Warfare and Global Warming

Dec 14, 2022 | Scott Moore
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The human toll of war is reason enough alone to avoid it at almost any cost. But warfare’s impact on global warming raises a number of intriguing policy questions, including which country is responsible for emissions from disputed territories or fighting that takes place in foreign lands. Indeed, the International Law Commission proposed draft principles in 2019 for the protection of the environment in relation to armed conflicts.

Previous conflicts are also estimated to have produced substantial emissions. Iraq’s deliberate torching of Kuwaiti oil fields during the Gulf War may have released some 400 million tons of carbon dioxide.

This increasing evidence for—and attention given to—the contribution of conflict and warfare to climate change has at least three major implications. The first is mostly technical: at present, there is no framework for accounting for conflict and warfare-related emissions or attributing them to one belligerent or another.