In early 2022, journalists began to ask us how Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine was affecting the climate crisis. While we could point to landscape fires, burning oil refineries and the thirst of diesel-hungry military vehicles, the emissions data they sought just wasn’t available. When it came to the reverberating consequences of Russia’s manipulation of Europe’s fossil fuel insecurity, or to the weakening of the international cooperation necessary for coordinated global climate action, our guesses were no better than theirs.
Two decades of international analysis and debate over the relationship between climate change and security has focused on how our rapidly destabilising climate could undermine the security of states. But it has largely ignored how national security choices, such as military spending or warfighting, can have an impact on the climate, and so undermine our collective security.
