What Does Military Readiness Mean in a Warming World?

Earlier this month, NATO released the latest edition of its “Climate Change and Security Impact Assessment.” It stands to reason that the 75-year-old security alliance, composed of 32 member countries, would care about the climate crisis. But NATO’s detailed studies of how rising temperatures are impacting its operations—from unbearably hot training grounds to storm-vulnerable bases and increasing deployments for disaster response—shouldn’t confuse anyone into thinking the organization is actually serious about fighting climate change.

As researchers at the Transnational Institute, or TNI, have found, NATO’s $1.34 trillion in overall military spending last year produced an estimated 233 million metric tons of carbon dioxide equivalent—more than the annual greenhouse gas emissions of Colombia or Qatar, both major fossil fuel–producing countries. Boosted spending in 2023 meant that the body’s greenhouse emissions increased by 15 percent.

NATO’s member countries—including the U.S. and European countries—have routinely failed to deliver adequate climate finance to poorer nations in the global south. The alliance, meanwhile, has grown increasingly insistent that more of its members commit to spending 2 percent of their annual gross domestic product (GDP) on the military. Doing so, TNI finds, would expand NATO’s total footprint to two billion metric tons of CO2 equivalent, “greater than the annual GHG emissions of Russia.”

While the overwhelming focus of their approach to climate readiness and resilience is on protecting troops, bases, and equipment against extreme weather, NATO and the Pentagon have each highlighted modest initiatives to bring down operational emissions in recent years, like using more sustainable aviation fuel and projects aimed at “advancing carbon-free electricity” on air force bases. Researchers argue, though, that the kind of unchecked military expansion NATO aspires to—and the extensive carbon-intensive manufacturing that entails—is incompatible with meeting even low-bar climate goals and certainly those as ambitious as the Paris Agreement’s target of capping temperature rise at “well below” two degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit).

Military spending and climate spending aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive. But even for the U.S. government, which has an extraordinarily large budget to play with, continually expanding Pentagon operations eats up resources, like industrial capacities, which could be put to use for other things. Practically speaking, as well, governments that prioritize expanding their militaries may opt to spend less on climate mitigation and adaptation efforts. In the recent U.K. election, for example, both Labour and the Conservatives pledged to spend 2.5 percent of GDP on the military while walking back climate commitments. Together, those two countries account for an outsize share of military emissions. Research at Common Wealth and the Climate and Community Project—climate-focused think tanks in the U.K. and U.S., respectively—note that, since the Paris Agreement was brokered in 2015, the U.K. and U.S. militaries have emitted a combined 430 million metric tons of CO2 equivalent, more than the total greenhouse gas emissions produced by the U.K. in 2022.

“Bolstering the militaries of the two latest imperial actors,” says Patrick Bigger, an author on the report and research director at the Climate and Community Project, “runs counter to the principles of climate justice and common but differentiated responsibility,” a principle enshrined in the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change. “If this is where spending is increasing, that’s an abdication of the rich world’s responsibility to countries that were often the subjects of military intervention,” he added. “I think we’re not even talking about baby steps. We’re talking about really significant steps toward building the capacity to actually implement climate apartheid.”

As Bigger notes, NATO’s approach to the climate crisis entails doubling down on the main climate adaptation strategy the U.S. and other wealthy countries seem to have adopted: investing in ways to arm themselves against the transformative effects of climate change—including migration—while doing comparatively little to stop the root causes driving people from their homes, whatever that might mean for the rest of the world. Given the kinds of international coordination that will be needed to reduce global emissions, its hard to see how the alliance’s call for a ballooning cache of carbon-intensive weapons—aimed at its geopolitical rivals—gets us any closer to a cooler future.