Press Briefing: War and Climate Change

Transcript

Mark Hertsgaard: Hello and welcome to another press briefing from Covering Climate Now. I’m Mark Hertsgaard. I’m the executive director of Covering Climate Now and the environment correspondent for the Nation Magazine. Today our subject is war and climate change. Covering Climate Now is a global collaboration of more than 500 news outlets that reach a total audience of billions of people. We’re organized by journalists for journalists to help all of us do better coverage of the defining story of our time. To learn more, you can visit our website coveringclimatenow.org, where you can subscribe to our weekly newsletter, the Climate Beat, and consider joining Covering Climate Now, which doesn’t cost you a dime. So today, two current headlines highlight the subject we’re going to be talking about. In Gaza, the latest Israeli military strike killed scores of women and children in Rafah and in India, capital city of Delhi has endured a record high temperature of 50.5 degrees Celsius. That’s 123 degrees Fahrenheit.

Most news coverage treats these kinds of events as separate, but in fact, war and climate change are intertwined in fundamental ways, and we journalists need to understand these connections and make those connections plain to our audiences. War and military operations in general have a massive carbon footprint, yet those emissions are excluded from the limits imposed by UN climate agreements. The military is out of those. Conversely, climate change can kindle war and armed conflict. This has happened within nations as in Syria’s civil war in 2010 and between nations. A 2004 Pentagon study warned that struggles over scarce water could trigger nuclear conflict between India and Pakistan.

But perhaps most challenging for us as journalists is that war makes it hard to talk about climate change in the first place. When bombs are dropping today, what’s been called the tyranny of the immediate understandably pushes climate change and other stories off the news agenda. That phrase, “the tyranny of the immediate” was first brought to my attention by Giles Trendle. Giles recently retired as the managing director of Al Jazeera English after 19 years at the network. He’s the co-chair of Covering Climate Now steering committee and the moderator of today’s event. So please join me now in giving a warm virtual welcome to my esteemed colleague, Giles Trendle.

Giles Trendle: Thank you very much, Mark. It’s great to be here. I think everyone can see me. Anyway, delighted to be doing this webinar on this very important topic. In terms of the webinar, we’re going to go on for about an hour. We’ll end at the top of the hour and we’ll be open to audience questions in the latter half. So if you do have a question, put it into the Q&A at any point during this discussion. So war and climate change, we often hear about the fossil fuel companies, we often hear about the meat industry, we often hear about industrial farming as climate culprits, but we don’t always hear so much about the military and war as a driver of climate change. In fact, the world’s armed forces are major contributors to greenhouse gas emissions. So it’s a significant driver of climate change. We have a great panel to discuss all this.

First we have Professor Neta Crawford, who’s currently in Oxford, England in the UK. Neta is professor at the University of Oxford and author of a number of books, one of which most pertinently for today is titled The Pentagon, Climate Change and War: Charting the Rise and Fall of US Military Emissions. Neta also co-founded the Costs of War Project. We also have Rawan Damen, who’s Director General of the Arab Reporters for Investigative Journalism. Henceforth, I will use the acronym ARIJ. ARIJ is an independent NGO which runs training initiatives and organizes collaborative investigative projects for journalists across the Arab world. And Rawan happens to be an old colleague of mine from Al Jazeera. And also we have Ellie Kinney of the Conflict and Environment Observatory, which I will use the acronym CEOBS for that henceforth and Ellie’s speaking today from Manchester, England in the UK.

I’m sorry, I should say Rawan is speaking from Amman, Jordan for us today. Ellie is campaign coordinator at CEOBS with the goal of increasing awareness and understanding of the environmental and derived humanitarian consequences of conflicts and military activities. So let’s get into the first questions. Ellie, if I could start with you. Climate change is obviously an existential crisis and it’s causing people to lose lives and livelihoods. But in war torn countries, there’s a more immediate existential threat, namely being killed or maimed. Journalists covering the region and covering these countries face the same danger. So how should we discuss climate change and its links to conflict without overlooking or without seeming to overlook the immediate threats?

Ellie Kinney: Firstly, thank you so much for the invitation to be here. It’s really fantastic to see Covering Climate Now highlighting the importance of this intersection between war and climate change. So when we talk about the environmental and the climate consequences of a conflict, this isn’t to take away from the devastating humanitarian impacts. In fact, it’s really important that we don’t take away from the devastating humanitarian impacts and that we recognize the immediate human suffering, which I mean at a time like now is shockingly visible. But it is important that we’re able to analyze the full range of impacts that a war has, and that includes environmental destruction and climate damage as it includes impacts on human rights, women’s rights, healthcare, and impacts on youth and children, for example.

What I hope we’ll leave this briefing with is a better understanding of how the humanitarian impacts are intrinsically linked to the environmental and climate damage and how war and climate change are not simply these two separate issues, whether that’s because of the way that emissions directly are caused by wars or by increasing military spending, or whether it’s the impact that a war has on an area’s ability to mitigate and adapt to the climate crisis. And definitely at the moment, I think as we face these multiple large scale wars and record-breaking temperatures, journalists really do play a key role in exploring these connections between these existential threats. So I’m really grateful that we’ve got a chance to dig into this today.

Giles Trendle: Great. And yes, we’re taking very much a holistic approach and joining these two issues. So at CEOBS, you’ve published reports on how the environment has been affected within different countries and different regions and CEOBS has published a number of reports on Ukraine, and this year a number of reports on the environmental damage in Ukraine. Can you summarize the findings of those reports and highlight how the damage has exacerbated the climate crisis?

Ellie Kinney: Yeah, so colleagues of mine have produced a range of reports on the environmental impacts of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, and this was done in partnership with Zoï Environment Network and with the UN Environment program. And there’s a host of reports. They cover topics like nature, like coastal and marine environment, like industry and nuclear and radiation risks, but it also covers climate change. And I guess the most direct way that we can look at this is the impact on global emissions. Now, it’s important to say from the get go here that there is no internationally agreed framework for measuring and reporting emissions from conflicts, which means that when researchers have wanted to look into the climate impacts of the war in Ukraine, as with other wars, they’ve had to start from scratch and build this methodology, which is very much what researchers have done at the initiative on greenhouse gas accounting of war.

They’ve developed a framework and they’ve used this to monitor the conflict. And their latest estimation is that the first 18 months have resulted in emissions equivalent to the annual outputs of an industrialized country like Belgium, which is a really significant amount to be taken from our global carbon budget. And this is something that we explore within our reports as well. So the estimation covers things like fuel consumption from both sides of the military as well as the impact of other factors like the way that closed airspace has led to the rerouting of flights. And another huge consideration in this is reconstruction. Reconstruction is hugely carbon intensive, and this is visible in Ukraine. And it’s also notable in the estimations of the impacts of Israel’s bombardment of Gaza at the moment too. The majority of emissions caused by a war will come from this kind of destruction and reconstruction of urban areas and infrastructure, which means that a green recovery is really key.

But that’s definitely not a given unless given financial backing and the resources to do so. And when we zoom out and look at emissions more widely, we can kind of see the way that… these fluctuations. You may see reductions in other sectors like the drop in the iron and steel sector in Ukraine, but it’s quite likely that these moved abroad rather than are now missing from global emissions. And then within the war specifically, there’s certain incidents that will cause spikes, like for example, the attacks on the Nord Stream pipeline.

So the UNEP analysis suggests that the amount of methane leaked from this represents, I think, less than 0.1% of the annual human made methane emissions. But it’s still a significant quantity of methane, which is a greater contributor to the climate crisis than if it was burned to release CO2. And this is an incident that’s specifically caused by the war. You can also look at the way that the mitigation, adaptation efforts have been impacted. So for example, the numerous renewable energy facilities that have been damaged, I suppose most notably the Kakhovka Dam and the loss of hydropower capacity that comes with that, but also the destruction of solar and wind farms across the southeast of the country. I think if you-

Giles Trendle: I mean that’s kind of-

Ellie Kinney: You get to build a picture.

Giles Trendle: I want to interject because I think it’s very important, as you said, that it’s not just the consequences of war, but it’s the reconstruction as well. I think it’s a very important point, the emissions from reconstruction. I’d like to come on to Neta about emissions that Ellie was obviously talking about. So Neta, you’ve written about US military emissions. Can you give us an idea of the scale of these emissions and the type of emissions? And you’re on mute.

Neta C. Crawford: Right.

Giles Trendle: Yeah.

Neta C. Crawford: US military emissions are the largest emissions from a country because… In fact, the US is the world’s largest military spender. Its spending is about 38 to 40% of total global military spending. So larger than any of its adversaries combined, its major adversaries. And its emissions come from both its operations, that is training and war, and it comes from installations. And so the lion’s share of the emissions are from operations but the more than 700 bases that the United States has around the world also contribute to emissions. Now, there’s a question of whether those emissions belong to the US or the country where the bases are, but essentially they’re caused by the United States.

If you look at US emissions and you add up installations and operations, it’s the United States single largest energy user, and therefore the United States single largest institutional emitter. And if you think about it that way, you can also think about it in terms of share of GDP or share of the entire economy. It’s about 1%, but then you also have to include military industrial emissions. And then when you do that, you need to double that number approximately. Now, I can give you numbers that are exact for operations and installations. I can’t give you exact numbers for military industry. That’s an estimate. We need better accounting of that.

Giles Trendle: And I think in the past you’ve explained about the difference between the emissions from operations and installations. I think you’ve done some work on dividing the emissions by sector, Air Force, Army, Navy. Is there anything you can tell us about which particular sector of the military is the highest emitter?

Neta C. Crawford: Air Force. Aircraft are extremely thirsty. We’re talking gallons per mile, not miles per gallon. Thousands of liters if you want to use the other system. Thousands of leaders per hour are consumed by aircraft. So the B-52, many thousands of liters, a smaller aircraft, less. But if you look across the armed services of the United States, it’s aircraft. And then in terms of other operational emissions, if you look at the profile of the U.S., there’s a certain amount that they don’t know, it’s called unknown. They can’t keep track of those, that fuel use, but the major lion’s share of it is aircraft for every service.

Giles Trendle: Right. Of course, it’s not just in war, but as you mentioned, it’s the day-to-day operations of the military in, I guess, projecting their power. And to what extent is fossil fuel behind the projection of U.S. power?

Neta C. Crawford: Well, the United States has bases all over the world in part to ensure access to fuel, that is petroleum in the Persian Gulf in the Middle East. So a certain portion of any sort of categorization of emissions needs to be sort of, you put it in the category, it’s to protect access to the flow of petroleum in the Persian Gulf or elsewhere, let’s say in the Straits of Malacca. As the United States decreases the amount of oil that it’s getting from the Persian Gulf, it has not significantly decreased the kinds of forces that it has ready to deploy to defend that oil. In other words, we have legacy military forces and bases preparing to defend oil that is decreasingly not needed and also shouldn’t be burned. So we’ve got a little mismatch between doctrine and what the world needs right now.

Giles Trendle: Fascinating. Okay. Thank you. We’ll come back to that. Let’s move on to Rawan. Rawan, obviously the Middle East is a region of many conflicts, present and past. Typically now, of course, what’s happening in Gaza, but we mustn’t forget Sudan. We’ve had Yemen, Libya, Syria, Iraq. I mean, it’s a region where conflict has been very present. You deal with a lot of journalists around the region, I mean hundreds, if not thousands, around the Middle East and North Africa. How big a story is climate change for journalists and the editors in the Middle East?

Rawan Damen: Thanks a lot, Giles. I’m happy to be here and happy to talk to Covering Climate Now, community as well, and journalists. It has been becoming more and more important I think in the eyes of both editors and journalists. I think 10 years ago, if you talk to journalists, especially investigative journalists, they would prefer working on political, follow the money, and climate will come next or third. Now it’s much bigger because ordinary people notice the effects and the impact of climate change on their lives. I think what we use to tell ordinary people, and they would think that this is only scientists, “No, it’s a long time thing, maybe 100 years from now it will happen,” is happening. So they noticed the effect of this on soil, land, air, water, the differences even in temperature in many places. So I think this also affected politicians in giving more importance of this, and so journalists became more aware of this.

But as you said, it’s very, very difficult nowadays with what’s happening in Gaza and the war in Gaza with more than 34,000 people killed and more than 77,000 people injured in a very tiny place that is Gaza Strip in Palestine, to convince journalists in Gaza and in Palestine to give climate change story that necessary. I think people from outside, especially that Israel refused to get any journalist into Gaza to cover what’s happening, understood that they need. And there is a lot of ways through satellite images, videos, pictures, testimonies from people on the ground, testimonies from you and agencies, to really understand very clearly. After eight months of an ongoing war that we don’t know when it will end, that the impact will be very long.

Let’s imagine that today the ceasefire happens and the war stops. The impact in Gaza on both land, soil, air, water, Gaza is not no longer a livable place to live in. So I think this will also affect inside the bodies of the alive people. The alive people will start the grieving, the trauma, and at the same time have, in the eight months, polluted water, polluted food, serious problems with the air and the pollution there. The Mediterranean, I think people forget that Gaza is on the coastal Mediterranean side, that this is affecting even Israel and even all the Mediterranean. So it’s very difficult for me, for people not understanding the importance of climate story because it affects not only one place where it is, but this travels in the sea of the water or the sea in the air. So it’s happening now as we are speaking. There is little, I think, coverage of the importance of the long-term impact that this ecocide thing happening in Gaza that will stay with us forever. I’m very worried that people will never be able to go back and live in their houses and places.

I remember Gaza, I visited Gaza. I’m Jordanian from Palestinian originally. I remember the greenhouses in Gaza. I remember how they used to plant in this very tiny place. Now, almost one-third of those green greenhouses have been destroyed, and there is a clear evidence that it’s systematic, the bombardment from the sky, then the Israeli tanks and troops come and uproot the trees, the greenhouses, the farms. It’s not only we are losing friends, relatives, people whom we had dinner with, had coffee with, have been killed and lost many of them, but the whole ecosystem of the place is being lost in front of our eyes. I’m afraid we are seeing something that we have never seen like before, even in Syria, Yemen, and the Iraq, because this is a very, very tiny place and it’s so difficult to imagine how to do this better in the future.

Giles Trendle: Yeah. You mentioned a very important word there, ecocide, and I know that Guardian did a report on ecocide in Gaza. But I think you’re right, the longer term consequences haven’t even been properly imagined or conceived yet. But aside from the terrible things happening in Gaza, what other stories in the last few years have you seen on the link between climate change and conflict in the Middle East? Has ARIJ supported any projects?

Rawan Damen: Yeah, we have been in the region for 17 years, working in all Arab countries in Middle East and North Africa. And I can put later the links to some of those stories. One of the stories that is worth mentioning that we did in Yemen on the fishermen and the war in Yemen, and the effect of that on the fishing catches, how the decline happened with the climate change. Unfortunately, when the war happens, many things are affected by the war and also neglected because of the war. And this is one of the stories that one of our journalists did in Yemen. There’s also a story we did a few years back on Syria and the green forests in Idlib, how killing the trees is another victim of the war in Syria. Also, people, when they have no fuel also, they themselves cut the woods of the forest, not only due to the war, and so there is a big loss in this.

But also sometimes, one of the stories that also I’m going to put the link to, we did in comparison for the water in Palestine-Israel between the West Bank and the Israeli settlers. We have in ARIJ this data diploma where we train journalists for six months on data diploma stories, and they did quite very interesting stories on how Israelis enjoy Palestinian water. And at the same time, they sell to the Palestinians the polluted mineral water. I think as you said in the beginning, Giles, in the introduction, I think this region and many other regions around the world, war can start from climate change environment issues, and war will affect this climate change. So it’s like a cycle.

In ARIJ, when we adopt any story, we are a small foundation, we are not a publishing platform, so we publish with many dependent publishing platforms across the Arab region. The journalists pitch the idea. If it is a good idea, we coach this journalist. Usually they are journalists who don’t have a lot of experience in investigative journalism. We spend six months to one year sometimes working on this story. Then we have a process of fact checking, legal screening. Every Arab country have a different legal screening. We need a lawyer from that country. Then most of those journalists freelancers find a publishing platform, we produce in Arabic language, and we translate some of the stories into English. So I’ll put some of this. But I think stories from Yemen, Libya, Iraq, Palestine have documented that people would say there’s no enough data. No, there is data, and you can calculate data. There is many creative ways of calculating the data and do the estimations rather than saying there’s no data covering those stories.

Giles Trendle: Right, right. Ellie, I’m going to come on to you in a minute. I’d like to ask a question to Neta to give us a little bit of, Rawan, I’ll come back to you, to give a little bit of historical context. Neta, I know that the oil companies knew about climate change many years ago, and we know these stories of companies like Exxon hiding the facts. But can you give us an idea about the military? Because being at the forerunners of a lot of innovation and needing to know the threats coming down the line, they must have known a while ago about climate change, particularly the U.S. military.

Neta C. Crawford: Well, Giles, it’s actually more interesting than that in the sense that the U.S. military was at the forefront of the research that help us understand the problem of climate change. Specifically, in the mid and late 1950s, the U.S. military was concerned about the environmental consequences of warming, causing a change in their capacity to operate: changes in salinity because of melting ice caps, changes in the ability to use sonar, and other effects like changing ports.

So what they wanted to understand was, starting in the late 1950s with the efforts of Roger Revelle and others, exactly what was the science. The Office of Naval Research, it turns out, funded most of the important early studies on climate change. And then that work in the 1950s and ’60s was reported to President Johnson and then later President Nixon and then later President Carter. All of this information was essentially at first driven by research that came from these Office of Naval Research funded grants. And then the military has also been at the forefront of trying to understand the links between climate and conflict, and they have some research on that as well, which has been fed into the national security strategies and intelligence estimates, and in fact is now filtering out to NATO.

Giles Trendle: So given that they kind of know about climate change, what are they doing about it? Are they continuing what they do? Are they finding ways to solve this or to do better operationally themselves?

 

Neta C. Crawford: Well, if you just look at the U.S. military emissions, their emissions have declined even in wartime in recent years. They were at their peak in the post 1975 period during the 1991 Gulf War. They peaked at 110 million metric tons, which is larger than several countries in 1991. They declined in the post Cold War period, then they went up with the post 911 wars. And then they’ve been declining and they’ve been declining because they’ve changed some of the ways they operate, but most importantly because in the post Cold War era, the number of overseas bases dropped dramatically. The installations and operations then declining was associated as well with changes in the kinds of fuel that were used at installation. So they stopped using coal like the rest of the U.S. economy. They shifted to natural gas. So changes in fuel use and some changes in installations, and then also the size of the U.S. military declined. But what we know is that military emissions, because most of them are operational, are tightly correlated with operations and war. And it very tightly correlated with military spending. So when the United States tells its allies to increase their military spending NATO up to, or more than 2% of their GDP, their Gross Domestic Product, those countries’ emissions will increase. And so what we see here is a half full half empty, but the major impetus for the US military decreasing its emissions have been operational and installation changes. They don’t talk about it as being concerned about their greenhouse gas impact until really the Biden administration when that’s become much more front and center, and we see some important changes. But they could be much more significant if we tackled the really big questions, which is which bases need to be there for defensive purposes, and which bases don’t? Which operations and exercises need to occur and which are basically legacy operations left over from ideas about how the world was, but we just don’t rethink them with the world that we’re in.

Giles Trendle: Interesting. Yeah. So would you say the military, I mean you mentioned that the emissions have gone down. Is that a positive? It must be a positive, but is the military going green, or what is this about?

Neta C. Crawford: Well look, US military emissions as a part of the United States economy, it’s the single largest emitter. Still is. The military will tell you that they’re the single largest energy user. They’ll also tell you that they’re greening and that they’re innovative. So that they are greening and they are innovative, but the costs of the innovation if they were to occur in the civilian sector would be lower. And the efficiencies that the military achieves are sort of on the margin. So yes, they are lowering their impact, but could it be more? Yes, it could be much more if they rethought their doctrines and bases and rethought what they need to be doing.

For instance, they have tested since I think around 2008 and certainly again with the Great Green Fleet in 2012 and 2016 and 2017 moving to different kinds of fuel. They could implement that, yet they don’t. And so they looked at beef fat for the Great Green Fleet, which was a number of surface ships that surrounded an aircraft carrier. They could still implement that. They’ve changed light bulbs on those surface ships. Yes, they have economies and that’s important, but we really have to think much bigger and that would entail rethinking their entire structure.

Giles Trendle: Right. Okay. And are they going to do that, or that’s the big question?

Neta C. Crawford: Well, I think we need to create an understanding that the way things have gone, business as usual isn’t going to save us. And then if I could, I’d like to pick up on something Rawan said about war, which is very important. And Ellie hinted at it or actually talked about it directly when she talked about Nord Stream 1 and Nord Stream 2. In war, the side that has the air power or the position will often target the other side’s fossil fuel infrastructure. So it’s not just that Nord Stream 1 and 2 were attacked.

In the 1991 Gulf War, the Iraqis blew up their oil wells and set then methane streaming into the atmosphere in the 2014 to 2016, US war against ISIS, they targeted ISIS oil infrastructure to cut off their supply of money, but it also emitted quite a bit of carbon. That’s not counted. We don’t know those emissions. We need to understand that better. But it also goes back to previous wars like World War II, and I could talk about that forever. But the point is that oil industry itself is a target. It’s a vulnerability, and that’s one of the things that the US military pays attention to as well.

Giles Trendle: Okay. Let me come back to Ellie. Ellie, we’ve been talking about emissions and you’re the campaign coordinator on the military emissions gap project at CEOPS, advocating for greater accountability for the military’s contribution to the climate crisis. What is the military emissions gap project that you’re working on?

Ellie Kinney: So the project is kind of born out of a report where we’ve been tasked with calculating the carbon emissions of the European Union’s militaries. And what we found was that this was actually a lot harder than we thought it would be because there’s shockingly little data. We noticed that there was a gap in military emissions reporting, and we coined the term military emissions gap. But simply put, it’s the gap between what militaries report and the actual levels of pollution. And this can be, I suppose, briefly split into three parts because I know that we want to get through to our Q&A. But the first part of this gap is what governments are obliged to report, the UNFCCC. As I said earlier, no country has to report their military emissions to the UNFCCC. Different countries have different reports and obligations, but not single one of those includes mandatory emissions for military activity.

And interestingly, this also links back to the US. So before the Paris Agreement when we had the Kyoto Protocol, it was the US who lobbied for militaries to be exempt from reporting and unsuccessful in that. With the creation of the Paris Agreement, this language changed from exempt to voluntary reporting. But we know that if something’s voluntary, it doesn’t particularly happen or it doesn’t happen particularly well. And that’s the second part of the gap, which is how countries report. Because it’s voluntary, they just don’t tend to do it very well. They often don’t disaggregate military data from civilian data, which makes it quite difficult to pull out information that we might need for research.

And then the third part of this is the big one. It’s what they don’t report at all. Emissions data that is voluntarily reported tends to be things like energy use at bases or maybe fuel use from equipment, but as Neta’s hinted to before, the military emissions are so much more than this. And the biggest absence of that is the military supply chain and the arms industry that is propped up by creating products for government. In similar industries, supply chain emissions can be five to seven times higher than what we call scope one and scope two emissions. So that really gives you an idea of the scale that we’re dealing with here. And then another part of what isn’t reported is, as we’ve said, the lack of reporting framework for conflict emissions. So when we set up the military emissions gap project, we set up militaryemissions.org, which brings together the data that governments do report into one place.

We analyze this against what we do know about militaries to estimate how big we think different countries emissions gaps are, and we update this every year with UNFCCC data and we add in whatever bits of reporting we can find and use this as basis to advocate for thorough and transparent military emissions supporting. Because on a broader level, the project is the campaign. We work across civil society, academia, even with militaries, to really highlight the scale of the problem and to demand action on UNFCCC level and on national levels ultimately to make militaries accountable for their contribution to the climate crisis and the situation we’re now in.

Giles Trendle: Right. So it all started in Kyoto really with the military not wanting to say how much they emit. If I was a military man, let me play devil’s advocate and I might say, well, I don’t want to talk about our emissions because it’s a national security. It might give information to our enemy. How valid a justification is that, do you think?

Ellie Kinney: Well, I think it’s very much the argument that the US was pushing in Kyoto. And it’s interesting, I’ll pop some links in the chat after this. So when you look at the kind of reports from that time, even the European Union and other countries didn’t really understand why this was such a big issue for the US. But nowadays, it’s very much used as a kind of get out clause. But when you start to pick it apart, you see that it doesn’t really make that much sense. I mean, firstly, whilst yes, reporting to UNFCCC is incredibly patchy, there are some countries that do publish relatively comprehensive emissions about their militaries. Not very many. But for example, Norway is one of them. They’ve published emissions data since 2012, and they obviously then feel that that’s not a huge security risk for them, which just kind of makes sense.

There’s a lot of publicly available data on militaries. Military spending data is already available, and that hints to the size of a military as well as year-on-year changes in size. And information like military structures, personnel numbers, equipment profiles and strategy. All of this is published in various Janes yearbook or the IISS military balance reports. Even the US Department of Defense publishes its large contracts. I think anything over seven or $8 million where you can see the type of equipment that’s being bought and who it’s being bought from. And then if you want to get even more specific, because this is a good fact, if you want to get even more specific, you can track in real time some naval vessels and military aircraft using data from transmitters. And this is where investigative journalists can do really interesting work around this. So I think if you think about it, not reporting to UNFCCC probably isn’t holding up national security.

Giles Trendle: So there are ways to get information. Investigative journalism, possibly operating with CEOPS, who knows? I want to come to some audience questions and I’ve got one here for Rawan. It’s from Angela at the Solutions Journalism Network. She asks, “Rowan, let me put this to you. How do we write or cover about the topic without being of the topic of climate change and war without being perceived as taking sides in any current conflict?”

Rawan Damen: It’s like any other story. You need to bring all the parties. You need to start with your hypothesis and expose the wrongdoing of any party. And that’s what all journalism is about. I’ve been a journalist for 25 years and it’s doable to do this. It’s always understandable that when there is victims, our hearts are with the victims, whomever they are. But it’s extremely important. Sometimes the victims are, they’re wrongdoers themselves without knowing some of the communities. And during the war, it’s extremely important to stand on the right partial side and explain what’s happening and also be very clear what you don’t know. Sometimes we publish many stories in investigations and there is a gap. There’s something we don’t know. There’s something, there is a question mark. And let’s be very clear with audience and say, “We tried to do this, we tried to achieve this, but we were not able to do that.”

I also spotted, Giles, another question from an anonymous person about language used in ecocide and genocide in Gaza and war crimes and the language used. It’s extremely important that we are very careful about the vocabulary we use. So we say that it’s investigated as a possible war crime or as a possible genocide. And it’s very clear under the Rome statute, which governs the international criminal court, it’s a war crime to intentionally launch an excessive attack knowing that it will cause widespread, long-term, and severe damage to the natural environment. The Geneva conventions, all of them require that warring parties don’t use methods of warfare that cause widespread, long-term, severe damage to the nature environment. So we can use the legal terms very clearly and be very specific about the words we use.

Giles Trendle: Yeah, and let me pick up on that point. I know that there are advocates and our campaigners who want to make ecocide a crime in the same way that the International Criminal Court, basically the International Criminal Court have four what they call serious crimes of concerns in international community. There’s genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes of aggression. And I know there’s a campaign to make ecocide a fifth crime. And it defines ecocide as unlawful or wanton act committed with knowledge that there is a substantial likelihood of severe and either widespread or long-term damage to the environments being caused by those acts. So yes, that’s a very important point. Let’s go to another question. Rawan, I’ll just come to you briefly with this because it’s from Joy because it’s kind of journalistic. What are some of the strongest visual materials or visual documentation that you are aware of that helps to illustrate this topic?

Rawan Damen: It’s becoming much more easier than before. Also with AI tools, I think in the past we used to have very difficult way of doing simple visualization. Visualization is extremely important, especially for ordinary audience. Many are getting only the visualization through the social media and then going to read the full investigation or the full data story. So visualizations is extremely important, but it’s also very important to be fit to what you want to say. Even in visualization, you can lie. There is visualization where you can have the less important thing more important than the more important thing, so it’s an editorial/design way of doing this. I would recommend the same journalists to play around different tools of visualization and also use some AI newly visualizing, very simple tools, most of them free or very cheap. And at the beginning, play yourself as a journalist and then work with a specialized designer to get something that’s really important. I think people nowadays, especially on social media, they want the quick things, so grab their attention with the visualization so they can come and read the full story in details.

Giles Trendle: Right. Okay. Let’s go to another question. It’s from Freida, and I think Neta, let’s put this to you. Is there such a thing as a climate-friendly war?

Neta C. Crawford: No.

Giles Trendle: Okay.

Neta C. Crawford: But just let me say something about this narrative about war and climate change, or climate change and war. So the dominant narrative recently has been that climate change will cause war. That may or may not be the case. It depends on human agency, how they react to the stresses and the tensions that arise from too much water, too much heat, too little water and so on. We can respond to those problems, but it’s long been the case that war has exacerbated emissions, either through the direct emissions that we’ve talked about or the loss of sequestration of let’s say forests or swamps. And that kind of consequence is much longer, hundreds of years from war. War causes climate change more than the other way around, I would argue. And we can do something about the stresses of climate change to diminish the likelihood of war.

And then Rawan mentioned the work on possible nuclear war between India and Pakistan. That is a concern, obviously, and both sides have hundreds of nuclear weapons. And if they did go to war, this would probably, or scientists are working on this right now, possibly trigger global cooling, which is its own kind of climate disaster. So we must reduce the number of nuclear weapons, because several hundred nuclear weapons targeted on cities, which is the doctrine of India and Pakistan, could lead to a global cooling which would mean the loss of the ability to grow food and famine that the world has never seen on a global scale.

Giles Trendle: Okay. We’ve got another question from Marijn. I’ll put this to Ellie. What would need to happen to put military emissions under a global accountability scheme? Is any such effort underway?

Ellie Kinney: That’s a really good question. Well, a lot of what we advocate for is directly to change the reporting framework that the UNFCCC sets out, to undo a lot of the damage that the US did back in Kyoto, and then the way that that was kept in a little bit in the Paris Agreement and bring the military in under the same amount of accountability that other sectors have within the UNFCCC. It’s not an easy task. The UNFCCC is huge, but there is absolutely an effort on this at the moment that we are part of, that lots of other organizations are part of, about recognizing the interconnected nature between war and the climate crisis. And not just war, but militarism overall. And groups that are really mobilizing on this within the climate movement, within the peace movement and academia as well are really supporting that. Yeah, so there’s absolutely a movement.

Giles Trendle: Right. And a slightly related question which I’ll put to you from Whitney to, again, Ellie. Is renewable energy a less viable target in war and oil and gas infrastructure? Why or why not?

Ellie Kinney: I imagine Neta will probably be a good one to come in on this as well. It’s interesting because I think when you listen to the way that militaries talk about the climate crisis now and the way that it will affect their operational effectiveness, a lot of it comes from energy security. A lot of it comes from the fact that a lot of money and lives are lost protecting fossil fuel resources in the battlefields in the US and Afghanistan. And if you can reduce that from a military perspective, obviously that’s the way that a lot of them are going. Whether it’s less of a target, I’m not sure. I don’t know whether Neta, you probably have something to add?

Neta C. Crawford: Okay, so the way that renewable energy works is often local grids and local production. Centralized production such as nuclear power plants and large coal and oil burning or natural gas burning plants are targeted much more easily than something that’s more distributed. So yes, militaries like to target the industrial production of energy, but these local grids and local production are much less vulnerable in a sense because it’s just much more difficult to find them.

Giles Trendle: Okay. Another question from Nick. I’ll put this to Rawan because it’s related to Gaza, and we’ve talked about the reconstruction after hopefully the end of this terrible war and bombardment that’s going on. Should there be a balance for the need of speed to rebuild versus the sustainable reconstruction?

 

Rawan Damen: The reconstruction itself of Gaza – of course, it was partial in 2008, 2012, 2014 – was also a climate problem. The emissions, the rebuilding is also similar to the war of a climate crisis. I’m usually, and Giles know this, I’m usually a very optimistic person. But since October 7th, I’ve been very pessimistic. I cannot see that there will be a rebuilding this time in Gaza because the situation of the systematic bombardment have been to making it unlivable, so I don’t really see how it will be rebuilding. The rebuilding with the blockade and the occupation and the closure Israel is putting has been done before partially and has been very problematic even for the waste, the water, the pumps. All of the infrastructure in Gaza have been bombarded. All the hospitals, the schools, the universities. It has never been something like this before.

Giles, also, there is a question from Firas on how to convince or encourage the journalists on the ground in the world to cover climate. I think the most important is how to get journalists to understand Neta’s books, Ellie’s research, understand how to analyze this, get them to that capacity building. Then they choose their priorities of connecting climate stories to their priorities, but with one prerequisite of a full comprehensive safety model. And that’s a very problematic thing in the region. In a region, we have a very comprehensive safety model of physical safety, digital safety, mental safety, legal safety, and career safety. If you are a journalist and you want to continue working on climate change in Yemen, as a freelancer, what is even the career safety channel you will go through? And many of them end up publishing in anonymous names.

I think maybe we are the only region where we have fact-checkers publishing anonymously. Even in Latin America, Africa, East Asia, we don’t have fact-checkers working anonymously, but in the Middle East and North Africa we do. So I think it’s extremely important to have the safety model, have the skills, have the knowledge, and then the journalist will come up with the stories that are very relevant to their communities.

Giles Trendle: Great point, and it’s very important. And very briefly, Rawan, just on that point, what are, very briefly, the risks that you’ve picked up for journalists in the Middle East working on climate change?

Rawan Damen: In the last five years I’ve been heading the only case where we had a journalist fired from her work as a full-timer was due to a climate change story. It was not due to follow the money or a big political story. So unfortunately, climate change wrongdoing is connected with businessmen, with politicians, with the army, with big wrongdoers in the region, and so the risks are high. Therefore, the safety model need to be very strong, and we encourage journalists to publish anonymously, unfortunately.

Giles Trendle: Okay. Well, look, this is a topic we can go on and on and talk about, and I’m sure we’ll come back to it again at some point. But I’d like to thank Ellie and Neta and Rawan. Thank you for joining us. Thank you for the conversation. It’s a really important topic. There are so many angles to it. We’ve barely scratched the surface, but it’s great to start this conversation. So thank you very much and I’m going to hand back to Mark.

Mark Hertsgaard: And thank you, Giles, and thank you again to our panelists. This has been an enriching, although of course also foreboding conversation that we’ve had. I say to my fellow journalists, this couldn’t be a more important topic for us to understand and to get across to our audiences, but also to get across to our colleagues in the newsroom, to our editors, to the people who green light or don’t green light our stories. We still do face this tyranny of the immediate, and I think today’s session, we heard from some really terrific experts on how we can as journalists and must basically, as we say in the United States, talk and chew gum at the same time. We can do justice to the terrible human suffering that’s going on in war zones around the world at the same time that we can and must do justice to the terrible human suffering that climate change is bringing all around the world and the related political and economic struggles around that.

This is especially important to do in this election year. This week, elections are being concluded in India on Saturday, being held in South Africa, and in Mexico, and soon, next month, in the European Union, and of course later this year in the United States. The governments that are put in power by these elections are going to decide not only questions of war and peace, but also whether we as a civilization begin the rapid phase-out of fossil fuels that science says is necessary if we’re going to preserve a livable planet for our children. And I speak here as a father. So these are important ethical considerations that we as journalists have to take into account.

And again, I want to thank all the three experts who gave us their wisdom today, and a special thank you to Giles Trendle who came up with the idea of this conversation. And this is something that Covering Climate Now will continue to be pursuing, so I think it shows. We had 163 plus journalists on this call today, and almost all of them stayed the entire hour. That shows that journalists are interested. It shows that the quality of this conversation was exceptional. So let’s all stay with it and we invite all of you to be in touch. We’ll be sending out a video of this in the next few days and we’ll do a report on it at the website of coveringclimatenow.org. All bonafide journalists around the world are warmly invited to join us there.

So with one last thank you again to our panelists for your terrific observations and your ongoing work, and a thank you again to Giles Trendle, our co-chair of the steering committee at Covering Climate Now, I’m Mark Hertsgaard. On behalf of Covering Climate Now, I bid you farewell and a very pleasant day.