Sherri Goodman

Senior Fellow
Wilson Center

Aug 21, 2021

Sherri Goodman is an executive, researcher, and lawyer bringing attention to the security challenges tied to environmental change and the ways to transform these risks into opportunities for peacebuilding. She chairs The Council of Strategic Risks, serves as the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, and is a Senior Fellow at the Wilson Center’s Environmental Change and Security Program. She holds many other titles, but her preferred one is “the mother of climate security.” Her educational path to this interdisciplinary work began with a bachelor’s degree in liberal arts from Amherst College, followed by a Master of Public Policy from the Harvard Kennedy School and a J.D. from Harvard Law School.

Sherri’s personal path to environmental peacebuilding was paved by the Cold War. Growing up in an era when nuclear weapons were widely regarded as the greatest security threat and then overseeing the energy portfolio as the first female professional staff member on Senate Armed Services Committee, she gained a deep understanding of the interactions between environment and security. Sherri led early environmental security efforts while serving as the Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Environmental Security from 1993-2001. She subsequently founded the Military Advisory Board of the Center for Naval Analysis (CNA), bringing together the first group of generals to recognize climate change as a security “threat multiplier.” She has continued to build on that work, for example, publishing the second World Climate and Security Report this June and a brief on improving predictive capabilities of climate-driven security risks last December.

Recently, Sherri has focused on climate security risks in the Arctic region. The Arctic is warming three times as fast as rest of the planet, and scientists expect ice free summers in the region as soon as 2050. Retreating ice and rising sea levels open new possibilities for navigation and trade, but also expose the surrounding countries and indigenous communities to new security and livelihood threats. An immediate threat is the militarization of the Arctic. Sherri explains: “Russia is remilitarizing the Arctic. Last summer, their military exercise in the Bering Strait forced native Alaskans to leave the area even though they were in a U.S. exclusive economic zone. And China has ambitions too. So the U.S. military is relearning how to operate there.” Russia has also built a floating nuclear power plant in the region and deployed nuclear-powered ships, creating further environmental hazards. “There will be increasing risks of collisions—between trade and military vessels, for example. And we have to be prepared to handle that,” says Sherri. To this end, she launched scenario exercises at the Council on Strategic Risks for government professionals. To address the human security risks to indigenous communities who rely on environmental stability to survive, Sherri works to amplify the voices of these communities in the D.C. policy world through events at the Wilson Center.

Sherri’s growing focus on communities reflects her belief that the second stage of environmental security is environmental peacebuilding. In a recent New Security Beat article, Sherri and her co-author Elsa Barron write that environmental peacebuilding is properly more focused on justice, inclusion, and non-state actors than the first era of environmental security was—and that enfolding these considerations into the understanding of security can lead to more durable peace.