Originally published 2019-08-05.
Yes, some environmental damage in war can already be a war crime, but only in narrow cases. In July 2019 a group of conservation scientists asked governments to go further, and the debate they joined has shaped how the United Nations now talks about nature and armed conflict. This guide explains what the scientists asked for, what the law already says, what happened at the UN afterwards, and why the question is harder than it first looks.
What the scientists asked for in 2019
On 23 July 2019 the journal Nature printed a short correspondence titled “Stop military conflicts from trashing environment”. Its lead author was Sarah M. Durant of the Zoological Society of London, writing with José C. Brito of the University of Porto, and 22 further researchers signed it.
The timing was deliberate. That summer the UN International Law Commission, the body of legal experts that drafts proposals for international law, was meeting in Geneva to continue a project it had opened in 2013 on protecting the environment in relation to armed conflicts. The letter urged governments to write explicit safeguards for wildlife and ecosystems into that work.
The authors also went a step further. They called on states to use the commission’s recommendations to “finally deliver a Fifth Geneva Convention” for the environment. The four existing Geneva Conventions of 1949 protect wounded soldiers, shipwrecked sailors, prisoners of war and civilians. A fifth treaty dedicated to nature has been proposed since the 1990s but has never been negotiated.
News outlets summarised the letter as a call to make environmental harm in war a war crime. That is a fair shorthand for its spirit, but it is worth keeping three things apart: a scientists’ appeal, the non-binding principles the UN later produced, and a binding treaty, which still does not exist.
How war damages land, water and wildlife
The scientists’ concern rests on a long record. A few well-documented examples show the range of harm.
Vietnam and Agent Orange
Between 1962 and 1971, the US Operation Ranch Hand sprayed roughly 20 million US gallons of herbicides over South Vietnam, Laos and Cambodia. More than 3.1 million hectares of tropical forest, about 18 percent of Vietnam’s forest cover, were defoliated, along with large areas of mangrove and farmland. The best-known mixture, Agent Orange, was contaminated with TCDD, a dioxin classed as a human carcinogen. Decades later, former air bases such as Da Nang and Biên Hòa remained dioxin hotspots, and a joint US–Vietnamese clean-up at Da Nang only began in 2012.
The Gulf War oil fires
As Iraqi forces retreated from Kuwait in 1991, they set fire to more than 600 oil wells. The fires burned for about ten months; the last well was capped on 6 November 1991. Estimates suggest around a billion barrels of oil were lost, hundreds of oil lakes formed in the desert and millions of barrels spilled into the Persian Gulf. Soot fell as far away as Bahrain and Riyadh.
Depleted uranium
Older versions of this story said bombs containing depleted uranium contaminated Iraq’s soil and water in 1991. The record is more specific: depleted uranium was used mainly in armour-piercing tank and aircraft rounds, with an estimated 286 to 318 tonnes fired during the 1991 war and much more after the 2003 invasion. Its main risk is chemical toxicity, especially to the kidneys, rather than radiation. Field studies by UNEP in the Balkans found contamination was mostly localised around impact points, yet scientists still disagree about long-term health effects, and clean-up of impact sites is recommended.
Afghanistan, burn pits and wildlife
Researchers at Brown University’s Costs of War project document how open-air burn pits on US bases in Iraq and Afghanistan burned everything from batteries to medical waste, polluting air, soil and groundwater and leaving veterans and nearby residents with respiratory complaints. Afghanistan also carries a heavy load of landmines and unexploded ordnance, which keep injuring people, and animals, long after the shooting stops.
Wildlife suffers in other ways too. During the wars in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, elephants, antelopes and primates were killed for meat and ivory or driven from damaged habitat. The Nature letter points to a further driver: when guns circulate freely, hunting becomes easier and harder to control.
Militaries, fuel and climate
Armed forces are also major energy users. The Costs of War project describes the US Department of Defense as the world’s single largest institutional consumer of oil, and one widely cited comparison, reported by Global Citizen, says the US military burned more fuel in Iraq in 2008 than about 1.2 million cars use in a year. Exact emissions totals depend on how fuel use abroad is counted, and military emissions have often been left out of national climate reporting, which makes direct comparisons with whole countries rough at best.
Deliberate destruction of fuel adds to this. Setting oil wells or depots alight, as in Kuwait, releases soot, sulphur dioxide and carbon dioxide in quantities no peacetime industry would be allowed to emit.
What international law already says
The law is not silent, but its bar is set very high.
- Additional Protocol I (1977) to the Geneva Conventions bars methods of warfare intended, or expected, to cause “widespread, long-term and severe” damage to the natural environment.
- The ENMOD Convention bans the hostile use of environmental modification techniques, such as deliberately altering weather, with widespread, long-lasting or severe effects.
- The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court makes it a war crime to launch an attack knowing it will cause widespread, long-term and severe environmental damage that is clearly excessive compared with the expected military advantage.
Because all three conditions must be met at once, and because the damage must be weighed against military advantage, these rules have rarely if ever been the basis of a prosecution. That is the gap the scientists wanted closed. They were not asking for every crater to become a crime; they wanted clearer, enforceable protection for ecosystems, species and water supplies.
What the UN did next
The International Law Commission finished its work in 2022. Under special rapporteurs Marie Jacobsson and later Marja Lehto, it adopted its draft principles on second reading on 27 May 2022. On 7 December 2022 the UN General Assembly, in resolution 77/104, took note of the principles and annexed them to the resolution. Commentators usually count 27 principles, often abbreviated PERAC.
The principles cover the environment before, during and after conflict, including during occupation. They encourage states to designate areas of major ecological importance as protected zones, to consider the environment when choosing targets, to share information and to clean up remnants of war. They are guidance rather than a treaty, however: no state is bound by them unless it chooses to follow them, and no Fifth Geneva Convention has been agreed.
The UN has marked the issue in other ways for years. Since 2001, 6 November has been the International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War and Armed Conflict, and a 2016 UN Environment Assembly resolution stressed that healthy ecosystems reduce the risk of conflict. UNEP research cited by the UN suggests that at least 40 percent of internal conflicts in the past six decades were linked to natural resources.
Common objections and myths
“If harming the environment were a war crime, almost all warfare would be banned.” The argument is often made, but it misunderstands the proposals. Both existing law and newer ideas focus on severe, widespread or long-lasting damage and on damage that is excessive or deliberate, not on the unavoidable impact of every shell.
“The UN has already created an environmental war crime.” Not in a new treaty. The 2022 principles are non-binding, and the only international war crime touching the environment remains the narrow Rome Statute provision.
“Ecocide is now an international crime.” Campaigners have proposed adding a crime of ecocide to the Rome Statute, and an independent expert panel drafted a definition in 2021, but it has not been adopted by the court’s member states. The European Union has separately moved to criminalise very serious environmental damage within its own law.
Why the question still matters
Environmental harm from war rarely stays on the battlefield. Poisoned wells, burned forests and contaminated soil shape health, farming and wildlife for decades after peace returns, as Vietnam and Kuwait show. Clear rules give commanders limits to plan around, give investigators something to enforce and give post-war recovery a stronger claim on funding. For readers who want to follow the issue, the most useful things to watch are whether states actually apply the PERAC principles in their military manuals and whether the ecocide proposal gains support at the International Criminal Court.
Sources: Nature: Stop military conflicts from trashing environment (Durant & Brito, 23 July 2019); UN International Law Commission: Protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts; Environmental Peacebuilding Association / China Dialogue: UN adopts new principles (January 2023); United Nations: International Day for Preventing the Exploitation of the Environment in War; Wikipedia: Agent Orange; Wikipedia: Kuwaiti oil fires; Wikipedia: Depleted uranium; Brown University Costs of War: Environmental costs; Global Citizen: Scientists want harming the environment to be a war crime (24 July 2019); Wikipedia: Ecocide.
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