After the Waters Receded: Destruction of Khakovka Dam Affects Ukraine’s Agricultural Production

The ongoing war in Ukraine has drawn international attention to the impact of conflict on global agricultural production and food security. On June 6 2023, the Kakhovka Dam in Southeastern Ukraine collapsed under attack, draining the 2000 square km reservoir which served as a source of water and power for 20,000 people [1]. The loss of this critical agricultural and energy infrastructure has left farmers on the left bank of the Dnieper River without irrigation in the historically arid Kherson and Zaporizhzhia oblasts [2]. In this study, we use Earth Observation to measure the change in irrigation coverage in the occupied region resulting from the loss of the dam. Given the current conflict and the lack of ground-truth data from the occupied regions, we use human-labeled validation sets derived from the greenness, thermal, and wetness characteristics of irrigated fields [3], using pre-collapse (2020-2022) imagery from PlanetScope, Landsat-8 and 9, and Sentinel-2 as the baseline. Preliminary results from an unsupervised approach show a significant reduction in 2023 of the types of fields identified as ‘irrigated’ in the pre-collapse years. Given that much of the summer crops would have been planted by June, this change in 2023 is hypothesized to be due to lack of irrigation in already-planted fields, rather than farmers changing crop types in response to irrigation loss.  References: [1] Naddaf, M. (2023). Ukraine dam collapse: what scientists are watching. Nature, 618(7965), 440-441. [2] Vyshnevskyi, V., Shevchuk, S., Komorin, V., Oleynik, Y., & Gleick, P. (2023). The destruction of the Kakhovka dam and its consequences. Water international, 48(5), 631-647. [3] Deines, J. M., Kendall, A. D., Butler, J. J., & Hyndman, D. W. (2019). Quantifying irrigation adaptation strategies in response to stakeholder-driven groundwater management in the US High Plains Aquifer. Environmental Research Letters, 14(4), 044014.