War Has an Environmental Cost Too

When thousands of human beings are killed in a war, including civilians and many of them children, the environmental impact may seem the least of our concerns. But once the conflict is over, the trail of destruction it leaves behind not only affects ecosystems that are valuable and necessary in their own right, with the damage spilling over into the surrounding environment, but it also harms human health and can make it extremely difficult for people to return to a normal life, even rendering previously populated areas uninhabitable or unproductive. The environmental cost of war is a growing concern today.

More than a century ago, the First World War was fought, often regarded as the first modern conflict because of new weapons technologies, including the massive use of explosives and new chemical weapons such as the war gases phosgene, mustard and chlorine. Some of the bloodiest battles were fought in northern France, where the environmental impact is still being felt more than a hundred years later. After the war, the once fertile lands of Verdun were declared a Red Zone, impossible to clear and uninhabitable, and left to repopulation by nature. 

From nuclear radiation to dioxins

Today, restrictions remain in certain areas, not only because of unexploded bombs—up to 300 per hectare, including gas bombs—but also because of soil contamination by lead, chlorine, mercury, copper, zinc and arsenic; the last, toxic and carcinogenic, still lingers at levels of up to 176 milligrams per kilo of soil, causing the death of 99% of plant life. Even in less affected areas, such as a less heavily fought area of the Battle of the Somme, a study by Christ Church University, Canterbury, found levels of copper and lead that, the authors write, are likely to have “caused detrimental ecotoxicological and human health effects.”

In the aftermath of that war, countless other conflicts have also left their mark on the environment, in both common and particular ways. The effects of nuclear radiation in the years following the dropping of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are well known. In the Vietnam War, the herbicide and defoliant Agent Orange used by the US to denude jungles “contained dangerous dioxins that continue to damage people and the environment today.” according to Stacey Pizzino, Michael Waller (both of the University of Queensland) and Jo Durham (Queensland University of Technology), who study the environmental costs of war. 

Dioxins are persistent organic pollutants, so their levels remain extremely high in certain regions of Vietnam and they are also detected in people’s blood and breast milk. This contamination has been linked to birth defects and genome instability, a factor implicated in cancer and neurodegenerative and other diseases.

The silent casualty of the environment

According to these authors, and although it is rarely reported in the news, “the number of armed conflicts currently raging around the world is the greatest since the end of the Second World War”; two billion people, a quarter of the world’s population, live in countries at war, and the number of deaths is at its highest level in 28 years. The researchers stress the immense cost in human lives but add: “We must not lose sight of what war leaves behind—the silent casualty of the environment.”

This problem received little attention during the 20th century, but since the beginning of the 21st century the number of publications has exploded, according to environmental geoscientist Jonathan Bridge of Sheffield Hallam University. In addition to scientific work, this growth in interest is manifested in the creation of organisations such as the UK’s Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS). In 2022, the United Nations adopted a resolution on “Protection of the environment in relation to armed conflict,” which is to be applied to concrete actions. This issue was also addressed for the first time at the COP28 climate summit in 2023 in the United Arab Emirates.

One region that has been particularly hard hit is the Middle East. In the 1991 Gulf War, oil well fires in Kuwait caused widespread contamination, and high levels of titanium and magnesium found in Iraqi children from war debris have been linked to increased neurological disorders. In 2006, Israeli bombing of a power station in Lebanon dumped 110,000 barrels of oil into the Mediterranean, causing an environmental disaster. In Syria, Bridge and his colleagues have documented the contamination of soil and water used to irrigate crops. 

Current conflicts and climate change

Today’s most globally significant wars are already taking their toll on the environment. In Gaza, high levels of heavy metals have been detected in mothers and newborns, along with birth defects from exposure to white phosphorus and other pollutants, all before the current conflict, where the UN has already warned that more than 100,000 cubic metres of sewage are being dumped into the ground and the Mediterranean every day. The widespread destruction of urban centres is releasing huge quantities of carcinogenic asbestos. As for Ukraine, according to a 2022 study, the destruction of infrastructure and the transport of pollutants into water supplies has already severely affected soil fertility in a country once considered the breadbasket of Europe, coupled with damage to human health and the nuclear threat.

Climate change increases the risk: as Greenland’s ice melts, residues from former secret US bases from Cold War times threaten to poison the water that supplies the local population. In Iraq and Jordan, warming has caused weapons depots to explode. And wars themselves fuel climate change: according to the CEOBS, the world’s armed forces are responsible for 5.5% of global CO₂ emissions, and Brown University ranks the US Department of Defense as the world’s largest institutional consumer of oil.

In short, according to Bridge, war is a “systemic catastrophe” that affects all human and ecological systems. “Armed conflicts leave a lasting trail of environmental damage, posing challenges for restoration after the hostilities have eased,” and these impacts are “persistent, pervasive and equally deadly.”

Javier Yanes