In the real world, changes in temperature are leading to water scarcity, poverty, political instability, social tensions, and other causes of conflict around the world. Developing countries are among the most vulnerable to climate change’s destabilizing effects due to their relatively weak infrastructure and lack of resilience. The issue has implications for how the United States protects its interests around the world.
Former Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats, in his Worldwide Threat Assessment delivered in January 2019, said that changes in the Earth’s environment “are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond.”
Coats identified immediate threats as weather-related incidents leading to damage at low-lying military bases in South and Southeast Asia, to water and food shortages in the Middle East, to warmer temperatures and the melting of sea ice as opening up the Arctic sea to adversaries like Russia and China.
Background:
- Earth’s average temperature has risen 1.9 degrees since the late 1800s, according to NASA, although most of the global warming has occurred within the last 35 years as a result of human activity that has caused the atmosphere to trap heat radiating from Earth toward space. The United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change assesses that earth’s temperature will increase 2.5 to 10 degrees over the next century.
- The hottest months on record have been June and July of 2019, and several U.S. cities by 2050 will experience more than 100 “dangerous days” of intense heat that is unsafe for humans, according to National Geographic.
- Climate change is contributing to increased numbers of displaced people in south Asia and the Sahel, who must travel greater distances for food and water. For example, competition for scarce resources between Nigeria’s farming and herding communities has resulted in 10,000 deaths since 2010.
- The Arctic ice minimum has decreased 12.8 percent per decade, causing sea levels to rise and creating new corridors for trade—opportunities that Russia and China are exploiting. Russia since 2014 has built military bases throughout the Arctic and in May 2019 launched a nuclear-powered ice breaker—the Ural—to bolster its claim to the region’s natural resources and its control over the Northern Sea trade route. Similarly, China is working to advance its ‘Polar Silk Road’ strategy, which looks to develop shipping lanes in the Arctic.
- Rising sea levels, coastal erosion, and natural disasters have weakened structural bases at military installations along the U.S. east coast. For example, the Air Force estimated that it would cost $3 billion to repair Tyndall Air Force Base in Panama City, FL and make it more disaster-resistant after Hurricane Michael hit it in October of 2018.
- Former Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense John Conger in June 2017 said that the Department of Defense (DOD) was open to spending its money “in a way that is cognizant of current and future climate-related threats,” but there was no line in the DOD budget that addressed climate change.
- The United States in June 2017 withdrew from the Paris Agreement, which was negotiated in 2016 and requires its 197 signatories to help keep the global temperature rise under 2 degrees Celsius. The Trump administration in August 2018 said that its plan to fight climate change included allowing states to come up with their own way to “make coal-fired power plants more efficient.”
The Cipher Brief tapped two experts with different security-related backgrounds to help us grasp a fuller picture of the national security implications of climate change and where it's headed. We spoke with Cipher Brief expert and former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence for the U.S. Department of Energy, Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, and Senior Fellow at the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center; as well as former U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense (Environmental Security), Sherri Goodman, who also works as Senior Strategist and Advisory Board member at the Center for Climate and Security.
The Threats
As we examine the threats that are likely to emerge as a result of resource scarcity caused by climate change, we see a likely blueprint forming. Experts predict an increase in urban migration and the resulting vacuum that creates, as well as political instability in the world’s rural and less-developed areas. The changing weather patterns are also likely to undermine U.S. Readiness, while emboldening U.S. adversaries.
“In terms of emboldening our adversaries, the Arctic is really a good case in point,” says Goodman. “It is a prime example of a region that's become accessible primarily because of climate change, because the ocean temperatures have warmed, the sea ice is melting, the permafrost is collapsing, wildfires are now rampant, temperatures are changing, melting, and warming at a rate twice as fast most of the rest of the planet.”
Sherri Goodman, Senior Strategist and Advisory Board Member, Center for Climate and Security
“Russia is seizing the opportunity to convert the Northern sea route that runs along its Arctic coastline into a toll road for shipping transport in the future from Asia across to Europe. Meanwhile, China sees the opportunity to both shorten its shipping routes to Europe from Asia and perhaps free itself from U.S. controlled sea lanes in Asia across Russia's Northern sea route or, way in the future, the central Arctic shipping route.”
"There are many resources; oil, gas, minerals, rare earth minerals throughout the Arctic that are becoming increasingly accessible because of the melt. China is increasing its foreign direct investment," says Goodman. "One could read President Trump's play to buy Greenland, in part, as a way to put China on notice.
"In terms of undermining military readiness, that's most evident in the way it's affecting U.S. bases and troop health," says Goodman. "We have many Navy, Marine, and even other service bases in coastal areas on the Southeast coast and the Gulf that are increasingly subject to hurricane, storm surge, sea level rise, and coastal inundation. Tyndall Air Force Base suffered major devastation and it's estimated to cost millions of dollars to rebuild from the hurricane last year, so did Marine Corps Camp Lejeune in North Carolina, and Austin Air Force Base in Nebraska."
"You've also got troop health," says Goodman. "Bases are at risk of getting damaged, they are costing more to repair, etc. and are at risk of not being able to perform their mission. In places like Norfolk where you send the ships out to sea and the aircraft as the hurricane approaches to protect those assets, what do you do with the families? What happens if you come back into a flooded environment? There's military family readiness at risk now, too."
The Causes of Conflict have Roots in Climate Change
Some experts are predicting that there's going to be an increase in terrorists’ ability to recruit from areas where people are fleeing from the effects of climate change. As more people flee the rural areas, there is greater instability in those ungoverned spaces which enhances terror organization’s abilities to recruit. So, what types of new threats are likely to emerge?
"I expect terrorist groups in the future to become more and more creative," says Mowatt-Larssen. "They're going to use weapons of mass destruction in a broad sense, meaning biological or nuclear weapons perhaps, or cyber. They will continue to use different forms of attacking an increasingly vulnerable society and infrastructure. So, the ability of terrorists to make their statement and to force people to take them seriously is only going to increase over time. We also need to prepare for the possibility that terrorism will morph back into eco terrorism in the next ten or twenty years. I recently gave a talk on nuclear terrorism, and to get the audience thinking I told them that right now, we are thinking about militant Islamist groups using nuclear or biological weapons, and that threat is probably going to be with us for the next several decades."
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, U.S. Dept. of Energy
"In the next 20 years, there are going to be other groups joining them, and there are two types of groups that I'm sure are going to be seeking nuclear and biological material. One is the white nationalist, far right groups. Nuclear terrorism is a problem we used to frame purely as a bin Laden and ISIS problem but in the future, it’s going to be more worrisome from the standpoint of some of these new groups."
"Another type of group is the anti-establishment terrorist group, similar to the Red Army Faction and the Red Brigade," says Mowatt-Larssen. "Their main complaint was that they were convinced that the establishment was taking the entire wealth of the world. In the future, we're going to see a much more sophisticated rebellion against authority and establishment than the one we saw in the 70s, when they kidnapped leaders like Hanns-Martin Schleyer, killing him and putting him in a trunk of a car. In the future, they're likely going to try to get a dirty bomb, or biomaterials, which is probably the most important thing I could cite as a reason why we need to be involved now."
How Intelligence Agencies Address Climate Change as a Threat
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, U.S. Dept. of Energy
"Intelligence is notoriously bad at thinking through
problems. We generally have to see the problem and then react to it. The Intelligence community also has a very difficult time allocating resources for long-term efforts. Even our process conspires against us, the way we allocate money, the way we hire people, the way we train people, we very rarely think about things 5, 10 or 15 years down the road."
"One of the scary things about climate change is that, whether climate change produces mass refugee dislocation, economic problems, reasonable conflicts, water wars, infectious disease rises, whatever the problem is, they're all going to happen a lot faster than we thought they would even 5 or 10 years ago," says Mowatt-Larssen. "To move at the speed we need to move at, we need to be rethinking how we operate our intelligence agencies."
Looking Ahead:
Russia's developed and deployed a nuclear-powered ice breaker. Many Cipher Brief experts in the past including General Philip Breedlove have articulated the fact that the U.S. is significantly behind in terms of its capabilities in the Arctic. Is the U.S. going to have any choice but to develop increased capabilities for operating there, if in fact China and Russia are exploiting the region in new ways for economic gain?
Rolf Mowatt-Larssen, Former Director of Intelligence and Counterintelligence, U.S. Dept. of Energy
“On the one hand, yes, everyone's going to exploit the economic opportunities in the Arctic. And there are some who do that more enthusiastically than others or with greater ignorance of the ramifications of doing it poorly, or unwisely. That's really the nub of the issue. I think over time, you're going to see more and more awareness that it's not just an economic decision, there are also immense decisions that relate to preserving the Arctic, its future and its people.”
“It’s going to be the same issue for the Russians in the Arctic,” adds Mowatt-Larssen. “They finally have this tremendous opportunity to unlocking these treasures, these resources, but they are not unaware of the consequences.”
“One of the common ways the intelligence and defense communities deal with threats is to increase the ability to do early warning and prediction,” says Goodman. “That was true even before the era of predictive analytics, but predictive analytics multiplied the opportunities available through classic intelligence assets.”
Sherri Goodman, Senior Strategist and Advisory Board Member, Center for Climate and Security
"You've got all those assets that can be used. They're not only just given the highest priority in terms of their assignments, but increasingly for example, you've got the Air Force weather community looking at, not only the hurricane that's about to hit its base in Florida, but also looking at, "What are the drought trends across Africa and the Middle East?"
"We know now over the last several decades, that Boko Haram and various Al-Qaeda factions take advantage of the vulnerabilities and insecurities of the local population," says Gooodman. "When fragility is amplified by water and food insecurities, then those groups gain more leverage. That's true across much of Northern Africa. It's increasingly true in the Middle East and parts of Asia as well."
Related: Future Threats is the theme of The Cipher Brief’s 2020 Threat Conference in Sea Island, GA. This is your opportunity to bring your national and global security-related experience to the table with leaders from the public and private sectors. Seats are limited. Apply for yours today.
Read more about what the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency knows about Russian air bases in the Arctic.
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