Minister Strilets: Ukraine’s war-related environmental damage already exceeds UAH 2.4T
The relevant statement was made by Ukrainian Environmental Protection and Natural Resources Minister Ruslan Strilets in an interview with Ukrinform, which is to be aired on the YouTube channel Ukrinform TV at 06:00 p.m., April 11, 2024.
“Today, the war-related environmental damage has already exceeded UAH 2.4 trillion. We already understand that the damage to the environment has even exceeded the damage from the destroyed infrastructure objects,” Strilets told.
In his words, with the assessment of losses from ecosystem services that were not received, this sum will even increase.
“Now, we are working with experts from the United States to include ecosystem services in our actual environmental losses. This is what a person could have got if the nature was preserved. So, if we also count the cost of ecosystem services, the price of a polluted square centimeter of land or air, affected by tonnes of contaminants, will increase several hundred-fold,” Strilets explained.
According to the minister, seven methodologies are used to calculate the losses, which get updated nearly every month.
In particular, inspectors from the State Environmental Inspectorate of Ukraine are documenting all environmental crimes around the clock. Additionally, the data are collected from users via the EcoZagroza [EcoThreat] app. Today, more than 80,000 people are using the app. It already contains information about more than 4,200 cases of environmental crimes.
“In the future, following a certain upgrade and legislative amendments, we are aiming to make the EcoZagroza app a daily work tool of each environmental inspector. This will allow us to cancel paper records and document everything digitally,” Strilets added.
A reminder that the environmental damage from Russia’s recent drone attack on an infrastructure object in the Zhytomyr region’s Zviahel has preliminarily been estimated at about UAH 50 million.
