The Narratives Around Armed Forces for a Greener Planet: Military Approaches to Climate Change

By amplifying risks and threats, climate change is already affecting international peace and security. The acceleration of the process of global warming will exacerbate tensions of all kinds, likely to lead to open crises or even conflicts. This will increasingly affect the international strategic context as well as the conditions for carrying out missions and the capabilities of the armed forces, which are major players in defense, peacekeeping and crisis management. Speaking about climate change brings to the front the impact it casts either in terms of raging storms and cyclones or the massive and successive waves of drought and water stress. Facing this invisible but imminent environmental threat, military entities are looking for means and measures of adaptation to restrict its carbon footprint and to adopt new strategies to confront hazards of climate change on vulnerable but severely affected regions in the world. For the past fifteen years, many Ministries of Defense has been committed to environmental protection and energy transition actions, a domain that belongs to public policies for sustainable development. The term “green defense” covers military measures contributing to the control and reduction of the impact of climate change. Though some armies are showing low incentives to reduce energy consumption or increase alternative to cope with climate change, others have begun significant efforts to cut energy use and greenhouse gas emissions. In this work we sketch the strategies of the armies in the USA and France to explain the extent to which their visions collide to restrict and limit the consequences of the issue when it comes to human displacement, tensions, and conflicts. Regardless of their strategies on climate change, this work attempts to explain the extent to which the mentioned military entities are showing urgency to handle the connection between climate change and security. In terms of adaptation, mitigation and resilience, this work examines the knowledge and anticipation capacities on the strategic issues of climate change; the dynamic processes of relief to the foreseeable upheavals induced by climate change and the cooperation dynamics on climate change defense issues within the framework of the State's actions to the achievement of international and national mitigation objectives.