Last week, in an unprecedented show of coordination to address the connections between climate change and security, the Biden-Harris Administration released four reports—which taken together, mark significant progress in the effort to center climate change in U.S. national security and foreign policy. The documents—which fulfill key requirements laid out in two Executive Orders issued by President Biden in the early days of his administration—describe how climate change will increasingly heighten instability and influence the United States’ strategic interests, including shaping competition with other great powers—most significantly, China.

Pentagon: Climate change is reshaping the geostrategic environment

The Department of Defense’s (DoD) Climate Risk Assessment (DCRA) is not the Pentagon’s first foray into climate change and national security but it does mark a notable expansion into the broader strategic implications and geopolitical consequences of climate change, beyond the previously narrow focus on its impacts on military readiness.

The bulk of the DCRA is focused on the nuts and bolts of how the Pentagon can incorporate climate risk into key strategic documents, programs, and international partner engagements. There is a strong emphasis on the role of data and science and the need to “continue to review and assess how to integrate climate science, data, and scenarios into Department documents and processes.”

In a 2-page section on climate hazards, impacts, and security implications, the focus is on how climate hazards—like increased drought, intensifying extreme weather events, and wildfires—can compound one another (e.g., drought leading to increased wildfire, which can cause more flooding) and have primary and secondary impacts on resource availability and ensuing social and political fall-out.

As the DoD makes moves to address climate security in a more comprehensive manner, it’s important the policymakers recognize that climate’s impact on conflict and instability, social tensions, or migration, for example, is not a linear or one-way relationship. Climate change is in fact the context in which resource availability and shifts in power dynamics are playing out. As the DCRA itself says, “Climate change is reshaping the geostrategic, operational, and tactical environments with significant implications for U.S. national security and defense.”

Intelligence Community: Climate change, and responses to it, threatens U.S. national security interests

The first-ever National Intelligence Estimate on climate change represents the consensus view of all 18 U.S. intelligence agencies.

Diplomatic tensions could rise, says the NIE, as countries struggle to meet the Paris goals and the “cooperative breakthrough” of the Paris Agreement is corroded. “Geopolitical tensions are likely to grow as countries increasingly argue about how to accelerate the reductions in net greenhouse gas emissions that will be needed to meet the Paris Agreement goals.” 

Looking out to 2040, the NIE warns that climate change will “exacerbate cross-border geopolitical flashpoints,” like competition over resources in the Arctic, transboundary water conflict, and increased migration. It recognizes that climate impacts will be felt most acutely in developing countries—and that those countries are the least able to adapt to climate change. As those impacts place additional strain on vulnerable populations and under-resourced governments, there is increased potential for instability and internal conflict. 

The NIE is the most elevated and comprehensive intelligence product in the U.S. government, said Stephanie Epner, a Senior Advisor in the Office of the Special Envoy for Climate Change, at a recent Wilson Center event. An NIE, said Epner, is able to be more comprehensive than the previous assessments and leverages more resources in the analysis.

It’s important to note, however, that the intelligence community has provided a number of assessments and analyses of climate’s impact on security going back over a decade to a 2008 classified National Climate Assessment that warned that climate change would pose a threat to stability, lead to increased migration, weaken governance institutions, and worsen poverty and social tensions.

White House: Climate-related migration will impact international security and political stability 

The White House’s Report on the Impact of Climate Change on Migration is the first official U.S. Government report on the linkages between climate change and migration. Overall, it does not represent a significant move of the needle on U.S. policy for climate-related migration, focusing more on existing U.S. foreign assistance avenues that could be leveraged in responses to climate-related for migration. For those who have been pushing for concrete policy, this comes as a disappointment. In the lifespan of a U.S. Administration, actions not taken by the end of the first year can quickly become missed opportunities. But for the first report of its kind—in which the U.S. government reports on climate change and migration—the report lays out a compelling case to meaningfully address climate-related migration. 

Importantly, the White House report acknowledges that migration can also be an important means of adaptation to climate change, and an “essential response” to climate’s impacts on livelihoods. Well-managed migration that is “safe, orderly and humane” will be critical to supporting this important climate adaptation strategy and relieving pressures on communities.

It lays out the ways that climate impacts are increasingly driving migration and displacement and warns that malign actors could take advantage of climate-related migration’s destabilizing effects. China and Russia, for example, could “seek to gain influence by providing direct support to impacted countries grappling with political unrest related to migration,” and non-state criminal networks and illicit activity can capitalize on climate-related migrants as a source of income and recruitment. Ill-managed migration flows may “exacerbate resource inequalities, stress public budgets, and contribute to xenophobia that increases political tensions,” the report warns.

The climate migration report is focused primarily on how climate-related migration will impact security and stability, which is laudable and important, but doesn’t account for how conflict and migration will impact people’s ability to adapt to climate change. The singular elevation of climate change into these agendas—without recognition of the impact of conflict and migration on people’s ability to adapt to climate change—obscures the complexity of risk as well as opportunities to respond.

The establishment of an interagency policy process is recommended to coordinate U.S. Government responses to climate-related migration, as well as steps to improve analytics and predictive tools, and increased investment in resilience-building measures and local climate adaptation efforts. Importantly, the report also highlights the need to address gaps in U.S. foreign assistance to urban and peri-urban areas, where the majority of migrants move to, and where access to critical services and safe housing is often lacking.  

DHS: Protecting the homeland from climate change’s physical impacts

The Department of Homeland Security’s (DHS) Framework for Addressing Climate Change is primarily focused on the physical impacts of climate change on the homeland, but also recognizes the vulnerability of the United States to competition in the Arctic and climate-related migration both within and across U.S. borders. 

The framework outlines 5 “interconnected lines of effort” to build climate resilience in the United States, including a strategy to develop a climate-informed workforce by bringing more scientific and technical experts on board who can translate climate change science into actions for DHS and inform solutions.

Bolstering its capacity to respond to emergencies, addressing capability and capacity gaps, and improving data analytics to get a more accurate assessment of the “true cost and frequency of climate change related response and recovery” will be critical to the agency’s ability to build climate resilience, says the report, as will be providing “timely, accessible, and tailorable” information to enhance climate resilience at the local level, and efforts to foster equity and justice in those efforts.  

As climate change “reshapes” DHS missions for the foreseeable future, the agency intends to employ data-driven strategic foresight and scenario-based planning in policymaking, budgeting, and programming. 

Avoiding Backdraft and focusing on climate change justice

Impressively, all these reports recognize that responses to climate change could also shape insecurity—a risk that the Wilson Center termed “Backdraft.” (Stay tuned to NSB for more on Backdraft).

• “Policy responses to climate change could also have unintended consequences and become sources of dispute, such as policies that impact supply chains or critical minerals,” says the DCRA.

• The NIE warns of increased competition for access to the minerals and resources required for renewable energy technologies, as well as the potential blowback from unilateral pursuits of large-scale solar geoengineering technologies. 

• As countries make their moves towards a low-carbon economy, the geopolitical implications of those shifts create “new, easily overlooked vulnerabilities that could also affect migration patterns,” warns the White House. “These vulnerabilities are likely to be acute in places with high volumes of critical minerals and limited or weak governance structures, as well as economies that include significant fossil fuel extraction or refining sectors.”

Avoiding “backdraft” will require a concerted effort to ensure that climate responses—decarbonization, financing, climate tech—are sensitive to conflict and include conflict prevention efforts that can reduce the risk of unintended consequences, especially, although not only, in countries affected by fragility and stability.  

Key to conflict prevention is increasing equity in climate programs and policies.

• As the Secretary of Homeland Security, Alejandro N. Mayorkas, writes, “The need to achieve equity will be a guiding principle throughout each line of effort described in this strategic framework.”

• “Assuring equity and inclusion in preparation and response to climate change impacts on migration is essential to effective program and policy development,” says the White House, recognizing that while equity and inclusion are important for their own sake, they are also critical to getting the most robust risk analysis possible, and finding the most effective and sustainable entry points for responses. 

• On the other hand, while the NIE hints at climate justice issues in its detailing of the potential tensions between high-emitting countries and developing countries, overall it avoids issues of equity and inclusion in its analysis.

Glasgow: A united front at the COP

Taken together, these reports represent a seismic shift: they show a never-before-seen level of coordination to support an integrated and comprehensive approach to the impacts of climate change on U.S. national security and global stability, and to center climate change in U.S. foreign policy and national security.

But wait, there’s more: 

• The first-ever U.S. national gender strategy, also released last week, promotes gender equity in climate responses, pointing out climate’s disproportionate impact on the health and safety of women and girls and its potential to further “entrench global patterns of inequality.” It calls for gender equity in climate leadership in both climate negotiations and climate science.

• USAID’s climate strategy, which is expected to be released in the coming weeks, could help identify where and how development and humanitarian assistance can help build climate resilience in the communities most at risk of its impacts and how climate-related assistance can be harnessed to strengthen other social, economic, and political dimensions of resilience. With it’s on-the-ground work in communities on the frontlines of climate change, USAID provides an important avenue to bring the complexity of climate-related risks into sharper focus.

• And just yesterday, the White House unveiled an ambitious $555 billion climate package that “represents the biggest clean-energy investment in U.S. history”—despite being scaled down. There is real ambition in this push for an energy transition and that transition will no doubt reverberate across the foreign policy and national security arenas.

Ahead of COP26, President Biden is signaling to the world that U.S. foreign policy, national security, and domestic efforts to mitigate climate change and prepare for its impacts are fundamentally interconnected. This alignment of policy and analysis is a critical step forward for advancing climate action in the United States. Now, we wait with bated breath. What happens in Glasgow will determine critical next steps—but it’s clear that the COP won’t be the only lever of power the Biden Administration uses moving forward.