The Overlooked Contributors to Climate and Biodiversity Crises: Military Operations and Wars

The military-industrial complex, military operations, and wars are major contributors to exacerbating both climate change and biodiversity crises. However, their environmental impacts are often shadowed due to national security reasons. The current paper aims to go through the devastating impacts of military operations and wars on climate change and biodiversity loss and challenges that hinder the inclusion of military-related activities into environmental crisis mitigation efforts. The information blind spot induced by concerns about national security reasons jeopardizes the efforts to involve the military-industrial complex and military operations in the global climate and biodiversity agendas. Besides that, many military-related challenges, such as specificity of operational requirements and lifecycles, dependence on fossil fuels, complex supply change, inadequate civilian technologies and innovations, and requirements of structural changes, can hinder emission reduction. Meanwhile, wars and conflicts not only threaten to drain all human and material resources available to tackle environmental problems but also inflict long-lasting destructions, pains, and trauma that can lead to hatred and distrust among nations and parties. With the rising hatred and distrust, global agreement and commitment to address climate change and biodiversity will hardly be achieved. Thus, promoting peace is the humanistic and planetary conscience.