[MUSIC] This is Financial Climate. Can innovations in finance help the world decarbonize? How can trillions of dollars of assets be redirected to catalyze a net zero economy? We explore these questions through conversations with innovators, experts, and investors from around the world. Here's your host, Alex Roth. [MUSIC] Wars and national defense cause huge greenhouse gas emissions. But military-related climate pollution is generally excluded from climate change emission totals, including the ones that are reported under the UN F-Triple C, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. Obviously, the Trump administration has been pushing US allies to shoulder more of their own security. And many European nations have already been ramping up military spending, at least since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022. But at the same time, the US has also continued to increase its own military spending. And so of other countries around the world, from Russia and China to Pakistan, Mexico, Japan, and others. My guest today is Ellie Kinney. She's the senior climate advocacy officer at a UK-based NGO called the Conflict and Environment Observatory. She and her colleagues advocate for the inclusion of military emissions in national accounting for greenhouse gas pollution. They estimate that the climate costs of military activity is above 5.5% of annual global emissions. That's nearly half the amount produced by all the world's cars, and more than all emissions from aviation. I sat down with Ellie to learn why military emission data is so hard to come by. I wanted to know what can be done to improve transparency and how the climate impact of militaries might be reduced. I wanted to better understand what strategies and innovations the conflict and environment observatory and allied organizations are using in their efforts to highlight and alleviate this enormous growing and mostly hidden problem. Here's our conversation. Ellie Kinney, welcome to Financial Climate. Thanks so much for having me. It's great to be here. You work for an organization called the Conflict and Environment Observatory. Can you talk a little bit about what that organization is and what it does? Yeah, so the the conflict and environment observatory or seaobs for sure, because it's a bit of a mouthful. We aim to give a voice to the environment and everyone who depends on it when it faces harm from armed conflict and military activity. So what that means in practice is doing things like conflict monitoring, monitoring the environmental impact of conflicts through things like open source intelligence and remote sensing, meaning that my very clever colleagues can monitor the environmental impact of wars going on far from from where they're based. But that being said, we also work with underground communities in places affected by conflict as well to kind of have that real kind of mix of information going in there. We also work with the mine action community. It's trying to reduce the environmental impact of landmine clearance and other operations like that. And as well, we have the project that I lead on the military emissions gap. Now what this project aims to do is really highlight the hidden military emissions and really try and reduce the climate impact of militaries, which I'm sure we're going to get into. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I want to talk about that. So specifically with the climate impacts of military activities, I understand that we have all these recognized sources of emissions. And you can kind of make a pie chart of what different parts of the economy caused different emissions, but that typically military emissions are excluded from those measures. Can you talk a little bit about why military emissions are excluded and how that came to be the case? Yeah, so this goes back to the development of the Kyoto Protocol. So this is within the UNF triple C, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. Governments were negotiating the Kyoto Protocol, which was starting to gather what emission sources we were going to be looking at and reporting on. And the US, specifically because of the US Department of Defence lobbied very strongly for militaries to be exempt from reporting. And they were successful. So that was roughly 97 or so that the Kyoto Protocol that you're talking about? Yeah, this stretches all the way all the way back to 1997. Fast forward a little bit more to the Paris Agreement. And you can see this change a little bit. The military exemption gets lifted in that there's no statement, specifically exempting militaries from reporting, but that doesn't get replaced with an obligation. So that means that now militaries have kind of moved from exempt from reporting to voluntary reporting. But we all know if something's voluntary. The chance of it getting done feels a bit slim and the chance of being done to high quality feels even slimmer. That's interesting. But I thought that the US never, they didn't ratify the Kyoto Protocol. Did they? No, this is what makes this even teakier. The fact that the US puts such a foot down. They managed to get it eliminated from the agreement and then they ditch the agreement themselves. Exactly. Yeah. So interesting way of doing things, but it's had an impact that the last to this day, really. Can you talk a little bit more about how that exemption applies? Because I feel like it sort of makes sense when you first say it and then when you think about it a little bit more, it's harder for me to get my mind around. For example, we have measures, at least approximations about how much emissions come from certain industries. Let's say steel or cement or chemicals or aviation or whatever. When you have those measures, they would typically exclude the military component of those things, such as like steel for military purposes or aviation for military purposes. Yeah. This is one of the kind of tricky things. If when we look at the UNFCC, specifically, every government reports to the UNFCC, there are different levels of reporting obligations. You have your annex one countries, they were kind of this was at the point of the Kyoto Prozcal. They were the more developed countries. So you kind of have, and this is UNFCC terminology of developed and developing. So your annex one, which tends to be your kind of European global North US, UK, EU, then you have your non annex one, which tends to be more kind of developing countries. At that time, non annex one countries have less of a reporting obligation compared to annex one countries. So already that's kind of a bit of a separation. But neither of these require military emissions reporting is the really kind of critical thing here. Where this voluntary military emissions reporting comes in is that when you look at the UNFCC reporting guidelines, there are a couple of categories where if you wanted to report the emissions from your militaries, this is where you could do it. But there's a few issues with this. On the one hand, it's no one there extensive enough. It doesn't cover the full range of military emissions. It's things like fuel use bases, fuel use, like equipment, I think as well. But that's kind of the tip of the iceberg when it comes to military emissions. Additionally, you also have, it's kind of like an other category, basically, where this military emissions kind of section is, which also means you can have other bits of civilian emissions data thrown in there, which means you can't really disaggregate from from our side, from a research or a campaigns or even a different journalist was looking at this. They wouldn't be able to disaggregate what amount was coming from the military and what was just a different civilian sector. So it makes this accountability element really really quite difficult. I see. Okay. Is that the main mechanism for measuring emissions or when we do research and learn about different sources, are we actually pulling from other sources that are unrelated to the United Nations framework typically? Yes. So the UNFCC will say is it's just one place, the housing emissions reporting. We find that also, I mean, governments report, have their own kind of internal or like national reporting as well. Where often they'll go into more detail, not necessarily more detail military emissions, but it's interesting that we find that often when you have government to a slightly more progressive in their national reporting, it doesn't match up to what gets reported to the UNFCC in terms of their military mission. So it already goes to show that some, some wires across some, something's not quite adding up. But the thing about the UNFCC is that this is kind of meant to be our anchor point for global climate action. And it's kind of the sort of level playing field where every government comes in, or we have this almost every government now, and we have this in theory coordinated approach to climate action based on transparency and accountability. And yet the military sector is just completely missing from the conversation. Despite this great limitations and data, your organization and others,
have made efforts to estimate what those emissions are. So we have at least some approximate idea of what's missing from the reporting. So can you talk a little bit about that about what we do know or what you've been able to estimate? - Yeah, so what we do know, like you say, it's based on estimations, because there's just simply not enough accurate military missions data out there to be able to pull together any kind of comprehensive figure on the scale aside from an estimation. So based on our calculations, militaries are responsible for an estimated 5.5% of global emissions. To put that in perspective, that's more than the entire continent of Africa produces. So it's a pretty chunky sector, but at this point, this is an estimation because we're simply not getting enough data from militaries themselves. And now that 5.5% estimation as well, that is based on data from 2019, so we're looking to update that very soon, hopefully this year. We know that the world is not what it was in 2019, military spending has gone up year on year for the past 10 years. And as well, there is this interesting relationship as the rest of society decarbonises. What does that mean for the percentage chunk ever set to light the military that continues to commit to really quite fossil fuel guzzling equipment? - You were speaking about the increase in military spending in recent years. I certainly hear a lot more about war and conflict in the news over the last few years than I have in prior years. And part of me though, wonder's about that because we hear a lot about the war in Ukraine. We hear a lot about the war in Gaza, but then we hear a lot less about wars in places like South Sudan or Armenia or other places that are not reported on as much. - So do you have a sense that conflicts overall in recent years have actually increased? - Yeah, so I mean, we are facing, I think the most violent conflict that we've seen since World War II, that's not research that we've done. We don't necessarily look at the quantity of the war that's going on at the moment, but yeah, I think we definitely, there is a lot of conflict out there at the moment. - You were mentioning that some of these wars involve explicitly targeting fossil fuel infrastructure when you do these estimates to gauge what you think the climate cost of war is, you must break it down into categories. So for example, supply chains is something that just exists and then if somebody bombs a gas pipeline or something, that's a totally different thing. So can you talk a little bit about the components of that and how it differs from like actual conflict versus just the maintenance of an enormous international force? - Yeah, yeah, 'cause I guess a really important sort of clarification is that when we talk about militaries being responsible for 5.5% of global emissions, that doesn't include any war fighting. That's the everyday maintenance of militaries, that's militaries and the military industrial kind of supply chains. That's the base level. You add on top of that, as we said, the highest number of conflicts in World War II, the emissions from all of those, as we're seeing, I mean, this is such a new area of research that's really kind of rapidly developed over the past couple of years where we've seen researchers like the initiative of greenhouse gas accounting of war who've been doing amazing work estimating the carbon footprint of Russia's invasion of Ukraine. We've had researchers out of Queen Mary University of London, Ben Neymar and others who have been estimating the carbon cost of the destruction and then hopefully the future rebuilding of Gaza and all of this pointing to huge amounts of emissions that come from the destruction of these areas. And these are different, these are just two conflicts of the many ongoing at the moment, but these are two that have played out in very different ways and the different sources of emissions from that, I think, is that the methodology of how you track that is really developing at the moment. But both have found that these equivalents are, you know, whole industrialized countries, the emissions are equivalent to, so you're adding that on top of the base level of 5.5%. And it starts to get quite scary. - I know you've been involved in some efforts to create greater transparency internationally. Can you talk a little bit more about those efforts? - Yeah, definitely. So we launched the Military Emissions Gap around COP26. So what this is, is a database of all the available data reported to the UNF TRIPLE C on military emissions. And what this does is it takes the data that we troll through all the uploads to the UNF TRIPLE C, we pull out the information on military emissions, and we compare this with the information that we do have about that country and their military spending, and other bits of information at the moment, we give them two scores, one that is data accessibility, which is the extent to which, as I said before, when you have countries that lump together civilian with military means that it's not accessible data. So we provide the data accessibility score, and we also provide a kind of ranking of quite how big we think their military emissions gap is, so the gap between the true scale of the emissions from that country's military, and actually what's being reported to the UNF TRIPLE C. And I guess spoiler alert is that no country is doing either side particularly well, summoning better than others, summoning absolutely atrociously, but no one's had a gold star just yet. - What are your thoughts about how that might play out? Are you thinking that there could be an international effort to include these emissions in the official reporting framework the way maybe people would have liked back before the Kyoto Protocol, or do you expect that it'll be done more country by country? What's your vision for how that might progress? - I think my vision, the big picture thinking is that this is exactly what the UNF TRIPLE C is for, is to have an accurate and transparent hub for climate action, which includes mitigation, adaptation. It's the whole range and reporting. So in my mind, military emissions reporting should be included within the UNF TRIPLE C. However, change on a UNF TRIPLE C level is hard one these days. That doesn't mean we don't try, but we try other options as well. And where the UNF TRIPLE C is slow to move, we know that governments move quicker or governments can move quicker rather. So we have seen governments making more of an effort than the UNF TRIPLE C requires into. Countries like Norway have been relatively progressive on their military emissions reporting. Slovenia recently also, yeah, coming through with that. And I think we really, yeah, we look to these leaders who can show that it's not only possible for a military to be better at opposing their emissions, but it's also kind of an essential part of how you consider a well-running Ministry of Defense is to have a climate mitigation strategy that is backed up with emissions reduction targets that have backed up with credible, transparent reporting. - Imagine that it was the case that you were successful in getting the really more robust reporting of this environmental or climate footprint of the military across the world. What would you think that that would lead to? I imagine it would mean that military emissions would be a bigger part of the conversation around climate solutions. But what is the hope that individual countries would seek to reduce the emissions of their military or what would be the result do you think? - Transparen military emissions reporting needs to be the kind of, it's a fundamental of climate action or it should be. But what is a stepping stone in our view, a stepping stone towards much needed, vitally needed, emissions reductions for the military sector. - Through militaries being kind of exempt from the UNFCC, it also means that when governments they're exempt from emissions reduction targets in line with the Paris Agreement, when you have countries submitting their NDCs, they're naturally determined contributions, which are basically a country's climate action plan. Military is missing. And if you look at countries like, for example, in the UK, the Mizu defenses like half of central government submissions and they're missing from the climate action plan. So these are really substantial chunk to be missing from the strategy of how we reach the Paris Agreement School of limiting warming to 1.5 degrees, which I mean, we're already kind of teetering on the brink of, if not, we've already passed. So at this point, we talk about having a whole society approach to decarbonization, which is, I think, kind of widely agreed that that needs to be the way forward. But consistently, a whole society approach is missing this hugely polluting sector. - Yeah, it's hard to have an honest conversation about it in the first place if we don't know that big piece of it. - Yeah, you can't manage what you don't measure. - I guess one would hope that over time, it becomes easier to reduce the climate cost of maintaining militaries. I mean, I guess the way I think of it is that there's, in some ways, I'm guessing that the military follows other trends across technologies or society, maybe that in some areas, it makes more sense to use, let's say solar panels to power remote areas or electric vehicles, maybe a more efficient way to power vehicles in some cases.
Yeah, and this is a really interesting point because I think what we're seeing with the military sector is that without the kind of policy drivers pushing for decarbonisation, you're not really getting that response from industry that is to put foot down in producing effective technologies for military, for decarbonised military. We're seeing bits of advances, but it's nowhere near the pace that would be needed. They have advancements that are needed. And what this means is that some of the military climate mitigation strategies that are out there are reliant on technologies that aren't available. They aren't available at the scale that they need them, or simply just not widespread produced yet. So I think a really interesting thing around this as well is what these policy drivers are for pushing for military decarbonisation and actually having this as part of the conversation of what a military looks like in the future. Because we have, I think the more savvy militaries, it's not out of the conversation that there is an operational effectiveness advantage to things like use of renewables. And I think especially in this current context where we're able to frame things as this real benefits of operational effectiveness, and it's not just green militaries for green militaries say, "Emilitaries are, I mean, yeah, they are behind this." And I think there's a real risk at the moment the ongoing shutdown of climate action that we're seeing internationally that that then continues to be this real dampener on the evolution of kind of technologies. But that being said, military decarbonised technologies will not be the thing that they can only go so far. There is also just, I think, a widespread reframing of how we think about security that needs to happen as well. And related to that, what are you hearing? I'm curious from the folks in the military. I've seen a lot of accounts in news items about awareness of some of the climate vulnerabilities of war. We talked about the issue of climate change being a threat multiplier. I've also seen a lot of discussion about climate adaptation where, for example, there are military bases maybe in low-lying areas that are threatened by sea level rise and need to adapt in those kind of ways. There may be certain types of conflicts emerging in the Arctic as the ice melts that didn't exist before. So it seems like just like what you're saying, military people are very aware of many different kinds of threats. And you see them addressing and talking about these different ways that climate may interact. So I'm curious if you've had some conversations about ways to reduce the climate impacts of military operations or do you find that's something that the military people that you've connected with are not really attending to? I think traditionally the kind of mainstream climate security discourse has been around the way that the climate crisis will impact military activity. And this feels like the area that the kind of military and most sort of comfortable talking about is, you know, this, how do we respond to a changing world? For example, yeah, the new roots opening up across the Arctic, the potential risk of increased conflict and how climate plays a role in that. But less familiar is the area of what is this reverse side, what impact is this increasing militarisation having on these impacts and it's almost feels like a missing link for me almost the fact that you can talk about this, assume the inevitabilities of a changed climate without doing anything to reduce those potential climate impacts by reducing your own emissions and taking some accountability for the military's role in producing these impacts of which then I'll try and to prepare for. So that has always felt slightly detached for me. But I think what's been a really kind of notable change over the past year, I suppose, has been with the coming of the second Trump administration and this complete disregard of climate actions and we don't talk about climate change and things like that. The kind of ripple effect that this is having across military institutions that was sort of moving in a better direction. So for example, prior to Trump 2.0, we'd had NATO talking about, you know, they had a greenhouse gas emissions methodology for kefir counting emissions, it didn't go far enough, but it was a step in the right direction. They'd published a sort of report of best practice of what kind of climate action NATO militaries were doing so that they can kind of learn from each other. They'd made a net zero promise which again doesn't go far enough because it didn't include militaries or military training but it was kind of a, you could see a sort of cultural shift happening in NATO in the way that they spoke about reducing climate impacts. You had Stoltenberg going to COP and talking about the fact that militaries need to reduce their climate impact. And the thought now of Mark Rooter going to COP and talking about reducing climate impact just feels completely detached from reality now because, and I think a big part of this is the way that this US influence across NATO has just meant they've stopped talking about this as an issue and then how that radiates across member states I think is really concerning. So I think we really are in a moment where we need to try and hold on to the progress that was made culturally within militaries and military institutions about the need to reduce climate impacts. Yeah, I'm really really hold on to that progress and try and not let it get washed away with a current kind of trend of climate denial. That's interesting, but it seems like also part of the current trends is that the United States is no longer regarded as quite as reliable and ally to NATO members as it was and has explicitly stated that they're not going to shoulder as much of the cost of the common defense as they did previously at a minimum. So then we see European nations and others that are increasing their military spending like you've described in part as a result of the United States insisting that they do so. Do you think that there's any way which a greater reliance on Europeans for their own defense may increase their interest in the climate in the sense that these are nations that are more committed to climate action in the first place? I'd really like to take an optimistic view on this, and I think that has been great work happening on any level driven by militaries and by ministries of defence looking at particularly as we're saying when you have this link between increased operational effectiveness and then use supernumables and things like that that are kind of groups within Europe, within the EU who've really been looking at this and piloting things and sharing their experience and projects like that, so much what we need at the moment. But then sort of unhelpfully and counterintuitive we took that. You have just a widespread culture or norm of military exemptions across EU climate and environmental policy. So for example when there are the various different policy frameworks that have been going through to protect the environment and support EU's decarbonisation and kind of pull these industrial levers to push the EU in that direction consistently we see the fact that there will be in there somewhere this doesn't count for militaries, military and defence sector not involved in this. I think when you see the progress that EU has made on kind of other levels to see this consistent exemptions, for military and defence sector I think is it's so unhelpful when it's dragging them behind frankly when it comes to this stuff. So I would like to take an optimistic view because I know that there is good stuff happening on any level of the equally it's just so for Stragithnik to consistently see this culture and military exceptionalism when it comes to environmental and climate policies on any EU level. Something that I found really fascinating just that I happen to have heard a little bit about lately is the work of an organisation that is based in UK called Bellincat for people not familiar with it they work generally on using open source technologies right and I'm sure you would know better than I do but they work on a lot of human rights atrocities and things like that that they're able to learn about through open sources like looking at satellite images or they'll see pictures that somebody posted on social media that shows a piece of military hardware and they figure out what it is and start to locate where it is and verify what happened and things like this. Some of these initiatives you were describing that look at the greenhouse gas related damage from blowing things up in warfare sound like they're have a similar ethos in terms of using open source technology to learn about things that aren't reported on so I wonder if you could talk a little bit more about some of those kinds of initiatives and how they're used to look at the environmental or climate costs of war. Yeah I will so at seaobs are kind of a conflict monitoring line of work that really has a lot of overlap with that light as you say in that Bellincat approach of open source intelligence and using the information that's posted on social media and things like that and then geolocating that using satellite imagery and remote sensing and that kind of thing is very much the kind of core of how we're able to monitor the environmental impact of conflicts. I know less about the use of that within a kind of climate context. I think we've had colleagues talk about whether you can kind of yeah look at various plumes and things and work out.
greenhouse gas emissions that way, but I don't think we've dealt into that yet. I see. So a lot of that is stuff that you connect with through partner organizations that do that stuff, or do you have people on staff that focus on that? That's more the environmental damage mapping side of things at the OBS than it is the kind of climate military emissions side of things. I always think my colleagues must be spies by the way that they're able to do okay things. So yeah, it's such a skill and such an important kind of elements this line of work to mean that you're able to support a monitor complex even from an office in the north of England. Yeah, do they have some estimates from you were saying that in with respect to maybe the war in Ukraine or the war in Gaza that there are organizations or research groups that look at that open source data to determine some of the damage? Do they have an estimate? You mentioned a rough approximation of 5.5% of global emissions that comes from just the steady state maintenance of militaries and their supply chains. Do you have a sense of how much of that or how big is the climate cost of blowing things up for lack of a better word in comparison to the 5.5%? Yeah, it's considerable. A big chunk of this work has been done by an organization called the Initiative and Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War and this is kind of group of sort of researchers and carbon accountants who were at close ties to Ukraine. So when Russia invaded Ukraine, I think if you're a carbon accountant you're trying to think of what's your what's your role you can play in this kind of push back and and actually that proves to be a really, really valuable one was to actually try and get an understanding of what the climate impacts are of the invasion and it's been the first time that's been done to estimate the emissions of a live conflict and landed in his team power updates every year usually around the anniversary. It's equivalents like whole industrialized countries operating on top of the current situation of emissions anyway. So really quite considerable. This comes from unexpected places I think what's been quite interesting around Leonard's work and his team is that it's not even necessarily there's the carbon cost of blowing stuff up but there's so much more in particular I mean there's blowing stuff up and then the reconstruction is a considerable chunk of emissions but you also have things like changing to flight paths the way that I think between London and Tokyo those pass-in lives civilian flights are now like an hour or two longer to avoid dangerous airspace and if you consistently have that increase in flight time that is a knock on impact of increased emissions as a result of rushes invasion. So these really interesting kind of sources of emissions linked to the conflict that you wouldn't necessarily think of you might think of that you know the blowing stuff up. Forest fires also being another one but then there are kind of these hidden sources and the movement of people as well as another one that's been really influential worked to be able to look at what these different sources are for one specific conflict and then that then provides a framework for other researchers to be able to learn from that as their landmark in his team have a Quimera University to apply bits of that to Israel's bombardment of Gaza but then also it's a different conflict it looks different so then they're able to kind of add on and I think is this area of research develops it's a very collaborative group of researchers and hopefully we can kind of get a better understanding of the carbon cost of a different complex moving forward. Well that's great yeah and thank you for clarifying that because here I started calling the cost of blowing stuff up as sort of a shorthand for other things but I appreciate you pointing out that that was very very simplistic and that there are a lot of other elements to it that need to be considered that's really interesting and you can see the cost of reconstruction would be enormous in terms of pouring all the concrete and the steel and rebuilding whole cities is an enormous environmental cost so it sounds like this network of people that are using open source information to learn things about the climate cost of war that we never thought was possible that's at least a small bright spot in a otherwise depressing situation I'm curious if you have any other potential areas of advancement that you expect to see positive results in the next few years. You have to remain hopeful not just in this role but in not just in this kind of one of work but I think just in life at the moment it's essential and I think my kind of real area of interest at the moment is this increasing conversation around a fossil fuel phase out and the upcoming conference first international conference and phase out of fossil fuels and really looking at what this roadmap for phasing out fossil fuels would look like because we can't have an honest conversation about phasing out fossil fuels without talking about militaries so I think this is if we think about going right back to the beginning of our conversation around the the US lobbying of Kyoto how did that play out if there were more campaigners that I could that have been prevented and here we are potentially finding ourselves at the start of another multilateral process for phasing out fossil fuels and how do we ensure that from the beginning militaries are there as a sector that we're considering as part of the big picture. That makes a lot of sense so this is a broad discussion of the phase out of fossil fuels that you're saying is really maybe more focused on non-military areas but needs to include militaries from the beginning in a way that the UN discussion in 97 did not. Yeah so it's this this kind of this idea of a fossil fuel phase out across society how do we pursue a whole society phase out of fossil fuels we can't militaries have to be part of our conversation otherwise we're missing a really substantial user fossil fuels I mean depending on as the world largest institutional user of fossil fuels you can't ignore these kind of players when we're talking about the green transition so yeah I see that kind of new and developing space is a real area for hope I think. That makes a lot of sense I think that's probably as good a place as any to end. Ellie Kinney thank you so much for talking with us on financial climate. It's been a great job. Thank you for listening to Financial Climate. 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