Amidst conflict around the world, scientists are confronting the damage to an often-overlooked casualty – the environment, which can remain scarred long after peace is restored.
“The environment is often the silent victim of war,” explained Atila Uras, Country Programme Manager for the UN Environment Programme (UNEP) in Sudan, who is working on the agency’s response to the environmental impacts of the country’s civil war.
“The environment is deeply intertwined with human life. It’s about livelihoods. It’s about public health. It’s about access to clean air and water, sustainability of food systems,” Uras said. “It’s about securing a safer future for nations, for their citizens – and for their neighbors, because usually the impacts of war on the environment don’t stay within the borders of a country,” he added.
At least 20,000 people have been killed in the conflict in Sudan since April 2023, according to the UN; a recent study by public health researchers suggests the real toll could be more than 62,000.
At least 11 million people have been displaced, according to the International Organization for Migration (IOM), while 14 million face acute hunger, the World Food Programme reports.
Sudanese scientists have told the ISC about harrowing journeys to find safety, and their fight to keep their work going and maintain irreplaceable science and education infrastructure.
The conflict has also had a devastating impact on the country’s natural environment. “The ongoing conflict in Sudan has not only disrupted life, but also damaged the environment, leaving communities more vulnerable to resource scarcity, deforestation and water pollution,” explained Mouna Zein, a programme analyst with UNEP in Sudan.
“It is in these fragile moments that monitoring and understanding the state of the environment becomes even more crucial,” said Zein, who spoke at the launch in September of a joint project led by the Khartoum-based Mutasim Nimir Center for Environmental Culture (MNCEC) with UNESCO, UNEP and IOM, which aimed to monitor the environmental effects of war in Sudan.
To get a better picture of how the war has affected the environment, MNCEC mobilized researchers across four states in Sudan. Focusing on the period from April to September 2023, they looked at both the direct effects of fighting – including damage caused by explosions, toxic chemicals from munitions and chemicals pouring out of destroyed infrastructure – as well as the secondary effects of the conflict through the displacement of millions of people.
Researchers managed to do the study despite extreme insecurity, unreliable communications and limited resources to carry out the dangerous work, explained Wifag Hassan Mahmoud, who led the project’s working groups. Even in Khartoum, where it was too dangerous to take direct measurements, researchers were still able to piece together qualitative assessments through first-hand testimony, Hassan Mahmoud said.
The results provide a detailed map of the extent and type of environmental damage the country has suffered. By September 2023, in Khartoum state alone, debris surpassed half a million tons – much of it contaminated with asbestos and toxic materials.
About 2,800 projectiles were fired every day in Khartoum during the three-month study period, littering the environment with lead particles, which researchers warn will leach into the water and contaminate the air.
In Northern State, where hundreds of thousands of people have sought refuge, researchers recorded a sudden increase in deforestation as displaced people have turned to charcoal or wood to replace cooking gas, which has become difficult to find or afford.
The sudden displacement of so many people across the country has strained local water, sanitation and hygiene systems. In White Nile State, researchers found that the worsening sanitation and buildup of solid waste has put the water system at high risk. That has in turn created a hospitable environment for mosquitoes, rodents and flies, leading to the spread of diseases like dengue and malaria, the survey found.
The research has also identified a wide range of ongoing trends that will continue to destabilize the environment, Hassan Mahmoud noted: alongside an increase in insect and animal disease vectors, researchers recorded an increase in wild dogs and changes in their behaviour – as well as shifts in the population and migration patterns of birds. As people have moved around, researchers have also recorded changes in economic activities with environmental effects, like mining and brickmaking.
All of these trends point to the urgent need for more on-the-ground research and monitoring to inform mitigation efforts and guide recovery, Hassan Mahmoud argued.
After more than a year of war in Gaza, nearly everyone has been displaced, many more than once, according to the UN. As of November 2024, at least 43,000 people have been killed – likely a dramatic undercount, with thousands more missing or buried under rubble, the UN reports.
Among the displaced are many of Gaza’s scientists, who have told the ISC about their struggle to survive, and the pain of losing family and colleagues and watching the destruction of their universities and labs.
Gaza has experienced an “unprecedented intensity of destruction”, according to a preliminary report from UNEP, which concluded that the war has had a profound effect on the natural environment.
“The exact effect of this in the long term, and whether it’s recoverable or not, is a big question mark,” explained Mazin Qumsiyeh, a cytogenetics expert and director of the Palestine Institute for Biodiversity and Sustainability at Bethlehem University.
Before the war, the environment in Gaza was already affected by significant soil, water and air pollution, and a constant shortage of clean drinking water. Years of work to address those problems had been showing some results, but that progress – which was “hard-won and costly, due in part to the political and security constraints”, according to UNEP – has now been reversed.
The conflict is likely to have a staggering and diverse range of short- and long-term environmental effects, UNEP reports.
By August 2024, the 365-square-kilometre Gaza Strip was covered with almost 42 million tonnes of debris, which includes unexploded ordnance, human remains and dangerous materials like asbestos, according to UNOSAT.
As of August, 75% of the cropland in northern Gaza and 68% of Gaza’s overall cropland had been damaged, according to an assessment from the United Nations Satellite Centre (UNOSAT). According to UNEP, it is “highly likely” that the bombardment has contaminated the soil with heavy metals and chemicals from explosives and other munitions.
With much of the waste and sewage infrastructure destroyed, the environment is becoming more contaminated by the day. The destruction of this infrastructure has had “major impacts on the environment and people”, according to UNEP, which notes the staggering increase in communicable diseases reported by the World Health Organization.
Chemical contamination from destroyed buildings and infrastructure, fuel leaks and toxic remnants of explosives will linger in Gaza for years, UNEP reports.
Qumsiyeh said he fears the extensive environmental destruction may leave Gaza unlivable: “We don’t have all of the data, but the preliminary data that we do have tell us that it’s not going to be recoverable in many areas.”
Two years of full-scale war in Ukraine have left more than a quarter of the country directly damaged by conflict, including about 30% of the country’s environmentally protected areas, according to the United Nations Development Programme.
Relentless bombardment has left the country littered with tens of millions of tonnes of rubble, which – like in Gaza – is mixed with unexploded ordnance and other dangerous materials including asbestos. Chemicals released by munitions will continue to affect the environment for years or decades, including lead and other heavy metals which can linger in the soil and contaminate crops.
Russian strikes have also frequently targeted industrial sites throughout the country, according to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), which has documented environmental damage in Ukraine. Targets of those attacks include a grain elevator in Luhansk, Eastern Ukraine, an oil depot in Volyn, in the far northwest, and a port facility storing sunflower oil in Mykolaiv, southern Ukraine. In addition to destruction and loss of life, many of these attacks have caused fires and chemical spills, and likely long-term environmental damage.
In much of the country, the environmental damage has been going on for more than a decade: in Donbas, Eastern Ukraine, where fighting began in 2014, flooded coal mines threaten to spread contamination into the surrounding water table. At least 39 coal mines have been flooded as a result of the conflict, according to an assessment from the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE). Before the conflict, some of the mines were used to store toxic waste, and one was the site of a Soviet-era underground nuclear explosion, notes CEOBS.
The war has also caused significant damage to Ukraine’s soil – which, before the war, provided crops that helped to feed an estimated 400 million people around the world, according to the WFP.
Crops grown in contaminated soil can contain heavy metals and other toxins. That’s why it’s critical to measure and map the damage, explained Olena Melynk, an Associate Professor in ecology and botany at the Sumy National Agricultural University in Ukraine, who is leading a multinational effort to respond to conflict soil damage in Ukraine.
“We have to eat. We have to feed our soldiers. We have to feed our people who are still living in Ukraine – and we don’t know what’s going on in our soil,” said Melnyk.Currently based at ETH Zurich, she has been studying the damage to Ukraine’s soil caused since the full-scale war began in 2022.
Her work has involved gathering samples across Ukraine for analysis at ETH and the UK Royal Agricultural University. To measure the damage in some of the hardest-hit areas, researchers partnered with demining organization HALO Trust, whose technicians collected 2,000 soil samples from bomb craters and battlefields.
While the damage is extensive, Melnyk says the team’s analysis suggests the soil is not irreparably contaminated. She’s optimistic that it will recover with time: “Nature knows better,” she said.
Carrying out the complex sampling and analyzing the reams of data has required all kinds of expertise, she added: “We need not just soil experts – we need remote sensing specialists, we need data analysis, statisticians.”
She’s now working on securing funding for a vast new project bringing together researchers from 14 countries around the world with experience dealing with the explosive remnants of war – including Second World War-era shells buried in French fields and landmines left over from conflict in Bosnia and Croatia.
“Our experience is not something that we can apply only in Ukraine, unfortunately,” Melnyk said. Further research could help to develop protocols for how countries should react and remediate soil damage, and how scientists can work together to respond to similar crises. “We should think about this not just on the level of countries, but intergovernmental,” she said.
After the invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, out-of-control wheat prices illustrated the economic importance of Ukrainian agriculture, and how closely the fortunes of one part of the world affect others. Those global connections are environmental as well as economic, Melnyk emphasized: “This isn’t only a Ukraine problem. Rivers flow wherever they want. The wind blows wherever. These are transboundary problems.”
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Protecting Science in Times of Crisis
International Science Council. (February 2024). Protecting Science in Times of Crisis. https://council.science/publications/protecting-science-in-times-of-crisis DOI: 10.24948/2024.01
Full paper Executive SummaryPhotograph by Masaru Goto for The World Bank on Flickr.
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