Climate Action in a Geofragmented World: Do Armed Conflicts Undermine the Implementation of International Climate Commitments?

Despite growing attention to the environmental consequences of armed conflict, little is known about how conflicts affect countries' ability to implement international climate commitments. This paper addresses this gap by introducing a novel Gap-to-Target indicator that harmonizes heterogeneous mitigation commitments into a common measure of climate policy implementation, capturing deviations between observed greenhouse gas emissions and the emissions implied by countries' pledges under the Kyoto Protocol and the Paris Agreement. Using a panel of 135 countries over the period 1997-2024 and complementary causal identification strategies, we examine the effect of armed conflict on climate commitment compliance. The results show that armed conflict systematically widens the implementation gap, with the largest effects under the Kyoto Protocol and persistent adverse impacts across successive Nationally Determined Contribution (NDC) cycles. These findings remain robust across alternative specifications, identification strategies, placebo tests, and sensitivity analyses. Fiscal crowding-out emerges as the main transmission mechanism, while stronger fiscal capacity, technological innovation, and climate finance substantially mitigate the adverse effects of conflict. The adverse impacts are particularly pronounced in developing countries, hydrocarbon-producing economies, countries with conditional mitigation commitments, and countries experiencing high-intensity conflicts. Beyond the country-level evidence, a global counterfactual analysis quantifies the climate cost of conflict-induced implementation failures. The results indicate that the forgone emissions reductions accumulated across the Kyoto Protocol and the first two NDC cycles have already generated approximately 2.54×10 -3 • C of additional global warming, directly linking armed conflict to the long-term temperature objectives of the Paris Agreement. More broadly, the findings shift attention from the ambition of climate commitments towards the conditions required for their effective implementation, highlighting that armed conflict constitutes a major implementation risk for international climate agreements and that preserving institutional capacity is essential for maintaining the credibility of global climate governance.