Introduction

When we talk about the environmental cost of armed conflict, there is often a focus on immediate, measurable and tangible impacts such as the physical destruction wrought by munitions or the escape of flood water, the pollution of water resources, disruption to soils or biodiversity loss. However, a purely technical approach of this kind can miss the vital component that is the nature-human relationship. This is well-understood in Indigenous Knowledge frameworks concerning land, which begin with relationship, and which view environmental damage as a fundamental rupture of that relationship. Looking through a relational lens, we can begin to understand the effects of environmental damage upon the physical, social and mental wellbeing of the communities that inhabit damaged places. It may also help us to harness the power of relationship with place to support recovery and environmental peacebuilding efforts post-conflict.

For example, a 2025 study from Ukraine examines how perceptions of and interaction with local landscapes such as forests and urban green spaces have been impacted by the harms suffered by those landscapes during the conflict.  The study highlights ‘the profound impact of war on the relationship between people and nature, emphasizing the significant loss of ecosystem services and the cultural connections that once sustained local communities.’ It is particularly interesting for the clear connection that it draws between the cultural and emotional significance of physical landscapes on the one hand, and the role communities play in managing them on the other.

‘Landscape’ as relationship

Environmental protection in general relies upon a common understanding of the term ‘environment’.  Equally, in discussing impacts upon landscapes it’s useful to define what a ‘landscape’ is. The European Landscape Convention (ELC) simply defines landscape as:

“…an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors.”

This may appear to encourage a strongly anthropocentric view of the physical environment but both the concepts ‘perception’ and ‘interaction’ are crucial to this definition — without either of them it falls apart. That ‘interaction’ is embedded into the definition affirms, helpfully, that where humans are present, their actions determine the outcomes for the places they inhabit. Those actions can be supportive components of the living, functional ecosystems of which they are part, or can disrupt them, representing different ends of a spectrum of landscape change. Either way, there is some form of relationship with the places concerned and that relationship is the key to understanding what it is we are talking about when discussing ‘landscape’.

Relationships are two-way, however, which is why the concept of perception is also a crucial and powerful one. It suggests that as much as people impact upon landscape, landscape impacts upon people through the way in which they encounter it. Returning to Indigenous understandings, a more rounded view of this reciprocity that attributes agency to every organism in the environment can further broaden both our understanding of landscape and of human accountability within it.

Protecting the value of landscapes to communities

In a 2022 study, the authors surveyed Kyiv residents’ attitudes towards and use of two municipal parks during Russia’s invasion — Yunist and Sovky. It found that these spaces provided valuable recreational and social opportunities to residents and that inspiration, consciousness of nature, aesthetic value and a ‘sense of place’ also featured strongly in what people valued. 

Counting the losses

Speaking to communities in war-damaged areas of Borodianka, Demydiv and Moshchun north-west of Kyiv, the 2025 study investigated the response by participants to the changing condition of landscapes significant to them before the outbreak of war. It found that it not only affected their access to the resources contained in those landscapes but also their perceptions and experiences of safety, their ability to sustain community relationships in the context of shared local spaces, their mental wellbeing and, at its heart, their relationship with the places in which they live.

The study took an ‘ecosystem services’ approach, considering the landscapes concerned as sources of provisioning, regulating, cultural and supporting services. It found that landscapes previously forming cornerstones of local community and cultural tradition — such as forests from which wild food and medicinal plants were formerly harvested — were now effectively off limits to many due to the presence of unexploded ordnance. Rivers and lakes reshaped by flooding were less available as fisheries or for recreation. Urban greenspaces formerly valued as community hubs. Recreational facilities were neglected due to loss of attractiveness and the re-prioritisation of personal time and resources made necessary by the war. However, it also found that individuals tended to offset the loss of access to some landscapes by changing the use of other spaces; for example by growing more food in their private gardens — if those were not also destroyed in the conflict.

Insights from Indigenous Knowledge frameworks

That the two Kyiv based analyses cited here both take an ecosystem-services approach is neither surprising nor wrong. However, once again, applying a reciprocal relational perspective can bring fresh insights. In a sustainable ecosystem in which people acknowledge their accountability to the environment as a whole, it is understood that taking from the land must be balanced by acts of care, renewal and respect. War can fundamentally disrupt this balance, creating conditions of profound asymmetry that accelerate extraction, depleting and damaging the land without any practices towards, or often possibility for, restoration of long-term relationships with land and place.

These transformations may also be understood as spiritual losses. Landscapes that once held meaning as sites of memory, ritual, and everyday life become sources of danger, contamination, and grief. In this way, war is a form of cosmological disruption. Communities are severed from the living systems that once sustained their livelihoods, as well as their deeper ways of knowing and being. At the individual level, the effects of environmental disruption to the individual experience of place have in recent years come to be recognised in the form of the study of solastalgia: ‘the distress that is produced by environmental change impacting on people while they are directly connected to their home environment’.

Reseeding lost landscapes

In spite of the devastating effects on individuals and communities of environmental loss, as long as there are alternative opportunities to reconnect with land and with natural processes, relationships with place and with land can continue in surprising ways. Visiting northern Iraq in 2017 to research the management of waste water in displacement camps, Simon witnessed how, in spite of the complete loss of home, displaced people often seek opportunities to establish a direct relationship with their new surroundings by establishing gardens — and not only for food. In some camps, greenery sprouted on every street corner, small spaces taken up with ingenious space-saving growing systems.

With NGO support, community gardens such as those set up by the Lemon Tree Trust provide essential shared space, acting as a pressure valve and source of healing for participants as well as a temporary repository for their knowledge, practices and cultural traditions.

In a real sense, then, displaced communities bring something of their landscape with them, allowing them to rebuild reciprocal relationships with the environment of their new permanent homes, seeding the recovery of the meaning of those lost landscapes whilst maintaining continuity with traditions, practices and systems of knowledge that would otherwise be erased by war.

Restoring landscape means restoring communities

Just as people are essential to the concept of landscape, they are also essential to landscape restoration, not least because fundamentally, landscape supplies the needs of the recovering communities, sometimes while hostilities continue to rage around them. In Gaza, driven both by necessity and as an expression of connection with land and place, farming is carried out on the less than 4% of land still available following the past two and a half years of bombardment.

Landscape is the logical setting for environmental peacebuilding between conflicted groups. However, whilst Co-design and Nature-based Solutions have been used to aid communities facing resource scarcity following conflict, documentation concerning participatory approaches in post-conflict reconstruction is perhaps more limited, if not entirely absent.

It may not be surprising that grassroots-led recovery processes are less visible than the multitude of highly resourced and well-publicised initiatives spearheaded by international agencies. This is not to suggest that top-down approaches do not have a place in landscape planning, especially where conflict-hit communities have been denuded of basic resources and the social infrastructure necessary to begin the process of rebuilding under their own strength. However, if environmental recovery is to be both sustainable and meaningful for the communities at the heart of the landscapes concerned, in each case sooner or later their interests, concerns, knowledge and expertise need to be foregrounded. Otherwise, the landscapes that result will be missing the crucial relationship that ensures they thrive in the presence of people: the connection with the people themselves.

Conclusion

Recent armed conflicts remind us that modern warfare is not nor can be surgical, clean or delimited in its consequences for people and environment. Nothing illustrates this more clearly than the wholesale destruction of Gaza’s urban and rural landscapes or the devastation of swathes of flooded land beneath the Kakhovka dam in Ukraine. Each diorama of ruin represents human tragedy alongside irreversible environmental impacts. Underlying those two apparently separate things is a broken relationship: the concept that humanity and environment are separate is one that facilitates environmental destruction in war. But when communities are given space to regroup after conflict ends, assess what they have lost and direct how their physical environment should be recovered, the process of landscape recovery can be holistically done with the recovery of the community itself.

Samira Siddique is Director of Strategic Initiatives at the Center for Earth Ethics; Simon Watkins is CEOBS’ Operations Co-ordinator. If you have found this post insightful, please donate so that we can publish more.

Additional reading

Bodnar, S., Dunker, C. L., & Kayira, J. (Eds.). (2025). Unmoored yet unbroken: Ecopsychology for a changing world—Stories of human-nature relationships. John Wiley & Sons.

Sphere. (2023). Nature-based Solutions for Climate Resilience in Humanitarian Action. Sphere.

Jones, L. (2020). Losing Eden: Why Our Minds Need the Wild. Penguin

Kimmerer, R. W. (2013). Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants. Milkweed Editions

Reynolds, F. (2017). The Fight for Beauty: Our Path to a Better Future. Oneworld Publications.