War Kills The Planet

Fire In The Lake, photo by Martha Ture

And now we’ve quantified the ecocide.

The war in Ukraine — thousands of civilians killed, kidnapped, tortured, mutilated; millions forced to flee, houses, schools and hospitals destroyed, dam destroyed, nuclear power plant compromised, millions of tons of grain disappeared. The deliberate destruction and collapse of Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam was an ecological catastrophe. The Russian invasion has blasted Ukraine’s natural environment.

Advocates and organizers in Ukraine have documented hundreds of environmental crimes that constitue the charge of ecocide by international courts — attacks on industrial facilities that contaminate groundwater supplies and airways, and Russian deliberate bombing of wildlife refuges.

And this war increases climate disaster in a quantifiable way, according to a new report entitled Climate Damage Caused by Russia’s War in Ukraine

https://www.cnn.com/2023/06/07/europe/ukraine-war-climate-change-impact-intl/index.html

A team of carbon accounting experts has evaluated the climate impact of the first year of the war in Ukraine, with a start date of February 2022. Nearly 22 million metric tons of planet-heating pollution came from warfare. “It’s the first time that the emissions of a war have been mapped on such a comprehensive scale,” Lennard de Klerk, the report’s lead author and…