‘If the UK is Serious About Tackling Climate Change it Must Combat Military Emissions’

David Lammy’s Kew Gardens speech on Tuesday echoed what the military have been saying for years – climate change is a “threat multiplier” to national security. 

Yet the military sector is a major contributor to the climate crisis. Its fossil fuel consumption generates an estimated 5.5% of global emissions, without including warfare, and it has a long history of not being transparent about it.

The sector doesn’t figure in national targets and there are no agreed standards for reporting them.   

The special treatment of the military sector goes back to the Kyoto Agreement of 1997 when Madeleine Albright, US Secretary of State insisted on an exemption. The loophole survived, allowing the sector to get away with lax and half-hearted reporting without jeopardising its taxpayer funding.  

Ellie Kinney, Campaigns director of the Military Emissions Gap project, notes that the Paris Agreement of 2015 brought a marginal improvement, changing the language of military emissions from “exempt” to “voluntary reporting”. But, “because it’s voluntary, (countries) just don’t tend to do it very well”, she says. 

And there are glaring omissions, like the impact of conflict. 

Kinney points out that the largest omission is “the military supply chain and the arms industry that is propped up by creating products for government”.

At a time of wars in Gaza, Sudan, Ukraine, Yemen and other countries, should emissions and climate change be our priority?  Should we not be focussed on the immediate humanitarian impacts of war?  

Kinney points to the intersection of war and climate change, arguing that to understand the full range of impacts of war on an area, the environmental, climate and humanitarian impacts must be included.  

Emissions reporting also exposes the scale of military funding. Professor Neta Crawford, author of The Pentagon, Climate Change and War, explains that “military emissions … are tightly correlated with operations and war, and very tightly correlated with military spending”. She notes that US military emissions are the highest of any country in the world “because …. the US is the world’s largest military spender”.  

This affects other countries too. “When the United States tells its allies to increase their military or NATO spending up to, or more than, 2% of their GDP, those countries’ emissions will increase”, says Crawford. 

NGO Common Wealth’s recent report notes that during 14 years of austerity imposed by the Conservative Government, UK military spending was not only protected, but increased.

While other government departments suffered cuts, the military received an “outsized proportion of public subsidy and procurement” with expenditure growing by 9.7% from 2013 to 2022.

The report adds that from 2012 to 2021, the UK paid more in defence contracts to the single supplier BAE than it committed in International Climate Finance and highlighted the immense opportunity that spending could have represented in green industries, the NHS or contributed to International Climate Finance.  

Former Prime Minister Rishi Sunak reduced UK foreign aid by around £4 billion in 2020.   Meanwhile, UK military spending increased, reaching $68.5 billion in 2022, making the UK the sixth highest spending country globally.  

Common Wealth argue that those countries with most responsibility for military emissions, notably the UK and the US, should adopt a “military-focused climate reparations approach”. 

This would redirect military spending to countries which have suffered from centuries of colonialism, extractivism, underinvestment and debt servicing – those countries with the least responsibility for the climate crisis but high vulnerability to its impacts.    

Common Wealth’s report examines the UK and US militaries’ role over the 20^th century, describing them as the “architects of the fossil economy”.

This determined US and UK military activity in the Middle East, for example, “the British empire’s division of the former Ottoman regions was explicitly designed around plans for hydrocarbon pipelines”.

Crawford describes the continuing emissions resulting from US bases which “ensure access to petroleum in the Persian Gulf, or (for example) the Strait of Malacca”.

David Lammy’s comments on the “fundamental .. systemic and pervasive” threat from the climate crisis affirm what the military have known for decades.

Crawford found that as early as the mid-1950s, the US military “was at the forefront of the research” into climate change.

The US Office of Naval Research funded important early studies on climate change; the work was then reported to President Johnson, and later to President Nixon and then President Carter.    

But this long-standing understanding did not prevent the sector’s vast increase in consumption of fossil fuels over the 20^th century.   

In the run-up to COP29, the Conflict and Environment Observatory argues that we must get military emissions on the table and finally agree rigorous standards for tracking and reporting emissions.

Kinney says regulation needs to come from the UNFCCC“to make militaries accountable for their contribution to the climate crisis and the situation we’re now in”.

Transparency of emissions will provide the first step towards accountability and re-evaluation of the role of the military in a world suffering the ravages of climate change.  

Lammy has recognised the systemic threat of climate change and says the UK has a key role to play in global efforts. 

Getting to grips with military emissions is overdue.