Assessing Pollution from Explosive Weapons in Southern Ukraine
Publisher: Norwegian People's Aid and Conflict and Environment Observatory
Author(s): Iryna Babanina, Anna McKean, Anastasiia Splodytel, and Doug Weir
Date: 2025
Topics: Weapons, Waste, and Pollution
Countries: Russian Federation, Ukraine
The use of explosive weapons in populated areas, or against civilian infrastructure, can generate a range of direct and reverberating environmental consequences that can harm people and ecosystems. While these consequences are common to many conflicts, their impacts on people are far better documented than those on the environment. This is despite many forms of environmental damage presenting risks to people’s health, livelihoods and wellbeing. With communities and ecosystems under pressure from the triple planetary crisis of climate change, biodiversity loss and pollution, it is more vital than ever that we understand and address the environmental consequences of armed conflicts.
However, armed conflicts create substantial barriers to environmental research, and to research into the impact of environmental degradation on people: they can limit access to affected areas, destroy local capacities for environmental assessment, divert attention from environmental issues and generate new and complex environmental risks. In this respect, it is important that we develop new methodologies for documenting these forms of harm.
Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine has affected every part of its environment. This project sought to document one component of this harm – the relationship between explosive weapons uses and conflict pollution in two areas of Kherson and Mykolaiv oblasts in southern Ukraine where Norwegian People’s Aid (NPA) is working. By using a mixture of remote analysis, field sampling and stakeholder interviews, the project was able to recover important data on the environmental consequences of the use of explosive weapons (EW) and on conflict-related pollution.1 The study highlights significant pollution, infrastructure damage, agricultural threats, and ecological harm from the use of explosive weapons and their reverberating effects.
The project was also a pilot for a collaborative research partnership between a humanitarian mine action and disarmament organisation and environmental researchers. We believe that the methodology developed and applied can be further developed and expanded as part of a more holistic approach to the protection of civilians from the use of explosive weapons.