Sun Sentinel Palm Beach Edition
Climate change seen as national security threat
Biden reports show warming will spark strife, spur migration
WASHINGTON — Worsening conflict within and between nations. Increased dislocation and migration as people flee climate-fueled instability. Heightened military tension and uncertainty.
The Biden administration released several reports Thursday on climate change and national security, laying out in stark terms the ways in which the warming world is beginning to pose significant challenges to stability worldwide.
The documents, issued by the departments of Homeland Security and Defense as well as the National Security Council and director of national intelligence, form the government’s most thorough assessment yet of these and other challenges, as well as how it will address them.
The timing of the release seems intended to give President Joe Biden something to demonstrate that his government is acting on climate change as he prepares to attend a U.N. climate conference next week in Glasgow, Scotland.
The reports “reinforce the president’s commitment to evidence-based decisions guided by the best available science and data,” the White House said Thursday, and “will serve as a foundation for our critical work on climate and security moving forward.”
Among the documents was a National Intelligence Estimate, which is meant to collect and distill the views of the country’s intelligence agencies about particular threats. The report said that risks to American national security will grow in the years to come. After 2030, key countries will face growing risks of instability and need for humanitarian assistance, the report said.
The document makes three judgments: Global tensions will rise as countries argue about how to hasten reductions in greenhouse gas emissions; climate change will exacerbate cross-border flashpoints and amplify strategic competition in the Arctic; and the effects of climate change will be felt most acutely in developing countries that are least equipped to adapt.
When it comes to countries around the world meeting the commitment made at the 2015 climate conference in Paris to keep the rise in global temperatures to less than 2 degrees Celsius (3.6 degrees Fahrenheit), the intelligence report said the odds were not good.
“Given current government policies and trends in technology development, we judge that collectively countries are unlikely to meet the Paris goals,” the report said.
The Pentagon also released a report that looked at how it would incorporate climate-related threats into its planning. That report said the military would begin to spend a significant portion of its next budget on climate analysis in its national security exercises.
“The Department intends to prioritize funding DOD Components in support of exercises, war games, analyses, and studies of climate change impacts on DOD missions, operations, and global stability,” according to its report. “In coordination with allies and partners, DOD will work to prevent, mitigate, account for, and respond to defense and security risks associated with climate change.”
The country is already seeing the effects of climate change on migration, with destructive hurricanes driving migrants to leave their homes in Central America and flee to the U.S. through Mexico. This has overwhelmed border officials at times since 2014.
The National Security Council released its own report Thursday, looking at how climate change is already pushing people around the world to migrate, both within countries and between them. The report notes one forecast suggesting that climate change could lead to almost 3% of the populations of Latin America, South Asia and sub-Saharan Africa moving within their countries by 2050 — more than 143 million people.
That movement wouldn’t solely be the result of climate change, but rather the interaction of climate change with other challenges, like conflict, it said.
While the report focuses on climate migration overseas, it notes some Americans are already moving because of the effects of climate change as well.
Teevrat Garg, an economics professor at the University of California, San Diego, who specializes in climate migration, welcomed the administration’s attention to the issue. But he said the report could have addressed the deeper question of what the United States and other developed countries owe to climate migrants.
“Much of the carbon emissions driving climate change have come from rich nations but the consequences are being borne disproportionately by the poor,” Garg said.