When Bombs Fall, the Climate Burns Too: War, Genocide, and the Climate and Ecological Emergency

Que Humanidad | Compiled & Mr. Alvarez’s Thoughts | AI Enhanced.

Climate conversations usually begin with smokestacks, tailpipes, and chainsaws. They rarely begin with a tank column, an artillery barrage, or a burning refinery. Yet war is among the most concentrated forms of environmental destruction humanity has ever devised, and it remains almost invisible in the way the world counts its carbon. When a city is flattened, its aquifer poisoned, and its orchards bulldozed, the damage does not stay inside a border. It enters the atmosphere, the groundwater, the food chain, and the bodies of children not yet born.

The Climate and Ecological Emergency and the emergency of mass violence are not two crises competing for our attention. They feed each other. This post looks at that intersection honestly: what the evidence shows, where it is uncertain, and what a climate-literate community can do about it.

The Battlefield Is an Ecosystem

Explosive weapons shatter buildings, sewer lines, power grids, and soils in seconds. Heavy vehicles compact farmland. Strikes on fuel depots, factories, and dams turn industrial sites into pollution sources that keep leaking long after the headlines move on.

Gaza. In September 2025, the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) released its second assessment of conflict damage in the Gaza Strip, warning that recovery from some harms could take decades. Since 2023, Gaza has lost an estimated 97 percent of its tree crops, 95 percent of its shrubland, and 82 percent of its annual crops. Roughly 78 percent of its approximately 250,000 buildings have been damaged or destroyed, generating about 61 million tonnes of debris, of which around 15 percent may carry a relatively high risk of contamination from asbestos, industrial waste, or heavy metals. Vegetation loss and compaction by military activity have left soils less able to absorb water, raising flood risk and reducing aquifer recharge (UNEP, 2025).

Ukraine. On 6 June 2023, the Kakhovka dam on the Dnipro River was destroyed, draining a reservoir that supplied drinking water, irrigation, and power, and flooding communities downstream. Ukraine and many independent analysts attribute the destruction to Russian forces; Moscow denies responsibility. Ukrainian officials and civil society groups have described it as ecocide and pressed for prosecution.

Sudan. Repeated fighting around the Al Jili (Khartoum) refinery, which once supplied about 60 percent of Sudan’s gasoline, has caused major fires and contamination; a fire in January 2025 produced a smoke plume stretching more than 300 kilometres over Khartoum (CEOBS, 2025). Displacement and disrupted fuel supplies have pushed families toward charcoal and firewood, accelerating deforestation.

The Carbon No One Counts

Militaries are among the largest institutional energy users on Earth, yet their emissions sit largely outside the climate system’s ledger. Reporting military emissions to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) is voluntary, a gap that dates back to the 1997 Kyoto negotiations. Scientists for Global Responsibility and the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) estimate the global military carbon footprint at about 5.5 percent of global emissions. If the world’s militaries were a country, they would rank fourth, ahead of Russia. CEOBS’s 2025 analysis found that reporting is getting worse, with the three biggest military spenders, the United States, China, and Russia, submitting no data or incomplete data.

Actual warfighting adds more. The Initiative on GHG Accounting of War estimated that the first three years of Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine generated about 230 million tonnes of CO₂-equivalent, comparable to the combined annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, Czechia, and Slovakia. By the four-year mark, the estimate reached roughly 311 million tonnes. Landscape fires ignited by shelling, drones, and mines account for about 23 percent of the total, and strikes on high-voltage equipment release sulphur hexafluoride, a gas roughly 24,000 times more potent than CO₂. None of it appears in any national inventory submitted to the UNFCCC.

Then there is the opportunity cost. A 2025 study in Nature Communications estimates that military spending trends could raise global CO₂ emissions by 1.1 to 2.5 percent by 2030. Every budget line that goes to rearmament is a line that does not go to adaptation, clean energy, or loss and damage, and every war frays the trust that international climate cooperation depends on.

Poison That Outlives the Peace

Humanitarian and legal experts use the phrase “toxic remnants of war” for contaminants left in water, soil, and air long after the fighting stops.

Vietnam remains the starkest reminder. Between 1962 and 1971, U.S. forces sprayed about 20 million gallons of herbicides, including Agent Orange, across roughly one-sixth of South Vietnam, and as many as 4.8 million Vietnamese civilians may have been exposed. Dioxin still contaminates former air bases; the joint U.S.–Vietnam cleanup at Bien Hoa involves treating enough soil to fill about 200 Olympic swimming pools, half a century after the spraying ended (Yale Environment 360).

Iraq and Kuwait. In 1991, retreating Iraqi forces set hundreds of Kuwaiti oil wells ablaze, blanketing the region in smoke for months. Later wars added open burn pits and damaged industrial sites whose health effects are still under study.

Kosovo shows why honesty matters. UNEP’s 2000 field mission sampled 11 sites struck with depleted uranium and found no widespread contamination and no immediate cause for toxicity concern, while flagging major scientific uncertainty about long-term effects, including future groundwater contamination. The responsible conclusion is neither panic nor dismissal. It is disclosure, monitoring, and cleanup.

Gaza shows the public health toll in real time: UNEP reports acute watery diarrhoea up 36-fold and acute jaundice syndrome, indicative of hepatitis A, up 384-fold as water and sanitation systems collapsed.

When Governance Breaks

War does not only damage ecosystems. It dismantles the institutions that protect them. Environmental ministries lose staff, budgets, laboratories, and access. Monitoring stops. Pollution controls are waived in the name of military necessity. In Gaza, sewage treatment collapsed and residents turned to cesspits, likely contaminating the coastal aquifer. UNEP staff could not enter at all and had to rely on satellite imagery and observations by other UN agencies. In Ukraine, firefighting near the front is hampered by mines, shelling, closed airspace, and shortages of personnel and equipment, so small fires become large ones. Adaptation planning, from flood defences to drought early warning, is among the first casualties.

The Feedback Loop

Does climate change cause war? Not directly, and not alone. The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) found in When Rain Turns to Dust that 12 of the 20 countries most vulnerable to climate change are also mired in conflict, but it stresses this is not a simple correlation: conflict weakens people’s ability to adapt. Most researchers describe climate stress as a threat multiplier that aggravates existing drivers such as poor governance, inequality, contested land, and exclusion.

The loop runs like this: drought and scarcity strain livelihoods; weak or unjust institutions turn competition into violence; war destroys water systems, farms, and forests while releasing carbon; degraded land and displaced people become more exposed to the next drought or flood. In Sudan, UNEP has estimated that around 40 percent of internal conflicts over the past six decades were linked to high-value natural resources.

Human Rights and the Shadow of Genocide

The rights to water, sanitation, food, health, and housing all depend on functioning ecosystems and infrastructure. When wells are poisoned and farmland razed, those rights collapse together. Indigenous and land-dependent communities, whose cultures are woven into specific landscapes, lose what cannot be rebuilt with concrete. Displacement compounds the harm, as people fleeing war often land in places already strained by heat, drought, or flooding.

The Genocide Convention includes deliberately inflicting conditions of life calculated to destroy a group, which is why environmental destruction increasingly appears in atrocity investigations. In September 2025, the UN Independent International Commission of Inquiry concluded that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza. Israel categorically rejected the report and declined to cooperate with the commission, and South Africa’s genocide case remains before the International Court of Justice. In January 2025, the U.S. State Department determined that Sudan’s Rapid Support Forces and allied militias committed genocide in Darfur. Final legal judgments belong to courts. Our lesson as a climate community is that the destruction of water, food, and land can be an instrument of mass atrocity, not merely its side effect.

Accountability: What the Law Already Says

The legal architecture exists, even if enforcement lags. Articles 35(3) and 55 of Additional Protocol I to the Geneva Conventions prohibit warfare intended or expected to cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment. The 1976 ENMOD Convention bans the hostile use of environmental modification techniques. The Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court treats clearly excessive environmental damage as a war crime. The ICRC updated its Guidelines on the Protection of the Natural Environment in Armed Conflict in 2020, and in December 2022 the UN General Assembly took up the International Law Commission’s 27 principles protecting the environment before, during, and after conflict. UNEP has assisted more than 40 crisis-affected countries since 1999.

The weaknesses are well known: legal thresholds are extremely high, the principles are non-binding, and no independent body monitors compliance. That is why campaigns to recognise ecocide as an international crime, and efforts to put a price on war emissions for reparations, deserve our attention.

Policy Recommendations

Close the military emissions gap. Make disaggregated reporting of military and conflict emissions mandatory under the UNFCCC and include them in national climate plans.
Count the cost of war. Adopt a standard methodology for conflict emissions and include climate damage in reparations and peace agreements.
Protect critical ecosystems in advance. Designate protected environmental zones before conflict, as the ILC principles recommend, and treat water infrastructure as untouchable.
Enforce existing law. Write the ICRC guidelines into military manuals, create independent monitoring, and support the effort to add ecocide to the Rome Statute.
Clean up toxic remnants. Require disclosure of munitions use, fund remediation, and assist affected communities.
Rebuild for resilience. Recycle debris, restore aquifers and farmland, decentralise renewable energy, and send climate finance to conflict-affected places that rarely receive it.

A Call to the Climate Tribe

Climate competence means seeing the whole picture. Here is how we can act:

Learn and teach. Read the UNEP and ICRC reports cited below and bring them into Climate Tribe discussions.
Ask the question. Write to your representatives and ask whether your country fully reports its military emissions. If not, why not?
Support recovery. Back credible humanitarian, water, and environmental recovery organisations working in conflict zones.
Refuse dehumanisation. Reject propaganda from every side and keep civilians, ecosystems, and future generations at the centre.
Build adaptive resiliency locally. Strong, cooperative communities with secure water, food, and energy are harder to break, in war and in climate disaster alike.

Conclusion

Climate leadership that ignores war is incomplete. We cannot decarbonise a world that keeps setting itself on fire, and we cannot adapt in places where the water, soil, and institutions are being destroyed. Peace is climate policy. Accountability is climate policy. Rebuilding with resilience is climate policy. The communities living through these wars are not distant statistics; they are the front line of the same emergency we all share. Our task is to learn, speak, and act as if that were true, because it is.

A note on process: AI is used to enhance my creativity and thinking. The research choices, judgments, and responsibility for these words remain my own.