During the Cold War, the nuclear threat was a defining national security challenge. Now, climate change is “the great global challenge of our era,” says Sherri Goodman, Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense.
Goodman tells The Cipher Brief that “climate change has emerged as the most serious challenge,” in which military leadership will play a leading role.
Goodman and 24 other senior military and national security experts signed a statement concluding that “the effects of climate change present a strategically-significant risk to U.S. national security and international security.”
The bipartisan group of signatories includes Geoffrey Kemp, former Special Assistant to President Ronald Reagan for National Security Affairs, and Dov S. Zakheim, former Under Secretary of Defense under President George W. Bush.
At an event in Washington this week, organized by the Center for Climate and Security (CCS) to release the bipartisan statement, as well as a military expert report on sea level rise and a briefing book on climate change for the next administration, Zakheim explained, “One of the things we in the Department of Defense do is account for risk.” He added that to the extent risks from climate change can be minimized, risks of being unprepared for a major conflict are also minimized.
U.S. readiness for traditional warfare is compromised with rising sea levels and extreme weather events. The CCS military expert panel finds, “Major transportation, command and control, intelligence, and deployment hubs may face unrelenting erratic outages, or curtailment of operations in the future, due to sea level rise and storm surge.”
Indeed, U.S. Secretary of State John Kerry kicks off the Our Ocean conference in Washington today to catalyze global action to protect the ocean from, among other things, climate-related impacts.
General (Ret.) Ronald Keys, who is a former commander with the U.S. Air Force and also a signatory to the climate and security statement, tells The Cipher Brief the U.S. military must “survive to operate.” Episodic heavy rain, stronger storms, prolonged drought, wildfires, and sea level rise will all impact U.S. bases, he says.
The U.S. military has 1,774 sites along coastline around the world, according to the U.S. Department of Defense.
Climate change risks have not gone unnoticed by U.S. administrations. Co-founder and President of CCS Francesco Femia tells The Cipher Brief that the George H. W. Bush administration recognized climate risks. By 2003, the Defense Department conducted a net assessment of the implications of climate change, and five years later, the intelligence community identified climate change as a risk in a National Intelligence Estimate.
In 2014, the Defense Department concluded climate change poses “immediate risks to national security,” in its roadmap on climate change adaptation.
“It’s relatively unknown that the military considers climate change to be a big risk,” says Femia, and that is why CCS decided to put together the event.
“We’re already living in the age of consequences,” remarked Goodman. She explained that the briefing book on climate change and security basically says the next U.S. president needs to make climate change a top priority because “at the end of the day and at the beginning of the day, it’s all about leadership.”
Brigadier General Joseph Robert Barnes echoed Goodman, noting the recommendations are not resource intensive, that is they do not need a lot of money to be accomplished, but rather they need strong leadership.
“This requires long-range, strategic thinking […] as well as immediate action,” he said.
Concrete recommendations include assigning a cabinet-level official to take the lead on domestic climate change and security issues, and prioritizing climate change in intelligence assessments.
“This is about conflict avoidance,” said Barnes. General Keys explained that climate change has economic consequences that can lead to humanitarian crises and mass migration, in which the United States would likely be involved.
A number of the experts point to the prolonged drought in Syria from 2007-2010 as a contributing factor to mass internal displacement and subsequently, the civil war that broke out in 2011, creating the greatest refugee crisis since World War II. The experts fear U.S. national security could ultimately be compromised by the devastating impact of climate change, both in the homeland and abroad.
Kaitlin Lavinder is a reporter at The Cipher Brief.
