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Ecological footprints of war: an exploratory assessment of the long-term impact of violent conflicts on national biocapacity from 1962–2009

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Abstract

Most large-scale studies exploring the relationship between natural resources or climate change and conflict have looked at how environmental factors lead to conflict. This paper reverses that causal arrow and presents an exploratory large-N study of 187 countries from 1962 to 2009 assessing the long-term impact of violent conflicts on their environment. I also look at how this relationship is affected by economic and political factors. I use national biocapacity data calculated by the Global Footprint Network as a measure of environmental resources. The results indicate that in the long run, the impact of conflicts on a country’s biocapacity is mediated by wealth and democratization. I find that both wealth and democratization are necessary to mitigate the environmental impact of wars. I also find that countries with high levels of democratization and low per capita GDP and countries with low levels of democratization and high per capita GDP experience a decline in their biocapacity in the long run as the intensity of conflict increases. These findings underscore how advanced, industrialized democracies export the environmental risk of wars onto other countries, which has implications for environmental security and international environmental justice.

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Notes

  1. Throughout this study, the terms “environmental resources”, “natural resources”, “ecological resources”, “environment”, and “ecological capacity” will be used interchangeably, but they all refer to the general idea of “natural capital” or biocapacity described here.

  2. Ecological modernization theories have been criticized on many fronts including how increased efficiency does not necessarily lead to a decrease in production or that rich countries often “outsource” environmental degradation to poorer countries by using them as sites of extraction and by locating polluting industries there Fisher and Freudenburg (2001) and Dinda (2004).

  3. For more details on how national biocapacity calculations normalize ecological capacity over time across and within countries, see Monfreda et al. (2004) and Wackernagel et al. (2004).

  4. The relationship between population density and biocapacity is extremely complex and requires further investigation, which is beyond the scope of this paper.

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  1. Oberlin College, 122 Elm St., Oberlin, OH, 44074, USA

    Swapna Pathak

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Pathak, S. Ecological footprints of war: an exploratory assessment of the long-term impact of violent conflicts on national biocapacity from 1962–2009. J Environ Stud Sci 10, 380–393 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13412-020-00626-5

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