The issue of the “Military Emissions Gap” - From a global perspective to the cases of Japan and the Republic of Korea

Abstract

Climate Change is the single most difficult collective action problem humans have ever faced to date. It has already been more than 30 years since the Conference of Rio of 1992, and it is now clear that targets on GHG emissions reduction are increasingly harder to achieve, and the aim of keeping the rise of global temperatures under the 1.5°C threshold is a more than ever hard task to reach. According to the UNFCCC secretariat, “We’re running out of time but not out of options to address climate change”. Actions toward effectively tackling climate change issues must be undertaken in all sectors. This includes the relatively understudied, when related to climate change issues, military and defense sectors: while their contributions to climate change may seem little or rather unimpactful, these sectors are huge energy and therefore fossil fuels consumers, to say the least. These facts alone allow for further research and new insights from various perspectives in this area, which has been called “green defense”. This thesis will try to answer how is it possible that, despite the large number of agreements on climate change issues that were adopted in the last thirty years, the defense and military sectors are still exempted from reporting their emissions, and how are the US, as the world’s aspiring leader in tackling climate change, Japan as an Annex I Party, and South Korea as a Non-Annex I Party, acting towards these particular sets of reporting issues. By following an eclectic approach, the global climate governance system will be analyzed in its science-policy interface and the issue of the “military emissions gap” will be tackled by looking deep into the relationship between the “policy” and “science” spheres of the UNFCCC. Further areas of research shown by the limits of this work and potential diverse approaches as these institutions develop over time will also be presented to open the research agenda even more.