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US Intelligence Community’s 2026 Annual Threat Assessment Ignores Climate Change
A version of this article first appeared on Hot Fronts: Security in a Warming World.
Last week, the US Director of National Intelligence provided Congress with the US intelligence community’s annual threat assessment (ATA) of the top security risks facing the United States. While the hearing itself focused largely on the war in Iran, the submitted written testimony provides a snapshot into what the intelligence community (IC) is focused on and why.
Last year was the first time in over a decade that the threat assessment issued by the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) did not mention climate change. This year followed that pattern. The closest the ATA comes to the topic is a sentence on drivers of migration:
“Extreme weather events are likely to continue to indirectly drive migration by worsening the economic and food security of many low-income countries, particularly in Central America.”
The Arctic does get a whole section, but the reader would never know from the text why so many countries are focused on it. The ATA makes references to it becoming more “accessible” – with this accessibility driving Chinese interest in particular – without ever explaining why that accessibility is growing.
Mentions of energy and critical minerals are largely focused on opportunities for extraction rather than on the risks of instability or conflict. The document identifies critical minerals, oil, and gas as a potential opportunity for the United States in the South Caucasus, Central Asia, and Venezuela. The ATA had this to say about Africa:
“Africa harbors vast reserves of critical minerals that are vital to U.S. advanced defense systems and economic competitiveness.”
The section on the fallout of Operation Epic Fury, the US military’s war in Iran, says nothing about how the conflict is affecting energy markets, food, or water security in the region. In some ways, this is understandable given the fast-moving nature of the conflict, but the assessment does comment on other aspects of the war, including its effect on terrorism.
A More Politicized Approach to Climate and Environment Analysis?
The 2025 and 2026 ATAs are a departure from the first Trump Administration, where the Intelligence Community (IC) retained its independence and regularly warned of climate change risks. For example, in 2019, the year that President Trump tried (and failed) to give climate denier William Happer a perch on the National Security Council from which to censor climate analysis, the ATA said this about climate change:
“Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.”
The 2026 ATA is the latest indication that the Trump Administration is politicizing the US intelligence community’s climate and environment analysis. Last year, the DNI gutted the office on the National Intelligence Council that covered climate and environment issues, with DNI Gabbard claiming at the time that the office was pushing a “political agenda that ran counter to all of the current President’s national security priorities.”
As Josh Busby, Greg Pollack, and I wrote in Foreign Policy at the time, this politicization creates a blind spot for the United States: “Destroying government capacity to analyze future trends and implement policy—whether related to climate change, artificial intelligence, global public health, or other challenges—puts U.S. national security at risk and cedes influence to the country’s competitors. China certainly isn’t stopping its long-term planning for how to manage climate change and navigate the energy transition to its own advantage.“
With the US intelligence community stepping back on its analysis of climate and environment risks, it is more important than ever that other countries that once relied on US information step up with their own assessments. Germany published its own intelligence assessment of climate risk in 2024, and the UK released a report on nature, biodiversity, and security earlier this year. Australia has conducted a similar effort, but has not publicly released the assessment yet. More countries should consider developing their own climate intelligence efforts to fill the gaps left by the US retreat.
For more details on previous US intelligence assessments of climate and environmental risks, visit the Center for Climate and Security Resource Hub.
CCS Recommendations Shape Initial Steps on Climate Security in the UK Home Office, Amid Political Barriers
By Tom Ellison
Last year, the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) conducted a research and education project aimed at exploring the implications of climate change for the UK Home Office and making recommendations to better address them. CCS’s final report, A Climate Security Plan for the Home Office, is now being publicly shared here (publication of this report does not necessarily imply Home Office endorsement of particular content or policy recommendations). Drawing on research, in-person interviews in the United Kingdom, and virtual roundtables on key issues, the report outlines the direct and indirect climate-related risks affecting the Home Office’s responsibilities for issues like emergency services, homeland security, immigration, public safety, gender-based violence, and organized crime and fraud. The report highlights the following risks:
- “#1: Harm to UK Citizens’ Health and Safety: Heat, wildfires, flooding, and disease spread pose increasing risks to UK citizens and to the Home Office’s ability to sustain key services for the public.
- #2: Strain on Services, Infrastructure, and Supply Chains: Climate change poses direct risks to the UK’s power, water, and food sectors and is likely to increasingly strain interconnected global supply chains.
- #3: Polarization, Domestic Extremism, and Gender–Based Violence: Climate hazards and heated policy debates give bad actors openings to spread misinformation, polarize society, and target women and girls.
- #4: Inability to Accommodate Increased Climate-Driven Migration: Climate change is increasingly driving and shaping migration and displacement. Migrants are at risk of criminal exploitation, political weaponization, and xenophobic extremism, which can contribute to political instability. Inflexible migration systems and the lack of overseas investments in climate adaptation and resilience amplify the risk.
- #5: Evolving Organized Crime and Fraud: Climate change is likely to make populations more vulnerable to scams and trafficking and shift illicit drug cultivation and markets, while some climate policies will increase fraud risks in underregulated climate finance flows and carbon markets and introduce novel customs and tariffs to enforce.
- #6: New Foreign Insecurity and Threats: Climate change will likely contribute to overseas instability, conflict, or geopolitical tensions in ways that can create new threats to the UK or reverberate throughout UK society.”
The report offered a series of recommendations for the UK Home Office to address climate risks “comprehensively, proactively, and humanely.” Recommendations were wide-ranging, including leading an internal climate resilience process, enhancing climate data and foresight capabilities, strengthening collaboration with peer ministries and civil society, and bolstering emergency services and legal migration avenues.
CCS also ran a climate security education series for Home Office civil servants. Participants working on migration, wildfire response, gender-based violence, and homeland security engaged in a tailored curriculum of readings, outside speakers, and seminar discussions on climate risks and policy solutions. The program culminated in a daylong foresight exercise in London, where participants noted that the program “changed my whole mindset” and provided “a place to start.”
Drawing on CCS recommendations, the Home Office has since taken new steps to understand and address climate risks to its responsibilities. For the first time, the latest yearly Home Office report to Parliament added climate security to its official risk register. It acknowledged that “climate change represents a serious threat to Home Office operations and policy interests.” The report notes CCS input drove new plans to appoint climate security champions across Home Office policy areas, improve data and evidence, and build internal climate literacy, saying:
The recommendations from [CCS’s] work formed further initiatives. In particular, we conducted more detailed analysis to improve our understanding of climate change risks, including under different scenarios, and we have started the process of embedding these risks in our departmental risk processes to improve climate security action. In 2024, the Home Office commissioned Climate Change Risk Assessments for its own property assets, identifying the key risks to its estate and operations.
At the same time, these are nascent steps in the scheme of UK and global climate risks. According to the UK Met Office’s State of the Climate report, extreme heat and flooding are becoming the norm, with three of the five warmest years on record coming since 2020. Work by CCS and others notes that the scale of climate threats to UK populations, energy, food, and economic security dwarfs policy action to address them, and the Home Office itself reports it lacks a “clear understanding of the nature, scale and proximity of climate security risks.” Moreover, much more work remains to align broader UK policy and resource prioritization with some of CCS’s recommendations, which face political headwinds. For example, since 2023, the Home Office has touted plans to cut both irregular and legal migration and strengthen border security, amid anti-immigration criticism from rightwing politicians, and the United Kingdom is cutting its overseas aid budget by 40%. September’s far-right “Unite the Kingdom” rally drew more than 100,000 anti-immigrant protesters, which resulted in dozens of arrests and injuries to police, and was featured in Russian official media as “a harbinger of a Western European cataclysm.”
The CCS report noted that as climate change drives and reshapes migration, “the risk is not migration or migrants, which are not security problems” but rather extremism, humanitarian suffering, and geopolitical meddling stemming from a “failure to adapt to and accommodate such migration,” with solutions lying in legal migration options and investments in sending and receiving communities.
NOAA’s Critical Contributions to US National Security
What is NOAA?
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) is an agency within the Department of Commerce with roots dating back over 200 years. NOAA was established in 1970 as the nation’s first physical science agency, combining the US Coast and Geodetic Survey, Weather Bureau, and US Commission of Fish and Fisheries (founded throughout the 1800s). NOAA is currently the largest agency within the Department of Commerce, making up roughly a quarter of the personnel and half of the department’s annual budget. NOAA’s budget overall makes up just 0.1% of the entire federal budget, yet is an incredibly outsized economic value add for the American people. A recent study by the American Meteorological Society shows that every dollar invested into the National Weather Service, just one of NOAA’s many services, produces $73 in value for the American public.
NOAA’s mission “to understand and predict changes in climate, weather, ocean, and coasts, to share that knowledge and information with others, and to conserve and manage coastal and marine ecosystems and resources” is crucial in numerous ways for the safety and security of the United States and its people. NOAA’s research programs, vessels, satellites, science centers, laboratories, and extensive pool of distinguished scientists and experts play key roles in protecting human lives and economic prosperity both domestically and internationally. Current reports indicate as many as 880 people across all six offices of the agency, including meteorologists, hydrologists, early warning systems staff, technicians, and other scientists, have been let go, with more potential reductions in force to come. Disruptions to these functions risk harm to global influence, US military capabilities, and homeland security.
(more…)Make or Break Moment for German Climate Security
This weekend, voters solidified a long-anticipated shakeup of the German government following a campaign season that focused largely on immigration and Germany’s sluggish economy. As expected, the vote shifted the balance of power sharply right from the left-leaning Social Democratic Party (SPD) coalition to the conservative Christian Democratic Union (CDU). However, while the CDU came out on top with 28 percent of the vote, the far-right populist Alternative for Germany (AfD) won an unprecedented (but expected) ~21 percent of the vote. Therefore, the CDU must build a coalition with other mainstream parties to maintain the so-called “firewall” against the far-right.
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