The carbon emissions of war put humanity’s right to exist at risk

livemint.com:

90 seconds to midnight last year, up from 120 seconds in 2019. War remains an immediate existential threat. But, unfortunately, it has got overshadowed by climate change in terms of global awareness and activism.

I have seen climate-change activists roll their eyes when the conversation turns to geopolitics. To the extent that they engage with the subject at all, it is to argue that international politics is a major hurdle to achieving emission targets and other climate goals. They do not sufficiently recognize that war is perhaps the most undesirable source of carbon emissions.

The UN General Assembly adopted a resolution on the Protection of the Environment in Relation to Armed Conflicts (PERAC) in 2022, but the environmental impact of war remains at the margins of the international discourse on climate change. That is an expensive mistake. Benjamin Neimark and his colleagues found that the “projected emissions from the first 60 days of the Israel-Gaza war were greater than the annual emissions of 20 individual countries and territories." The incremental increase in emissions over the first two months was around 280,000 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e).

If we were to bring this up to date, almost a million tCO2e has been wastefully dumped into the atmosphere. The researchers estimate the reconstruction of Gaza will create another 30 million tC02e of emissions. These are very conservative estimates and the real cost to the environment might be of a bigger order of magnitude.