Nature, an oft-unsung casualty of war, needs legal protection against its aggressors
By Cecille Monnier
Environmental damage from the late-August eruption of violence between Georgia and Russia, replete with bombings, forest fires and oil spills, will linger for quite some time.
All armed conflicts inflict environmental harm, but spoiled or scarce natural resources, such as water, are traditional causes of politic-economic struggles and war, according Silja Halle from UNEP's Post-Conflict and Disaster Management Branch. Halle adds that a badly degraded environment can seriously impair post-conflict rehabilitation and reconstruction efforts in affected countries.
In fact, there are several instances throughout history of wars in which attempts have been made to defeat the enemy by damaging the environment. During the Vietnam War, for example, the United States military sprayed 70 million litres of defoliant chemicals to destroy jungle areas and deny cover to their opponents. Now, decades after the war, Vietnam still suffers the environmental consequences of those tactics. More recently, deliberately released crude oil and uranium-tipped weapons have been employed by forces in the Persian Gulf with severe impacts on public health and the environment.
This type of military destruction has alarmed the international community and sparked fresh enquiries into rules and principles of international humanitarian law, as well as laws to protect the environment during times of war. Some provisions of the 1907 Hague Convention, Nuremberg Tribunal (1945) and Geneva Convention (1949) forbid destructive acts against the environment during times of war, though only indirectly; hence the adoption of international legal instruments to directly protect the environment, two of which are the Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Techniques (ENMOD) and Protocol One of the Geneva Convention.
ENMOD, adopted by the United Nations General Assembly on December 10, 1976, entered into force in 1978. The convention is an instrument of international disarmament law intended to protect the environment when war breaks out. It specifically forbids hostile use of the environment as a means of warfare, and prohibits the deliberate manipulation of natural processes that could produce phenomena such as floods, drought, hurricanes, tidal waves or other changes in climate.
While ENMOD outlaws geophysical warfare, Protocol One to the 1949 Geneva Convention, adopted in 1977, targets ecological war through two key provisions. Article 35 states that it is prohibited to employ methods or means of warfare which are intended or may be expected to cause widespread, long-term and severe damage to the natural environment. Alongside this is Article 55, which requires combatants to protect the natural environment from the same types of damage.
This pair of multilateral agreements is essentially complementary, though their scope is limited and the issues involved are addressed mostly in a theoretical sense. One could be tempted to call for the adoption of additional and more comprehensive legal instruments, but efforts should first be made toward the practical implementation and enforcement of existing rules.
