Flight International - 04

Environment Defence
Emission reduction efforts must be balanced against
allied nations’ need to maintain combat effectiveness
“The prioritisation of environmental topics is
changing fast,” says Jose Antonio Coll Guzman,
head of sustainability at Airbus Defence & Space.
“For the defence sector, it is not only a topic of
emissions, but also of energy dependency, supply
chain vulnerability and the effects of climate change
on future operations.”
Dr Duncan Depledge, a lecturer in Geopolitics
& Security at the UK’s Loughborough University,
is undertaking a project to assess the impact that
achieving net zero carbon emissions by 2050 will
have on the UK’s armed forces.
“Defence has a carbon problem,” he wrote in an
Oxford Academic article in February. “The strengthening
of net-zero emissions targets in response to the
deepening climate crisis is forcing militaries to find
answers to the question of how to wield force effectively
within the constraints of a net-zero world.”
Depledge tells FlightGlobal there are three prongs
to the carbon problem for militaries. “The thinking
for the first problem is that climate change is going
to lead to increased conflicts, certainly increased
insecurity, and instability.
“The second is that as the world warms as more
carbon enters the atmosphere, climate change itself is
going to alter the operating conditions for defence,”
he says. He notes that in its Climate Action Plan,
the USAF observed one example of the impact of
climate change: “Across the globe, extreme heat and
humidity are a detriment to our ability to execute
operations including impacting aircraft performance
and payload capacity.”
The third element of the carbon problem is fuel
use in operations. “The mitigation piece is critical
because defence itself is a huge consumer of fossil
fuels. It burns a lot of carbon and it’s going to have to
address that as well,” says Depledge.
Carbon combat
Taking this thinking a step further, he introduces the
concept of ‘low-carbon warfare’, with one of the
key questions being: “can you have a high-carbon
military in a low-carbon world?” The answer surely
must be no.
“If pressure to decarbonise military forces
continues to build, Western societies will need to
confront future threats to defence and security with
a much smaller carbon ‘bootprint’ than they do
today,” he says.
“Then the challenge becomes how to retain or
even enhance military operational effectiveness
while supporting action to mitigate the climate crisis,
reducing a costly reliance on fossil fuels (as well as
on petro-states such as Russia), and maintaining the
April 2023 Flight International 53