kind of crowdsourced environmental detective work,” Mr. Smith said.
Many contaminated sites have been identified near the cities of Kyiv, Luhansk and Kharkiv, according to Evgenia Zasiadko, head of the climate department at Ecoaction.
As fighting intensifies in the eastern part of the country, a heavily industrialized corridor with chemical factories, coal mines and refineries could come under fire.
Damage to coal mines in the region could poison the groundwater that small villages in the area rely on for drinking water. “There is a major risk for local people and for longer environmental impacts if military activities happen there,” Ms. Stavchuk said.
In other parts of Ukraine, public-health experts expressed concern over the release of heavy metals such as lead and cadmium from industrial sites—which are linked to developmental delays in children—into the air and drinking water. “In the midst of a war, it’s hard to quantitate the exposure” to environmental pollutants, said Barry Levy, an adjunct professor of public health at Tufts University School of Medicine and an expert on the effects of war on public health.
After missile debris damaged fertilizer tanks in the Ternopil region, east of Lviv, river-water samples downstream showed ammonia levels 163 times above normal and nitrates 50 times as high, according to Ms. Stavchuk.
Across Ukraine, hundreds of enormous reservoirs store about 6 billion tons of liquid waste from mining and industrial activity, according to a 2019 report by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Those toxic chemicals could spill into nearby land or rivers if the reservoirs were damaged.
The conflict has knocked out more than a dozen water facilities, including water-treatment plants and dams, said Wim Zwijnenburg, project leader of PAX’s effort to monitor environmental damage sites in Ukraine. Damage to water-treatment plants has left untreated wastewater to wash into rivers or streams.
Air pollution is another major concern, according to Neta Crawford, a professor of political science at Boston University and co-director of the Costs of War Project at Brown University. Depending on how long the war lasts, emissions from tanks, military aircraft and trucks could amount to “as much as a small or medium-sized country in an entire year,” she said.
Russian strikes have targeted fuel depots and refineries across Ukraine, prompting large fires and the release of pollutants including soot, methane and carbon dioxide.
Previous conflicts suggest that those emissions can have long-distance impacts. In Kuwait in the early 1990s, for example, Iraqi soldiers set fire to hundreds of oil wells that burned for months. Air monitoring at the time estimated that the burning oil made up 2% of global carbon-dioxide emissions that year, about as much as emissions from all of Canada. Ice core samples collected years later in Tibetan glaciers suggested that the soot was carried hundreds of miles by the wind, coating the glaciers.
NEWSLETTER SIGN-UP
Notes on the News
Keep up with major developments in Ukraine, plus today’s headlines, news in context and good reads, free in your inbox every day.
SUBSCRIBEIn cities that have been targeted by Russian strikes, cement dust released into the air by crumbling buildings poses a threat to residents and rescue workers, according to Philip Landrigan, director of the Global Public Health Program and Global Pollution Observatory at Boston College.
The fine particles are highly alkaline and can irritate the airways and cause scarring in the lungs when breathed in, said Dr. Landrigan, who led major studies of first responders who combed the rubble of the World Trade Center towers after the Sept. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks. He likened breathing the dust to “inhaling a fine powder of Drano.”
Asbestos used in construction is another urban hazard, and can linger for years because the mineral doesn’t decompose or wash away in rains. Asbestos has been linked to various cancers, with effects felt decades later. “When people inhale it, it gets down into the lungs and then it’s like a time bomb,” Dr. Landrigan said of airborne asbestos.
Environmental damage is often ignored during wartime but should be closely tracked, according to Mr. Zwijnenburg of PAX. “The environment is not just a matter of saving trees and planting flowers,” he said. “It’s very elementary to people because if it gets contaminated, they can’t live there anymore.
0 comments:
Post a Comment