For the latest report, he and colleagues combined the emissions from fires with emissions from warfare, buildings reconstruction, damage to energy infrastructure, refugee movement and civil aviation displacement to estimate greenhouse gas emissions equivalent to 229.7m tonnes of CO2 since the war began.
Civil aviation emissions, which included extra emissions as a result of aircraft having to avoid the war zone, were mostly linear with time, and emissions from refugee movements also mainly occurred in the first year of the conflict, De Klerk said.
The burning of Ukraine’s forests at unprecedented rates over the past year has helped push the total greenhouse emissions from the war since Russia’s full-scale invasion to almost 230m tonnes, analysis shows.
De Klerk, who has worked on climate emissions analysis for two and a half decades, started investigating the climate impact of the war in Ukraine soon after the invasion on 24 February 2022.
“What stands out in the third year is that we’ve seen the landscape fires, but particularly the forest fires, escalating,” said Lennard de Klerk, the lead researcher at the non-profit Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War.
