Conservation Policies Must Address an Overlooked Issue: How War Affects the Environment
Publisher: Nature
Author(s): Doug Weir, Sarah M. Durant, Henrike Schulte to Bühne, Michael Hoffmann, Olesya Petrovych, Beth Sua Carvajal, and Sara Fernandes Elizalde
Date: 2024
Topics: Governance, Programming, Renewable Resources, Weapons, Waste, and Pollution
Countries: Russian Federation, Ukraine
Since Russia’s invasion in 2022, 3 million hectares of Ukraine’s protected areas have been affected by military activities. For example, the authors' independent analysis of satellite imagery shows that in the Sviati Hory (Holy Mountains) National Nature Park in the east of the country, 16% of forested areas have been physically damaged by fires, shelling and the movements of military vehicles (see ‘Assessing impacts in conflict zones’). Protected areas have lost their staff and equipment, and properties have been damaged or destroyed.
Today, more armed conflicts are under way than at any point since the Second World War. Conservationists and others are increasingly investigating the impacts on biodiversity2–4, yet governments and conservation organizations have been reluctant to explicitly address the issue in conservation policy. In 2022, when nearly 200 countries agreed in Montreal, Canada, on the Global Biodiversity Framework — a set of goals intended to prevent catastrophic loss of the world’s biodiversity — armed conflict was left unmentioned.
This month, ministers of the environment, conservationists, Indigenous peoples and others are gathering in Cali, Colombia, to help to translate the biodiversity framework into action at the 16th meeting of the Conference of the Parties to the Convention on Biological Diversity (COP16). Colombia is one of the world’s most biodiverse nations. Since 2016, it has also been facing challenges in implementing a peace agreement signed after five decades of conflict, much of which was between its government and the guerrilla movement FARC.
Linking to the experiences of the Colombian people, COP16 organizers have specified that the meeting should be “a COP of the people”, and that it should prioritize “Paz con La Naturaleza” or peace with nature. In doing this, they are encouraging attendees to focus on how the exploitation of natural resources, and the conflict that this brings, can harm biodiversity, as well as on how interventions to protect biodiversity might help to foster peace (see go.nature.com/3y95zgv).