Ukraine is at risk of hydrometeorological hazards and natural disasters, which primarily affect the agricultural and human health sectors, through seasonal flooding and periods of drought. Threats from riverine, urban floods and wildfires are considered high. Impacts from climate change make Ukraine increasingly vulnerable to: droughts, high temperatures, heat waves, heavy precipitation, mudflows, and floods. The most common natural disasters are associated with heavy rainstorms that may cause mudslides and flooding of large areas of agricultural land, houses and industrial buildings. Climate change is expected to increase risks and severity of natural disasters in Ukraine, through more intense temperatures as well as rainfall patterns, prolonged heat waves, and water scarcity. In recent years, the number of natural disasters has increased in the region and in many cases, they have been considered as catastrophic, causing fatalities and leading to significant economic losses.
This section provides a summary of key natural hazards and their associated socioeconomic impacts in a given country. It allows for a quick assessment of most vulnerable areas through the spatial comparison of natural hazard data with development data, thereby identifying exposed livelihoods and natural systems.
The charts provide overview of the most frequent natural disaster in a given country and understand the impacts of those disasters on human populations.
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Climate change is now recognized to have a significant impact on disaster management efforts and pose a significant threat to the efforts to meet the growing needs of the most vulnerable populations. The demands of disaster risk management are such that concise, clear, and reliable information is crucial. The information presented here offers insight into the frequency, impact and occurrence of natural hazards. Source (PDF)
Understanding natural hazard occurrence as well as historical climate conditions, in relation to development contexts, is critical to understanding a country’s historical vulnerability. This tool allows the visualization of different natural hazards or historical climate conditions with socio-economic and development datasets. Select the Development Context and either a Natural Hazard or Climate Condition and overlay horizontally by sliding the toggle left or right to gain a broader sense of historically vulnerable areas.
Data presented under Historical Climate Conditions are reanalysis products derived from ERA5-Land data. ERA5-Land is a global land-surface dataset at 9 km resolution, consistent with atmospheric data from the ERA5 reanalysis from 1950 onward. Climate reanalyses combine past observations with models to generate consistent time series of multiple climate variables. They provide a comprehensive description of the observed climate as it has evolved during recent decades, on 3D grids at sub-daily intervals.
This data has been collected, aggregated and processed by the Climate Resilience Cluster of the European Space Agency’s (ESA) Earth Observation for Sustainable Development (EO4SD) initiative.
- Ukraine is expected to have an expanded summer season as well as higher temperatures and prolonged heat waves during summer months. Climate change is also expected to shift boundaries of spring frosts, with adverse impacts on the agriculture sector.
- With the country’s high number and vast networks of rivers, catchments and aquifers, changes in precipitation can result in high risk flooding scenarios. In Ukraine, river flood hazard is classified as high, with potential for damaging and life-threatening river floods across the country.
- Droughts may become more frequent in some areas (north and west) due to a reduction in precipitation and river runoff decrease as well as from increased demand and consumption from economic development and population growth.
- Water resources will be affected by changing temperatures and precipitation regimes, which will have long-term implications on the amount and quality of water available.
- Higher temperatures will increase aridity and may adversely affect agricultural areas and growing seasons as well as pose additional and significant risks to population health, especially vulnerable groups.
- Extreme events are expected to increase in frequency and intensity.
- Climate change threatens to exacerbate hydrometeorological risks such as recurring floods and drought. Prolonged drought in turn is projected to worsen potential for forest fires and shorten growing seasons.
- While warming trends have led to increased productivity by the country’s boreal forests, there has also been a related increase in hazardous forest and peat fires, resulting in a disruption of the stability of ecosystems, replacement of some species, and a growing probability of population explosions among forest pests.
- Ukraine is working through the Sendai and Hyogo Frameworks to improve disaster preparedness and response by consistently integrating modern technology and policies in order to increase resilience to natural hazards.
- Ukraine is looking to improve its resilience to increased risk of natural hazards and reduce vulnerability of local communities and institutions to better prepare for and mitigate and respond to natural hazards and increased threats from climate change.