You're listening to a stage talk titled Study
and Conflicts Impact on the Environment. This
week we were joined by Dr Owen Derbyshire from
the UK charity, the Conflict and Environment
Observatory. Owen spoke about the many different
types of conflict pollution and environmental
harm they've come across and how the organisation
works to monitor it, sometimes for years after
the initial fighting has stopped. You can find
links to all the resources mentioned in the talk
in the podcast description. This talk was hosted
by me, Charlotte Ma, on Thursday the 20th of
November 2025 in the Bellingcat Discord server.
Hello and welcome back to the Stage Talks series.
This week we're exploring the impact of conflict
on the environment. We all know the damaging
effect of war on society, but the often overlooked
toll of war is on the environment. Someone who
works to cover this harm is Dr Owen Derbyshire,
an environmental scientist working at the Conflict
Environment Observatory. The Conflict Environment
Observatory is a UK charity with a mission of
increasing awareness and understanding of the
environmental and derived humanitarian consequences
of conflicts and military activities. They also
work with organisations to develop tools to improve
data collection and sharing. Their reports focus
on regions around the globe with their latest
investigating ongoing conflicts from Ukraine
to Sudan. They're also about to release a new
database showing the incidents in a searchable
format. Hopefully by the end of this talk, you'll
have an understanding of what can be measured
when it comes to environmental damage caused
by conflict and how those measurements could
be used to enact change. As we talk, please make
sure to add your questions in the chat box via
the message bubble icon in the top right corner
of your screen. and please note within your question
if you do not want me to read your username out.
Okay, Owen, I'm going to mute my mic and pass
it over to you. So yeah, hello everyone and thanks
for having me. So environmental scientists, we
often struggle to document harm and conflict
zones. We can't get to sites, samples are dangerous
to collect and information is tightly controlled.
But with OSINT, we have opened doors that were
previously shut. So we now have satellite archives,
we have underground footage, and we have community
reporting. And so what we do is bring together
environmental science and OSINT. And this allows
us to understand wartime environmental harm in
ways that simply were not possible a decade ago.
But first of all, let's start with a big question.
Why? Should we care about war and the environment
given everything else that happens in war? Well,
environmental harm and conflict translates directly
into harm to people. Pollution, destroyed ecosystems
and collapsing services create immediate health
risks and they also leave long shadows. You know,
sometimes for generations, for example, the legacy
of herbicides in South East Asia. Just one example
of how long these effects can linger. And once
the war finishes, once the front lines move on,
people remain and they're left to live amongst
toxic residues, damaged infrastructure, chronic
exposures to pollution and maybe more importantly
governance vacuums where further environmental
exploitation can flourish. We should also care
because the environment has intrinsic value of
its own. It's the only one we have. It's the
only one in the universe. But conflict accelerates
harm to the biodiversity, to wildlife, exactly
when ecosystems are already under lots of pressure.
And so for as long as this damage continues,
there's a real need for organizations like SeaOps
to exist. So SeaOps, the Conflicts and Environmental
Observatory, we have a simple goal, and that
is to reduce environmental damage from armed
conflict and military activity. There are many
ways to achieve that, but today I'm just going
to focus on one of those, hopefully of most interest
to the audience here, and that's monitoring and
evidencing environmental harm in a robust and
at times systematic way. Now, if you haven't
come across us before, we are a small UK charity
formed in 2018 and that was building on earlier
work around toxic remnants of war and in part
we emerged because of the big potential of open
source investigation to give a voice to the environment.
2018 now maybe seems a bit of a bygone age given
how dramatically the world around us has shifted.
Geopolitical fragmentation, climate stress, AI,
disordered discourse and also the growing securitisation
of the environment. However, I think in that
time the dial has shifted a bit. The environment
is perhaps no longer the silent victim. as we
used to say back in 2018, but we need to continue
to work hard to ensure it's not a pyrrhic victory
and that the environment does not now become
the sidelined victim. So we need to sort of stick
to our core values to keep on track. So that's
solidarity, it's collaboration and it's expert
situated knowledge. And yeah, I think at this
point it'd be nice before you see all the pictures
and images and stuff to give full credit to my
colleagues. So we are comprised of environmental
scientists, remote sensing specialists, policy
analysts, legal experts, and based in the UK,
the Ukraine and beyond. So for anyone in the
audience thinking about Korea, maybe in investigative
environmental work, it might seem very niche,
but I think it's a growing field and there's
lots of space to work in and lots of different
paths. So what do we mean? What do I mean when
I say environmental harm? and why is this so
much different in war to in peacetime? Now, in
conflict, environmental harm takes many forms.
Some of this is really immediate and obvious,
big explosions. Other forms are slower or more
systemic, polluted soils, damaged water systems,
or a collapse in environmental governance. But
let's start with something very clear and obvious
and direct, which is air pollution. Often what
we see in almost every war is that oil facilities
are targeted and this is just one example from
earlier this year in Tehran where there's a nice
satellite image here with two fuel storage sites
that have been simultaneously attacked. This
is one big difference to peacetime, you might
have one of these incidents as a one -off. In
war you get them simultaneously, very frequently.
And whereas in peace time you have a big civil
response to this, most of the time in conflict
settings there is no civil response. There's
no people, there's no bodies going out to measure
air quality and provide PPE and safeguard health
and so on. The air quality impacts, now maybe
we don't know anything much about what's going
on in the stratosphere, mass missile launches,
you know, they could be depleting ozone. So there's
different interesting research angles to go in.
But maybe bringing things back down to the ground
is exposure to air pollution that is very linked
to war, so energetic compounds and repellents
that you wouldn't, civilians would not be exposed
to in peacetime. So this on screen here is an
explosion of an ammunition storage site in a
densely populated area. Sticking with this example,
showing the damage from such an explosion in
eastern Ukraine, you can also see how it may
lead to widespread land contamination and energetic
materials, for example, TNT. We know this is
a possible carcinogen and exposure to even low
concentrations can lead to long -term health
impacts. You know, waste from these kind of explosions
can also pose serious health threats. So even
from the very building materials themselves.
So these, for example, the Asbestos Mountains
in Gaza. You could have imagined a child surviving
everything that's gone on there, only to grow
up and die from asbestosis. Examples of complex
land contamination in urban areas, especially
when different types of facilities with different
pollution profiles are hit. So here's the area
of about a kilometre by a kilometre in Bari Industrial,
this area in Khartoum, which has destroyed plastic,
pharmaceutical and food factories. Next to destroyed
warehouses and car workshops, together this creates
a very complex pollution mix. So land contamination,
it's not just an urban problem. When the fighting
is in fields it becomes a big problem for crops,
both now and in the future. That speaks to food
security, it speaks to livelihoods. Soil is physically,
biologically and chemically damaged. Explosives
like RDX can bioaccumulate in crops and pose
reverberating threats for many many years. On
top of this is the risk from unexploded ordnance
and other military litter. So particularly at
the moment there's concern from the impact of
fibre optic drones and the impact they will have
on wildlife in Ukraine especially. But there's
also reports of them being used elsewhere now
so we've seen this major change in material being
used in war. which could have really significant
long -term effects on wildlife. Even entire nature
reserves have been transformed delicate ecosystems
into military training grounds. This has happened
a lot in Ukraine. So then we come to the very
profound impact war has on water and its reverberating
impacts. Just one example would be the militarisation
and draining of the Mesopotamian marshes in Iraq.
starting back in the 80s, not only altering the
entire hydrological system, but also an entire
culture. Nowadays we're seeing this over -resurgence
in using water as a military tactic. Huge events
like the Kokovka Dam collapse, but in addition
to those very large events, there's also thousands
of small -scale damages to water and sanitation
infrastructure, and this can release pollution
into both surface waters. but also down into
groundwater where the impacts are stored for
many years. Out of this thing called climate
change and yes, wars and military activities
contribute to this. We are really only just finding
out the magnitude of these conflicts and military
missions and more monitoring is urgently required
and a big space to expand into for us into work,
I think. But really I could have taken you through
dozens of examples of environmental harm and
gone into way more depth for the more indirect
and reverberating impacts. But I hope those slides
gave you a brief taste of the range of harm that
we see. One overarching feature of environmental
harm in warfare is the convergence of vulnerabilities.
So damage, stacks upon damage. This then compounds
everything else. the human rights risks, the
displacement, the food insecurity, public health
crises. And this all unfolds in places where
data is scarce, governance is weak, and accountability
can be contested. And this is exactly where OSINT
methods come into their own. OSINT satellites,
social media posts, eyewitness footage, and public
dead sets. They give us a way into understanding
how on the ground, I'm fairly sure everyone in
this room and listening understands that. Now
earlier in COB's work we carried out a lot of
ad hoc investigations. This could be verifying
an oil spill clean up, could be assessing ammunition
storage explosions, flooding events, so on. These
snapshots were valuable, but they were just at
snapshots. They told us what happened that day
to that site, or maybe over a few days. However,
as we've just found out, conflict -related environmental
harm is anything but a series of isolated events.
It's dynamic, it's cumulative, and it's all interconnected.
So this is why we've moved towards more systematic
monitoring. OSINT remains absolutely central
to this, and it's what led us to develop the
approach I'll describe next. I'll bring you on
to Wyzen. We'll soon be launching this formally,
but today I'm going to give you a sneak peek
of something we've spent the last few years developing.
Wisen, the wartime incidents to environment database.
The idea is straightforward. Conflicts generate
countless environmentally harmful incidents,
but the evidence has been scattered, inconsistent
or disappearing. Wisen brings that information
together in a structured, verifiable remote analysis
framework, and assesses each incident's environmental
risk and harm from the local level to the national
scale. So I'd like you to think of it as a sort
of counterpart to what organizations like Air
Wars and ACLID have done in their respective
domains. I think that's an outstanding idea,
but it emerged in its earliest form in the early
days of the full scale of invasion of Ukraine.
when it was immediately obvious that the scale
of environmental damage required systematic tracking.
We had the tools, satellites, OSINT, environmental
expertise, and why the Ukraine grew from there.
Now, there are really many other important ways
of studying conflicts in the environment, like
mapping burned areas, vegetation loss, crater
detections, air quality time series, all of these
things, very important, we call them continuous
cohort approaches. They're essential and academics,
especially now, are doing fantastic work in that
space. But WISON is the counterpart to that.
It focuses specifically on discrete incidents
affecting specific facilities. It's built around
hierarchy. So at level zero, we have damaged
facilities, but where we don't have enough temporal
detail to define an incident. Level one is a
wide ranging list of verified incidents. with
calculated environmental risk scores. And level
two is the big deep dive investigations into
the highest risk incidents where we assess the
actual environmental harm. When we cast a wide
net, we do systematic searches of social and
mass media, emergency services updates, curated
data sets, OSINT community outputs, and satellite
driven findings. to generate a list of potential
incidents. We then verify those, geo and chrono
locate them. And if it meets our definition,
we give it a score for the environmental risk.
And that's calculated based on the theoretical
risk. So what the type of facility is and where
it's situated. Is it near people? Is it near
crops? Is it near ecologically important areas?
And also an event magnitude score based on the
the magnitude of what would have happened. We
can see that these occur across Ukraine and Norway
really escapes. This gives you a real sense of
the breadth of incidents and the highest risk
incidents we then promote up to level 2 analysis.
Level 2 is where the serious OSINT work happens.
For each priority incident, we build a structured
dossier. So we have a chronology of social and
mass media posts, capturing the earliest posts,
multiple viewpoints, testimony, screenshots,
URLs, all of that business. So we have a reproducible
search trail. We also generate a stack of annotated
satellite imagery before, during, after, from
all of the openly available satellite feed sources
and occasionally some commercial ones too. We
then do more detailed geolocation of key footage
even if we know it is definitely where it is
it's good practice to do so and maybe a more
unique element is we collect subsequent evidence
from later imagery a month later two months later
or from local reporting or from official assessments.
And this means we can do an assessment of not
only the immediate damage, but also the longer
term damage. And that's exactly what we do. We
have a sort of structured environmental harm
assessment, looking at hazards, affected media,
loss of ecosystem services and local vulnerabilities.
So this gives us then a scorecard record of harm.
And if the same facility struck multiple times,
we can add that together. and work out cumulatively
the most impacted facilities. The result is a
detailed, scalable and transparent picture of
environmental harm. We can see national patterns,
we can see regional trends, individual facility
histories. WISEN has already been used in our
advocacy, media work and external investigations.
and also for ground proofing with mine action
teams. And because the methodology is transferable,
we've also applied it in Khartoum and Al Jazeera
states in Sudan. Our in now is to partner up
so we can scale up, develop it more and roll
it out to other appropriate armed conflicts,
employing local situated expertise and ultimately
and eventually handing responsibility. over to
those local partners. Now, Wisen isn't perfect.
No data set is, but it gives us something we've
never had before, which is a replicable way of
understanding environmental harm of scale in
conflicts. And so this sets up the question.
Now that we have this data, what can it help
us change? So one is accountability. Once harm
is documented clearly and consistently, we can
use it for justice. This can be very simple in
terms of recognition or for transitional justice.
It could even extend as high up as international
legal processes. What it does is it moves the
conversation from we think this happens to here
is the evidence and here is the scale. It can
also support behavior change and norm development.
So we can work out all the time which actions
are causing the greatest environmental harm,
which tactics, and then we can make the argument,
maybe some of these tactics are not appropriate.
And then finally there's recovery. If we know
where contamination and ecological damage are
concentrated, we can prioritise those areas for
remediation, for restoration and for resource
and funding basically. And this is central to
any green and just recovery process. And that's
something we're working on. actively in Ukraine
at the moment. So to close I'd like to turn the
question back to the audience actually. What
are we missing? Are there other places OSINT
can help? WISEM captures what we can observe
but what are we not seeing? Could we be looking
more at health impacts and assessments? More
at prevention and predictive analytics? More
at supply chains, the militaries for example
and all of this in the context of the information
space which is shrinking is becoming more fragmented,
more content is ephemeral and there's more this
and misinformation and that is they also impact
environmental narratives. So how do we go about
keeping documentation trustworthy? So genuinely
welcome your ideas, your questions. And thank
you for being here today. Thank you. Thanks for
being patient as well with my clicking. Apologies
about the tech issue there that prevented you
from clicking yourself, but I really appreciate
you taking us through that and actually taking
us through some quite surprising to me anyway,
impacts of war. Some of the things like air pollution,
I'd not even thought about when we're covering
conflict. Usually we look at fires. and deforestation
as environmental impacts, but not necessarily
air pollution, which was super interesting. We
have a bunch of questions in the chat, but just
to respond initially to your question at the
end there, a lot of people are saying, what are
we missing? Somebody said my answer, volunteers,
and they are ready to volunteer. I don't know
if you have a volunteer program or a way that
people can get involved. It's almost like a set
up question. So we previously have trialed volunteers
like maybe like a couple of years ago and what
we found was that we were probably asking too
much of them in terms of like the there's the
awesome knowledge but then there's like an extra
bit of environmental like knowledge that's missing.
So we've been sort of learned from that and we've
been thinking about it and I certainly do think
there is a role for volunteers and At the moment,
we're trialing out with some sort of, some students
are working part time on the level zero part
of the database, which is just damaged facilities.
So we're going to see how that goes and maybe
see if that is something that we can roll out
as a, as a wider thing for volunteers as a citizen
science thing perhaps. Could it be hosted somewhere
like Zooniverse? We're just, we're sort of, yeah.
investigating these ideas, it would be good to
know what's too much to ask of volunteers and
what's the reasonable ask. That's maybe where
we struggled before. Yeah, perhaps people can
put their experience of volunteering in the chat.
I know, for example, we have a volunteer group
here at Bellingcat and it's always a learning
process in terms of how much to ask for and how
much to get back. What I often find is that people
are very willing to give a lot of time and actually
it's up to you as the responsible organization
to make sure that they're not overworking, which
I think is a key point. We've got a few questions
about the Wison map as you presented it. Saiba
has asked, that Wison map of Ukraine, does that
show overall environmental damage or is there
a way or reason? to separate it into air, water,
ground and damage, et cetera. And somebody else
has put, is there a correlation made between
the WISEN findings and population health after
an incident? For example, degradation in crops
slash animal health, et cetera. So have you thought
about breaking down the things mapped on the
WISEN maps to show kind of the breakdown in different
types of environmental damage? And also is it
linked to population health as well? Absolutely
fantastic questions. And yes, we can break down
that map. We could separate it out by the type
of facility. So if we just wanted to look at
water facilities, we could have the same map,
just looking at water facilities, same for agriculture,
industry, military even. And we could start to
see how things look different for different sectors.
It's important to say that wouldn't give you
the whole story for like water in Ukraine. If
you were just looking at our our database, it
would give you a lot of information and a lot
of the detail. We also need to then be still
looking at some of the more, I can mention the
sort of like continuous cohort approaches. So
looking at not incidents, but let's say water
quality over a very long period of time in lots
of different places, which is not something that
would be picked up by Vyzen as an incident. You
might see. the three, four years of the conflict,
the change in water quality, which you could
maybe attribute to the conflicts, but it's sort
of one of these more hidden sort of things. Absolutely
breaking it down by sector, by domain is really
important. We're trying to understand this in
terms of health. That's the sort of next big
frontier. That's where a present is. exceptionally
hard to make the connection between environmental
damage, some exposure to pollution and the health
impact. The sort of, even in peacetime in civilian
settings, it's very hard to do that sort of epidemiological
work because there's so many other confounding
things happening. That's made even harder in
conflicts because people's bodies are under more
stress from the mental stress. physical stress,
there's everything else going on. Um, but it's
definitely, I think that where if we keep pushing
and keep trying, we will like uncover lots of,
lots of connections, lots of important connections
and connections that are not just acute and over
a few days or weeks, but like chronic over a
very long term. More just in the way What's with
pageant orange and herbicide use in Southeast
Asia? You mentioned a lot of the time in your
talk about the cumulative effects that you're
monitoring. Where does your organization draw
a line on monitoring? Are you monitoring these
effects of conflict forever? When does it no
longer become? When does conflict no longer become
the causation and how long into the future are
you monitoring this land and these pollution
effects? I think that's an amazing question.
And it depends what you're particularly interested
in, but the answer can be decades. Even now,
there's fields that farmers can't use in Northern
France because of contamination from World War
I battlefields. So you do need to think on those
time horizons. And I also think there's a lot
of space to research into some of the wars in
the 60s, 70s, 80s, 90s, even into the 2000s of
health impacts now. And there's been like the
most work done around like US veterans who were
exposed to burn pits in Iraq, Afghanistan and
so on. where all of the outside the bases they
were just burning everything and they now have
elevated health risk let's say. What will happen
to the local civilian populations in those places?
We don't really know anything about that so we'd
need more monitoring and more monitoring into
the future. Where to draw the line? The line
gets drawn for us I think by the resource we
have. More hands on deck are needed by the sounds
of it. And I'm sure everyone listening is now
really fascinated and interested in getting involved
in this kind of work. One of my colleagues, Jake
Godin, who has been working at looking at the
land changes in Gaza for quite some time now
is curious if you or your colleagues have tried
messing around with hyperspectral imagery yet
on observing environmental changes slash impact.
Perhaps you can give us an insight into some
of the tools you mentioned, satellite imagery,
but specific tools that you use on a regular
basis to monitor this work. Yes. Okay. Let's
start with hyperspectral because it's the most
exciting. Um, it is, I think if we had access
to hyperspectral data, so that's where you could
have sort of the spectral fingerprint for every
object. on the surface of earth basically. That
would be really, really sort of transformative
in environmental monitoring conflicts. Environmental
monitoring overall, but like especially in conflicts
we could much more easily document change. We
haven't actually played with hyperspectral, at
least high resolution hyperspectral, high spatial
resolution hyperspectral. that we would love
to if there's any commercial companies out there
who would like to take us on board to do case
studies with. What we are doing, otherwise, is
pretty much the same as lots of people here,
which is, you know, using the openly available
stuff. So Sentinel -2, obviously, also Sentinel
-1, Radar, Danger Detection, Muse. If we have
to we use proprietary imagery so especially the
planet scope stuff is good or we can buy some
very high res imagery which we find we often
need to do if we want to know if a certain like
chemical tank has been damaged. You just simply
can't see that from a Sentinel -2 but you might
be able to from a very high resolution image.
I expect a lot of you are familiar with that
sort of stuff in the room. Maybe what you're
not so familiar with is all of the sort of open
environmental data, which is out there. Now this
will sort of vary between countries, but there's
a lot of derived products, maybe from satellite
data, maybe from models. We see loads of value
of combining the OSINT stuff with that open environmental
data. And that's what helps us sort of be able
to, to assess environmental health. I wonder
if any of our listeners, and I'm speaking more
directly to the Bellingcat staff members who
are lurking in here, if they have any suggestions
for satellite image tools or tools in general
that might be useful to this group. I've got
another question. Could you say more about the
verification process? Do your local partners
verify the incident and impact assessment? How,
how do your local partners get involved with
the verification process? So the way we've, the
way we've done that so far is have a, uh, bring
in as a staff member working on the database
with situated knowledge and, uh, contact with
people who, who are there, even if they're not,
they might be diaspora. but they have contacts
for people who are there so they can have the
situator knowledge. They can tell us that's not
a, that's not a farm, it's a military facility.
But as to our eyes on satellite, it might just
look like a farm, things like this. Um, it's
something we need to be careful with, of course,
from the ethics side, exposing people to things.
Um, but generally that's how we get the the expert
knowledge in for the situated knowledge and then
for the rest of the verification it's always
the usual triage. So making sure that there is
alignment between different satellite products,
the satellite products and the social media.
And yet having quite high bar for saying something
that's happened. You talked about justice and
accountability as a next step. This might be
a silly question, but who is responsible for
protecting the environment during conflict? Are
there international laws that you can appeal
against and steps that you could take with evidence
that you've collected to try and change things
and make sure the environment is top? of the
conversation when conflict happens. Ultimately
the answer is basically no. There are provisions,
you know, you could apply environmental damage
as a Rome Statute war crime, but the thresholds
which need to be met are severe, long -term and
widespread. The definitions for those thresholds
are not clear when it comes to the environment.
And so yeah, no, there's been no successful case,
environmental case. That might change. There's
guidance coming out very soon from the ICC on
better prosecution for environmental crime. So
we'll see what they come up with. There's also
the movement towards having ecocide as an international
crime. which is something that may, may eventually
come, but at the present moment and for what's
recently happened in Sudan, Gaza, Ukraine, there's,
there's nothing, but it's possible that will
change, it's possible Ukraine will bring cases
and there will be processes and the lawyers will
lawyer and, and there will be sort of, yeah,
maybe reparations, some sort of high level accountability.
Maybe you can tell I'm not a lawyer. Well, I'm
hoping that your organization is already speaking
to legal institutions, but if anyone's listening
and thinks that they might be the right fit,
perhaps they can reach out to you. I think it's
great though that you're collecting this data
in preparation for such a step as well. Speaking
of Ukraine, I just put some Bellingcat resources
in the chat. Back in 2023, we built a tool that
shows what war has done to Ukraine's forests.
It's a deforestation tracker tool that you can
use. And more recently, we've just had a guide
written on visualising impact on the environment
from conflict, including displacement data that's
linking to the question about population health
as well. We've actually had a question on the
fibre optics waste that you mentioned briefly
at the beginning. Someone's asked, can you talk
a little bit more about the impact of fibre optics
waste on the environment from the Ukrainian conflict.
I think this is quite a new concept for quite
a few people in the audience. Yeah. So I'm guessing
people have seen footage of these fibre optic
drones. They have a little spool and that may
have 10 to 40 kilometres worth of fibre optic
cable on it. And there's thousands of these,
well tens of thousands of these drones flying
around the front lines of Ukraine. They use fibre
optics so that they can't get jammed from electro
magnetic interference and what we then see is
this, these fibre optic cables grouped across
trees, upland. It's really strange when you watch
a lot of the footage from the conflict they kind
of glisten and they look almost quite pretty,
like quite Christmassy, but I think what we're
going to find is that they have a sort of similar
impact on wildlife, like, um, so fishing nets,
um, for fisheries and so on, because they're,
they end up in a tangle. Wildlife will get trapped,
but wildlife were also using these. So there's
like some images of like a bird's nest made out
of fibre optic cables rather than twigs. pretty
devastating. Um, and yeah, these are, these are
all draped over areas of frontline, which are
heavily mined, inaccessible, and they're going
to be there for, you know, maybe decades. They're
not going to degrade very naturally, very quickly.
It's going to be a very long -term problem I
think. It actually brings me to my next question,
which is what do you think is a long -term implication
of conflict -related environmental degradation,
which is most underestimated. The thing that
you are concerned is going to be unraveled in
a couple of years time as a major issue. That's
a really good question. I do not have an immediate
answer for. I think that I don't know. I'm going
to give an example. I'm not going to say this
is the most, um, significant, it's just one that's
immediately come to mind. So I'm thinking in,
in Ukraine, we have Krakow -Kadan collapse. We
have the big flood. We also have the, the upstream
area, which relied on the reservoir for all the
irrigation. And that's now gone. There's severe
drought. There's going to be probably, even if
there is access in the future for farmers, civilians
to return. It's going to be really hard to make
a living there. There's going to be lots of soil
erosion because of climate change. So actually
southern Ukraine is going to be sort of very
severe impacts from climate change. And sort
of there's a risk that areas like that will be
because of the environmental impacts of war become
very, very hard to live and survive in. that
might be a very long -term consequence, like
people move permanently. And I'm guessing that
that impact isn't just isolated to Ukraine either.
There's going to be other regions similarly affected
in the same way. It's very, very difficult to
think about positives. And I just wanted to remind
people that there's about 10 minutes left. So
if you want to put your comments in, your last
final questions, please do. And thank you to
those who've been dropping links in the chat
as well. I'll make sure that they're included
in the description of the podcast. So if you
do have any helpful links related to this field
of work, please do pop them there. I was talking
about trying to pull some positives from this.
What gives you hope in this field? If that's
an impossible question, please respond as such.
But is there any hope within this field that
you've seen from your research? Yes, yeah, there's
got to be hope. There's always hope. We're here
today talking about this and that gives us hope,
right? There's like people who are affected directly
by environmental damage in conflict. They are
a source of hope because they do things on the
ground to make their environment better. What
we need to do is make sure they get the support.
to do that in the right way, in the safe way,
in a sustainable way. And I think that is possible.
That might come. There are changes going on at
a high level as well. You know, things like the
move towards the eco side. These will help. Yeah,
we always have to have help. It keeps us driving
forward at least at Bellingcat. As we're talking
about that, you've mentioned within your talk
that OSINT is kind of a hopeful method that's
been helping advance this. What would be your
advice to people who are listening to this, perhaps
with open source research skill sets like satellite
analysts and people who are very used to kind
of looking at environmental degradation through
open source methods. What would be your advice
to them in terms of getting involved in the kind
of work that you do, not necessarily related
to your organization, but within the same field?
What would be your advice to them? Any tips or
tricks or organizations that you might want to
point out that people could reach out to as well?
try and learn as much as you can about the science
of fires, the science of deforestation, ecology,
like the more knowledge you have on a particular
environmental topic, the better your analysis
is going to be. So I think don't shy away from
learning stuff as well. Don't just think that
because you You can write a Google Earth engine
script that detects burn areas you know about
fires. Like go away, teach yourself, learn, there's
stuff out there. Get in contact with organisations
like us, like we're always happy to answer an
email. So please do. And then give it a try,
yeah. See what you can do. Publish it. There's
lots of, there's like, I can't like reiterate
enough how much is not being reported and there
is to report upon. So yeah. Where do you see
the biggest data gaps? Like if you were, if you
were wishing on the spot right now for more researchers
to dive into a certain area of what you've spoken
about, where are the huge data gaps within this
field? So I can point to like countries where
there's massive gaps of information. So Sudan
is an obvious one. It's probably an answer you've
heard in relation to not just the environment,
but there's other places too, places that are
maybe not so actively at war that just come out
with fighting, places like Yemen, Syria, Lebanon,
where there is so much that we could know and
need to know, but you're not currently know and
people are not researching. If I had to pick
an environmental domain where we don't know very
much, I would probably go with biodiversity.
And not on vegetation, not habitats, but more
on actual wildlife itself. How particular species
are affected by something like noise pollution
from water. We don't know anything about that.
Really. You mentioned Sudan. I've put the Sudanese
Civil War link in the chat there for anybody
who wants to chat, well, research, particularly
that particular conflict. Don't be afraid to
also put environmental damage in these conflict
channels that we have in the server. It's absolutely...
It's absolutely something we want to talk about.
It's absolutely fine to not focus so much on
the immediate effects of war, but the long term
effects of war. That's absolutely vital as well.
Cyber's written, good grief. I forgot about noise
pollution. Yeah. That's what I found through
this talk is that more and more Owen, you're
uncovering all these types of pollution that
we may have overlooked over this time. Have you
ever had the most surprising kind of effects
of war? What would you say in terms of environmental
damage has surprised you when it's come to conflict?
Did you always expect to, for example, find fibre
optic cables being polluted via conflict? Has
there been some surprising aspects that you've
come across in different conflicts around the
world? It's a good one. That's a good one. I
think the sort of conflict is maybe not directly
conflict but what I maybe didn't have so much
of an appreciation of before was to how much
the oceans are like the Wild West and what happens
in the oceans or dodgy dealings there are. We
know a bit more about this now, like all the
great work about ship to ship transfers and so
on. I think that was quite surprising to me.
Learning about the amount of marine pollution
basically. And linked to that is old marine pollution
as well. So the amount of dumped unexploded ordnance
from World War II in the Baltic. in the Irish
Sea and how that's now degrading, corroding with
warmer oceans and is potentially going to be
a problem as things that are encased, TNT, et
cetera, are released into the environment. So
yeah, maybe, yeah, I'll go with marine pollution.
Yeah, if you're interested in looking more into
maritime issues and ship -to -ship transfer,
I mean, we've recently had a fantastic stage
talk from Christine Panton, who's just an ocean
hobbyist, has a full -time day job, but in his
evenings creates a really amazing tool called
Sketchy Boats, which looks at suspicious boats
doing suspicious things around the world. And
we've also, Bellingcat created a tool, well,
one of our contributors, Ollie Ballinger, who's
a fantastic lecturer in London, he created a
tool that's called the Ship Detection Tool, which
also highlights using synthetic aperture radar
imagery when ships are in port or doing ship
-to -ship transfers in the middle of the sea.
So you can have a look at that as well. I put
the link to that in our chat and I'm sure SettleKnife
or any of the mods listening could also put the
link to the last stage talk on suspicious boats
in the chat as well. We are coming close to time.
I just want to read a final few comments. Someone's
put, what we are doing right now is actually
a step in the right direction. Spreading awareness
is a very real action you can take. By keeping
yourself informed, you can inform others. Yes,
hopefully that's exactly what this stage talk
has done for you guys listening in. And somebody
else put, more on climate change, the amount
of CO2 released from burning refineries and ammunition
depots must be astounding, as well as local environmental
effects and petroleum chemicals as well. Yeah,
I think that was mentioned also within the talk.
Right. Thank you so much, Owen, for your time
today. I've really appreciated you coming in
and walking us through what is practically quite
a depressing view of the impact of conflict on
the environment, but a very important one and
the work that your organization is doing is incredible.
Just to finish off, how can people get in touch
with you? Where is the best place to find information
on the observatory. How can people reach out
if they want to help or offer tools for your
work? and yeah, happy to speak to people. Great.
If you want to continue this conversation, I
mentioned the Sudan channel earlier up, but we
also have a hashtag environment and wildlife
as well as many conflict channels within the
space. Please do jump in. To those, if you want
to continue this conversation, highlight tools
and resources that you can use to continue investigating
this topic. But for now, thank you so much, Owen.
And we'll be back in two weeks time with another
stage talk. Thank you, everybody. Thank you for
listening to the stage talk. If you'd like to
catch a stage talk live where you can ask the
guest questions, join the Bellingcat Discord
server by visiting www .discord .gg slash Bellingcat.
The music you've heard is titled Dawn by Newer
Self and is courtesy of Artlist.