The Missing Layer of Environmental Peacebuilding: Why Soil Biodiversity Matters in Post-War Recovery

Soils are fundamental to environmental resilience, food security, and human wellbeing, with soil organisms underpinning nutrient cycling, vegetation recovery, and long-term ecosystem stability. Despite this, soil biodiversity remains largely absent from monitoring programmes, especially within post-conflict environmental assessment and recovery planning. As modern conflicts increasingly degrade landscapes, there is an urgent need for a framework that enables rapid, robust evaluation of soil health in their aftermath.

Fewer than 10% of peace agreements include substantive environmental restoration provisions, reflecting persistent policy gaps and the lack of standardised, comparable environmental data – including for soils. Existing assessments prioritise physicochemical indicators while overlooking biological dimensions, leaving critical aspects of soil system damage undocumented.

Using examples from conflicts worldwide, this presentation presents the findings of the first meta-analysis of war-related impacts on soil biodiversity and highlights the key limitations in the existing research. The analysis evaluates how armed conflict alters not only species richness and abundance but also the functional composition of soil communities, focusing on shifts in key functional groups and the ecosystem services they underpin (i.e. decomposers, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, detritivores and ecosystem engineers). The study also examines how soil functional diversity relates to ecosystem recovery trajectories and potential indicators for post-conflict restoration. By critically comparing methodologies used across case studies – ranging from traditional morphological identification to molecular metabarcoding approaches – the study assesses the reliability, comparability, and spatial coverage of current evidence.

To address limitations in this field, we outline a pathway for integrating soil ecology into post-conflict assessment from determination of effective bioindicators to harmonised protocols for sampling, processing, and analysis. A comprehensive framework must incorporate biological indicators alongside chemical contamination and physical disturbance to capture the full scope of ecological disruption. Establishing consistent, biodiversity-inclusive methodologies will improve evaluations of wartime impacts, support evidence-based remediation, and strengthen the role of environmental stewardship within peacebuilding processes.