Quantitative analysis of abandonment and grain production loss under armed conflict in Ukraine

Abstract

The armed conflict in Ukraine has been ongoing, with firefights concentrated in Kherson, Zaporizhia, Dnepropetrovsk, Donetsk, Luhansk, and Kharkiv oblasts of eastern Ukraine. Armed conflicts have caused damage to valuable black land and agricultural infrastructure, resulting in reduced food production and greatly affecting the world food supply. Therefore, it is urgent and important to quantify the extent of the impact of armed conflicts on cropland. We applied the Sentinel dataset based on the GEE platform and used the time-weighted dynamic time warping (TWDTW) method to map abandonment in six eastern oblasts and propose a cumulative NDVI (cumNDVI) method to characterize food production loss. The accuracy of the 2022 cropland abandonment in Krain was excellent. The overall accuracy was 92.5%, with a kappa coefficient of 0.85. The area of abandoned cropland in southeastern Ukraine was 11,892.49 km2, which was 7.17% of the cropland. The most abandoned cropland in Kherson was 26,692.22 km2, with 3,661.12 km2 of abandoned and a 13.72% abandonment rate. Because of abandonment, the loss of grain production in the six oblasts was from 3.67% to 15.18% respectively. And the other loss of grain production of cultivated cropland was found to be 33.02%, with a general loss characteristic in all regions except Donetsk slightly increased. In 2022, the grain production loss was a totally 8.19 million tons. That means the grain production loss of the six eastern oblasts in 2022 was up to 31.5% compared to the average yield level in 2016–2020 and accounted for 6.76% compared to the national grain production. The study not only mapped the distribution of abandonment with high precision at a 10 m resolution in 2022 but also quantified the food production loss due to armed conflict. It reveals the severity of the food crisis and proposes measures for post-war replanting and restoration of agricultural economic activities.