Case Explained: Ecocide law expands but war crimes go unchecked – Legal Perspective

“This research shows that even if ecocide were to be recognised as a new international or domestic crime, existing international frameworks may still shield wartime perpetrators from accountability.”

The research calls for ongoing attention to the adaptability of existing frameworks and praises the International Criminal Court’s recent endeavour to strengthen its capacity to respond to environmental destruction. 

Future initiatives might explore how existing international crimes -such as attacks on civilian objects (protected places like schools, homes, hospitals, places of worship, and cultural sites that serve no military purpose), pillage, or starvation tactics – could be interpreted to cover ecological destruction, while also supporting domestic, regional, and international efforts to criminalise ecocide. Without such reforms, wartime perpetrators will continue exploiting loopholes that leave the environment unprotected.

The concept of ecocide first emerged in response to herbicidal warfare in Vietnam, where scientists like Arthur Galston and lawyers such as Richard Falk compared environmental destruction to genocide. Over time, advocacy broadened ecocide’s meaning to encompass peacetime harms like oil spills and climate change. 

The campaign to introduce a new international crime of ecocide has gained significant traction in recent years. Vanuatu, Fiji and Samoa have submitted a formal amendment to the International Criminal Court’s statute, while the European Union’s 2024 Directive requires EU states to introduce offences “comparable to ecocide.” Belgium has passed a domestic ecocide crime, and France introduced a qualified ecocide offence in 2021.

Yet in international law, ecocide remains weakest in its application to war: Additional Protocol I (the 1977 amendment to the Geneva Conventions), the ENMOD Convention (on the prohibition of hostile use of environmental modification techniques), and the ICC Statute (the International Criminal Court’s founding treaty) all prohibit environmental destruction in conflict, but their thresholds are so restrictive that they are virtually unenforceable.

The UN has repeatedly warned that armed conflict accelerates environmental collapse. For example, UNEP estimates that over 40 percent of all intrastate conflicts in the past 60 years have been linked to natural resources, and post-conflict recovery is severely hindered by environmental damage. These statistics underscore the urgency of reform: environmental harm is not collateral, but central to the dynamics of modern warfare.

Ecocide is welcome recognition of the impact of environmental destruction on people and the planet. Yet, war-related ecological destruction still falls through the cracks.