Peace Can Be Bad for Forests: Study Maps a Hidden Research Gap in Conflict Zones

When a war ends, the world celebrates. But in the world’s tropical forests, the end of fighting can trigger a quiet catastrophe. A new systematic bibliometric review published in Environmental and Sustainability Indicators by Yolima Cortés and Javier Toro of Universidad Nacional de Colombia reveals a striking blind spot in environmental science: researchers have extensively studied deforestation, resilience, and armed conflict separately, but almost never together. Of 1,567 records initially retrieved from the Scopus database, only 349 survived rigorous filtering, and the resulting keyword network shows that resilience and armed conflict are not even directly linked in the scientific literature. The finding exposes a critical gap at precisely the moment when peace agreements around the world are reshaping forests faster than science can measure.

The scale of the problem is enormous. Global deforestation runs at roughly 10 million hectares per year, and the net loss of forest area between 2015 and 2020 was 4.7 million hectares annually, according to the FAO. Forests shelter 80 percent of amphibian species, 75 percent of bird species, and 68 percent of mammal species, yet in 2023 alone more than 1.4 million hectares vanished within forested Key Biodiversity Areas. Agriculture drives 73 percent of tropical forest loss, with international demand for beef, soybeans, and palm oil pushing frontier expansion across Africa and South America. But these headline numbers conceal a deeper complexity: the drivers of forest loss shift dramatically depending on the political and territorial context, and nowhere is that more true than in zones of armed conflict.

The review’s most counterintuitive insight concerns what researchers call gunpoint conservation. Armed actors sometimes function as de facto environmental regulators. In Colombia, the FARC-EP controlled vast stretches of Amazonian forest for decades, imposing measures that proved effective in conserving trees, restricting megaprojects, and deterring extractive activities through the threat of extortion and intimidation. Similar dynamics have been documented elsewhere: forced displacement of populations can reduce pressure on forests or even allow them to recover, as studies from Colombia to the Polish Carpathians have shown. War, in other words, is not uniformly bad for forests, and peace is not uniformly good for them.

The Colombian case provides the starkest quantitative evidence. After the 2016 peace agreement, deforestation in municipalities where the FARC-EP had been present surged by 177.4 percent, compared with 90.8 percent in municipalities without that presence. Overall, Colombian deforestation rose by 44 percent following the accord. Once the guerrillas demobilized and abandoned their forest strongholds, private investment flowed in, previously controlled forests became freely accessible, and governance vacuums opened across the landscape. In the Catatumbo municipality of Tibú, coca cultivation drove deforested areas up by as much as 709 percent. The pattern is not unique to Colombia: in the Iran–Iraq War borderlands of the Zagros forests, agricultural expansion increased deforestation between 1976 and 1984, and then accelerated again during the post-conflict period from 1988 to 1998.

To map the field, the authors conducted a PRISMA-guided search of Scopus covering 2002 to 2026, combining Boolean terms for deforestation, resilience, and peace, then filtering by document type and excluding sixteen irrelevant subject areas such as medicine, mathematics, and chemistry. The final corpus of 349 records was analyzed in VOSviewer, which builds networks where node size reflects keyword frequency and link thickness reflects co-occurrence strength. The resulting network is highly connected, with climate change and deforestation acting as central hubs, and the largest nodes being climate change, deforestation, biodiversity, sustainable development, and environmental protection. Resilience links directly to climate change, sustainable development, and biodiversity, but no direct link between resilience and armed conflict appears anywhere in the network.

That absence is the review’s central alarm. Armed conflict appears in the literature mainly as a bridge node connected to conservation, protected areas, and land use change, not to resilience thinking. Even more telling, the exact keywords peace, peacebuilding, postconflict, and peace agreement are barely represented among indexed keywords; peace-related concepts often appear in abstracts and full texts but are rarely formalized as author keywords, making the entire peacebuilding dimension nearly invisible to bibliometric searches. The literature, in short, discusses war’s environmental effects but has not built a coherent framework for assessing how forest social-ecological systems absorb, adapt to, or transform under the disturbances that conflict and peace processes create.

Conceptually, the review leans on the distinction between general and specific resilience. General resilience describes a system’s capacity to cope with any disturbance, including novel ones; specific resilience asks resilience of what, against what, in the formulation of Carpenter and colleagues. The authors frame forests as Forest Social-Ecological Systems, or FoSES: tightly coupled human-nature systems characterized by self-organization, the ability to spontaneously reorganize structures and functions through internal dynamics rather than external control. Resilience here is not a simple bounce back to a pre-disturbance state but an emergent property encompassing absorption, reorganization, adaptation, and transformation. Existing assessment methods, from remote sensing of vegetation optical depth in the Amazon to hierarchical frameworks of principles, criteria, and indicators, mostly measure generic resilience rather than the specific resilience of forests to deforestation in conflict-affected territories.

The publication landscape mirrors this fragmentation. The 349 records appeared across 173 sources, with a classic long-tail distribution: 113 journals published only one relevant article each, while the five most productive outlets, Ecology and Society, Forest Policy and Economics, Forest Ecology and Management, Ecological Indicators, and Trees, Forests and People, together accounted for just 14.3 percent of output. Geographically, the Global North dominates: the United States leads with 114 documents, followed by the United Kingdom with 62, Germany with 42, and Canada with 34. Colombia is the striking exception from the Global South, with 41 publications, a direct reflection of its half-century of internal armed conflict and its globally significant post-2016 peace experiment. Brazil, South Africa, Kenya, Mexico, and Indonesia contribute smaller but meaningful shares, each at different stages of forest transition from accelerated loss to reforestation.

From the corpus, the authors extracted a preliminary set of candidate indicators spanning eight dimensions: annual forest loss rate and forest fragmentation on the ecological side; effective institutional presence under governance; dependence of livelihoods on forests as a measure of social vulnerability; land tenure security; historical presence of armed actors as a conflict variable; changes following peace agreements or demobilization; and community organization as a marker of adaptive capacity and collective action. Each indicator draws on identifiable data sources, from Landsat and Global Forest Watch to cadastres and conflict event databases. The authors are careful to stress that these are candidates, not a validated composite index; operational definitions, weighting, sensitivity analysis, and validation with experts and local communities remain future work.

The stakes extend far beyond academic taxonomy. The reviewed literature proposes adaptive multilevel governance, community participation, territorial planning, restoration, and sustainable livelihood alternatives as responses to post-conflict forest loss, and recent work introduces concepts such as Protective Pathways to connect environmental peacebuilding with territorial recovery. But without an integrated, indicator-based framework for assessing the specific resilience of forest social-ecological systems, planners cannot identify which components of a landscape have the lowest response capacity or where interventions should be prioritized. The authors argue that resilience assessment should be built into peace agreements themselves, so that land abandonment, the removal of access restrictions, and expected deforestation surges are anticipated and negotiated in advance rather than discovered afterward. As peace processes unfold from Colombia to Ukraine, the review’s message is clear: ending a war is only the beginning of a second, quieter struggle, this one between accelerating human pressures on forests and the scientific tools we have to understand and manage them. Right now, the tools are lagging behind, and the forests are paying the price.

Subject of Research: Social-ecological resilience of forests to deforestation in armed conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article Title: A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts

Article References: Cortés, Y., & Toro, J. (2026). A systematic bibliometric review of social-ecological resilience to deforestation in conflict and peacebuilding contexts. Environmental and Sustainability Indicators, 32, Article 101530. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.indic.2026.101530

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: deforestation, social-ecological resilience, armed conflict, peacebuilding, Colombia, FARC-EP, forest governance, bibliometrics, VOSviewer, post-conflict, FoSES, environmental peacebuilding