- It's been a year since Russia invaded Ukraine and the war's environmental toll is massive.
- Environmental advocates in Ukraine want the country to start making green investments right away.
This article is part of Insider's weekly newsletter on sustainability, written by Tim Paradis, future of business senior editor. Sign up here.
In December, Svitlana Krakovska, Ukraine's top climate scientist, managed to place a solar array on the roof of her Kyiv apartment building to provide electricity for her family when the power goes out.
For Krakovska, the system she and her husband set up was well worth the two months they waited for the equipment to arrive. It wasn't just about having a more-reliable source of electricity, but also about providing light for their youngest child, an 11-year-old boy who has autism.
Krakovska's son didn't like it when the war would knock out the lights. "He was really afraid," Krakovska told Insider by phone from her office in Kyiv. Part of her son's fear, she said, comes from the many hours spent with other children in shelters that can go dark when electricity fails.
The resiliency the solar panels deliver is part of what Krakovska hopes will come out of the brutal war with Russia, now one year on. Rebuilding the country in a way that's greener will help people like Krakovska and others who share her 10-story apartment building, which she said is less than half full because so many residents have fled. More broadly, solar and other renewable-energy sources that might one day dot the vast country would help Ukraine break free from fossil fuels and prevent at least some oil and gas money from flowing to the Kremlin.
Even though the conflict shows no signs of easing, it's essential to be working now on a green reset for the country, Yevheniia Zasiadko, the head of the climate department at Ecoaction, a nonprofit environmental group in Kyiv, told Insider. Because unless smart plans are developed before the war's end, she said, Ukraine won't be ready to go when the fighting ceases.
Finding ways to remake energy, transportation, food, and other infrastructure will be all the more necessary because the war itself is compounding the problems of the global climate crisis. In just the first seven months, the conflict produced some 49 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide emissions, Zasiadko said. That's about what a country the size of Portugal puts out in a year. And more emissions have emerged in the months since researchers compiled the estimate.
Another reason to push ahead with renewables is that they can provide benefits right away, as they have for Krakovska and her family. She noted there are large solar installations in Ukraine where a missile might destroy some panels but the remaining ones will still work.
Zasiadko pointed to a project in a village near Kyiv in which a small clinic that had been damaged by shelling was outfitted with solar panels and a groundwater heat pump. The result is an 80% drop in heating costs and more-reliable energy to keep the clinic running.
Zasiadko said the war made fighting the climate crisis more urgent, not less. Before Russia's invasion, the need to reduce the use of fossil fuels and take other steps felt like something playing out over 10 to 15 years, she said. "When the war started, we understood that we have to do it now. We don't have any more time," she said.