Climate Change as an Unconvential Security Risk

Oct 23, 2020 | Cullen Hendrix
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As security threats go, climate change is not the wolf at the door, threatening to blow the house down. Rather, it is thousands of termites whose individual impacts are small and hard to see, but whose collective impact is potentially just as catastrophic.

Because of the complex nature of these threats, climate change does not fit neatly into conventional security paradigms for risk mitigation or neutralization. This implies the traditional toolkit for addressing security threats will need to be augmented by a more inclusive approach to conceptualizing national security threats and the agencies tasked with addressing them.

Climate change will require a retraining and refocusing of the U.S. military and intelligence community around planning for slow-onset problems: making sure they are just as cognizant of termites as the wolves.