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- Permanent Link:
- http://dpanther.fiu.edu/dpService/dpPurlService/purl/FI15042627/00001
Notes
- Summary:
- The U.S. intelligence community is expected to provide indicators and warnings
of a wide variety of security threats—not only risks of international wars that might
threaten U.S. interests or require a U.S. military response, but also risks of violent
subnational conflicts in countries of security concern, risks to the stability of states and
regions, and risks of major humanitarian disasters in key regions of the world. This
intelligence mission requires the consideration of activities and processes anywhere in the
world that might lead, directly or indirectly, to significant risks to U.S. national security.
In recent years, with the accumulation of scientific evidence indicating that the
global climate is moving outside the bounds of past experience and can be expected to
put new stresses on societies around the world, the U.S. intelligence and security
communities have begun to examine a variety of plausible scenarios through which
climate change might pose or alter security risks. In 2010, as part of its ongoing work
with the National Academy of Sciences/National Research Council (NAS/NRC) on
issues related to climate and security, the U.S. intelligence community asked the
NAS/NRC to organize the study whose results are described in this report.
The central purpose of the study, as defined in its statement of task, was “to
evaluate the evidence on possible connections between climate change and U.S. national
security concerns and to identify ways to increase the ability of the intelligence
community to take climate change into account in assessing political and social stresses
with implications for U.S. national security.” The study committee was tasked to “focus
on several broad questions, such as: What are the major social and political factors
affecting the relationship between climate change and outcomes relevant to U.S. national
security? What is the basis for this knowledge and how strong is it? What research and
measurement strategies would strengthen the basis for this knowledge?” In response to
this charge, this report presents a conceptual framework for addressing such issues, offers
an evaluation of the available evidence, identifies key factors linking climate change
phenomena to security concerns, and offers conclusions and recommendations related to:
(a) improving understanding of climate–security linkages; (b) improving monitoring and
analysis of the factors linking climate change to social and political stresses and to
security risks; and (c) improving the ability to anticipate potential security risks arising
from climate phenomena.
As the study developed, and upon consultation with the study’s sponsors, we
focused our efforts in three specific ways. First, we focused on social and political
stresses outside the United States because such stresses are the main focus of the
intelligence community. Second, we concentrated on security risks that might arise from
situations in which climate events (e.g., droughts, heat waves, or storms) have
consequences that exceed the capacity of affected countries or populations to cope and
respond. This focus led us to exclude, for example, climate events that might directly
affect the ability of the U.S. military to conduct its missions or that might contribute
directly to international competition or conflict (e.g., over sea lanes or natural resources
in the Arctic). We also excluded the security implications of policies that countries might undertake to protect themselves from perceived threats of climate change (e.g.,
geoengineering to reduce global warming or buying foreign agricultural land to ensure
domestic food supplies). These kinds of climate–security connections could prove highly
significant and deserve further study and analysis. They could also interact with the
connections that are our main focus; for example, an action such as buying foreign
agricultural land might go almost unnoticed at first, only creating a crisis when the
country where the land is located experiences a crop failure it cannot manage with
imports. Third, , we concentrated on the relatively near term by emphasizing climatedriven
security risks that call for action by the intelligence community within the coming
decade either to respond to security threats or to anticipate them.
Although these choices of focus helped bound our study, they left it with some
notable limitations. Climate change is a global and a long-term phenomenon. Events
within the United States and those outside the country affect each other, indirect links
between climate and conflict can be related to direct ones, and the effects of climate
change will not stop beyond a 10-year horizon and, in fact, can be expected to increase at
an increasing rate. Thus a complete security analysis should project the risks of climate
change beyond the next decade in order to inform U.S. government security policy
choices in the near term that will prepare the nation for events in later decades.
Our study includes the full range of potentially disruptive events that are
becoming more likely because of climate change, whether or not a particular event can be
unequivocally attributed to human-caused climate change rather than to natural variation.
We made this choice because any such climate events can become disruptive and create a
need for U.S. government action regardless of whether they can at this time be uniquely
attributed to anthropogenic climate change.
Record Information
- Source Institution:
- Florida International University
- Rights Management:
- Please contact the owning institution for licensing and permissions. It is the user's responsibility to ensure use does not violate any third party rights.
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