Global observatory · 2026 edition · Signals · Biosphere
The Wounded Man, The Wounded Earth
Every war is fought twice — once against a people, once against the ground beneath their feet. The scorched fields of Ukraine, the poisoned waters of Gaza, the coltan trenches of Kivu and the carbon shadow of the world's militaries are one wound, cut into the same common home.
The earth herself, burdened and laid waste, is among the most abandoned and maltreated of our poor.
Laudato Si', §2
The scale of the phenomenon
Three generations of ecocide, now watched from orbit.
The wounding of the earth by war is not new. Vietnam was defoliated by chemistry, Kuwait was set alight by retreat, and the herbicides and oil fires of the twentieth century still mark soil and lungs. What is new is the witness: the wars of Ukraine, Gaza and Sudan are the first to be documented in full by satellite from the first day, and the first whose carbon can be counted while the fires still burn.
Conflict-driven CO₂-equivalent emissions, 2022–2025 (cumulative, MtCO₂e)
Cumulative emissions attributed to each active conflict. Figures are conservative and undercounted: military emissions remain excluded from UNFCCC reporting under the 1997 Kyoto exemption.
Ukraine: Initiative on GHG Accounting of War (De Klerk et al., 2024–2026 assessments) via EcoAction and the Planetary Security Initiative. Gaza: Neimark, Larbi et al. (Lancaster / QMUL, 2024–2026).
The curves are estimates, not indictments, and the belligerents dispute them. But for the first time in the history of war, the carbon and the debris can be measured as they are made — and what can be measured can, in time, be answered for.
Why an algorithm can be human
Four lenses on a war against the common home
The wounding of the earth by war is what happens when the algorithm of a society — its weapons, its ledgers, its indifference — stops recognising the soil, the water and the air as anything worth sparing. AEGIS reads it through four dimensions.
Peace, justice and the preservation of creation are three absolutely interconnected themes, which cannot be separated.
Laudato Si', §92This is the thesis of the observatory. A conflict against a people and a conflict against their land are not two events but one; the bombed hospital and the poisoned aquifer, the amputee child and the deforested slope, belong to a single wound. Peace is the one key that opens both locks — the wounded man and the wounded earth heal together, or not at all.
Six wounds
Six patterns of injury AEGIS names
Beneath the particular horror of each conflict, six patterns of injury recur — five inflicted on the earth, one on the human body itself. Each is measurable, each is sourced, and each names a form of harm that a conflict inflicts on the living, on the ground that must outlast them, and on the peace that must one day heal both.
The invisible ledger: annual emissions compared
Approximate share of global greenhouse-gas emissions (%)
CEOBS / SGR, 2022; sectoral shares from IEA and IMO reporting.
The observatory
Cases we cannot un-see
Statistics describe the shape of the phenomenon. These four cases describe its edge — the moments at which a strike, a breach or a sabotage forced the world to see that a war on a people is also a war on a place. Each ends with the question we are left holding.
Normative capacity
The protection gap
Across eight instruments of international law, AEGIS reads five tests of whether the environment is truly shielded in war: whether the instrument is in force, whether it binds those who never signed it, whether it protects the environment explicitly, whether it can be enforced in armed conflict, and whether it treats ecocide as a crime. No instrument passes all five.
| Legal instrument |
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What we count and why
The five tests are deliberately strict. In force records whether the instrument is a binding treaty today, not a draft or a proposal. Binding on non-signatories is marked yes only where a rule has hardened into customary international law reaching states that never ratified it — a threshold almost none of these instruments meet. Explicit environmental protection asks whether the environment is named as a protected object, not merely shielded by implication. Enforceable in armed conflict is marked partial wherever a prohibition exists but no reliable mechanism compels compliance mid-war. Covers ecocide as crime is the strictest test of all: no existing instrument yet criminalises ecocide as an autonomous crime under international law. The reading is an editorial synthesis by AEGIS and does not substitute the primary instruments listed in the Methodology.
Drivers of conflict-ecology damage
What makes the earth porous to war
The scale of the harm tells us how much. Risk factors tell us why. Six drivers recur across the literature on war and the environment — and, like the wounds themselves, they are structural and designed before they are accidental.
The human algorithm
Seven principles for peace and the biosphere
The common home is not a spoil of any conflict. AEGIS advocates seven principles — opened and sealed by peace — for any belligerent, any negotiator and any reconstruction that follows.
Methodology
How this observatory reads the data
Sources
Editorial notes
Conflict-emissions figures are drawn from peer-reviewed and grey literature and are inherently uncertain: military emissions are excluded from UNFCCC reporting under a 1997 Kyoto exemption, so every headline number is a lower bound rather than a ceiling.
The 230 Mt figure for the first 24 months of the Russia–Ukraine war and the 311 Mt mid-2025 cumulative estimate follow the Initiative on GHG Accounting of War; the Gaza estimates follow Crawford and Neimark. Both are contested by the belligerents and should be read as orders of magnitude.
The debris, tree-crop and infrastructure figures for Gaza and the Kakhovka assessment are taken from UNEP field and satellite reporting; the DRC tree-cover figure is from WRI Global Forest Watch.
The protection reading is an editorial synthesis by the AEGIS board of five objective tests. It records the presence and reach of instruments, not their enforcement, and does not substitute the primary legal texts.
We do not invent numbers. Where a datum is uncertain, we use the most conservative published figure and cite it. The theological framing draws on the encyclical Laudato Si' and is offered as an ethic of integral ecology, not as a partisan claim.