More river pollution from untreated urban waste due to the Russian-Ukrainian war: a perspective view

Figures & data

Figure 1. Summarized overview of the impact of damaged water-related infrastructures on river pollution and its rural and urban sources as a result of the Russian-Ukrainian war. (a) the overall impact. (b) examples of the damaged infrastructures for the Dnipro Basin. (c) and (d) the water pollution sources (rural and urban) before (c) and during (d) the Russian-Ukrainian war. We consider solely flood-protection dams. Values in fig. 1b are average estimates based on collected literature (see justifications in Tables S1-S5). Source: the figure synthesizes the current knowledge based on literature (references can be found in the text of Section 2, text S1, and Tables S1-S5).

Figure 2. The estimated impact of damaged sewage connections and wastewater treatment plants (WWTPs) in urban areas on total river pollution in four sub-basins of the Dnipro basin draining into the black Sea. (a) increases in river pollution relative to the reference case (RC, % change). (b) shares of the sources of river pollution in the reference case (RC) and alternative case (AC) (%). The RC case represents the situation of the recent past. The AC case assumes the impact of the damaged sewage and WWTPs based on values in fig. 1b and justified estimates in Tables S3-S4. Source: the existing MARINA-Multi model for Ukraine (Strokal et al. 2023) with updated removal fractions (Micella et al. 0000) and added diclofenac (Zhang et al. Forthcoming).

Figure 3. A VITA framework for actionable strategies to reduce river pollution that is caused by the Russian-Ukrainian war. VITA is short for Visualizing, Integrating, Translating, and Assessing.

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Data availability statement

The authors confirm that the data supporting the findings of this study are available within the article and its supplementary materials.