Executive Summary

A short-lived gap in the clouds let satellites observe a striking phytoplankton bloom east of Greenland, June 16, 2024.
(NASA Earth Observatory image by Lauren Dauphin, using MODIS data from NASA EOSDIS LANCE and GIBS/Worldview)

Abstract: This report leverages insights gained from the use of strategic foresight as an approach for better anticipating how risks to global security are heightened by ecological disruption. It offers a range of use-cases for applying the foresight toolkit to the field of ecological security and to establish a knowledge base to assist practitioners, governments, and institutions in enhancing their anticipatory decision-making and planning processes for addressing the security ramifications of large-scale destabilization and decline of the biosphere and ecosystems.

Executive Summary

In February 2021, the Council on Strategic Risk’s Ecological Security Program published its landmark report, The Security Threat that Binds Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It.¹ The report identified ecological disruption as a substantial and underappreciated security threat and aimed to prescribe recommendations for how the US government should adapt its national security architecture to better respond to this evolving threat landscape– including stresses to critical systems such as water, food, wildlife, forests, and fisheries, and how these stressors heighten threats to global security, namely pandemics, conflict, political instability, and loss of social cohesion.

The initial report noted that the US government needed to adapt its national security architecture and mainstream ecological concerns to better anticipate the evolving threats from ongoing ecological disruption. Enhancing strategic foresight capabilities is one approach to addressing this challenge. To this end, the preliminary report developed an ecological security research agenda that involved several strategic foresight practices: (1) use foresight tools such as horizon scanning to better understand and uncover the linkages between ecological disruption and security, (2) develop early warning indicators to identify what signals of harmful future ecosystem regime shifts can be detected in the present and inform anticipatory planning, (3) build mature ecological forecasting capabilities to improve resilience against future shocks. All of these recommendations fall under the strategic foresight toolkit.

In line with these recommendations, the Ecological Security Program undertook several foresight initiatives, including a two-day Ecological Security Game conducted in May 2023 and several scenario exercises on the security impacts of ecological decline and biodiversity loss in Southeast Asia and Africa. Building on the success of these activities and the Program’s ongoing horizon scan for drivers and trends at the intersection of ecological disruption and global security risks, this report proposes several actionable, futures-focused strategies and tools for stakeholders and policymakers to integrate into existing ecological response and national security efforts.