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Climate Change and Ecological Security Must Be at the Center of Our National Defense Strategy
By Holly Kaufman, Sherri Goodman and John Conger
At a United Nations Security Council meeting in September 2021, U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken asserted, “Look at almost every place where you see threats to international peace and security today – and you’ll find that climate change is making things less peaceful, less secure, and rendering our response even more challenging.” Earlier that month, in the U.S. Department of Defense’s Climate Adaptation Plan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin similarly declared climate change to be a “destabilizing force” that is “demanding new missions” of the Department and “altering the operational environment.” These leaders are exactly right.
In this context it is imperative that the Biden Administration places the destabilizing role of climate change–and ecological security more broadly — at the center of the new National Defense Strategy (NDS). In fact, any NDS that does not consider climate change a central variable — as we have long recommended — will get things wrong when it comes to other core U.S. interests such as China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, terrorism and cybersecurity.
(more…)Finding Climate Change Between the Lines in the National Defense Strategy
By John Conger
Earlier this year, concerns were raised by both Republicans and Democrats in Congress about the new National Security Strategy and the National Defense Strategy omitting references to climate change or its possible impact on our security situation.
Recent work by the American Security Project (ASP) shows that even though the National Defense Strategy does not call out climate change specifically, it is most certainly in there implicitly. ASP decided to look for climate change between the lines and concluded:
The 2018 NDS outlines how the operating environment is changing, highlighting “challenges to free and open international order and the re-emergence of long-term strategic competition between nations.”
Within this framework, we find that climate change will impact the national security of our nation in three main ways. First, climate change will undermine the existing international order. Second, at the same time, weak states will be more vulnerable to great power influence. And third, threats to the homeland will become closer to home and less concrete, allowing them to permeate our borders. As noted in the NDS, “the homeland is no longer a sanctuary.” (more…)