BattleScars: Global Conflicts and Environmental Health

Abstract

War is as old as humanity, but the study of its environmental health effects is just beginning. Age-old problems still follow war—lack of food, shelter, water, and sanitation, risk of infectious diseases, and psychological trauma. But war today, in all its modern permutations, can also saddle populations with new threats from industrial and military chemicals, pesticides, and radiation. Modern conflicts show a fundamental departure from the form of earlier wars. The Nobel Foundation report Wars in the 20th Century and Nobel Peace Prize Statistics states, “From 1900 to 1910, wars of all categories were represented rather evenly, whereas from 1990 to 2000 most were civil wars.” Between 1945 and 1975 many former European colonies waged wars of independence in Latin America, Africa, and Asia. “Today there are few interstate wars with clearly defined parties, but civil wars have become increasingly internationalised,” states the report. “Few internal wars today take place without the intervention of foreign states.” The post–Cold War world is split by development inequities, competition for control of natural resources, and seemingly intractable ethnic and religious divisions. Today, more than ever, conflict is a tangled interplay of social, political, and economic factors. In a speech delivered to the United Nations on 5 October 2004 titled “Development and Conflict,” Paul Collier of the Center for the Study of African Economies at Oxford University noted that the more dependent a country is on the export of natural resources, the more vulnerable it is to civil war, and that doubling the per capita income halves the risk of conflict. [For more on the connection between conflict and natural resources, see “Global Resources: Abuse, Scarcity, and Insecurity,” EHP 112:A168–A175 (2004)]. Wars are costly, too. Civil war in a poor country lasts an average of 10 years and costs $50 billion. More than half this cost is borne by neighboring countries, which often see influxes of fleeing refugees and combatants, Collier said. Perhaps the most important change in warfare, from the perspective of the environment, is the fact that wars are no longer limited to a designated field and clearly identifiable combatants. Instead, they may rage in urban streets and village squares, on cultivated land, or along highways, and the fighters may emerge from and blend into the civilian population. Because conflicts are no longer cordoned off in specified combat zones, but are now played out in everyday human environments, the environmental health consequences of war increase exponentially.