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s global climate experts converge in Belém for COP30, certain policy gaps remain beyond prominent global discussions. For nations constantly navigating geopolitical faultlines, international pledges often feel like tragically inapplicable theories. One of the core issues that endangers global climate action is the systematic exclusion of the carbon footprint generated by military activities and armed conflicts.
“In the Kyoto Protocol, when talking about military emissions, the governments emphasised that military emissions should not be declared because it is a threat to national security. This issue wasn’t brought up again, and it remained optional to disclose the emissions from military,” says Sana Muhammad, an organiser with the People’s Climate Front in Pakistan.
Under international frameworks such as the Paris Agreement, reporting of military emissions remains voluntary and, in many cases, incomplete or absent. This has created a military emissions gap, as armed forces operate in a zone beyond climate accountability.
The global carbon footprint of conflicts is largely unregulated under existing climate frameworks. This omission is rooted in early climate treaties and has not been adequately challenged.
The carbon footprint from military emissions is composed of the immense fuel consumption required for less (fuel) efficient aircraft, naval vessels and ground transportation; the emissions from the detonation of ordnance; the destruction and subsequent carbon-intensive rebuilding of infrastructure; and the massive release of stored carbon from damaged forests and ecosystems.
“No domestic carbon tax, no solar park installation and no NDC can compensate for the immediate, catastrophic and systemic environmental damage and resource diversion caused by armed conflicts and security imperatives,” says Muhammad. “There are two ways of working for climate change: one, to let the structure stand and do something within it or, two, to acknowledge that the current structure is flawed and needs replacing. Right now, the fossil fuel economy benefits from wars and military action. The $1 billion Loss and Damage Fund is a tiny fraction of the global military spending.”
A failure of global climate architecture is the failure to confront the military emissions.
She says a discussion on demilitarisation is the only way forward. A failure of global climate architecture is the failure to confront the military emissions.
There is a widening gap between the ambition of global climate policy and the outcomes of conflicts. The wound bleeds away trillions in resources. It also diverts critical political attention from issues of environmental degradation. Research has demonstrated that the environmental damage from the defence sector exceeds many better scrutinised industrial sectors. In regions with perpetual tensions, military exercises and the occasional flare ups release emissions that are orders of magnitude greater than what a domestic industrial policy can hope to mitigate. Yet, most nation states are unwilling to subject their core defensive capabilities to an international carbon audit.
The recent India-Pakistan conflict has resulted, among other things, in the threat of endangering fresh water security in the region. Climate change, leading to accelerated glacial melt and shifting monsoon patterns, is already stressing the shared natural resource. The potential for a nuclear exchange, meanwhile, makes every civilian climate mitigation effort pale in comparison. In the current framework, the national security imperative to maintain a nuclear deterrent overrides climate concerns. Scarce resources are thus not available for mitigation measures to combat problems like smog and extreme heat exposure.
Mehr Fatima Husain, a journalist, says, “When a state must allocate a big chunk of its resources towards national security, it can often not make adequate investments to implement sustainable practices.”
The conversation at global conferences should courageously move beyond unenforceable pledges and confront the smoke, blood and debt generated by geopolitical tensions. The success of future summits rests on their ability to acknowledge and integrate the inescapable issues of national security.
The writer is a freelance climate journalist from Lahore.