Conflict has a climate cost

Whether any major action points will emerge from Dubai, where the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change’s Conference of the Parties, or COP 28 is set to conclude on December 12, remains to be seen. 

COP-28 was already beset with controversies, including those of the host nation, UAE, being a petro-state and the presidency being held by the CEO of Abu Dhabi’s National Oil company, Sultan Ahmed Al-Jaber.

But what is reassuring is that the presidency included a thematic day for peace, relief, and recovery, for the first time in COP history. Perhaps this was not part of mainstream political parleys, but the Declaration on Climate, Health, Recovery, and Peace called for improved financial support for adaptation and climate resilience in fragile and conflict States. Activists and experts welcomed the decision to highlight the need for climate finance to be ‘conflict sensitive.’

The declaration was the result of a series of workshops and bilateral meetings convened over the past year. Among various civil society bodies, activists, and commentators, were the peacebuilders or Peace@COP28, an umbrella grouping of about 150 individuals across 60 organisations and five continents, who had been working on getting the world to focus attention on ‘conflict sensitivity’ across projects and to make it relevant to climate change conversations, so that peace got included in negotiated outcomes.  

Whether it’s the ongoing Israel-Hamas conflict or the year-old Russia-Ukraine war, the loss to human lives, damage to property, displacement of thousands as they flee their countries, have made the military cost of war more devasting than all that humanity and the earth has faced.

According to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), which “seeks to challenge the idea of the environment as a ‘silent victim of armed conflict’, what is distressing is that countries are not obliged to report the emissions from their military activities.

Ellie Kinney, CEOBS’ Campaigner states that with reporting being voluntary, the UNFCC gets patchy data and at best absent. However, he adds, “While not on the formal agenda, it is becoming increasingly difficult for the UNFCCC to ignore the emissions caused by conflicts.”

Researchers estimate that the first year of the Russian war on Ukraine “produced emissions comparable to a country the size of Belgium over the same time period.” Add to that the recent fighting in the Middle East. 

As these conflicts rage in the backyards of oil rich nations, the developed world, expected to finance climate change programmes, is either busy fueling the wars or funding their own domestic fuel needs. This is while neighbouring countries in war-torn zones are coping with an influx of refugees, putting pressure on food and shelter needs. And in a divided and growingly insular world, countries are only going to become more inward looking than ever before. 

But, in an interconnected world, can anyone afford to be isolated or unaffected by war, however remote it may seem?  War causes death and destruction, displaces people, causes severe food and water shortages, irreparable harm to biodiversity through the rising pollution from military action.       

Experts have even been arguing that the five-year long Global Stocktake, which is reviewing the progress of the Paris Accord of 2015, to limit the rise of temperature to 1.5 degrees C by 2030, should factor in military emissions gap too. The Global Stocktake is looking at mitigation, adaptation, and finance while identifying gaps in climate action and will suggest pathways and solutions to bring countries back on course. 

According to the UN Environment Programme’s (UNEP’s) Adaptation Gap Report, and the Emissions Gap Report, progress on climate adaptation is slowing down and the world is heading for a temperature rise far above the Paris Agreement. UNEP stated, “In 2023, temperature records toppled, while storms, floods, droughts and heatwaves caused devastation,” pointing out that the world was ‘underfinanced and underprepared’ to deal with the vagaries of climate change. 

So how much worse must the situation be, with the destruction from war?

But thanks to civil society bodies, activists and commentators, peace has got built into a declaration. Even if it was not part of the main political parleys, it is a start. Hopefully, this will propel political dispensations around the world to focus on the military cost of war to humanity and the climate, as geopolitical tensions continue to rage in the world. It’s time to give peace a chance. 

(The writer is a journalist and author)