Biodiversity is all the various kinds of life you would find in one area, whether it may the variety in animals, plants, fungi, or even bacteria that make up our uniquely natural world. All of these species and microorganisms work together in our ecosystems like a well built system to maintain, balance, and support life on Earth. Biodiversity is also thought as a free fall globally, declining quicker than most moments in human history. There are numerous reasons as to why this is, but one main reason as we all know it is, human induced cause. One of these causes that destroy both humans as well as our planet, is armed conflicts.
Armed conflicts harm biodiversity in countless amount of ways, degrading forests and land, natural resources, and even hastening species loss. Military activity has significant impacts on the environment. Not only can war be destructive to the socioenvironment, but it also produces vast amounts of greenhouse gases which obviously contributes to anthropogenic climate change, pollution, and causes many of our resource reduction. Attacks can lead to water, to the soil, to species at which is only harmful and lethal.
Although this toll is increasingly acknowledged, there is no specific legal protection for biodiversity under international humanitarian law, which normalizes how armed conflict is waged and lays out protections in order to limit its consequences. Since biodiversity protection comes down to the responsibility of the actors of the armed conflict, environmental education is critical. There should be more training and education amongst armed military actors. There should also be work done to inform militaries around how to protect the environment in times of armed dispute. Thus far, we’ve only managed to create a race against time for us with everything we’ve done however with more awareness and active concern, hopefully we can slow down the race of time.
Applied Plant Ecology Winter 2020 