Analyzing the Climate Security Threat: Key Actions for the US Intelligence Community

Jan 26, 2021 | Erin Sikorsky
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President Joe Biden’s national security adviser has called climate change an urgent national security priority. Yet, as the person who recently led climate analysis across the U.S. intelligence community, I speak from experience when I say U.S. intelligence agencies are not treating it like one. The House Intelligence Committee agrees, noting in a report from September 2020, “the intelligence community places insufficient emphasis on … interconnected long-term national security threats, such as infectious diseases of pandemic potential and climate change.”

During my time on the National Intelligence Council from 2017 to 2020, I saw this all too often. Existing intelligence structures are organized around regions, state actors and, in the wake of 9/11, tactical threats. Actorless, borderless risks like climate change too often fall through the cracks and receive fewer resources than the so-called “hard” security threats — terrorism, great power competition, and nuclear proliferation — that are considered more important. Yet, as the House Intelligence Committee report pointed out, and as the COVID-19 crisis has unfortunately taught us, in today’s world the distinction between supposedly “hard” and “soft” security issues no longer makes sense. One cannot analyze U.S. competition with China and Russia without examining how climate change will affect their food and water supplies, coastal cities, energy demands, or health security. Similarly, one cannot forecast the likelihood of conflict in fragile states without exploring how climate change contributes to instability, nor can one understand extremist trajectories without digging into how the opportunity cost of joining terrorist groups is lowered when the effects of climate change eliminate the ability to make a livelihood from farming, for example. Indeed, these issues are not “soft” at all — they have real and wide-ranging “hard” security implications.

The bottom line is that the United States’ siloed approach to intelligence is largely incompatible with the scope and nature of a shared global threat like climate change. Earlier this year, former CIA Deputy Director Michael Morell stated that of the three greatest threats to the United States — nuclear war with Russia, pandemics, and climate change — only the nuclear threat receives the attention it deserves. This must change not only because the intelligence community’s top customer, Biden, is intensely focused on climate but because the community will fail in its duty to protect the United States if it does not. There are three primary actions the intelligence community and its new leaders should take to recalibrate their approach to the changing security landscape.