Bringing together experts from multiple fields, this event examines how rising military activities and armed conflicts generate major yet largely unregulated environmental harms.
Global military spending has reached a new high, accounting for 2.5% of the world's GDP, with the highest number of states in conflict since the end of World War II. This is directly reflected in the environmental and climate impacts of the supply chains, training, ammunition, land use, and reconstruction. The greenhouse gas emissions caused by active conflicts surpass the annual emissions of entire states. While the science on these impacts slowly developed, the role of law in producing this set of problems remains underscrutinised.
To showcase the physical consequences of legal neglect and provide an empirical basis for their transformation, two panel discussions will bring together specialists from diverse disciplines, including geopolitical ecology, law, history, international relations, and engineering.
In the first part of the event, panelists will reveal the status quo - the complex relationship the military establishes with the natural environment to fulfil its core functions, consolidating collective violence on behalf of the state, maintaining these capabilities, further developing them, and utilising them under specific circumstances. Additionally, not only are relevant norms scarce or difficult to enforce, but international law helps constitute the very conditions under which conflict-related emissions and other harms persist.
The second part of the event will map the pathways to sensitise the legal framework to these environmental harms. Palestine’s suggestions to the ICJ to provide specific guidance in the advisory opinion on state responsibility for GHG emissions resulting from armed conflicts and other military activities, including occupation, and Ukraine’s planned claim of US$43.8 billion in climate compensation from Russia are some examples of pursuits to ensure accountability and state responsibility. Yet, what will be the hurdles in the way of those and similar claims? And what legal linguistics are still lacking? The discussions will aim to distil a possible legal definition of military emissions and span the other identified gaps, imagining new structures of integration between the climate change regime and military exemptions.
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