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Grace Matu
Demilitarization should be a Climate Priority
There’s an elephant in the room. To save the planet, we cannot simply rely on better farming practices, zero-waste grocery stores, or reusable bags. Not even shopping second hand and turning the whole planet vegan will be enough. While these actions help build a culture of sustainability, their aggregate impact remains marginal when compared to the industrial-scale destruction happening right now.
The largest polluters are energy companies and the military. Considerable attention has been paid to fossil fuel executives, greenwashing, and delayed transitions to renewables. Militarization and armed conflict, however, remain largely absent from mainstream climate discourse. This omission is no longer tenable.
The direct effects of war include the destruction of ecosystems, displacement of human populations, and the killing of flora and fauna across Palestine, Ukraine, the Democratic Republic of Congo, Sudan, and elsewhere. Beyond the immediate humanitarian catastrophe, there is an energy and financial cost that could otherwise fund climate adaptation and mitigation.
The Scale of Military Emissions
The U.S. Department of Defense is the single largest institutional consumer of hydrocarbons in the world. If it were a country, its fuel use alone would make it the 47th largest emitter of greenhouse gases. In 2017, the Pentagon purchased approximately 269,230 barrels of oil per day, emitting over 25,000 kilotonnes of CO₂ from fuel combustion alone.
Globally, combined military emissions are estimated at approximately 5.5% of all greenhouse gases. To contextualize, if the global military were a nation, it would be the fourth-largest carbon emitter on the planet, behind only China, the United States, and India.
However, these numbers don’t show the full picture. Due to exemptions secured at the 1997 Kyoto Protocol, and continued gaps in the Paris Agreement reporting frameworks, militaries are not required to disclose their emissions fully. This loophole shields the single largest institutional polluter from public accountability.
War is accelerating Climate Collapse
Militarization serves as the enforcement arm of the fossil fuel economy. The destruction in Gaza provides quantifiable evidence. It is estimated that the first 60 days alone of the bombardment generated approximately 281,000 metric tonnes of CO₂. That figure exceeds the annual carbon footprint of more than 20 of the world’s most climate-vulnerable nations.
In Ukraine, environmental damage is similarly severe. Ukraine’s Deputy Minister of Environmental Protection reported that after 18 months of war, emissions reached an estimated 150 million tons of CO₂, greater than Belgium’s entire annual emissions.
What’s more, these figures exclude long-term ecological destruction: contaminated water systems, soil poisoned by heavy metals and depleted uranium, and the release of sequestered carbon from burning forests. We cannot demand “Net Zero” while allowing armies to bomb pipelines, industrial sites, and cities into rubble, releasing locked-in carbon instantly.
The economics of war
The biggest contributors to climate change are the foundations of our global economic system, which will continue to be extractive and destructive as long as warfare is profitable. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2024. The world spends 30 times more on its military than it does on climate finance.
Energy companies and weapons manufacturers pollute the planet at rates the planet cannot stomach, and they generate enough profit to consolidate political power that allows them to continue. They then invest in delegating responsibility to us, via campaigns urging us to stop using plastic cups, while they manufacture F-35 fighter jets that consume fuel at astronomical rates.
Focusing our advocacy on zero-waste grocery stores and plastic bag bans while wars continue is not climate justice – it effectively condemns us to endure preventable climate collapse and is adjacent to collective punishment.
There will be nothing left to fight for if we do not stop war from destroying life on earth first.
Real climate action requires shifting vast portions of military budgets toward a just transition. The capital required to build solar farms, secure food systems, restore degraded land, and pay for loss and damage currently sits inside the budgets of defense departments worldwide.
Anti-militarization is not a pacifist abstraction. It is a practical climate policy. Without redirecting resources away from armed conflict and toward ecological restoration and emission reduction, the conditions for a habitable planet will continue to deteriorate, regardless of consumer behavior or voluntary corporate commitments.
