Climate & National SecurityNational Security Consequences of Climate Change

Published 28 November 2021

The consequences of climate change for national security and international stability are numerus and serious. Rising temperatures which reduce agricultural opportunities can lead to mass migrations away from struggling communities. Violent hurricanes and winter storms can disrupt electric grid operations, interrupting access to electricity and other utilities long after the initial climate threat has passed. Researchers are simulating how climate change affects the safety and security of the country.

Using novel data sets and computing systems, researchers at the Department of Energy’s Oak Ridge National Laboratoryare simulating how climate change affects the safety and security of the country. This research can help policy and decision makers at federal, state and local levels quickly identify risk factors and develop real-world mitigation strategies.

For more than two decades, ORNL scientists have modeled environmental factors, such as temperature and precipitation, and population distribution. Currently, researchers are studying how climate change affects population density, critical infrastructure and security to better understand how extreme climate events can threaten physical safety and set off a domino effect of economic ramifications and other national security challenges.

In some cases, rising temperatures that reduce agricultural opportunities can lead to mass migrations away from struggling communities. In other cases, violent hurricanes and winter storms can disrupt electric grid operations, interrupting access to electricity and other utilities long after the initial climate threat has passed.

“We’re interested in contextualizing the tangible consequences that phenomena like sea level rise and temperature and precipitation changes have on humans,” said Carter Christopher, who leads ORNL’s Human Dynamics Section in the National Security Sciences Directorate. “Human security is a function of the security and resilience of a community, whether that’s a rural county, a small town or a major city, domestically or internationally.”

Researchers in the National Security Sciences Directorate and across the laboratory are studying the relationship between climate change and national security from multiple perspectives — yielding important results that decision makers can use to strategize how best to protect people before they end up in dangerous situations.

Assessing Risk and Resilience
Bandana Kar, who leads ORNL’s Built Environment Characterization, or BEC, Group, focuses on examining and forecasting the risk and resilience of the nation’s critical infrastructure systems and cities. Using geographic information science concepts and technologies including satellite remote sensing, geospatial modeling and data sets, and computational science, Kar’s team assesses and identifies the risk factors present in communities and cities, as well as access to resources such as energy in those areas, which is crucial for resiliency and disaster recovery.

Because the nation’s critical infrastructure systems are interconnected, seemingly unrelated concerns, such as increased shipping costs and limited supplies of gasoline or other fuel sources, could affect supply chains and the communities that rely on them.