Over the last year of a full-scale war, the amount of damage caused to the environment has increased 5 times, namely from 13.2 billion hryvnia in May 2022 to 2 trillion hryvnia in August 2023.
The Minister of Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Ruslan Strelets wrote about this on Facebook.
He stressed that the damage from the consequences of the explosion of the Kakhovskaya hydroelectric power station is still being calculated.
“The amount is growing every day. These are far from definitive figures. We will get a complete picture after the de-occupation of the whole of Ukraine,” Sagittarius said.
He also added that in December 2022, after the de-occupation of the Kharkiv region, the amount of environmental damage amounted to 1.5 trillion hryvnia. In August 2022, the amount of damage was UAH 395 billion.
Sagittarius noted that on August 27, the Day of Ecological Debt was celebrated in Ukraine. Each year, the research organization Global Footprint Network determines the day each country used its annual amount of renewable natural resources. For the whole planet, this day came on August 2nd.
"This methodology shows when each individual state begins to live "on credit". Everything that we take from nature from today will be at the expense of future generations," the minister said.
Sagittarius stressed that in 2026-2027, the study of the Global Ecological Footprint Network will show how the war has affected the "credit history" in the use of natural resources.
We shall remind you that over 500 days of full-scale war in Ukraine, almost 2,500 cases of environmental damage caused as a result of the war have been recorded. The total damage is estimated at 52 billion euros.
As EcoPolitics previously reported, a study by carbon accounting experts found that the war in Ukraine and carbon emissions in the first 12 months of the war reached about 120 million tons.
