Ticking boxes: are military climate mitigation strategies fit for purpose?

Assessing ambition

It is encouraging that an increasing number of militaries are publishing climate mitigation strategies, as well as providing annual greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions data. The list now includes NATO members with the largest military expenditure, such as the US, UK, Germany and France. At COP28, NATO’s Secretary General restated a commitment to significantly cut emissions, and that by 2050, there should be “net zero in the armed forces”. This aligns with NATO’s July 2023 communiqué to ‘contribute to the mitigation of climate change’.

Within the EU, the Strategic Compass for Security and Defence outlines a commitment to substantially increase EU military and security spending by 2030, while also embedding climate change and environmental considerations. These are potentially conflicting objectives, and present a challenge to the EU’s Climate Change and Defence Roadmap. This underlines the importance and urgency of effective and transparent measures to reduce the contribution that European militaries will increasingly make to the climate crisis. There is also scope for EU transparency and decarbonisation policies to help establish global norms, should the ambition be there to include militaries in the EU Green Deal target of a 90% cut in emissions by 2040, versus 1990 levels.

In line with established practice across government, commerce and industry, military climate strategies must include meaningful policies that reduce emissions. However, because military emissions mitigation policies are at an early stage of development, and vary between countries, we have developed two 20-point checklists to help stakeholders gauge their likely effectiveness. The checklists are informed by net-zero guidelines promoted by the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC), the International Organization for Standardization, and the Science Based Targets Initiative. It is hoped that these checklists will be of use to policymakers, the media, civil society and to militaries themselves, as they reorient themselves towards a low carbon future.

Alignment with guidance

All effective strategies, policy, and management systems involve a plan, review and improvement cycle. Example reviews under our ‘checklists’ for both the UK,¹ and the US are summarised in Table 1 below. The checklist reviews cover published strategies, as well as recent emissions summary reporting,² and while they are not intended to represent a thorough audit, they highlight gaps and where future improvements can be made as implementation progresses.

Table 1: Our initial assessment of UK and US climate mitigation strategies using the checklist that we have developed. Key: ⦿ addressed, ⦾ partially addressed, – not addressed.

NATO is also taking steps with its own emissions reporting, and its recent Compendium of Best Practice highlights current activities across some NATO members on climate awareness, mitigation, adaptation and outreach, including any GHG reduction targets or commitments that have already been set. The compendium does not yet provide links to all published emissions reports, and reduction strategies. Seventeen of the current 31 NATO members are included in the compendium (see table below), but few provide detail on what GHG emission data is collected or reported.

Table 2: Assessment of NATO member climate policies based on the 2023 Compendium of Best Practice.

Decarbonisation in complex sectors – the case of healthcare

Many sectors face difficult challenges in reducing their GHG emissions in order to achieve net-zero targets by 2050. Healthcare is estimated to be responsible for around 5% of all global GHG emissions, which is similar to the 5.5% estimate for the military. Naturally, a balance is needed between the demands of decarbonisation, and the urgency and necessity of healthcare provision. Effective GHG reduction strategies in the healthcare sector must balance the need to maintain affordable, high quality patient care, uphold infection-control standards, and be operationally resilient. Similarly, militaries argue that their first priority is maintaining their core mission, and not decarbonisation.

Are there lessons from the challenges that healthcare and health authorities face that are relevant to the military? Healthcare authorities own and manage ageing buildings with poor energy-performance, have large and complex supply chains, and multiple and problematic waste streams, such as clinical and hazardous waste. A detailed carbon footprint of the National Health Service (NHS) in England found that 66% of its emissions are from the goods and services (Scope 3), provided by around 80,000 different NHS suppliers. Militaries also have large supply chains but despite this challenge, NHS England has set a net-zero target for scope 1 and scope 2 GHG emissions across its estate by 2040, and scope 3 by 2045, with an interim reduction target of 80% by 2032.³ The NHS Net Zero Building Standard was introduced in February 2023, effectively banning fossil-fuel heating and hot water installations in new-build hospitals. NHS England currently employs 1.4 million people, the UK Ministry of Defence 250,000.

In the US, the situation is complicated by a decentralised and largely privatised healthcare system. Yet 116 organisations representing 872 hospitals have already signed the Department of Health and Human Services’ Health Sector Climate Pledge, launched in 2022. The pledge commits signatories to reducing scopes 1 and 2 emissions by 50% by 2030 and 100% by 2050, and completing an inventory of scope 3 emissions by the end of 2024. The US Inflation Reduction Act has introduced climate legislation to incentivise and accelerate the transition to a low-carbon economy. Some federal states provide tax incentives to support the decarbonisation of healthcare facilities, or penalties for excessive emissions from existing buildings. Financial incentives are likely to increase over time. Decarbonisation incentives could equally apply across the military and its supply chain, although a recently adopted prohibition in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act on requiring military contractors to provide GHG emission information in Department of Defense contracts will limit such opportunities.

While healthcare providers – like militaries – may not be able to directly control their scope 3 emissions, they can strongly influence them, maintain an inventory of their supply chains and factor decarbonisation into decisions about partnerships and procurement.

Data for decision-making and decarbonisation

While militaries have long highlighted the security threats posed by the climate crisis, they have been slower to acknowledge the need for decarbonisation. This is gradually changing, with militaries increasingly adopting emissions reduction targets. There is urgency; and as NATO’s Secretary General Jens Stoltenberg stated in 2021, ‘there is no way to reach Net Zero without also including emissions from the military’.

As the example of the healthcare sector demonstrates, many of the challenges militaries face are not unique, in particular those associated with institutional scale and complexity, and the oft-stated need to pursue decarbonisation without compromising operational capability. What is also clear, is that an already complex decarbonisation task will be an impossible one without the accurate tracking and reporting of the GHG emissions data necessary to inform and support decisions on decarbonisation strategy, processes, technologies and other mitigation measures.

It was this need for accurate and transparent tracking and reporting that motivated us to develop these checklists, and we encourage their use to review progress, and warmly welcome feedback on either the checklists themselves, or outputs from their use.

Linsey Cottrell is CEOBS’ Environmental Policy Officer