The natural catastrophe of war
Human beings are not the only victims of military conflict. Guy Jobbins* reports on the threat faced by the environment
At an anti-war forum in London last year Bruce Kent, vice- president of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), criticised the environmental movement for failing to tackle the issue of war. At the time my response was to say that against the human horror of war, the deaths and injuries and shattered families, most environmentalists would be reluctant to point out the dangers to wildlife for fear of being labelled insensitive to the more obvious human suffering.
On deeper reflection, the question of how war affects the environment is an extremely serious one. The environment is not just the province of butterflies, pandas and whales -- humans also live within it. Violence done to the environment during wartime can come back to haunt us, effectively becoming a medium for a continuation of violence upon humans long after armed conflict has ceased. In this sense, then, our increased scientific knowledge of, and post-Rio care for, the environment can fortify the position of those who maintain that war is not only morally wrong, but is the greatest obstacle to global sustainable development.
With advancing technology the impact of war on the environment has changed. Historically wars in Europe resulted in deforestation as kings felled woods for fuel and ships' timber. During the Vietnam War the United States defoliated the jungle canopy with Agent Orange, depriving their enemy of cover. This not only directly harmed the rainforest ecology, but also contaminated the air, water and soil of large areas of Vietnam. Thirty years later human babies are still being born with defects thought to be due to parental exposure to Agent Orange. Vietnam claims that 150,000 birth defects and one million cases of other maladies can be blamed directly on the herbicide, figures disputed by the United States.
Throughout recorded history man has waged war on the environment of his rivals to deprive them of food and clean water. Pillaging arable land, sowing fields with salt and poisoning wells all served strategically to weaken one's enemies. Nowadays greater harm can be dealt as a mere by-product of modernised warfare, as in the Iraqi army's firing of oil wells during their retreat from Kuwait in 1991, or the use of depleted -- but still radioactive -- uranium munitions by the United States during the same war. Whilst these environmental impacts may be unintentional, their legacy continues to affect survivors of conflict for many years.
Afghanistan is one of the most talked-about examples of war's environmental legacy. More than 20 years of conflict left a scarred landscape, the ability of which to support a human economy has been much diminished. For centuries an intricate and delicate network of irrigation channels and reservoirs essential for agriculture watered the arid land. Much of this network was destroyed during the long years of war, either intentionally to deprive enemies of food, or as a by-product of shelling and battlefield explosions. As a result, agriculture in most parts of Afghanistan is now at its most primitive, with farmers struggling to provide food for their families. One reason so many farmers grow the opium poppy is because it requires less water than most food crops, and can then be traded for food.
Whilst the water supply network was being destroyed, traditional pastoral communities were frequently trapped in the hilly uplands by minefields or ongoing battles. These people, who move their herds between summer upland and winter lowland pastures, were left with no alternative but to deforest the hills to provide firewood during the bitterly cold winters. Meanwhile their herd animals overgrazed the fragile upland ecosystem, aggravating the effects of deforestation -- soil erosion and desertification.
The combination of these two factors -- loss of the lowland water distribution network and the loss of upland vegetation -- means that desertification is now one of the most serious issues facing Afghanistan in the long term. Eighty per cent of the Afghani people live in rural areas, and the scale of the current problem is such that analysts worry whether the country will be able to feed itself, let alone have a thriving agricultural sector. Recovery of the ancient irrigation system will be expensive and technologically challenging, but in comparison with restoring the upland ecosystem it almost appears an easy challenge.
So far we have only considered the loss of environmental services such as food, water and fuel provision. A more comprehensive analysis of the potential environmental costs of Afghanistan's conflicts would account for the inadequate disposal of waste, treatment of sewage and pollution, and exposure to toxins resulting from damaged infrastructure, or how the migration of the rare Siberian Crane was disrupted by the US-led invasion in 2002. Wildlife experts have warned that the 150 Snow Leopards thought to live in northern Afghanistan may have been driven to local extinction by the conflicts. How the loss of individual species affects ecosystems and their services to humanity is difficult to predict, but in addition to ethical arguments about the right of species to exist, the loss of long- term economic benefits also need to be calculated, such as those from nature-based tourism. Similarly, the Central African war has most likely led to the near-extinction of mountain gorillas and the loss of tourism earnings from them.
During the Gulf War of 1990-1991 television pictures showed terrible images of the environmental troops fleeing Kuwait. Perhaps thinking to cover their escape, or as part of an old-fashioned 'scorch and burn' policy, the soldiers fired more than 700 oil wells in the desert, burning about 67 millions tons of crude oil. Only unseasonal weather conditions prevented the thick clouds of smoke from spreading far and most of the pollution fell to the ground quite rapidly, turning the desert black. Nevertheless, the World Health Organisation estimates that the death rate in Kuwait rose by 10 per cent over the following year due to breathing problems and skin conditions arising from the pollution. The Iraqis also deliberately spilled about six million barrels of oil into the sea, killing an estimated 15 to 30,000 birds in the largest oil spill in history. Scientists monitoring the aftermath of the war in the Gulf report that whilst in some ways there has been a surprisingly fast recovery, for example in bird and fish populations, other aspects of the ecosystem remain severely damaged.
By comparison, other environmental impacts received relatively little attention during the war yet have proven to be more significant in the long term. Between 300 and 800 tons of depleted uranium debris is estimated to litter Iraq and Kuwait, mostly as dust and in fragments of shell casings from bombardment during and since the 1990-1991 conflict. Depleted the uranium may be, but U238 is radioactive with a half-life of 4.5 billion years, effectively making contaminated areas radioactive until the end of time. As might be expected the figures and statistics are disputed, but there has been an increase in cancer rates of between 100 and 1,200 per cent in affected areas since 1990. As dust, radioactive material is of course highly mobile, contaminating not just the soil and air but also capable of entering water supplies and the food chain. Little work has been done on the effects of this contamination on the ecology of Iraq, but the symptoms, in terms of human health, are already evident.
It is important to remember that although much attention has focussed on the issue of depleted uranium, this is not the only toxic compound to be found in modern weaponry. Lead from bullets and chemicals found in propellants and explosives have serious potential consequences for human and ecosystem health. In certain parts of Europe this problem is still being dealt with almost 60 years after the end of World War II.
Although formal hostilities between Iraq and the U-led coalition ceased in 1991, in effect there has been an ongoing military conflict in parts of Iraq ever since. Little is known about biodiversity in Iraq, so it is difficult to assess the full ecological impact of this conflict. However, the draining of the wetlands in southeastern Iraq is a well-documented case. To deny rebel groups cover, the Iraqi government began an extensive programme to drain the marshes, destroying the homeland of a distinct human culture, the so-called "Marsh Arabs". This also put 40 species of birds at risk and reduced the input of nutrients into the Gulf, important for fisheries. The United Nations Environment Programme has compared the drainage programme to deforestation in Amazonia in terms of its global significance as an ecological disaster. Less well known are the impacts of the conflict in the north of the country, or the allied airstrikes that have continued for the last 11 years.
The 1980-1988 Iran-Iraq war together with the 13 years of conflict following Iraq's invasion of Kuwait just about equals the length of sustained military conflict in Afghanistan. A report released by the United Nations in January concluded that environmental degradation was among the most critical issues facing the post-conflict reconstruction in Afghanistan. Bluntly, if reconstruction consists solely of building roads, then all people will use them for is to leave. Yet environmental remediation and ecosystem rehabilitation are immensely challenging and uncertain tasks, and they tend to receive less attention from donors than projects on health, infrastructure and the economy.
We know already that Iraq is experiencing similar problems to those reported in Afghanistan: disrupted water supply networks and waste disposal systems, increased pollution, loss of wetlands, shortfalls in food supply, and the human consequences of these in terms of malnutrition and disease. What is unknown is how much an escalation of conflict in the region would worsen these factors, and what plans the United States and the United Kingdom have to aid in post-conflict reconstruction and environmental remediation. The cost of cleaning up depleted uranium in Iraq, for example, is estimated to run to at least several billion dollars. How a nation as economically crippled as Iraq might escape the legacy of such contamination, reflected in birth defects, lowered life expectancy and so on, is unclear. The effects of 23 years of conflict in Iraq will be felt by its inhabitants for a very long time, a continuation of violence mediated through the environment.
* The writer is an ecologist and policy analyst currently holding a research fellowship in environmental informatics and social learning at University College London.
