A polluting war: Risk, experts, and the politics of monitoring wartime environmental harm in Eastern Ukraine

Freek van der Vet

Environment and Planning C, 2024, vol. 42, issue 7, 1187-1206

Abstract: War always harms the environment. As the fog of war produces unreliable data, it also obstructs our capacity to monitor those harms. While some call for more data collection to advance a clear narrative of the origins of environmental harm, sociologists of risk and professional risk assessors find that the urgency of environmental hazards depends not on data alone but on who has the authority to define those risks. Without a clear understanding of how environmental experts engage in the socio-political struggles over the interpretations of risk during armed conflict, we may undervalue, first, how assessments and adequate action remain practically and politically difficult, and second, how data may be misused. Drawing on interviews with environmental experts and reports, I examine the politics of environmental expert knowledge on conflict pollution in the war in Donbas (2014–2022), a region hosting over 4500 hazardous industrial enterprises. By going beyond technological evidence collection, the article broadens our understanding of the obstacles of knowledge production and the attribution of environmental harm in highly politicized and violent contexts. Based on insights from environmental politics, the article finds that experts manage three issues undermining the reliability of environmental risks in an active warzone: pre-existing industrial pollution, environmental damage spread across government and non-government-controlled territories, and disinformation.

Keywords: Environmental protection; risk assessment; armed conflict; Russia; pollution; disinformation; sociology of expertise (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/23996544241229553 (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:sae:envirc:v:42:y:2024:i:7:p:1187-1206

DOI: 10.1177/23996544241229553

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in Environment and Planning C
Bibliographic data for series maintained by SAGE Publications ().