Prediction of changes in war-induced population and CO₂ emissions in Ukraine using social media

Monitoring the changes in population and anthropogenic CO₂ emissions caused by geopolitical conflicts is significant for humanitarian assistance and also for revealing the CO₂ emission patterns of human activities. However, the changes in population and anthropogenic CO₂ emissions are highly dynamic, and representative survey data are generally unavailable. We monitor the near-real-time and fine-grained changes in war-induced population and anthropogenic CO₂ emissions in Ukraine through social media data. One year after the invasion, over 11 million Ukrainians are displaced from the baseline 0.1° × 0.1° gridded regions. There is a significant correlation between the estimated changes and the reference changes for each month in all CO₂ emission sectors, with R² respectively ranging from 0.57 to 0.93, 0.41 to 0.9, 0.74 to 0.99 for residential consumption, ground transport, and industry sectors. Overall, the proposed method provides a new perspective to monitor Ukrainian refugee crisis and measure the spatio-temporal response of anthropogenic CO₂ emissions.

Zhenjie Liu, Jun Li, Haonan Chen, Lizhe Wang, Jun Yang, Antonio Plaza