Is it possible to prepare for the unexpected? Could anyone have foreseen, for instance, a nuclear meltdown triggered by an earthquake-induced tsunami? Or a brutal band of transnational militants quickly capturing Iraq’s largest dam while attempting to establish a new Islamic caliphate? Perhaps not exactly, but that shouldn’t stop us from anticipating unlikely events, says Chad Briggs, a risk assessment expert and strategy director of consulting firm GlobalInt.

Scenario creation is one tool used by leaders to manage risks and improve decision-making processes. Long employed in military and intelligence contexts, scenario-building exercises may be equally valuable in the environmental domain, according to Briggs.

Earlier this year, GlobalInt conducted a foresight scenario symposium at the Wilson Center in collaboration with ECSP. The event brought together nearly 40 high-level participants from the military, development, conservation, humanitarian, and academic communities to raise awareness about the complexity of environmental security and related risks.

The participants were split into groups and given sets of “driver cards,” each representing a potential trend or shock, like growing megacities, water scarcity, or transnational crime. Groups were then asked to pick a random selection of cards from the set and begin building scenarios that might emerge from those combined drivers. Participants were encouraged to consider unlikely combinations of events that might bring out previously unrecognized vulnerabilities.

The results were diverse, compelling, and sometimes terrifying. One scenario highlighted the various ways a global pandemic could wreak havoc across a range of sectors; another showed how a cyber-attack on oil infrastructure could affect foreign energy investment and security in Nigeria. While seemingly implausible, many were no less so than recent headlines, and the creation process helped participants understand how a failure of imagination can have devastating consequences.

We emailed Briggs a number of questions about scenario planning and why he thinks it’s important for environmental security.

What is your background? How did you come to be interested in environmental security risk assessment and scenario planning?

I’ve always had a split background in international relations and environmental sciences. In graduate school I began working on environmental security as a way of connecting my interests in water and conflict, particularly as I felt that political science was too blinkered in its views and use of new tools and concepts. My first published article argued that new concepts of complexity and different disciplines had to be brought together.

I spent much of my Ph.D. studies learning about environmental assessments and risk, where different methods of scenario planning were common. Once I finished my Ph.D., I began to specialize more in risk assessments where few data were available and/or where non-linear (abrupt) relationships existed.

How does the scenario-creation methodology help participants prepare for the unknown? If participants are involved in the creation, how do you surprise them?

Normally in our jobs we deal with issues that are already well known to our organization or research discipline – essentially what the military worries about in “preparing for the last war.” Bureaucracies tend to avoid ideas or concepts that are uncomfortable, and in environmental risks that means focusing on risks that are historically more “probable.” But as we’ve seen with drought in California or the 2011 tsunami that struck Japan, history is not always the best guide for preparing for the future.

What we’ve found in our past scenario planning work with the U.S. Air Force Minerva project and the U.S. Department of Energy is that most of these disasters are not single events, but rather improbable combinations of probable factors. Addressing any one of these factors individually leads us to think that we are well prepared for future risks, but when we combine seemingly unrelated factors we begin to understand how the entire system behaves.

One of the benefits of the scenario-creation workshops is that they encourage participants to address these uncomfortable and complex combinations of risks. Rather than ignoring risks because we interpret too much uncertainty as “highly improbable,” the workshops examine the consequences of shocks in terms of systemic resilience.

You distinguish between “forecasts” and “foresight.” Can you describe this distinction?

Forecasts attempt to predict what will happen in the future, and normally attach a probability function to individual variables such as daytime high temperature, river flood levels, or energy prices. Forecasts take existing data and extrapolate into the future, requiring reliable information and generally linear relationships.

Foresight is a broader concept, which admits that present knowledge is imperfect and that both our current understanding and future actions can affect how the future is shaped. In other words, foresight admits gross uncertainty and attempts to understand how to adjust to complex, potential futures.

Some observers have challenged the notion that the environment can or should be “securitized.”  What do you say to those who question the compatibility of military/intelligence techniques, like scenario building, and environmental perspectives?

I am quick to admit that there are risks in securitizing environmental issues and these must always be kept in mind. Daniel Deudney wrote an important article warning of securitizing environmental issues in 1991, and his warnings are still pertinent today.

First, if people link the environment and security merely for the purpose of bolstering their own position, either politics or research can be warped in misleading ways. For example, when the U.S. military provided disaster relief in Pakistan following the 2010 floods, there was a risk of the Pakistani military gaining greater power vis-à-vis the civilian government. Likewise, academics who shift their environmental research and link it to security to gain more notice risk emphasizing state stability over ecological or human security concerns. The focus of many environmental security discussions on violent conflict is especially problematic.

Second, securitizing natural events or resources can be misleading when insecurity is presented as “naturalized,” or when analyses suggest that resources are themselves sources of insecurity rather than the way they are managed or traded. It’s far more common for the environment to be used as a weapon in war than to be the actual cause of war.

Third, the military and intelligence communities are accustomed to secrecy, which can be an enormous barrier when open exchange of information is so important for effective foresight. To their credit, the Minerva project allowed us to keep almost all of our work unclassified and its interests in energy and environmental factors were far more pragmatic than I’ve seen in many university departments.

How do you see climate change fitting into broader security discussions and efforts to plan for future risks?

While the security community has discussed climate change impacts as security risks since the early 2000s, the narratives we see in popular media and political dialogues today often differ significantly from what occurs in operational and strategic planning.

The military’s most pressing concerns tends to focus on infrastructure (e.g., rising sea levels flooding naval bases), new operational concerns (especially the Arctic Sea), and disaster response. The link between environmental change and violent conflict has always been tenuous, and too much focus on conflict as an end-point ignores broader human security concerns and can even be something of a self-fulfilling prophecy. Even if the military is interested in risks like climate change, military responses are often inappropriate.

The trick, then, is to use military and intelligence tools in assessment and early warning, but recognize that they are limited in how they can respond by themselves. Processes like workshops are therefore important in first identifying risks and vulnerabilities, but then asking who would respond (and how) given cascading impacts. It’s much easier to discuss that in advance than after a disaster strikes, and environmental risks are good points for potential cooperation.

Your workshops highlight the need to identify vulnerabilities across different time horizons. In your experience, how do slower trends, like population dynamics, play into environmental security scenarios? 

The slower processes, like water supplies or population changes (growth, urbanization) are crucial for background information. Scenarios typically have long-term trends overlaid by short-term changes or shocks, so even a scenario set five years in the future has to incorporate 40-year trends. Likewise, a scenario that focuses on Uganda has to include global trends such as increasing food and energy demand from China.

Population in and of itself isn’t a risk, just like a hurricane isn’t considered a disaster until it makes landfall somewhere – the important thing is to understand how factors like population dynamics interact with other factors over time.

Urbanization is one example. Massive numbers of people are moving to coastal cities and increasing the vulnerability of those places through a combination of increased hazard exposure (especially flooding), greater reliance on urban infrastructure, and loss of community networks and resilience. As coastal cities grow, the challenges for disaster mitigation and response increase substantially.

Another factor with population and demographics is to remember that disasters often disproportionately affect women, children, and the elderly, and that resilience and disaster response policies can easily ignore vulnerable populations in favor of those who are easiest to help. Providing certain services to vulnerable populations can provide enormous dividends in systemic resilience, reducing the need for disaster response missions and long-term aid.

Researchers and policymakers have to be careful not to ignore certain groups just because few data exist on them, and this is one reason I’ve long argued that tools from field epidemiology have a place in international security planning. We need ground-up assessments that try to look at the dark places in our scenarios, and address uncertainty head-on rather than avoid it. Tackling uncertainty is one area where intelligence and security planning differs sharply from the research and policy communities, and where some important lessons can be learned.