Four decades after Chornobyl: long-lived radionuclide legacy and sustainable land and resource use

Chornobyl remains the world’s longest-running field-scale experiment of how societies and ecosystems respond to persistent, spatially heterogeneous contamination. Yet sustainability-relevant synthesis across environmental compartments—soils, forests, surface waters, groundwater, and the evolving exposure landscape—remains fragmented, often separated into radiological, ecological, or regulatory discussions. Here we integrate four decades of observations in and around the Chornobyl Exclusion Zone to evaluate what has changed, what has not, and what this implies for sustainable land and resource use under long-lived hazards. We assess four compartment-linked insights: (i) soils as the primary long-term reservoir of fallout: inventories of ¹³⁷Cs and ⁹⁰Sr have declined but remain highly heterogeneous, while vertical redistribution and particle-associated processes increasingly govern mobility and bioavailability; (ii) forests as both sink and pathway: radionuclides are continuously recycled through litter and biomass, and contrasting within-tree distributions of ¹³⁷Cs versus ⁹⁰Sr impose distinct constraints on wood utilization and circular-economy strategies; (iii) aquatic systems as delayed but persistent exporters: multi-decadal river records exhibit long tails and sensitivity to disturbances (e.g., floods, fires), while groundwater pathways—especially for ⁹⁰Sr—represent enduring, often weakly observed legacy with clear management relevance; and (iv) exposure landscapes that evolve nonlinearly: spatiotemporal changes in dose fields complicate re-zoning decisions that depend on both scientific evidence and societal acceptance. We synthesize these findings into a sustainability framework that links environmental dynamics to governance choices, including conditional resource use, monitoring prioritization, and intergenerational risk trade-offs. These lessons generalize to other nuclear accidents and to broader classes of persistent contaminants where returning to baseline is unrealistic and sustainability must be designed under enduring constraints.