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Climate change leadership requires more than stirring speeches. It means facing up to the hard truths. One truth that governments around the world are struggling with is the immense contribution their militaries are making to the climate crisis.
In other words, the US military is a more consequential climate actor than many of the industrialised countries gathered at the COP26 summit in Glasgow.
One reason we know so little is due to militaries being one of the last highly polluting industries whose emissions do not need to be reported to the United Nations. The US can take the credit for that. In 1997, its negotiating team won a blanket military exemption under the Kyoto climate accord. Speaking in the senate the following year, the now special presidential envoy for climate, John Kerry, hailed it as “a terrific job”.
At present, 46 countries and the European Union are obliged to submit yearly reports on their national emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). The 2015 Paris Agreement removed Kyoto’s military exemption but left military emissions reporting voluntary.
Military emissions reporting by the many countries that do not have to report annually to the UNFCCC is even worse. This includes countries with massive military budgets, such as China, India, Saudi Arabia, and Israel.
This vast military imprint on the Earth’s atmosphere is not on the formal agenda of COP26. However, hopes are that it will be for COP27 next year, as countries begin to wake up to their huge military carbon footprint.
In June, the military alliance North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) announced that it would set concrete targets for it “to contribute to the goal of Net Zero emissions by 2050”. Meanwhile, countries like Switzerland and the United Kingdom (UK), which have passed domestic legislation setting net-zero targets, are finally having to face up to the uncomfortable truth that their defence ministries are the largest institutional emitters within government.
While military emissions are gaining attention, the culture of military environmental exceptionalism that birthed it, will continue to drive the long war that militaries have been quietly waging on the climate. For all their spending power and political influence, militaries are behind the curve on sustainability.
This was clear from the NATO’s additional 2021 pledge to develop a carbon counting methodology for its members to use – an area where militaries are lagging behind other major sectors.
And what about overseas operations, whether overt or covert, or the wider climatic costs of war and peace, such as landscape degradation, deforestation, or rebuilding?
Western governments, including institutions like NATO, are busy positioning themselves as leaders on the security implications of the climate crisis. Their credibility on climate security, and on climate action more broadly, will be contingent on their willingness to first face up to some difficult truths about their own contribution to climate change. It will also require far more openness and transparency. Both will be vital for delivering real change, rather than more weapons-grade greenwash.
You can view your government’s military emissions data at the authors’ website The Military Emissions Gap.
(Doug Weir is a Research and Policy Director at the Conflict and Environment Observatory, and Visiting Research Fellow, Dept of Geography, King's College London. Benjamin Neimark is a Senior Lecturer at the Lancaster Environment Centre, Lancaster University. Oliver Belcher is a Assistant Professor of Geography at the Durham University.)
(This is an opinion piece and the views expressed above are the author’s own. The Quint neither endorses nor is responsible for them. This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article here.)
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