How to report on the environment in wartime Ukraine 

If we don’t count isolated incidents, such as the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam in Southern Ukraine – which caused massive flooding, displacing thousands of people and devastating local ecosystems – environmental stories tend to get brushed away in times of conflict, giving precedence to political decisions and military moves.

Yet, estimations already say that Ukraine’s nature will need years and tens of billions of dollars to recover from Russia’s war, and many reports describe the environmental damage of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine as “ecocide”. The war has also produced more greenhouse gases than the annual emissions of 175 countries, significantly aggravating the global climate crisis. The impact of the war on the environment, Ukraine’s residents, and the world is therefore an integral part of wartime reporting that shouldn’t be forgotten. 

An emerging beat, shaken up by war

In Ukraine, environmental journalism is a fairly new beat, and it is therefore not taught at journalism schools, or widespread in local newsrooms. Journalists usually report on ecology alongside stories on politics and economics, as part of the daily news agenda, and they don’t get the time to develop an expertise for this beat. “Most journalists simply do not understand what they are writing about and how to cover a certain [environmental] topic correctly,” says Anna Koriahina, Assistant at the Communications Department at Ecoaction, a Ukrainian NGO aiming to protect the environment. 

However, there are exceptions to the rule. One of them is Rubryka, a solutions journalism website publishing content in Ukrainian, Russian, and English, which in its section Ecorubryka also focuses on environmental topics. Before the war, the section reported about how to set up waste sorting in an urban setting, and presented sustainable innovations, such as mushroom foam, and fur production in Ukraine, to mention some. 

Then, Russia invaded Ukraine in February 2022 and forced the media outlet to reinterpret its reporting. Viktoriia Hubareva, the leading journalist at EcoRubric, says that the invasion forced her to develop an in-depth knowledge of materials used in the war, such as heavy metals and explosives and their impact on the environment. She also started to feel more responsible for the statements she mentioned in her stories. “No one else had written about the harms of war in as much detail as we had in EcoRubric, which meant that we had to be careful about what we said about this or that harm,” Hubareva says. Regardless of the changes, however, Rubryka’s journalists try to keep true to the media outlet’s mission: to offer solutions. In times of extensive environmental damage, that means highlighting what can recover on its own and what might need additional support, both financial and human.

EcoRubryka’s stories nowadays cover long-term consequences of conflict-related environmental disasters, such as the destruction of the Kakhovka dam, but also indirect outcomes of the conflict like the changes in bird migration routes, as well as civic initiatives, such as wartime bat-saving missions. 

Personal stories as a gateway to an international audience

During the war, there’s enough bad news. So how can you get audiences to read stories about a topic, which tends to be neglected even in more peaceful times? 

Olga Tarasenko, Ecoaction’s Community Manager, observes that the war actually triggered an interest in environmental stores. “Ukrainians felt the need to protect the environment and kinship with nature,” she says. However, for foreign audiences, the war and its impact on the environment might often seem like a distant conflict. Complex stories on recycling, energy grid upgrades, and green recovery institutions in Ukraine don’t resonate as much with them, says Rubryka’s social media marketing lead Kateryna Saienko. For international followers, emotions are key – especially when presented through personal confessions of love for their land, town, and animal species. “A good example would be any report on helping biodiversity, rescuing rare and valuable species and also involving the youngest Ukrainians to make their communities ‘greener’ and safer, despite the war damage,” she notes.  

Journalism as a legal record

Emotions, however, should not give precedence to accurate reporting, which should also be a guideline for foreign journalists when reporting on environmental stories. Rubryka’s Hubareva recalls a foreign report falsely claiming that one-and-a-half-metre-long vipers are now living near the former Kakhovka reservoir and strangling dogs due to the dam’s destruction. “This, of course, is not true,” she notes. “The report was shown to me by a biologist I work with on one of the projects. We laughed about it, but on the other hand, the fact that the Kakhovka disaster is surrounded by so many fakes suggests that journalists do not have enough knowledge, do not analyse information well, and this upsets me.”

Accuracy can help document environmental damages for legal procedures. “We hope that the Russian invasion will be able to bring crimes against the environment and climate into the legal realm,” Ecoaction’s Tarasenko says. “In this way, we will not only bring justice for our nature but also the environment in other countries.” 

In fact, some legal procedures are already underway. Last year, Hubareva wrote an article about how Dzharylhach Island, the most significant migratory waterfowl station in Europe, is suffering under Russian occupation. After the prosecutor’s office read her article and other reports on the issue, it opened a criminal case against Russians for ecocide. “I think this is a perfect example of how the media should work in times of war,” Hubareva says. 

Source of the cover photo: Dsns.gov.ua, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

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