Scientists Want to Make Harming the Environment a War Crime

Forests burned to the ground. Rivers damaged by broken infrastructure. Animals slaughtered and driven from their habitats. The environmental impacts of war are staggering, yet they’re often overshadowed by the societal wreckage created by conflict.

Making harming the enviornment a war crime.

Now in a letter published in the scientific journal Nature, a group of scientists is urging the United Nations to make it a war crime to harm the environment during times of conflict. The UN’s International Law Commission is in talks through Aug. 8, and the scientists are calling on attending members to create a framework “to protect the environment in regions of armed conflict.”

“We call on governments to incorporate explicit safeguards for biodiversity, and to use the commission’s recommendations to finally deliver a Fifth Geneva Convention to uphold environmental protection during such confrontations,” the petition reads. 

Read the story from Global Citizen by Joe McCarthy and Erica Sanchez - “Scientists Want to Make Harming the Environment a War Crime.”

The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster

Late in the summer of 2012, while walking his coffee groves on a hillside rising above Santa Ana, El Salvador, Mario Mendoza Corleto noticed something unusual: the leaves on some of his trees were coated with an orange fungus and had begun dropping to the ground. It was “leaf rust,” a form of blight that had pestered coffee farmers in El Salvador since the 1970s. Normally, spraying the trees with fungicide once or twice a year would keep the disease at bay. Not anymore. “This year it was totally different,” Mendoza recounted to me recently. “Spraying didn’t help.”

Illustration: Jordan Moss

As the days wore on, the problem only worsened. By September, many of Corleto’s once-bushy trees stood completely bare. Their green fruit hardened in the sun, never ripening into the candy-red cherries that Mendoza’s workers would pick and process into coffee beans destined for specialty roasters. That year, half of the trees on his family’s 100-year-old farm died. The next year, as Mendoza’s remaining trees continued to struggle, he laid off most of his workers. The harvest was a quarter of its usual size.

What happened to Mario Mendoza Corleto played out all across El Salvador, as well as Honduras and Guatemala: ground zero for the Western hemisphere’s most prized coffees.

Read the Medium story by Elizabeth G. Dunn- “The Hidden Struggle to Save the Coffee Industry From Disaster.”