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Summary
- Nations are not required to report military-related greenhouse gas emissions as part of their national climate targets, despite military emissions accounting for around 5.5% of total global emissions.
- Researchers have found that the immediate, intermediate, and long-term emissions from war in Gaza and Ukraine are substantial, with reconstruction efforts contributing significantly to overall carbon emissions.
- Organizations like CEOBS are calling for the UNFCCC to change its reporting framework to include military emissions, with some countries, like the U.S., already setting climate mitigation policies for military emissions.
What if I told you that nations around the world were ignoring a significant amount of their greenhouse gas emissions by omitting an entire dirty sector from their tally? Would you be horrified? Would you want to close that loophole so that parties to international agreements are required to report these hidden emissions as part of their national climate targets?
That is, of course, the case with the climate costs of warfare. Parties to the Paris Agreement are not required to report their military-related emissions as part of their climate plans and as a result these not-at-all-small emissions are mostly absent from Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs). Best estimates put military emissions at around 5.5% of total global emissions—but that 5.5% figure only covers the routine emissions that result from maintaining a military and not the emissions from actually dropping bombs, deploying troops, or otherwise waging war.
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To be clear, none of this is to discount the humanitarian crisis, the attacks and hostage-taking, or unprecedented death toll, but the environmental costs of have been largely overlooked—as they often are.
Read the full post at Legal Planet.
