Military boot-prints and the environment

OCTOBER 20, 2024

If the world’s militaries were a country, they would have the world’s fourth largest national carbon footprint. Martin Franklin reports.

There are currently over 120 military conflicts around the world, involving over 60 states and 120 non-state groups.  The highest number of state-based conflicts since 1946 were recorded in 2023.  While the first casualty of war may be truth, it’s closely followed by humanitarian suffering and environmental destruction. 

The environmental impacts of war include pollution from damaged infrastructure such as burning oil facilities, toxic or explosive munitions left after conflict, the destruction of water and sanitation infrastructure and human displacement creating refugee movement and encampments that put pressure on resources such as timber and water.

Images of environmental damage following years of trench warfare during WW1 show the results of industrialised warfare. Today weapons have massively increased destructive capacity, with the potential for complete annihilation or creating a world of wastelands until recently only seen depicted in dystopian science fiction.

The Vietnam War was a turning point in the use of mechanised weaponry aimed at the environment. The US military sprayed defoliants across the country resulting in contamination still affecting Vietnamese communities today. Agriculture was targeted; napalm and the ploughing of jungles were used to undermine the Viet Cong.  

Today environmental targeting is becoming routine and normalized. Ukraine and Gaza offer examples, the latter a particularly stark one.

The war in Ukraine has destroyed forests, agriculture, industrial and civilian infrastructure.  The resulting toxic pollution and disruption to ecosystems will have a lasting regional effect.  The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station has become embroiled in the conflict, constituting a dangerous breach of norms around nuclear safety. 

Gaza, a densely populated strip of land around a quarter of the size of London (365 square kilometres), has, since October 2023, experienced one of history’s heaviest conventional bombing campaigns. By April 2024 it was estimated that Israel had dropped over 70,000 tons of bombs, surpassing the bombing of Dresden, Hamburg, and London combined during World War II. Agriculture and water supplies, sanitation and other civilian infrastructure have been targeted. These and other Israeli actions have created a humanitarian crisis.  The assault on Gaza is estimated to have generated 60 million tonnes of CO2 and reconstruction could double that figure. Pollution from the conflict will afflict the area for years to come.

Since Vietnam, the environment has been accorded protection and incorporated into international humanitarian law under the Geneva Convention. Red Cross guidelines for militaries have been taken up by the UN’s International Law Commission. UN bodies, including the Security Council, have focused attention and concern on the environmental impacts of conflicts.

This is positive progress, but conflicts are often complex and involve many actors, making it hard to identify responsibility for environmental damage which itself is challenging to quantify. In addition to these technical / legal problems is the presence of resistance and inertia from states and the military. 

Nuclear weapon states including the UK and the US reject Protocol 1 of the Geneva Conventions. The protocol prohibits means of warfare which cause widespread damage to the natural environment, which nuclear weapons will inevitably do.

Though efforts to hold belligerent actors to account for humanitarian and environmental harms increase, it is becoming common for states to ignore UN resolutions and international law when engaging in military operations.

Military emissions were excluded from the 1997 Kyoto Protocol and exempted in the 2016 Paris Agreement.  The provision of data on military emissions is voluntary along with any commitment to reducing them. Most countries refuse to report emissions as do many companies supplying military equipment.  

It is estimated that the total military carbon footprint amounts to approximately 5.5% of global emissions. If the world’s militaries were a country, they would have the fourth largest national carbon footprint in the world.  Even when not engaged in conflicts, militaries have a big environmental footprint.  Aircraft, tanks and other hardware use a lot of fuel and military supplies involve long global supply chains. Any decisions to increase military expenditure or activity mean increases in greenhouse gas emissions.

The UK is a leading military power. Its budget is amongst the largest in the world and it is one of the world’s top exporters of weapons and military equipment. The arms industry exercises considerable influence on governments to resist monitoring and accountability for emissions. 

Military forces are inherently destructive and, like all responses to the environmental crisis, progress is slow in building accountability for environmental harms.  The environment has been a neglected victim of war, but vital work is being done by organisations such as the Conflict and Environment Observatory to inform legal and policy initiatives to reduce environmental harm and raise public awareness. 

Martin Franklin is a member of the Islington Environment Forum steering group. With thanks to Doug Weir from the Conflict and Environment Observatory.

Impact: Impact of War on the Environment. Author: Sayedqudrathashimy1991, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.