Armed conflicts from Kuwait to Vietnam continue to remind us that the environment can be deeply scarred by war, a reality that climate risks now magnify for many dependent communities. But while a certain amount of environmental damage may be considered inherent to war, the destruction must and does have limits.

This post by ICRC legal advisers Vanessa Murphy and Helen Obregón, which launches a series on war, law and the environment co-hosted with the Conflict and Environment Observatory, provides an overview of the ICRC’s updated Guidelines on the Protection of the Natural Environment in Armed Conflict and sets out measures to accelerate better respect for international humanitarian law (IHL) rules protecting the natural environment.

Today’s climate and environmental crises threaten the very survival of humanity. The Climate and Environment Charter for Humanitarian Organizations, the result of a collective effort across a wide range of humanitarian organizations and climate and sustainability experts, sets out seven commitments aiming to galvanize and steer collective humanitarian action in response to these crises.

In this post, IFRC Climate Change Coordinator Tessa Kelly and ICRC Policy Advisors Catherine-Lune Grayson and Amir Khouzam describe the collective commitments outlined in the Charter, why it matters, and signal to organizations across the humanitarian sector that it is open for their signatures.

Implementing international humanitarian law’s (IHL) precautionary measures for both defending and attacking forces is a challenge in urban conflict. Urban battles pose heightened risk to civilians and critical infrastructure and much is needed to prepare forces to engage military objectives only and avoid incidental civilian harm.

In this post, part of our special series on urban warfare, Sahr Muhammedally, Director for MENA & South Asia at the Center for Civilians in Conflict (CIVIC), outlines a checklist on ways to protect civilians for commanders preparing for urban operations.

Protecting family links and helping to prevent and, whenever possible, resolve cases of missing persons requires action during armed conflict and other situations of violence but also in peacetime and post-conflict. Families of missing persons bring special insight into the long-term impact of conflict and violence on individuals, on the fabric of society and on the relationship between citizens and the State.

As we mark the 150th anniversary of the Central Tracing Agency, Eva Svoboda, ICRC Deputy-Director for Law and Policy, and Filipa Schmitz Guinote, ICRC Policy Advisor, reflect on what the shared experience of families of missing persons can teach us about war and about some of the factors which are important for peace, such as trust and inclusion.

Military legal advisers today play a key role during various military operations, including aerial targeting in urban areas, and State militaries will likely increasingly rely on them as warfare becomes more urbanized. By providing legal advice to commanders on a range of issues, military lawyers help to ‘operationalize’ international humanitarian law (IHL), transforming the rules of war into realities on the ground. But what does legal advice during aerial targeting look like and what is really at stake?

In this latest post in the urban warfare special series, author of The War Lawyers and Lecturer in Political Geography at Newcastle University Dr. Craig Jones explains how the risk to civilians during aerial targeting is significant even when legal advisers are ‘in the loop’, and that good faith interpretations of IHL rules on the conduct of hostilities must be applied in order to protect civilians during military operations in urban areas.

As long as there have been cities, wars have been staged within them. While the term ‘urban warfare’ conjures more recent images of hollowed buildings and human suffering from Mosul and Mekelle, its history dates back several millennia.

In this post, part of our blog series on urban warfare, ICRC’s historian Daniel Palmieri takes us through the archives of war and the city.

Urban warfare is not a new phenomenon; cities have featured as a stage for violence since humans began building them, and images in recent years – from Aleppo, Mosul, and Sana’a to Marawi, Mogadishu, Donetsk, and Mekelle – leave little room for doubt that towns and cities will remain primary battlegrounds for future armed conflicts. We can expect belligerents to continue using traditional methods such as sieges, tunnels, booby traps, artillery, mortars and snipers and complement these with modern capabilities such as new technologies of warfare and precision. Against this evolving backdrop, we must reflect urgently and in earnest about the ways in which contemporary urban conflicts are fought and the devastating humanitarian consequences they cause to cities and their populations.

In this post, Laurent Gisel, Head of the Arms and Conduct of Hostilities Unit, Pilar Gimeno, Head of the Protection of Civilians Unit, Ken Hume, Head of the Armed and Security Forces Unit, and Abby Zeith, Legal Adviser, launch a new series on urban warfare. In the coming months and years, the series will feature contributions from a diverse range of experts debating and exploring the humanitarian, legal, military and other challenges raised by urban warfare, such as the choice of means and methods of warfare during urban combat, the practices of non-State armed groups, the role of law and military lawyers, siege tactics, underground warfare, precautionary measures, human shields, and lessons learned from recent urban operations.

Contemporary non-international armed conflicts are increasingly fought by a myriad of non-State actors, often engaging in hostilities against a common enemy and at times operating under the same coalition. These complex situations raise pivotal challenges for classification purposes, whereby applying traditional criteria might be unfeasible or lead to conclusions that do not reflect the reality on the ground.

In this post, a reply to last year’s blog on the subject, Chiara Redaelli – Research Fellow at the Geneva Academy of International Humanitarian Law and Human Rights and Visiting Professor at Lille Catholic University, Law School – analyses the possibility to aggregate the intensity of violence of groups that fight a common enemy in a geographical and temporal continuum.

The digital transformation of humanitarian operations raises (at least) two existential issues: one, how do humanitarians preserve what is unique about their work amidst growing dependence on uncontrolled commercial partners; and two, how do humanitarians avoid being exploited for their qualified immunity? The answer is to make an implicit assumption in humanitarian law explicit: humanitarian organizations have a duty to integrity.

As part of a growing debate around the humanitarian use of digital cash assistance, Sean Martin McDonald, CEO of FrontlineSMS and co-founder of Digital Public, highlights the importance of organizations’ responsibility to ensure that partners operating under their license abide by their humanitarian duties.

Misinformation, disinformation and hate speech (MDH) has become a ubiquitous feature of the ‘information’ or ‘digital’ age. In conflict settings, so-called ‘fake news’ can lead to death, injury, imprisonment, discrimination or displacement. It can, directly or indirectly, fuel vicious cycles of violence and further entrench already protracted conflicts.

Ahead of a discussion on ‘information disorders’ in the humanitarian sector, Sandrine Tiller, Strategic Adviser at Médecins Sans Frontières, Pierrick Devidal, ICRC Policy Adviser, and Delphine van Solinge, ICRC Digital Risk Adviser, discuss how harmful information online or MDH is a growing yet overlooked risk in humanitarian settings, with potentially far-reaching implications for people affected by armed conflict and other situations of violence.