Ukrainian scientists to assess impact of russia’s war on environment with aerial photography

Ukraine's Ministry of Ecology and Natural Resources got this opportunity after Ukraine's State Space Agency expanded the functionality of the aerospace survey system.

Ukraine records all environmental war crimes committed by russia on the territory of Ukraine. However, there is a problem: it is difficult to document and record data in the occupied territories because it is impossible to get there.

Currently, this problem has been solved—fires on land and at sea, the movement of equipment, etc. will be recorded using aerial photography, Rubryka reports.

The Ministry of Ecology was able to use the images of the aerospace imaging system with the cooperation of the State Space Agency last year. Initially, the government created the system to record illegal logging, but now the functionality has been expanded, and specialists can also monitor the condition of coasts.

Specialists use archival and operational photos from different dates, select the necessary areas and, with the help of software transformations, conduct a retrospective analysis by comparing space images from specific times. Further, the information obtained from the space data regarding the detected changes is compared with the materials of the permit documents.

It is not our only functionality. Now, even NASA provides images when the world is looking at Ukraine. Commissioner for the Environment Virginijus Sinkevičius recently stated that the EU gave Ukraine additional opportunities to use the Copernicus satellite system of the European Union to record russia's environmental crimes.

Read more about it in Rubryka's article about war and the sea.