Every Euro spent on the military carries a carbon cost to the climate and to our future security.
Ellie Kinney explores why ramping up military spending while military decarbonisation is in its infancy risks locking in carbon-intensive military equipment for decades, why spiralling military spending is placing climate action and our collective security at risk, and what needs to happen next.
Climate action drowning in rising tide of militarism and spending
In many ways, Prime Minister Keir Starmer’s decision to raise the UK’s defence budget to 2.5% came as no surprise. For the past nine years, global military spending has been increasing year on year, reaching an all time high of $2,443 billion in 2023. A rising tide of militarism interlinked with ongoing large-scale conflicts and global instability means that this figure will undoubtedly have risen in 2024 too. EU member states alone spent €326 billion in 2024, an increase of more than 30% since 2021. And now, as EU leaders plan an €800 billion boost to defence spending — every Euro of which will carry a carbon cost — military climate action is becoming more important than ever. But instead voices are calling for it to be deprioritised, or actively erased.
Research suggests that a 1% rise in military spending by share of GDP increases national greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions by up to 2%. Ramping up military production to increase stockpiles is energy-intensive and, with limited progress towards military decarbonisation, the current procurement push means that militaries will be locked into fossil fuel-intensive equipment for decades. The European Defence Agency (EDA) recently noted the lack of standardised ‘green’ procurement across EU militaries, with fewer than 40% of respondents reporting a ‘green’ procurement policy in place — ‘green’ in this context does not equate to low carbon. This means that we are committing to equipment today that will hinder tomorrow’s mitigation efforts.
In addition to directly increasing military emissions, rising military spending also risks diverting finance from climate action. Research finds that increasing military spending crowds-out green investment and innovation, disrupting the green transition. Elsewhere, governments like the UK are directly cutting aid and development funding to fuel defence spending, throwing uncertainty over the country’s ability to meet climate finance commitments and support crucial climate projects overseas. As expected, charities have branded this decision as “disgraceful’ and ‘short-sighted’, and even a former Army chief of staff has called the move “a fundamental strategic error”. Not only will rising military spending risk worsening the climate crisis, it will also limit our ability to respond to its impacts effectively.
Less transparency on military emissions means less climate action
The world’s militaries are already responsible for an estimated 5.5% of global emissions, a proportion that will increase as military spending rises and the rest of society decarbonises. However, this is only an estimate as countries don’t currently have to include the emissions from their militaries in their national reporting to the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. While some choose to publish their military emissions independently, what is released is far from the full picture. This means that we don’t have an accurate understanding of the impact that militaries are having on global emissions now, and nor can we accurately project how this will increase with the planned increases in military spending. As governments ramp up military spending, accurate data is becoming increasingly critical for efforts to understand how much of our rapidly dwindling carbon budget is being consumed by military investment.
We urgently need more transparency. Instead we can see the opposite happening. Since taking office in January, the Trump administration has deleted the climate portal from the Department of Defense (DoD) website, removing a back catalogue of US military emissions reporting. The US DoD is the single largest consumer of energy in the US, and the world’s single largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels and, while this reporting was not a complete picture of the full scale of the US DoD’s climate legacy, it represents a significant portion of global military emissions. The removal of this data is not just a headache for academics or activists working to spotlight the military’s emissions, it also sets a dangerous precedent globally. While avoiding reporting military emissions is not a new phenomenon, the past few years have seen a slow but steady creep towards greater transparency of military emissions and the US closing the book altogether should be condemned by civil society, militaries and policymakers alike.
The actions of Trump’s administration to hide the true scale of the DoD’s contribution to the climate crisis, and to performatively denounce military climate action as ‘woke’ nonsense is a warning sign of a more far-reaching risk. The EU faces its own rise of far right populism, which joins Trump in using military climate action as fuel for culture-war fires. Add to this spiralling defence budgets detached from consideration of their environmental impact, and you create the perfect conditions for less transparency in military emissions reporting, and stalled progress on defence decarbonisation.
Fighting for our future
Pushing back on this threat requires far deeper engagement from the climate movement, and from activists to donors, than we have seen to date. We also need leadership from those governments whose militaries have adopted climate targets and are already advancing decarbonisation policies — weaker sectoral action and backsliding on commitments will impact existing and planned work. We need a coalition of voices, be they military, academia, or civil society raising the alarm about the risks that abandoning military climate action poses to national and international climate targets, and ultimately to our collective security.
The foundations of this coalition already exist. Aside from our own network of experts on military and conflict emissions, progress from military actors like the EDA Consultation Forum for Sustainable Energy in the Defence and Security Sector, and an increasing number of academic experts are already providing a much-needed voice for the sector, highlighting decarbonisation pathways and their benefits. The last few years had seen considerable momentum begin to build around military decarbonisation but the current rush to rearm for short-term defence threatens to undermine this progress, while exacerbating the longer term threat we face from the climate crisis. Military decarbonisation is a prerequisite for our future security but this future will not happen unless governments and the wider climate movement fight for it.
Ellie Kinney coordinates CEOBS’ climate advocacy.
