By Laura Millan May 15, 2023 Source: Bloomberg
Photo Source: Unsplash,
Ukrainian activists, scientists and architects are pushing for a postwar recovery unlike any in history, with a focus on climate resilience and clean energy.
Valeriya Izhyk was excited when she arrived at the Ukrainian ski resort of Bukovel, in the Carpathian Mountains, last Christmas Eve. The 28-year-old would be reunited with her parents for the first time since February 2022, when she had fled her home in Kyiv for Brussels in the wake of Russia’s invasion.
The three had picked the resort because it was far from the front lines and cities under constant shelling. But it was still marked by the war.
“The first thing we heard when we stepped outside was the noise of the generators. Every hotel had one, and they were huge,” Izhyk said. “The second thing we felt was the polluted air — worse than in any city. It was impossible to breathe.”
The memory stayed with Izhyk after she’d returned to Brussels and her job at CEE Bankwatch Network, a consortium of environmental groups. It made her think differently about the European Parliament’s Generators of Hope program, which has donated hundreds of diesel-powered generators to Ukraine as Russian attacks knocked out the power grid. While the program met a critical need, the tradeoffs worried her.
“It’s not enough to just throw the cheapest energy solution to Ukraine and expect this to be considered as, ‘Job done,’” she said. “You have to put your money where your mouth is, even in situations like Ukraine.” Izhyk belongs to a far-flung yet constantly in-touch network of Ukrainian activists, scientists and architects who share the same goal as officials in Kyiv and Brussels: ensuring that the rebuilding of Ukraine — a massive project that is getting underway even before the war’s end — has as small a carbon footprint as possible and improves the nation’s resilience to impacts of climate change.
Thinking about rebuilding in the middle of a war, with a new offensive against Russia in the works, might seem far-fetched. But for Ukraine, green reconstruction is not just good for the planet. It’s essential to the country’s economic recovery and national security. Russian attacks caused damages worth $8.1 billion in Ukraine’s energy sector during the first year of war, the Kyiv School of Economics estimates. The average Ukrainian household endured 35 days without power last winter.
“It is very important to decentralize our power generation,” Energy Minister German Galushchenko told Bloomberg Green. “The obvious solution is renewables.” Leaders also see clean power as a way to permanently end the country’s dependence on Russian gas. For decades, Moscow used its control over gas that flows through pipelines across Ukraine and into Europe as a tool to influence officials in Kyiv. (In 2015, Ukraine stopped direct purchases of gas from Russia’s Gazprom PJSC following the country's invasion of the Crimea peninsula and the Donbas region.)
“We need to speed up [the transition from gas] from the point of view of a military threat,” Galushchenko said.
Green rebuilding is crucial as well to the country’s hopes of attaining European Union membership. Ukraine was given candidate status in June and, as part of that, will need to align itself with the bloc’s sustainability principles, climate targets and legislation. “To rebuild Ukraine in a way that wasn’t energy efficient, that didn’t have green solutions or integrated transport schemes that will lower pollution — basically, that would be a big mistake,” said Virginijus Sinkevičius, the EU’s environment commissioner.
Even as the war grinds on and its outcome remains uncertain, reconstruction funds have started to flow. Clean energy and energy-efficient buildings are part of the Ukrainian government’s plans, and lenders such as the European Investment Bank and the European Multilateral Development Bank have added climate conditions to their reconstruction loans. A greener Ukraine rising from the rubble is the vision. It could be a global template for climate-friendly postwar recovery, especially since it will be able to tap resources that most nations emerging from conflict can’t. But this will be challenging to pull off, despite the EU’s full backing.
The urge to build back fast to meet immediate needs, regardless of green targets, will be strong. At least 5.3 million Ukrainians were internally displaced as of January, and 17.6 million people in the country are in need of humanitarian assistance, according to the UN Refugee Agency.
Climate change is unlikely to be a pressing concern among the thousands of local leaders who will ultimately spend the rebuilding money. Aid flowing to Ukraine is subject to strict supervisory and reporting rules, but corruption has historically been a problem in the country: Transparency International in 2022 gave the nation a score of 33 on its 100-point Corruption Perceptions Index (a low score, but higher than it was in 2013). That could threaten projects being executed to green standards or sour the public on decarbonization.
“Corruption will happen for sure; you can’t really prevent it,” said Denis Žiško, the energy and climate change program coordinator for the Aarhus Centre, a Danish NGO, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. There, after the Balkans conflict ended, local institutions were decimated and not prepared to run the checks needed to monitor spending of the billions that suddenly flooded in, he said.
“Green rebuilding is not a tree-hugging exercise,” Sinkevičius acknowledged. “There is a lot of work to be done which is not so beautiful to talk about.”
Even before Russia’s invasion, the country had its environmental and climate work cut out for it. In 2021, almost a third of Ukraine’s energy consumption came from coal, the most polluting of fossil fuels.
Ukraine's Fossil Fuel Grid
Most of the country's power came from coal, oil and gas in 2021
Air pollution took a higher toll on health in Ukraine than in any other nation in Europe, according to World Health Organization data from 2019. The country’s Soviet-era factories, together with inefficient heating of poorly insulated apartments and decades-old vehicles on the roads, meant harmful particulates in the air of large cities often surpassed recommended levels by a factor of hundreds.
Then came the invasion. Power generation and the infrastructure used to distribute it across the country became military targets, with half of the country’s installed power capacity under occupation, damaged or destroyed as of December.
A silver lining for the climate is that attacks have rendered coal plants inoperable, essentially phasing out that power source ahead of the nation’s 2040 target. “We see the war has sped up the process,” Galushchenko, the Ukrainian minister, said. “Due to the destruction, we won’t repair.”
The country’s government is now aiming for a mix of 50% renewables and 50% nuclear on its grid by 2030. But about 90% of the country’s wind farms, the main source of clean electricity before the war, have been destroyed or stand in occupied territories. While the first year of war decimated much of Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, it also offered a crash course on the value of distributed renewable power. Solar installations — ranging from small foldable panels hung from balconies to systems covering entire rooftops — have started to pop up everywhere as backups to the grid.
One of those places is the Kyiv home of Svitlana Krakovska, 54, a cloud physicist and Ukraine’s most prominent climate scientist. Last September, as it became clear that Russia would target power infrastructure in the coldest months of the year and the price of diesel generators started to spike, she and her husband decided to install solar panels on the roof of their apartment building to provide electricity for their family of four.
“We had only two sunny days this winter, but it was enough — during blackouts we charged batteries and kept some lamps on for our son, who is really afraid of darkness,” she said.
Solar and wind farms can be built in weeks or months, as opposed to the years it takes to build a nuclear plant. And installations can provide off-grid electricity to essential infrastructure from hospitals to military facilities.
Krakovska was likely the first person to talk publicly about the war’s links to climate change, on Feb. 24, 2022, when Russian troops and tanks started to make their way inside Ukraine.
At the time she headed the Ukrainian delegation on the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations-sponsored group of researchers that produces the mammoth reports that guide climate policy decisions around the world. As delegates gathered for a virtual meeting, Krakovska decided to leave aside highly technical language and speak from the heart. Her comments received press coverage and became part of a growing call for Europe to phase out imports of Russian fossil fuels. (The EU dramatically reduced its imports later in the year.)
Manmade climate change and Russia’s war against Ukraine have the same roots, Krakovska told fellow scientists on a video call as bombs started to fall over Kyiv. The struggle to control fossil fuel resources that produce greenhouse gases when burned defines the balance of power among states.
“We can’t change physical laws — the more greenhouse gas we put in the atmosphere, the more the planet warms,” she said. “But we can change the laws of our human life towards a climate-resilient future.”
An inventory of damage to the fabric of Ukraine’s towns and cities, released in March by the Kyiv School of Economics, is stark: Some 154,000 housing units, 3,100 educational buildings and more than 1,200 healthcare facilities have been damaged or destroyed since Russian troops invaded.
Ukraine’s recovery will involve “colossal investments” and be “the biggest project of our time,” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy told global leaders last July. In its roadmap, the country estimates it needs over $750 billion through 2032 in grants, debt and equity — more than three times the annual budget of the EU. Upwards of $150 billion is needed for housing and related infrastructure alone.
Green Rebuilding Plans Ukraine needs between $150 and $250 billion to rebuild, modernize housing The European Investment Bank is among the major financial institutions backing reconstruction efforts. The EU’s lending arm, which is one of the world’s largest funders of climate projects, already had a €3 billion plan to rehabilitate and rebuild damaged buildings in the Donbas. After the full-scale war started last year, the lender committed an additional €340 million and is now planning to approve €260 million more. At least 50% of the funds are required to go toward improving buildings’ energy efficiency, including heating and insulation. “We implement the policy of the EU and that policy is climate — even in recovery projects,” said Violaine Silvestro von Kameke, a senior loan officer at the EIB overseeing Ukrainian programs.
But Oleg Drozdov, an architect and university professor from Kharkiv, has seen how hard it is to keep the big picture in mind in wartime circumstances. In Lviv, where Drozdov fled after the invasion, “Decision-makers only talked about the need to rebuild quick, fast and beautiful,” he said. “I thought that was a problem, and that we would have to work on some alternative.”
The 56-year-old founded the Ro3kvit Urban Coalition for Ukraine. Pronounced rozkvit, the name means blossoming or renaissance in Ukrainian. A group of architects, urban planners and other experts, it has carried out research on forms of emergency housing and on “circular” rebuilding — that is, using rubble to repair damaged structures. The group is also doing large-scale planning work for cities including Mariupol and Zaporizhzha, envisioning new districts to accommodate larger numbers of internally displaced people and trying to enhance public safety and mobility as well as urban ecology.
“We are returning to the epoch of thinking cities,” Drozdov said. “And what we are thinking is that a lot of the territory of the city can go back to nature in quite a clever way.”
Through the same network of climate-minded Ukrainians and allies that Izhyk and Krakovska belong to, Ro3kvit reached the top of the EU hierarchy: the European Commission, the bloc’s regulatory arm. Through a €7 million initiative called Phoenix — part of the New European Bauhaus, the commission’s agenda for a greener 21st-century Europe — Ro3kvit will help train Ukrainian mayors and local officials in sustainable reconstruction techniques.
They’ll help places like the town of Pervomaiskyi in Ukraine’s northeast. When the war is over, officials want to build a large solar farm. But for now, authorities are now grappling with providing housing for internal refugees as well as securing electricity and heat for everyone.
In other parts of the world that have experienced conflict in recent decades, the path of reconstruction has been strewn with obstacles — even when there are no green strings attached. Five years after being liberated from its occupation by the Islamic State, the city of Mosul in Iraq is recovering slowly. Funding has been scant and key infrastructure including the airport remains damaged. There are projects underway to repair historic structures, plant trees and upgrade sewage systems. But plans are lagging behind climate impacts like extreme heat and drought, according to Iraqi historian and activist Omar Mohammed.
Mohammed blogged as “Mosul Eye” during the occupation and then founded the Mosul Eye Association, which promotes making the city more resilient to heat and water scarcity.
“Urban expansion is unregulated, water is drying out and the government won’t do anything about it, partly because no one is pushing,” said Mohammed, who now lives in Paris and teaches at Sciences Po.
In Bosnia and Herzegovina, the problem of corruption in the construction sector dates back to the rebuilding effort after the Balkans conflict, noted Žiško of the Aarhus Centre.
The EIB’s Silvestro von Kameke says things will be different in Ukraine. The bank has learned valuable lessons from its years-long quest to rebuild in Donbas, she said, where personnel from the UN Development Programme monitor spending on the ground.
At a Brussels cafe earlier this year, Izhyk, the activist, pointed around her to the people munching granola and petting well-groomed dogs: Any of them could be an EU official with power to influence the fate of her country. Being in Brussels herself gives her reason for optimism, she said. But keeping up the pressure is essential, as the temptation of quick wins beckons and goodwill from abroad fades.
“This is when all standards, all the action plans that were written for years, risk being put in a desk,” she said. “Our mission is to help our government not forget about the bigger role behind keeping the lights on.”
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