A silent casualty in times of war, the environment often suffers from neglect, exploitation, human desperation and deliberate abuse on a terrible scale.

It was the images of hundreds of burning oil wells, torched by the retreating Iraqi army in Kuwait in 1991, that brought home the inherent ecocide of war.

An age-old ‘scorched earth’ strategy in war, famously used by Stalin, has long been outlawed. Destroying the food and water supply of a civilian population in areas of conflict was banned in 1977 under the Geneva Convention.

Modern warfare pollutes the air, soil and water. Among chemicals used by the military are toxic cyclonite used in explosives, and perchlorates – a rocket propellant which is damaging to the thyroid gland. Perchlorates are also found in Maltese fireworks.

Even in peacetime the military exerts a certain impact on the environment. The maintenance of standing armies to counter the threat of war exerts enormous strain on environmental resources according to Professor of Anthropology Catherine Lutz at Rhode Island’s Brown University, the US.

The university is home to the Watson Institute for International and Public Affairs. A study carried out by the Cost of War project at the institute points out that the most serious environmental damage caused to Iraq was systematic destruction of its infrastructure, including systems that supported the environment.

Sewers flowed into rivers and pipelines leaked oil into the soil. The sanctions that followed meant little of the damage was repaired.

Displaced people will still turn to the environment to support their basic needs. The Worldwatch Institute reported that during the Rwandan civil war between 1990 and 1994 around 1,000 tonnes of wood was removed from Virunga national park by refugees.

Close to a million people had little choice but to live in camps on the edge of the park. Every day for two years they cut wood from trees in order to build shelters, feed cooking fires and create charcoal for sale. By the time the conflict ended an area of forest nearly half the size of Malta had been damaged, much of it stripped bare.

Africa’s conflict zones have also put endangered animals at risk because park rangers are often forced to flee rebel armies who covet their vehicles, radios and guns. The rebels feed their troops on meat from the bush and finance their operations with ivory, timber, charcoal and minerals from protected areas.

A massive influx of high-powered weapons in these areas led to a dramatic rise in poaching, both during and after conflict. In 2006, Mai-Mai rebels in the Democratic Republic of Congo slaughtered almost the entire hippopotamus population of two rivers in the park, changing its ecosystem forever.

While the environment suffers as a consequence of war, the root cause of conflicts can often be partly traced to gradual environmental changes

Years of war in Afghanistan have stripped the country of its trees, including native pistachio woodlands, bringing drought, desertification and species loss. Migratory birds passing through the country have vastly reduced in number due to the loss of habitat.

Yet, while the environment suffers as a consequence of war, the root cause of conflicts can often be partly traced to gradual environmental changes when combined with other factors.

Land is abandoned when political and economic change force internal displacement of populations. Global risk analysts conclude that this is what happened in Syria, a semi-arid country mostly taken up by steppe grassland which was traditionally dominated by pasture farming for thousands of years. Systems of farming that had worked well for centuries simply fell apart.

In retrospect, analysts now admit that they had skimmed over the impact of environmental changes on Syria’s agrarian community and its consequences for food security, internal migration and political discontent. They only looked at problems of sectarian and ethnic differences without considering the environmental factor.

Changes on the land began when, following a trend started by other Middle Eastern states, Syria invested heavily in modernising and expanding its irrigation systems. The emphasis was on land reclamation and agricultural intensification of the Al-Badia steppes. There was an explosion in the number of wells tapping ground water from the aquifers, with the Ba’ath Party in government subsidising the project.

By 2010, the land area under cultivation had doubled, with water-intensive crops, such as wheat and cotton, being the primary output. More water available on the steppes meant more sheep, more people and increased pressure on agricultural and water resources.

Unfortunately this coincided with Syria’s worst long-term drought and the most severe set of crop failures in recorded history. The over-exploited aquifers were simply not able to compensate for the increased demand for groundwater. Around 85 per cent of livestock on the Al-Badia plains died.

The political environment offered no solution. Rural and agricultural interests did not hold any rank among the informal power networks in Bashir Al-Assad’s patronage-based presidential system. Several million farmers were reduced to a state of extreme poverty almost overnight. Entire rural communities saw their only route to survival as migration to the cities.

The suppression of protests which ignited the Syrian civil war started in Daraa, a city in southwestern Syria that had received a considerable influx of internal refugees from the Al-Badia steppelands.

Despite hopes of a better life in the city, they quickly found themselves in competition with indigenous populations and other refugees from Iraq and Palestine in a crumbling urban environment rife with a lack of employment opportunities. The result was food insecurity for more than a million people and subsequent social unrest.

Last month, Al-Jazeera reported that Syria’s war situation had spurred the first ever retrieval from a ‘doomsday’ seed vault in the Artic.

The global seed depository, serving 11 centres around the world, is buried in an icy mountain in Norway to keep the seeds intact. The vaults contain a back-up supply of seeds to ensure crop diversity and safeguard global food supplies in case of nuclear war or other massively destructive events around the world.

The call for return of the seeds came from the International Centre for Agricultural Research in Dry Areas, originally based in Aleppo before the headquarters relocated to Lebanon.

The centre has been working on the development of a hardy new disease-resistant and wilt-tolerant strain of lentil developed without genetic engineering by simple crossing with another variety.

ICARDA claims that investing in lentil improvement can lead the way towards ensuring food and nutritional security of millions, particularly among low-income families, because of the high protein content of lentil seed.

www.lenntech.com/environmental-effects-war.htm

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