{
  "abstract": "International law organisations are actively looking into declaring \"ecocide\" -- mass environmental destruction -- as a prosecutable international crime and in September 2024, Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa submitted a proposed amendment to Rome Statute. No consistent, statistically sound method yet has been developed to document such a claim of harm, however, because prior environmental trends are not easily differentiated from harm caused by conflict, existing satellite-based assessments of environmental war damage are qualitative and based on visual interpretations of images. In an attempt to fill this gap, I estimate the impact of the Kakhovka Dam's destruction on Ukraine and employ a causal-inference framework of Difference-in-Differences to those data. The design compares monthly NDVI in Kherson Oblast, a region generally affected by the conflict, against a \"control\" panel of four counties in Romania which are comparable on the pre-conflict ecology of the river deltas, steppe regions, and coastal areas along the Danube/Black Sea corridor but which are indeed not affected by the conflict. It is statistically significant with respect to the decrease in vegetation caused by the event (coefficient = −0.0703, 95% CI [−0.130, −0.010]; p = 0.022 [HAC-robust]). The result has been confirmed by a clean placebo-control test based on a counterfactual date preceding the event. As a robustness check, I run the same analysis at the level of the 4-county panel as a whole, obtaining a similar result (coefficient = −0.0600, HAC p = 0.029), and three of the four controls individually reproduce it, while the fourth, Constanța, does not — which I report as an open question rather than resolve away. In addition, there's this very real methodological challenge that I didn't anticipate, where I find after running the event study on a quarterly basis that there is a significant effect in the pre-treatment quarter, but this relates to a banally acknowledged 'conflict status' of conflict prior to the dam's destruction, where in fact lots of territory was already involved in conflict when the dam went up, which I report openly as a specification I know I'm dealing with, rather than hide and ignore, and a similar challenge shows up in a different variant the moment I run the event study for the four-county panel, where I find that a cluster-robust inference is problematic at five clusters. An independent verified flood extent for a flood rise-peak-recession cycle is obtained from the multi-sensor validated flood extent data (UNOSAT). I demonstrate that for this event, which has never before been the subject of a satellite-based environmental war-damage assessment beyond qualitative measures, causal-inference methods can supplement the existing qualitative approach with quantitative measures based on statistical significance — directly answering the call the existing literature itself makes for future research.",
  "abstract_shown": true,
  "affiliations": [],
  "article_type": null,
  "arxiv": null,
  "author_total": 1,
  "authors": [
    {
      "name": "SAKSHI D. MASKE"
    }
  ],
  "bibtex": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5ye7w6jthf553.bib",
  "cited_by": 0,
  "doi": "10.31223/x5bn4k",
  "fulltext_url": null,
  "id": "5ye7w6jthf553",
  "issns": [],
  "landing_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14827/",
  "language": null,
  "licence": "CC-BY-4.0",
  "licence_label": "CC BY 4.0",
  "licence_source": "article",
  "licence_url": "https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/legalcode",
  "metadata_licence": null,
  "native_subjects": [
    [
      "bepress",
      "Applied Statistics"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Biodiversity"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "CAUSAL INFERENCE"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "CONFLICT MONITORING"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "DIFFERENCES-IN-DIFFERENCES"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "ECOCIDE"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE ASSESS"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "ENVIRONMENTAL DAMAGE ASSESSMENT"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Earth Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Environmental Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "GEOSPATIAL ANALYSIS"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Geographic Information Sciences"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Geography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Human Geography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "International and Area Studies"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "KAHOVHKA DAM"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "NDVI"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Other Geography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Physical and Environmental Geography"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "REMOTE SENSING"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Remote Sensing"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "SATELLITE IMAGERY"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Spatial Science"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Statistical Methodology"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Statistical Models"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "Statistics and Probability"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "UKRAINE CONFLICT"
    ],
    [
      "bepress",
      "WAR CRIME"
    ],
    [
      "openalex",
      "2308|Environmental and Biological Research in Conflict Zones"
    ]
  ],
  "openalex": "W7208810590",
  "pdf_url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/object/14827/download/25775/",
  "pmcid": null,
  "pmid": null,
  "published": "2026-09-05",
  "publisher": null,
  "ris": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5ye7w6jthf553.ris",
  "sources": [
    {
      "first_seen": "2026-10-30T12:17:26Z",
      "native_id": "14827",
      "source": "eartharxiv",
      "url": "https://eartharxiv.org/repository/view/14827/"
    }
  ],
  "subjects": [
    {
      "field": "earth",
      "origin": "bepress:Environmental Sciences",
      "subfield": "environmental-science"
    },
    {
      "field": "mathematics",
      "origin": "bepress:Applied Statistics",
      "subfield": "statistics"
    }
  ],
  "title": "ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction",
  "title_text": "ECOCIDE: Quantifying War-Time Environmental Damage: A Difference-in-Differences Analysis of the Kakhovka Dam Destruction",
  "type": "preprint",
  "updated_at": "2026-10-30T12:17:26Z",
  "url": "https://research.draconitic.com/paper/5ye7w6jthf553",
  "venue": "EarthArXiv",
  "versions": []
}