Drones and war: Neglected environmental impacts and the potentiality of drone conservation

Abstract

The use of drones in war is a well-researched topic within International Relations and Security Studies. A notable gap within the literature relates to the environmental aspects of drones in conflict contexts, which have received little attention. In contrast, there is extensive scholarship examining how the use of drones in ecological research affects various taxonomic groups of animals – and in particular different species of birds. Putting these different fields of drone research into a novel conversation with each other, and drawing on original empirical data, this interdisciplinary article examines some of the environmental risks of extensive drone use in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war. Drones, however, are a double-edged sword; they present both risks and opportunities. An illustration of the latter is the potential of drone conservation in conflict and especially post-conflict settings. That this potential remains under-explored represents a missed opportunity to consider how drones might be creatively used to help monitor and address the environmental impacts of war. In discussing this, the article links the possibilities of drone conservation to a larger relational turn in IR.

1. Introduction

On 1 June 2025, Ukraine launched an audacious attack deep inside Russia. In ‘Operation Spider’s Web’, Ukrainian agents deployed 117 drones, covertly transported into enemy territory in prefabricated sheds over a period of several months, to make a successful and coordinated assault on four Russian airbases, including Belaya in Siberia and Olenya in Murmansk oblast in the far northwest (Kiley, 2025). Officials in Kyiv have claimed that 41 Russian aircraft were destroyed or degraded. These include A-50s, strategic cruise missile carriers and giant Airborne Warning and Control Systems from the Soviet era (Adams, 2025). According to one analyst, ‘Operation Spider’s Web is one of the starkest examples yet of just how adept Ukraine has become at gaining an asymmetric advantage – doing more with less’ (Bego, 2025).

Drones continue to play a hugely significant role in the Russia-Ukraine war. ¹ They have been described as ‘all but ubiquitous’ (King, 2024, p. 198) and ‘the deadliest weapon of this war’ (Limaye, 2025); and DeVore (2023, p. 263) maintains that the conflict ‘can rightfully lay claim to being the world’s first “drone war”’. Moreover, both sides are producing large numbers of drones (Beznosiuk, 2025) – with Russia receiving crucial support in this regard from the People’s Republic of China (Stepanenko, 2025, p. 9) – and are continuously looking for new ways to innovate. According to a press release by the UK government on 23 June 2025, announcing a landmark 3-year agreement with Ukraine to share battlefield technology, ‘Ukraine is the world leader in drone design and execution, with drone technology evolving, on average, every six weeks’ (Prime Minister’s Office and Ministry of Defence, 2025).

The use of drones in war is a well-researched topic within International Relations (IR) and Security Studies (see, Brunstetter & Braun, 2011; Calcara et al., 2022; Enemark, 2019; Lushenko et al., 2025). There is also growing research on the use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war (Chávez & Swed, 2023; Kunertova, 2023a, 2023b; Mittal & Goetz, 2025). However, there are two important gaps in these bodies of literature, which this interdisciplinary article seeks to address. The first is that the environmental risks associated with drones remain neglected in conflict and security research. While there are some references to these risks (see Moreland, 2025; Wirtu & Abdela, 2025), they are relatively few, and detailed studies are critically lacking. What makes this gap even more striking is the fact that there is extensive literature examining how the use of drones in ecological research affects different groups of animals – and in particular Aves (see Rümmler et al., 2016; Wilson et al., 2023). Indeed, Gray and Weston (2021) underline that the topic of ‘[i]nteractions between drones and wildlife has recently become a prominent issue’. This article brings these different bodies of literature into conversation with each other, while also drawing on novel empirical data, to reflect on some of the environmental risks of drones in the context of the Russia-Ukraine war. It discusses drones as acoustic stressors but also, more broadly, as multi-layered environmental risks.

The second gap relates to drone conservation. Although there is substantial research on this topic (see Rossi & Wiesmann, 2024; Wich & Koh, 2018), the potential of drone conservation in conflict and especially post-conflict settings remains under-explored. This represents a missed opportunity to examine how drones might be creatively used to help monitor and address the environmental impacts of war. Fundamentally, they are a double-edged sword that can be both harmful and beneficial (Millner et al., 2023). For example, drones can contribute to plastic pollution, thereby affecting wildlife and marine ecosystems (Moreland, 2025), but they are also being used to detect and clean up plastic waste (see Denih et al., 2025; Tech Now, 2025). In discussing some of the ways that drones could be usefully harnessed for conservation purposes in Ukraine, the article also emphasizes their significance in helping to foster the production of knowledge ‘that intertwines the observer with the territory’ (Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024, p. 55). Such knowledge is important, in turn, for developing more holistic analyses of war and its impacts that address the traditional marginalization of more-than-human words and the persistence of human/nature binaries. In this regard, drone conservation has a neglected role to play in contributing to a larger ‘relational turn’ (Kavalski, 2018, p. 2) in IR that directly challenges the field’s anthropocentrism.

1.1. Methodology

The idea for this article took shape in the context of a research project examining the environmental impacts of Russia’s war in Ukraine. I conducted a total of 30 online semi-structured interviews and a further three via email. The interviewees consisted mainly of Ukrainian scientists, including botanists, ornithologists and herpetologists. ² Reflecting my interest in soundscape ecology (Krause, 2015; Pijanowski et al., 2011), which remains pronouncedly overlooked in conflict contexts, I also asked interviewees to make two soundscape recordings – that is, recordings of their local acoustic environments – using their mobile phones. ³ I was particularly curious to investigate and understand how sound is relevant to thinking about some of the war’s environmental consequences (see Clark, 2025a). ⁴ Some of the interviewees recorded the sound of drones and captured or spoke about animals’ reactions to them.

In this article, I draw on the empirical data – interviews and soundscape recordings – to discuss and unpack some of the potential environmental risks associated with the use of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war. None of the interviewees, to be clear, were experts on drones, and none of them had been involved in any studies of the environmental impacts of drones. The empirical material, therefore, necessarily has limitations, which I fully acknowledge, but it also offers some important and novel insights into a neglected dimension of drone warfare. To build up a more comprehensive picture, I triangulate the empirical data with other sources, including ecological research analyzing the effects of drones on different taxonomic groups of animals. Of course, the use of drones to monitor species and the mass use of drones in war for offensive and defensive purposes are fundamentally different contexts. Despite this, the wealth of research assessing how drone use in peacetime affects and disturbs animals is pertinent to thinking about some of the many environmental risks of drones in war settings.

While this article refers to the environmental risks that drones present – a looser term than environmental impacts – it does not offer a comprehensive environmental risk assessment. Van der Oost et al. (2003, p. 58) define environmental or ecological risk assessment as ‘the procedure by which the likely or actual adverse effects of pollutants and other anthropogenic activities on ecosystems and their components are estimated with a known degree of certainty using scientific methodologies’. The data on which this article is based, combined with the lack of existing studies focused on the environmental aspects of drone use in war, do not allow for this level of certainty. If, however, as Simpson et al. (2021, p. 490) argue, ‘analysts and managers tend to break risk assessments into silos, often taking a component-oriented, rather than interaction-oriented, view’, this research actively resists these silos by focusing on both the environmental risks of drones and how they might be utilized for conservation purposes. In this way, it effectively examines possible ways of addressing and managing these risks – another integral component of environmental risk assessment (Kaikkonen et al., 2021, p. 63). None of the interviewees themselves spoke about drone conservation, which is maybe unsurprising given the intensity of the war and what they are experiencing, including frequent drone attacks (Davies, 2026). Accordingly, the article’s discussion about drone conservation draws solely on secondary sources of data.

2. The use of drones in war

2.1. The larger context

The use of drones in war has a long history. Gregory (2011, p. 189) notes, for example, that:

remotely piloted aircraft have been used since the First World War, assault drones were deployed in the closing stages of the Second World War, and the first major combat use of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) was during the Vietnam War.

Drones were used for reconnaissance during the Cold War, and the space race and nuclear arms race between the US and the Soviet Union contributed to important developments in drone technology (Hall & Coyne, 2014, p. 451). In 1995, the US deployed its new Predator drone – the first that could be controlled by an operator thousands of miles away (Gusterson, 2016, p. 10) – for reconnaissance purposes in Bosnia-Herzegovina and subsequently in Kosovo (1998-1999); and it relied heavily on drones, including Predator and Reaper models, in its so-called ‘war on terror’ following the 9/11 terrorist attacks (Maass, 2015).

More recently, Azerbaijan’s military victory over Armenia in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war in 2020 is often attributed to its use of drones – and specifically Bayraktar TB2 combat drones manufactured in Turkey (Hambling, 2020; see, however, Postma, 2021, p. 15). Drones, including Bayraktar TB2s, also played a key role in the Tigray war in Ethiopia (2020-2022), helping the government to repel the advance of Tigray rebels seeking to overthrow it (Rogers, 2023, pp. 256–257); and various African states – including Togo and Niger – have purchased Bayraktar TB2s to deal with jihadist and insurgent groups (Melly, 2022). In the Middle East, Israel has used drones in its war against Hamas (Abualouf, 2025), and in the recent Israel-Iran war in June 2025, both countries launched multiple drone strikes against each other (France 24, 2025).

Additionally, violent non-state actors (VNSAs) increasingly deploy drones. Iranian-backed Houthi rebels, for example, have used them to attack commercial ships and oil tankers in the Red Sea (Hall, 2025); and Hezbollah has frequently used them against Israel (Al Jazeera, 2024), dating back to 2006 when it launched three armed drones from its base in southern Lebanon. This was the first recorded case of a VNSA using drones to attack an enemy (Haugstvedt, 2024, p. 133). VNSAs primarily rely on commercial drones, which are inexpensive and user-friendly, and offer considerable flexibility in terms of how they are utilized (O’Connor & Lanoszka, 2025). According to Chávez and Sved (2020, p. 31), ‘civilian drones provide VNSAs a new, efficient platform to advance their agendas’.

2.2. Drone use in the Russia-Ukraine war

Drones have, in many respects, become ‘a mainstay of modern war’ (Kreps & Lushenko, 2023, p. 271), and the Russia-Ukraine war is a particularly illustrative case study in this regard. The first point to underline is that a variety of different drones are being used very effectively in this conflict to inflict harm. One-way attack and first person view (FPV) drones, for example, reportedly generate between 70% and 80% of front line military casualties (Horowitz, 2025); and the Foreword to the UK’s 2025 Strategic Defence Review states that ‘[d]rones now kill more people than traditional artillery in the war in Ukraine, and whoever gets new technology into the hands of their Armed Forces the quickest will win’ (Ministry of Defence, 2025, p. 3). Drones have also been used to cause extensive damage to Ukraine’s energy infrastructure (European Commission, 2026; Phillips & Tian, 2025) and to hit oil and gas production facilities inside Russia (Tizard, 2025).

Interviewees in Ukraine frequently mentioned Iranian-designed Shahed drones, which Russia started using in late 2022 (and is now also manufacturing, since 2024), and these drones are often deployed in large numbers to attack urban areas. ⁵ During the summer of 2025, for example, Russian forces sought to advance into the northeastern region of Sumy, which borders Russia, and 100 Shahed drones per night was ‘standard for Sumy’ (Guerin, 2025) in this period. In recent months, moreover, Russia has stepped up its use of drone (and missile) attacks against Ukrainian towns and cities. A record high was reached in July 2025, during which Russia reportedly targeted Ukraine with 6,129 drones – exceeding the previous record of 5,337 drones in June 2025 (Taradiuk, 2025); and large-scale attacks involving 500 to 600 drones have become a regular occurrence (Sabbagh & Clinton, 2025).

The second pivotal point – underscoring that ‘drones have emerged as the key weapon for both sides’ (Beznosiuk, 2025) – is that some of Ukraine’s spectacular successes in the war have been achieved using drones. At the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022, for example, 30 drone operators on quadbikes helped to repel a huge column of Russian tanks approaching Kyiv. The drone operators, part of an air reconnaissance unit called Aerorozvidka, conducted night ambushes on the column, including one on the Russians’ supply depot (Borger, 2022). To take another example, in the spring of 2022 Ukraine began work on designing and building the world’s first combat sea drone, Magura-V5. Several months later, in October 2022, Ukrainian forces deployed several of these drones to launch an attack on Russia’s Black Sea fleet in the port of Sevastopol in Crimea (Williams, 2024). The attack – which also involved cruise missile strikes and forced the Russian Navy to withdraw from Sevastopol – has been described as ‘one of the clearest examples of the success of asymmetrical threats against a larger, more powerful, opponent’ (Sutton, 2024). More recently, as discussed in the article’s introduction, Ukraine used drones to carry out Operation Spider’s Web, heralded as marking a ‘significant milestone’ in its warfare capabilities against a vastly more powerful enemy (Bondar, 2025).

The third point is that there has been an enormous amount of drone-related development during the war. In this fast-moving field, each side needs to try and get (and stay) one step ahead, which highlights, in turn, how innovation and adaptation in war often occur not from the top down, but, rather, from the bottom up or horizontally between different units on the ground (Chávez & Swed, 2023, p. 599). One example is the development of fibre optic drones – which the commander of a Ukrainian drone unit has described as ‘an experimental response to battlefield jamming’ (in Sabbagh, 2025). Another example is the use of small commercial drones (like those used by VNSAs), which are much cheaper than military drones and present a more complex picture – or ‘drone script’ (Kunertova, 2023a, p. 583) – than is often found within Security Studies literature. According to Kunertova (2023a, p. 583), ‘[i]nstead of advanced million-dollar large drones that formed the basis of the theoretical literature, small, low-tech drones of commercial origins are changing dynamics on the battlefields of Ukraine’.

A significant recent development is Ukrainian forces’ use of unmanned land drones – also known as robot soldiers – to supply troops on the frontline, including in the embattled city of Pokrovsk (the majority of which Russian forces now control). As one report notes, ‘[t]he battle of Pokrovsk will probably go down in history as the first in which unmanned ground vehicles were used on a mass scale, largely to deliver supplies and evacuate wounded’ (Abdurasulov, 2025). In 2024, moreover, Ukraine became the first country ever to create a special branch of its armed forces that is exclusively dedicated to unmanned systems. This branch is known as the Unmanned Systems Forces of the Armed Forces of Ukraine (Kirichenko, 2025b).

2.3. Some notable gaps

Notwithstanding a wealth of research discussing the use of drones in war, remarkably little attention has been given to the environmental risks that they present. Scholars have noted that ‘environmentally damaging ingredients’ – including copper and plastic – are used in the construction of drones (Anderson et al., 2025, p. 674), and that drones are one of the military technologies that particularly ‘contribute significantly to environmental degradation during conflicts’ (Wirtu & Abdela, 2025). Conspicuously missing are detailed studies on the topic.

One possible reason is that IR and Security Studies have traditionally been very human-centred fields that marginalize more-than-human worlds. Pereira and Renner (2023, p. 390), for example, note that ‘[a]nimals have remained largely invisible in IR’; and Mitchell (2014, p. 5) has argued that ‘existing approaches to security are radically anthropocentric’. Viewed against this contextual backdrop, it is perhaps unsurprising that little attention has been given to the environmental risks and impacts of drone use in war. There is, however, an expanding body of scholarship that directly problematises simplistic human/nature binaries and presents more inclusive and relational ways of thinking about war and security (see Cudworth & Hobden, 2023; Fagan, 2017; Fougner, 2024). Research examining the environmental costs of drones would be a very welcome and important addition to this literature.

Yet it is also necessary to acknowledge that such research is far from straightforward – which is another potential reason why the topic has not received the attention that it merits. Drones are used in warfare alongside other weapons systems. For example, Russia frequently attacks Ukraine with a combination of drones and missiles, including ballistic missiles (see Adams & Lukiv, 2025). It is likely to be difficult in practice, therefore, to isolate the environmental impacts of drones from the wider context in which they are deployed. Indeed, it might even be argued that it is somewhat artificial to attempt to do so. Adding a further layer of complexity is drone type. González (2024, p. 7) remarks on the fact that in Ukraine, ‘an astonishing variety of drones have been deployed…ranging from inexpensive over-the-counter devices outfitted with grenades or improvised explosives to sophisticated machines armed with cruise missiles’. This is noteworthy because what we know from ecological research and monitoring is that a multitude of factors shape and influence the environmental effects of drones – including the types of drones used (Brisson-Curadeau et al., 2025) and their particular ‘sound signature’ (Mesquita et al., 2021, p. 158). The challenges of assessing environmental risks and impacts, therefore, are necessarily amplified in highly dynamic conflict settings where assorted drones are deployed – and in huge numbers.

These challenges accentuate, in turn, that researching the environmental effects of drones in war is fundamentally different from doing so in other contexts. Despite this, the large corpus of mainly ecology-based research exploring how animals, and especially birds, are affected by the use of drones for observation and monitoring purposes is helpful for thinking about some of the environmental risks associated with drones in war. This can also be taken one step further. Neglected within conflict and security literature is the ‘potential of drones to deepen our understanding of animal behaviour and to improve conservation efforts’ (Pedrazzi et al., 2025). Harnessing this potential in conflict and especially post-conflict settings – the focus of the article’s final section – requires understanding some of the environmental impacts of drones in peacetime, to try and minimize them.

3. Drones as acoustic environmental risks in the Russia-Ukraine war

Many soldiers returning from the frontline in Ukraine have been described as suffering from a new form of trauma –‘droneophobia’ – linked to the persistent buzzing sound of enemy drones flying overhead (Gunter, 2025). This highlights the fact that drones are a powerful acoustic stressor, inducing, as McSorley (2019, p. 84) notes, ‘widespread feelings of predation, anxiety and ontological insecurity that at any given moment death might be instantaneously dealt from above’. The noise that drones make, moreover, is inseparable from the important issue of the environmental risks that they pose in war – a salient theme within the empirical data on which this article draws.

In the context of my research on the Russia-Ukraine war, and as a way of acoustically thinking about some of the war’s environmental impacts, I developed an interview guide that incorporated several questions about sound – including ‘how have your soundscapes changed since the start of the full-scale invasion in February 2022’? This was a question that elicited some very rich responses. Interviewees spoke about sounds that they no longer hear, such as civilian aircraft (Ukraine’s airports are closed) and fireworks (which are now banned). They also referred to sounds that they miss due to changes in the accessibility of particular places – including nature reserves and protected areas that are currently under Russian occupation and/or affected by military operations (see Petrovych & Yamelynets, 2024). In answering the question, interviewees particularly talked about new sounds, such as air raid sirens, generators and the silence of curfew (from midnight to 5 am in many Ukrainian cities). Another new sound that they frequently mentioned was drones – and especially Shahed drones, which, according to one interviewee, ‘sound like a motorcycle but in the sky’ (interview, 25 November 2024). Several of them also gave examples – sometimes in the form of soundscape recordings – of how drones affect animals.

One of the herpetologists made a recording while taking an evening stroll in Zaporizhzhia in southeast Ukraine. During her walk, Russian forces launched several Shahed drones nearby. The recording begins with the sound of neighbourhood dogs barking. The barking intensifies as the sound of explosions – from Ukraine’s air defence system shooting down these enemy drones – is heard. Discussing the recording, the interviewee explained that ‘[t]he sound was very loud and we could feel the vibrations. So, it was pretty close. During some attacks, we hear quite distant sounds from drones, but this time the sound was very close’. Commenting specifically on the dogs, she emphasized that ‘all the animals are very nervous, and they start barking as soon as the drones or other dangers approach’ (interview, 13 November 2024).

Another interviewee, a botanist, spoke about the impact of drones and other war-related acoustic disturbances, such as low-flying military aircraft, on animals in Ukraine’s oldest nature reserve, Askania-Nova. The interviewee was not able to make a recording from inside Askania-Nova, which is situated in Kherson region in southern Ukraine, as it is now under the control of Russian-installed authorities and has a new Russian ‘director’. Nevertheless, the interviewee and his colleagues are closely monitoring what is happening in the reserve, via Ukrainian technical staff who continue to work there, satellite images and open-source resources. He noted, for example, that there are documented cases of animals – including ungulates ⁶ – being crushed against fences as they sought to flee from unfamiliar war sounds. In one such case, in August 2022, a male Nilgaw antelope broke its neck after running into an enclosure fence (Hubareva, 2024). The interviewee underscored that ‘[t]hese animals had never experienced aircraft noise and the sound of drones, and some have died trying to run away from these unknown sounds and threats’ (interview, 22 November 2024).

Illustrating how birds, as aerial species, are especially susceptible to drone-induced stressors (Wilson et al., 2023, p. 1817), a scientist working in Tuzlivski Lymany National Park in Odesa region made a recording of five Shahed drones flying close to his office. In discussing the audio, he detailed how the sound of drones has affected birds in Tuzlivski Lymany, including flamingos – a species with a high sensitivity to disturbances (Valle, 2022, p. 320). In 2021, many flamingos arrived in the park from Turkey, after Tuz Lake – Turkey’s second largest lake – dried up. The interviewee recalled that ‘[i]n 2022, we expected that we would have nesting flamingos, but then the war started, and it was very hard to do anything for wildlife in this area and the flamingos did not nest’. In 2023, flamingos began to nest in a strictly protected area of the park. However, there were too many war-related acoustic stressors and the birds left. They returned in July 2023 and 200 chicks were subsequently born. This was the first time that flamingos had successfully nested in Ukraine (Rubryka, 2023). The following year, there were no chicks;

[t]he flamingos sat on their nests and for the first week or so everything was more or less normal, but then there was a lot of sound pressure on them, due to the noise from Shahed drones. As a result, the flamingos left their nests and seagulls took their eggs (interview, 30 June 2025).

The interviewee also expressed concerns about the possible impact of drones and other war-related sounds on birds that annually visit the park, including waders such as avocets. If these birds are disturbed and need to expend valuable energy in finding other places in which to feed, ⁷ they may not be in good physical condition when it is time for them to migrate. ⁸

For her part, one of the ornithologists recalled a couple of occasions when Shahed drones, shot down by Ukraine’s air defence system, landed in the nature reserve where she works, which is located next to the Dnipro River. She noted that the river is a place for many wintering birds, including mallards and goosanders, and that the sound of drones – and of explosions when they are intercepted – shocks these birds, as evidenced by what she called their ‘panic flight’ (interview, 25 November 2024). Yet this research participant also presented a more nuanced picture. She made two soundscape recordings from the nature reserve and the Dnipro River prior to the interview and was keen to make some additional recordings during the spring when there is greater avian vocal activity. Several months after the interview took place, she made and shared a recording that captures the combined sounds of a nearby Shahed drone and the morning chorus of a hornbeam forest. ‘In this recording’, she explained, ‘European robins, song thrushes, chiffchaffs and wood warblers keep singing as a Shahed drone flies over the forest’ (post-interview correspondence, 4 May 2025). Studies of drone impact on birds in peacetime have illuminated salient inter-species differences (see Barr et al., 2020; Brisson-Curadeau et al., 2025; Wilson et al., 2023, p. 1817). Similarly, the interviewee underlined that based on her observations, some bird species, including forest birds, herons and white storks, do not appear to be as sensitive as others to the sound of drones and other war-related acoustic disturbances. ⁹

It is important to emphasize the large spectrum of sounds that war and armed conflict produce – which Daughtry (2015, p. 3) refers to as ‘the belliphonic’ – and to acknowledge, relatedly, the diversity of sound-based stressors that may exist, including air raid sirens, gunfire and explosions. Hence, the environmental risks that drones pose to more-than-human worlds cannot be viewed, to reiterate an earlier point, in isolation from this larger context. However, what arguably makes them a particularly significant acoustic disturbance in Ukraine is the vast quantities of them being used – although Shahed drones are reportedly becoming quieter (Layton, 2024). Some of the counter-drone measures that both sides are using, such as decoy drones (Hambling, 2025), further contribute to the overall disturbed soundscape.

Although this article mainly focuses on flying drones (and indeed the interviewees only spoke about these), it is essential not to overlook marine drones and their pertinence to this discussion about acoustic risks. This type of drone, which first started to appear near the end of the twentieth century, is also being innovatively used in the Russia-Ukraine war. Ukraine has utilised its ‘Sea Baby’ drones, for example, to target the underwater supports of the Crimea Bridge (Lutatsky & Gatapoulos, 2025) – built by Russia following its illegal annexation of Crimea in 2014 – and to hit Russian oil tankers in the Black Sea (Aeberhard & Bennett, 2025). As Bursuc et al. (2024, p. 205) point out, moreover, ‘Ukraine announced on August 24, 2023, the formation of Brigade 385, the first specialist maritime drone unit in the world’.

We know little about these drones in terms of their environmental impacts. However, although they are quieter than sea vessels and designed to be stealthy (Cheetham, 2023), they rely on sonar, which can significantly affect marine life. Sonar can be especially detrimental to cetaceans – such as dolphins and whales – that rely on echolocation for navigation, communication and foraging (see Parsons, 2017). Indeed, naval sonar – as an element of war-related acoustic pollution – is believed to have contributed to the mass deaths of dolphins and porpoises that occurred during the early months of the war (Conflict and Environment Observatory, 2025).

4. Drones as multi-layered environmental risks in the Russia-Ukraine war

While the previous section focused on sound, the environmental risks that drones present are multi-layered and not solely acoustic in nature. The visual appearance of drones is also very relevant. Many avian species, for example, have to contend with aerial predators, and ‘birds are particularly likely to perceive drones as threats’ (Brisson-Curadeau et al., 2025). As one illustration, Weston et al. conducted a study involving 561 trials on 22 species in central southern Victoria in Australia, using a type of drone (a Dajiang Innovations Phantom 3) that is a popular choice among recreational drone users. They found that ‘escape responses predominated’ (Weston et al., 2020, p. 781), but also that there were inter-species variations in response rates and sensitivity (p. 782). They further found that ‘at the altitudes we tested, most birds responded before the drone was overhead’ (Weston et al., 2020, p. 782) and that escape responses were 14.6% more likely when the drone was flying at lower altitudes (p. 781). Interestingly, and linking back to the discussion in the previous section, 20% of the trials involved the initiation of an escape response during the ascent phase of the drone, which is also the noisiest phase (Weston et al., 2020, p. 783).

In another study, Rümmler et al. analysed how Adélie penguins in the Antarctic region reacted to a drone (octocopter) flying over their colony during breeding season. They found, inter alia, that the penguins visibly reacted to the presence of the drone, especially when it was flying at lower altitudes (Rümmler et al., 2016, p. 1332); and that vertical flights caused higher levels of disturbance among the birds than horizontal flights, perhaps because they resembled an attack by predators (p. 1333). The authors also note in this regard that field personnel subjectively observed that the sound volume of the drone was higher when making vertical movements, which, they suggest, ‘possibly contributes to the higher disturbance by vertical than horizontal flights found at altitudes below 20 m’ (Rümmler et al., 2016, p. 1333).

It is very difficult, however, to draw any overarching conclusions from existing studies because myriad variables can affect whether and how birds respond to drones. These include the drones themselves and their particular flight paths (Mo & Bonatakis, 2022); the type of birds surveyed and whether they are territorial species (Lyons et al., 2018); and the time of year when the surveying is being done (Geldart et al., 2022). Some studies have even found that drones are only minimally intrusive to bird populations (see Gallego & Sarasola, 2021; Sikora & Marchowski, 2023). Yet as Vas et al. (2015) underline, even if birds do not exhibit any obvious behavioural changes, this does not mean that they are unaffected by the presence of a drone flying above them or near them. They might, for example, have increased heart rates and/or raised corticosterone levels.

The idea, moreover, that drones constitute only a limited disturbance is potentially much more problematic in conflict settings, especially when – as in the case of Ukraine – vast numbers are being deployed. Unique to conflict contexts, there is also an ongoing need for military innovation – which Horowitz and Pindyck (2023, p. 99) define as ‘changes in the conduct of warfare designed to increase the ability of a military community to generate power’ (emphasis in the original). Such innovation can further contribute to the environmental risks of drones. Two factors in particular stand out with respect to the Russia-Ukraine war.

The first relates to so-called ‘swarming drones’. Swarming involves a group of drones that are programmed to work together as a coordinated unit to achieve a specific objective. In the Russia-Ukraine war, both sides are developing and testing swarm technology – including autonomous drones – as a ‘natural response to advancements in counter-drone systems’ (Mittal, 2025a). While King (2024, p. 186) maintains that experts in artificial intelligence overplay the potential of autonomous drone swarms, an important question is how increased use of swarm tactics and advances in swarm technology – both in the Russia-Ukraine war and in other conflict environments – will affect more-than-human worlds. The concept of biomimicry (also known in military settings as biologically inspired engineering), and in particular avian biomimicry, is very relevant in this regard. This is the idea of mimicking bird performance to improve military design and robotics. While it is not new, when drones are deployed in swarms, this replicates ‘the natural phenomenon exhibited by insects, flocks of birds, and shoals of fish’ (Matthews & Matthews, 2024, p. 391). There is crucial research to be done, therefore, to examine how these swarms might affect the behaviour, including flushing responses, of birds and other animals.

The second factor is the development of fibre optic drones. Standard drones rely on radio frequencies that can easily be jammed, and indeed jamming has knocked out a large number of drones in the Russia-Ukraine war (Kirichenko, 2025a). In the case of fibre optic drones, in contrast, information is transmitted to and from the drone via cable. These drones are therefore a significant counter-response to the challenges of electronic warfare. They can also fly very low, and the absence of radio signals means that they are more difficult to detect (Sabbagh, 2025). According to Stepanenko (2025, p. 8), however, fibre optic drones ‘are not a particularly sophisticated technological adaptation’, and certainly they come with their own set of challenges. ¹⁰ The key point for the purposes of this discussion is that these drones present additional environmental issues. A photograph posted on X by a Ukrainian soldier from the 12th Brigade Azov, for example, shows the image of a bird’s nest with pieces of fibre optic cable inside it. ¹¹ Commenting on the image, Hambling (2025) remarks that it is ‘a striking sign of how much debris from fibre-guided FPVs now litters the landscape of Ukraine’. The presence of large amounts of cable draped across the landscape in frontline areas, ¹² moreover, can ensnare wildlife, including birds and bats, and reduce connectivity. Moreland (2025) highlights in this regard that:

Even where wildlife avoids entanglement the cables can act as barriers to movement, effectively becoming fences in the sky, on the ground and in waterways. As such they represent a major threat to wildlife by reducing access to high-quality habitat or important resources, and in so doing reducing ecosystem functioning.

There is also a heightened risk of plastic pollution associated with the use of fibre optic drones (which draws attention, more broadly, to the fact that drones have received little attention as a source of electronic waste). Polymer optical fibres consist mainly of polymethyl methacrylate (PMMA). Over time, the fibres can degrade into microplastics, which are hugely harmful to the environment, and when PMMA is burned, it can release noxious gases – such as nitric oxide and carbon monoxide – into the atmosphere (Moreland, 2025). Anti-drone nets made of non-biodegradable materials, such as fishing nets (Chapple, 2025), are a further potential source of pollution (and risk to wildlife), although a charity in France has supplied Ukraine with old fishing nets made of natural horsehair (Willsher, 2025).

This section and the previous one have unpacked some of the environmental risks that drones pose in war – and specifically in the Russia-Ukraine war. In the absence of detailed systematic studies, however, these risks should not be over-stated or taken out of context. There is so much that remains unknown. It is also essential to acknowledge the multiple and diverse uses of drones. In particular, ‘[o]ne of the most dynamic applications for drones has been in biodiversity conservation’ (Fish & Richardson, 2022, p. 8). Addressing the fact that their potential in this regard has received little attention in conflict and post-conflict environments, the article’s final section reflects on how drones could be usefully deployed in such settings to help monitor and address some of the environmental impacts of war – both in Ukraine and more broadly.

5. The possibilities of drone conservation

There are multiple ways that drones can and have been utilised in conservation work, in diverse environments and across different continents. They have been deployed, inter alia, to increase surveillance capacity in the fight against elephant and rhinoceros poaching in Africa (Bergenas, Stohl & Georgieff, 2013); and to conduct aerial sampling of flying insects in an area of southwestern Spain (with the aim of fostering a better understanding of insect behaviour, interactions and abundance within the under-explored planetary/atmospheric boundary layer) (Mulero-Pázmány et al., 2022). Drones have also been used to assess the body mass of harbour seals in the Skagerrak region of Scandinavia, as a way of monitoring the health and visibility of the colony and of detecting early signs of population decline (Carroll et al., 2025). Additionally, the development of so-called ‘snotbot drones’ has enabled researchers to collect whale blow samples from humpback whales during their migration from Antarctica to northern Australia, in order to sample them for viruses and thus to learn more about the microbial diversity of the whale virome (Geoghegan et al., 2018). Indeed, Johnston (2019, p. 440) maintains that drones ‘are poised to revolutionize many aspects of marine science and conservation…affordably filling the gap between in situ sampling and established remote sensing approaches’.

The use of drones in conservation work provides crucial openings for researchers to learn more about, and to sample, species in places that would otherwise remain inaccessible (Anderson et al., 2025, p. 668). By providing high-resolution data, moreover, both temporally and spatially, drones offer ‘new opportunities for scale-appropriate measurement of ecological phenomena’ (Anderson & Gaston, 2013, p. 145), and, by extension, opportunities for new insights into ecosystem complexity – including the complexity of vegetation (Müllerova et al., 2025). Drone conservation also presents many potential, yet little explored, opportunities in conflict and post-conflict contexts, as a way of monitoring and addressing some of the environmental impacts of war.

The Russia-Ukraine war, for example, has taken a huge toll on forests. Milakovsky et al.’s (2025) research has identified three large areas of forest loss in Ukraine since the start of the full-scale invasion in 2022, including in the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone, and underlines that ‘[c]ontinuous battles along the shifting frontline had devastating effects on forest cover, especially in pine stands’. The war has also affected forests in other ways, such as hampering effective fire-fighting and prevention efforts. In May 2022, for instance, Russian occupiers prohibited Ukrainian attempts to extinguish wildfires (of unknown origin) that raged through forests in Kherson region (Cazzolla Gatti et al., 2025).

Against this backdrop, drones could play a valuable conservation role – particularly once the war ends. First, they offer a way of safely monitoring forests that present serious accessibility risks and challenges, due to the presence of landmines and other unexploded ordnance (UXO) (Vasyliuk, 2024). It is useful to note on this point that ongoing work is being done to try and make drones less acoustically intrusive. As Mane et al. (2024, p. 1389) remark, ‘[n]oise reduction in unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) is a pressing concern as UAV technology becomes increasingly integral across diverse sectors’.

Second, drones could be used to help restore forest loss and regenerate tree cover. In Kosovo, for example, where large swathes of forest are lost every year as a consequence of illegal logging and forest fires, drones have been deployed to drop ‘seed bombs’ as part of a pilot project aimed at reforesting particular areas (Baftiu & Hoti, 2024). In Brazil, a Franco-Brazilian company, Morfo, is seeking to restore 1 million hectares of forest using seed-sowing drones that are able to carry between 10 kg and 30 kg of seeds (Malleret, 2024). Such work is not without challenges. Concerns have been raised about the quality and availability of seeds (Coldrey & Thompson, 2024, p. 1635); and Castro et al. (2023) emphasize that ‘to restore the forest is not simply to drop seeds from a drone; there are many issues once the seeds are on the ground that have to be taken into account to guarantee restoration success’. While such arguments make clear that the use of drones for reforestation purposes cannot be approached uncritically, they do not take away from the under-explored potentiality of drone conservation in conflict-affected and post-conflict societies.

Continuing with the focus on forests, there is a third use for drone conservation in Ukraine. Forests, like other ecosystems, have important regenerative capacity and can recover from disturbances. A good example of this can be found on the site of the former Kakhovka reservoir in Kherson region. When Russian aggressors breached the Kakhovka dam in June 2023 – a crime that Ukrainian prosecutors are investigating as a possible case of ecocide (Kostin, 2024) – the reservoir was left drained and desiccated. More than 2 years on, a young willow forest is now growing there (Mundy, 2025), and a historic area known as Velykyi Luh or Great Meadow – consisting of floodplain forests, swamps and meadows that were destroyed when the reservoir was built during the 1950s – is gradually recovering (Ukraine War Environmental Consequences Work Group [UWEC], 2025). One of the interviewees, an expert on forests, explained that:

[t]he forests on the site of the former Kakhovka reservoir have rapid growth and high productivity because large reserves of fertile silt are accumulated at the bottom. In these conditions, the seeds of some rare species of willows and other plants have successfully germinated (interview, 8 July 2025).

Drones can support these natural restoration processes by providing researchers with opportunities to monitor plant health and to map vegetation composition and structure (Robinson et al., 2022, p. 1908). It should be noted in this regard, linking back to the first point, that large areas of the former Kakhovka reservoir remain inaccessible to scientists due to landmines and ongoing shelling (Mundy, 2025).

In light of the above suggestions, it is necessary to acknowledge that important concerns have been raised about the militarization of conservation (Duffy, 2016; Lunstrum et al., 2025), which, according to Duffy et al. (2019, p. 69), is ‘fundamentally problematic’ in conflict zones. Questioning, for example, whether militarized conservation increases levels of violence in conflict contexts, they highlight, inter alia, that conservationists working in such environments can feel threatened by the presence of armed groups or poachers; and that ‘[w]hen faced with such threats it can seem a “common sense” response for rangers to resort to the use of force to protect wildlife and themselves’ (Duffy et al., 2019, p. 69). Such concerns must be taken seriously. However, this article, to be clear, is not advocating the ‘use of forceful and violent strategies in conservation’ (Duffy et al., 2019, p. 71). Rather, its argument is that the potential benefits of a circumscribed use of drones in conflict-affected societies for specific and well-defined conservation tasks should not be overlooked.

Relatedly, some scholars have expressed concerns – which this article also fully acknowledges – about the possible social implications of drone conservation. These include infringement of civil liberties and extension of social control (Sandbrook, 2015), disempowerment of local communities and traditional conservation practices (Lunstrum, 2014), and entrenchment of (racial) stereotypes and discrimination (Millner et al., 2024). Yet research has also illuminated how the use of drones can contribute to developing more inclusive conservation practices – as expressions of ‘knowledge production “from below”’ (Amador-Jimenez et al., 2024, p. 53) – that involve local people and groups.

Discussing heritage conservation in post-conflict Mozambique, for example, Barrett-Casey (2025, p. 99) maintains that drone technology can ‘break a dependency on the international community to conduct conservation surveys, which can go far in reversing the political inequalities entrenched in the international heritage field’. In their work in southern Africa, Muashekele et al. (2022) accentuate community-based co-design, grounded in Ubuntu philosophy, as an innovation enabler in conservation work. They also detail the input of game guards with respect to drone design and usage in the Iona-Skeleton Coast Transfrontier Conservation Area between Angola and Namibia. For her part, Millner has followed monitoring practices in the Maya Biosphere Reserve (MBR), located in the Peten region of Guatemala. She makes salient the top-down dynamics of these practices, linked to state objectives and the ‘racialised policing of rural populations in the MBR’ (Millner, 2020). Yet she also underlines that such vertical technologies ‘offer rich possibilities for thinking beyond the militarised, securitised, and neoliberalised visions of conservation acquiring traction globally’ (Millner, 2020), by enabling local communities to see and experience in new ways the entanglement of human and other-than-human life.

This last point is particularly significant. Drones can foster deeper understandings of different lifeworlds, which spotlights, in turn, their relevance to ‘green recovery’ (Flamm & Kroll, 2024) in post-conflict societies. As quintessential hybrids ‘suspended between nature and culture’ (Fish, 2020, p. 249), they also encapsulate the interconnectedness of human and more-than-human worlds. Indeed, entanglement is one of the five ‘drone ontologies’ that Fish (2020, p. 252) identifies. ¹³ Ultimately, therefore, the potentiality of drone conservation in conflict-affected and particularly post-conflict societies is deeply relational. Drone conservation can contribute to further fostering and developing – ontologically and epistemologically – expanded ways of thinking about war and its legacies that challenge traditionally anthropocentric framings. It also offers a very practical approach, as a complement to complex and protracted legal processes, to dealing with some of the environmental legacies of war.

6. Conclusion

The aim of this article was to address two salient gaps within scholarship on drones and war. Notwithstanding extensive research on this topic, the environmental aspects of drone use in conflict contexts have received little attention. In contrast, there exists a large corpus of scholarship discussing the environmental impacts of drones in peacetime. This article has cross-fertilized these different bodies of literature, while also drawing on novel empirical data, to discuss and reflect on some of the environmental risks linked to the extensive use of drones in the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.

Yet it has also sought to demonstrate, to cite Fish (2023, p. 172), that ‘[t]he drone is more than a weapon of war, death, and necropolitics. It is a pharmakon, an existential technology with both poisonous and sanative potentials’. More specifically, the article has emphasized the neglected possibilities of drone conservation in conflict-affected and especially post-conflict societies. Although drone conservation is a very complex issue, about which scholars have articulated a variety of concerns, there remains huge scope for exploring it as one way of monitoring and addressing the environmental legacies of war – and of dealing with accessibility risks and challenges in areas contaminated with landmines and UXO. The article has particularly underlined the relational potentiality of drone conservation in making salient and fostering greater awareness of, and respect for, the entanglements and interconnectedness of different lifeworlds. In this way, drone conservation can be situated vis-à-vis an important relational turn within IR and can contribute to the development of ‘richer relational perspectives and conversations’ (Kurki, 2022, p. 822).

The relationship between the two components of this article is ultimately symbiotic. Understanding drones from an environmental risk perspective is an important part of safely exploring and maximizing their conservation potential. The possibilities of drone conservation, in turn, accentuate the need for clear regulations and guidelines to help minimize undesirable impacts and disturbance effects (see Brisson-Curadeau et al., 2025; Gray & Weston, 2021). At the same time, the many insights to be gained from the complexities and challenges of drone conservation in conflict-affected and post-conflict societies, and from studies of the environmental impacts of drones in such settings, can usefully feed into the development and expansion of these regulatory frameworks, which must necessarily remain fluid in order to reflect continuing advances in drone technology.