Nature and Wars Seminar 6: Long-term environmental consequences of the past wars

From wartime destruction to peacetime extraction: environmental consequences beyond the battlefield
Barbara Magalhães Teixeira (Stockholm International Peace Research Institute, Sweden)
Abstract: War and armed conflict have profound environmental and climate consequences, from the emissions from military activities and build-up to the destruction of the environment during wartime. However, some of the same logics of environmental harms during war transition into peacetime. In this presentation, we will discuss different types of relations between nature, climate, and the environment with conflict dynamics, and how peace building strategies based on extractive models continue to perpetuate environmental and climate harm. We will critically engage with current environmental peace building strategies and creatively discuss alternatives for building sustainable and climate-resilient peace.

Barbara Magalhães Teixeira is a peace and conflict researcher and educator. She is currently a Researcher in the Climate Change and Risk Program at SIPRI -Stockholm International Research Institute. Her work focuses on how nature, climate, and the environment affect and interact with conflict and peace dynamics. She pays special attention to gender, inequality, development and extractivism.

Warfare as a Geomorphic Agent: Divergent Landscape Evolution After Conflict
Joseph Hupy (Purdue University, USA)
Abstract: Warfare presents itself as a distinctive form of anthropogenic disturbance where historical and recent evidence argues that modern conflict should be understood as a significant geomorphic agent. Drawing from examples in World War I landscapes at Verdun, France, warfare landscapes in Vietnam, and from the trenches of Ukraine, the talk explores how explosive munitions, trenching, cratering, and postwar land use create long-lasting changes in topography, soils, drainage, and landscape pattern. Battlefield disturbance varies according to the magnitude and type of warfare, the position of armies on the landscape, the stagnation of front lines, and underlying geologic conditions, while also showing that postwar land use can amplify, obscure, or redirect wartime effects. Ultimately, the presentation frames warfare landscapes not as sites that simply recover, but as places that follow divergent pathways of ecological and geomorphic evolution with important implications for environmental history, land management, and military training landscapes.

Dr. Joseph P. Hupy is a soil geomorphologist/ field-based geographer whose past work centered on how war reshapes and scars the physical environment, particularly through soil disturbance and long term battlefield recovery. He is widely known for his concept of “bombturbation,” describing how explosive munitions churn and reorganize soils, and for landmark studies such as “The Environmental Footprint of War” and related research on World War I battlefields like Verdun, where he used soils and microtopography as proxies to understand post conflict landscape stability. Building on this foundation in anthropogeomorphology and the human driven transformation of terrain, Hupy sought to integrate unmanned aerial systems (drones) into his research, employing high resolution remote sensing and UAS based survey methods to safely map disturbed, hazardous, or hard to access environments and to advance digital, data rich approaches to environmental monitoring in the post conflict and military landscape context. In addition to his role at Purdue’s School of Aviation and Transportation Technology, he collaborates across disciplines, including earth sciences and natural resource management. Although now regarded as a technique's researcher with UAS, Hupy very much wants to get back to battlefield disturbance recovery research and is always looking for those in other disciplines to engage in collaborative research.

Learning from Absence: Past Data Gaps and the Case for WISEN
Eoghan Darbyshire (Conflict and Environment Observatory, Leeds, UK)
Abstract: Our understanding of how war damages the environment has a fundamental problem: we rarely begin collecting the right data until it is too late. Drawing on recent work in Southeast Asia, this presentation examines how incomplete historical records make it genuinely difficult to assess the lasting impact of unexploded ordnance (UXO) left over from past conflicts - with serious consequences for clean-up efforts and policy responses. Where records are fragmented or missing, understanding the true scale and cumulative effects of that harm remains deeply uncertain.

To address this, we developed the Wartime IncidentS to ENvironment Database (WISEN) - a structured framework for documenting environmental harm caused by conflict incidents. Combining satellite imagery, open-source information, and a tiered approach to analysis, WISEN captures data as events unfold rather than relying on reconstruction long after the fact. Developed initially in response to the environmental destruction in Ukraine and since applied in Iran and Sudan, WISEN aims to ensure that future researchers are not left working from the same fragmentary evidence that constrains our understanding today - providing a more solid basis for science, accountability, and long-term recovery.

Dr. Eoghan Darbyshire is a researcher at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, where he applies environmental science to better understand the often-overlooked ecological consequences of war. His current work uses open-source data to analyse, communicate, and encourage further research on the environmental dimensions of armed conflict. Eoghan is an environmental scientist with expertise in air pollution and atmospheric aerosols, combining in-situ measurements and remote sensing approaches in rapidly changing environments. Dr. Darbyshire completed his PhD at the University of Manchester, where he studied biomass-burning aerosols over tropical South America. He also holds an MRes in Physics of the Earth and Atmosphere from the University of Leeds. Following his PhD, he worked as a postdoctoral researcher at the University of Manchester, where he developed scientific instrumentation and led field campaigns investigating urban air pollution in Delhi.

An Environmental History of the Crimean War (1853–1856): Our Interdisciplinary Road to Discovery
Catherine M. Ashcraft (University of New Hampshire, USA) and Alexis Peri (Boston University, USA)
Abstract: Historic wars pose specific challenges for understanding the role of the environment in war and the long-term impacts of war on the environment. This presentation shares our interdisciplinary approach to researching the Crimean War of 1853-1856, highlights challenges we’ve encountered researching and accounting for the environmental consequences of a historical war, and presents some of the data sources we are analyzing. Our approach combines methods from cultural history, focusing on the way people construct narratives of meaning about their world, and international environmental politics, focusing on understanding interactions between environmental processes and human decisions and how these impact ecological and human vulnerabilities. By centering on personal interactions with the environment, in the trenches, soil, water and air, we consider how people transformed their surroundings and how biophysical features impacted their bodies and minds as well as the trajectory and outcomes of war.

Dr. Catherine M. Ashcraft is an Associate Professor of Environmental Policy and Planning in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at the University of New Hampshire, USA. Her research focuses on strengthening environmental policies and institutions to manage conflict, foster justice, and respond to change, particularly in freshwater systems and climate adaptation planning. She co-edited the book The Politics of Fresh Water: Access, conflict and identity (with Dr. Tamar Mayer).

Dr. Alexis Peri is a historian and Associate Professor at Boston University. Her work focuses on the history of Russia and the Soviet Union, and she has strong interests in the history of war, terror, intimacy and private life, women, US-Soviet relations, diaries, letters, literature in history, and environmental history. She authored The War Within: Diaries from the Siege of Leningrad and Dear Unknown Friend: the Remarkable Correspondence between American and Soviet Women.

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