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Climate Security: A Tale of Two Defense Hearings
By John Conger
Sometimes you want to hear from the very top, and sometimes you want to get into the details. In the last couple of weeks, the U.S. Congress has done both, and each one teaches us something important about the way the Department of Defense (DoD) is planning to deal with climate change early in this Administration.
The first hearing described below included the Secretary of Defense and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, covering a broad range of issues and setting the stage for the President’s budget release, which included climate change as a priority. The second addresses military infrastructure, which has been one of the key facets of the broader climate security portfolio within DoD. It is the part of the climate challenge that has imposed the largest direct cost on DoD so far, and countering it also involves significant investment. The second hearing gets into the details of this part of the portfolio.
(more…)Initial Reactions to the Biden Budget: Takes Systemic Security Risks Seriously, But More Is Needed
Perhaps more than any executive branch budget submission in history, the first budget released by the Biden administration today takes the gravity of transnational, systemic security risks seriously and begins significant investments in addressing them. Yet there will be more work to do past the Fiscal Year 2022 budget in order to ensure that federal government resources are commensurate to these threats. Here are initial reactions to the budget by several CSR experts in these issues.
(more…)The CSR Team on the Biden Budget and Systemic Threats
To date, the Biden administration appears to be prioritizing work to address the greatest threats to international security and stability, including biological risks, the security implications of climate change, dramatic ecological disruption, and nuclear threats. Analyzing, anticipating, and addressing these issues—and how they intersect and exacerbate one another—are at the core of the mission of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR).
In anticipation of the administration releasing its first full budget request on May 27th, the CSR team offers the following insights and hopes for what it will contain.
(more…)A Climate Security Plan for America Part 4: Prepare for and Prevent Climate Impacts
By John Conger
See Part 1, “Demonstrate Leadership,” here, Part 2, “Assess Climate Risks,” here, and Part 3, “Support Allies and Partners,” here.
As the Biden Administration rolls out its first budget request, we revisit the fourth and final pillar of the Climate Security Plan for America, Prepare for and Prevent Climate Impacts. In many ways, the policy recommendations in the earlier pillars build to the investments, and the policies that shape investments, that are called for in this section of the report.
In other words, once the Administration has demonstrated leadership by prioritizing climate security as a core element of national security, and it has assessed risks throughout the enterprise to understand what they’re up against, and finally incorporated a global perspective that reflects the principle that climate impacts abroad affect the United States, then what must be done to prepare?
Under the heading of preparing for and preventing the impacts of climate change, the Climate Security Plan for America (CSPA) summarized the challenge this way:
“Facing this future, the U.S. must incorporate climate change considerations into its military requirements, build long-term resiliency into its infrastructure, prioritize climate change threat reduction across the U.S. government, be prepared for global changes where there is no excuse for being surprised, and reduce emissions to prevent catastrophic security consequences.”
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