05-03-2025
It's Time to Hold States Responsible for the Climate Impact of War
This article is part of an ongoing partnership between World Politics Review and New America's Planetary Politics program, which will focus on the energy transition, the digital revolution and the shifting dynamics of global power blocs, with a particular emphasis on how these factors impact the Global South and global governance.
As misguided as his declaration that the U.S. will 'take over' Gaza was, President Donald Trump did get at least one thing right: cleaning up and rebuilding the territory will be an immense project, lasting decades and costing at least $53 billion, according to the United Nations.
It will also be expensive for the climate. Since the war between Hamas and Israel started on Oct. 7, 2023, more than 60 percent of the buildings in Gaza have been destroyed, along with 65 percent of the territory's roads and 85 percent of its water desalination and sewage treatment plants. Removing the debris and rebuilding the damaged infrastructure will release about 53.4 million metric tons of greenhouse gases, according to an estimate published by Queen Mary University of London in June. That is roughly 15 times what the Palestinian territories emit in a year and on par with the annual emissions of Portugal—and that is not counting all the additional destruction caused since June.
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While negotiators argue over who will pay for Gaza's reconstruction, one thing is clear: The world will pay the bill for those carbon emissions—in rising sea levels, increased heat and extreme weather events caused by climate change.
Even before the costs of reconstruction are factored in, the actual carbon cost of the war itself—in cargo flights, reconnaissance sorties, bombing raids, bombs, artillery, rockets, burned bunker fuels and damage to some 500 Israeli tanks and armored vehicles—came to just over 700,000 metric tons for the first 12 months of the conflict, estimates Benjamin Neimark, a senior lecturer at Queen Mary and co-author of the Gaza emissions report.
That is larger than Greenland's greenhouse gas emissions for 2023. Yet unlike the emissions from Greenland, emissions from the war in Gaza will not be recorded on any tallies submitted to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, or UNFCCC. Those tallies are used by the U.N. body to calculate the world's progress—or lack thereof—on meeting the Paris Agreement's goal to stay 'well below' a 2 degrees C increase in average global temperatures compared to preindustrial levels.
The methodology for carbon accounting in conflict used by Neimark's team was pioneered by the Initiative on Green House Gas Accounting of War, led by Dutch researcher Lennard de Klerk. In an updated paper released on Feb. 24, 2025—the third anniversary of Russia's all-out invasion of Ukraine—de Klerk estimated that the combined military emissions from the war there have now reached roughly 230 million tons of greenhouse gas equivalents. That is the equivalent of the annual emissions of Austria, Hungary, the Czech Republic and Slovakia combined. But those emissions will not factor into global calculations either.
Ukraine and Gaza are two high-profile examples. But according to the Armed Conflict Location and Event Data portal, conflicts surged around the world last year, killing an estimated 233,000 people in Ukraine and Gaza, but also in Lebanon, Sudan and Myanmar, among others. In addition to the immediate humanitarian suffering, all these conflicts combine to exacerbate the climate crisis, while remaining invisible in the emissions accounting.
For Neimark, of Queen Mary, 'setting emissions targets that aren't reflecting the scale of the emissions of conflict' amounts to 'kidding ourselves.' After all, to make meaningful cuts to greenhouse gas emissions, we need accurate baselines. 'We can't cut what we don't know,' he says.
The fact that we don't know the scale of military emissions is no coincidence, however. Under the Paris Agreement, reporting them is voluntary. As a result, military emissions are 'insufficiently accounted for' by the UNFCCC, according to the U.N. Environmental Program's most recent report. Researchers with Scientists for Global Responsibility, a U.K.-based consortium promoting responsible science and technology, estimate that the unreported carbon emissions produced by military activity each year amount to about 5.5 percent of total global emissions. If the world's militaries were a country, that would give them the fourth-largest national carbon footprint in the world—greater than that of Russia. And that's just the emissions of standing militaries and weapons production, not active conflict.
In addition to skewing projections of how fast it will be necessary to decarbonize in order to prevent or mitigate the impending climate catastrophe, omitting the ongoing carbon costs of standing militaries and warfare also reduces individual countries' incentives to decrease military emissions. This is all the more worrying given the current trend toward arms races in Europe, the Middle East and Asia. For instance, Trump's demands that NATO nations raise their defense spending target from the current 2 percent of gross domestic product to 5 percent will increase their military carbon emissions as well.
For all the explosive power of a detonating bomb, its carbon emissions are not that high. But when the energy required to manufacture it is factored in, along with the production of the components, the carbon intensity of steel production and the transport of both the raw materials and the munition itself—so-called scope 2 and 3 emissions—it adds up. So too do the costs of feeding, housing, training and transporting military personnel. National defense ministries 'think about what a war will cost in terms of casualties and resources and money,' says Neimark. 'We believe that climate effects should be included in those calculations.'
The question of whether to hold militaries responsible for the damage they do to the climate is also beginning to be raised: If political and military leaders can be held accountable for crimes against humanity, could they also be held responsible for crimes against the climate?
For the moment, the answer is no. Under the terms of the Paris Agreement, there are no repercussions for states that do not meet their decarbonization goals. But given the enormous consequences, climate-vulnerable nations have asked the International Court of Justice, the U.N.'s principal judicial organ, to issue an advisory opinion on states' obligations to protect the climate under international law. Essentially they are asking whether states can and should be held liable for greenhouse gas emissions that damage the climate.
At preliminary hearings held in December, 96 countries and 11 international organizations presented oral statements that described how climate change had destroyed livelihoods and upended agriculture in their countries. They also debated the relative merits of the Loss and Damage Fund agreed to as part of the U.N. COP 28 Climate Change Conference in Sharm el-Sheikh, Egypt, in 2023.
At those hearings, the state of Palestine came forward not with a description of how it, as one of the world's most climate-vulnerable nations, had already suffered the consequences of climate change. Rather, it requested that the court expand the case to include state responsibility for climate impacts caused by armed conflict and other military activities, including occupation.
'This is an important issue that the State of Palestine, as the Court will appreciate, is particularly well positioned to address,' said Ammar Hijazi, the Palestinian ambassador to the Netherlands, in his address to the court. Hijazi pointed to the 'clear negative climate effects' of the Israeli occupation, 'affecting Palestine directly and affecting the world at large.'
The court is expected to send an advisory opinion to the U.N. later this year. But the fact that it is taking on the question of state obligations to prevent climate change at all is a significant milestone, says de Klerk. If the court also includes a ruling on the climate consequences of conflict, he says, 'it will be transformative.'
Advocates for including military emissions in UNFCCC calculations and holding states accountable for the climate impact of their military activities are not naïve enough to think that Russia might reconsider its invasion of Ukraine based on the war's carbon footprint alone, or that Israel might reduce its tank deployments in the West Bank to shave off a couple of tons of annual emissions. But by acknowledging that states are legally obligated to account for all their emissions, even those expended in conflict, the court would go a long way toward ensuring that climate costs are no longer lost in the fog of war.
Aryn Baker is a Rome-based foreign correspondent who has spent the past 25 years writing about the intersection of climate change, conflict, migration, science, culture, health and politics around the world for Time Magazine, the New York Times and other outlets. She is currently a visiting fellow at New America's Planetary Politics project.
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