By Erin Sikorsky, Elsa Barron and Brigitte Hugh

In an analysis released early this year, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) noted that climate change and climate security risks are not separate from other security challenges facing the United States—instead, they are overlapping and interconnected. The Russian invasion of Ukraine is no exception. Climate change is shaping the national security landscape against which this crisis is unfolding, from the tactical to the strategic level. The Ukraine crisis exemplifies the importance of integrating a climate security lens into foreign policy—while climate stress is not the catalyst for conflict in this case, without an understanding of climate and energy transition dynamics brought to the table, policymakers may get key analytic questions and their answers wrong while also missing opportunities for constructive policy interventions.

In this briefer, we discuss four key areas of climate and ecological security that are linked to the crisis in Ukraine: 1) The need to accelerate the clean energy transition; 2) Degradation of Ukrainian ecological security; 3) Decreasing global food security; 4) Russia’s own climate security vulnerabilities.

Read the full briefer here.