Belligerent Blindspots: Battle's Baneful & Buried Carbon Burden When delegates assembled for COP30 in Belém, Brazil, in November 2025, they subjected virtually every major sector of the global economy to rigorous scrutiny for its contribution to rising greenhouse gas concentrations. Agriculture, aviation, steel, cement, shipping, all were placed under the analytical microscope of international climate diplomacy. One sector, conspicuous by its absence from the negotiating table, was war. This omission is not a minor procedural oversight but a profound structural failure of global climate governance, one that allows some of the most carbon-intensive human activities on earth to proceed entirely outside the accountability frameworks that govern every other major emitting sector. Russia's invasion of Ukraine, now entering its fifth year, has generated an estimated 311 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, a figure comparable to the combined annual emissions of Belgium, New Zealand, Austria, & Portugal. CO₂ equivalent is the standardized metric used to compare the relative warming impact of various greenhouse gases, including methane, nitrous oxide, & sulphur hexafluoride, to carbon dioxide, enabling scientists & policymakers to aggregate diverse emission sources into a single, comparable figure. Research published in early 2026 calculated that the first 15 months of Israel's war in Gaza generated more than 33 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, a volume comparable to the combined 2023 annual emissions of Costa Rica & Slovenia. In February 2026, Israel & the United States launched military operations against Iran, adding yet another conflict to a lengthening list of wars whose emissions go entirely uncounted in global inventories. Neta Crawford, a researcher associated with the Cost of War project at Brown University, has highlighted in recently published work how armed forces, militarization, & war collectively fuel climate change at a scale that is systematically excluded from the data that governments & international bodies rely upon to assess progress toward climate targets. Crawford argues that military emissions & conflict-related emissions remain profoundly undercounted, even as they actively undermine every effort to mitigate the warming trajectory of the planet. These are massive, consequential emissions, generated without any formal mechanism to record, report, or attribute them, & without any accountability for the climate costs that cascade across conflict zones & far beyond their geographic boundaries, affecting populations who bear no responsibility for the wars being fought in their names or on their soil.

Gargantuan Gap: Governance's Glaring & Grievous Military Omission The scale of the military emissions gap, defined by researchers as the difference between what governments formally report to international bodies & what their armed forces actually emit across peacetime operations, training exercises, supply chains, & active conflict, is staggering in its magnitude & troubling in its political origins. Estimates from multiple independent research organizations suggest that militaries & their associated supply chains account for approximately 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions, a share large enough to rank the world's combined military sector as the fourth largest emitter on the planet if it were counted as a single country, surpassing the emissions of every nation except China, the United States, & India. This figure, moreover, covers only peacetime military operations & does not incorporate the dramatically elevated emissions generated during active armed conflict, meaning the true share of global emissions attributable to military activity is substantially higher than even this alarming estimate. The problem is rooted in the foundational rules of international climate governance. Under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, countries have been formally exempt from fully reporting military emissions since the Kyoto Protocol negotiations of the 1990s, when the United States successfully lobbied for the exclusion of military emissions on national security grounds, establishing a precedent that has persisted through every subsequent iteration of the international climate architecture. The 2015 Paris Agreement introduced voluntary reporting of military emissions, but as a 2025 briefing from the Conflict & Environment Observatory & Griffith University made unambiguously clear, the result is a reporting system that is, in the briefing's own characterization, "patchy, incomplete or missing altogether." The three largest military spenders in the world, the United States, China, & Russia, either submit no emissions data at all or provide incomplete, non-disaggregated figures that cannot be meaningfully verified or incorporated into global emissions accounting. This constitutes a structural blind spot of the first order, one that deliberately excludes one of the most carbon-intensive sectors of human activity from any form of meaningful accountability, & that has been maintained not through scientific necessity but through political choice. Researchers at the Conflict & Environment Observatory have noted that the exclusion was never scientifically justified, only politically convenient, & that the methodologies required to measure & report military emissions accurately already exist & have been demonstrated in practice by civil society organizations operating entirely outside the formal reporting architecture.

Combustive Conflict: Calculating Combat's Catastrophic CO₂ Cascade A landmark study examining the full carbon cycle of Israel's war in Gaza provides one of the most comprehensive & methodologically rigorous accounts yet produced of how armed conflict generates greenhouse gas emissions across multiple phases & pathways, revealing a distribution of emissions that challenges intuitive assumptions about where the greatest climate costs of war are concentrated. The study found that direct combat emissions, encompassing the fuel burned by military jets, the propellants in rockets & artillery shells, the diesel consumed by armored vehicles & naval vessels, & the energy used in military bases & command facilities, account for just 1.3 million of the total 33.2 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent attributed to the first 15 months of the conflict. The vast majority of the war's projected climate cost, more than 31 million metric tons, is expected to arise not from the fighting itself but from the reconstruction of the infrastructure that the fighting has destroyed: nearly 450,000 apartments, more than 3,000 kilometers of roads, schools, hospitals, water treatment systems, & the entire built environment of a densely populated territory. Rebuilding what war destroys is, in climatic terms, the single largest act of war, a finding that fundamentally reframes how policymakers & climate scientists should think about the relationship between armed conflict & greenhouse gas emissions. The picture from Ukraine is similarly alarming but differently structured. Research by the Initiative on Greenhouse Gas Accounting of War found that direct combat emissions constitute 37% of total emissions from the conflict between February 2022 & 2026, a significantly higher proportion than in Gaza, reflecting the industrial scale of conventional warfare being waged across a vast geographic theater. Russia's military operations have ignited thousands of fires in Ukrainian forests & wetlands, a category of emissions that accounts for 23% of the conflict's total carbon footprint, releasing carbon stored in biomass & soil over centuries into the atmosphere in a matter of hours. Russia's systematic attacks on Ukraine's electrical infrastructure have additionally released sulphur hexafluoride, a greenhouse gas 24,000 times more potent than CO₂ on a 100-year warming basis, from high-voltage switching gear & electrical substations, adding a particularly insidious dimension to the conflict's climate legacy. The rerouting of civilian aircraft around Ukrainian & Russian airspace has added an estimated 20 million extra metric tons of CO₂ equivalent compared to pre-invasion flight paths, a spillover cost borne by the entire global aviation system & ultimately by the planet's atmosphere.

Iranian Inferno: Igniting Invisible & Immense Emission Inventories The military operations launched by Israel & the United States against Iran in February 2026 have added a further, largely unquantified dimension to the growing body of conflict-related emissions that exist entirely outside the formal accounting frameworks of international climate governance. Early estimates suggest that the war against Iran has already unleashed over five million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, a figure driven primarily by the destruction of energy infrastructure, industrial facilities, & urban built environments, rather than by the direct fuel consumption of the military assets conducting the strikes. Iran's energy sector, which encompasses extensive oil & gas production, refining, & distribution infrastructure, represents a particularly carbon-intensive target set, as the destruction of such facilities releases not only the CO₂ generated by combustion but also unburned hydrocarbons, methane, & other potent greenhouse gases that escape into the atmosphere during the chaotic, uncontrolled conditions of military strikes. The destruction of oil storage facilities in Tehran & other major Iranian cities has generated massive plumes of black carbon & particulate matter, contributing to both immediate air quality crises for civilian populations & longer-term atmospheric warming through the deposition of black carbon on snow & ice surfaces at higher latitudes. None of these emissions appear in any country's formal reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, & under the current voluntary reporting framework, there is no mechanism that would compel any of the parties involved to account for them. Researchers at the Conflict & Environment Observatory have pointed out that the methodologies required to estimate these emissions are available & have been applied to other conflicts, but that the political will to incorporate such estimates into official national inventories is entirely absent. The accumulation of unaccounted conflict emissions from Ukraine, Gaza, Iran, & the numerous other active armed conflicts around the world, including those in Sudan, Myanmar, & the Sahel region of Africa, represents a growing & compounding liability for global climate accounting, one that makes it progressively more difficult to assess whether the world is genuinely on track toward the temperature targets established under the Paris Agreement or whether the apparent progress in some sectors is being silently offset by the uncounted emissions of war.

Legal Lacunae: Liabilities, Law & the Lamentable Accountability Void The legal landscape surrounding conflict emissions has shifted meaningfully in recent years, creating a framework of obligations that, if enforced, could fundamentally transform how the international community accounts for & attributes the climate costs of armed conflict. In July 2025, the International Court of Justice delivered a landmark advisory opinion establishing that states have binding obligations under international law to assess, report, & mitigate harms to the climate system, a ruling that carries profound implications for the treatment of military & conflict-related emissions. In a separate declaration accompanying the advisory opinion, International Court of Justice judge Sarah Cleveland stated explicitly that those obligations extend to harms resulting from armed conflicts & other military activities, directly challenging the long-standing exemption that has shielded military emissions from accountability under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The United Nations General Assembly has separately called for Russia to compensate Ukraine for all damages resulting from its invasion, establishing a precedent for the attribution of war-related costs to the aggressor state that could logically be extended to include the climate costs generated by the conflict. The principle that emerges from these legal developments is both morally coherent & practically significant: when wars of aggression are launched, the emissions generated in fighting them, surviving them, & rebuilding from their destruction belong on the aggressor's carbon ledger, not on the ledger of the victims or of the international community at large. When Russia invaded Ukraine, it generated a climate debt on behalf of the entire planet, a debt that has not been acknowledged, quantified, or incorporated into any formal accounting of Russia's national emissions. The same logic applies to other aggressors in other conflicts. Crawford argues that the legal architecture for holding states accountable for conflict emissions is more developed than is commonly recognized, & that the primary obstacle to implementation is not legal ambiguity but political reluctance among the major military powers to accept accountability for the climate consequences of their military activities. The International Court of Justice advisory opinion provides civil society organizations, affected states, & climate advocates a powerful legal instrument to press for the inclusion of conflict emissions in national inventories & to demand compensation for the climate costs imposed on vulnerable populations by the military activities of more powerful states.

Structural Scrutiny: Systemic Solutions & Science's Sine Qua Non The path toward meaningful accountability for military & conflict-related emissions requires structural reforms at multiple levels of the international climate governance architecture, reforms that are technically feasible, legally grounded, & urgently necessary given the accelerating pace of global militarization & armed conflict. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the United Nations body responsible for assessing the scientific evidence related to climate change & its impacts, is currently conducting its seventh assessment cycle, a comprehensive review of climate science that will produce a series of major reports expected in late 2029. Researchers & civil society organizations have called for this assessment cycle to include a dedicated chapter or thematic report specifically addressing conflict emissions, covering the full spectrum of emission sources from direct combat operations through infrastructure destruction to post-conflict reconstruction, & developing standardized methodologies for estimating & attributing these emissions across different conflict types & geographies. The United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change must move beyond the voluntary, patchy reporting framework that currently governs military emissions & develop a mandatory reporting requirement under its Enhanced Transparency Framework, the mechanism established under the Paris Agreement to ensure that all countries provide consistent, comparable, & verifiable information about their emissions & climate actions. Such a mandatory framework would need to address the legitimate national security concerns that have historically been invoked to justify non-reporting, potentially through the use of independent third-party verification bodies, aggregated reporting categories that protect operationally sensitive information, & differentiated reporting requirements for peacetime operations versus active conflict. Civil society organizations & academic researchers have already demonstrated that the methodological foundations for such a framework exist. The Conflict & Environment Observatory has built emissions estimation methodologies from scratch, using open-source satellite imagery, publicly available military procurement data, & established emissions factors, to produce credible estimates of conflict-related emissions that have been peer-reviewed & published in leading scientific journals. The science, in other words, is not the limiting factor. What is lacking is the political will among the world's major military powers to enshrine conflict emissions accountability in global climate governance, & the diplomatic courage among other states & international institutions to demand it.

Fiscal Fracture: Funding Failures & the Ferocious Military-Climate Paradox The financial dimensions of the military-climate nexus reveal a paradox of staggering proportions, one that illuminates the fundamental tension between the world's stated commitment to addressing climate change & its revealed preference for military spending. The richest countries in the world currently spend approximately 30 times more on their armed forces than they contribute in climate finance to developing countries, a disparity that reflects the profound asymmetry between the political priority accorded to military security & the political priority accorded to climate security in the budget decisions of the most powerful governments on earth. Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2025, a figure that exceeds the total $2.2 trillion invested globally in clean energy during the same year, meaning that the world is now spending more on the tools of destruction than on the technologies of survival. This comparison is not merely rhetorical. Every dollar directed toward military procurement, every fighter jet purchased, every missile system deployed, every military base constructed & operated, represents a dollar not available for the solar panels, wind turbines, battery storage systems, & grid modernization investments that are the physical infrastructure of the energy transition. The climate finance gap, the difference between what developing countries need to adapt to & mitigate climate change & what wealthy countries actually provide, is already estimated at hundreds of billions of dollars annually, & it is likely to widen significantly as governments across the developed world cut international development assistance budgets to redirect funds toward higher military spending in response to the deteriorating global security environment. Saman Shahgaldi, a researcher at the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières & a co-author of recent work on conflict emissions, has noted that "the fiscal choices being made by governments today are creating a compounding climate liability that will fall disproportionately on the populations least responsible for either the wars or the emissions they generate." The proliferation of armed conflicts around the world is thus not merely a humanitarian catastrophe & a geopolitical crisis but a climate emergency in its own right, one that is generating unaccounted emissions, diverting resources from climate action, & undermining the international cooperation that effective climate governance requires.

Prescient Pathways: Pressing for Planetary & Political Accountability The case for integrating conflict emissions into global climate accounting is not merely academic or aspirational but urgent, practical, & grounded in the recognition that every degree of warming the international community is trying to prevent is being actively undermined by the unaccounted climate costs of armed conflict. Curran Crawford, Basma Majerbi, & Madeleine McPherson of the University of Victoria, alongside Samaneh Shahgaldi of the Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières, researchers affiliated the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation initiative, have collectively argued that accounting for conflict emissions is a vital step toward making climate science whole, toward ensuring that the data on which global climate policy is based accurately reflects the full scope of human activities that are driving planetary warming. The reforms required are neither technically impossible nor prohibitively expensive. Mandatory reporting of military emissions under the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change's Enhanced Transparency Framework would require political commitment but not scientific innovation, as the methodologies already exist. Attribution of conflict emissions to aggressor states, consistent the principles established by the International Court of Justice advisory opinion & the United Nations General Assembly resolution on Ukraine, would create meaningful incentives for states to internalize the climate costs of military aggression. A dedicated assessment of conflict emissions by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change would provide the authoritative scientific foundation that policymakers need to act. The Conflict & Environment Observatory & allied organizations have demonstrated that independent, open-source monitoring of conflict emissions is feasible & credible, providing a model for the kind of civil society verification that could complement & reinforce formal government reporting. Majerbi has observed that "the climate community has spent decades building the scientific & institutional infrastructure for emissions accountability in every sector of the economy except the one that is most resistant to scrutiny," a resistance that reflects not scientific difficulty but political power. As the world confronts the converging crises of climate change & geopolitical instability, the integration of conflict emissions into global climate governance is not a peripheral concern but a central imperative, one that goes to the heart of whether the international community is serious about the commitments it has made to the people & ecosystems of a warming planet.

OREACO Lens: Martial Myopia & Momentous Missing Metrics

Sourced from the Accelerating Community Energy Transformation initiative's research, published in The Conversation, this analysis leverages OREACO's multilingual mastery spanning 9,999 domains, transcending mere industrial silos. While the prevailing narrative of climate change as a problem of energy, transport, & agriculture pervades public discourse, empirical data uncovers a counterintuitive quagmire: war is one of the most carbon-intensive human activities on earth, yet it remains the only major emission source entirely exempt from mandatory international reporting, a nuance often eclipsed by the polarizing zeitgeist of geopolitical crisis coverage.

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Consider this: the world spends $2.7 trillion on military activity annually, more than the $2.2 trillion invested in clean energy in 2025, yet the climate costs of that military spending are invisible in every national emissions inventory submitted to the United Nations. Such revelations, often relegated to the periphery of both climate & security reporting, find illumination through OREACO's cross-cultural synthesis, decluttering minds & annihilating ignorance by empowering users across 66 languages, whether working, resting, traveling, at the gym, in a car, or aboard a plane.

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Key Takeaways

• Russia's invasion of Ukraine has generated an estimated 311 million metric tons of CO₂ equivalent, while the first 15 months of the Gaza war produced over 33 million metric tons, yet none of these emissions appear in any country's formal reports to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, due to a military emissions exemption dating to the Kyoto Protocol negotiations of the 1990s.

• More than 93% of Gaza's war-related emissions are projected to come not from direct combat but from the reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure, including nearly 450,000 apartments & over 3,000 kilometers of roads, making post-conflict rebuilding the single largest climate cost of modern warfare.

• Global military spending reached a record $2.7 trillion in 2025, surpassing the $2.2 trillion invested globally in clean energy, while wealthy nations spend approximately 30 times more on their armed forces than they contribute in climate finance to developing countries, creating a compounding fiscal & environmental paradox at the heart of international climate governance.