Mission and Vision

The Center for Climate and Security (CCS), a non-partisan institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, has a team and distinguished Advisory Board of security and military experts. CCS envisions a climate-resilient world which recognizes that climate change threats to security are already significant, unprecedented and potentially existential, and acts to address those threats in a manner that is commensurate to their scale, consequence and probability.

This position is a clear-eyed, explicitly non-partisan one, rooted in fundamental security approaches to threat reduction, and is based on numerous assessments by security and intelligence communities inside and outside governments that have raised significant concerns about existing and future threats from a changing climate.

To advance the above goals, CCS facilitates policy development processes and dialogues, provides analysis, conducts research, communicates to the public, and acts as a resource hub in the climate and security field.

Program Areas

• Policy Development: Convening and facilitating public-private collaborative policy development processes and dialogues in critical areas of the climate security field, such as the role of national and intergovernmental security institutions in addressing climate change.

• Analysis: Elevating the climate and security discourse through the Center for Climate and Security blog, our reports on the sub-national, national, regional and international security implications of climate change, and other publications.

• Research: Conducting research to fill information gaps, including assessing the security community’s strategic and operational rationale for addressing climate change risks, examining the role of climate change, water and food insecurity in the security dynamics of strategically-significant regions of the world, and forecasting the potential of disruptive technologies to address climate and security risks.

• Resource Hub: Answering frequently asked questions, keeping track of the latest policy developments, and acting as a resource hub for key climate and security documents from governments, international institutions, non-governmental organizations and academia.

Context

Climate change, in both scale and potential impact, is a strategically-significant security risk that will affect our most basic resources, from food to water to energy.  National and international security communities, including militaries and intelligence agencies, understand these risks, and have already taken meaningful actions to address them. However, progress in comprehensively preventing, preparing for, adapting to and mitigating these risks will require that policy-makers, thought leaders and publics take them seriously and act accordingly

CCS was founded in 2010 by Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell.

The Center for Climate and Security is a non-partisan institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, a non-profit organization.