Climate is War
AD
September 2026
“And when you hear of wars and rumours of wars, do not be alarmed; this must take place, but the end is not yet. For nation will rise against nation, and kingdom against kingdom; there will be earthquakes in various places, there will be famines; this is but the beginning of the birth-pangs.”
Mark 13 7-8 (RSV)
You know it’s here because you can smell it.
Across the summer across the UK in all kinds of places
The island has been burning.
And in all kinds of places you wouldn’t expect:
The Cairngorms, bird reserves, back gardens, golf courses.
And in Abertillery the army was called out.
It’s like there’s a war on,
And there is a war on;
In fact there are wars on in more than 20 countries of the world, and ‘serious conflict’ in over 50 others
(But here in the UK we tend not to hear about them and try not to think about them).
Runaway climate change is upon us.
Meanwhile the war business is booming.
There has never been so much war,
And at a time when we most need to cut our carbon emissions
(Indeed we have already overshot 1.5 degrees, says the UN).
But even if the world does achieve the drastic cuts needed to get to net zero by 2050
(43% by 2030, 60% by 2035, says the IPCC)
We won’t be at actual zero because of all the omissions
(never mind the emissions).
Aviation is not included
(It counts for 2.5% of global emissions currently, and this is set to more than double by 2050. Aviation is on track to be the single biggest source of emissions in the UK by 2040. Despite having set an ‘aspirational target’, the industry recently admitted it won’t reach ‘jet zero’ by 2050 after all).
And nor is shipping
(It accounts for nearly 3% of global emissions currently, and these are set to increase to 10% by 2050. There is currently no agreed pathway – even a voluntary one – for emissions reduction. Trump’s US delegation to the IMO is busy bullying shipping nations to backtrack on the draft Net Zero Framework which has been in negotiation for a decade).
And over and above these there is war.
Military emissions are not included in the UN climate accounting process.
It’s not even mandatory to report them.
At time of writing only seven nations worldwide have targets to reduce their military emissions
(and the US under Trump is not among them – under Biden, briefly, yes)
And what they report on is very selective: a fraction of what they emit.
Take the UK military as an example:
They only report on ‘peace time’ emissions: combat is not included.
They only include Scope 1 & 2 emissions (direct) and nearly half of those (45%) are exempt from detailed reporting.
The UK military’s Scope 3 emissions are not reported (the arms and bombs they buy, and the embodied carbon in the making of them) and these are estimated to be the majority of MoD emissions (bigger than Scopes 1 and 2 together).
Just based on the non-exempt peace time emissions, the MoD has the largest reported footprint of any department in the UK Government, around 3 MtCO2E.
But including all the exempted and supply chain emissions, the actual figure for the UK’s non-conflict emissions is more like 13 Mt.
By point of comparison, the US military non-conflict footprint (in 2019, when reported under Biden in 2023) was 55 MtCO2E – the biggest of any military in the world, and roughly equivalent to the emissions of Ireland.
And this is just the peacetime emissions. What happens when they set the bombs off?
This is a subject for researchers, and the current War in Gaza has provided pretty good data to support their calculations.
Ben Neimark and team at QMUL used the first 15 months of the war in Gaza and came to total conflict emissions of 33.2 MtCO2E.
This is made up of:
preparatory emissions (Hamas digging tunnels, the IDF building a wall) = 0.49 Mt
direct conflict emissions (inc. flights bombs and missiles) = 1.9 Mt
post conflict reconstruction (of all the destroyed infrastructure) = 29 Mt
(It is notable the last of these – reconstruction – is the largest. This is in keeping with non-military emissions, of which construction is the single biggest emitting industry: accounting for up to 15% of global emissions).
It’s also notable that there’s a time lag on these emissions: Gaza is yet to be rebuilt (and the researchers’ model assumes like for like reconstruction, not some golden Gaza Riviera).
Climate science is full of time lags – like the heat held in the oceans which means that sea level rise is locked in – and climate accounting is likewise. Even after the war is over the vast majority of its CO2 is still to be emitted.
Gaza may not be typical of the 70 wars and conflicts worldwide, but at least it gives us some wartime data (there is little else out there). And if we were to work with these data at face value, we would arrive at an estimate of 1.9 Gigatonnes of carbon emissions per year from war across the globe. Which is somewhere over 4% of global emissions, and comparable to aviation and shipping added together.
From a zero carbon point of view, all these ‘industries’ are going in the wrong direction. Defence spending is on the increase. Trump pledged in his Big Beautiful Bill to increase the Pentagon’s budget for 2026 by 13%. Given that carbon emissions track defence spending closely, this could equate to an increase of 8 MtCO2E.
On top of this are the increases in the proportion of GDP which NATO allies have been forced by Trump to commit to military spending, including in the UK (where, according to the Government’s carbon budget we need to cut our emissions by 68% by 2030 - not increase them).
So even if we were to achieve the necessary cuts within the carbon accounting process, there are all the excluded emissions (omissions) from the process which the atmosphere itself will have to absorb. And these are only increasing.
We may not reach net zero on its own terms, but even if we were to, we would be nowhere near zero.
Climate is war. And not just because the Army has been called out to save us from wildfires. Climate change and global conflict are manifestations of the same purpose in the world. They are where our civilisation has got to.
War has long been the frontline of technology, and is now being waged with AI. If war doesn’t kill us, its innovations will.
Seeing climate as war clears up a number of misconceptions. It makes it apparent that the people who most deny climate change are the ones who most cause it. And they are the ones who want war.
Trump’s second administration has been marked by an eagerness for military intervention (where he had previously pretended to an isolationist stance) and an insistence on exploiting oil reserves (‘drill baby drill’) – and sometimes, as in Venezuela, both at once.
Some people actually want war (and need it, for their geopolitical business model to work). These are the same people who want climate change. Or at least view it as collateral damage, a side-effect.
Take Peter Hegseth, US Secretary of Defense (or War, as self-styled). “The @DeptofDefense does not do climate change crap. We do training and warfighting.” And obviously, climate change: the US are world leaders in both. These people will kill us all.
If you can bomb a school in Iran and deny it, of course you can deny climate change. And if you can kill 120 children in the process, why would you try to save the lives of future generations?
Climate is war. And if you are wondering whether or when the world will get to net zero, think Gaza, just Gaza.
[References]
Guardian (16/8/25) ‘It’s been very tough’: hope of progress in gruelling battle against south Wales wildfire
Krautart (4/3/26) Current Wars 2026: All Active Armed Conflicts, Listed and Mapped
https://www.krautart.de/global-conflicts-2026-one-machine-twenty-wars/
ACLED (12/25) Conflict Index 2025
https://acleddata.com/series/acled-conflict-index
International Committee of the Red Cross (11/25) Navigating Violence: Learning from Civilian Experiences and Strengthening Humanitarian Action in Contested Territories.
Uppsala Conflict Data Program (9/6/26) UCDP: record number of conflicts between states – press release
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (1/9/26 ) Limiting Overshoot - Navigating exceedance of 1.5°C and pathways towards return
https://www.unep.org/resources/limiting-overshoot-navigating-exceedance
Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) (April 2022) Climate Change 2022: Mitigation of Climate Change – Sixth Assessment Report, Working Group III
https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg3/
United Nations Environment Programme (UNEP) (4/11/25) Emissions Gap Report 2025
https://www.unep.org/resources/emissions-gap-report-2025
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https://climateactiontracker.org/sectors/aviation/
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https://www.transportenvironment.org/topics/ships/climate-impact-shipping
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https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2026/feb/26/us-bullying-could-scupper-carbon-levy-shipping
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https://ceobs.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/11/131125-Briefing_-Accounting_for_the_Uncounted.pdf
Parkinson, S (3/7/26) Military climate strategies: Are they just greenwash? Scientists for Global Responsibility
https://www.sgr.org.uk/projects/climate-change-military-main-outputs
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https://www.sgr.org.uk/publications/uk-military-ghg-emissions-and-greening-government-commitments
Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) (18/8/23) Reflections on the UK Defence and Climate Change Report
https://ceobs.org/reflections-on-the-uk-defence-and-climate-change-report/
DoD (June 2023) Department of Defense Plan to Reduce Greenhouse Gas Emissions
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https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2590332226000497
UN Environment Programme (UNEP) (September 2023) Building Materials and the Climate: Constructing a New Future
https://www.unep.org/resources/report/building-materials-and-climate-constructing-new-future
Guardian (30/5/25) Neta Crawford: How the US became the biggest military emitter and stopped everyone finding out