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Feel free to republish and share widely. In addition to its death toll, Israel's war in Gaza comes at great cost to the climate, mainly because of the emissions that will be required to reconstruct tens of thousands of buildings there, a study published Thursday shows. The study looked at the first four months of the war, during which time the authors estimated that some 156,000 to 200,000 buildings were destroyed or damaged in the Gaza Strip.
The resulting climate costs were greater than the annual emissions of the world's 135 lowest-emitting countries put together, the study , which was published in the SSRN and is currently under peer review, shows. "While the world's attention is rightly focused on the humanitarian catastrophe, the climate consequences of this conflict are also catastrophic," Ben Neimark, a co-author and lecturer at Queen Mary University of London, told The Guardian . Though the vast majority of the estimated climate cost comes from the future rebuild, the study authors also looked at the immediate climate emissions from wartime activities, most of which came from flights by Israeli fighter jets and U.
S. cargo planes that supplied weapons, fuel, and other supplies. There were 244 round-trip cargo flights from the U.
S. to Israel during the four-month study period. Experts not affiliated wit.
