Large-scale international summits frequently attract criticism and controversy. COP summits are no exception. One of the inherent contradictions of these events is that they generate significant carbon emissions – a fact that sits uncomfortably with their overarching goals of addressing and limiting climate change. Most obviously, there are the environmental impacts of thousands of delegates travelling – often by air and in some cases by private jet – to the summit venues. This year, 50,000 people are expected to attend COP30 in Belém, in Brazil; and there is a 50 per cent increase in scheduled flights to Belém during the time of the summit compared to the same period in November last year. Furthermore, large areas of Amazon rainforest – an important carbon sink – have been destroyed and fragmented to make way for a new four-lane highway to facilitate access to the event.
The purpose of this article is not, however, simply to criticise COP30. Rather, I want to highlight a notable gap in recurrent COP agendas and to discuss, by drawing on some of my own research, how this gap might be addressed. At the centre of this article is the relationship between war and climate change.
War and Climate Change
Ana Toni, the chief executive of COP30, recently claimed: ‘There’s no doubt that the wars that we’ve seen – military wars and trade wars … are very damaging – physically, economically, socially – and they divert the direction and the attention from climate’. What is striking about this statement is how it neglects the huge environmental impacts of war and the important nexus between war and the climate crisis.
War machines – including fighter jets, tanks and other vehicles – and the industrial complexes that produce military hardware are major polluters, due to their high energy consumption. A study focused on the war in Gaza, for example, estimates that direct war activities during the period from October 2023 to January 2025 resulted in carbon emissions totalling 1,898,330.9 tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalent (tCO2e). War can also impact on climate change in other ways. In the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war, for example, Russia frequently targets Ukraine’s energy infrastructure, including storage facilities and refineries. One study estimates that during the first 24 months of the war, greenhouse gas emissions due to attacks on energy infrastructure totalled 17.2 million tCO2e.
Examples such as these make it abundantly clear that ‘the carbon cost of conflict needs to be understood’. However, military emissions – which are estimated to account for 5.5 per cent of the world’s global greenhouse gas emissions – have consistently been downplayed in the context of COP. As an illustration of this, the Paris Agreement, which was adopted at COP21 in 2015, does not require militaries to report on their emissions. There have been calls, therefore, for mandatory reporting through the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change to address this military emissions gap. It is also important, however, to think more broadly, and this is where my work on transitional justice fits in.
Transitional Justice and COP
Transitional justice refers to the variety of processes – judicial and non-judicial, formal and informal – that societies adopt and engage in to address the legacies of war and large-scale violence. While this is a field that continues to grow and expand, it remains deeply anthropocentric. Rooted in liberal ideology, transitional justice focuses on violations of individual human rights and neglects the impacts of war and atrocities on more-than-human worlds (including animals, forests, rivers and steppes). This absolutely needs to change. Against the global backdrop of climate change and biodiversity loss, to continue conceptualising and operationalising transitional justice in ways that ignore the myriad entanglements between human and more-than-human worlds is unsustainable.
There is an obvious connection in this regard between transitional justice and COP, in the sense that both of them critically downplay the war-climate nexus. I argue that an important way for COP to acknowledge the significance of this nexus and to make it much more prominent is to incorporate transitional justice into its discussions on climate justice. The environmental impacts of war and armed conflict raise fundamental issues of justice that are highly relevant to COP, and COP30 has a role – and a responsibility – to play in challenging narrow human-centric framings of transitional justice.
There is another connection between transitional justice and COP30 in relation to my work that I want to highlight. In examining some of the environmental impacts of war and their implications for transitional justice, I have examined different ways of capturing – and learning about – the effects of war on more-than-human worlds. My work has placed particular emphasis on the relevance of soundscape recordings, as a rich source of data that can offer novel acoustic insights into the experiences of more-than-human worlds. The incorporation of soundscape recordings into transitional justice offers a potential way of challenging the field’s anthropocentricity, by making space for the ‘voices’ of more-than-human worlds to be heard.
By extension, there is enormous and unexplored scope for incorporating such recordings into COP30. Doing so would represent a fundamental shift from simply speaking about more-than-human worlds to also listening to them and acknowledging their agency. In the words of Professor John Dryzek, ‘Recognition of agency in nature…means that we should listen to signals emanating from the natural world with the same sort of respect we accord communication emanating from human subjects’.
