What to expect on militarism, conflict and climate at COP29

The “COP of Peace”?

COP29’s presidency had a rocky start. Host Azerbaijan was only announced after lengthy delays resulting from Russia blocking EU states from hosting. Armenia and Azerbaijan had both offered to host but Armenia dropped its offer in exchange for the release of more than 30 Armenian prisoners of war. Azerbaijan quickly branded the conference a “COP of Peace”, with Hikmet Hajiyev, foreign policy adviser to president Ilham Aliyev, telling The Observer that: “…we are working on the advancement of the peace agenda.” Ahead of climate COPs we usually wonder about the extent to which peace will feature, this year there are concerns that ‘peacewashing’ may be on the agenda instead.

Echoing the UAE’s COP28 presidency, which sat uncomfortably with its fossil fuel interests, it has been reported that Azerbaijan is expanding gas production through its state-owned oil and gas company Socar, with Europe’s efforts to diversify its energy supply away from Russia a major driver of this expansion. Yet, Socar’s president Rovshan Najaf is part of the COP29 organising committee. As research shows that there is no room for new oil and gas projects in any credible plan to limit warming to 1.5°C, there are concerns around where the presidency’s interests lie.

In COP28’s closing plenary, the Women and Gender Constituency’s Michelle Benzing asked parties why there is always money for war and never for climate action. A little under 12 months on, and wars continue to inflict tragedy around the world. The world is facing the most conflicts since WWII; Ukraine, Myanmar, Gaza, Lebanon and an escalating crisis in the Middle East, and the displacement of millions in Sudan, to name just a few. The toxic effects of conflicts on climate diplomacy are visible at COPs: COP28 saw some delegations demonstrate disruptive tendencies, while others walked out in protests. The recent UN Pact for the Future may have pledged ‘a new beginning in multilateralism’, but how will this hold up under the reality of an increasingly war-torn world and the existential pressure of the climate crisis?

Eyes on the goal

While promoted as the “COP of Peace”, civil society has instead branded it the “finance COP” and it will be through this lens that the conference’s success is judged. This is because parties must agree on the New Collective Quantified Goal on Climate Finance (NCQG), and that goal is to overtake the current target of $100bn per year, although it’s debatable whether this target has been achieved so far. The Climate Action Network is calling for at least $1tn a year in grants, while others in the climate movement are pointing to the $5tn climate debt owed to the Global South by the Global North. The likely response from Global North countries will be that this can’t come solely from public money, and funds must be mobilised from across the private sector, which risks exacerbating the global debt crisis.

Nevertheless, a recent report from Oil Change International suggests that $5tn could be mobilised by wealthy countries through a tax on the arms trade, and through the redistribution of 20% of public military spending, among other measures. This isn’t the first time that the arms trade has been suggested as a route to finance the NCQG. During June 2024 talks on the goal in Bonn, Saudi Arabia, on behalf of the Arab Group, surprised many by proposing a 5% sales tax on developed countries’ arms companies, as well as taxes on fashion and tech.

Civil society has made similar calls in the past. In early November the Climate Action Network called on developed countries to tax companies in high-emitting sectors – such as the military industry – to fund climate action. Assuming that the arms industry would pass the costs onto their government customers, it potentially provides an interesting way to mobilise public funds via a private source. Needless to say, as Saudi Arabia is the world’s fourth largest military spender and purchases much of its equipment from Western arms companies, its suggestion raised eyebrows.

Irrespective of whether the idea make its way into the negotiations it’s unsurprising that developing countries are looking at the huge disparity between rising military spending and developed countries’ unwillingness to mobilise funds for climate action. The wealthiest 23 countries spend 30 times as much on their militaries than they do on climate finance. Conflict-linked surges in spending only serve to highlight this disparity: the US has allocated $17.9bn in military aid to Israel in the last 12 months, 1,000 times more than it promised to the loss and damage fund at COP28. There’s no escaping that there is always money to be mobilised if the political will is there.

Transforming climate finance for conflict-affected communities

The NCQG could also provide an opportunity to address failures in the current climate finance system. Climate finance typically flows where it’s easiest to deliver, through national governments in stable countries. This means that finance is less likely to reach communities in fragile and conflict-affected settings (FCAS), despite their heightened climate vulnerability. In 2022, the 10 most fragile states received $269m in climate adaptation financing, representing less than 1% of total flows. Of the climate finance that does arrive in FCAS, over half comes in the form of loans, burdening countries already struggling with high levels of debt. A truly transformative NCQG would ensure that a greater and more equitable proportion of high-quality climate finance is channelled through grants, not loans, with targets set to ensure finance is earmarked for FCAS. The starting point for negotiations does recognise that ‘parties in fragile or conflict-affected situations’ may be excluded from contributing to the finance goal but will the final text go as far as to earmark funds for them?

Time to commit

At this year’s COP, we can expect to see the launch of a number of Nationally Determined Contributions (NDCs), the national climate plans that outline a country’s commitment to tackling climate change. They are a requirement for all states party to the Paris Agreement and are due to be updated by February 2025. Whilst the number of countries that have acknowledged their military’s contribution to national emissions and that have set out climate mitigation policies and strategies continues to grow, few current NDCs even mention the military. In some cases, such as Australia’s 2022 NDC, militaries have even been explicitly exempted from commitments; this is unacceptable in a climate emergency and should not be tolerated in the new round of NDCs.

To show full commitment, provide transparency within the UNFCCC and encourage other states to follow suit, military GHG mitigation commitments should be integrated into all new NDCs. Failing to integrate even those military GHG mitigation plans that already exist into new NDCs risks reducing external scrutiny and diminishes their likelihood of delivery. Canada, Estonia, France, Germany, Japan, Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Spain, the UAE, the US, New Zealand and the UK have all published military climate mitigation policies and strategies – watch this space to find out which countries rise to the challenge of committing to them in their NDCs.

Relief, Recovery and Peace Day

Friday 15th November marks the second Relief, Recovery and Peace Day to be held at a climate COP. Last year’s saw the launch of the COP28 Declaration on Climate, Relief, Recovery and Peace, which acknowledged the need for ‘bolder collective action to build climate resilience’ while focusing on countries and communities affected by fragility or conflicts. While its call on signatories to scale-up financial resources, capacity and partnerships in these areas was welcome, it failed to acknowledge the bidirectional relationship between conflicts and the climate crisis. The climate crisis is exacerbating fragility and conflicts across the world but wars are currently emitting the equivalent of whole countries, with alarming consequences for global climate action.

The COP29 presidency aims to build on the COP28 Declaration with the Baku Call on Climate Action for Peace, Relief, and Recovery, which it hopes will capture the support of parties, UN agencies, donors and civil society. Launching on Peace Day, the Baku Call encourages states to turn commitment into action – a necessary step forward for the Declaration. However, the Call has missed the opportunity to fill earlier gaps in the Declaration, and fails to make the connection that a declaration on peace must require action and accountability from military actors to prevent climate and environmental damage.

Although the Baku Call fails to address the climate and environmental impacts of war, this vital issue will still be visible on Peace Day via three reports from the Bonn Contact Group on Climate Peace and Security. The reports focus on: food insecurity, water scarcity and contamination by remnants of war. The latter, which focuses on land degradation, was co-authored by CEOBS’ trustee Dr Sarah Njeri, and calls for investment in the restoration and rehabilitation of land affected by fragility and conflict. Making a critical connection to climate finance, the report also recommends innovative funding mechanisms to address the dual challenges of climate change and explosive remnants of war (ERW) for communities affected by fragility and conflict. Funding that bridges traditional divides between humanitarian, peacebuilding, development and climate could help open up finance for FCAS to address both climate change and ERW. Could COP29 see silos beginning to be dismantled?

The military emissions gap

Meanwhile, the military emissions gap remains wide open thanks to the UNFCCC’s ongoing failure to address it. No country is obliged to report the emissions from its military activities, and since reporting is voluntary, data reported to the UNFCCC is at best, patchy and at worse, entirely absent. We update our Military Emissions Gap website ahead of every COP with the latest UNFCCC data, alongside our analysis of the accessibility of that data in national reports, and a rating of the scale of the gap in national emissions reporting. This year, the UNFCCC is transitioning to the ‘Enhanced Transparency Framework’, where national inventory reports that detail a country’s greenhouse gas emissions are submitted alongside their first ‘biennial transparency report’. As the deadline for submitting the new reports is the end of 2024, we’ll run our analysis early next year. Ironically, the ‘Enhanced Transparency Framework’ doesn’t look likely to offer any enhanced transparency of the hidden emissions from militaries.

COP29 will fail to address the military’s contribution to climate change through its official outputs but the topic will continue to be raised by concerned parties and organisations. CEOBS is pleased to be jointly hosting a side event with Slovenia and Ukrainian NGO Green Wave, titled Transparent military emissions reporting and the path to military decarbonisation. An expert panel representing militaries and civil society will highlight progress in military emissions reporting, presenting case studies from both Slovenia’s Ministry of Defence and from FFI – the Norwegian Defence Research Establishment. Our aim is to demonstrate the practical steps that can be taken by militaries to better understand their carbon footprint in order to make the emissions cuts that are urgently needed. As well as offering this guidance, representatives from civil society including DCAF – the Geneva Centre for Security Sector Governance – and the Climate Change Performance Index (CCPI) will stress the importance of transparency for driving forward climate action, while advocating for an end to military climate exceptionalism.

CEOBS is also collaborating on a second event this year. Measuring climate impacts across the cycle of armed conflicts will launch a new methodology for estimating the emissions from conflicts. This remains a flaw in the UNFCCC reporting system, where a lack of guidance on reporting the emissions from warfighting results in inaccurate or missing data, adding to the military emissions gap, and setting another barrier to holding belligerents accountable. Hosted in partnership with Ukraine, Zoi Environment Network and Ecoaction, the event will explore how the methodology has been developed from researchers’ experience measuring the climate impact of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and how the lessons learnt can be applied to different contemporary conflicts. The events take place back-to-back on Monday 18th November, in Baku and streamed online via the UNFCCC for virtual badge-holders. Recordings of the events will be available on YouTube after the COP.

A growing, global movement

One thing is guaranteed at COP29: civil society will be vocal on injustice, on human rights, women’s rights, militarism and on countless other issues that intersect with the climate crisis. The climate movement has been growing increasingly intersectional, with more and more activists making the connection between militarism and climate change, often through solidarity with victims of war. Last year’s COP saw mobilisations for Palestine, while campaigners were de-badged at the Bonn intersessional conference for an unauthorised protest calling out ‘business as usual during a genocide’. With the wars in Gaza and Lebanon ongoing, and instability spreading across the Middle East, this will undoubtedly be a focus for activists at COP29.

Recently, the first ever Global Week of Action for Peace and Climate Justice provided a foundation of knowledge-sharing for activists working on this intersection, with events on almost every continent. Many focused on building momentum in the lead up to COP and saw new connections to unite the peace and climate movements. Groups that were new to the COP space last year are growing in strength and numbers. For example, the Peace and Disarmament Working Group, formed within the Women and Gender Constituency, which represents women’s rights and voices in the UNFCCC process, has been vocal on the connections between militarism and the climate crisis, and how this disrupts the UNFCCC.

A growing coalition of NGOs spanning the development, peacebuilding and humanitarian sectors are calling for peace-responsive and conflict sensitive approaches to climate action under the banner ‘Peace@COP’. The network has published a detailed brief signed by more than 30 organisations: Navigating the peace and security implications of climate change. It includes recommendations across climate finance, loss and damage, community engagement and on mitigating the impact of military and security sector actors. While progress on integrating military and conflict emissions into the UNFCCC may be frustratingly slow, the momentum behind the global movement calling for action and accountability on climate, peace and security is building.

Ellie Kinney coordinates CEOBS’ climate advocacy and will be at COP29 in Baku – please get in touch if you’d like to connect while you’re there.