The United Nations may have accepted that overshooting 1.5C of warming – at least temporarily – is inevitable – but God’s representative on Earth didn’t get the memo.
The new pope, Leo XIV, sent a video message to cardinals from the Global South gathered at the Amazonian Museum in Belém on Monday evening, saying “there is still time to keep the rise in global temperature below 1.5°C” although, he warned, “the window is closing.”
“As stewards of God’s creation, we are called to act swiftly, with faith and prophecy, to protect the gift he entrusted to us,” he said, reading from a sheet of paper in front of a portrait of the Vatican.
And he defended the 10-year-old Paris Agreement, saying it has ”driven real progress and remains our strongest tool for protecting people and the planet.” “It is not the Agreement that is failing – we are failing in our response,” he said. In particular, the American Pope pointed to “the political will of some.”
“We walk alongside scientists, leaders and pastors of every nation and creed. We are guardians of creation, not rivals for its spoils. Let us send a clear global signal together: nations standing in unwavering solidarity behind the Paris Agreement and behind climate cooperation,” he emphasised.
UN climate chief Simon Stiell welcomed the message, adding that the Pope’s words “challenge us to keep choosing hope and action, honouring our shared humanity and standing with communities all around the world already crying out in floods, droughts, storms and relentless heat”.
War’s carbon footprint grows but stays off the books
During the Leaders’ Summit that happened just before COP, Brazilian President Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva referred to ongoing conflicts around the world, saying that “spending twice as much on weapons as we do on climate action is paving the way for climate apocalypse”. “There will be no energy security in a world at war,” he added.
But COP30’s schedule doesn’t appear to reflect his concerns, as there’s no mention of any peace initiative on the official schedule and no thematic day for peace, a marked difference from COP28 and COP29, with Baku calling for a truce for the summit’s duration. It didn’t produce the desired result.
And yet discussions about militarism and what it is costing the planet have not been absent from the COP30 halls. The first week saw the publication of ‘Accounting for the uncounted: The global climate impact of military activities’, an analysis by a group of civil society organisations and the University of Warwick that showed how global armed forces produce 5.5% of all greenhouse gas emissions.
If counted as a country, they would be the fourth biggest emitter, topped only by the US, China and India – and producing more emissions than the continent of Africa.
Ellie Kinney, senior climate advocacy officer with the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS), one of the organisations behind the report, explained that, while the Paris Agreement made military emissions reporting voluntary, few countries fully comply.
China and the US, the world’s two biggest military spenders, have ceased their partial reporting on them altogether: the US has not sent their annual report to UNFCCC this year, and China said its military emissions are ‘not occurring’.
But the research findings are alarming: the Russia-Ukraine conflict has produced 237 million tonnes of CO₂ over three years, while the Gaza conflict has already surpassed the combined annual emissions of Costa Rica and Estonia. The Afghanistan war was responsible for a staggering 400 million tonnes CO₂, and the EU’s rearmament could lock in 200m tonnes of CO₂ mainly through the production and transportation of weapons, an activity that uses steel and aluminium, which are very carbon-intensive to produce.
Ana Toni, COP30’s CEO, said back in March that countries that increase their military budgets should also increase their climate spending or face more wars in the future. “Wars come and go. Unfortunately, climate change is there for a long time.”
The European Parliament used its annual COP resolution to call on the defence sector to help tackle climate change by cutting its emissions intensity and urged EU decisionmakers to formulate a proposal to increase the transparency of military emissions accounting to the UNFCCC.
Campaigners want military emissions reporting to be mandatory, especially after 2024 — the first calendar year to surpass the 1.5C temperature goal and with 56 wars involving 92 nations, the year with the highest number of active conflicts since WWII.
“We can’t have this future where defence comes at the cost of climate action,” Kinney said. “Military security is not the only security – climate action is part of our collective security, too.”
