FIRE · Fighting Insurgency, Ruining the Environment: towards an understanding of the causal relationship between conflict and forest fires
Horizon 2020 — Marie Skłodowska-Curie Actions
- Duration
- 2018-10-01 → 2020-09-30
- EU contribution
- €185,857
- Participants
- 1
- Scheme
- MSCA-IF-EF-ST
Lines connect the coordinator with its partners.
Results in brief
Fighting Insurgency, Ruining the Environment: towards an understanding of the causal relationship between conflict and forest fires
The FIRE (Fighting Insurgency Ruining the Environment) project was built on three main research questions: 1- How do armed conflicts affect human-environment systems? 2- How are forest fires used discursively by conflicting groups? 3- Is there a positive correlation between inter- and intra-state conflict and forest fires? In this research project, the overall objective was to produce reliable data on the selected cases in Turkey, Israel, the Palestinian Territories, and Syria that can allow us to better understand the conflict-human environment nexus and can provide insights for a broader sustained engagement with the correlation of their interrelationship. Building on qualitative research (i.e. content analysis, interviews, fieldwork) we have identified certain regions where forest fires and conflict simultaneously occur. We have then used open-access fire data provided by NASA (MODIS) and conflict data provided by the Uppsala Conflict Data Program (UCDP) to focus on the selected areas, and analysed the correlation between the occurrence of fires and instances of manifest conflict. This interdisciplinary research aimed to make an academic contribution (i.e. using available data to explain the relationship between fires and conflict) as well as raise societal awareness on environmental damage related to the conflict. With an interdisciplinary approach, the project produced charts, maps, and in-depth analysis of the different accounts of forest fires and conflict in the selected cases. Given the limited literature that focuses on the environmental damage and tree loss in the Middle East, which is not only due to climate stress but also to ongoing conflict, the project’s findings will be of interest to many other communities, beyond its original focus on the specific cases of Turkey, Israel, the Palestinian Territories and Syria, and will help further integrating environmental degradation and restoration/restitution to peacebuilding projects.
Data: CORDIS, © European Union
Project objective
Despite the growing interest in the relationship between environmental degradation and political conflict, most discussions take the direction of causality for granted and try to understand whether or the extent to which environmental factors such as climate change-related drought lead or contribute to violent conflict. The aim of this project is to reverse the causality and look into how conflicts contribute to environmental degradation. It will do this by focusing on forest fires in the Middle East through a detailed study of the cases of Turkey, Syria and Israel. The questions that will be addressed in this context are: (1) Is there a positive correlation between inter- and intra-state conflict and forest fires? (2) How do conflicts affect ecosystems and biodiversity as well as the lives of inhabitants? (3) How are forest fires used discursively by conflicting groups? The proposed project is going to make a significant contribution to the existing literature in five ways: (1) It will explore whether actors deliberately damage the environment to gain the upperhand in a conflict; (2) it will focus on an underexplored aspect of the environment-conflict nexus, forest fires; (3) it will carry out fieldwork in three “non-European” cases which have spillover effects on European societies; (4) it will introduce novel techniques to the study of this problem, notably Geographical Information System (GIS) and digital Remote Sensing (RS); (5) it will combine “hard data” with qualitative analysis obtained through critical discourse analysis, elite interviews, and political ethnography to understand the political, economic and cultural dimensions of the environment-conflict relationship, thereby straddling the lines between natural and social sciences in a truly interdisciplinary spirit.
Original text from CORDIS.
Participants
- LUNDS UNIVERSITET · LundCoordinatorSweden
Links
Data: CORDIS, © European Union