Celebrating Success – Dr Erwei (David) Xiang
Congratulations to Dr Erwei (David) Xiang collaborated with external partners to produce the report on how increasing global military expenditure threatens SDG 13 on Climate action, which is published to the Conflict and Environment Observatory (CEOBS) website. Moreover, this study was covered by an article in The Guardian, revealing how Nato rearmament could increase emissions by 200m tonnes a year.
- Report: ‘How increasing global military expenditure threatens SDG 13 on Climate action’ (link here: https://ceobs.org/how-increasing-global-military-expenditure-threatens-sdg-13-on-climate-action/#1)
- The Guardian article: ‘Revealed: Nato rearmament could increase emissions by 200m tonnes a year’ (link here: https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2025/may/29/nato-military-spending-could-increase-emissions-study-finds)
The following content is extracted from The Guardian article mentioning our study:
“There is a real concern around the way that we are prioritising short-term security and sacrificing long-term security,” said Ellie Kinney, a researcher with the Conflict and Environment Observatory and a co-author of the study, shared exclusively with the Guardian.
“Our analysis specifically looks at the impact on sustainable development goal 13, which is climate action – to take urgent action to combat climate change and its impacts,” Kinney said. “And what our analysis finds, looking at the various sub-targets of that … [is] that there is a real threat to global climate action caused by global increase in military spending.”
Of all functions of states, militaries are almost uniquely carbon-intensive. “First of all, with the equipment that they purchase, which is mainly a lot of steel and aluminium, which is very carbon-intensive to produce,” said Lennard de Klerk, of the Initiative on the GHG Accounting of War, another co-author of the study.
“Secondly is during operations, armies are very mobile. And in order to move around they use fossil fuels – that’s diesel for ground operations and kerosene for air operations. Or for maritime operations it’s mainly diesel as well, if they’re not nuclear-driven.”