Full information on scope, guest editors, and submission process at: https://iopscience.iop.org/collections/erl-251125-1010. Please email Jamon Van Den jamon.vandenhoek@oregonstate.edu with any questions.

Recent years have seen a sharp rise in armed conflicts worldwide with some estimates pointing to a roughly 25% increase in conflict events each year since 2020, alongside a growing population directly affected by violence. Here, we use ’armed conflict’ to refer to situations in which organized groups, including governments, use weapons against one another. Though widespread, the environmental toll of armed conflict remains poorly understood in part because the impacts of armed conflict on ecological, human-environment, and climatic processes may manifest in different ways at different times. Examples such as burned agricultural fields in eastern Ukraine, damage to urban and peri-urban areas in the Gaza Strip, and cleared woodlands in Tigray may be evident almost immediately through first-hand accounts and detectable in satellite images collected thereafter.

But what of the long-term impacts on soil health, air quality, and carbon emissions, or changes in land and resource management decisions in response to armed conflict? These indirect environmental consequences are far more difficult to measure and attribute since they manifest over longer timespans, farther away from the conflict, and may result from a complex interplay of conflict dynamics, governance shifts, and other stressors such as climate variability. Nonetheless, their inclusion is essential for a full accounting of the environmental consequences of armed conflict, both to inform accountability and reparations processes, to guide long-term recovery and peacebuilding, and to ensure that conflict-affected regions are not left behind in meeting global climate and sustainability goals.

Rather than considering only the immediate or acute environmental impacts of armed conflicts, this focus issue seeks research contributions that examine the broader spectrum of environmental consequences, including indirect effects that unfold over seasons or years and extend across diffuse geographies. We are particularly interested in research that integrates conflict dynamics into analyses of environmental outcomes, and that employs innovative combinations of Earth observation, geospatial data, and qualitative insights to capture the plurality of conflict consequences at different temporal and spatial scales. Such approaches can illuminate how armed conflict processes, shaped by both deliberate and involuntary decisions, translate into specific environmental impacts.

• Examining linkages across urban, peri-urban, and rural environmental impacts of war
• Presenting novel approaches for assessing soil contamination and degradation in conflict settings
• Building causal frameworks linking conflict processes and environmental outcomes
• Multi-sensor monitoring of carbon emissions and atmospheric pollution arising from armed conflicts
• Tracking environmental impacts over the arc of war preparations, warfare, and post-war stages
• Assessing livelihood impacts of legacies of war including mining, unexploded ordnance, and toxic pollution
• Innovating methods for validating remotely detected environmental impacts
• Tracing the impacts of armed conflict on telecoupled land use systems and cross-border resource flows
• Integrating empirical environmental datasets to guide post-conflict environmental peacebuilding
• Disentangling impacts of war, aid, and climate change on food insecurity in conflict and displacement settings
• Counter-intuitive cases of conflict-induced improvements in ecosystem services