Wars and national defense cause enormous greenhouse gas emissions. But military-related climate pollution is generally excluded from climate change emission totals, including those reported under the UNFCCC (the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change).

Obviously, the Trump administration has been pushing US allies to shoulder more of their own security. And many European nations have already been ramping up military spending at least since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But at the same time, the US has also continued to increase its own military spending. And so have other nations around the world, from Russia and China to Pakistan, Mexico, Japan, and others.

My guest today is Ellie Kinney. She’s the Senior Climate Advocacy Officer at a UK-based NGO called the Conflict and Environment Observatory. She and her colleagues advocate for the inclusion of military emissions in national accounting for greenhouse gas pollution. They estimate that the climate costs of military activities is above 5.5% of annual global emissions. That’s nearly half the amount produced by all the world’s cars, and more than all the emissions from aviation.

I sat down with Ellie to learn why military emissions data is so hard to come by. I wanted to know what can be done to improve transparency and how the climate impact of militaries might be reduced. I wanted to better understand what strategies and innovations the Conflict and Environment Observatory and allied organizations are using in their efforts to highlight and alleviate this enormous, growing, and mostly hidden problem.

Additional resources mentioned in this episode:

The Conflict and Environment Observatory
https://militaryemissions.org/
Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War
Benjamin Neimark and Kate Mackintosh: "How wars ravage the environment – and what international law is doing about it"
Bellingcat