A new report on the environmental costs of conflict by the Strategic Foresight Group has highlighted the environmental damage in the Middle East due to constant conflicts and wars throughout the region.
While a sobering read, even more sobering to readers will be understanding how the environmental costs of conflict are not limited only to the Middle East, but that war costs the environment no matter where it occurs.
Among the costs detailed by the Strategic Foresight Group specifically because of conflicts in the Middle East:
- Stress on water resources (the Israel-Hezbollah war caused severe damage to South Lebanese water networks)
- Arable land degradation
- Forest utilization and destruction
- Oil spills (almost 55 million barrels of oil were spilt in the desert and at sea during the first gulf war)
- Sewage dumping (since the 2003 Iraq war, over 300 000 tonnes of raw sewage are dumped into the Tigris daily)
- Habitat loss, leading to increased stress on local species and overall biodiversity levels
- Increased and significant carbon emissions caused by the machinery of war (as detailed in another report on Red, Green and Blue, an Abrams tank’s fuel efficiency is rated at 0.56 miles per gallon!)
While the Strategic Foresight Group’s report has detailed Middle Eastern environmental costs, all of these environmental costs would have some correlation with on-going conflicts occurring in such locales as Sri Lanka, South Ossetia, or the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
In addition to the fairly thorough list of costs detailed above, there are other, perhaps more hidden environmental costs to war and conflict. Potential environmental protection and remediation projects, water desalination activities, and development of intelligent transportation systems are all examples of environmentally beneficial projects that are prevented from moving out of the design phase due to a state of local conflict. While preventing these projects may not have immediate environmental costs (those are more long-term in the sense of opportunities lost), failure to start and develop these projects will have impacts in the lost jobs and tax revenues forgone.
Image: 081020-A-3715G-278 via Flickr’s Media Commons
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