Guest Editorial: The Legacy of Conflicts

rooms the misery of human suffering. When conflicts are over, the news usually concentrates on reconstruction issues. However, the legacy of conflicts might also include longer-term security threats, such as environmental degradation, damaged infrastructure, and conflict related risks to human health. Because of poor environmental administration in postconflict countries, environmental and health risks may not be addressed properly. For the past 5 years the United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) has been working in countries where the natural and human environments have been damaged as a direct or indirect consequence of conflict. In 1999, as the ruins of targeted industrial facilities in Kosovo, Serbia, and Montenegro were still smoldering, UNEP teams conducted the first postconflict environmental assessment there. UNEP postconflict environmental assessments seek to identify immediate risks to human health and livelihoods and provide recommendations on priorities for clean-up, sustainable use of natural resources, and for strengthening environmental governance. In the Balkans UNEP concluded that there were several environmental hot spots—such as targeted industrial facilities and oil refineries in Pancevo, Novi Sad, Kragujevac, and Bor—where immediate clean-up was needed to avoid further threats to human health. The Danube was at risk because of leakage of more than 60 different chemicals, including mercury, from Pancevo. These findings led the international community for the first time to include environmental clean-up in their postconflict humanitarian aid. Since then, UNEP has conducted postconflict activities in Afghanistan, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Iraq, Liberia, the Occupied Palestinian Territories, and Serbia and Montenegro. UNEP's report on Afghanistan's postconflict environmental assessment identified the pressures on the natural resources, including waters, soils, forests, and wildlife, and linked poor environmental management in the waste and water sectors directly to human health risks (UNEP 2003a). UNEP found that most of the country is subject to an alarming degree of environmental degradation exacerbated by poverty and population growth. Moreover, many of Afghanistan's environmental problems can be traced back to the collapse of local and national forms of governance and resource management, highlighting the urgent need to rebuild the Afghan environmental administration. In early 2003 UNEP published a Desk Study on the Environment in Iraq (UNEP 2003b). The report provided a timely overview of key environmental issues in the context of the recent conflict in Iraq. It also took into consideration the chronic environmental stress already in place from the Iran–Iraq war of the 1980s, the 1991 Gulf War, the unintended effects of the UN …