Effects of post-WWII forced displacements on long-term landscape dynamics in the Polish Carpathians

Armed conflicts and major political changes can result in the forced displacement of thousands of people and may have substantial effects on the environment. However, it is difficult to predict and mitigate long-term consequences of such displacements, especially when they trigger abrupt land-use changes that result in a regime shift of the land-use system. Our main goal was to determine the effects of post-WWII forced displacements on long-term landscape dynamics in the Polish Carpathians. After World War II, 630,000 Ukrainians were forcibly displaced from southeastern Poland, leading to permanent depopulation of mountain borderlands. We conducted a village-level analysis of forest area change across the Polish Carpathians (1685 villages/cadastral communities), and a detailed analyses of landscape change and land-cover trajectories in two highly depopulated test sites. Our source data were pre-war (1850s-1860s and 1930s) and post-war (1970s and 2010s) census data and topographic maps. We found a substantial forest area increase after displacements, far outpacing the widely reported forest increase due to the collapse of socialism in early 1990s, and a striking landscape simplification. Astonishingly, almost two thirds of the post-war (1930s-1970s) forest area increase in the entire Polish Carpathians (115,000 ha out of 181,000 ha) was due to the forced displacements. The land-use regimes shifted from being agriculturally-dominated to being forest-dominated, and approached a stable alternative state. As a result, a once densely populated rural region has become one of the largest ‘wilderness’ areas in Central Europe, with vast areas void of human settlements and resurgent wildlife populations. This highlights that forced displacements, which are common during and after armed conflicts, can have substantial and long-lasting effects on land use.