Connecting Disarmament with the Enviromental Pillar of the SDGs

Oct 15, 2018 | Doug Weir
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The UN Secretary-General’s Agenda for Disarmament finds that “there is not yet a general understanding on the many areas where the successful achievement of disarmament objectives would benefit the implementation of the Sustainable Development Goals” (SDGs). As armed conflict is widely viewed as sustainable development in reverse, this should be a matter of concern for everyone at First Committee.

Nowhere is this lack of understanding more apparent than in the debate over the linkages between disarmament, the protection of civilians, and the environment—which is one of the three pillars of sustainable development. This is not entirely the fault of states, as the SDGs and their indicators lack the degree of specificity required to fully capture the environmental dimensions of conflicts and military activities.

Nevertheless, the strength of the SDG framework’s generality is that it allows for flexible interpretations that can serve as entry points for more meaningful analysis and, hopefully, action. For example, the Agenda highlights the impact of contamination from remnants of war, and the use of nuclear, chemical, and biological weapons, on SDGs 14 and 15—on life on land and in the sea. However, curiously it stops short of making the connection between the illicit arms flows referenced in SDG 16, arms transfers and the environment. This is in spite of recent research by INTERPOL that has found that the illicit exploitation of natural resources is the single largest overall category of finance to conflicts today, estimated at a 38 per cent share of illicit flows to armed groups in conflict. When combined with their illicit taxation and extortion that figures rises to 64 per cent.

That the Agenda draws attention to the means through which the use of improvised explosive devices (IEDs) can cripple infrastructure and cause environmental contamination—as was the case with Islamic State’s deliberate attacks on Iraqi oil infrastructure—is welcome. As are the Agenda’s references to the environmental consequences of unplanned explosions at munitions sites, and the reverberating impact of explosive weapons. And yet its implementation plan contains no explicit references to the environment, or the pressing need to determine and articulate the environmental costs of weapons throughout their lifecycles.

You do not have to look particularly closely at any given disarmament issue to begin to ask these questions. Consider cyber attacks on industrial facilities; the use of cheap drones to sabotage environmentally risky targets; the ability of autonomous weapons to judge the environmental consequences of attacks; or the need for reviews into the environmental risks from emerging technologies that go beyond the overly permissive framework of international humanitarian law. Aligning the global disarmament agenda with the SDGs is a worthwhile goal But it is a goal that will first require far more attention to the environmental dimensions of weapons. States, civil society, and the UN should welcome this challenge, because the insights that it can provide could offer new avenues to address the harm that weapons cause to civilians, to ecosystems, and to sustainable development itself.