Research and Other Publications
Developing Effective Environmental Laws and Policies
Addressing the Environmental Consequences of Armed Conflict in Africa
Throughout Africa, international conflicts, civil wars, and internal unrest devastate the environment. Land mines maim innocent civilians and wildlife. Belligerents and refugees alike regularly invade national parks, hosts to rare and endangered species. The lack of law enforcement leads to rampant poaching, illegal timber harvesting, and mining. In fact, extraction of natural resources such as diamonds, ivory, and tropical hardwoods frequently supports belligerents, prolonging the conflict. Drawing upon its substantial experience in analyzing ways to prevent, minimize, redress, and punish environmental consequences of war, ELI spoke on “Legal Mechanisms for Addressing Environmental Consequences of War” at the GLOBE-Southern Africa Conference on Environmental Security in Africa, held September 21-22, 2000 in Cape Town, South Africa.
Internal armed conflicts and civil strife present a particularly vexing problem for environmental advocates in Africa. Such conflicts tend to be persistent and widespread across the continent, yet there are few meaningful mechanisms for holding people accountable for their actions in these conflicts. This breeds a culture of immunity and impunity, frequently leading to increasingly egregious environmental and human rights violations. To stimulate debate on the topic, ELI researched and published a 2001 report entitled “All is Not Fair in (Civil) War: Criminal Liability for Environmental Damage during Internal Armed Conflicts.”
From April 22-25, 2001, ELI participated in a workshop in Victoria Falls, Zimbabwe on “Conservation in Conflict: Strategies for Mitigating the Impacts of Armed Conflict on the African Environment,” sponsored by the Biodiversity Support Program (BSP) and ZimTrust. The workshop focused on the impacts of armed conflict on conservation and natural resource extraction in countries such as Congo, Ethiopia and Eritrea, and Liberia and Sierra Leone. BSP used the workshop to develop a set of general principles and guidelines for effective conservation in areas affected by armed conflict. ELI participated in a core group that advised BSP on the guidelines, and distributed copies of an ELI paper on “Legal Mechanisms for Addressing Wartime Damage to Tropical Forests,” which was published in the Journal of Sustainable Forestry and as a chapter of War and Tropical Forests: Conservation in Areas of Armed Conflict (2003) edited by Stephen V. Price.
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