Operation Pollute: The Planet and The Parable of The Conservative Estimate

Image Courtesy: defense.gov

As of 2023, both climate and environmental degradation have been linked to the top six most severe global risks in the next ten years. Despite accounting for 5.5% of annual CO₂ emissions, and ranking just behind the top polluters: China, the US, and India, global military emissions remain unpublished. In 2022, the UK Government launched an inquiry into Defence and Climate Change, with a plethora of interests and objectives, but with one central question: how can we address the inevitable increase in demand for defence support due to climate disasters, while simultaneously reducing greenhouse gas emissions? The Government’s subsequent report,  aiming  to ‘green’ the military, offers little more than surface-level solutions. For most, it is impossible to ignore the oxymoron that is a sustainable military. However, the Government does not seem to gauge, or potentially ignores the full extent of military impact on the environment. The report side-steps critical issues such as environmental training, post-conflict reconstruction emissions (discussed later), and overseas deployment, tunnel-visioning specific issues rather than aiming for radical, systematic change. 

Environmental politics in the UK, especially concerning the military, disproportionately focus on air pollution reduction. However, this is likely not the most pressing issue when it comes to their degradation of the environment, even after including the extractive, destructive economy of the arms industry. More immediate effects of military activity include soil erosion, land fragmentation, ecosystem degradation, flora destruction, prevention of animal movement and seed dispersal; The list goes on. The military impact on climate change comes later for the attacked region, and exacerbates the degradation that has already occurred. Given the corrosive nature of conflict on both land and water (bulldozing, land mines, chemical warfare, oil spills, dredging, sonar), boosting defence and reducing environmental impact are entirely conflicting goals.

Despite the government’s CO₂ obsession, we know relatively little about the military's fossil fuel expenditure. In fact, only four countries produced any sort of data on their military emissions for the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC). Why is this allowed? In short, loopholes, which were set during the Bush administration and maintained in the 2015 Paris agreement, largely thanks to the US, claiming a breach of national security and therefore refusing publication. This brings us to the ‘Parable of the Conservative Estimate’. The Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) estimated that, for 2018 alone, around three million tonnes of CO₂ were produced as a direct greenhouse gas from UK military actions, with a further approximate 8 million tonnes from indirect emissions. While these figures may seem concrete at a glance, the constant change of estimations and approximations in military emission discourse leaves much room for imagination. 

At the beginning of the post-October seventh Gaza Genocide, scientists from Queen Mary University produced a predictive paper, ‘snapshotting’ emissions from the first three months of conflict. This marked a vital step in unveiling the military's long-silent war on our environment. They covered the conflict at three timescales, with total predicted emissions amounting to almost 40,000,000 tonnes of CO₂ (the amount produced by ~5000 UK homes in a year). Their predictions mostly relied on past conflicts, often from other continents, due to limited public and academic access to information.  Months later, however, scientists’ predictions increased to an estimation of up to 60,000,000 tonnes of CO₂  for rebuilding alone, post-genocide. Given the scarcity of provided data, scientists must rely on broad, uncertain predictions to begin assessing environmental impacts and the future. As we see in the tens of millions of tonnes discrepancies above, even expert opinions are ever-changing. 

The Military Emissions Gap is an organisation aiming to reveal what governments must report to the UNFCCC, how they report it, and what they don’t report. The UK, the US, and the EU itself are considered Annex I, meaning they are historical polluters. As a result, they are obliged to report more of their emissions than other countries and have more requirements to reduce them. However, some of the biggest polluters with the largest military outputs are not part of this group, such as China, Saudi Arabia, and Israel. In the case that military emissions are published, they are largely unclear, incomplete, or categorically inconsistent. Some countries even refuse to produce data, retaining the guise of ‘national security’. A nation's safety is truly compromised when climate scientists are denied the transparency needed to assess environmental threats, especially when nearing the brink of climate disaster. Conflict has, however, been evidenced to sometimes allow a break for the local biodiversity from the constant pressure of resource-based economies. When even war means a welcomed rest for our natural world, you can truly see how detrimental the continuation of capitalist society is for the environment.