Yesterday, following his inauguration, President Trump announced a range of climate and energy-related measures, including that the US would once again withdraw from the Paris Agreement. In 2019, our Climate Security Plan for America, endorsed by dozens of national security leaders, including 8 retired four-star generals and admirals, argued that such a move would lead to “… a loss of American prestige and international leadership as a result, a lack of trust between the US and its partners and allies, and significant moves by other nations, such as China, to fill that global leadership vacuum.” This is still the case, and already China is working to seize leadership on the topic globally.
The President and his administration are also stepping back from identifying climate change as a national security issue, revoking the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. This creates a blind spot for US foreign and security policy and ignores years of bipartisan support in Congress for addressing climate security risks.
The truth is, regardless of these orders, climate-driven hazards will continue to threaten the American people, the country’s critical infrastructure, its military readiness, and its competitiveness on the world stage. Just last week, the unprecedented wildfires in Los Angeles highlighted the range of human and national security threats posed by climate hazards. We at the Center for Climate and Security will continue to identify and analyze those threats, provide common-sense policy recommendations, and work with national, subnational, and international leaders to prepare for and prevent climate security risks. To that end, here are some key CCS resources:
- Climate Security Policy Recommendations for the New Administration: In the face of rising and accelerating security risks from climate change, both in the US and elsewhere, we present a set of recommendations for ensuring that the US is prepared to address those risks, including four key categories of recommendations: Prioritize domestic resilience to disasters, Strengthen the US military’s competitive edge through improving its resilience to climate effects; Invest in upstream prevention and resilience with US allies and partners; Accelerate efforts to address global food and water insecurity
- The Military Response to Climate Hazards Tracker: In the past 2.5 years, militaries globally have deployed nearly 500 times in almost 100 countries in response to climate hazards such as floods, wildfires and hurricanes. The US military has deployed nearly 200 times in 12 countries in the same time period. For more details and sources, our tracker is here.
- Climate Change in the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA): The US Congress has a bipartisan history of including climate provisions in the annual NDAA. Details here, including measures passed and signed into law during the last Trump Administration.
- US Government Climate Security Documents: Policies and strategies related to climate security from the Biden Administration are here, and this larger archive includes US documents from the White House, Department of Defense, Intelligence Community, and other agencies, spanning both Republican and Democratic administrations since 1991.
In 2021, President Trump’s incoming National Security Advisor Mike Waltz noted that preserving the US military’s advantage means “our bases have to be resilient to rising sea levels, to flooding, and certainly to storms,” and in a 2023 hearing on Capitol Hill promoted the importance of climate resilience. This common sense approach to climate security risks is even more important today than it was eight years ago when President Trump took office the first time. A government that ignores the threat of wildfires, hurricanes, extreme precipitation, and other climate-driven hazards puts its people and national security at risk. We at CCS, a nonpartisan security policy institute, will continue to present objective analysis on the accelerating security risks of climate change and to present policy solutions that are commensurate to those risks. We strongly encourage the new Administration to take these risks seriously as well.