Climate Change and Global Security: Planning for Potential Conflict
Publisher: Climate Institute
Author(s): Charlotte Collins
Date: 2019
Topics: Climate Change, Conflict Causes, Disasters, Governance, Programming
Climate change is set to impinge on human well-being in many ways, from rising sea levels to devastating heat waves. While we pay a lot of attention to such illustrative examples of a planet experiencing drastic changes, almost every effect of climate change contributes to mounting risks in global security. The rise of climate refugees, droughts, the loss of coastlines—each a crisis in and of itself—all prompt conflict. As our planet hurtles towards two degrees of warming around the year 2030, global governance and law must prepare for a climate-induced exacerbation of violence, resource depletion, and subsequent threats to global security.
The conditions of climate change are expected to worsen tensions over water, land, and agriculture. As temperatures rise and populations grow, nations have begun to take notice of this impeding danger. In January 2019, the CIA, NSA, FBI and other federal agencies published their annual “Worldwide Threat Assessment,” stating plainly that “climate change is an urgent and growing threat to our national security” (Nuccitelli, 2019). In March 2019 a group of 58 former American military and intelligence officials submitted a letter to President Trump specifically warning him against compromising the capabilities of scientific agencies for political reasons, “forcing a blind spot onto the national security assessments that depend on them [eroding] our national security” (Nuccitelli, 2019). This concern dates back decades, with the first warnings of climate change as a risk to security being voiced in the late 1980s. Since then reports from the Pentagon in 2003, the Center for Naval Analysis in 2007, the Department of Defense in 2015 and the Quadrennial Defense Review in 2010 have all explicitly linked a changing climate to imminent threats of war and violence (Nuccitelli, 2019).