 Hello and good morning, good afternoon and good evening, and welcome to the sixth session of the DM25's Alternative Climate Conference, COP-OFF. Today we are discussing a very, very critical issue, often under-reported, of course, on the military and the climate emergency. And I am honored to have with me esteemed guests Laura Stysian, who is the outreach coordination for the National Priorities Project at the Institute of Policy Studies, which is a project dedicated to fighting for a U.S. federal budget that prioritizes peace, economic security, and shared prosperity. In this role, Laura helps facilitate collaborations with climate change-focused organizations on shifting our war economy to address the climate crisis. And we also have Doug Ware with us. Doug has been researching and doing advocacy on the toxic legacy of armed conflicts and military activities since 2005. And he formally coordinated the International Coalition to Ban Iranian Weapons, which expanded into other toxic material before establishing the conflict and environment observatory, to monitor and raise awareness of the environmental and derived humanitarian consequences of conflict. Thank you for being here. We also, as you might know, are the audience that we were supposed to have media Benjamin with us, the co-founder of Code Pink. She's in Cuba at the moment, we're not sure if she's able to join us yet. We are standing by for that, but we are live-streaming at this time, so we're going to go ahead and hopefully she can be with us. So the audience is quite well aware, I think, the destruction of war, but I just wanted to emphasize two statistics for everyone's attention. And I'm going to use the war on terror as the example here, because this is the foremost in our minds and our condolences to all the thousands of people and service men and women who've lost their lives either through conflict or through suicide on this. And the United States especially has lost 10 times as many service persons to suicide as compared to combat deaths, so just something to bear in mind that this costs the US more. But also it has led to the forcible displacement of 38 million people and that's a conservative estimate and this immense displacement and environmental destruction, of course, is now being touted by front-ex, by military border forces, etc., to request more funding, more restrictive laws, more border patrols and more fuel to deal with the security implications of climate change. And we know that the majority of this military activity is unaccounted for. Recent studies, and we're going to dig into this as well later on, indicate that the military boot print accounts for around 7% of global emissions, around, there's no exact scientific number for this. And this is more than twice global aviation. So just keep that in mind as we're going through this event today. Let me just maybe start with you, Doug, on this. And you've been, you were at the COP26 conference and you witnessed firsthand this lack of transparency around the military greenhouse emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, etc. Do you want to maybe just give us a bit of an outlook and overview of what you saw and what happened? Most recently, yeah, thanks for having us on and the invitation. Yeah, I mean, we were there in Glasgow with our colleagues from Lancaster University and Durham University, with whom we've been collaborating, trying to map and bring together the data that is out there around the scale of military emissions. And as you say, it's, yeah, for historical reasons, dating back to the Kyoto Protocol and the, it was a condition of the US signing up that military emissions weren't to be included. Paris made it voluntary, but it was still at a situation where it's just not an issue which is talked about, not an issue which is on the table in the main conference room. But yeah, you know, discussing before like this year, it was quite significant how much attention this issue was getting outside the main conference room from civil society organisations and the number of events which are popping up. So yeah, we launched a website there, but there are others, I think it was like four or five side events and fringe events around aspects of military emissions, but also this kind of securitisation of the climate crisis. So it was really interesting to see this bubbling up and it's a very interesting space for civil society to have potential collaborations from the environmental movement as well as from peace movement more traditionally. And again, these military emissions, this isn't an issue which has been addressed in a way by a lot of the environmental movement historically, and this is kind of a pattern we see repeated in a lot of the international environmental agreements around different kind of chemicals and pollution that the military stuff is kind of too hard and too political for the environmental movement to take on. So there's kind of structural challenges we're going up against as well as the deliberate exclusion from these from the COP process. You're just on mute Amir. Thank you for that. It's it's an ongoing click that I need to bear in mind. But anyway, moving on. So from that point of view, I mean, civil society is getting further engaged on this and this one and moving from being ignored to being a voluntary and we saw from the military map emissions map that there is some countries are participating with others or not. How's the evolution of that going? Yeah, well, maybe I'll take you through and just introduce you to what we found in a more sort of a constructive way. So I'll just share the map. OK, and OK, so just, yeah, it's going back to the basics, really. I mean, why are we actually looking at military emissions? As you said, we don't know how big the big print is globally. No one has that data. The military's don't have that data because because they've been exempted from this process for so long. And I've enjoyed this environmental exceptionalism. They are far behind this on a private sector, commercial sector, in actually tracking the emissions that they produce. But we know they are massive producers of consumers of hydrocarbons. They have very large and complex supply chains. They burn a lot of stuff. They use a lot of stuff. That means they have a big emissions footprint. And I think we're at the stage now, COP26, current COP27 next year, that actually there aren't any sectors at this stage which we can exempt from emissions cuts. The climate emergency is an emergency and the military can no longer be exempt. And I think there's an interesting question around legitimacy here, which you touched on earlier, that we see a lot of militaries and a lot of Western states in particular as big advocates around climate and security. So it was one of the outcomes from the NATO summit this year in May was NATO sees climate change as a bigger threat as China. They can have a central excellence around climate change. They want to be climate actors in the climate security sphere. Obviously, climate change is not the kind of thing you can shoot at. And there aren't really hard security solutions to climate change. But on the one hand, militaries want to be seen as legitimate actors, but at the same time, they're not reporting their emissions, they're way behind on this kind of environmental norms, which rest of society is having to engage with. So why did we kind of work towards putting up a website? As I said before, we don't know how big emissions are. We just don't have that data. It does me a lot of focus historically around the US because it's the largest department of defence, is the largest institutional emitter on the planet. But at the same time, we have very little data generally. There is some reporting, which is done to the UNFCCC, the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change. The International Panel on Climate Change IPCC has various sort of formulas for how militaries can record their emissions. So there is data out there, but the data has kind of been hidden away in these IPCC reports. And yeah, I'll come back to that in a second about how hidden this is sometimes. And obviously, you know, if we can't see how much they're emitting, there's no pressure, there's no external pressure on militaries to actually cut what they're emitting. And so transparency around emissions reporting is really vital. Also coming on to what we found, so this is kind of the map in the data. So the dark coloured countries, so these are annex one countries. So when this whole process started for developed countries, which are historically responsible for more emissions, they have particular reporting obligations so they have to report every year on their emissions. The developing countries at the time, they don't have to report every year. So these are the non-annex one countries and these are ones in light blue on the map. So with the 40 so industrialised countries, it's around 44 plus the EE who have to report. So they spent over a trillion dollars on their militaries in 2020 in a pandemic, somehow still managing to spend over a trillion dollars. Only five of them actually report their emissions in line with the UN guidelines. Most of them just aren't and these guidelines are really, really minimal. So this isn't something to be particularly proud of at this stage. But then this also includes another 15 countries which spent half a trillion in 2020. And this includes China. So the US is the biggest spender on military annually. China spent about a third of what the US do and they're kind of number two. But also includes countries like Saudi Arabia, which spend about the same as the UK every year, South Korea, very significant spenders, countries like Iran and Pakistan, where again, you have militaries who are completely embedded in the economy of the countries. We know nothing about their emissions. They just don't report any data at all. And historically, there's been a lot of focus on the US because it's an update, obvious target. Actually, we don't know anything about the emissions from most of the defence spending, military spending globally. And so these countries, they might report a little bit of data, but it's not disaggregated at all, so we can't see where it's coming from. So this is kind of a state to play where we are at the moment. And why is there this gap? So the first problem is kind of what governments are obliged to report to the UNFCCC, which is what I touched on before about this disparity between the developed countries and the developing countries, as well as, I mean, Israel. It's one of these developing countries for the purposes of UNFCCC. They spend a lot on their military every year and they don't have to report anything at all. So the question is how they report their military emissions. So under the UNFCCC, countries can report what they spend on fuel, so mobile fuel costs, and then their stationary fuel costs, how much it costs to heat their buildings. And that's it. That's what should be reported. We don't see that being reported in a particularly complete way from a lot of countries. And sometimes that data is hidden within these reports under the different sections. Sometimes it's put together with civil defence and other issues like that and mountain rescue and stuff like that. And there are some who say, well, we don't give you any data at all because we think it's a military secret. And then the third is what we don't report. So this is a question of, well, there's fuel use, there's heating buildings, but then what other carbon costs do military have? I mentioned before, they have these huge supply chains. And we see when we look at commercial companies that actually the supply chain emissions are usually three, four, five times the size of the institutional emissions. So even if we do have complete data on fuel use, which we don't, even if we have complete data on heating buildings, which we don't, we're missing out a huge amount of data on emissions from this supply chain from all the stuff they buy, the stuff they use. And then there's other questions like, well, should we also factor in the emissions they cause during conflicts, for example, which isn't just about the fires and the bombs. But it's also about the massive societal environmental change which we see during conflicts and also during peace, some of which can lead to increased emissions. So what can we do to fix some of this stuff? So mentioned before, you know, there's been increasing interest around this issue at COP this year, which is great. We need to maintain that momentum, keep it going, try and get it onto the formal agenda, not just outside the room on the fringe. And right now, the states have got to commit to improving their reporting. And we've seen interesting signs from NATO that, you know, they've recognized this, but they're going to try and develop their own methodology, which their members can use, which is a little bit marking their own homework for our liking. So we're going to be keeping very close eye on that and putting out our expectations on what we think states should count. And in the meantime, they've got to start cutting now. They can't keep up this level of carbon expenditure. They need to make pledges now to cut. Which is difficult for them because they don't know how much they emit at the moment. So it's hard to make a meaningful cut. And we also need to address the flaws in the reporting guidelines for militaries. It's not enough. The current situation is the actual bare minimum of data. So there's a lot of work which needs to be done and a lot of attention, which is needed on this topic, and I will leave it there. But if you want to check what your government is reporting in terms of its military emissions, just go to the site, militaryemissions.org. Find your country, click on it. And that's the data which they provide to the UNFCCC. Thanks very much, Doug. And this one of the key messages that came through now, throughout, you know, for us and for us to for the views and we can also see some questions coming up. So we're going to also try to address that as well. But it was the month of spend you mentioned over a trillion dollars. And I want to quickly turn to Laura because we know that the war on terror costs 21 trillion dollars. But that there was a U.S. spend, if I'm not mistaken. And since 2001 and that resulted in eventually a hasty evacuation from Afghanistan. So this 21 trillion dollars wasn't a good investment in that sense. This huge sum of money, I'm sure, could have been used elsewhere for better purposes, right? I mean, decarbonizing the energy sector. We know about the public transfer inflation in the U.S. is crumbling. Maybe you could touch on that factor a bit first. Thank you. Yeah, thank you, Amir, for that introduction. Yeah, the 21 trillion dollar figure that you're referring to is from a recent report from the National Priorities Project called State of Insecurity that calculated militarized spending in the United States since 9-11. And so that figure represents not only money spent on the military, the Department of Defense, but also on this larger infrastructure of national security, which has certainly grown within the context of the war on terror. So that includes institutions like funding for the Department of Homeland Security with militarized immigration enforcement, for example. Yeah, thank you, Amir, for that introduction and for hosting this conversation. I'm going to kick off a little bit where Doug left off speaking about military expenditures. Let me get a presentation keyed up for you. So before I get into some of the specifics of global military expenditures, I just want to sort of frame our discussion today within this just transition framework. This graphic sort of illustrates a process of transforming the extractive economy that we have now, which is an economic system that exploits and harms people and the planet to a living economy that really creates the conditions for healthy thriving communities and ecosystems. And it might be a little bit hard to make out, but hopefully you can see that militarism is identified as the system of governance and the extractive economy. And what that means is that militarism is really the coercive arm of the economy. So in other words, it's really violence and the threat of violence that keeps an economy that isn't meeting people's needs and that's wrecking the planet in operation. And so when we understand the role of militarism in this extractive economy that we have now, it's clear that if we don't divest from militarism, then we really can't build the kind of economy that we need to fight climate change and to live well. And so I just want to keep that in mind and that this isn't just a narrow conversation about sort of shifting resources around. It's really about sort of shifting entire economies of war and violence to regenerative economies of life. That's a little framework for us to have in mind. A little repetitive with some of what Doug shared, but according to the latest data on global military expenditures, the world spent almost $2 trillion on militaries in 2020. The first five biggest spenders in 2020, which together accounted for more than 60% of global military expenditures, was the United States, China, India, Russia and the United Kingdom. Today, I'm mostly going to speak to military spending coming out of the United States, not only because that's where I'm based and where most of my knowledge lies, but also because the United States is both the world's largest military spender and also responsible for more carbon emissions than any other countries. As Doug said, also an incredibly carbon-intensive military infrastructure. Last year, the United States accounted for almost 40% of global military spending, which was more than the next 11 countries combined. So what does that look like? Right now in the United States, we're spending over $750 billion every single year on the military. That's about half of the federal discretionary budget that Congress allocates every year. So that's obviously a huge portion. But when you add in sort of other types of militarized spending on top of that, so I'm thinking here about militarized immigration enforcement agencies, for example, funding for law enforcement and incarceration on a federal scale, militarization occupying even bigger piece of the pie. So almost two-thirds of the federal discretionary budget in the United States goes to militarized spending, two-thirds. So that leaves only, you know, about one-third of this pie left for all sorts of other important things that are in the discretionary budget. So things like education, housing, and the environment. So meanwhile, within this context, anytime sort of proposals to meaningfully address the climate crisis come up, they're often characterized by politicians or other people in power as these sort of unrealistic pipe dreams. It's way too expensive. We have in the United States this now sort of infamous quote from Nancy Pelosi calling the green new deal the green dream or whatever. But that same scrutiny is almost never applied to military spending. So politicians across parties come together year after year to approve massive military expenditures in the United States with very little discussion. I mean, if you're in the United States or keeping an eye on the sort of ongoing discussions around legislation that Congress is trying to pass right now, that's in stark contrast to the sort of arguments and teeth pulling that it is to get any kind of investment in climate action. And military spending is really justified as necessary for safety and protection, which I mean, of course, first of all, that has only ever been true for certain groups and for certain economic interests. But it's also very clear in this context that war and militarism are actually diverting resources away from the things that we need to actually keep us safe. So we've spent more than 6.4 trillion dollars on war in the United States in the past two decades. By comparison, the cost of decarbonizing the entire US power grid is estimated to be something around 4.5 trillion. So instead of funding war and devastation, we could have completely transformed our energy grid in the United States in the past two decades. We've already done that and had literally trillions of dollars left over. And you know, at the end of the day, it's not just about physical money, but also about the misdirection of physical resources and people that are needed at home in the context of the climate crisis. One striking example is that while there was wildfires raging in the Western United States one recent summer, many of the largest firefighting aircraft weren't available because the Department of Defense had sent them to Afghanistan to fight in at that time of 20-year-old war. Another way of sort of looking at this issue of climate expenditures is that the military is the only major federal jobs program in the United States. And since the military-industrial complex is spread out across every single state in the United States, many members of Congress sort of justify military spending by the jobs it creates in their states and districts. And so sort of accordingly, war spending is often perceived as an effective way to increase employment. But there's actually far better ways besides massive military jobs program to employ Americans. In fact, compared to alternative uses for those funds, military spending is one of the least effective sources of job creation. We see dollar to dollar investments in green jobs yield more job creation than investments in the military. And green jobs, which are everything from sort of renewable energy jobs to also very low-carbon jobs in the care sector like teaching or healthcare, certainly time after time yield greater job creation than investments in the military. So this isn't even just about domestic budget priorities. It's also about the sort of distribution of resources on a global scale. So during the COP26 coalition, or actually just ahead of it in Glasgow, President Biden announced that the United States would quadruple its international climate finance over Obama era levels, which, you know, that might sound significant, but when the bar is so low, when you're starting at almost nothing, that amounts to be a pretty insignificant amount. So if the U.S. makes good on this promise, that will still only amount to an annual contribution in international climate finance that's equivalent to what the U.S. military spends about every five days, which is, you know, utterly reprehensible. Given that the United States historic emissions are greater than any other countries, and it's also the wealthiest country in the world, the United States should be the number one provider of climate financing to the South as sort of reparations for harm caused by our emissions. But instead, we sort of continue to invest in ways that cause harm and worsen the climate crisis. I'll sort of leave it at that. We'll have space for more discussion. I just want to close this portion with a quote from Martin Luther King Jr., who sort of famously said, a nation that contributes year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death, which I think is quite apt in this context. I think it's clear, given the massive military expenditures that we certainly have resources available to meet people's needs and to keep people safe. And the reality is, is that militaristic budget priorities in the United States and across other powerful countries are not accomplishing either of those things. Thank you, Laura, for that presentation. And you mentioned Nancy Pelosi in your, at the beginning. And of course, we all, you know, you might, people have seen on Twitter the interview by the journalist where she defends Nancy Pelosi defends further polluting the environment which and creates a role for Pentagon, for further role for Pentagon to get more funding, actually. So that's a big battle for us to win. Let me just quickly turn to some questions we've had from the audience. And Doug, maybe this first one, I'm going to just read it out and maybe you want to tackle that one. It goes back a little bit to the earlier presentation when that military missions are exempt from COP meetings. Does that mean these are not included in the national emissions statistics? Can these not be captured in other ways? Maybe you can take that question. Thank you. Yeah, I think maybe the easiest way to do this is to show you what's actually reported. So I will just jump to our map for a moment. There we are. So this is the interactive map. So historically, between 1997 and 2015, states did not have to report any of their military emissions. They were wholly exempt from reporting. And at the Paris Agreement in 2015, their reporting was made voluntary. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change has kind of set out the criteria for how all emissions should be reported. And they do have some criteria for how many emissions should be reported. So in the case of the UK here, as I was mentioning before, you have these stationary emissions. So emissions from buildings and bases and mobile emissions, fuel use from aircraft or tanks or whatever else. So at the moment, the UK is reporting, but it uses just over a million tons of CO2 equivalent. Our colleagues at Scientists for Global Responsibility, they did an assessment of the UK's emissions, Ministry of Defence's emissions. And they put it close to 11 million tons. So 10 times less being reported to the UNFCCC. And even the Ministry of Defence itself and its national reporting. So these are just the reports which go to the UN. And they're just like the UK, who also produce statistics themselves, domestic reporting on their emissions. And the Ministry of Defence actually reports about 3 million tons of CO2 equivalent. So even they can't even manage to sort of align their reporting between the UN reporting and their domestic reporting. So there is some reporting happening. That's the thing. It's not a complete blank canvas. And that's what we're trying to get across with the website. But then we have this kind of issue with these two types of reporting, which countries have to do, depending on whether they were developed countries or developing countries. So Saudi Arabia was viewed as a developing country, despite sitting on vast quantities of oil wealth that it spends largely on weapons, 8% of GDP on its military purchases. And they report no data at all. There's nothing in their reports. They don't have to do annual reporting, but they kind of have to do reporting every couple of years. So there's a whole load of countries like Saudi Arabia who just aren't reporting anything at all. So yeah, I guess it's not the kind of a simple black and white of like nothing's being reported. Things are being reported, but what's being reported is incomplete. It's confused. It's very difficult to compare between countries. And we've had to think about, you know, when we're working on this, is there not something we can just some calculation of like looking at defense spending and go, okay, they're spending that much money. Therefore, they must be emitting this much. And we kind of did it in a back of a fag packet sort of way, just to try and figure out how realistic this data was. But it's very difficult to compare like and like between countries because obviously the carbon intensity of militaries is different between countries. The structure of militaries is different between countries. So you know, China has a huge military, but it looks quite different to the U.S. military. So it's very difficult to kind of compare like with like and see who's actually performing well or performing worse across this stuff. And that's why we would need a lot more attention on how this stuff should have been reported because we can't really make any progress until we actually have a grasp handle on what's being emitted and who's emitting what. That was quite a long answer, I grant you. No, absolutely. And this level of detail is critical because that's what's lacking in a sense. And of course, we're assuming that, you know, the countries that are under attack and are being bombed, et cetera, that naturally don't even have the capability to add that to the database. So we're dealing with the industry that not only pollutes exponentially compared to, you know, other industries, if you like, in that sense. And not only does it extract a lot of metals and other precious resources that could be used elsewhere, but also leaves behind extensive pollution and damage in those recipient cold countries where the bombs are dropped. So I mean, you know, and I think, Laura, you're touching on what you said earlier on about, you know, in the longer term we are, the demilitarization is the goal. And of course, the military sometimes is also used even in a non-conflict situation to create further damage. And I think there was a question as well on the, from one of our members of the audience regarding the militarization of conservation. And of course, the militarization of the climate change. So maybe you want to tackle these two together? Sure. Yeah, this is an important question that I don't know as much about, but I'll share a little bit of context. I think this question about the militarization and how that can sometimes be tied to these conservation schemes advance by various states. I sort of go back to that just transition framework that I put up before that really situated violent militarism at what keeps extractive economic systems, extractive corporate bodies in operation, right? And so these very violent economic interests really rely on forms of violent militarism. Sometimes those are forms of militarism associated with a state, sometimes not, as a way to sort of push their extractive economic schemes that are not good or logical for people or the planet, but sort of advance certain discreet economic interests. And so I think sometimes you can see that playing out with various types of so-called conservation schemes that are sort of greenwashed to be advancing conservation goals. I'm thinking here, for example, this UN mechanism called RED, which is sort of presents itself as a scheme of presenting deep forestation, but is also attached to all sorts of colonial frameworks that are removing indigenous people, for example, off of the land in various parts of the global south. And so we see in all these different situations that these certain interests really rely on military powers to push their agenda. I'm also thinking about how this plays out, for example, in the United States with pipeline projects and other forms of fossil fuel infrastructure that have massive resistance, often indigenous lead resistance. And we see that military force is used to try to quell that resistance and push forward these various schemes. Yeah, thank you, Laura. And we actually had a question as from the audience that came up asking, well, stating that a big chunk of the US GHGs are coming from its overseas bases upwards of 800. And I can read it as a rhetorical question of why is the US not closing its military bases as well. I think it's based on what Nancy was saying, they want to open more. Right, yeah. So I think a lot of people, particularly in the United States, people whose countries are colonized by US military bases probably have a better sense of this, the sort of massive military infrastructure across the globe and this huge amount of military bases that again sort of dwarfs any other country's military bases by comparison. And this is this is directly tied to what Doug is talking about in terms of military missions and military missions that are excluded from national calculations. And this is also a part of what when the United States talks about climate change as a national security issue, right, we see President Biden on his first days in office issuing executive orders that they're declaring that climate change is a national security issue and there's been a series of reports that have been issued since then, which I think sounds good on the one hand, if you're not totally familiar with what the implications for that with that characterization are. But a big part of what that actually looks like is looking at the ways that climate change is going to impact military operations from the United States around the globe, right? So there's a lot of military bases, for example, that are on small islands. And how will climate change, we know that small island nations, for example, are particularly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. So part of looking at climate change as a national security issue is looking at how these huge infrastructure of bases might be impacted by climate impacts and thinking through how the US military can sort of continue to operate on the scale that it's operating within the context of a climate change future. So it's really about sort of maintaining US dominance and US military powers within the context of climate change, not sort of using the military to actually fight climate change or address the root causes. And of course, it's naturally, in this role that we are involved in activism and providing knowledge and opening up consciousness of the public to this issue is also about bringing these issues together, whether it's the climate, the peace movement, climate activists, et cetera. And of course, we're going to see, of course, the issue of refugees, whether military refugees, war refugees, if you like, or the estimated 1 billion climate refugees by 2050 at the rate that we're going above 2.5 degrees Celsius. So maybe Doug, I can bring you in on this regarding, if you like, mainstreaming the environmental concerns with the humanitarian considerations issue. And I think CEO BS has been quite active on this as well. Yeah, thanks Amir. Yeah, it's kind of an interesting one. So in the time I've been working around this kind of interface between conflict and the environment, there's been a massively expanding interest and attention around environmental mainstreaming. So we work on projects with mine clearance organizations, clearing land mines, cluster munitions. They're looking at how they can green the work they do, because obviously digging up land mines actually has an impact on the environment. But at the same time, you could potentially bring in benefits to biodiversity and to climate resilience through what you do with that land after you've cleared the mines. So there are entry points throughout this. We also work with humanitarian organizations. You obviously are active in places like Iraq or Yemen, where clearly on the front line of climate change, where there's very strong environmental signals, there's decades of environmental degradation from weak governance and conflicts. And so it's very clear to make these links between environmental degradation and impact on people on the ground. And it's a very clear case of that, like the Iraqi marches, for example, which Saddam Hussein drained to attack the Marsh Arabs and put down their revolution. That had a huge impact. There's been kind of refilling of the marshes since, but now the marshes are at risk from transboundary water disputes with Turkey upstream. You've got climate change impacting southern Iraq, which is pushing temperatures quite soon up to levels where people will not be able to survive. You have potentially this micro climate around the marshes, which could help to mitigate these temperatures. So we need to sort of take these quite holistic approaches to the environment. And it's been interesting looking at so climate security, for example, which has been an issue in the UN Security Council since 2007. And it was the UK, which initially got it on the agenda there. And Laura touched on this before about the different ways in which states and other actors are engaging with this issue. And so for some militaries, it's, will our equipment work? Will our bases flood? And for others, it's about what about displacement, migration, what the impact is going to be? Are we going to have a repeat of a million Syrian refugees appearing in Germany and the impact, physical impacts that that had domestically? And then for others, it's, well, are there ways which we can sort of use the environment to help build and sustain peace, post conflict? So there's a whole different entry points. And it's been really interesting to look at all these different organizations from all these different sectors who are slowly sort of addressing these relationships between environment, peace, and security. One of the areas it's kind of, I think the flow has been less pronounced, it's been within kind of the environmental movement itself, who aren't necessarily mainstreaming security in there. And a good example of this is COP 15, which was also happening this year, which is the one about the biodiversity framework. So obviously COP 26, that's about the climate change framework. There's also the biodiversity meetings, which is happening this year in China. And this was setting out what government should do for the next 10 years to help address the biodiversity crisis. And conflicts have been recognized in there and insecurity have been recognized as an indirect driver of biodiversity loss through direct environmental damage, but particularly weak governance in conflict affected areas, which means it's very difficult to protect biodiversity. And yet this instrument and obviously huge transnational environmental NGOs, the governments who are engaging there, they're just not talking about conflicts. It's like, well, we're going to have this agreement, we're going to be expecting countries who are affected by conflict to implement these plans over the next 10 years, but without any sort of way to attention on how they're going to do that when they're affected by conflict and insecurity. So we almost need to see this mainstreaming go the other way into the environmental movement as well, and not just the environment coming into a kind of peace and security discourse. But compared to where we were 10 years ago, 20 years ago, we are light years ahead. And that's kind of really encouraging in many ways. But we totally have to be careful about how this stuff is framed and what this actually translates into, particularly in terms of the climate security debate. And I think historically, there's been a lot of work to try and get, particularly for the US to get the military to engage on this issue by framing it as a hard security risk. And if you do that, then you bring the US policymakers with them because the military is kind of friendly territory for them. But then the ultimate outcome of this is potentially hard security solutions to climate change, of which there are none. And it's got to be addressed and the root causes of the problem and attacking it that way. But it's a really interesting space. There's a lot happening. There's a lot of people doing really excellent work, particularly around environmental peace building, particularly around monitoring environmental change and damaging conflict. And particularly the Red Cross this year, they put up a climate pledge for all humanitarian organizations to sign up to try and reduce their emissions because dealing with humanitarian emergencies creates vast quantities of emissions as well. So there's a lot of people doing a lot of good work around this, but we do need to be careful and think through what the outcomes of some of these processes are. Thank you so much for that, Doug. And there's an opportunity for another question from the audience that has come in. And the question is, is there any idea of what percentage the war and military contributes to domestic GDP of countries with high military expenditure? The person asked, what I mean is secondary domestic GDP effects such as consumer expenditure? So it's an interesting question to tackle. And Laura, I can see you shaking your head and I think, sorry, everybody is. So maybe Laura, you want to chime in on it and I can maybe also take a minute as well with pleasure. You should take it in here. I was taking my head because I don't have the answer. Okay, well, of course, I'll happily do that. There's also the way I'm going to try to address it in a very brief way is that of course we know that a lot of the spend and actual notion of GDP itself is also decoupled from the reality in that sense. I mean, we're talking about trillions and trillions of dollars being additionally printed to boost the economy, if you like. So that spend that the person is asking about in that sense is actually could be directed in any different way. Right. So maybe this is a way to tackle it. So if that's those trillions that's being printed and used for the military could be used in, as Laura mentioned at the beginning, 4.5 trillion for decarbonizing, that would have created a lot of economic activity, but for a better purpose. And I think thinking about it as a positive contribution, as I'm reading the question, of course, is maybe thinking about it that well, if that manufacturing plant is there, it just depends how you use it. So and the downstream effect, and there's a question on consumer expenditure, well, in that sense, again, it's just about where it's directed, etc. So let's maybe hopefully respond to that. And then so go for it, Doug. Yeah, just want just some thoughts on that, really. I mean, yeah, I'm not an economist. But I was just thinking back to that Pelosi question last week. And the panel kind of sitting there, vacant with their strange platitudes around sort of military expenditure. And, and obviously, Laurie can be terribly on top of this and I am. But just the extent, particularly in the US, but you know, here in the UK and elsewhere in the way that military spending has been used as a political tool to pay for particular military contractors in particular areas of the countries and particular constituencies, this kind of pork barrel politics. And, you know, we see it the same here in the UK about how spending investment is directed. And, you know, even at the moment around climate change, got a lot of talk around nuclear power and small modular reactors and how these are the future. Because all these new, new incredible moves forward in nuclear weapons, sorry, nuclear power have been used kind of historically. But the main company making this a Rolls-Royce who make small nuclear reactors for submarines. And as far as the UK is concerned, it's about keeping the expertise in place so that they can also make these for the submarines, which they need and maintaining the kind of defense base. And this whole question of if we're trying to reduce defense spending, because all of this spending has a carbon cost, politically it's going to be really difficult in these countries where, like the UK, like the US, but also like, you know, Pakistan, Iran, where you have this really profound connection between sections of the economy and military spending. And trying to untangle that and unpack that is going to be a real problem, I think, as we try and reduce, I mean, just military itself, but also the emissions created by military spending. Thank you for mentioning that, Doug, because you mentioned the submarine. And we saw the recent cancellation of the submarine deal between France and Australia. And of course, it been taken over by the British US, you know, consortium, of course, to be to be considered further and 100 billion, etc. The numbers are vast for I think nine or 12 submarines. And then we could too later we saw a underwater collision with the strange object of a US nuclear submarine, right? And the news came out after that of some manufacturer of the alloys for the submarine, fruiting the strength of the material around the submarine, etc. And so forth. And these, you know, billions and billions of dollars are not going to improve security are not going to improve the human security of the United States. And the way actually warfare is moving. And let's put our piece hats off and just look at it from the side of warfare itself. And, you know, one submarine with 25 anti air missiles, anti drone missiles, if you like, well, you can make cheap drones underwater drones to seek it out. And there's the billions of dollars are wasted so quickly. In a sense, so the way the war is moving and spending on this big, heavy 19th, 20th century thinking isn't actually to the now again piece hat off military benefit even. So even those military calculations are orientating everything towards additional corporate profits and not even defense security, never mind human security, etc. We know that we in this room together, but so, you know, the public is getting defrauded and defleased for something to bump into something under on the water. Let's quickly move on a little bit on the issue of securitization of climate. And maybe Laura, you can pick up on that, you know, on regarding migration from a US context. Thank you. Yeah, sure. And I mean, this sort of directly ties to this question of, you know, a cash grab for the bloated military sector and profits for contractors. Because that's, as we've said, you know, for the Pentagon, climate change is another security issue requiring more militarism and justifying a bigger military budget. And for defense contractors, it's also a business opportunity, right? There's sort of a lucrative industry that revolves around a militarized security led for profit approach to climate adaptation and disaster response. And a part of that is around the militarization of borders, and sort of transferring different technologies that military contractors have produced and sold within the context of warfare to the context of borders and hardening immigration policies. And so sort of within the context of the United States and migration, you know, we know that on a warming planet, cross-border migration will rise. And instead of these powerful nations who have the financial resources to receive people who have been displaced who also happen to be the same states that are most responsible for the climate crisis, instead of sort of responding with, it's not just responding with solidarity or compassion, but also sort of responsibility for harm to done. Migrants are just sort of increasingly met with expanded border enforcement and repression. And this is what writer Christian Forenzi has called the politics of the armed life boat, which I think is a really nice, kind of nice image. It's a terrifying image, but it's sort of a useful image for understanding this climate response that's not based on mitigating the damage or even preparing to cope with the impacts of climate change, but on sort of arming ourselves up and shutting down borders. There's this great U.S. writer, journalist Todd Miller, who lives in the U.S. borderlands and writes about the U.S. borderlands and has written quite prolifically on this topic. And he talks about how the only sort of real preparations for a climate change world are sort of walls and surveillance technologies. And you look back at those charts around budget priorities. I mean, this is what we're set up to fund. These are the sort of most robustly funded climate responses. And so anyways, there's a great report that folks should check out, written in part by this journalist Todd Miller, along with folks at the Transnational Institute called Global Climate Wall, that sort of compares the funds that various states have used towards international climate finance compared to building up their borders. It's called Global Climate Wall. It really encourages folks to check that out. Thank you for that, Laura. So there's lots to be read and to be done. And we also need to consider the way forward from here, of course, in that sense. And as we all know, Chomsky always begins with us and begins with activism and getting further involved in our societies and our local actions to mitigate and move towards demilitarization, of course, as we talked about at the beginning. I wanted to just, unless there's any other further questions, maybe give the floor to each of the panelists just to do the roundup. And then we'll also mention the next events and what we're doing around this issue of disarmament, but we'll give it a few minutes. Doug, would you like to go? Yeah, thanks, Amir. A roundup of sorts. Yeah, I think for us is kind of two things, I guess. Well, there's more than two things. There's certainly one thing, and that's building on and sustaining the momentum which is built up around this military emissions issue over the last 12 months in particular, and which we saw at COP26. It's a really interesting time because we're seeing movements from within the miniatures, from individuals in the miniatures who are pushing for change. We're also seeing a wider range of organizations engaging on this topic and bringing different perspectives around this question. There is not going to be a green warfare at any point. There's not going to be green militarism at any point. Let's be very clear about that. But at the same time, there's work which needs to be done to try and direct how this process goes. So earlier in the year, we thought NATO were going to come out with pledges to reduce emissions around COP, and NATO did. They didn't say how much they were going to cut stuff by, and NATO members were a little bit more circumspected. We're going to reduce our emissions by some point at some undisclosed point in the future. But it was really important for us as civil society to set out our expectations of what military cuts need to be, and they're not offsets. Clearly, it's not just some vague net zero. It's actually significant changes within how militaries are structured, within how emissions are reported, a whole load of stuff. And it's really important as this debate goes on that civil society engages with it and not only puts on pressure on states to address the footprint, the blueprint of their militaries, but also guides this process and creates a, provides different perspectives on how it should proceed. So there's that. Engage on this stuff up to COP 27 and beyond. It's going to be a long, long process to get anywhere where we need to get, but it's a really good space to engage with now and bring together different civil society groups from a whole different range of sectors. The second one is, I guess, around conflict in the environment, which generally, you know, there's so many different entry points around this very briefly mentioned, you know, Syria, Libya, Afghanistan, they're not at the table at COP and, you know, they're not submitting annual reports and countries affected by conflict aren't able to engage in this sort of normal expectations of global environmental governance like this. That's a huge issue. At conflicts, we see huge levels of environmental change, much of which can generate emissions, a lot of which undermines human security and stability, undermines economies, undermines the ecosystems, and we need to address the environmental impact and consequences of conflict in a more meaningful way than we do at the moment. Just simple things. You know, there's been decades of talk around how climate change may influence security, but hardly any research whatsoever on how conflicts actually influence emissions. So, you know, we looked at it quite recently and there's different ways you can look at it. So for example, you sometimes get massive landscape change, land use changes that can generate emissions. You can lock countries into really polluting technologies like we see with the oil and gas sector in Yemen or Iraq. You know, if Iraq and Yemen stopped flaring gas, tomorrow they would meet all of their commitments on climate change just by introducing technologies to stop flaring gas. We've seen very little focus on this and we need a much more coherent research base on it and also about how peace can influence emissions. So in Colombia, similar with many countries which have tropical forests, when peace comes, we see huge increases in deforestation and that can drive emissions increases and biodiversity loss. So we need to understand this kind of the environmental damage to the conflict throughout the conflict cycle, not just as an end driver of conflict, but as a victim of conflict, but also as a tool for peace and sustainable recovery and I'll stop talking there. Cheers. Thank you, Doug, and of course, Pizzlora. Thank you, Amir and Doug for sharing this space and for everyone for tuning in. I mean, I think clearly the only sort of long-term just solutions to these problems, whether it be violence or climate change, are to sort of do away with all the systems of violence and domination in our society. Right, but like what does that really look like to dismantle the systems we have now and build alternative futures? I certainly turn to abolitionist thinkers like the brilliant Ruth Wilson Gilmore who talk about creating conditions where violent systems are the solutions to our problems. And I think that that useful, that offering is really useful here. So in this case, like what does it take to create a world where militarism isn't the solution to our problems? And what would it really take to create real security for people and for communities in this place and everywhere in the world? And so I think this sort of divest, reinvest movement framework that we see across several movements is really useful. Right, because obviously we know we're a very long way away from this vision, but we can sort of start chipping away at it and start removing some of its power. Because right now we're pumping hundreds of billions of dollars every year into a security apparatus that is not making people secure. It's actually heightening insecurity for people around the world. And not just because it's a dancing militarism, but it also means that we're not investing in things like healthcare in the United States. I mean, it's not a coincidence that we have this massive military infrastructure and like the world's work healthcare system by some metrics in terms of accessibility in the United States. So it's really time to hold our lawmakers accountable to their complexity in advancing militarism and climate chaos. As we talked about today, these things are certainly intertwined. And as I think I mentioned briefly, there's bipartisan consensus in the United States to have massive military expenditures, military budget passes every year, gets bigger. Basically every year there's very little discussion, very little controversy. And so as movements, we have a lot of work to do to actually hold lawmakers accountable for participating in this and really strategizing around ways to make serious demands to cut the military budget and sort of to chip away at this massive violent infrastructure. Thank you so much, Laura, as well. And I mean, this raising of consciousness is important because there are students, there are academics, engineers, technical experts, etc. that are indirectly even involved in the military industry. I think today it came out that Google is considering taking up further contracts with the Pentagon. And that's now seen by the chairman of Google that it's not in conflict with Google's do no harm principle. And that's for up to the engineers to think about that. And it is, you know, it does depend on us civilians and people that are indirectly also fueling this. So that's for us to think about and see in which direction we want to go. So we do have people power and we should exercise it. I just want to end off with quick announcements if I may. One is our next talk on Green New Deals, hosted by the Green New Deal for Europe campaign coordinator Dushan. And I look forward to that as well personally. And also, many of you might be wondering, as the audience, you've picked up on some new information and some new facts, etc. We're organizing open calls over the next few days at the end of COP-Off starting from tomorrow. It's called COP-Off Talks On and we have four topics and one of them is disarmament. There should be a link, I think, coming right away for everybody else. So it's an open meeting that anybody is welcome to attend. And for us as the public to keep the conversation going and getting more active on this issue and of course on others that we have in this series. So I want to also thank the audience for their time and patience and questions and thank you again to Doug and Laura for being here. Thank you so much. Thanks, Amir.