The Environmental Impacts of War
More transparency is needed.
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According to the International Crisis Group, wars have been on the rise since 2012. There is still a civil war raging in Sudan. Ukraine continues to go head-to-head with Russia. The Myanmar Civil War has been waged for three years now with some of the most intense violent conflicts. Everyone’s attention is on the Israel-Hamas War. Wars have many negative impacts on humanity of course, including death, grief, trauma, and displacement. Another important impact of war is its effect on climate change and the environment. Climate change has not only the biggest negative impact on humanity but on the planet and all the species we share it with.
With fires, rockets, explosives, burning oil refineries, and gas-guzzling military vehicles, it makes sense that the carbon emissions of war would be high. But the first thing I noticed when I began looking into it was that there is minimal research and part of this problem is the difficulty in gathering the necessary information.
Carbon Footprint of War
In a 2022 report launched as a contribution to the COP27 climate negotiations by Scientists for Global Responsibility, they estimated the global military carbon footprint to be approximately 2,750 million tons of carbon dioxide equivalent (MtCO2e) or 5.5% of global emissions. Looking at the graph below you can see that if the world’s militaries were a single nation, it would be between India and Russia. Note that this study was done two years ago, and military conflicts are on the rise
This data is based on numbers of active military personnel, emissions from energy use at military bases, fuel consumption by military aircraft, ships, and land vehicles between military bases, and supply chain multipliers for military activities. The study concluded that the largest portion of the total footprint was the supply chain emissions. While they were able to source data on the numbers of active personnel, data on the other factors was obtained from only a small number of nations.
Also, this research is unable to account for the larger impacts of war such as, fires at oil storage buildings, damage to forests, crops and green spaces, construction of concrete strongholds, movement of refugees, transportation of humanitarian aid, aviation emissions, reconstruction after war, etc.
A 2023 scientific assessment was done by The Initiative on GHG accounting of war, to determine the greenhouse gas emissions from one year of the war between Russia and Ukraine. An assessment is a scientific evaluation of data, models, inferences and professional judgment to fill gaps in information. This assessment totaled 120 million tons of CO2 e, equivalent to the total greenhouse gas emissions produced over the same period from an entire small European country. They determined that nearly half of emissions were for post-war reconstruction and the next largest portion was due to fires, while warfare accounted for a smaller share and transport emissions from refugees were relatively low.
Lack of Transparency
There are many limitations to determining the actual number of emissions produced from war. Military emissions data was excluded from the 1997 Kyoto protocol thanks to insistence by the United States. In the 2015 Paris agreement, this was changed from exclusion to voluntary reporting, but only a handful of countries publish the bare minimum required by UN reporting guidelines and countries with the largest militaries choose to publish nothing at all.
Meanwhile, the United States Department of Defense is the world’s single largest consumer of oil, equivalent to 257 million passenger cars, more than double the number of cars on the road in the United States.
Before we can even begin to fully recognize the impact of war on climate change, we need more transparency from world governments with required emissions reporting for both war and peacetime through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). We need to recognize the large role that militaries have in global emissions.
Environmental Impact of War
Another important aspect of war’s impact on the environment to take into consideration is what happens to the ecosystem and arable land after it has been bombarded with weaponry. Explosives can contaminate the land, damage irrigation networks, deteriorate soil quality, increase erosion, poison watersheds, displace animals into extinction, and other long-lasting environmental damage. This is yet another area where research is limited and needed to strengthen international humanitarian laws and environmental protections.
Make Love Not War
I often wonder at the insanity of fighting for land that you are willing to bomb. For me, this is the clearest sign of our society’s ultimate disconnection from the Earth. A society in which the powers that be are willing to bomb crops, forests and waterways is ultimately in for certain demise.
To bomb and destroy the land is unjustifiable and insane. The land is our home, our habitat, our entire existence. Destroying our planet is suicidal. We may think that war is creating progress or defeating an enemy but truly war against any human is war against all humans. Every war waged in a far-off land is a war against the planet and therefore humanity. It does not matter which side you are on; we are all on the side of planet Earth. Protesting war, any war, is a means of protesting climate change and saying that you will no longer tolerate the senseless killing of our habitat.
“I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” -Albert Einstein
