On Wednesday of this week, Ben Rhodes, Assistant to the President and Deputy National Security Advisor for Strategic Communications and Speechwriting, hosted a short Q&A on national security via twitter. The Center for Climate and Security’s Caitlin Werrell posed the following question, and received the following response from Mr. Rhodes:
Mr. Rhodes continued with additional comments on what the U.S. would be doing in this space:
The Center for Climate and Security applauds Mr. Rhodes’ acknowledgment of the security risks of a changing climate, as well as President Obama’s mention of the climate change threat in his State of the Union address. This view is shared by a growing bi-partisan consensus among leaders in the national security, military and intelligence communities.
Important to be aware of climate security and national security links. Also good to draw in the related links with resource security. May I suggest the next step would be a strategic framework for managing all these links as a whole system. This NATO-published piece proposes extending the vision of ‘global security’ for this purpose. http://blindspot.org.uk/global-security/
An advantage of a whole system method is that system goals need not conflict. For example the goal of economic security need no longer reduce ambition with climate security. Hence planning can be more science-led. Science tells us that climate impacts follow waste carbon concentrations hence we must plan for carbon-negative scenarios.