Alexandra Huneeus & Pablo Rueda-Saiz, Environmental Protection in War: Beyond Humans and Nature, 67 Harv. Int’l L.J. (2026).
Abstract
War is not just a human tragedy—it is an environmental catastrophe. Across the globe, armed conflicts leave behind oil-slickened rivers, poisoned soils, and forests reduced to barren landscapes. These harms last for generations, but they are not borne equally. The peoples who live most intimately with the land—drawing from it food, water, culture, and identity—suffer the most enduring losses. Their very existence as a people may be put at risk.
This Article asks: How have the laws of war addressed environmental destruction, and, more specifically, what protection do they afford to communities whose very existence is bound to the places where conflicts unfold? For much of their history, the law of armed conflict (“LOAC”) have paid limited attention to the natural world. In recent years, international legal scholarship has begun to take the environment seriously as a subject of sustained inquiry. Even so, the scholarship continues to overlook the particular ways in which war harms the relationship of communities and their environment. This Article steps into the rapidly growing conversation about war and the environment with three contributions: It develops a novel typology of the approaches that have historically guided the laws of war, identifies the emergence of a new “ecocultural” approach, and advances a normative justification for its further expansion.
A historical review of the laws and debates on the LOAC since the 19th century reveals two dominant paradigms. The first, which we call the anthropocentric approach, treats nature as property or as a resource for human survival. It has roots in the 19th century but continues to be the dominant paradigm to this day. The second, the ecocentric approach, emerged in the wake of the Vietnam War’s environmental destruction. It seeks to protect the “natural environment” without requiring a nexus to human harm.
In recent practice, however, a third paradigm of LOAC engagement with the environment s emerging: the ecocultural approach. Its animating principle is that maintaining the integrity of relations with the environment is essential to the survival, identity, and dignity of certain peoples. The ecocultural approach appears in recent efforts to connect environmental harm to cultural practices. In 2023, for example, Colombia initiated prosecutions for environmental crimes on Indigenous, Tribal, and peasant territories during a fifty-year armed conflict. They have been lauded as the world’s first environmental war crimes indictments. Their goal, however, was not the protection of the natural world, nor the protection of human lives and wellbeing alone. Rather, they aimed to protect the symbolic and material dimensions of the relationship between certain place-based peoples and their environment. The Article argues for further integration of the ecocultural approach into the LOAC and provides guidance for doing so.
Amid growing calls to expand environmental protection during war, this proposed typology provides governments and international organizations with the historical basis and legally grounded conceptual resources to build a heightened regime of protection for the environment and its peoples.
