UN needs to focus on stopping and preventing wars to fight climate change

The United Nations General Assembly 2026 is over. The United Nations continues to disappoint with how ineffectual it has become at stopping wars—a contributor to climate change.

Wartime greenhouse-gas emissions originate from military vehicles, fires, the transport of arms, and the production and launch of weapons. They also come from destroying infrastructure with embedded carbon. Forests, wetlands and other carbon sinks are weakened, if not destroyed.

Take the case of Russia and Ukraine. According to the Ukraine-supported Initiative on GHG Accounting of War, estimates as of a year and a half ago put emissions at over 230 million tonnes of carbon-dioxide equivalent released due to the war.

Today, multiple wars run in parallel. We know the ongoing devastation in Gaza will have very strong planetary repercussions. Hostilities in West Asia, along with the participation of the Houthis, and the endless civil war in Sudan are just some more. In each case, weapons, vehicles and the pummeling of nature contribute to everyone’s destruction, near or far from the wars and their locations.

The United Nations was formally launched in 1945, with a key mandate to prevent wars. If it stayed focused on resolving ongoing wars and hostilities today, the UN would also be able to deliver better on the climate front. Just the UNFCCC alone isn’t enough. Now that we have a better understanding of the climate impact of war, the UN should focus on its top mandate: to stop our planet from boiling over. If only the UN could focus on preventing and ending wars, we could all expect reduced emissions amid a planetary crisis.

(The writer is the founder and director of Chintan Environmental Research and Action Groups)