Wars bring destruction and death, human and economic devastation, but what is not sufficiently highlighted are the environmental consequences of wars. Their disastrous environmental impact includes water and soil pollution and the destruction of ecosystems, leaving profound and lasting scars on nature, jeopardizing the health of our planet for future generations.
Record levels of conflict and violence have been recorded in recent years: according to some analyses, 170 conflicts were recorded in 2023, and by the end of that year, nearly 120 million people worldwide were forced to flee their homes.The environmental damage caused by wars has devastating consequences for ecosystems, people's health, and livelihoods. When forests are cleared for military purposes or fertile land and water resources are lost and contaminated, vast areas are rendered uninhabitable and difficult to recover after many years.
Examples include Sudan, where these tactics have been denounced by local populations, and Iraq, where wetlands were drained during the civil war.
In Ukraine, vast areas are at risk of contamination by mines and unexploded ordnance. Soil, waterways, and forests have been polluted by bombings, fires, and floods. Clearing mines and unexploded ordnance often takes years and requires significant investment. In Ukraine, the estimated costs for such clearance currently amount to $34.6 million. These rapid damage and needs assessments[1]are conducted by organizations such as the World Bank, the United Nations, and the European Commission, which estimate physical damage, socioeconomic losses, and recovery needs following disasters and conflicts.
In Gaza, in addition to the tens of thousands of deaths, there is also land degradation, water pollution, and the loss of arable land. Sewerage, wastewater, and waste management facilities are collapsing.
The destruction of buildings, roads, and infrastructure has generated millions of tons of debris, some contaminated with unexploded ordnance, asbestos, and hazardous substances, as well as an increase in communicable diseases.
The World Health Organization reports 179,000 cases of acute respiratory infections and 136,000 cases of diarrhea in children under five after just three months of conflict. This is a clear sign of the impact of the destruction of public works.
In other countries, the abundance of natural resources fuels armed conflicts, a case in point being the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where the extraction of rare earth elements continues to fuel the conflict in the eastern part of the country.
Emissions from military activities represent a significant and often underestimated source of greenhouse gases; according to a study by Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), military facilities are responsible for approximately 5.5% of global emissions. They arise primarily from the massive consumption of fossil fuels by aircraft, ships, and armored vehicles, as well as from the production of weapons and energy for bases, often benefiting from exemptions in international climate reporting. Global military operational emissions are estimated to range from 300 to 600 million tons of CO2 equivalent (MtCO2e) per year. Considering the entire supply chain, the carbon footprint is between 1,600 and 3,500 MtCO2e, or between 3.3% and 7.0% of global emissions, to which the CO2 from post-conflict reconstruction must be added.
Since the Kyoto Protocol, military activities have often been exempted or not properly reported in climate agreements, creating a data gap (military emissions gap): military data are secret, and states are not required to report their emissions. Greenhouse gas emissions caused by armed conflicts have always been classified military information, excluded from every global climate agreement, and any call for transparency has been rejected in the name of internal security. Rising global military spending, particularly within NATO, is expected to further exacerbate pollution, with estimates of over a trillion tons of CO2 produced over the next decade.
In war, having a more powerful weapons system than my adversary, regardless of its active ingredient and constituents, gives me such a tactical advantage that I don't think about the potential long-term environmental damage caused by the substances I use. And this is a common thread that remains as valid a hundred years ago as it is today.
The speaker is Matteo Guidotti, a chemist and senior researcher at the CNR's "Giulio Andreatta" Institute of Chemical Sciences and Technologies in Milan. He studies the environmental damage caused by conflicts like the one in Gaza, where a previous study highlighted how the war in the Strip had led to an estimated 281,000 tons of CO2 emissions, more than the amount of the same molecule released into the atmosphere in a year by twenty countries around the world.
The bombing of chemical industrial sites and oil depots, as is currently happening in Iran, serves to cripple a country's industrial and economic potential, preventing an easy recovery. However, what they cause in terms of the release of pollutants into the air, water, and soil is significant immediate and long-term damage to human health and the environment.
During the first Gulf War in 1991, more than six hundred oil wells burned uncontrollably, causing the daily release of 500,000 tons of pollutants, with global air quality repercussions.
Guidotti states: "In Ukraine, we're now talking about ecocide, the deliberate and voluntary destruction of an ecosystem; there are more than half a million tons of weapons waste abandoned on the territory." Or the episode of the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam,[2]which rendered approximately one million hectares of agricultural land unusable due to water contaminated by toxic substances from industries and urban and industrial wastewater that spilled over an entire region.
"Ukraine," Guidotti states, "is a highly industrialized country, and if industries, power plants, warehouses, and even buildings are hit, by mistake or intentionally, then enormous damage can be caused."
It should be emphasized that Ukraine has a high rate of soil contamination: much of its land is unused and will remain so for a long time, due to unexploded ordnance and the massive presence of toxic substances such as white phosphorus, used in the invasion of Ukraine. These bombs rain down white phosphorus, a highly destructive chemical that ignites upon contact with air and water, causing deep tissue necrosis in living beings. A deadly and devastating effect.[3]
The intense bombing has caused widespread fires, resulting in the loss of vast areas of forests: unique forests and habitats that Ukraine hosts, 6,808 protected natural areas, and approximately 35% of continental biodiversity. The conflict has had significant effects on biodiversity, with the disappearance of forest environments and several rare animal species: it is estimated that numerous bird species have been lost, and approximately 50,000 cetaceans have died from the bombing at sea. This, combined with the noise from ships, disorients these animals, condemning them to death in the short or long term.
Tehran, already shaken by the horrors of a regime that massacred thousands of young people who tried to resist, is now engulfed by black smoke from burning refineries and huge oil storage facilities.
Toxic fumes and highly corrosive acid rain are chemical pollutants caused by oil spills from affected facilities, which release mixtures of carbon monoxide, nitrogen dioxide, and formaldehyde into the air, as well as dioxins from the burning of plastic materials.
Ecocide
The crime of ecocide has been discussed since the 1960s, following the discoveries in the 1940s by American biologist Arthur W. Galston, who described the defoliant effect of a chemical used in Agent Orange,[4]later used in Vietnam by the US Army.
In 1972, Swedish Prime Minister Olof Palme raised the issue again during the United Nations conference, calling it an international crime precisely because of its use in Vietnam. The following year, Professor Richard Falk proposed an international convention on the crime of ecocide, defining the concept for the first time.
From that moment on, the definition of ecocide began to be codified as a crime in domestic law only in a few states, but "the main problem lies in the definition of the concept of ecocide;" as Elisabetta Reyneri, a lawyer specializing in environmental crimes, explains, "the issue today is that at the European level it is difficult to recognize ecocide as an autonomous crime, when it seems more appropriate to recognize a series of well-defined and clear crimes such as pollution, habitat destruction, the illegal release of waste, climate-altering emissions... treated as so-called qualified crimes."
To date, the European Commission has recently adopted Directive 1203/2024 on the protection of the environment through criminal law, which has not yet been translated into national law. In practice, the directive explicitly refers to conduct capable of producing catastrophic effects. This is a somewhat more precise concept of ecocide that would allow for more severe penalties if crimes committed under this directive produced catastrophic or serious effects on the environment.
This directive, like international treaties, agreements, and conventions, does not prevent and has not prevented the hundreds of thousands of civilian deaths in all the conflicts that have occurred since the last century, nor have they prevented the resulting environmental devastation, as schematically described in this text.
The mutagenic and carcinogenic effects do not disappear with the end of the war; serious consequences for human health remain and persist over time. The climate and environmental damage of wars is defined as collateral and is still not given due consideration, yet the spreading of poisons into soil and aquifers and the emissions of poisonous gases into the air, in addition to killing people and animals, will also have an impact on future climate change, which is already causing death and destruction.
Notes
[1]World Bank, Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, European Union, United Nations, Second Ukraine Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA2): February 2022 - February 2023, World Bank Group, Washington, D.C. (US), 2023 (http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/099184503212328877).
[2]The dam and its hydroelectric power plant were severely damaged on the night of June 6, 2023, during the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
[3]A dramatic historical precedent: during the Vietnam War, a variant called napalm-B was developed, in which instead of gasoline, a mixture of polystyrene in a benzene-gasoline solution was added to which white phosphorus was added, which facilitated ignition when the gel was dispersed in the air, increasing its effects.
[4]Agent Orange was the code name given by the US Army to a defoliant that was widely sprayed throughout South Vietnam between 1961 and 1971 during the Vietnam War. See Agent Orange, «Wikipedia» (https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agente_Arancio).
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