This is the second article examining the environmental cost of modern warfare. The first article in the series explored war as a powerful, compressed engine of pollution. Here we ask a harder question: when environmental destruction is not incidental, but deliberate, should it be declared a crime against the Earth?
Read part one
Environmental lawyer Llewellyn Botha has a long history of fighting for more than just human issues. What deeply concerns him right now is that, increasingly, environmental destruction is being used as a weapon of war, devastating ecosystems.
According to him, such actions should be prosecuted as crimes undermining local and global sustainability.
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“There’s been a clear shift in how environmental systems are affected in modern conflict,” he said in an interview with Maverick Earth. Targets have become intentionally environmental, undermining lifestyles, livelihoods and daily lives of people – taking away their water, taking away their food, their electricity, making land unusable, sometimes for generations.”
Nuclear power stations have been hit and have become bargaining chips in “or else” political brinkmanship, with frightening potential consequences. In Ukraine, the destruction of the Kakhovka Dam by Russia flooded farmland, displaced wildlife and polluted the Dnipro River.
According to Botha, this shift marks a departure from the traditional view of environmental damage as collateral. It’s not always a side issue… it’s intentional destruction.
This interpretation is supported by recent legal research. As noted in our previous article on war pollution, scholars Viktoriia Sydor and Yuri Ishchenko describe environmental destruction…