Ms Ellie Kinney:

Excellent. We have definitely seen a shift at European policy level. I definitely saw genuine interest in and enthusiasm for the European Green Deal until two or three years ago. For us working in military decarbonisation, we saw real progress on a policy level that we were seeking to operationalise. This was on the understanding that it was the future and that we had evolved and understood our responsibilities, the thinking being that if we were to meet the goals of the European Green Deal, it would require a whole-society approach to decarbonisation, which must include militaries. That rhetoric feels very far away from where we are now. Decarbonisation feels so far down the list of priorities because operational effectiveness is what matters the most.

Even on a broader climate level, there is a real risk of watering down EU net zero and emissions reduction targets, which is deeply concerning. As was mentioned, the sense of speed and urgency that is being implied here is simply investment in short-term security. Who does this short-term security benefit, as has been covered very much already? What this will do in the long term is directly compromise long-term security on a multitude of levels, one of those levels being $264 billion a year in climate damages. It is a very large number so it bears repeating multiple times across this session. Then, on other levels, social cohesion is being cut within this very proposal.

I am based in England so I can speak on a UK level to the trend happening at the moment where you see cuts from governments across development and climate commitments, and that being redistributed directly into military budgets. In the UK we did this very explicitly. We cut development funding and put it straight into the military budget. This is definitely a trend we are seeing and why I was not hugely surprised to see these two proposals hand in hand, where you see climate funding and other socially beneficial funds being redistributed to military spending. It is a really key focus at the moment but it is such short-term thinking to not consider the full range of risks we are facing. If anything, we can learn a lot of militaries in their approach to risk management. I do not think any military ever considers the one risk that is ahead of it. There is a multitude of risks we are facing at any given time and it makes very little sense to directly funnel resources into policy that is directly contradictory to climate action and directly incompatible with the goals of the Paris Agreement.