On July 28, 2022 the United Nations General Assembly (UNGA) voted—by a count of 161 in favor, with 8 abstentions — that living in a clean, healthy, and sustainable environment is a human right. Building on the similar declaration by the UN Human Rights Council in October 2021, the UNGA has now reinforced the notion that the growing assaults on human health through environmental hazards are transgressions against the basic rights and freedoms of people.

The field of environmental peacebuilding (EP) is uniquely positioned to help global citizens achieve these normative aims, but currently it is not adequately addressing the most significant factor preventing people enjoying these declared human rights: Toxic pollution. Thus, a critical next step for EP research and practice is to explicitly integrate environmental management into its scope of action and to account for environmental violence that comes.

Presently, the field of EP addresses many of the critical issues related to negative human outcomes from environmental change, especially violent conflict. Yet the majority of its literature focuses on natural resource management as opposed to environmental management.  Its primary focus is access, distribution, and use of resources (NRM), and protecting human health and the environment from human-produced pollution. As I have highlighted elsewhere, toxic pollution concerns are explicitly named in the origins of environmental peacebuilding (and especially in considerations of the toxic remnants of war), yet they are otherwise largely  absent.

If EP is to be geared towards more than just a negative peace or the absence of direct violence (as it has been defined most often to date), then it must focus on what is necessary to attain positive peace. This will require environmental justice, and environmental violence is the principal environmental injustice today.

Assessing the Evidence

My new book, Environmental Violence: In the Earth System and the Human Niche (Cambridge University Press), develops a more complete picture of how human-produced pollution creates direct and indirect harm to human health and flourishing. The numbers associated with environmental violence are staggering. Even if we consider only toxic air pollution such as particulate matter, at least 9 million people die early and several millions more experience sickness and non-fatal harm each year. These fatalities make up almost 20 percent of global all-cause mortality annually. The death rate from toxic pollution production is still increasing today, with a 7 percent increase between 2015 and 2021 and a 66 percent increase since 2000. As a result of human exposure to particulate matter, which the global average human exposure rate now registers at 3 times the level recommended by the World Health Organization, the AQLI estimates that global life expectancy could drop by 2.2 years.

It is hard to imagine that at least 6 million people, though some recent estimates indicate the real loss is at least 10 million people, died of exposure to particulate matter in the atmosphere last year than perished as a result of violent conflict and terrorism. But to put these figures in perspective, approximately 90,000 people die annually due to armed conflict. In total, there were about 1 million armed conflict deaths between 2000-2017, and about 2.25 million between 1990 and 2017. Globally, another 450,000 people perish annually via homicide. Thus, the sum of armed conflict and homicide deaths is 89 times less than the annual deaths attributable to human-produced toxic pollution. And, importantly, these toxic pollution early mortality estimates do not include deaths caused by climate change. It also does not include, for example, the 275 million Disability Adjust Life Years (that is, years of life spent sick and degraded from toxic pollution exposure) lived every year.

These estimates also do not include many other forms of environmental violence, such as extreme weather and heat-related deaths stemming from the growing effects of climate change. Coincidentally, countries most at risk of the effects of climate change are, in general, also those most impacted by toxic pollution. They also tend to be the poorest countries. Perversely, these countries are generally the least responsible for creating climate impacts. Nor do these estimates include a broad range of overall loss and damage, a topic that was central to the COP27 UN FCCC discussions this year in Egypt.  It is disturbing that while new UN declarations now recognize “environmental violence” as a violation of human rights, it is also the most widely distributed and experienced form of violence today.

A Promising Pathway

To wrestle down the myriad pathways of harm laid out above, while also addressing associated or exacerbated ills such as direct violence, environmental peacekeeping is primely placed to leverage environmental management for peacebuilding. Indeed, there are instances where this has happened, though not always successfully—and not without persistent challenges. For example, as part of the Oslo Accords of 1993, Israel and Palestine agreed to jointly manage and coordinate transboundary hazardous waste forming environmental peace agreement provisions. The negotiations of these provisions for managing hazardous waste were hailed as a success for an approach that saw environmental issues serve as a point of cooperation rather than a cause for conflict. According to its design, this provision would have effectively protected human health and the environment for both parties. However, physical security concerns, institutional capacity constraints, and logistical shortcomings came into confluence in ways that meant that the agreement has largely failed to achieve its aims.

But other ripe opportunities exist to make the inclusion of environmental management into EP a seamless act. For example, environmental peacebuilders and researchers can extend the current focus on natural resource management to specifically include the potential pollution impacts of their programming. Many of these projects already include an Environmental Impact Assessment or Environmental and Social Impact Assessment (ESIA), and these assessment tools are readily available and broadly applicable for applied and research aims alike. There are also opportunities to harness existing environmental protection policies to fund EP, with the Minamata Convention attempted in Colombia as only one example. In short, the list of open opportunities to integrate environmental management into EP is long.

Toxic pollution emissions, climate change driven hazards, and other human-produced environmental hazards are only increasing in their presence, frequency, and intensity. Concern for environmental risks and conflict is also on the rise, especially in light of Russia’s war of aggression in Ukraine. And the corresponding human security ills of vulnerability, displacement, degraded human health, and the potential for conflict—broadly defined—are concomitantly increasing. If the aims of the UN declarations for a safe environment as a human right are to be achieved, the need for environmental peacebuilding, and especially an EP that intentionally and explicitly integrates toxic pollution research and programming, is only growing.