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Coronavirus Shows We Are Not At All Prepared For the Security Threat of Climate Change
Author: Kate Guy is a Senior Research Fellow with the Center for Climate and Security
This is a cross-post of an article first published on The Conversation.
How might a single threat, even one deemed unlikely, spiral into an evolving global crisis which challenges the foundations of global security, economic stability and democratic governance, all in the matter of a few weeks?
My research on threats to national security, governance and geopolitics has focused on exactly this question, albeit with a focus on the disruptive potential of climate change, rather than a novel coronavirus. In recent work alongside intelligence and defence experts at the think-tank Center for Climate and Security, I analysed how future warming scenarios could disrupt security and governance worldwide throughout the 21st century. Our culminating report, A Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change, was launched in Washington just as the first coronavirus cases were spreading undetected across the US. (more…)
The Geopolitics of COVID-19 and Climate Change
By The Stockholm Environment Institute and Mistra Geopolitics hosted a webinar on the Geopolitics of COVID-19 and Climate Change on 3 April. It covered how the ongoing crisis might impact climate ambition in the near term, whether or not global cooperation around the Covid response might increase resilience and counteract trends toward nationalism and isolationism, and how best to integrate climate and sustainability objectives into pandemic recovery efforts. (more…)
Last Year, the U.S. Intelligence Community Warned of a Coronavirus Pandemic: Will We Heed their Climate Warnings?
By John Conger, Francesco Femia and Caitlin Werrell
In the absence of a public hearing and release of the U.S. Intelligence Community’s “Worldwide Threat Assessment” this year, it is instructive to look at last year’s assessment to see what the nation’s intelligence professionals were predicting. The following passage was particularly striking:
We assess that the United States and the world will remain vulnerable to the next flu pandemic or largescale outbreak of a contagious disease that could lead to massive rates of death and disability, severely affect the world economy, strain international resources, and increase calls on the United States for support. Although the international community has made tenuous improvements to global health security, these gains may be inadequate to address the challenge of what we anticipate will be more frequent outbreaks of infectious diseases because of rapid unplanned urbanization, prolonged humanitarian crises, human incursion into previously unsettled land, expansion of international travel and trade, and regional climate change.