Oil spills resulted of military actions: Environmental consequences and decontamination techniques

Oil spills resulting from military actions present significant environmental challenges and demand effective decontamination strategies. These incidents, often stemming from warfare-related damage to infrastructure such as pipelines, refineries, and storage facilities, can lead to widespread ecological damage. The environmental consequences include severe contamination of soil, waterways, and marine ecosystems, adversely affecting biodiversity, water quality, and public health. The consequence of soil pollution of the petroleum hydrocarbons remains their hydrophobicity, the occurrence of anaerobic conditions, increased erosion, and loss of soil fertility. The impacts are exacerbated in conflict zones where response and remediation efforts are hindered by ongoing hostilities. Addressing these challenges requires a comprehensive approach encompassing immediate containment, clean-up, and long-term restoration efforts. Based on studies of toxicokinetic and toxicodynamic oil for certain groups of microorganisms, approaches to the use of bioremediation as an effective set of measures aimed at soil purification using biological objects have been developed. Bioaugmentation and biostimulation are two main techniques within bioremediation improving natural processes of petroleum hydrocarbon degradation with an appropriate microorganisms and nutrients needed for their metabolism. For this purpose, taxonomic classification and review of the metabolic pathways of the transformation of petroleum compounds were carried out using the electronic databases KEGG (Kyoto Encyclopedia of Genes and Genomes), MetaCyc, BacDive and the EzTaxon database and visualized using the IslandViewer 4 web server. Application of anaerobic digestate (by-product of biogas production) during biostimulation is currently under investigation due to content of nutrients, anaerobic bacteria and organic matter stimulating the process of oil compounds transformation. Thus, military actions have a catastrophic effect on the environment by oil spills that require the development of specific techniques, particularly, soil bioremediation.