In Ukraine, over 6.5 million acres of agricultural land have been mined or contaminated to date, requiring costly remediation to render safe for livelihoods, food, and freedom of movement. In Ukraine’s urban centers, more than 210,000 buildings have been destroyed, many of which contain hazardous material such as asbestos. In Gaza, most agricultural land has been destroyed or otherwise rendered unsafe, while 70% of the water infrastructure has been destroyed or damaged. The environment can be more than a potential trigger of conflict. The environment during conflict is degraded, neglected, a mechanism of control, and a vector of violence—all of which erode peace and possibilities to restore it.

Peace studies as a field of research has historically overlooked critical aspects of the environment in conflict, though scholars in adjacent fields have long highlighted concerns of violent environments. The emergent field of environmental peacebuilding has worked to address this gap, but even it has underrepresented important areas critical to human flourishing and peace. For example, environmental peacebuilding has predominantly focused on natural resource management rather than environmental management, despite a long history of considerations for the toxic remnants of war and ecocide in the ecology of conflict. Importantly, the gaps should be seen not as shortfalls of the past, but rather open opportunities of the future for peace scholars and practitioners. In many cases it is peace scholarship, especially empirical evidence derived from on the ground fieldwork, that needs to catch up to communities of practice.

The dominant lens of environment-conflict relationships in peace studies has been the environment as a potential trigger of (armed) conflict. Resource scarcity and abundance have both been shown to contribute to conflict, but also to cooperation. The long-running debates around the direction and impact of this relationship are many.  Climate change as a driver of numerous ecological and social outcomes, a purported ‘threat multiplier’ contributing to direct violence has also been explored in depth—again with robust debates. Alongside this, in the field of ecological economics, the idea of ecological distribution conflicts emerged capturing direct violence tied to the unequal distribution of toxic risks—a core inequality found in environmental justice research and activism.

Investigating if, how, and under what conditions environmental stresses can beget conflict is important. But human-caused environmental change itself is a vector of violence. Climate is not just a threat multiplier, it is a hazard that directly harms humans. In the long-running debate about whether climate change ‘causes’ conflict, for example, explorations up the causal chain stop at ‘climate,’ rather than further up the chain to attribute the “cause” of climate. 

Environmental violence— direct harm to human health from human-produced pollution beyond what is needed to meet human needs and flourishing—is a primary cause of human suffering detracting from peace. In fact, it is one of the largest sources of early human mortality today. We can map and measure the sources, distribution, and outcomes of environmental violence, so it is not invisible and thus potentially manageable and mitigatable. Yet, these environmental vectors of human harm are often not conceptualized as violence, importantly not in environmental policy nor in peace studies. This is despite recent recognitions of a clean, safe, and healthy environment as a human right.

Recent work in environmental security studies has begun to question and recognize climate as a form of violence as an additional valence of environment-conflict relationships. However, it is still a heterodox position in key peace studies conversations. For example, in the last twenty years the Journal of Peace Research, which many consider the flagship journal of peace studies, has not published a single research article on environmental violence, slow violence, climate violence, or environmental justice. Like many venues, these sources of human suffering are not considered a form of or akin to direct violence, and therefore not peace studies.

The gap of environmental violence is in part a result of two additional gaps. First is a gap in systems thinking as an underpinning concept and methodology for tracking and understanding the complexity in human-environment interactions in peace studies. Recent work has strongly pushed this point and demonstrated the value of systems thinking for peace studies, especially complex adaptive systems thinking. Second is the need for multi and transdisciplinary investigations, either executed by individuals or research teams. In other words, scholarship that thoroughly integrates multiple ways of knowing and knowledge bases from the humanities to the environmental and social sciences, to comprehensively account for environmental violence and its multivalent impacts that degrade peace and human security.

Environmental violence is a complex, multivalent, but not intractable phenomena. It is also one of the greatest threats to human flourishing and peace today. Mainstreaming it in peace studies is not only essential, but a generative opportunity.

Richard Marcantonio

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Dr. Richard (Drew) Marcantonio is a researcher, teacher, and practitioner focused on regenerative and durable livelihoods, environmental management and policy, environmental and other violence, and peacebuilding. He is the author of Environmental Violence: In the Earth System and the Human Niche (2022; Cambridge University Press), co-author of the textbook Environmental Management: Concepts and Practical Skills (2022; Cambridge University Press), and lead co-editor (with John Paul Lederach and Agustin Fuentes) of Environmental Violence Explored (2024; Cambridge University Press). He has published numerous peer-reviewed, policy, and public facing articles in periodicals ranging fromPeacebuildingtoEnvironmental Science and Policyto the popular periodical theBulletin of Atomic Scientists. He has conducted research and practice on these critical issues on five continents working with communities, elected officials, regulators, corporations, and NGOs alike.