Terraforming Warfare and International Law - Opinio Juris
Terraforming Warfare and International Law
25 Feb Terraforming Warfare and International Law
25.02.26
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[Dr Saeed Bagheri is Lecturer (Assistant Professor) in International Law at the University of Reading School of Law. His research focuses on the law on the use of force and international humanitarian law.
Gerhard Kemp is Professor of Criminal Law at UWE Bristol in the United Kingdom, with his research focusing on international criminal law, comparative criminal law, and transitional justice.]
The Office of the Prosecutor (OTP) of the International Criminal Court (ICC) has recognised in its Policy on Addressing Environmental Damage Through the Rome Statute (which was launched in December 2025) that ecological damage can be a significant factor in the various ICC crimes (war crimes, genocide, crimes against humanity, and the crime of aggression). The challenge is to turn this acknowledgement into effective prosecutorial actions. As Maud Sarliève and Pauline Martini noted, the OTP Policy:
represents a significant development in international criminal law (ICL), clarifying that environmental destruction may lead to criminal accountability for individuals, and not to merely regulatory sanctions or civil liability.
International humanitarian law (IHL) and international criminal law (ICL) have long struggled to account for environmental destruction during armed conflict. Environmental harm has been doctrinally marginalised, treated as secondary to civilian casualties or property damage, and constrained by legal thresholds that are rarely operationalised in practice. At the same time, debates on “ecocide” and other ecocentric crimes remain largely prospective, with limited traction in existing accountability mechanisms. These limitations are starkly illustrated by the ongoing hostilities in Gaza, where environmental harm has reached levels that far exceed what international law typically treats as incidental collateral damage. Building on our recent article in the Journal of International Criminal Justice, this post presents a conceptually grounded assessment of the Gaza situation, relevant to similar cases of what we call “terraforming warfare” . We argue that the Gaza conflict exposes a critical accountability gap: international law lacks an adequate conceptual and legal framework for addressing systematic, landscape-altering environmental destruction as a method of warfare. To address this gap, we propose the concept of terraforming warfare, understood as forms of hostilities that intentionally transform the natural and built environment in ways that undermine long-term civilian life. While this anthropocentric (as opposed to ecocentric) framing can certainly be critiqued, we contend it is normatively defensible and realistic. Indeed, when properly interpreted, current IHL and ICL legal standards, especially those concerning war crimes related to environmental damage, are applicable to such conduct and ought to be enforced, even in the absence of a specific crime of ecocide. The OTP Policy on Environmental Crimes articulates this anthropocentric yet realistic view on how best to approach crimes that affect the environment and, by extension, human existence. The Policy recognises that environmental protection has inherent value. Regarding criminal liability for environmental harm, it states:
There are significant synergies between the fight against impunity for international crimes and preventing environmental damage. Destroying, degrading, or polluting the natural environment will often directly impact humans, such as by causing people to be displaced, inflicting great suffering or injury on victims, or even causing death. If a causal link can be established between a perpetrator’s intentional actions and an objective element of a Rome Statute crime, those acts may constitute Rome Statute crimes both during armed conflict and in times of peace.
We<br>submit that “terraforming warfare” is a particularly egregious form of<br>environmental destruction and firmly within the parameters of Rome Statute<br>crimes, and war crimes in particular.
Terraforming Warfare: Concept and Legal Relevance
We use<br>“terraforming” as a term borrowed from science fiction, typically used to<br>describe the artificial transformation of an environment to make it accessible<br>for settlement. The term ‘terraforming’ joins ‘terra’ (land) with ‘forming’,<br>the ‘making’ or ‘moulding’ of land, land-making. In the settler-colonial<br>projects described in Amitav Ghosh’s book<br>on the subject, the phenomenon of terraforming was ‘fundamentally conflictual;<br>it was a mode of warfare, of a distinctive kind’ (p. 55). In the context of<br>armed conflict, however, terraforming takes on a darker meaning: the<br>intentional transformation of an environment into one that is hostile to human<br>life. Terraforming warfare refers not to isolated attacks causing environmental<br>harm, but to patterns of...