ECO-WAR-NET
Contact person: Nandor Knust
Status: Pre-project
ECO-WAR-NET will ask what happens to the legal protection of the environment in armed conflict when the facts on which that protection depends are increasingly produced by machines. International humanitarian law protects the natural environment through the prohibition on "widespread, long-term and severe" damage and the requirement that environmental harm enter the proportionality assessment, yet in four decades these rules have gone almost entirely unapplied — not, the project will argue, because states disagree about the norms, but because the law demands factual determinations about the extent, severity and expected consequences of harm that it has no method for making. Artificial intelligence is now transforming this evidentiary landscape on both sides of the strike: after the event, machine-learning change detection, satellite remote sensing and open-source investigation document conflict damage at scale; before the event, digital twins — AI-driven computational replicas of oceans, battlespaces and infrastructures already entering military planning — simulate how an environment would respond to intervention, making credible prediction of environmental harm possible for the first time. Taking the Arctic marine environment as its object — the ocean region where the law is least developed, where a fragile, slow-recovering ecosystem makes any harm most likely to be long-term and severe, where military activity and undersea-infrastructure vulnerability are intensifying fastest, and where Norway's own security and ocean-governance stakes are highest — the project will ask whether, when and with what authority algorithmically generated and simulated evidence can ground — or be demanded for — a legal judgement, and how such evidence reshapes the legitimacy of targeting decisions, drawing on the Black Sea, Red Sea and Baltic as the contemporary practice against which the Arctic framework will be tested. To be anchored at the Norwegian Centre for the Law of the Sea (NCLOS) at UiT The Arctic University of Norway — Norway's national centre on UNCLOS, marine environmental law and Arctic ocean governance — the project would unite NCLOS's IHL/ICL and law-of-the-sea scholarship with NUPI's expertise on the data, modelling and machine-learning systems through which militaries render the world targetable, green criminology, and INTERPRT's forensic-visual practice at NTNU, within TRUST — The Norwegian Centre for Trustworthy AI, whose Action Cluster on AI in Armed Conflict the PI co-leads. ECO-WAR-NET would build a machine-readable ontology of Arctic marine conflict harm, theorise the conditions under which AI-derived evidence can carry legal weight, validate the reconstructed doctrine experimentally with legal practitioners, and prototype EcoProp, an AI-supported methodology for anticipatory environmental proportionality assessment — testing, for the first time, how far legal judgement itself is computable, and where human judgement must remain, as simulation and algorithmic evidence become the infrastructure of decision-making in war.