Panorama of shoreline with smoke during coastal bombing (Photo by Dirck Halstead/Getty Images)
On May 15, 2024 the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in Cambridge Massachusetts, hosted an exploratory meeting of experts titled Climate Conundrum: Bridging the Gap Between Science and Security. The venerable convening venue was graced with a promenade of framed letters from historical members of the Academy that include General George Washington as well as Nelson Mandela. I was invited to the workshop by Oxford professor Neta Crawford, a member of the Academy, who published a book recently titled The Pentagon, Climate Change and War which won the Grawemeyer Award for Ideas that Improve World Order. A key question that underpinned the conversations that day was - are contemporary conflicts considering environmental costs in any meaningful way in comparison from the wars of yesteryears? Recall the Vietnam war when defoliants like Agent Orange were being sprayed without much care across the vast rainforests of Indochina by the United States.
The conversation was sobering. Despite numerous ostensible efforts at “greening of warfare,” the material and energy usage of current conflicts is astonishingly large. A neglected aspect of the cost of war that came through was the infrastructure damage and reconstruction footprint. The Conflict Environment Observatory, a charity based in the UK has the most detailed tracking of the environmental footprint of wars. A presentation at the event by Linsey Cottrell from the Observatory presented data collected by the Initiative for GHG Accounting of War and is presented in the pie chart below. They calculated that in the current Ukraine war, the largest carbon footprint by far of the war will be in reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure. This could be even worse per capital for the war in Gaza given the far greater amount of bombing intensity in that conflict.
Estimates of emissions from the war in Ukraine from data starting February 24, 2022, to September 1, ... [+]
Deliberate targeting of environmental resources as a weapon of war has been observed in modern conflicts, most recently the oil spills and fires that were started by the Saddam regime following the first Gulf War. Environmental clean-up has thus been given a security dynamic and the United Nations Environment Program set up a post-conflict assessment process after that conflict which is now housed within their “Disaster and Conflict” unit. Yet, the challenge remains as to how much of these efforts at data gathering can motivate change among adversaries in hastening peace agreements. From all indications in the current conflicts, environmental factors are low politics and are on no one’s radar in terms of mitigating conflict intensity or duration.
Perhaps the incentives of the war economy, that led erstwhile General and President Eisenhower to warn us of the “military industrial complex” in his farewell address, remain a potent hurdle to peacebuilding. However, there is a way to give the military some livelihood assurance through other more peaceful professional pursuits as well. As an institution, the military’s functionality is often perceived by the public as an insurance policy to address security challenges through defensive or offensive mechanisms. There can often be some excess capacity within military establishments during periods of relative peace. To remain relevant to its public mandate, particularly in these periods, the military can provide important services in other non-combat crises.
Historically, countries with large militaries have used such excess capacity by volunteering troops for peacekeeping through the United Nations system. Countries such as Bangladesh and Pakistan, which have very large militaries, have often been key providers of military human capital for peacekeeping missions with the United Nations, that are often labeled “blue helmet” missions. In a similar vein, there can also be an important role for militaries in international environmental conservation, remediation, and enforcement missions (green helmets).
The United States Department of Defense (DoD) has an “Army Environmental Command.” The USAEC mission states that it is “committed to delivering environmental solutions in support of U.S. Army readiness and sustainability.” There is also the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers that has been involved in numerous environmental remediation projects. Such organizations within current militaries provide some hope that environmental factors could lead to more informed choices on material and energy usage, but they must also be part of the broader calculus of combat decisions. In this election year the immense power that the world’s largest miliary has should also be used to raise alarm about the environmental impact of war — and also as a motivation for more rapid peace-making.
