CLIMATE CHANGE & SECURITYClimate Change Poses Serious National Security Threat
After years of debate, there is growing awareness within the Department of Defense and the U.S. government more broadly that climate change poses a serious national security threat. Some efforts to cope with this challenge are already underway.
RAND has just issued a study on the consequences of climate change for U.S. national security. In the study, Beyond the Eye of the Storm: Mapping Out a Comprehensive Research Agenda for the National Security Implications of Climate Change, authors Bryan Frederick and Caitlin McCulloch write that after years of debate, there is growing awareness within the Department of Defense and the U.S. government more broadly that climate change poses a serious national security threat. Some efforts to cope with this challenge are already underway.
The main areas of concern:
· Climate change increases the likelihood of civil conflict through multiple mechanisms, including the scarcity of water or food being exacerbated by climate change and that scarcity having the potential to lead to more instability.
· Changes in rainfall levels lead to changes in economic growth, with reductions in economic growth strongly related to increases in the risk of internal instability, migration, and civil unrest and instability.
· The effect of climate change on resource availability increase the likelihood of interstate conflict. Such conflict may also be the result of waves of climate migrants crossing into neighboring countries in search of arable land to cultivate.
· Climate change threatens DoD basing, infrastructure, logistics chains, and ability to perform national critical functions.
Here are the report’s Introduction and Conclusion:
Introduction
he Department of Defense (DoD), including the Department of the Air Force (DAF), has been late to assess the full potential of climate change to affect U.S. national security. While such issues as base resilience or disruptions to logistics flows are studied extensively, climate change is not just a series of isolated extreme weather events. It is a long-term, global phenomenon with the potential to alter political, economic, and social systems in ways that could have far-reaching effects on U.S. security interests. This concept paper lays out a research agenda to pursue in order to better understand the possible scale and scope of these effects and their potential implications for the DAF and DoD. Pursuing this research agenda would enable the DAF and DoD to be better prepared for a greatly altered future with more and more impacts slated to arrive over the next ten to 20 years).
