CiR2P Option 32 | Establish no-fly zones

DISCUSSION:

No-Fly Zones (NFZs) can provide meaningful and rapidly deployable protection to civilians from climate-related harm. No-fly zones involve an outside actor or actors prohibiting some or all aircraft flight over a specified territory and will undertake measures to intercept aircraft violating the prohibition or otherwise punish those responsible for violations. Key policy decisions include what aircraft is restricted and where; and what enforcement mechanisms and broader penalties will apply for no-fly zone violation.

Aerial assets have long been deployed to deal with climate-related issues. For example, helicopters are a critical component to any search and rescue operation in the aftermath of a climate-related impacts, and also contribute significantly to the movement of essential emergency medical, food and water supplies around a country.  

Airborne relief can also involve fixed-wing air drops of food and medical supplies to regions that are suffering the slow onset of climate-related impacts such as protracted drought and water shortages. While food airdrops can be expensive, and are most effect when coordinated with ground forces, they can be nonetheless essential to the immediate survival prospects of populations located in inaccessible (perhaps due to terrain and or conflict) climate-ravaged regions.

Other relevant uses of aerial assets in climate adaptation and mitigation strategies include aerial fighting and surveillance of environmental assets (ie addressing illegal logging of carbon stocks).

But it is another and quite significant step to argue that a coalition of foreign states should use military assets to establish and enforce a no-fly zone in a sovereign country to protect civilians from climate-related harm.

An instance that may attract consideration of no-fly zones as a policy response could involve instances where hostile government forces were using air power to destroy environmental infrastructure (eg water, sanitation, waste, and energy infrastructures) critical to sustain human life and livelihoods in regions suffering severe climate change impacts (eg severe drought zones). Aerial bombardment of ‘environmental infrastructure’ has become a normalised tactic in current and recent conflicts in the Middle East and North Africa including in Libya, Syria, Yemen.

The legal instruments that offer pathways towards establishing a climate-informed no-fly zone to protect civilians include Protocol I and II to the 1976 Convention on the Prohibition of Military or Any Other Hostile Use of Environmental Modification Techniques. As part of the basic rules pertaining to warfare, Article 35 prohibits ‘methods or means of warfare which are intended, or may be expected, to cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment’; while Article 54 states that ‘it is prohibited to attack, destroy, remove or render useless objects indispensable to the survival of the civilian population’, which includes civilian infrastructure such as ‘drinking water installations and supplies and irrigation networks’. Militaries are to avoid attacking such installations so as not ‘to leave the civilian population with such inadequate food or water as to cause starvation or force its movement’.

It should also be noted that since the 1990s, the UK and the US have established no-fly zones in several conflict zones with and without legal cover from the Security Council. For example, a no-fly zone was established in Bosnia in 1993 with Security Council authorisation, while in Iraq in 1991 and 2003 without authorisation.