War is undermining soil health and availability more than urbanisation

Abstract

Ever since the Earth has witnessed the dawn of mankind it has had to deal with conflicts and their consequences. The number of ongoing conflicts continues to increase year by year, as does the power of the weapons at stake. Consequently, also increasing is the impact of warfare on the total environment, which is already in crisis due to climate change and exponential population growth. Although now emphasis is mostly given to the necessity that the urban sprawl and the operation of companies causing planetary harm should be carefully regulated, by collating up-to-date data on the size of the footprint of various human activities, here we show that warfare is undermining soil health and availability for productive use much more than urbanisation and other infrastructures have hitherto done. This means that modern, wide-ranging conflicts are no longer bearable from an environmental point of view – as well as from the ethical, social, and economic ones – and this should be an additional, primary reason to prompt the international community to discourage or stop them as far as possible with tireless mediation.