Nature of War: The Political Ecology of the 2020 Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict

The Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has had profound consequences for both the political and physical geography of the South Caucasus region. Since the fighting of the 1990s there has been a relative status quo, with a militarised line of contact separating the two sides. This changed on September 27 2020, when intense fighting erupted along the whole of the front, and especially in the south-east. After a month and a half, fighting concluded on 10 November 2020 which saw the implementation of a ceasefire which ceded large portions of the Nagorno-Karabakh (Artsakh) Republic to Azerbaijan. There has yet to be an investigation on the kinds of changes to human and natural systems that the most recent conflict (2020) engendered. In response to this research lacuna, this paper asked whether the effects of the 2020 armed conflict had a significant effect on the region’s agricultural systems. This paper approached the question by examining per-pixel NDVI metrics - derived from Landsat 8 composites from April through June - before and after the conflict. These per-pixel metrics were correlated with conflict data from ACLED. This approach aims to test the hypothesis that areas which witnessed the most intense fighting saw significant drops in NDVI, indicating land fallowness and abandonment. The results from this study indicate that conflict intensity has a significant effect on vegetation health (p-value < 2.2e-16), and supports the hypothesis that conflict leads to a decrease in NDVI, however conflict intensity on its own does not have strong explanatory power for estimating changes in NDVI (R2 0.09667) and future work ought to segment the study area in order to obtain a non-obfuscated regression coefficient (coefficient -0.0057322).

纳戈尔诺-卡拉巴赫（Nagorno-Karabakh）冲突对南高加索地区的政治与自然地理均产生了深远影响。自20世纪90年代的武装冲突以来，该区域长期维持相对僵持的态势，双方以军事化接触线相互分隔。这一局面在2020年9月27日被彻底打破：全线爆发激烈交火，尤以东南部地区战况最为惨烈。历经一个半月的战事，双方于2020年11月10日达成停火协议，纳戈尔诺-卡拉巴赫（阿尔察赫，Artsakh）共和国的大片领土被割让予阿塞拜疆，战事随之宣告结束。目前学界尚未有针对此次2020年最新冲突所引发的人类与自然系统变化展开的系统性研究。针对这一研究空白，本文旨在探讨2020年武装冲突的影响是否对该区域的农业系统造成了显著冲击。

本文采用冲突发生前后（4月至6月）的Landsat 8合成影像反演得到的逐像素归一化植被指数（Normalized Difference Vegetation Index, NDVI）来解答上述问题，并将该逐像素指标与武装冲突地点与事件数据项目（Armed Conflict Location & Event Data Project, ACLED）的冲突数据进行关联分析。本研究的核心目标是验证如下假说：交火烈度最高的区域，其归一化植被指数值会出现显著下降，这一现象可间接反映土地休耕与弃耕的发生。

本研究结果显示，冲突烈度对植被健康状况存在显著影响（p值 < 2.2e-16），支持了冲突会导致归一化植被指数下降的假说；但仅依靠冲突烈度本身，对归一化植被指数变化的解释力较为有限（决定系数$R^2=0.09667$）。后续研究应当对研究区域进行分区处理，以获得无偏的回归系数（回归系数为-0.0057322）。