Pollution caused by war: the environment is suffering too

On top of all this, there are other forms of environmental damage, such as that to agriculture, such as the approximately 2,000 agricultural sites destroyed in Gaza or the approximately 60 million litres of sewage which, every day in Gaza, have ended up untreated in the soil and groundwater.

And furthermore, in Colombia the Amazon rainforest has, paradoxically, been at greater risk under peace than when it was the scene of the FARC guerrilla conflict. The guerrillas had, in fact, forced farmers to leave at least a quarter of their land untouched, because the tree cover served them as a hiding place to defend themselves against aerial bombardments. Following the 2016 peace agreement and the guerrillas’ withdrawal, that ‘control’ ceased, so the following year, partly due to the expansion of livestock farming and the cultivation of coca, the country lost 219,973 hectares of tree cover, the equivalent of 35 football pitches every hour.

This has triggered a further long-term consequence: over the following decade, the Colombian Amazon lost around 1.2 million hectares. In 2024 alone, deforestation rose by 43 per cent. This map of devastation was compiled in the very year when, both in Italia and in many parts of Europe, the summer the heatwave officially broke the all-time record set in 2003, is the recently published essay entitled ‘War and Climate’ (Il Saggiatore) by Stefania Divertito, an essayist and investigative journalist specialising in environmental issues. “On 21 June 2026,” writes Divertito, “the European Copernicus programme recorded the all-time record for surface temperature of the world’s seas, and in the Mediterranean, the basin around which wars arise and never truly end, satellites detected waters up to six degrees warmer than the average over the last forty years’.

A situation that would call for a strong punitive response, such as the introduction of the offence of ecocide as a standalone crime in the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court – a proposal which, however, is still merely under discussion. In the meantime, however, an act of responsibility – albeit a theoretical one – towards future generations has materialised: ‘Since March 2022,’ writes Divertito, ‘the Italian Constitution has contained 12 words addressed to people who do not yet exist: the Republic ‘shall protect the environment, biodiversity and ecosystems, also in the interests of future generations...”, Germany had already assumed, in writing, through Article 20 of the Basic Law, responsibility towards future generations as early as 1994; France incorporated its Charte de l’environnement into the Constitution in 2005. And in 2008 Ecuador went further than anyone else, because its new Constitution, approved by referendum, recognises as a subject of rights nature itself, which it refers to by the name given to it by the Andean peoples, Pachamama, Mother Earth, and guarantees it the right to exist and to regenerate its own life cycles’.

Ukraine: The collapse of the Kakhovka dam

On 6 June 2023, the Kakhovka dam, on the River Dnieper, was destroyed during the Russian occupation, releasing 16.4 cubic kilometres of water in a matter of hours and draining a reservoir that covered 1,870 square kilometres, 90 per cent of its surface area. The study published in Science in 2025 by Oleksandra Shumilova and colleagues calculated that approximately 83,000 tonnes remain on the exposed riverbed of heavy metals, deposited by decades of industrial activity upstream: contamination that the researchers describe as a ticking time bomb, because rain and erosion could mobilise it towards the Black Sea.

Gaza: Rubble equivalent to ten Pyramids of Giza

In Gaza the water was already compromised before the war: in 2023, the WHO estimated that over 97 per cent of the coastal aquifer – the Strip’s only groundwater reserve – was unfit for consumption due to salinity and nitrates. The conflict destroyed 70 per cent of the sewage pumps and no treatment plants remain operational, meaning that around 60,000 cubic metres of sewage seep into the ground every day and from there into the aquifer. The second UNEP assessment, published in September 2025, estimated 61 million tonnes of rubble – equivalent to around ten Pyramids of Giza – 15 per cent of which poses a high risk due to asbestos and heavy metals.

Sarajevo: Uranium in the groundwater, lead in the parks 

In Sarajevo, the siege ended in 1995, but the ground continues to bear witness to it. Between 1994 and 1995, NATO A-10 aircraft struck the area around the city with nearly three thousand kilos of ammunition depleted uranium, concentrated mainly on Hadžići. In 2002, a UNEP mission confirmed, for the first time at a European site, that the uranium had reached the groundwater. In 2016, environmental chemist Aida Šapčanin analysed the soil of the city’s playgrounds for the first time and found heavy metals, polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons and polychlorinated biphenyls, with lead levels of up to 48 milligrams per kilogram.

Sudan: Where gold is poisoning children

In Sudan, torn apart by the conflict between the army and the Rapid Support Forces that broke out in April 2023, the area most affected is not the one that has been bombed, but the one that has been dug up. Having lost access to two-thirds of its oil revenues following the secession of South Sudan in 2011, the country turned to gold, which in 2025 generated around 1.8 billion dollars, largely extracted from artisanal mines. To separate the metal from the rock, mercury is used, which is then burnt to make it evaporate: the substance settles in the soil, seeps into the water table and, following the floods of 2022 and 2023, has even reached the Nile, causing neurological damage among children exposed to the fumes from the burning.

Iraq: The surge in cancer cases 

In Falluja, the war has left a legacy that can be measured in terms of cancer. In 2004, the US deployed a high-explosive device followed by the dropping of white phosphorus, a substance that burns at 816 degrees. As the phosphorus settles into the ground, it transforms into phosphoric acid and phosphorus pentoxide, acidifying the soil and reducing fertility for years; to this was added depleted uranium, which had already been widespread in the region since 1991. A study published in 2012 in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health recorded, in the years that followed, a four-fold increase in all cancers and a twelve-fold increase in childhood cancers.

Iran: Over 300 environmental incidents

Tehran is a city of nine million inhabitants nestled between the Alborz Mountains and a desert plain, a geographical formation that traps the air as if in a basin. On the night of 7–8 March 2026, air strikes hit four oil depots around the capital, including Shahran and Karaj: the smoke remained visible from satellites, and in the days that followed, what the media dubbed black rain fell – a mixture of particulate matter, nitrogen oxides, dioxins and polycyclic aromatic hydrocarbons. CEOBS has recorded over three hundred environmental incidents linked to the conflict. The destruction of the Rey and Kan depots released 19.5 million litres of fuel and 47,000 tonnes of greenhouse gases.