Climate Change: NATO and Climate Change: Better Late Than Never

Mar 11, 2022 | Jamie Shea, German Marshall Fund of the US
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It has taken some time for the security implications of climate change to find their way on to the NATO agenda. This can be explained by the many security challenges that the alliance has faced in the 21st century—a more assertive Russia in NATO’s eastern neighborhood, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the threat of cyberattacks and hybrid warfare campaigns, and now the implacable rise of China as a global military and technological power. At the same time, for a security community used to reacting to—not anticipating—crises and to dealing with concrete and imminent challenges, climate change may well have seemed difficult to assess. It would have a future, not present, impact and affect areas of the world, such as sub-Saharan Africa or the Middle East and Central Asia, where the alliance was little engaged. In the international arena, the focus was on mitigation, trying to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions, rather than on adaptation, making our societies more resilient to cope with the shocks that climate-change-driven events would more frequently engender. Once the dimensions of climate change as a security challenge became clearer, policymakers would have time to adjust their strategies and capabilities.