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India’s climate debate and agenda have increasingly become impressively granular, especially in the context of its updated NDC. We count the carbon emissions and intensity of power plants, transport, agriculture, industry, waste, steel, and coal, as well as electric mobility and the cost of adapting our cities to extreme heat. Yet, one of the country’s and arguably the world’s largest consumers of fuel, land, infrastructure and industrial production remains almost entirely outside climate scrutiny: the defence establishment. This article does not present an argument against national security; rather, it states that national security cannot be separated from national climate policy, especially when the military has to operate within the varying degrees of hot summers, unstable mountains, flooded bases and disrupted supply chains, very aware of the interplay of climate change as a security risk.

In fact, the defence sector should also accept that the security sector is a climate actor, especially given that its bases, construction, procurement chains, and high-altitude logistics generate emissions and ecological damage. However, if those costs are neither measured nor disclosed, they cannot be intelligently reduced, and this problem is not only unique to India but rather presents a global blind spot. An estimate puts the carbon footprint of the world’s militaries and their supply chains at around 5.5% of global greenhouse gas emissions; if they were treated as a country, they would collectively have one of the largest carbon footprints.

Though this estimate is merely an approximation, it shows the extent of military contribution, even when military fuel is often buried within broader energy or transport categories; emissions from overseas operations and international bunker fuels are incompletely captured; and the carbon embedded in weapons, metals, electronics, and construction is rarely counted consistently and is often masked as continued invisibility.

When carbon emissions from global conflicts exceeded 30 million tonnes

In fact, this problem becomes more profound when we look at the estimates during the war, which indicated that the United States’ post-2001 operations emitted about 1.2 billion tonnes of greenhouse gases between 2001 and 2017, with a substantial portion attributable to overseas operations. In fact, recent estimates of carbon emissions from the Israel-Gaza conflict exceeded 30 million tons. While it cannot be attributed to a single military, such estimates should also avoid double-counting; however, excluding these emissions might produce an even greater distortion. War appears in public accounts as a geopolitical and humanitarian catastrophe, but not as a climate event.

India, too, illustrates this very problem, especially in its Fourth Biennial Update Report to the United Nations climate regime, which recorded 2,959 million tonnes of greenhouse gas emissions in 2020, excluding land use and forestry, and did not present the armed forces as a distinct emissions category. Defence-related fuel and electricity consumption may be statistically absorbed elsewhere in the inventory, but the public cannot identify the military share, distinguish routine activity from operational surges, or evaluate........

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