'Huge' Carbon Footprint Of Wars Overlooked By COP25 Agenda - Anti-War Movement Chief

'Huge' Carbon Footprint of Wars Overlooked by COP25 Agenda - Anti-War Movement Chief

Wars leave behind a carbon footprint disproportionate to the funds that are invested in mitigating it, yet some countries are embarrassed to bring up this issue at international platforms like the 25th UN Climate Change Conference (COP25), David Collins, head of the Movement for the Abolition of War in the United Kingdom, told Sputnik

MADRID (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 10th December, 2019) Wars leave behind a carbon footprint disproportionate to the funds that are invested in mitigating it, yet some countries are embarrassed to bring up this issue at international platforms like the 25th UN Climate Change Conference (COP25), David Collins, head of the Movement for the Abolition of War in the United Kingdom, told Sputnik.

"We think the UK is one of the most war-like states, almost continuously at war, and somewhere in the world all the time. The UK makes a security risk assessment, how much percent of the risk, but the risk we have here is 100 percent. Yet the funds are going to the military side of a huge proportion. And the states finance for international climate change mitigation is 0.3 percent of the military budget," Collins said.

The anti-war movement chief believes that redirecting this money toward the fight against climate change is a better investment than toward military expenditures "that simply cause even more problems in the future."

"The carbon footprint of war is huge. If you take 220 ships, billions of liters of petrol [are needed] to supply those troops in the Iraq war.

Then you have all these aircraft, tanks, armament manufactures all that is creating an enormous amount of carbon," Collins continued.

According to him, deforestation and petrol fires are only some of the dreadful environmental impacts of heavy military investments.

"But this is not on the agenda at all. There is not one single speech linked between war, the military and climate change. Britain would be embarrassed to bring this subject up when it's all over the world causing all these troubles. I think that's quite a significant thing that is not on the agenda," Collins said.

He added that their organization was put on a waiting list to speak at the COP25 and that wait continues.

The COP25 launched on December 2 in the Spanish capital of Madrid and will run through Friday. The agenda is focused on the goals outlined in the Paris Agreement on climate change. The treaty's most well-known premise is to try to keep the global temperature rise below 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) above pre-industrial levels and to ideally pursue an even lower limit of 1.5 degrees.