A History of U.S. Defense, Intelligence and Security Assessments of Climate Change

Mar 5, 2019 | Peter H. Gleick
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In March 2019, the Trump Administration announced they were considering creating an ad hoc White House panel to dispute a long-series of national assessments of the science of climate change, including the threat climate change poses to national and international security. Such a panel would impose a political sheen on independent and intensively reviewed scientific and intelligence community analyses.

In this context, it is vital to understand the history of U.S. intelligence and military assessments of the security implications of climate change. These assessments go back nearly four decades to the 1980s and since that time, hundreds of assessments of climate change, a massively growing body of literature on the impacts of human-caused climate change, and analyses from every U.S. defense, intelligence, and security agency have acknowledged the links between climate and security.