The GROMADA project: citizen science for environmental protection and accountability in Ukraine

The GROMADA project connects international law with citizen science as it explores its potential role for environmental recovery and accountability in Ukraine.

Three students sit at a desk looking at blown up satellite images of facilities in Ukraine, they are deep in conversation. — Students at the GROMADA summer school in Hamburg working on a remote sensing challenge set by CEOBS. Credit: GROMADA

CEOBS is part of an Erasmus+ funded consortium exploring the potential for participatory environmental research in Ukraine to contribute to environmental protection, legal accountability and community engagement. In this post, Iryna Babanina introduces the project, its aims and outputs to date.

Ukrainian for community

Participatory environmental monitoring in areas affected by armed conflict has always been an important area of interest for CEOBS. Alongside documenting the severe environmental damage caused by Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine, we are also exploring the potential of low cost and locally-driven data collection where state monitoring capacities are overstretched or where physical access is limited.

The GROMADA project is a partnership between CEOBS, the universities of Copenhagen, Hamburg and Lund, Italian NGO Systasis and Greek education company Web2Learn. The project has brought together academics, lawyers, civil society activists and students to explore the potential of citizen science to detect war-related harms in Ukraine. Another crucial component of the GROMADA project is its focus on civic evidence collection for legal accountability.

The first half of the project focused on learning, educating Ukrainian and international participants through webinars on how the environment is damaged by war, and on the legal framework protecting the environment in relation to armed conflicts. CEOBS’ contributed two webinars to the extensive series, one on how wars affect the environment and on the pattern of harm in Ukraine, and a second on using environmental data that is already available for civic monitoring in Ukraine, legislative changes during the war, and mechanisms for citizen participation in post-war recovery planning.

The state of citizen science in Ukraine

We had initially assumed that the concept of “citizen science” — or indeed “civilian science” — was not widely known in Ukraine. However, the issue proved to be purely terminological. International citizen science platforms, such as iNaturalist or GBIF, are popular among amateur scientists and environmental activists in Ukraine. In 2024, the Science at Risk initiative published its White Book for Citizen Science in Ukraine, which summarised the pre-war citizen science projects and their new wartime outlook.

Numerous local projects have developed in Ukraine under the umbrella of “civic environmental monitoring”. Save Dnipro, an environmental monitoring and advocacy organisation, is an example of a civic initiative that has made it to the national scale and now closely cooperates with the government in environmental policymaking. Another group, Stop Poisoning Kryvyi Rih, has developed civic water monitoring protocols and tested local sources in Dnipropetrovsk Oblast for their suitability as an emergency water source during the war. Elsewhere, the Dovkola Network of citizen science developed its Green Book of Environmental Monitoring in Ukraine. Importantly, it is felt that citizen science has a considerable, and still quite untapped potential, for countering misinformation and establishing environmental truths.

Citizen science’s potential role in investigating environmental crimes is also relevant and increasingly under the spotlight. However, it is still limited by procedural constraints, the admissibility of evidence and lack of case law in most jurisdictions. The Formosa case in Texas, where the judge found a petrochemical company liable for violating the US Clean Water Act on the basis of evidence collected by the civic group, is an important example of citizen-driven data supporting litigation.

Russia’s war against Ukraine has provided an impetus for new citizen science initiatives. The most notable ones are led by professional environmentalists or involve cooperation with academia, and try to support investigative authorities in collecting evidence of environmental crimes. The Ukrainian Scientific Centre for the Ecology of the Sea and the Let’s Do It Ukraine youth organisation joined water and sediment sampling efforts on the Black Sea coast after the Kakhovka Dam breach, with the data made available to the investigative authorities.

To date, the GROMADA project has engaged a wide range of Ukrainian citizen science practitioners and activists, as well as lawyers working on accountability issues, as it has explored their needs and their perceptions of citizen science in the context of the war. The war itself has created important challenges for civic monitoring. Access to many government data portals is closed, routine environmental inspections are not taking place and baseline data is often unavailable. Importantly, evidence collected by citizen science initiatives within a criminal investigation must remain confidential during the pre-trial phase, limiting the possibility of informing communities about the extent of harm and any risks it may have generated. Ensuring communities’ right to access information may require alternative ways of organising this work, together with dedicated funding.

Project outputs to date

In August 2024, Hamburg University hosted a week-long summer school and moot court on international law and citizen science. The event, which welcomed a cohort of Ukrainian and international students, academics and practitioners, explored international humanitarian, human rights and environmental law, and the emerging concept of ecocide, and their applicability to the most notorious environmental crimes in Ukraine, such as the ongoing occupation of the Zaporizhia nuclear plant and the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam. Our team from CEOBS provided lectures on the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts and a workshop on the basics of remote environmental monitoring, with students testing their skills in an interactive exercise to detect the damage to industrial facilities.

A woman stands at the front of a classroom to the right of a large TV screen, the first powerpoint slide is entitled "remote environmental monitoring and data collection", three students can be seen in the foreground listening to her. — CEOBS' Dr Anna McKean presenting an introductory lecture on remote environmental assessment in areas affected by conflict to GROMADA summer school participants. Credit: GROMADA

The summer school culminated in the moot court, which imitated an accountability trial against Russia and saw the student teams acting as prosecution and defence using the legal knowledge that they had built up during the week.

The grand central atrium of the Bibliotek Hamburg. A seated audience watches a low stage, on it a man in legal robes stands at a podium addressing the audience. To his right on teh stage, three black robed judges sit listening. Behind, two floors of colonnades in white marble rise above the scene. — The GROMADA moot court, where summer school participants represented a number of different countries in a mock case concerning Russian environmental conduct during its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Credit: Claudia Höhne

The project has generated a number of publications, this includes a Handbook on the Legal Dimension of Environmental Harm Monitoring in War Contexts, with and by Conflict-Affected Communities. The handbook was developed in consultation with Ukrainian citizen science practitioners and lawyers, and explores the legal frameworks protecting the environment in relation to armed conflict and the role of civic environmental monitoring and citizen science in gathering evidence for legal proceedings.

Understandably, the ethical dimension of citizen science increases in importance in conflict-affected or insecure settings. For example, some activities may take place in frontline communities and address immediate local harms, dealing with physical risks and security restrictions. Initiatives can also be displaced by conflict; the Drukarnia civic and environmental initiative was forced to relocate from Ukraine’s Slovyansk to Ivano-Frankivsk and to integrate its work into this new context. Reflecting on these and other challenges for citizen science in conflict settings, we identified specific principles that can be added to the classic 10 Principles of Citizen Science:

Safety of volunteers (including informed participation in field work, physical safety and considerations for unintentional security breach) must be paramount.
Explosive ordnance risk education (EORE) is necessary for any fieldwork.
The collected data must be used in a fair and transparent manner and the participants should be informed on the mode and purposes of using the collected data.
Volunteer contributions must be properly recognised (with due regard for their safety and anonymity, where there is a risk of exposure). The balance between ensuring intellectual property and attribution, on one hand, and specific safety challenges during wartime is an important area yet to be explored in depth.
Citizen science initiatives should not be politicised.
Tangible support should be provided to displaced academics and citizen scientists.

In November 2024, project partners hosted three digital hackathons for Ukrainian and European students addressing soil, data and the law and water quality. A detailed report on CEOBS’ water quality hackathon is available here. These also generated insights on citizen science and civic participation in Ukraine, many of which are transferable to other similar settings. They included:

The need for low-cost, easy to use sensors and systems that are resilient to power shortages;
The sustainability of civic monitoring systems and the engagement of international, charity, private actors in supporting these systems;
The modalities of cooperation with the communities in simple monitoring procedures; e.g. for water quality, these can include rapid quality testing and alert systems;
Knowledge of the state environmental monitoring and data resources;
Awareness about existing mechanisms and opportunities for public participation in decision-making at the city, community, region levels;
Open-access remote sensing tools, and educating participants in the basics of satellite monitoring.

The GROMADA project concludes at the end of 2025 and this spring and summer the focus is on support to students at Odesa State University who have developed eight projects responding to a suite of environmental issues linked to the war. In addition, more publications are planned, together with a final conference hosted by Copenhagen University in the autumn.

Final reflections

The remote environmental assessment of armed conflicts has undergone rapid and far reaching changes over the last decade, and this is contributing to growing international awareness of their environmental dimensions, and to policy change. Nevertheless, access, security and financial barriers still prevent much of the data collection on the ground that could validate remote assessments and help protect and empower affected communities. Low cost participatory research in these contexts remains in its infancy but projects like GROMADA are providing valuable insights into how it could be developed — get it right and it could prove as transformative as the expansion of remote assessments has been.

Iryna Babanina is a Junior Researcher with CEOBS, Doug Weir contributed to this post.