Category: Dossier

- Shaazia Ebrahim

As wars intensify and climate negotiations proceed as if in isolation, a critical truth remains sidelined: militarism, occupation, and extractivism are key drivers of ecological collapse. Climate justice cannot be separated from struggles against colonial violence, and Global South movements are challenging the limits of current climate diplomacy.

The 2020s have been marked not just by accelerating climate breakdown but also by staggering waves of conflict, forced displacement, and geopolitical violence. By the end of 2023, nearly 120 million people worldwide were forcibly displaced due to persecution, conflict, violence, and mass human rights violations, which has been too often documented as a human catastrophe, overlooking the profound effects it has on climate and the environment.[i]

This separation is analytically inaccurate and politically, morally dangerous.

Environmental damage wrought by wars and occupations accelerates climate breakdown, undermines adaptation, and aggravates global inequities. When forests are cleared for military tactics, wetlands are drained, or critical infrastructure is destroyed, both ecologies and communities pay the price, in their lives and livelihoods and in their capacity to absorb carbon. But rather than confronting these realities, major global climate negotiation spaces like the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) Conferences of Parties (COP) have systematically sidelined war, militarism, occupation, and colonial violence from formal agendas and accountability mechanisms.

Climate justice, which is understood as equitable responsibility, historical accountability, and meaningful participation, cannot be separated from broader struggles against systemic violence. As civil society actors from the Global South have repeatedly argued, the architecture of global climate governance continues to reflect deep structural inequities.[ii]

At successive COPs, debates typically focus on mitigation targets, adaptation finance, loss and damage, and energy transitions. A glaring omission persists: the climate impacts of war and militarism. Military and war-related emissions are some of the most fossil-fuel intensive sectors, with the world’s militaries collectively accounting for an estimated 5.5% of all global greenhouse gas emissions. This is roughly equivalent to the emissions of an entire industrialised nation. Yet, the climate impact of global military operations is frequently underreported and poorly understood.

The omission of militarism from COP agendas is not accidental, it is historical.[iii] Military emissions are often excluded from national greenhouse gas reporting due to “national security” concerns.[iv] The 1997 Kyoto Protocol excluded military emissions from mandatory reduction targets. Nearly two decades later, the Paris Agreement maintained this leniency, making military emissions reporting voluntary and permitting governments to continue underestimating one of the world’s most carbon-intensive sectors, protecting them from meaningful and necessary scrutiny.

Research highlighted in discussions around the International Court of Justice’s climate advisory opinion accentuates how military emissions sit outside the core accountability frameworks of international climate law.[v] Scientists and advocates have also warned that the climate and environmental impacts of militarism are systematically neglected in global negotiations.

This exclusion is a political choice which is maintained deliberately in global climate governance to serve the interests of the military-industrial complex and imperialist powers.

The United States military, often cited as the largest institutional consumer of fossil fuels globally, operates within transparency gaps that allow emissions from bases, operations, and supply chains to evade full accounting. While countries in the Global South are continually pressured to decarbonise rapidly, often under conditions of debt and structural adjustment, military sectors in powerful states remain partially shielded from the same scrutiny.

Such asymmetries reveal how global climate governance continues to reproduce colonial hierarchies: those most responsible for historic emissions have flexibility, while those most vulnerable shoulder disproportionate burdens.

War as a driver in the climate crisis

War is both a humanitarian crisis and an environmental one. According to the United Nations, conflicts degrade ecosystems, contaminate water sources, and destroy agricultural systems, undermining both mitigation and adaptation efforts.[vi] Forests and wetlands – vital carbon sinks – are frequently damaged or destroyed during conflict. Industrial facilities targeted in warfare release pollutants into air, soil and waterways. The reconstruction phase itself is carbon-intensive, causing further emissions.

In Sudan, these dynamics are stark. Already ranked among the world’s most climate-vulnerable countries, Sudan faces extreme heat, erratic rainfall, severe droughts, and devastating floods. When war broke out between the Sudanese Armed Forces (SAF) and the Rapid Support Forces (RSF) in 2023, these vulnerabilities deepened catastrophically. Millions have been displaced internally, agricultural systems have been disrupted, famine is widespread and local governance structures fractured, all of which severely limit climate adaptation capacity.

The data emerging from conflict zones globally shows how emissions generated during active warfare can rival or exceed those of entire nations. Yet the technical capacity to measure and report these emissions in war-torn regions is profoundly limited. This creates systemic underrepresentation: the very places most affected by environmental destruction often lack the infrastructure to quantify and submit climate data into global reporting frameworks.

In Palestine, environmental destruction is inseparable from occupation. Civil society organisations and researchers document patterns of agricultural land destruction, groundwater contamination, and infrastructure demolition that degrade ecosystems and livelihoods. These patterns demonstrate ecocide, an environmental destruction that is embedded in systems of domination and dispossession.

Civil society and Global South resistance

Where formal negotiations remain silent, civil society has intervened both analytically and politically.

The Climate Justice Coalition (CJC) – a South African movement made up of over 80 members including trade unions, NGOs, community-based organisations, faith-based groups and more committed to a transformative and intersectional vision for climate justice – has joined other climate justice organisations in making the links between war and environmental destruction. The CJC has consistently emphasised that climate justice is inseparable from struggles against militarism, imperialism and entrenched extractive interests.

In South Africa, the CJC has supported and mobilised around frequent protests against Glencore’s export of coal to Israel, linking fossil resource flows directly to the financing of militarised states and, by extension, to systems of violence.[vii] These actions challenge the simplistic framing of coal as a domestic economic resource, highlighting how globalised fossil fuel supply chains can be implicated in enabling military expansion and state-led violence.

The CJC has maintained solidarity with Palestinian liberation, fusing the struggle against occupation with a broader struggle against fossil capitalism, extractivism and racialised violence.[viii] In the same vein, the CJC Secretariat publicly backed South Africa’s call to end Israel’s genocide in Gaza, a political position that situates climate justice within global movements against structural violence and apartheid.[ix] As a movement, we recognise that all anti-colonial struggles are climate justice issues. Colonial and neocolonial land dispossession drives climate injustice by enabling extractive industries like oil and gas, degrading ecosystems that could act as carbon sinks. At the same time, it continues to deepen vulnerability by displacing Indigenous, poor, and Black communities and stripping them of access to land, water, and food and leaving them more exposed to the impacts of climate change in a vicious cycle.

As members of civil society, the CJC refuses the compartmentalisation of climate politics. For the CJC and its allies, climate justice is about confronting the material relations that produce both ecological destruction and social suffering.

Initiatives such as “The Military Emissions Gap” seek to map and quantify military carbon footprints, challenging the opacity that shields defense sectors from accountability. Scientists and peace researchers have emphasised the link between militarism and climate breakdown, urging negotiators to integrate these realities into formal processes.[x]

Legal scholars are also making arguments that international law, including principles discussed in the context of the ICJ’s climate advisory opinion, could be interpreted to impose environmental obligations even in contexts of occupation and armed conflict.[xi]

Meanwhile, as Global South movements we are reframing climate justice. Rather than treating climate change as a purely environmental issue, activists connect fossil capitalism, militarism, and colonial extraction as intertwined systems. The call is not only for mitigation targets, but for demilitarisation, debt cancellation, reparations, and reconstruction funding that acknowledges environmental harm.

Conflict-sensitive adaptation has also emerged as a growing principle in development discourse, recognising that climate resilience cannot be built in the absence of peace, justice and political stability. Yet even this framing often stops short of naming the geopolitical forces that perpetuate instability.

What is at stake

Sidelining war and occupation in climate negotiations shapes whose suffering is visible, whose emissions count, and whose futures are prioritised.

When military emissions remain underreported and war-related environmental destruction absent from COP agendas, powerful states evade accountability while climate-vulnerable populations face compounded crises. Communities living under bombardment or occupation are excluded from shaping the policies that govern reconstruction and adaptation.

The political stakes are profound. Climate justice becomes hollow if it addresses solar panels and carbon markets but refuses to confront militarism. It becomes technocratic rather than transformative.

The moral stakes are equally stark. To treat war as separate from climate breakdown is to ignore how violence fuels ecological collapse — and how ecological collapse in turn deepens instability and displacement.

Toward a more honest, just climate politics

If climate negotiations are to remain legitimate, they must expand their scope. That means demanding transparency around military emissions. It means integrating war-related environmental damage into loss and damage discussions. It means recognising that adaptation finance in conflict zones must address political violence, not simply infrastructure gaps.

Civil society actors from Palestine, Sudan, South Africa, and across the Global South are already articulating this expanded vision. They insist that climate justice cannot be separated from struggles against colonial violence, occupation, and war. They challenge the assumption that climate governance can remain politically neutral in a world structured by unequal power. Climate justice is not possible in a world where we ignore ongoing genocides and settler-colonial projects. A future of climate justice is a future where we disrupt and uproot systems of oppression wherever we find them.

For European audiences, this raises urgent questions: Can climate diplomacy claim moral authority while ignoring the environmental toll of militarism? Can a just transition occur alongside expanding military budgets and ongoing occupations?

True climate justice requires confronting these contradictions. Ecological destruction and political violence are not parallel crises; they are intertwined realities. To separate them is to perpetuate a politics of erasure. To confront them together is to begin building a climate framework rooted not only in carbon metrics, but in justice.

References

[i] United Nations Peace & Security, How conflict impacts our environment, n.d. Consultable : https://www.un.org/en/peace-and-security/how-conflict-impacts-our-environment

[ii] Serge, Nanda Silatsa, Inequity in Climate Negotiations : A Call for Justice in the Global South, Global South Forum, 19 Janvier 2025. Consultable : https://www.globalsouthforum.org/article/inequity-in-climate-negotiations-a-call-for-justice-in-the-global-south

[iii] Bera, Manabendra Nath, Militarism: A Leading Cause of Environmental and Climate Crises, International Union of Scientists, 28 Avril 225. Consultable sur https://www.iuscientists.org/militarism-and-climate-crises/

[iv] United Nations Peace & Security, ibid.

[v] Baudichau, Eva, Of Warming and Warzones: The Legal Status of Military Emissions in the ICJ’s Climate Opinion, VerfBlog, 08 août 2025. Consultable https://verfassungsblog.de/military-emissions-icj-climate-opinion/, DOI: 10.59704/ca99ffd63031501e.

[vi] United Nations Peace & Security, ibid.

[vii] Climate Justice Coalition, Shut Down Glencore’s Genocide Economy: Actions Planned Ahead of Glencore’s AGM, Media Statements, n.d. Consultable: https://climatejusticecoalition.org/shut-down-glencores-genocide-economy-actions-planned-ahead-of-glencores-agm/

[viii] Climate Justice Coalition,The Climate Justice Coalition Stands In Solidarity with Palestinian Liberation, News, n.d.. Consultable : https://climatejusticecoalition.org/the-climate-justice-coalition-stands-in-solidarity-with-palestinian-liberation/

[ix] Climate Justice Coalition,The Climate Justice Coalition Secretariat Backs South Africa’s Call To End Israel’s Genocide in Gaza, News, n.d.. Consultable sur https://climatejusticecoalition.org/the-climate-justice-coalition-secretariat-backs-south-africas-call-to-end-israels-genocide-in-gaza/

[x] Bera, ibid.

[xi] Baudichau, ibid.