Radioactivity warning sign in Pripyat, a city close to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in Ukraine
The lack of human intervention is causing wild species to thrive in Chernobyl and on the Korean border.
The Amazon rainforest, the Great Barrier Reef, and national parks like Yellowstone and Yosemite come to mind when thinking about wildlife sanctuaries.
You’re unlikely to immediately think of the Chernobyl exclusion zone or the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between North and South Korea.
But that’s exactly what they became. In areas where humans are not allowed to live, the wildlife is thriving.
Does this accidental rebirth carry a conservation lesson?
More than 70 years without humans
Free movement between North and South Korea became impossible in 1953, after the creation of the Demilitarized Zone (DMZ), with 248 km long and 4 km widewhich crosses the Korean Peninsula.
Activities in the DMZ are very limited and the area is littered with landmines.
But this does not discourage animals and plants.
The National Institute of Ecology of South Korea states that 6168 species of wild animals live in the DMZ, including 38% of the peninsula’s endangered species.
The area has suffered very little human interference for more than 70 years and is now home to species such as eagles, mountain goats and deer.
The area is also home to many endemic plants of Koreathat is, that they are not found anywhere else on Earth.
Seung-ho Lee, chairman of the DMZ Forum, an organization that advocates conservation in the zone, said nature was “accidentally protected by the armistice“.
“Nature took back what belonged to her. Many animals and bird species, in particular, have greater access to the area, while most human activity has disappeared,” he said.
And many of the species that live there are of global importance, including the cranes that live in the DMZ, but “fly all over the world“.
Korea’s Demilitarized Zone isn’t the only unlikely refuge for wildlife.
Em April 26, 1986a reactor at the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant, in the former Soviet Union – in what is now Ukraine – exploded, releasing highly dangerous radioactive elements into the atmosphere.
Radioactive contamination spread over thousands of square kilometers and hundreds of thousands of people were evacuated.
An exclusion zone was established around the site, which remains largely uninhabited. The area has since been expanded and now covers around 4,000 square km.
According to the UK Center for Ecology and Hydrology, it is still one of the places most contaminated by radioactivity not world.
The “red forest”
Immediately after the explosion, the subsequent ecological impacts were severe, according to Jim Smith, professor of environmental sciences at the University of Portsmouth in the United Kingdom.
Trees died and were left with a reddish brown tone in an area now called the Red Forest, and there was damage to mammals and aquatic life, he said.
But the radioactive elements released by Chernobyl decayed quickly.
“Radiation doses dropped very quickly in those days and weeks after the accident, and what was left in the area was a chronic low-level radiation over decades,” he said.
These levels are unsafe for long-term human habitation, but for other species, the story is different.
“Wildlife is thriving in Chernobyl… without a doubt, I think the exclusion zone is much more ecologically diverse and abundant than it was before the accident,” he said.
“We studied the fish in the lakes, including the cooling lake [nuclear]… We studied aquatic insects and found that the most contaminated lakes are as diverse and abundant in aquatic communities as the nearly uncontaminated lakes in the area.”
Os Mammals also appear to be thriving in the exclusion zone.
“We looked at whether we could see any difference in mammal populations between the most contaminated areas and the least contaminated areas, and we couldn’t,” Smith said.
“The only difference we observed was in the wolf populationwhich was seven times higher in Chernobyl than in other nature reserves in the region.”
“Let nature be nature”
The fact that wildlife can thrive better in a radioactive zone than outside it may seem surprising, but there is logic to it.
“It’s a huge area, free for wildlife, no noise, no lights, no pesticidesno herbicides, no forestry, no agriculture,” said Germán Orizaola, associate professor of zoology at the University of Oviedo in Spain.
“Human pressure is much, much worse for nature than the worst nuclear accident ever.”
Smith agrees.
“What I learned from Chernobyl is that… our occupation of an ecosystem is the real damage“, he says, adding that other things, such as pollution, are important, but “secondary”.
“[Chernobyl] It’s a powerful example of what repopulating wildlife can do,” he said.
Orizaola believes the site shows what kind of conservation strategies work.
“We often have these nature reserves and national parks, but they become a mix of tourist attractions and some form of human exploitation, and they do not work for nature conservation”, he said.
“[Chernobyl] It’s a wonderful place, a really incredible place… if we really wanted to preserve nature, the best recipe is to reduce our pressure on land and let nature be nature.”
