Armies are among the most important sources of climate-damaging gases. But states do not have to disclose their military emissions. There are generous exceptions in the climate agreements.
The F-35 fighter jet emits far more carbon dioxide than its predecessor. This footage is from a South Korean military exercise on March 25, 2022.
War equipment is big, loud and harmful to the environment, that’s no secret. On average, a Leopard 2 tank swallows just over four liters of diesel and emits 1.5 kilograms of CO in the process2 out – per kilometer.
Airplane emissions are even greater. An F-35 fighter jet, of which the Federal Council wants to order 36 copies, blows per mission Estimated nearly 28 tons of greenhouse gas into the air. It clearly surpasses its predecessor, the F-16 fighter jet, which is used most frequently worldwide. This deterioration in the environmental balance is not an isolated case, because newer military vehicles are more powerful than their predecessors.
That adds up. Armed forces are responsible for around five to six percent of greenhouse gas emissions worldwide, estimates the independent British scientific organization “Scientists for Global Responsibility”. in a report. The reason for this is not only the vehicles, but also the operation of military installations and the procurement and logistics of operational materials, from boots to ready meals.
None of this appears in the emissions reports from the UN. Because armies are not obliged to report. That is why there are only incomplete data that are not taken into account for the climate targets.
The military is exempt from climate protection
This is due to an exemption obtained by the US military in the 1997 Kyoto Protocol. The clause explicitly excluded military emissions from the national emissions of the signatory states. The then senator and current climate envoy of the American President, John Kerry, congratulated his country’s negotiating team at the time with the words “terrific job”. The exception in the Paris Agreement of 2015 was not renewed. But recording and transmitting military emissions remains voluntary for signatories.
There are only a few independent studies on the environmental balance of armed forces due to a lack of data. One of them comes from Neta Crawford of Boston University. She approximated the Pentagon’s emissions between 2001 and 2018 using data from the US Department of Energy. in her report the political scientist shows that during this period the American military emitted the equivalent of 1.3 billion tons of CO2 emitted of greenhouse gases. Emissions have been falling slightly for years, but the country’s armed forces still emit more greenhouse gases each year than nations like Sweden or Denmark.
The US Air Force consumes the most fuel and therefore emits a lot. This May 17, 2022 file photo shows paratroopers during a U.S. Air Force exercise in Pordenone, Italy.
A look at the data also shows that the United States Department of Defense accounts for up to 80 percent of the government’s total energy needs. Almost 30 percent of this flows into the operation of the military facilities, 70 percent is used for training, vehicles and military operations. The Air Force has the greatest hunger for energy, using four times as much kerosene as the entire army uses diesel. “The US Department of Defense is the world’s largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels,” says Crawford.
Forced release of fuel consumption data
The researcher’s work is a broad overview. A more detailed insight is hardly possible as long as the Pentagon keeps its exact consumption under wraps, explains Crawford. Therefore, British researchers have tried a detour. Citing the US Freedom of Information Act, they made binding requests to the logistics arm of the military. In this way, the researchers obtained the legal release of all data on fuel purchases. Noisy their study The agency has offices in 38 countries and handles over $50 million worth of fuel shipments every day.
From the amount of fuel, the researchers calculated the emissions that arise when the fuel is burned. In 2017 alone, the authority bought 270,000 barrels of oil per day and caused emissions of more than 25 million tons of greenhouse gases. From this, the researchers created a country ranking. “If the US military were a state, it would rank 47th in the world, between the total national emissions of Peru and Portugal,” says study author and political ecologist Benjamin Neimark of Lancaster University.
Many emissions from the military are unknown
However, the number of unreported military emissions is likely to be significantly higher. Because indirect factors are not taken into account. Hidden emissions arise, for example, in the production of protective walls against bomb attacks. The “blast walls” made of reinforced concrete are manufactured by the military directly in the war zones. This releases large amounts of greenhouse gases.
Civil concrete production alone causes eight percent of global CO2-Emissions. However, military production is not recorded, which is why Neimark is currently working on a case study on concrete production by the US military in the Iraq war.
The rare studies on military emissions focus almost exclusively on the United States. Crawford and Neimark admit that this can easily distort the picture to their detriment. Less data are available for other countries. However, that does not mean that they cause fewer emissions. This one-sidedness is also due to the way the data is transmitted.
The UN expects precisely broken down data from the USA, the EU and 44 other countries. But there is a second category: countries like China and Russia provide far less detailed data – if they report at all.
military spending serve aas an indicator for emissions
Looking at military spending trends can help fill in these knowledge gaps. Defense budgets have not only been increasing since the war in Ukraine. The Stockholm peace research institute Sipri shows in a reportthat global military spending will surpass $2 trillion for the first time in 2021. The US spends the most, but their arms purchases and emissions are down slightly. The opposite is likely to be the case in Russia, as the Sipri data shows. Before the invasion of Ukraine, the government there increased its defense budget by three percent.
This is probably not an isolated case. An arms race is emerging around the world. Moscow has announced that it will increase its defense budget by another 20 percent. For its part, NATO has decided to increase its rapid reaction force from 40,000 to 300,000 soldiers. Germany has announced 100 billion special debts for the Bundeswehr, Japan a doubling of its defense budget, and China a seven percent increase.
Given these developments, both Crawford and Neimark say there is no doubt that emissions will increase. How high this increase will be can hardly be predicted with the current data gaps. According to the researchers, it is therefore difficult to take effective countermeasures.
An opportunity to tackle this hitherto ignored pollution would come at next November’s UN climate change conference COP27 in Sharm al-Sheikh. But military emissions are not on their agenda for the time being.