Polesia

Bordering Poland, Belarus, Ukraine, and Russia and shaped significantly by the Pripyat River, Polesia is a massive lowland region covering more than 18 million ha. It is one of Europe’s largest natural complexes, with habitats including transitional mires, fens, and marshes, raised bogs, wetlands, peatlands and ponds. Almany Mires, one of Europe’s largest mires, can be found here, covering an area of 100,000 ha. The area also boasts one of the largest complexes of floodplain meadows and alluvial floodplain forests.

Polesia supports numerous species of nationally and internationally threatened flora and fauna. The yearly gathering of Eurasian wigeon and godwits on the floodplains of the Pripyat is the largest in Central and Eastern Europe, and the vast natural floodplain meadows and mires provide critical spawning grounds for many fish species.

Moreover, Polesia’s wetlands provide vital ecosystem services, such as carbon storage and mitigation of climate change, accumulating fresh water supplies on which millions of people depend, prevention of extreme natural events like floods, droughts and landscape fires.

Project context and opportunity

Anthropogenic pressures including logging, fires, drainage, unsustainable hunting and berry foraging, illegal amber mining, radioactive contamination (caused by the Chernobyl disaster of 1986) and construction of roads and pipelines are damaging the ecological integrity of Polesia. As a result, the connectivity between the area’s nationally and internationally threatened populations of mammals, including wolf, lynx and European bison, as well as several bird species, is at risk.

The project team is consistently working on making the protection of Polesia’s unique landscape efficient. The activities carried out include expanding protected areas and creating new ones, improving protected area management, restoring disturbed and degraded wetlands as well as research and monitoring of ecosystems and biodiversity.

Taking into account the transborder character of the region and commitment to ecological integrity of Polesia’s core area, the project was intended and originally implemented as an international one involving partner organisations and staff from Belarus and Ukraine. However, after Russia’s military invasion of Ukraine that directly affected Polesia the project had to be revised. Efforts are now focused on the Ukrainian part of Polesia.