The Nile is one of the world’s most famous rivers. It’s also Africa’s most important freshwater system. About 300 million people live in the 11 countries it flows through. Many rely on its waters for agriculture and fishing to make a living.

The Nile’s two main tributaries, the Blue Nile and the White Nile, come together in Sudan’s capital city, Khartoum. This industrial hub has grown rapidly over the past few decades.

The Nile is not immune to the same pollutants that affect rivers all over the world. Plastic debris is of particular concern. Over time plastics break down into smaller pieces known as microplastics. These are tiny plastic particles with a maximum size of five millimetres, all the way down to the nanoscale. Recent research found that

rivers are modelled to export up to 25,000 tons of plastics from their sub-basins to seas annually. Over 80% of this amount is microplastic.

This has huge negative consequences for biodiversity and the climate. As microplastics degrade, scientists have found, they produce greenhouse gases. Airborne microplastics may influence the climate by scattering and absorbing solar and terrestrial radiation, leading to atmospheric warming or cooling depending on particle size, shape and composition. It also negatively affects animal and human health. Microplastics have been shown in laboratory studies to be toxic to animals and cells.

Much of the research about microplastics in African waters has focused on marine and coastal areas. To address this gap, I conducted a study to assess the presence of microplastics in the River Nile in Khartoum. My students and I tested for the presence of microplastics in Nile tilapia. This popular African freshwater fish species forms the basis of commercial fisheries in many African countries, including Sudan.

Photo by Islam Hassan on Unsplash

The results do not make for happy reading. In the 30 freshly caught fish we surveyed, we found a total of 567 microplastic particles. This shows that the River Nile is contaminated with microplastics that can be consumed or absorbed in various ways by the tilapia and other aquatic organisms.

Our sample

The fish used in our study were caught just after the meeting point of the two Niles, known in Arabic as Al-Mogran.

We visited the Al-Mawrada fish market in the Omdurman area, which is also alongside the Nile. All 30 specimens we bought were freshly caught.

We dissected the fish to remove their digestive tracts. The individual tracts were treated so they would digest any organic matter they contained without interfering with the analysis of microplastics. The resulting solution was subject to another extraction procedure and we then conducted physical and chemical analyses.

Every specimen had microplastics in its digestive tract.

The number ranged from as few as five to as many as 47 particles per single fish. In total we identified 567 particles. This is high compared to studies that have reported microplastics in tilapia species in other rivers and lakes. There is, as yet, no global guideline or standard for what might be an “acceptable” number.

Shape, size and colour

We detected different sizes of microplastics (0.04mm to 4.94mm), shapes (fibres, fragments, films, foams and pellets) and colours. The most common were very small (less than 1mm), fibrous – they appear slender and elongated – and coloured (dyed).

These characteristics make sense because of how fish and other aquatic organisms feed. Nile tilapia are versatile feeders: they consume a variety of organisms including phytoplankton, aquatic plants, invertebrates, detritus, bacterial films, as well as other fish and fish eggs. That puts them at a high risk of ingesting microplastics.

Nile tilapia are also more likely to consume particles that are within a similar size range as their natural prey, as well as the same shape and colour.

Smaller microplastics are especially good carriers for other pollutants such as heavy metals, resulting in additional health risks. Their small size also makes it easier for them to move into organs like the liver. Studies have found microplastics in the tissues, muscles, livers, blubber and lungs of other aquatic as well as marine mammal species.

Fibres, the most dominant shape found in our specimens, stay in the intestine for longer than other microplastic shapes. This, too, can lead to health problems for the fish. Coloured microplastics contain dyes, many of which contain toxic chemicals.

This all has serious implications for human health, as people catch and eat the fish, which introduces those microplastics and associated chemicals into their bloodstreams.

Pollution sources

Where does all this plastic originate? For starters, 65% of plastic waste in Khartoum is disposed of in open dumps. From there, it contaminates water bodies and other parts of the environment.

Image by Refaat Naiem from Pixabay

The city’s wastewater treatment system is ineffective. The three wastewater treatment plants in Khartoum state, Karary, Wd-Daffiaa and Soba, are outdated and do not meet local and international standards. That means untreated effluent from domestic, industrial and agricultural activities is another probable source of microplastic pollution.

There are also countless recreational sites along the River Nile in Khartoum. The Nile Street is the most popular in the capital city, hosting water sports, restaurants, cafes, clubs, event venues and hotels, as well as the tea ladies (women who serve hot beverages from makeshift mobile cafes along the banks of the river). However, waste disposal and collection practices are sorely lacking, so plastic litter from these leisure activities leaks into the river.

No easy fix

Tackling microplastic pollution is not easy. It will require technological advances, as well as the collective efforts of consumers, producers, governments and the scientific community.

As consumers, we need to change our behaviour around plastic products, especially single-use plastics. For example, opt for fabric shopping bags instead of plastic bags; use glass and metal containers. Recycling is also important.

Governments must enforce waste management regulations and improve waste management practices, as well as helping to improve public awareness. Strategies and policies must explicitly feature microplastics.

Scientists can not only fill the knowledge gaps around microplastics. Communicating scientific findings is crucial; so too is developing innovations to protect against microplastics and their harmful effects.

I would like to thank and acknowledge my student Hadeel Alamin, who conducted this study with me.

Dalia Saad, Researcher, School of Chemistry, University of the Witwatersrand, University of the Witwatersrand

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – On the morning of December 6 1917, a French cargo ship called SS Mont-Blanc collided with a Norwegian vessel in the harbour of Halifax in Nova Scotia, Canada. The SS Mont-Blanc, which was laden with 3,000 tons of high explosives destined for the battlefields of the first world war, caught fire and exploded.

The resulting blast released an amount of energy equivalent to roughly 2.9 kilotons of TNT, destroying a large part of the city. Although it was far from the front lines, this explosion left a lasting imprint on Halifax in a way that many regions experience environmental change as a result of war.

The attention of the media is often drawn to the destructive explosions caused by bombs, drones or missiles. And the devastation we have witnessed in cities like Aleppo, Mosul, Mariupol and now Gaza certainly serve as stark reminders of the horrific impacts of military action.

However, research is increasingly uncovering broader and longer-term consequences of war that extend well beyond the battlefield. Armed conflicts leave a lasting trail of environmental damage, posing challenges for restoration after the hostilities have eased.

Research interest in the environmental impacts of war

Toxic legacies

Battles and even wars are over relatively quickly, at least compared to the timescales over which environments change. But soils and sediments record their effects over decades and centuries.

In 2022, a study of soil chemistry in northern France showed elevated levels of copper and lead (both toxic at concentrations above trace levels), and other changes in soil structure and composition, more than 100 years after the site was part of the Battle of the Somme.

Photo by Kevin Schmid on Unsplash

Research on more recent conflicts has recorded the toxic legacy of intense fighting too. A study that was carried out in 2016, three decades after the Iran-Iraq war, found concentrations of toxic elements like chromium, lead and the semi-metal antimony in soils from the battlefields. These concentrations were more than ten times those found in soils behind the front lines.

The deliberate destruction of infrastructure during war can also have enduring consequences. One notable example is the first Gulf War in 1991 when Iraqi forces blew up more than 700 oil wells in Kuwait. Crude oil spewed into the surrounding environment, while fallout from dispersing smoke plumes created a thick deposit known as “tarcrete” over 1,000 sq km of Kuwait’s deserts.

The impact of the oil fires on the air, soil, water and habitats captured global attention. Now, in the 21st century, wars are closely scrutinised in near real-time for environmental harm, as well as the harm inflicted on humans.

Embed from Getty Images
American Red Adair fire fighting worker sets up a permanent hose 30 May 1991 in Al-Ahmadi oil field in southern Kuwait in order to keep the fire of the damaged oil wells in the direction of the wind whilst protecting the employees who attempt to extinguish it. In 1991, Iraqi troops retreating after a seven-month occupation, smashed and torched 727 wells, badly polluting the atmosphere and creating crude oil lakes. In addition, up to eight billion barrels of oil were split into the sea by Iraqi forces damaging marine life and coastal areas up to 400 kilometres (250 miles) away. Kuwait will seek more than 16 billion dollars compensation for environment destruction wrought by Iraq during the 1991 Gulf War, Kuwaiti newspaper Al-Anba said 07 December 1998. (Photo credit should read MICHEL GANGNE/AFP via Getty Images).

Conflict is a systemic catastrophe

One outcome of this scrutiny is the realisation that conflict is a catastrophe that affects entire human and ecological systems. Destruction of social and economic infrastructure like water and sanitation, industrial systems, agricultural supply chains and data networks can lead to subtle but devastating indirect environmental impacts.

Since 2011, conflict has marred the north-western regions of Syria. As part of a research project that was led by my Syrian colleagues at Sham University, we conducted soil surveys in the affected areas.

Our findings revealed widespread diffuse soil pollution in agricultural land. This land feeds a population of around 3 million people already experiencing severe food insecurity.

The pollution probably stems from a combination of factors, all arising as a consequence of the regional economic collapse that was caused by the conflict. A lack of fuel to pump wells, combined with destruction of wastewater treatment infrastructure, has led to an increased reliance on streams contaminated by untreated wastewater for irrigating croplands.

Contamination could also stem from the use of low-grade fertilisers, unregulated industrial emissions and the proliferation of makeshift oil refineries.

More recently, the current conflict in Ukraine, which prompted international sanctions on Russian grain and fertiliser exports, has disrupted agricultural economies worldwide. This has affected countries including the Democratic Republic of Congo, Egypt, Nigeria and Iran particularly hard.

Many small farmers in these countries may have been forced into selling their livestock and abandoning their land as they struggle to buy the materials they need to feed their animals or grow crops. Land abandonment is an ecologically harmful practice as it can take decades for the vegetation densities and species richness typical of undisturbed ecosystems to recover.

Warfare can clearly become a complicated and entangled “nexus” problem, the impacts of which are felt far from the war-affected regions.

Conflict, cascades and climate

Recognising the complex, cascading environmental consequences of war is the first step towards addressing them. Following the first Gulf War, the UN set up a compensation commission and included the environment as one of six compensable harms inflicted on countries and their people.

Jordan was awarded more than US$160 million (£127 million) over a decade to restore the rangelands of its Badia desert. These rangelands had been ecologically ruined by a million refugees and their livestock from Kuwait and Iraq. The Badia is now a case study in sustainable watershed management in arid regions.

In the north-west region of Syria, work is underway to assess farmers’ understanding of soil contamination in areas that have been affected by conflict. This marks the first step in designing farming techniques aimed at minimising threats to human health and restoring the environment.

Armed conflict has also finally made it onto the climate agenda. The UN’s latest climate summit, COP28, includes the first themed day dedicated to “relief, recovery and peace”. The discussion will focus on countries and communities in which the ability to withstand climate change is being hindered by economic or political fragility and conflict.

And as COP28 got underway, the Conflict and Environment Observatory, a UK charity that monitors the environmental consequences of armed conflicts, called for research to account for carbon emissions in regions affected by conflict.

The carbon impact of war is still not counted in the global stocktake of carbon emissions – an essential reference for climate action. But far from the sound and fury of the explosions, warfare’s environmental impacts are persistent, pervasive and equally deadly.

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Jonathan Bridge, Reader / Associate Professor in Environmental Geoscience, Sheffield Hallam University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Since their inception in the 1940s, the so-called forever chemicals have woven themselves into the fabric of our modern world. But recently, they’ve been appearing in alarming news headlines about their damaging effects on our health.

PFAS have, in fact, come under intense scrutiny due to new research showing their persistent nature in the environment and potential health impacts.

So what are they and are they an issue in the UK and Ireland?

Per- and Polyfluoroalkyl Substances (PFAS) are man-made chemicals, numbering approximately 4,700 variants. What makes them different is their formidable carbon-fluorine (C-F) bonds, renowned among scientists as the mightiest in chemistry.

Image by Baroco Ferison from Pixabay

This stability makes them an important ingredient in many products. PFAS, in various forms, have played pivotal roles in creating oil- and grease-resistant food packaging, non-stick cookware, water- and stain-resistant textiles, and fire-fighting foams, to name a few. Their versatility has propelled them into our daily lives.

The strength of their carbon-fluorine bonds is also what makes them resist breakdown by natural processes. Their longevity, often measured in centuries, has earned them the moniker of “legacy compounds”.

Forever chemicals

Their presence has been detected in worrying concentrations in drinking water, soil, air and even in Arctic ice. Recent scientific investigations have unveiled a concerning connection between PFAS exposure and damage to health, both in humans and animals.

These effects include an increased risk of cancer, liver damage, compromised immune function, developmental disorders and hormonal disruption.

The adverse health effects can be traced to their persistence within the human body. Unlike many substances that are metabolised and eliminated over time, PFAS accumulate in bodily tissues and fluids without breaking down.

This accumulation creates a perpetual, self-sustaining cycle: PFAS contamination permeates rivers, soil and the food chain. These chemicals find their way into the bodies of humans and animals, where they continue to accumulate over time.

The mounting evidence of PFAS-related health risks has triggered global concern. Organisations such as the Stockholm Convention on Persistent Organic Pollutants have set their sights on imposing stricter regulations on PFAS use within the European Union.

There is still a lot we don’t know about the long-term health consequences of PFAS exposure, but the increasing global concern is indisputable.

In the UK and Ireland, PFAS contamination infiltrates everyday consumer products and industrial processes. In 2019, the UK Environment Agency’s screening consistently identified PFAS in surface water samples, with PFOA and PFOS found at 96% of the sites they surveyed.

The presence of heightened PFAS concentrations signifies that none of England’s rivers meet the “good chemical” status criteria established by the Water Framework Directive. The Chief Scientist’s Group report identified military and civilian airfields, landfills and wastewater treatment facilities as the likely sources of PFAS contamination.

A pressing issue in Europe and the UK is the absence of standardised regulations regarding these forever chemicals. Only two of the most prevalent PFAS variants, PFOA and PFOS, are currently monitored in the UK.

The Environment Agency’s 2021 report underscored gaps in the environmental monitoring of PFAS in British waters.

These gaps include a lack of toxicology information about how PFAS are released throughout the life cycle of consumer products and drinking water, for instance recycling and waste disposal practices. This makes it difficult to properly assess the risks forever chemicals may pose.

The solution

It’s important to acknowledge that certain PFAS play a crucial role in drug formulations and medical uses.

But the lack of research, testing, and public awareness surrounding these compounds has allowed this issue to persist for too long, mostly due to the useful properties of forever chemicals.

The intricacies associated with PFAS mean we need a holistic approach involving research to discover new chemical compounds that do not harm the environment and human health.

While the solution is complex, it is undoubtedly achievable. We need stringent regulations, more research and a global effort to eliminate PFAS. The pay off is worth it – a safer and healthier future for both our planet and its inhabitants.

Eadaoin Carthy, Assistant Professor of Mechanical and Manufacturing Engineering, Dublin City University and Abrar Abdelsalam, Research Assistant in Biomedical Engineering, Dublin City University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – Microplastic pollution is a global environmental problem that is ubiquitous in all environments, including air, water and soils.

Microplastics are readily found in treated wastewater sludge — also known as municipal biosolids — that eventually make their way to our agricultural soils.

Our recent investigation of microplastic levels in Canadian municipal biosolids found that a single gram of biosolids contains hundreds of microplastic particles. This is a much greater concentration of microplastics than is typically found in air, water or soil.

Given that hundreds of thousands of tonnes of biosolids are produced every year in Canada, we need to pay close attention to the potential impacts such high levels of microplastics might have on the environment and find ways to reduce microplastic levels in Canada’s wastewater stream.

Municipal biosolids

Municipal biosolids are produced at wastewater treatment plants by settling and stabilizing the solid fraction of the municipal wastewater inflow.

In Canada and around the world, municipal biosolids are used to improve agricultural farmland soil. This is because they are rich in nutrients needed for plant growth, such as phosphorus and nitrogen.

Municipal biosolid applications are carefully regulated in Canada for heavy metals, nutrients and pathogens. However, guidelines for emerging contaminants, such as microplastics, are not currently available.

While current wastewater treatment plants are not explicitly designed to remove microplastics, they are nevertheless efficient at removing nearly 90 per cent of microplastic contaminants. The removed microplastics are often concentrated in the settled sludge and eventually end up in the biosolids.

Microplastics in municipal biosolids

Previous studies have shown that municipal biosolid waste is an important pathway for microplastics to enter the broader terrestrial ecosystems, including agricultural fields.

In collaboration with scientists from Environment and Climate Change Canada and Agriculture and Agri-Food Canada, we conducted the first pan-Canadian assessment of microplastics in municipal biosolids. We analyzed biosolid samples from 22 Canadian wastewater treatment plants across nine provinces and two biosolid-based fertilizer products.

We found hundreds of microplastic particles in every gram of biosolids. The most common type of microplastic particles we observed were microfibres, followed by small fragments. We found small amounts of glitter and foam pieces too.

Microplastic concentrations in municipal biosolids are substantially higher than other environmental networks in Canada like water, soil and river sediments. This provides further evidence that microplastics are concentrated in biosolids produced at wastewater treatment plants.

Reducing microplastics

Wastewater treatment plants are well-equipped to remove large plastics like bottle caps and plastic bags from municipal wastewater. However, microplastic particles are so small they can’t be caught by current treatment infrastructure, so they end up concentrating in wastewater sludge.

As wastewater streams concentrate microplastics, they also offer an opportunity to reduce the plastic pollution that is entering the environment. While researchers across Canada are working to find insights on the short- and long-term ecological consequences of microplastic pollution on soil ecosystems, one solution is already clear.

Microplastics can be reduced at sources via systematic reductions in the use of single-use plastics, washing clothing with synthetic fibre less frequently and removing microfibres using washing machine filters. These approaches will help minimize the amount of microplastics that get into the wastewater stream and, ultimately, into the broader terrestrial and aquatic environments.

Building new technologies at our wastewater treatment plants to remove microplastics through physical or chemical means should also be explored.

We need to better understand the impact of high concentrations of microplastic on agro-ecosystems where biosolids are applied, including its impacts on soil-dwelling organisms like earthworms and insects. We also need to start building national guidelines for microplastic levels in biosolids and agricultural soils.

Branaavan Sivarajah, Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of Geography and Environmental Studies, Carleton University and Jesse Vermaire, Associate Professor, Institute of Environmental Science, Carleton University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Featured image: In Canada and around the world, biosolids are widely used to improve agricultural farmland soil. Biosolids being sprayed on an agricultural field.
(Branaavan Sivarajah), Author provided

( Tomdispatch.com) – If you didn’t know better, you’d think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there’s nothing menacing about him. He lumbers around like a wise, old hobbling tortoise.

We’re standing in the deco lobby of the historic Kiggins Theater in downtown Vancouver, Washington, about to view a screening of Atomic Bamboozle, a remarkable new documentary by filmmaker Jan Haaken that examines the latest push for atomic power and a nuclear “renaissance” in the Pacific Northwest. Lloyd, a Vietnam veteran, is something of an environmental folk hero in these parts, having led the early 1990s effort to shut down Oregon’s infamous Trojan Nuclear Plant. He’s also one of the unassuming stars of a film that highlights his critical role in that successful Trojan takedown and his continued opposition to nuclear technology.

I’ve always considered Lloyd an optimist, but this evening I sense a bit of trepidation.

“It concerns me greatly that this fight isn’t over yet,” he tells me in his deep baritone. He’s been at this for years and now helps direct the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, which promotes renewable energy, even as he continues to oppose nuclear power. “We learned a lot from Trojan, but that was a long time ago and this is a new era, and many people aren’t aware of the history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement.”

The new push for atomic energy in the Pacific Northwest isn’t just coming from the well-funded nuclear industry, their boosters at the Department of Energy, or billionaires like Bill Gates. It’s also echoing in the mainstream environmental movement among those who increasingly view the technology as a potential climate savior.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Bill Gates couldn’t have been more candid about why he’s embraced the technology of so-called small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. “Nuclear energy, if we do it right, will help us solve our climate goals,” he claimed. As it happens, he’s also invested heavily in an “advanced” nuclear power start-up company, TerraPower, based up in Bellevue, Washington, which is hoping to build a small 345-megawatt atomic power reactor in rural Kemmerer, Wyoming.

Buy the Book

The nuclear industry is banking on a revival and placing its bets on SMRs like those proposed by the Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power Corporation, whose novel 60-megawatt SMR design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2022. While the underlying physics is the same as all nuclear power plants, SMRs are easier to build and safer to run than the previous generation of nuclear facilities — or so go the claims of those looking to profit from them.

NuScale’s design acceptance was a first in this country where 21 SMRs are now in the development stage. Such facilities are being billed as innovative alternatives to the hulking commercial reactors that average one gigawatt of power output per year and take decades and billions of dollars to construct. If SMRs can be brought online quickly, their sponsors claim, they will help mitigate carbon emissions because nuclear power is a zero-emissions energy source.

Never mind that it’s not, since nuclear power plants produce significant greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining to plant construction to waste disposal. Life cycle analyses of carbon emissions from different energy sources find that, when every stage is taken into account, nuclear energy actually has a carbon footprint similar to, if not larger than, natural gas plants, almost double that of wind energy, and significantly more than solar power.

“SMRs are no longer an abstract concept,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff, a leading nuclear advocate who has the ear of the Biden administration, insisted. “They are real and they are ready for deployment thanks to the hard work of NuScale, the university community, our national labs, industry partners, and the NRC. This is innovation at its finest and we are just getting started here in the U.S.!”

A Risky (and Expensive) Business

Even though Huff claims that SMRs are “ready for deployment,” that’s hardly the case. NuScale’s initial SMR design, under development in Idaho, won’t actually be operable until at least 2029 after clearing more NRC regulatory hurdles. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are already calling for fossil-fuel use to be cut by two-thirds over the next 10 years to transition away from carbon-intensive energy, a schedule that, if kept, such small reactors won’t be able to speed up.

And keep in mind that the seemingly prohibitive costs of the SMRs are a distinct problem. NuScale’s original estimate of $55-$58 per megawatt-hour for a proposed project in Utah — already higher than wind and solar which come in at around $50 per megawatt-hour — has recently skyrocketed to $89 per megawatt-hour. And that’s after a $4 billion investment in such energy by U.S. taxpayers, which will cover 43% of the cost of the construction of such plants. This is based on strikingly rosy, if not unrealistic, projections. After all, nuclear power in the U.S. currently averages around $373 per megawatt-hour.

And as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis put it:

“[N]o one should fool themselves into believing this will be the last cost increase for the NuScale/UAMPS SMR. The project still needs to go through additional design, licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, construction, and pre-operational testing. The experience of other reactors has repeatedly shown that further significant cost increases and substantial schedule delays should be anticipated at any stages of project development.”

Here in the Pacific Northwest, NuScale faces an additional obstacle that couldn’t be more important: What will it do with all the noxious waste such SMRs are certain to produce? In 1980, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 7, a landmark ballot initiative that halted the construction of new nuclear power plants until the federal government established a permanent site to store spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. Also included in Measure 7 was a provision that made all new Oregon nuclear plants subject to voter approval. Forty-three years later, no such repository for nuclear waste exists anywhere in the United States, which has prompted corporate lobbyists for the nuclear industry to push several bills that would essentially repeal that Oregon law.

NuScale, no fan of Measure 7, has decided to circumvent it by building its SMRs across the Columbia River in Washington, a state with fewer restrictions. There, Clark County is, in its own fashion, beckoning the industry by putting $200,000 into a feasibility study to see if SMRs could “benefit the region.” There’s another reason NuScale is eyeing the Columbia River corridor: its plants will need water. Like all commercial nuclear facilities, SMRs must be kept cool so they don’t overheat and melt down, creating little Chernobyls. In fact, being “light-water” reactors, the company’s SMRs will require a continuous water supply to operate correctly.

Like other nuclear reactors, SMRs will utilize fission to make heat, which in turn will be used to generate electricity. In the process, they will also produce a striking amount of waste, which may be even more challenging to deal with than the waste from traditional reactors. At the moment, NuScale hopes to store the nasty stuff alongside the gunk that the Trojan Nuclear Plant produces in big dry casks by the Columbia River in Oregon, near the Pacific Ocean.

As with all the waste housed at various nuclear sites nationwide, Trojan’s casks are anything but a permanent solution to the problem of such waste. After all, plutonium garbage will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Typically enough, even though it’s no longer operating, Trojan still remains a significant risk as it sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where a “megathrust” earthquake is expected someday to violently shake the region and drown it in a gigantic flood of seawater. If that were to happen, much of Oregon’s coastline would be devastated, including the casks holding Trojan’s deadly rubbish. The last big quake of this sort hit the area more than 300 years ago, but it’s just a matter of time before another Big One strikes — undoubtedly, while the radioactive waste in those dry casks is still life-threatening.

Nuclear expert M. V. Ramana, a soft-spoken but authoritative voice in Jan Haaken’s Atomic Bamboozle documentary, put it this way to me:

“The industry’s plans for SMR waste are no different from their plans for radioactive waste from older reactors, which is to say that they want to find some suitable location and a community that is willing to accept the risk of future contamination and bury the waste underground.

“But there is a catch [with SMR’s waste]. Some of these proposed SMR designs use fuel with materials that are chemically difficult to deal with. The sodium-cooled reactor design proposed by Bill Gates would have to figure out how to manage the sodium. Because sodium does not behave well in the presence of water and all repositories face the possibility of water seeping into them, the radioactive waste generated by such designs would have to be processed to remove the sodium. This is unlike the fleet of reactors [currently in operation].”

Other troubles exist, too, explains Ramana. One, in particular, is deeply concerning: the waste from SMRs, like the waste produced in all nuclear plants, could lead to the proliferation of yet more atomic weaponry.

Nuclear Hot Links

As the pro-military Atlantic Council explained in a 2019 report on the deep ties between nuclear power and nuclear weapons in this country:

“The civilian nuclear power sector plays a crucial role in supporting U.S. national security goals. The connectivity of the civilian and military nuclear value chain — including shared equipment, services, and human capital — has created a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, wherein a robust civilian nuclear industry supports the nuclear elements of the national security establishment.”

In fact, governments globally, from France to Pakistan, the United States to China, have a strategic incentive to keep tabs on their nuclear energy sectors, not just for potential accidents but because nuclear waste can be utilized in making nuclear weapons.

Spent fuel, or the waste that’s left over from the fission process, comes out scalding hot and highly radioactive. It must be quickly cooled in pools of water to avoid the possibility of a radioactive meltdown. Since the U.S. has no repository for spent fuel, all this waste has to stay put — first in pools for at least a year or more and then in dry casks where air must be constantly circulated to keep the spent fuel from causing mayhem.

The United States already has a troubling and complicated nuclear-waste problem, which worsens by the day. Annually, the U.S. produces 88,000 metric tons of spent fuel from its commercial nuclear reactors. With the present push to build more plants, including SMRs, spent fuel will only be on the rise. Worse yet, as Ramana points out, SMRs are going to produce more of this incendiary waste per unit of electricity because they will prove less efficient than larger reactors. And therein lies the problem, not just because the amount of radioactive waste the country doesn’t truly know how to deal with will increase, but because more waste means more fuel for nukes.

As Ramana explains:

“When uranium fuel is irradiated in a reactor, the uranium-238 isotope absorbs neutrons and [transmutes] into plutonium-239. This plutonium is in the spent fuel that is discharged by the reactor but can be separated from the rest of the uranium and other chemicals in the irradiated fuel through a chemical process called reprocessing. Once it is separated, plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons. Even though there are technical differences between different kinds of nuclear reactors, all reactors, including SMRs, can be used to make nuclear weapons materials… Any country that acquires a nuclear reactor automatically enhances its ability to make nuclear weapons. Whether it does so or not is a matter of choice.”

Ramana is concerned for good reason. France, as he points out, has Europe’s largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, and its atomic weapons industry is deeply tied to its “peaceful” nuclear energy production. “Without civilian nuclear energy there is no military use of this technology — and without military use there is no civilian nuclear energy,” admitted French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019. No surprise then, that France is investing billions in SMR technology. After all, many SMR designs require enriched uranium and plutonium to operate, and the facilities that produce materials for SMRs can also be reconfigured to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Put another way, the more countries that possess this technology, the more that will have the ability to manufacture atomic bombs.

As the credits rolled on Atomic Bamboozle, I glanced around the packed theater. I instantly sensed the shock felt by movie-goers who had no idea nuclear power was priming for a comeback in the Northwest. Lloyd Marbet, arms crossed, was seated at the back of the theater, looking calmer than most. Still, I knew he was eager to lead the fight to stop SMRs from reaching the shores of the nearby Columbia River and would infuse a younger generation with a passion to resist the nuclear-industrial complex he’s been challenging for decades.

“Can you believe we’re fighting this shit all over again?” he asked me later with his usual sense of urgency and outrage. “We’ve beat them before and you can damn well bet we’ll do it again.”

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

Plastic pollution has become such major problem that it’s threatening our human rights. That’s the view of two UN special rapporteurs (human rights advisers) who recently issued a joint statement, warning against the “overwhelming toxic tidal wave” of plastic endangering us and the environment “in a myriad of ways over its life cycle”. They called for urgent action on dealing with this global crisis.

Such a call could not be timelier, as governments have achieved disappointingly little so far. Yes, most restrict single-use plastic bags, or some other type of single-use plastics. But such measures are clearly not enough.

Even the UN treaty on plastic pollution, which has been agreed in principle and is currently being negotiated, is unlikely to produce fundamental change, at least in the short term. And there is no guarantee any new measures it leads to would have a different fate from the many existing plastic pollution laws that governments fail to implement.

Amid growing concerns over plastic pollution and weak governmental response to it, individuals and communities have been seeking action by resorting to courts. I recently published an academic study on the global tug of war over plastic going on in courts in more than 30 countries.

I found lots of different approaches. Some argue that their governments do not implement the existing laws. For instance, a group in the Philippines has persuaded the country’s supreme court to review the government’s implementation of solid waste management law.

Others claim that their governments do not consider the impacts of plastic pollution when allowing new factories making plastic products. One group of Māori in New Zealand recently appealed a decision to expand a billion-bottle-per-year water plant.

Some seek compensation from plastic-producing companies for dumping waste into rivers, such as the Texas residents who won a US$50 million (£39 million) settlement after finding billions of plastic pellets in their local waterways.

Local governments are also increasingly turning to courts claiming that businesses deceptively market their plastic products as recyclable. Cases like these send a clear message to the governments and businesses that individuals and communities are concerned about the impacts of plastic pollution and want more decisive action to stop it.

But at the same time, all these cases are only one part of the picture. Increasing restrictions on plastic products also result in claims brought by businesses that oppose such measures, including the producers of plastic products as well as supermarkets and restaurants, and ask the courts to quash them.

Image by Rosy from Pixabay

Cases where businesses argue that restrictions on plastic products cause economic loss or are scientifically unsubstantiated are very common throughout the world.

Businesses also regularly challenge provinces or cities that adopt additional restrictions to the ones imposed by national authorities. Such cases send the message that our society is still massively dependent on plastic products, and so measures to address plastic pollution need to be systemic.

The role of courts in tackling plastic pollution

The courts’ involvement has direct consequences for any attempts to tackle this global crisis and for action on environmental and health protection more generally. For example, businesses might be able to persuade a court to declare local anti-plastic pollution measures invalid.

This happened in Mexico recently when the nation’s supreme court ruled a ban on single-use plastics by the state of Oaxaca was unconstitutional. The success of such cases can prompt other businesses to challenge local environmental and health protection measures.

On the other hand, if a court upholds such measures, other local governments may decide to follow the example of their neighbours and introduce such measures as well. If anti-plastic pollution measures already exist, they can be used to persuade the courts that further action should be taken.

Similarly, by holding businesses accountable for pollution resulting from various stages of plastic life cycle, courts help protect vulnerable individuals and communities from various human rights violations caused by plastic pollution.

No single country has a comprehensive response to plastic pollution. But many are gradually tightening up measures on single-use plastics which moves the world closer towards a comprehensive regulatory response to this crisis.

Courts will undoubtedly continue playing an important role in this process. Those concerned about plastic pollution will keep pressing for tighter regulation, while those who oppose regulation will have more restrictions to challenge.

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Sam Varvastian, Lecturer in Law, Cardiff University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

(The Conversation) – People once believed the planet could always accommodate us. That the resilience of the Earth system meant nature would always provide. But we now know this is not necessarily the case. As big as the world is, our impact is bigger.

In research released today, an international team of scientists from the Earth Commission, of which we were part, identified eight “safe” and “just” boundaries spanning five vital planetary systems: climate change, the biosphere, freshwater, nutrient use in fertilisers and air pollution. This is the first time an assessment of boundaries has quantified the harms to people from changes to the Earth system.

“Safe” means boundaries maintaining stability and resilience of our planetary systems on which we rely. “Just”, in this work, means boundaries which minimise significant harm to people. Together, they’re a health barometer for the planet.

Assessing our planet’s health is a big task. It took the expertise of 51 world-leading researchers from natural and social sciences. Our methods included modelling, literature reviews and expert judgement. We assessed factors such as tipping point risks, declines in Earth system functions, historical variability and effects on people.

Alarmingly, we found humanity has exceeded the safe and just limits for four of five systems. Aerosol pollution is the sole exception. Urgent action, based on the best available science, is now needed.

So, what did we find?

Our work builds on the influential concepts of planetary boundaries by finding ways to quantify what just systems look like alongside safety.

Importantly, the safe and just boundaries are defined at local to global spatial scales appropriate for assessing and managing planetary systems – as small as one square kilometre in the case of biodiversity. This is crucial because many natural functions act at local scales.

Here are the boundaries:

1. Climate boundary – keep warming to 1℃

We know the Paris Agreement goal of 1.5℃ avoids a high risk of triggering dangerous climate tipping points.

But even now, with warming at 1.2℃, many people around the world are being hit hard by climate-linked disasters, such as the recent extreme heat in China, fires in Canada, severe floods in Pakistan and droughts in the United States and the Horn of Africa.

At 1.5℃, hundreds of millions of people could be exposed to average annual temperatures over 29℃, which is outside the human climate niche and can be fatal. That means a just boundary for climate is nearer to 1°C. This makes the need to halt further carbon emissions even more urgent.

2. Biosphere boundaries: Expand intact ecosystems to cover 50-60% of the earth

A healthy biosphere ensures a safe and just planet by storing carbon, maintaining global water cycles and soil quality, protecting pollinators and many other ecosystem services. To safeguard these services, we need 50 to 60% of the world’s land to have largely intact natural ecosystems.

Recent research puts the current figure at between 45% and 50%, which includes vast areas of land with relatively low populations, including parts of Australia and the Amazon rainforest. These areas are already under pressure from climate change and other human activity.

Image by Rosina Kaiser from Pixabay

Locally, we need about 20-25% of each square kilometre of farms, towns, cities or other human-dominated landscapes to contain largely intact natural ecosystems. At present, only a third of our human-dominated landscapes meet this threshold.

3. Freshwater boundaries: Keep groundwater levels up and don’t suck rivers dry

Too much freshwater is a problem, as unprecedented floods in Australia and Pakistan show. And too little is also a problem, with unprecedented droughts taking their toll on food production.

To bring fresh water systems back into balance, a rule of thumb is to avoid taking or adding more than 20% of a river or stream’s water in any one month, in the absence of local knowledge of environmental flows.

At present, 66% of the world’s land area meets this boundary, when flows are averaged over the year. But human settlement has a major impact: less than half of the world’s population lives in these areas. Groundwater, too, is overused. At present, almost half the world’s land is subject to groundwater overextraction.

4. Fertiliser and nutrient boundaries: Halve the runoff from fertilisers

When farmers overuse fertilisers on their fields, rain washes nitrogen and phosphorus runoff into rivers and oceans. These nutrients can trigger algal blooms, damage ecosystems and worsen drinking water quality.

Yet many farming regions in poorer countries don’t have enough fertiliser, which is unjust.

Worldwide, our nitrogen and phosphorus use are up to double their safe and just boundaries. While this needs to be reduced in many countries, in other parts of the world fertiliser use can safely increase.

5. Aerosol pollution boundary: Sharply reduce dangerous air pollution and reduce regional differences

New research shows differences in concentration of aerosol pollutants between Northern and Southern hemispheres could disrupt wind patterns and monsoons if pollutant levels keep increasing. That is, air pollution could actually upend weather systems.

At present, aerosol concentrations have not yet reached weather-changing levels. But much of the world is exposed to dangerous levels of fine particle pollution (known as PM 2.5) in the air, causing an estimated 4.2 million deaths a year.

We must significantly reduce these pollutants to safer levels – under 15 micrograms per cubic metre of air.

We must act

We must urgently navigate towards a safe and just future, and strive to return our planetary systems back within safe and just boundaries through just means.

To stop human civilisation from pushing the Earths’s systems out of balance, we will have to tackle the many ways we damage the planet.

To work towards a world compatible with the Earth’s limits means setting and achieving science-based targets. To translate these boundaries to actions will require urgent support from government to create regulatory and incentive-based systems to drive the changes needed.

Setting boundaries and targets is vital. The Paris Agreement galvanised faster action on climate. But we need similar boundaries to ensure the future holds fresh water, clean air, a planet still full of life and a good life for humans.

We would like to acknowledge support from the Earth Commission, which is hosted by Future Earth, and is the science component of the Global Commons Alliance

Steven J Lade, Resilience researcher at Australian National University, Australian National University; Ben Stewart-Koster, Senior research fellow, Griffith University; Stuart Bunn, Professor, Australian Rivers Institute, Griffith University; Syezlin Hasan, Research fellow, Griffith University, and Xuemei Bai, Distinguished Professor, Australian National University

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

The war has cost lives and destroyed the Ukrainian economy. But it has also been a major environmental hazard.

( Foreign Policy in Focus) – Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has resulted in the deaths so far of more than 8,700 Ukrainian civilians, including more than 500 children. It has caused a massive drop in the country’s economic output, with GDP declining by 29.1 percent.

And it has had widespread consequences for the environment: inside Ukraine, in surrounding countries, and beyond.

Russia has occupied at least 25 percent of Ukraine’s renewable energy facilities and destroyed about 6 percent of the country’s renewable energy capacity. The war has rendered 40 percent of the country’s energy system at least temporarily inoperable. The air, soil, and water of Ukraine have been severely contaminated, with more than 1,000 industrial, agricultural, and maritime cases tracked by the Ukrainian NGO Centre for Environmental Initiatives “Ecoaction.” Thousands of landmines pose a continued risk to residents and farmers.

An even greater environmental catastrophe lies in wait at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, the largest such facility in Europe. A meltdown at Zaporizhzhia on the order of the Chernobyl accident would have even greater impact than what happened on the territory of Ukraine in 1986.

“The difference is that Zaporizhzhia is close to the Black Sea and the Azov sea,” reports Yevheniia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department at Ecoaction and a climate policy expert. “So, it might also impact the whole marine ecosystem. The Russians are planting mines and exploding bombs on the territory of the Zaporizhzhia station.” The plant was built to withstand certain shocks, but the risks remain high.

Although Ukraine’s carbon footprint has likely decreased as a result of the war’s impact on the economy, the invasion has caused considerable unnecessary emissions. In collaboration with several international NGOs and the Ukrainian environment ministry, Ecoaction has calculated that the war-related greenhouse gas emissions equal the amount of carbon into the atmosphere as the country of the Netherlands or Belgium emitted over the same period. Fully half of those emissions come from the destruction of civilian infrastructure and its subsequent reconstruction.

Although the conflict is still ongoing, Ukraine has been able to rebuild in areas that aren’t too close to the conflict zones. The government has pledged to “build back better,” but there have also been enormous pressures to prioritize speed over sustainability.

“We want to build the country to be greener,” says Anna Ackermann, a board member of Ecoaction and a policy analyst at the International Institute for Sustainable Development working on the green reconstruction of Ukraine. “It’s not only about the environment. It’s also a lot about public participation—how to make sure that the communities are engaged—and how to make sure that International funds are effectively used. We shouldn’t be rebuilding roads or cities the way they were. In eastern Ukraine, where the war is still going on, these regions depended on heavy industry, coal, and so on. No one will be investing in coal anymore, and some of this heavy industry is also based on coal.”

Even as Russia’s war in Ukraine causes untold environmental consequences, it is also paradoxically pushing the world toward a tighter embrace of renewable energy. In Europe, for instance, coal consumption and carbon emissions hit their post-COVID peak in September 2022 but have been declining ever since. “Renewables and nuclear power were responsible for a record 39 percent of global electricity generation last year,” according to Fortune in 2023. “The gains came almost entirely from new wind and solar installations, which now account for a record 12 percent of global electricity generation, up from 10 percent in 2021.”

Ukraine, too, has discovered that renewable energy can be a tool of resistance. As Russia massively targeted the country’s energy infrastructure, some institutions from hospitals to schools turned to solar power, a relatively cheap and decentralized alternative, to keep the electricity on.

At a Global Just Transition webinar, Zasiadko and Ackermann discussed the many adverse environmental impacts of Russia’s war on Ukraine. But they also reflected on how post-war recovery can allow Ukraine to leapfrog into a Greener future.

Russia’s Devastation

It’s not easy to address environmental disasters during a war.

“The first reaction of most of the staff members of Ecoaction was that everything that we had been doing before was not relevant somehow after the Russian invasion,” recalls Anna Ackermann. “So that’s why we started to search for ways to help Ukraine and to do at least something. One thing we thought was important was to collect data about damage to the environment. This work is still going on, thanks to the support of our volunteers.”

The Ukrainian Ministry of Environment reached out to Ecoaction and other Ukrainian civil society organizations “during the second week of the war to help with monitoring because it was clear that the environmental consequences were huge,” adds Yevheniia Zasiadko. “We need to talk not only about war crimes and crimes against humanity, but also environmental impact. It’s been 14 months since the invasion, and we’ve compiled almost 1,000 cases. At the beginning, half our team at Ecoaction was involved in monitoring.”

That team divided the country up by region to assess damage to industrial facilities, energy safety, nuclear safety, and the war’s impact on marine, livestock, and waste. It has recently relied more on volunteers as well as media reports and government statistics to compile its cases.

“The largest damage in terms of cost has been to housing, buildings, industry, and infrastructure like road and rail,” Ackermann notes. “The price tag for this direct damage is $140 billion, which is much more than the annual state budget of Ukraine. This figure takes into account how much it would cost to actually rebuild Ukraine better according to European Union standards and not just the old Ukrainian standards. As the Russian invasion continues, this price is increasing every day.”

There are some obvious limitations to these assessments. For one, the Russian attacks have been so intense in some areas that it’s hard to grasp the full environmental impact. “In my hometown, we actually had thousands of missile strikes, so it was not possible to monitor missile by missile,” Zasiadko relates.

Also, there is very little information available for the Russian-occupied territories. “There is no independent journalism or any Ukrainian representatives in the Luhansk and Donetsk regions,” she continues. “We couldn’t even go to these occupied regions after 2014, so we don’t know the real situation, which is now much worse.” In that region, for instance, dozens of coal mines have been flooded since the war began in 2014, which not only renders them inoperable but threatens to pollute surrounding territory.

Then there’s the issue of demining the country. “Some experts estimate that it will take 10-15 years to demine all of Ukraine after the war,” Zasiadko reports. “That’s a minimum. In the example of the Balkans, 30 years after the wars in former Yugoslavia, there’s still heavily mined territory that poses a high risk. Russia has also mined the Black Sea, which also affects Georgia, Turkey, and Romania.”

Pollution, like mines, can have considerable future consequences. “Our team is planning a fact-funding mission to liberated territory to understand the real impact of pollution on the soil and the water and to actually understand the real risks for us,” she says, adding that contamination will eventually make its way into the food supply. “The moment when the territory is liberated people usually start to grow something on the land, even though it can be heavily polluted.”

Ukraine is a primarily agricultural country. “Soil is a very important resource for Ukraine since 40 percent of our economy comes from agriculture,” Zasiadko says. “And this soil has been heavily polluted from the military action.” Using soil samples from the Kharkhiv and Kherson regions, Ecoaction identified physical damage from vibration, radioactivity, and thermal impact, including the release of chemical pollution, all of which threatens both agricultural production and the health of surrounding communities.

France, after World War I, similarly had to deal with polluted lands, part of which was declared uninhabitable because of chemical contamination and unexploded ordnance. These became effectively nature-protected zones. “Maybe it’s good that we will have more nature-protected zones in Ukraine,” she adds. “But it won’t be because of biodiversity but because it’s too dangerous to grow anything or do anything on that land.”

Then there are the consequences of the destruction of industrial facilities. “In the east and south of Ukraine in particular we had a lot of industry,” Zasiadko points out. “When the Russians attacked, they damaged or destroyed many industrial facilities in Kharkhiv, Zaporizhzhia, and Dnipro. During first year of the full-scale war, 426 large or medium-sized enterprises were damaged or destroyed. Probably everyone saw the pictures of the destruction in Mariupol. But this happened in other places too. We saw a huge risk of pollution from the heavy metal and chemical industries, which were bombed. Russia also targeted livestock waste facilities, which contaminated rivers and killed fish. They bombed ships and ferries in the Black Sea and the Azov Sea, which has contaminated the marine ecosystem.”

But perhaps the greatest risk lies with the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, which Russian troops occupied and have kept running with Ukrainian staff working under enormous stress. “Specific experts should be working there,” she notes. “Even though the Russians brought in some nuclear experts from Russian nuclear facilities, it doesn’t mean that they actually know how to deal with the facilities, because each plant is unique. So that’s why Ukrainian people are still there, trying to keep safe the whole world from this threat. We have two types of heroes in Ukraine: those in the military and those working in the energy sector like Zaporizhzhia.”

There is also the threat of Russia weaponizing Zaporizhzhia. “Depending on weather conditions—how strongly the wind is blowing and in which direction—an explosion at the plant could affect Europe to the west or lands to the south or north,” she continues. “Experts say that we are still lucky that nothing has happened yet.”

Zasiadko laments that the international response to these nuclear risks has been weak. “Russia’s state atomic energy corporation, Rosatom, still doesn’t face any sanctions,” she adds. “They are still selling nuclear fuel to Europe and to other countries.”

In a report on carbon emissions associated with the war, Ecoaction and its partners looked at five sources that produced approximately 100 million tons of carbon dioxide (or their equivalent). The largest source of emissions, fully half, comes from reconstruction, followed by fires (roughly one-quarter), warfare (just under 10 percent), and the movement of refugees (only 1.4 percent). Also included in the calculations was the leakage connected to the sabotage of the Nordstream pipelines, which accounted for 15 percent of the total amount. These figures only cover the first seven months of the war, though a full-year accounting is in the works.

“In this way, Russia has attacked the whole world,” Zasiadko says. “The war is affecting the whole climate discussion.”

Building Back Better

Ukraine is a huge country. If it entered the European Union, it would suddenly become second largest member by territory. The war is concentrated in the eastern and southeastern parts of the country. So, different regions experience the war in different ways: some through direct ground attacks, others through aerial bombing, and still others mostly from the movement of refugees and relocation of businesses.

“In the north, some territories were temporarily occupied by Russia in February and March last year, and then liberated by the Ukrainian army,” Anna Ackermann points out. “The damage was huge, but demining is already happening and so is reconstruction. The whole world heard about Bucha, which was heavily destroyed. It’s already been rebuilt. You can actually go there and see how this is happening. Meanwhile, cities in the east are still being destroyed, even erased: Bakhmut, Vuhledar, Marinka.”

For those areas of the country destroyed by the war—through occupation or by aerial attacks—the Ukrainian government is engaged in an ongoing process of planning and reconstruction. “We are thinking about how to improve, how to enlarge, how to change the economy, and so on,” she continues. “And now the question is: who’s going to pay? Who’s going to rebuild? Ukraine will not be able to do all this. The economy has shrunk, and we don’t have enough resources because everything is going into fighting the aggressor at the moment.”

One option has been to divide the country into zones of international support. According to one map considered by the Ukrainian government, different countries would take primary responsibility for financing the reconstruction of different Ukrainian regions: Canada for Sumy, Germany for Chernihiv, and so on. With Ukraine becoming an EU candidate member in 2022, the EU is likely to take the overall lead in terms of reconstruction, with the United States and other G7 countries playing important but secondary roles. Also, as Ackermann notes, because of its candidate status, “Ukraine has to be moving toward European standards, climate neutrality goals, and other EU policies.”

Environmental standards play an essential role in this process. “We have dirty industries based on coal,” she continues. “Do we want to rebuild new heavy industries? What will happen with our coal mines? We have to transition to something else, to another type of economy. NGOs are trying to shape the discussion of this transition. But it’s progressing slowly.”

The essential challenge is to balance the need to build back sooner and the desire to build back better. “No country after a war has been built back that much better,” Ackermann observes. “No country was thinking really long term. Many of our colleagues from European countries where cities were rebuilt after the Second World War say that it was more about mass production and building back faster, definitely not about better.”

The motto “build back better” applies across the economy. “Here in Ukraine,” she continues, “we will have to transition from fossil-fuel power plants to renewables, from energy-inefficient buildings (of which we have a plenty) to using heat pumps and improving the energy efficiency of our building stock, to using new types of transportation.”

Ukraine has come to a new appreciation of renewables as a result of the war. “If we think about a destroyed thermal power plant, to fix it takes months or even years,” Ackermann reports. “But with solar panels, if several are shelled, you can move them around. You can quickly fix them and in just a few weeks the array works again. Some Ukrainians had their lives saved because their communication was sustained during the occupation. Thanks to the solar panels on their roofs, they could call their relatives to say that they were fine despite the blackouts when there there was no electricity.”

Ecoaction realized during the early days of reconstruction that it was important to provide concrete examples of the importance of renewables and Green building techniques. “Together with other NGOs, we worked to rebuild the energy system of a hospital in the north of Kyiv, not far from Bucha, in the city of Horenka,” she relates. “It’s a small hospital that was shelled by the Russian army. It was repaired. Then we put solar solar panels on top with energy storage and heat pumps. Ukraine can get quite cold in the winter, so we need good heating. This system also works during cloudy weather. It started up in January this year, and we calculated how much it actually costs. Now we have infographics to show to the government and our international partners. We brought them there to demonstrate why It was important.”

To replace destroyed energy infrastructure, outside donors sent diesel generators to Ukraine. “This was really critical and important,” she continues. “Running these generators is super expensive, in addition they are usually noisy and polluting. So, we wanted to show how renewables could be part of the critical infrastructure for hospitals, for water supply facilities, for kindergartens and schools that restarted their work recently. We are working with international partners to scale this up as much as possible, and the government also became interested in having this sort of installation around Ukraine. For us today it’s less about climate friendliness and more about resilience and security.”

Ackermann sees lessons here for the rest of the world as well. “These stories of resilience can affect a lot of people and show that these systems can work well,” she says. That includes building model cities that can inspire other countries. “What about having the first climate-neutral city in the whole of Europe?” she asks. “We’re working with coal mining communities, and they’d love to be this kind of pilot. It’s very sad, but making a city that was completely destroyed climate neutral is easier than remaking an intact city.”

One major obstacle to reconstruction efforts is labor. More than two million Ukrainians lost their jobs after Russia invaded last year with the destruction of industries and the mass displacement of people. At the same time, the military has absorbed many able-bodied personnel, and millions more fled the country. All of this has contributed to a shortage of skilled workers in the construction sector.

“We have to think about people coming back, and not just coming back but returning to rebuilt houses and roads and places to work,” Ackermann observes. “That’s why rebuilding Ukraine is also about rethinking what kind of economy we are building.”

It’s also about what place Ukraine will occupy in Europe. Will it just be a source of raw materials or agricultural goods?  “We have to be an equal partner in this discussion,” she continues. “We have to be higher in the value chains of the whole of the EU. If we talk about building a green economy, we could be producing heat pumps that everybody needs now in Europe and beyond. We could be producing high-standard energy-efficient materials. Ukraine is already producing parts for wind turbines. There was a big factory in Kramatorsk, now quite close to the front line, and this production moved to the western part of the country. Together with German companies, they are planning to enlarge. This is the kind of example we need to expand upon. The question is, how many countries want to have Ukraine as a competitor? Probably no one, so Ukraine has to be fighting for this.”

Part of the rebuilding process is environmental restoration. Ecoaction is currently researching the new kinds of pollution associated with the war and how best to restore soil and water. Then there’s the question of dealing with military waste, which the country has little experience in addressing. “We don’t have the human resources to deal with this issue,” Zasiadko laments.

Photo by Alex Fedorenko on Unsplash

Another key part is democratic participation. “One of the best reforms in Ukraine before the war was decentralization,” she continues. “During the first period of the war, the cities survived because of this decentralization. During the last year, people and local authorities actually felt that they can decide for the communities. They have their own money, they can make decisions. And these cities are looking for partners to rebuild better. One of the best example is Irpin,” a liberated suburb of Kyiv that The New York Times has dubbed a “laboratory for rebuilding.”

International Environmental Solidarity

The countries of the Global North have sided with Ukraine in its struggle against Russia. Much of the rest of the world condemned Russia’s invasion but has not levied sanctions against Russia or provided military support to Ukraine. Could environmental solidarity—around climate debt, for instance—serve as the basis for greater cooperation between Ukraine and the Global South?

“I can understand why there is less support from the Global South, which depends from country to country,” Anna Ackermann observes. “Before February 24, 2022, most people associated Ukraine with post-Soviet countries, including Russia. Then, everybody started discovering us, and we are also discovering the world. Now our diplomats started reaching out to secure international support.”

Russia, on the other hand, has long worked around the world to cultivate ties. “Promoting their culture, setting up embassies everywhere,” she continues. “They’ve had the resources. And we see the results of this kind of strategic work. Unfortunately, Ukraine did not do that.”

“Climate-related and energy transition-related issues offer some potential links,” Ackermann points out. “In terms of the production of critical raw minerals needed for the energy transition, Ukraine is in the very same position as many countries of the global South.”

Ukraine, like many countries in the Global South, is burdened with a lot of debt. “I’ve heard discussions that perhaps this debt should be forgotten,” she notes. “But in fact it keeps increasing. We hear a lot about countries claiming that they give a lot of assistance to Ukraine, but we never know if it’s a loan or a grant. Probably only our government knows all of the details.”

Ackerman understands why the government solicits all types of foreign investments. “Government officials see the very bad situation our economy is in, so their only thought is how to get any investments at all when there is no insurance, no guarantees for anyone,” she observes. “There is already big interest for reconstruction. Hundreds of German companies are in the queue to enter once the war is over, and the same applies to Italian companies and many others.”

Looking Ahead

Ecoaction has developed a detailed call to action for the international community around energy and environmental issues. At the top of the list is “strengthening Ukraine’s emergency response capacity” and demilitarizing and de-occupying the Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Ecoaction needs help in its monitoring efforts. And this includes building up their corps of experts, a problem that goes back at least to 2014 when the war with Russia started. The lack of expertise applies in particular to addressing environmental consequences such as land mines.

The call to action isn’t just focused on the here and now. It calls for holding Russia responsible for all of the consequences of the war and developing a global environment peace and security agenda that emerges from the wreckage of the conflict.

Nor should the international community wait before committing to long-term projects. “We don’t have to wait until the war is over,” Yevheniia Zasiadko says. “Reconstruction is happening now, so it’s important to have this vision of green sustainability.”

The war has had even larger climate implications. “Russia’s invasion of Ukraine actually led to an acceleration of the energy transition as countries realized their dependence on fossil fuels,” Anna Ackermann observes. “This very tragic situation has led to many changes in climate policies—in the EU, of course, but also around the world. It revealed the vulnerability of countries to global agricultural trade, so hopefully countries will work on increasing sustainable domestic food production.”

And then there’s the link between climate and security. “We should work to combine security issues with the environmental and climate agenda,” Ackermann concludes. “This war revealed so many things that we hadn’t seen, that we didn’t want to see, so we’d closed our eyes. Now they are revealed, and we have to be working on that.”

Via Foreign Policy in Focus