The WHO were right: Won´t get fooled again…!
The Interlocking Crises of Climate and Conflict
Climate change and armed conflict have always been thought of as separate global crises. But they’re now entwined, with each making the other worse. This has created a huge threat to social stability. As the world warms and emissions destroy ecosystems, this forces people into competition for resources that then causes more militarism, leading to further destruction.
This collision was made clear when Pakistan was hit by floods even though it’s currently suffering through conflict, or when Typhoon Rai destroyed parts of the Philippines during fighting across the country. However, despite institutions seeing this all happen we still don’t seem to be doing enough. The public doesn’t trust politicians and organizations fail to take major contributors like national defense into account when addressing climate threats.
The data surrounding these crises is not positive either. Nations are investing trillions into weapons while we see violent conflicts happening all over the world. Military spending reached its highest ever levels in 2022 worldwide. COP28 also saw an underwhelming response which fell short of matching what’s needed to stop us from breaching the 1.5 degree Celsius threshold.
However, it's not just physical atmospheric warming we need to worry about anymore; it’s also about military budgets and resource wars that will bring our society down in flames if continued.. These two things compromise community well-being and our dependence on ecosystems to survive.
The scale at which these ecological threats come from armed establishments is quite staggering as well. Conservative estimates show that military forces produce roughly 5% of greenhouse emissions on an annual basis which puts them ahead of entire industrialized nations as one of the top institutional polluters in the world – yet their contributions aren't included.
That's not even taking everything else into account such as private defense contractors or emissions from nuclear stockpiles and intelligence operations among others in addition to infrastructure destruction caused by actual conflicts.
According to some estimates that factor these things in, the global military actually contributes up to 6% of all human carbon emissions. These figures only represent a small portion of just the daily operations which doesn’t reflect wider security impacts. In reality, the world’s armed forces are massive undisclosed contributors to climate breakdown and we should've held them accountable for this a long time ago.
As long as trillions are wasted on instruments of destruction instead of human protection, our civilization will continue being vulnerable to the social calamities that come with a heating world. We need resources that have been going into bombs, submarines and fighter jets to be used for climate-proof infrastructure and support for communities who live life on the line. Technologies built for surveillance can be repurposed too – they can help us spot wildfires or floods so we can better respond to disasters accordingly. Strategic planning needs to shift its focus from geopolitical chess games to global cooperation around food, water and clean energy abundance.
The reality is, what keeps us safe in this century will have less and less to do with military might. Instead, security will come from putting some of the hundreds of billions we spend on defense into investments that build equitable climate resilience and freedom from dependence on dwindling resources like fossil fuels or old-fashioned dominance.
The narrow window through which human destiny now turns requires a complete shift from cultures and industries of violence to those that regenerate: We have a brief time for societies to move their loyalty and resources from engines of annihilation into systems that might be able to replace what they destroy. To not do so is to condemn countless generations to suffer vast, tragic-scale climate instability.
Which is why any institutional commitments to slash emissions must also embrace military decarbonization and demilitarization targets; why corporations using AI or nanotechnology must be incentivized (or forced) by policy to put civilian priorities above combat ones; why we need more research into how it can be possible for humanity to grow out of its addiction to conflict as the go-to mechanism for resolving differences — all while spending untold sums on healing ecosystems and making communities resilient everywhere.
Ultimately, it’s about collective priorities matching realities cascading toward us. Will they continue to narrow around reelections and stock prices, news cycles with no memory? Or will entire societies begin more fully grasping our interdependence in a world headed toward ruin — that none are secure until all are secure — so that conscious constraint may replace ceaseless expansion? Our trajectory still hangs in the balance.
