INSUBCONTINENT EXCLUSIVE:
The Ukraine war has shown the heavy toll military conflict takes not just on people but also on the planet, say experts at the UN climate
summit in Egypt.From the emissions caused by diesel-powered tanks, fighter jets and missile blasts to urban and forest fires and massive
waves of refugees, the conflict has also spewed out huge amounts of greenhouse gases."This is a field of significant emissions and nobody
has really dealt with this problem," said Axel Michaelowa, head of the University of Zurich's International Climate Policy research
group.Russia's invasion has plunged Ukraine into misery, heightened geopolitical tensions, driven up global energy and food prices and
distracted the world community from the urgent need for climate action.A fast-heating world "cannot afford a single gunshot," Ukrainian
President Volodymyr Zelensky told the COP27, arguing that the aggressors "are destroying the world's ability to work united for a common
experts have argued, while acknowledging that so far they lack precise data.Estimates of planet-warming emissions from the world's
militaries range between 1-5% of the global total, according to a commentary published in the journal Nature last week.That can be compared
military, the world's biggest by expenditure, were a country, it would have the world's highest per capita emissions, at 42 tons of CO2
equivalent per member of its personnel.When one of its F-35 fighter planes flies 100 nautical miles, it hurls into the atmosphere as much
CO2 as the average British petrol car does in a year, the experts wrote.'Conflicts past and present'Ukraine has started to calculate
emissions linked directly and indirectly to the invasion launched by Russia on Feb
24, a first for a country at war.Fires in buildings, forests and fields sent into the skies 23.8 million tons of CO2 equivalent, and the
1.4 million tons, said the project created two months into the war, while reconstruction of destroyed infrastructure will cause another 48.7
compared to around 100 million tons produced from all sources by the Netherlands over the same period, according to the initiative."It shows
us how much we are missing from other conflicts past and present," said Deborah Burton, co-founder of the group Tipping Point North South
"We have not had this level of detail on Iraq or Syria or other conflicts."The authors of the Nature commentary argued it is high time to
address the issue."Why are reports from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and United Nations climate summits silent on military
blind spot" in the calculation of global emissions, said Lennard de Klerk, a private-sector specialist on carbon emissions who took part in
formalize this change.""The best step in our view would be to actually bring this directly to the IPCC process," Michaelowa told AFP."The
challenge is that military data are usually kept confidential, but there are possibilities to actually find proxies."You know which aircraft
are operating in which area, you have an idea of the emission intensity of certain types of vehicles," explained Michaelowa."So, by using
proxy data, you should be able to have estimates of military emissions that are at least accurate in the level of plus or minus 10-20%."The
Nature authors argued that carbon emissions "must be officially recognized and accurately reported in national inventories, and military
operations need to be decarbonized.""Military emissions need to be put on the global agenda."
