Counting the carbon footprint of Israel's war on Gaza as Asia's climate crisis becomes more severe

Mint

6 hours ago

Climate Change & You is a fortnightly newsletter written by Bibek Bhattacharya and Sayantan Bera. Subscribe to Mint's newsletters to get them directly in your inbox.
Dear reader,
War is in the air, and all the uncertainties and tragedies that come with it. In times like these, when bombing raids dominate the daily news cycle, it can become difficult to recognize that other problems—like climate change—exist, and that rising global temperature doesn't discriminate between who is bombing and who is getting bombed. The end outcome is the same for everyone, and equally grim.
War and the climate crisis are not unrelated subjects. In fact, they are deeply intertwined, because ultimately, every explosion, every missile fired, every building and life destroyed, follows the basic laws of physics, like the transference of energy (a building explodes into smoke), moving in a straight line towards entropy, or the ultimate end of matter.
Take Israel's relentless bombing of Gaza since October 2023—a continuous exercise in pulverization that has levelled all of Gaza Strip and killed over 55,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials. A studypublished on 30 May, calculated that greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions from the conflict in the first 15 months (October 2023-January 2025) were nearly 1.89m tCOe (million tonnes of carbon dioxide equivalents).
Also Read | The world has already breached a dangerous level of warming, and India isn't prepared
The report, aptly titled War On Climate, states that this is more than the annual emissions of 36 individual countries and territories. If one were to factor in the military preparations going into the conflict, and add the material costs of rebuilding Gaza, the emissions shoot up to over 32.2m tCO2e, overtaking the annual emissions of 102 countries. The authors note that the emissions of militaries are grossly underreported, and that their calculations 'point to the urgent need for increased visibility and mandatory reporting of military emissions for both war and peacetime".
State of the climate
Asia is heating up faster than the global average
The World Meteorological Organization (WMO) released a report on Monday, the State Of The Climate in Asia 2024. Among other findings, the report states that Asia is warming nearly twice as fast as the global average. In fact, the warming trend in 1991-2025 has been nearly double that of the period of 1961-1990.
Some of the other highlights from the report are the fact that Asia's major mountain ranges, especially the Tien Shan and central Himalaya, are losing glaciers at an alarming rate, with 23 out of 24 major glaciers steadily losing mass between 2023 and 2024. Intense marine heatwaves are also becoming increasingly common in the Indian Ocean, and land heat records are going through the roof.
Also Read | Remembering Pope Francis's climate advocacy, Bill Aitken's nature writing, and the race to avoid runaway climate change
The report highlights several cases of extreme weather events in India, including the Kerala landslide during the monsoon last year, where over 350 people died after Wayanad experienced 500mm of rainfall in just 48 hours. The report also highlights India's intense heatwaves, as well as 1,300 people losing their lives due to lightning strikes, and intense cyclones like Remal making landfall. In 2024, Asia's average temperature was 1 degree Celsius higher than the 1991-2020 average.
The news in brief
-In a previous newsletter, I had written about Indian policy think tank Council on Energy, Environment and Water's (CEEW) new research on how India is suffering from extreme heat. In this article, my Mint colleague Manjul Paul takes a closer look at the report.
- Donald Trump may be the most anti-climate president in recent US history, but 70% of Americans support the need for global climate policy to tackle the climate crisis.
-The world's indigenous people are on the frontlines of the devastating impacts of climate change. This haunting photo-essay takes a look at how rising temperatures are upending the lives of Peru's Andean communities.
Climate change tracker
Two years left to act
It is becoming increasingly clear that the impacts of climate change are way worse than previously reported. We had pointed out in an earlier edition of this newsletter how the world is closer than ever to permanently breaching the 'safe' warming limit of 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels by 2030. An important new study published in early June has now presented us with more granular updates on how global indicators of the climate crisis have changed over the past year.
The study titled, Indicators Of Global Climate Change 2024, is the work of a international consortium of climate scientists. It's headline findings include the fact that the world has heated up by 1.36 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times, and that the current rate of warming is an alarming 0.27 degrees Celsius per decade. This means that if global GHG emissions aren't drastically reduced, we will shoot towards a catastrophic 2 degrees of warming much earlier than 2100.
This also means that the hopes of keeping long-term warming to within 1.5 degrees Celsius now hang by a thread. To achieve this goal, the world can burn 80 billion tonnes of fossil fuels for just under 2 years and no more. For context, in 2024, the world burned approximately 37 billion tonnes of fossil fuels.
Since this is not going to happen, the study urges that we look at goals that are still achievable, like limiting warming to 1.7 degrees Celsius. For that, the world's carbon budget stretches to just over 9 years, at 390 billion tonnes. Right now, we are looking at a catastrophic warming of 2.7 degrees Celsius or more by the end of the century.
Know your jargon
Cloudburst
Over the past few years, we have become accustomed to news of cloudbursts in different parts of the country during the monsoon. The India Meteorological Department (IMD) defines this as a rain event that sees 'an extreme amount of precipitation in a short period of time, sometimes accompanied by hail and thunder, which is capable of creating flood situations".
India experienced such heavy dumping of rain last monsoon, like the Kerala landslides mentioned above, or when Delhi was hit by a cloudburst-like situation on 31 July. That day, over 100mm of rain fell across 24 hours, leading to widespread flooding, and the IMD declared a red alert over the city. On 25 May this year, Himachal Pradesh experienced devastating flash floods when over 100mm of rain fell in various parts of the state in 24 hours, causing landslides and massive property damage. We may yet experience such violent rainfall events this monsoon.
Also Read | India's climate crisis: Early heatwaves, Himalayan glaciers melting and a biodiversity collapse
A 2020 climate report published by the Ministry of Earth Sciences (MoES), noted that as India gets hotter, cloudburst events are also increasing, with the west coast seeing a rise in short-span high intensity rain events (an increase of 5 such incidents per decade) between 1969 and 2015.
The horrific deluge in the Western Ghats between 19-25 July in 2021 is testament to the havoc such rain can cause. Speaking to Mint in the aftermath of the cloudburst, then MoES secretary Madhavan Rajeevan said, 'Now the number of rainy days (in a season) is decreasing. And the length of the dry spells is increasing. There's not much change in the total amount of rain. The number of rainy days may be small, but when it rains, it will rain very heavily, so that the seasonal total will be same."
Prime Number
120
A recent study published in the journal Nature, titled Impacts Of Climate Change On Global Agriculture Accounting For Adaptation, states that for every 1 degree Celsius of warming, global food production will decrease by an average of 120 calories per person per day. For the study, researchers conducted a wide survey of 12,658 regions across 54 countries to understand if adapting to a warming climate can offset losses to food production.
They found that under the current heating scenario, staples like wheat will see reduced yields of 7.7%, soy by 16% and corn by 8.3%. If our daily meals are to be divided into breakfast, lunch and dinner, this would be akin to the world giving up breakfast. If the world were to heat up by more than 2.7 degrees Celsius by 2100, then crop losses will be much more severe. 'In a high-warming future, we're still seeing caloric productivity losses in the order of 25% at global scale," the study's lead author Andrew Hultgren, an environmental economist at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, told The Guardian.
Book of the month
This Changes Everything: Capitalism Vs. The Climate by Naomi Klein
It may be common knowledge now, but author and activist Naomi Klein's 2014 book was the first to lay bare in forensic detail the intimate relationship between the capitalist mode of production, fossil fuels and the climate crisis.
Published a year before the historic Paris Agreement on climate change, nearly everything that Klein talks about still holds true, be it the organized way in which climate denialism works or the dangerous techno-fantasies of geoengineering. Ironically, this goes to show that in the eleven years sinceThis Changes Everything was published, nothing really has changed. However, it remains a powerful book and a great introduction to the climate crisis.
So that's it for this edition of Climate Change & You, dear reader. Sayantan will be back in a fortnight with the next instalment.
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