One Year of War Money Could Bring Half the Planet Back to Life

There is a number so large it has stopped meaning anything. In 2025 the world spent roughly $2.887 trillion defending itself — from each other. Michel de Kemmeter, the Belgian economist who invented what he calls "Systemic Economy," looked at that figure and asked a question that reframes the entire century: what if it is the wrong kind of defense?

His argument, published under the Club of Brussels banner, is not a plea for tree-planting. It is an accounting exercise with a moral edge. Put the world's annual military spend next to the price of healing the planet's ruined soil, he says, and you find the two numbers are the same order of magnitude. One of them buys tanks. The other buys survival for half of humanity. We are, in his telling, paying full price for the second problem while funding only the first.

01 · The MathThe numbers nobody wanted to line up

Start with the ledger. The UN Convention to Combat Desertification estimates it would take about $2.6 trillion to regenerate the planet's degraded land by 2030 — roughly $260,000 per square kilometre. De Kemmeter's 10% target is 14.9 million km². Divide one year of global defense spending by the per-kilometre cost and you land near 11.1 million km² of soil brought back to life. Not the full tenth, but close enough that the comparison stops being rhetorical and starts being a budget line.

02 · The ChainWhen land dies, people die

The reason the comparison bites is that land degradation is not a slow, distant tragedy — it is already here. About 40% of Earth's land surface is degraded, touching nearly four billion lives. De Kemmeter draws the causal chain with unusual flatness: a dry land becomes a desperate land, a desperate land becomes a migration corridor, and a migration corridor becomes a conflict zone. By the time the tanks are needed, he argues, the real battle — over water, soil and food — was already lost, years upstream and far cheaper to win.

This is the move that makes the essay more than an environmental appeal. It relocates regeneration from the charity column to the security column — the one budget line that never gets cut. If restored soil prevents the drought that empties a region, then a green corridor is not a nice-to-have. It is a border wall that happens to feed people.

03 · The DesignGreen corridors, not scattered islands

The plan is deliberately not a patchwork of isolated reserves. De Kemmeter wants connected "green corridors of life" — restored soils, agroforestry, water-retention systems and protected biodiversity stitched into continuous ribbons. Inside them sit safe-haven regions with real local economies, rain-positive zones where recovery is physically feasible, protection belts around fragile ecosystems, and regenerative villages that double as training hubs. Continuity is the point: life spreads along a corridor in a way it never does across a fenced-off island.

04 · The PilotWhy it starts in Zambia

Grand plans die of abstraction, so de Kemmeter names a place. Zambia — 752,610 km², half its population under the age of 20, strong agricultural potential and quiet influence over its neighbours — is the proposed proof-of-concept. The staging is almost cinematic: begin with a 1,000 km² pilot small enough to see and photograph, grow it into a 10,000 km² corridor, and eventually reach 75,000 km² — a tenth of the country turned green.

05 · The MoneyA $10 trillion opportunity in the dirt

Here the framing flips again. Regeneration, de Kemmeter insists, is not a cost to be endured but a $10 trillion-a-year business opportunity — millions of jobs built from solutions that already exist. To finance it he floats Kairos, a currency built on "Regeneration Credits" and a "Proof of Useful Work" mechanism, claiming investment multipliers of five to twenty times, underwritten by social bonds or tax incentives. It is the most speculative part of the pitch, and he knows it; the point is less the mechanism than the insistence that the capital is findable if the will is.

06 · The ProvocationArmies that plant instead of clear

For more than twenty-five years the Club of Brussels, Extrapreneurs and RegenEra have worked as a loose think-tank "for a new earth." Now, de Kemmeter reveals, they are exploring pilot collaborations with military actors themselves — to co-design regenerative deployment across Sub-Saharan Africa, MENA and Eastern Europe. It is the essay's sharpest image and its biggest gamble: the armies of the future planting corridors instead of clearing them, logistics chains built for war repurposed to move water and seed.

Whether the Kairos currency ever mints a credit is almost beside the point. The essay's real weapon is the comparison it forces you to hold in your head — one year of defense spending, one tenth of the planet, the same price tag — and the uncomfortable question that follows it home. If the cheapest way to prevent the next war is to bring the soil back to life first, why are we still buying the expensive kind of safety?