Online launch of the CBEES Annual State of the Region Report 2022

Nickolai Denisov is the deputy director and co-founder of Zoï Environment Network, a non-profit organization in Geneva. He holds a PhD in environment/geography and has over twenty years of international experience in environmental assessment, reporting, information management and communication. Denisov has worked with the UN and other international organizations, development banks, bilateral assistance programmes, organized and contributed to numerous environmental studies and capacity-building projects, in particular in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus and Central Asia. This has included a series of regional assessments and activities under the UN-OSCE Environment and Security initiative, and years of assessing the environmental cost of fighting in Donbas. Since February 2022 his team has been monitoring the environmental consequences of the war in Ukraine.

Marc Elie is a senior researcher in history at the National Center for Scientific Research (France). He is the deputy director of the Center for Russian, Caucasian, Central Asian and Central European Research. Marc Elie holds a PhD from the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences (France). His fields are the environmental history of Soviet Kazakhstan and disasters in the Soviet Union. He works on droughts and erosion in the regions of the ‘Virgin Land’ Campaign and on the environmental health crisis of the late Soviet years.

Tatiana Kasperski has been a researcher at Pompeu Fabra University in Barcelona, Spain. She is a specialist on nuclear issues in former Soviet spaces and on radioactive waste
politics and history. She is currently working on a nuclear environmental history of Ukraine at Södertörn University, Stockholm, Sweden.

Eva Richter is an assistant professor at the Department of Sociology at Charles University in Prague. Her research interests include public responses to environmental and climate change policies, related theoretical concepts, measurement and methodology, environmentally significant behaviors and practices, and risk in modern societies.

The aim of the CBEES State of the Region Report 2022 is to present an insight into the different environmental challenges facing the region due to the legacy of Communist modernity, the breakdown of Communism and the transition period, as well as the ongoing war. It also sheds light on how political and economic concerns shape the approach to the environment and maps contemporary awareness and responses, forms of resistance and engagements with these issues in the region. The report gathers in-depth analyses of environmental concerns in the region's transition, focusing on destruction and waste. It draws out common features and highlights local and cultural diversity in the region regarding waste, nature and activism.

The report consists of essays dealing with overall themes and 14 country reports. Together theindividual contributionsgivea nuanced picture of theenvironmental threats in the region, the complexity linked to ideas of modernity and political and economic decision-making, as well as values and rights claimed by indigenous people and even nature itself. The current war in Ukraine adds another dimension to ecological concerns and brings new destruction levels to the region.

The report is the third in a series of annual reports from CBEES (Centre for Baltic and East European Studies), reporting and reflecting on the social and political developments in the Baltic Sea Region and Central and Eastern Europe each year from a new and topical perspective. The overall purpose of this initiative is to offer a publication that will be of great interest to fellow researchers, policymakers, stakeholders, and the general public.