Environmental Impacts of the Russian Invasion of Ukraine on the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve and Mariupol: A Change Detection Analysis

Abstract:

Armed conflicts inevitably have severe direct and indirect environmental impacts in many ways that often ripple through the decades. However, these impacts are difficult to assess due to restricted access during or after wartime, and environmental monitoring often becomes a low priority under weakened or distracted governance during such crises. While armed conflicts can cause profound environmental damage, it also creates restricted access to resource exploitation, thereby allowing ecosystems a rare opportunity to recover. Using vegetation change detection and a statistical threshold method in remote sensing, this study contributes to the ongoing debate on varying warfare-induced environmental impacts on different geographical contexts by measuring both environmental degradation—indicated by a loss in the Normalized Difference Vegetation Index (NDVI)—and potential vegetation recovery, represented by an NDVI gain. The method is applied to two case studies in Ukraine—the Black Sea Biosphere Reserve (a UNESCO site) and Mariupol (one of the most severely destroyed cities). This study has yielded two main findings. Area change calculation reveals that the Black Sea region has a larger extent of NDVI gain (79.40 km² ) than loss (56.92 km²), while Mariupol experiences a larger coverage in NDVI loss (94.65 km²) than gain (93.56 km²). In terms of spatial distribution shown in map visualizations, vegetation loss is observed predominantly in Mariupol’s outskirts, with more gain in areas closer to the city center, whereas both loss and gain are evenly distributed across the Black Sea Region, with more NDVI loss observed around shorelines and lakes.

Keywords: remote sensing, change detection, environmental assessment, armed conflicts

Authors: