Somali maritime police are training to deal with oil spills somewhere in the Horn of Africa. Local prosecutors and NATO-affiliated personnel are inspecting industrial waste sites in Kosovo. EU advisors are assisting security forces in the Central African Republic in their efforts to combat illicit timber trafficking. These aren’t the kinds of operations that make headlines, and most people don’t associate defense with these kinds of operations. However, they are starting to play a larger role in defense, and this change is happening more quickly than the industry is willing to acknowledge.
For years, the term “climate security threat” has been used frequently enough in policy circles to lose its urgency and come across as bureaucratic. However, the current situation feels different. The first global warming threshold of 1.5 degrees Celsius was reached in 2024. In just Europe, the European Environment Agency identified 36 climate risks that could have serious repercussions. Over 55 million people worldwide were impacted by record droughts. These are no longer projections. These are the circumstances in which defense contractors, armies, and security forces are required to operate and make plans.
Historically, the defense sector’s response to climate change has been, at best, awkward. For military clients, safety, dependability, and raw performance have always been the top priorities; environmental factors have been at the bottom of the list. In a thorough analysis of the industry, Boston Consulting Group found that defense contractors have hardly started to address the 90 to 95 percent of their emissions that are not under direct operational control—that is, the gases that are embedded in supply chains and in the products themselves after they are sold and deployed. It’s possible that the industry is more aware of the scope of the issue than it is disclosing to the public, and that the speed of response is a reflection of actual technical difficulty rather than apathy. Decarbonizing military jet engines and naval propulsion systems is a real challenge. However, the pressure to close the emissions gap between the defense industry and other heavy industries is growing and is no longer limited to environmental advocates.
Read the article from Primary Ignition here.
