As Russia’s unprovoked assault on Ukraine continues, the world’s focus is rightfully on ending this conflict as soon as possible. But the global impact of a senseless war launched by a petro-dictator also calls for deeper reflection.  

Yes, the conflict shines a spotlight on the need for a global shift to renewable energy sources. But how much rethinking do our concepts of “national security” need for such a shift to take hold? Must we envision them more broadly to contend with sweeping environmental changes? 

Such questions were at the top of President Joseph Biden’s agenda as he took office. As the new president introduced his national security team, he observed that it was a moment to “reimagine American foreign policy and national security for the next generation.” And in one of its first executive orders, the Biden administration asked the intelligence community on January 27, 2021 to produce a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on the “national and economic security impacts of climate change.”  

A National Intelligence Estimate represents a coordinated and most authoritative written assessment of a specific national security issue by the U.S. Intelligence Community, and generally is intended for policymakers and other experts. Yet when the resulting NIE, “Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to U.S. National Security Through 2040,” was published in October 2021, it peered through the proverbial keyhole: offering a narrowly accurate picture from which vital information and perspectives were missing.  

The NIE’s scope was limited to the effects of climate change on U.S. national security interests abroad. Climate change’s fundamental challenges to national security were addressed, whether they involve geopolitical tensions over emissions reductions, or how its effects will “exacerbate cross-border geopolitical flashpoints.”  

The new climate NIE proved to be a lost opportunity, however. It perpetuated a military and defense framing of “security” that is rooted in the concept of fossil fuel-dependent energy security—a conceptual policy cornerstone dating back to the end of World War II.  

Indeed, continuing to frame the climate and security discussion narrowly is in itself an inherent security risk. To meet the administration’s stated objectives, future approaches to the question must look beyond a traditional state-centric national security lens to grapple with the larger ecological, social, political, and intergenerational dynamics already arising due to climatic changes and other complex, transnational challenges. 

Narrow Lens = Strategic Surprises 

Readers of the October 2021 NIE could easily come away with the sense that the biggest     national security challenges related to climate are global competition for land in the warming Arctic and the possibility that a country might unilaterally deploy geoengineering. The report makes no mention of the COVID-19 pandemic, for instance, even as it acknowledges that higher temperatures and loss of biodiversity will increase human health risks. 

COVID-19 has triggered global economic contractions, reversal of international development gains, greater vulnerabilities for girls in low-income countries, and tremendous turbulence in supply chains. The crisis also has exposed and exacerbated security-related vulnerabilities and inequities that weaken society’s capacity for resilience. The relationship between continuing disparities in vaccine availability and acceptance and the emergence and spread of new mutations of the novel coronavirus also underscore the severity of the security challenge.  

The COVID-19 pandemic suggests that national security should be reframed to prioritize global    public health. Climate change and environmental breakdown contribute to recurrent disease outbreaks, including pandemics. International cooperation on public health will be essential to human, national, and economic security 

The phenomena of pandemic and climate change are related, despite a public that sees them as different issues. Their global nature and interdependence within natural and human systems reveal important new security realities that cannot be captured by a state-centric analysis.  

The pandemic’s broad and sudden emergence points to another issue: the NIE’s assumption of a gradual increase in climate change-amplified risks over time. A chart on the report’s first page projects the geopolitical “risks to US interests through 2040” as a steadily building emergency that will progress in a logical, step-by-step fashion.  

It is difficult to capture abrupt change in a linear chart. Yet in its rigid focus on potential state-based strategic competition, the climate NIE also reflects—and perpetuates—current concepts of security, obscuring systemic risks in human and ecological systems. 

Russia’s latest incursion into Ukraine and a global pandemic demonstrate clearly the impact of highly disruptive and surprising nearer-term risks. Add in the immediacy and unpredictability of the abrupt departures from normal climatic patterns already happening, as well as the prospect of accelerated risks emanating from converging crises, such as the prospect of extreme weather events causing global disruptions in food, energy, or medicine, and the gradual model of risk offered by the NIE seems inadequate. 

National security often assumes an inert and stable natural environment as a baseline condition. That was always was an invalid assumption, but it has become more dangerous in today’s disrupted climate system and biosphere. We lack a suitable national security framework through which to understand climate change impacts.  

Analyses that fail to anticipate abrupt and significant Earth system changes and growing interdependencies may increase the potential for surprises—and offer a false sense of security. For example, as the climate NIE highlights the dangers of food insecurity, it overlooks instances in the last decade when localized climate events (including droughts, floods, and wildfires), affected global commodities networks. 

In particular, assessments of individual nations must factor in a complex international web of transboundary interdependencies. The NIE observes that “Egypt is less exposed to climate effects than many countries.” But is it? High rainfall in Canada in 2010, as well as drought and bushfires in Russia, Ukraine, and Kazakhstan that same year, helped drive unexpected spikes in global wheat prices. Egypt’s reliance on imported wheat was soon felt in higher bread prices that sparked the political protests that coalesced into the Arab Spring movement. And although the Arab Spring emerged first in Tunisia, its rapid spread to Egypt in early 2011 was a major strategic  surprise—both for the United States and global institutions. 

Challenges and Collaboration  

The NIE’s approach to climate change evokes an earlier age when national security’s near-exclusive focus involved defending the United States against external threats – an approach that assumes international and zero-sum competition.  

Global headlines provide ample evidence that state-sponsored aggression against the rules-based international system and crimes against humanity are not things of the past. And Russia’s invasion of Ukraine magnifies the importance of new thinking about interconnected global challenges. Is it possible to evolve a concept of shared security and shared risk in newly cooperative and anticipatory ways that include non-traditional security issues and expertise? 

The necessity of reframing national security in a context in which systemic global changes intertwine with regional and national developments, instability, and unpredictability is increasingly clear. Yet Earth system changes are not a typical focus for intelligence analysis and such integrated analysis lacks a theoretical underpinning in international relations or security studies.   

The paradoxical regularity with which we are now surprised by “unprecedented” natural disasters argues for a new model that accepts uncertainty and builds in anticipatory analysis as part of a global security paradigm. Becoming better attuned to the behaviors of complex natural systems requires different frames of analysis, with much of this work happening outside of traditionally classified government intelligence institutions and processes. 

And as security is reconceived to better integrate climate challenges, young people’s rights, perspectives, and needs deserve special consideration. As of mid-2020, children under 15 years of age made up about one quarter of the world’s population. In a recent survey of 10,000 young people between 16 and 25 years old in ten countries, more than half reported being very or extremely worried about climate change, as well as experiencing feelings of anger, sadness, and guilt. Society’s failure to act is creating feelings of deep insecurity in youth that portend potentially profound implications for governments. 

Indeed, current framings may vilify climate activists by criminalizing their advocacy for their own security, and creating new security dynamics involving international and intergenerational tensions. Young people involved in nonviolent direct actions such as road blockages, civil disobedience, or mobilizing public support are sometimes—and perhaps increasingly—seen as security threats themselves. The Indian government, for example, has invoked  a colonial-era sedition law against 22-year-old climate activist Disha Ravi.  

The key failing of the new NIE is its refusal to adopt a wider lens to look broadly at the security implications of climate change. Assessing its impacts requires more deliberate consideration of global interdependencies between natural and manmade systems. Uncertainties and the potential for strategic surprises must be more explicitly analyzed at both a national and a global level, processes that cannot come about without prioritizing international cooperation as a national security imperative. And children’s rights to security, today and in the future, deserve consideration.  

This much-needed reframing must occur outside of the existing concepts and institutions, and should address new thinking about national security with a similar—or greater—level of urgency, resources, expertise, and alliances. A big part of this effort will rely on building trust and sustaining international relationships. It also must integrate science more extensively into international security discourse. The shift in thinking about security needs to be aligned with the new Earth system realities of our permanently climate-disrupted biosphere. 

Traditional concepts of national security analysis generally served the United States well in the postwar era. But the manifold and uncertain challenges of an uncharted world mean that the future of civilization itself depends on how we frame today’s threats, whose work and perspectives we consult, and the urgency and global cooperation with which we address them.