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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.
2025 Annual Threat Assessment First in Over A Decade to Omit Climate Change
Every year, the Director of National Intelligence delivers to Congress an Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) meant to warn of the top national security risks facing the United States. The 2025 ATA, briefed to the Senate on 25 March by DNI Tulsi Gabbard, was the first to omit any mention of climate change in over a decade. Even a textbox on Russia and the Arctic does not mention climate, melting ice, or the changing environment – despite repeated, previous warnings from the US Intelligence Community (IC), across both Democratic and Republican administrations (including the first Trump term), about warming temperatures’ exacerbating risks of instability and geopolitical competition in the region.
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Climate and Ecological Security in the 2023 Annual Threat Assessment
By Erin Sikorsky and Michael Zarfos
On March 8, the Director of National Intelligence (DNI) and other top U.S. intelligence agency leaders came before the Senate Intelligence Committee to present their Annual Threat Assessment (ATA)—a rundown of the top threats facing the United States in the coming year. As in previous iterations, climate and ecological security issues featured in the briefing and submitted testimony from the DNI, with the unclassified version of the testimony’s Foreword stating, “ The accelerating effects of climate change are placing more of the world’s population, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, under threat from extreme weather, food insecurity, and humanitarian disasters, fueling migration flows and increasing the risks of future pandemics as pathogens exploit the changing environment.”
Ecological Security
In the question and answer portion of the hearing, Senator Martin Heinrich (D-NM) highlighted (1:29:30) the Council on Strategic Risks 2020 report, “The Security Threat that Binds Us,” which he commended for its recommendation of elevating ecological security in U.S. national security policymaking. He noted in particular its assessment of China’s illegal, unreported and unregulated (IUU) fishing. DNI Avril Haines acknowledged seeing the report, her concern regarding IUU fishing, and explained that the intelligence community was working to follow some of its recommendations, including a greater integration of the federal scientific community with the Intelligence Community (IC).
The ATA identified IUU fishing as a significant driver of stock depletion across the globe. It also highlighted the converging risks that combine with overexploitation to cause species declines. Human pollution (e.g. agricultural and sewage nutrient runoff) and climate change (e.g. warmer, more acidic water) increase the vulnerability of marine species to decline as important ecosystems (e.g. seagrass and coral reefs) are undermined.
Warming waters are expected to drive important species into new regions of the ocean, while also removing some species from countries’ territorial waters and Exclusive Economic Zones (EEZs). The presence of heavily subsidized IUU fleets—such as those fielded by China—increases competition for these diminishing and shifting fish stocks. Poorer countries that rely on the sea are ill-equipped to compete with these fleets, leading to reduced economic and food security that may contribute to internal unrest.
More broadly, the ATA outlines how ecological degradation in general (e.g. deforestation, pollution, wildlife trafficking) can combine with climate change to threaten human and national security. As each of these anthropogenic stressors progresses, natural resources (e.g. food, soil, timber, and water) will in some regions decline or shift in their geographic availability. These outcomes, combined with a changing climate, will impact human health through malnutrition and the spread of unfamiliar diseases. Natural disasters will add immediate stress to punctuate these gradual processes. Where these combined stressors do not immediately contribute to conflict, they will displace populations and exacerbate inequality, which in turn may destabilize societies.
Climate Finance
An important new angle of climate security in this year’s ATA was its focus on potential geopolitical challenges related to climate finance. The ATA noted, “Tensions also are rising between countries over climate financing. High-and middle-income countries still have not met their 2015 Paris Agreement pledges to provide $100 billion per year to low-income countries by 2020, and low-income countries want more assistance with adapting to climate effects.”
The assessment goes on to raise last year’s climate-driven floods in Pakistan and the country’s subsequent calls for loss and damage funding as an example. Certainly, the dynamics at COP27 around the creation of a loss and damage fund, including the eventual agreement by developing countries that China would not benefit from such a fund, reflect the changing global dynamics of climate finance. This highlight in the ATA underscores a point the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) made in a briefer earlier this year about the security links to climate finance issues, and the importance of the United States understanding these connections as it approaches allies and partners on climate issues.
Overall, it is heartening to see both the IC exploring a wide range of climate and ecological security issues in the ATA, and members of Congress expressing increased interest in these critical issues.
Lyston Lea Joins the Center for Climate and Security Advisory Board
The Center for Climate and Security is pleased and honored to announce that Lyston Lea has joined its distinguished Advisory Board of military and national security leaders. This group supports CCS leadership by providing substantive and strategic guidance.
Mr. Lea recently retired from Defense Intelligence Senior Level Federal service in March 2022, after over 38 years of professional experience working in the Intelligence Community (IC). Before retiring he served as the Principal Advisor to the Director of the National Maritime Intelligence-Integration Office (NMIO). During his career, Mr. Lea served in the Analytic Integrity and Standards Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI), the Defense Intelligence Agency, as a Senior Briefer for the J2’s daily Intelligence Briefing to the Chairman, Joint Chiefs of Staff, and the Deputy Office Chief of the Defense Warning Office. Mr. Lea holds a Master of Science in National Security Studies from the National War College, a Master of Arts in Public Administration from Fordham University, and a Bachelor of Arts in History from Washington & Jefferson College.
Read Mr. Lea’s full bio here.