The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent, nonpartisan membership organization, think tank, and publisher dedicated to being a resource for its members, government officials, business executives, journalists, educators and students, civic and religious leaders, and other interested citizens in order to help them better understand the world and the foreign policy choices facing the United States and other countries.
Council Special Reports (CSRs) are concise policy briefs, produced to provide a rapid response to a developing crisis or contribute to the public’s understanding of current policy dilemmas. CSRs are written by individual authors—who may be Council Fellows or acknowledged experts from outside the institution—in consultation with an advisory committee, and are intended to take sixty days from inception to publication. The committee serves as a sounding board and provides feedback on a draft report.
Climate change presents a serious threat to the security and prosperity of the United States and other countries. Recent actions and statements by members of Congress, members of the UN Security Council, and retired U. S. military officers have drawn attention to the consequences of climate change, including the destabilizing effects of storms, droughts, and floods. Domestically, the effects of climate change could overwhelm disaster-response capabilities. Internationally, climate change may cause humanitarian disasters, contribute to political violence, and undermine weak governments. In this Council Special Report, Joshua W. Busby moves beyond diagnosis of the threat to recommendations for action.
Recognizing that some climate change is inevitable, he proposes a portfolio of feasible and affordable policy options to reduce the vulnerability of the United States and other countries to the predictable effects of climate change. He also draws attention to the strategic dimensions of reducing greenhouse gas emissions, arguing that sharp reductions in the long run are essential to avoid unmanageable security problems. He goes on to argue that participation in reducing emissions can help integrate China and India into the global rules–based order, as well as help stabilize important countries such as Indonesia. And he suggests bureaucratic reforms that would increase the likelihood that the U. S. government will formulate effective domestic and foreign policies in this increasingly important realm.
In developing this Council Special Report, I interviewed a number of individuals who work on climate change, national security, and the intersection between the two. These included current and former U. S. government officials, former members of the military, and academics, as well as staff from international organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and businesses. During the course of writing this report, I consulted with an advisory group that met to offer constructive feedback.
When Hurricane Katrina struck New Orleans in 2005, Americans witnessed on their own soil what looked like an overseas humanitarian-relief operation. The storm destroyed much of the city, causing more than $80 billion in damages, killing more than 1,800 people, and displacing in excess of 270,000. More than 70,000 soldiers were mobilized, including 22,000 active duty troops and 50,000-plus members of the National Guard (about 10 percent of the total Guard strength). Katrina also had severe effects on critical infrastructure, taking crude oil production and refinery capacity off-line for an unprecedented length of time. At a time when the United States was conducting military operations in Afghanistan and Iraq, the country suddenly had to divert its attention and military resources to respond to a domestic emergency.
Climate change and Katrina cannot be linked directly with each other, but the storm gave Americans a visual image of what climate change—which scientists predict will exacerbate the severity and number of extreme weather events—might mean for the future. 1 It also began to alter the terms of the climate debate. The economics community has been engaged in an important, ongoing discussion since the early 1990s about whether early action to prevent climate change is justified; this debate has compared the potential economy-wide costs of lowering greenhouse gas emissions to the possible economic costs of climate change. In 2007, the debate turned, broadening beyond economics to include, in particular, the consequences of climate change for national security.
Because the links between climate change and national security are worthy of concern in their own right, and because some significant climate change is inevitable, strategies that go beyond long-run efforts to rein in greenhouse gas emissions are required. This report sharpens the connections between climate change and national security and recommends specific policies to address the security consequences of climate change for the United States. In all areas of climate change policy, adaptation and mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) should be viewed as complements rather than competing alternatives—and the national security dimension is no exception. Some policies will be targeted at adaptation, most notably risk-reduction and preparedness policies at home and abroad.
These could spare the United States the need to mobilize its military later to rescue people and to prevent regional disorder—and would ensure a more effective response if such mobilization was nonetheless necessary. Others will focus on mitigation, 2 CSIS/CNAS, The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Global Climate Change, November 2007; available at http://www. cnas. org/climatechange. 2 which is almost universally accepted as an essential part of the response to climate change. Mitigation efforts will need to be international and involve deep changes in the world’s major economies, such as those of China and India. As a result, the processes of working together to craft and implement them provide opportunities to advance American security interests.
Such opportunities exist within many areas of climate policy: military-to-military workshops on emergency management, for example, can help other states deal with new security threats and, at the same time, cement strong relationships that can pay off in other national security dimensions.
While some areas in northern Europe, Russia, and the Arctic may experience more positive effects of a warming climate in the short run, the long-run net consequences for all regions are likely to be negative if nothing at all is done to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases. Africa and parts of Asia are particularly vulnerable, given their locations and their limited governmental capacities to respond to flooding, droughts, and declining food production. Even the United States will face negative impacts from.
This report focuses on physical effects that scientists already regard as those most likely to surface in the coming decades, rather than more long-term, uncertain, or unlikely effects, which would include abrupt climate change and the scenario of a twenty-foot sea-level rise popularized in former U. S. vice president Al Gore’s film An Inconvenient Truth. roughts, heat waves, and storms.
Each of these has potential consequences, direct and indirect, for national security. National security extends well beyond protecting the homeland against armed attack by other states, and indeed, beyond threats from people who purposefully seek to damage or destroy states. Phenomena like pandemic disease, natural disasters, and climate change, despite lacking human intentionality, can threaten national security. For example, the 2006 U. S. National Security Strategy (NSS) notes that the Department of Defense has been charged to plan for “deadly pandemics and other natural disasters” that can “produce WMD-like effects.
It also notes that “environmental destruction, whether caused by human behavior or cataclysmic mega-disasters such as floods, hurricanes, earthquakes, or tsunamis … may overwhelm the capacity of local authorities to respond, and may even overtax national militaries, requiring a larger international response. ” Like armed attacks, some of the effects of climate change could swiftly kill or endanger large numbers of people and cause such large-scale disruption that local public health, law enforcement, and emergency response units would not be able to contain the threat. Climate change does not pose an existential risk for a country as large as the United States.
Moreover, while Washington, DC, has had its share of storms, the nation’s political and military command-and-control center is not as vulnerable to extreme weather events as other parts of the country. However, Hurricane Katrina demonstrated all too well the possibility that an extreme weather event could kill and endanger large numbers of people, cause civil disorder, and damage critical infrastructure in other parts of the country. It would be easy to dismiss that storm’s effects as the result of a particularly vulnerable city and an extraordinarily damaging hurricane. But the 2007 IPCC report explicitly warns that coastal populations in North America will be increasingly vulnerable to climate change—and nearly 50 percent of Americans live within fifty miles of the coast.
Given poor countries’ resource constraints, foreign aid should cover at least part of the cost. A modest investment in adaptation in poor countries will likely be much more cost-effective than responding to state failure or humanitarian disasters through military and relief operations. The United States should take the lead on adaptation by supporting a Climate Change and Natural Disaster Risk Reduction initiative n a scale similar to President George W. Bush’s Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief.
The president’s AIDS plan delivered $15 billion over five years through a combination of bilateral programs and support for the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB, and Malaria. Based on the initial estimates of the adaptation costs for poor countries, climate risk reduction should have at least that level of support, divided between bilateral and multilateral programs. The bulk of this support should finance adaptation programs by vulnerable governments. It should go beyond the protection of new infrastructure and include agricultural research and planning for emergencies.
The previously mentioned military-to-military workshops for disaster management should form part of this effort, too. The United States should take advantage of the creation of AFRICOM to create a multiagency African Risk Reduction Pool with a budget of at least $100 million per year. AFRICOM may develop new ways of incorporating climate and other environmental concerns into conflict prevention. It may also serve as a model for interagency coordination that is applicable to other regions. AFRICOM is already structured to have a State Department official as the deputy. There is a danger, however, that the mission will be conceived narrowly as capturing and killing terrorists.
While important, another component should be conflict prevention to address the underlying causes of political instability, including the potential for climate change to contribute to refugee crises and water and resource scarcity, among other problems. For conflict prevention, most environmental adaptation programming will be development work rather than traditional security initiatives, necessitating greater on-theground coordination between civilian and military agencies.
The idea of a risk-reduction pool is based on the African Conflict Prevention Pool (ACPP), a collaborative effort by the United Kingdom’s Department for International 15 Development (DFID), the Ministry of Defence (MOD), and the Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO), which is equivalent to the U. S. State Department. The three agencies pool their funds for conflict prevention.
The ACPP, with a subsidy from the UK Treasury, has a budget of more than ? 60 million per year ($120 million). Funds are administered by all three agencies in a “joined-up” field operation where interagency teams collaborate on a common strategy. Depending upon their area of expertise and comparative advantage, individual agencies draw down resources for different purposes (such as security sector reform, demobilization of soldiers, efforts to control small arms, and programs addressing the economic and social causes of conflict). This model offers great potential for enhanced interagency collaboration in the field and can minimize duplicative programming.
The U. S. ersion, likewise, should draw upon a broader number of civilian agencies, including the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA), the Department of Agriculture, NASA, the U. S. Army Corps of Engineers, and NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration). The pool should finance a number of climate security initiatives, including early warning systems of extreme weather events as well as investments in coastal defenses, water conservation, dispute settlement systems, and drought-resistant crops. Whatever climate changes come to pass, these measures would be designed to minimize the potential consequences for political stability and social strife. Even a successful portfolio of risk-reduction and conflict prevention strategies will experience an occasional failure.
When crises do strike, the pool approach would facilitate rapid response and better integration of military and civilian efforts to move quickly from emergency to postcrisis. The pool should finance contingency plans for humanitarian relief operations and purchase some relief supplies in the event of crises, including surplus grains from African farmers. While African countries may resist a heavy U. S. footprint, the United States should consider some pre-positioning of lift capabilities and ground transport for emergency situations either at the main base in Africa, once established, or distributed throughout the region as needed. The Africa example is a model of what potentially could be extended to other vulnerable regions
At the domestic level, the absence of a federal policy on climate change has paralyzed more proactive efforts to insulate the United States from climate risks, and this extends even to efforts to document the problem. As of October 2007, the House of Representatives had appropriated $50 million for an innovative two-year Commission on Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation for fiscal year 2008. The Senate had not appropriated any support for the commission. An important complement to the ongoing National Intelligence Estimate on climate and security, the commission would allow the EPA to fund studies by a number of federal agencies.
Studies could also consider the cost-effectiveness of different policy remedies, including improved sea defenses, building codes, emergency response plans, and even relocation strategies. Congress should fully fund the commission’s activities. Research should focus on whether and where extreme weather events could cause localized humanitarian crises, divert or disable national security instruments, or contribute to regional disorder. Internationally, the first priority should be to generate more precise estimates of adaptation costs. The United States, perhaps acting in coordination with the IPCC or World Bank, should take existing studies of coastal areas vulnerable to climate change and evaluate which strategies are likely to yield the most damage reduction at the least cost.
A similar analysis should be conducted for food production and freshwater availability. A global assessment from the Bank might identify countries most vulnerable to climate change without regard to their underlying geopolitical importance. A U. S. risk assessment might be more targeted, focusing on countries that are of more obvious national security concern to the United States. The National Intelligence Council is preparing an analysis on climate change and national security that may provide a first assessment of this challenge. More global studies would have the advantage of pooling expertise and potentially identifying areas of non-obvious security significance.
Analysis and projections should be supplemented with more sophisticated realtime information on changing climate conditions. While meteorological information about the United States is extensive, satellite coverage in other parts of the globe is patchy. While risk reduction is essential, climate damages are likely to exceed most governments’ adaptive capacities unless a major reduction in greenhouse gases takes place before the mid-twenty-first century.
For example, the IPCC reports that by 2050, three coastal deltas—the Nile, the Mekong, and Ganges-Brahmaputra—will be extremely vulnerable to climate change, meaning that more than a million people could be displaced. 15 And just as many adaptation policies have clear national security dimensions, so do many possible mitigation initiatives. Consider three cases that illustrate this: China, India, and Indonesia.
Engagement remains the most important strategy to encourage China to become a status quo power and reduce the risk that China’s rise leads to confrontation between the great powers. Climate policy provides a valuable avenue for such engagement. While advanced industrialized countries bear historic responsibility for existing concentrations of greenhouse gases, China will be increasingly fingered as a climate culprit in the future. This will create a common interest between the United States and China in avoiding world condemnation for being “climate villains. ” Enlightened climate diplomacy could build on that common interest to improve U. S. – China relations.
Such legislation, if passed, would probably be used against China, adding to existing frictions over trade, intellectual property, and the level of China’s currency. So just as climate change presents an opportunity to solidify relations with China, so too does it present the possibility of new tensions in the relationship. Deft handling of the climate dimension of the U. S. -China relationship could have profound implications. Once the United States joins other rich countries in adopting a domestic regime to control carbon emissions, climate change will become an important part of the global rules–based order. Whether China chooses to remain engaged depends on whether it can meet its perceived needs inside the system.
A climate policy that induces China to join the rules-based global regime for dealing with global warming—independent of the fine details of that policy—would contribute to the broader project of cementing China’s commitment to the world order, which in turn could create payoffs in building a positive security relationship. At the same time, clumsy handling of climate issues could sour relations more broadly, damaging American security interests well beyond the climate sphere. The same is true of India. While the 2006 nuclear agreement with India was designed to reduce the threat of nuclear proliferation,16 from a security-oriented climate perspective, the nuclear deal also has the potential to restrain the country’s greenhouse gas emissions. David G.
Victor of Stanford University and the Council on Foreign Relations estimates that if India were to build twenty gigawatts of nuclear power as envisioned in the 2006 agreement, this could save 145 million tonnes per year of carbon dioxide emissions that would otherwise have been belched from coal-generating plants.
Already, the IEA has memoranda of understanding with both countries to enhance cooperation on climate change; were the U. S. government to support the deepening of these ties with an eye toward eventual membership, it would help advance climate goals while further integrating China and India into the rules-based global order. Indonesia provides another example. Indonesia is a major player in climate change because of deforestation, which releases carbon stored in plant matter and the soil: deforestation and forest fires in Indonesia helped make it the third-largest contributor of greenhouse gases behind the United States and China.
Paying Indonesia to keep its forests would likely be a much cheaper way for rich countries to avoid emitting greenhouse gases than retrofitting existing industrial infrastructure or seeking a rapid change in transportation fuels. But there is a security angle here, too. Indonesia’s political instability has fostered terrorist groups that may have global ambitions. Managing forestry payments deftly could help to solidify Indonesia’s social order and discourage radicals.
In Aceh, for example, the provincial government, led by a former rebel, is seeking support for avoided deforestation as a means of persuading former separatists to protect the forests and refrain from icking up their guns; providing him with the resources he seeks could mitigate both climate change and separatism. Similar win-win opportunities may exist in other strategically important countries, including Brazil and the Democratic Republic of the Congo.
The idea of compensating other countries for avoided deforestation has gained attention in recent years, spurred by a proposal from Costa Rica and Papua New Guinea on behalf of forest-rich countries at the 2005 Conference of Parties (COP) in Montreal. However, the Kyoto Protocol, largely because of worries about problems monitoring and 18 IEA membership is linked to membership in the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
Congress should ask the NIC to provide regular updates on climate and security risks. At the very least, it would be useful for Congress to get updated assessments after the release of important peer-review reports of climate science, like the IPCC assessments or those the president may request from the National Academy of Sciences.
Until recently, the debate about climate change has emphasized how large the economic consequences are, how these compare to the costs of action, and whether the United States or other nations can afford to address the issue. Extreme weather events such as Hurricane Katrina, the fires in Greece, and the floods in Africa and Asia suggest a different way of thinking about the issue.
The macroeconomic costs of Hurricane Katrina were minimal in the context of a large and resilient U. S. economy, but the human and political consequences were significant and painful. Whether or not Katrina was linked to global warming, climate change will likely yield more of these kinds of episodes, which are characterized by concentrated costs to particular places and people, leading to severe local impacts and cascading consequences for others.
The concentrated impacts of climate change will have important national security implications, both in terms of the direct threat from extreme weather events as well as broader challenges to U. S. interests in strategically important countries. Domestically, extreme weather events made more likely by climate change could endanger large numbers of people, damage critical infrastructure (including military installations), and require mobilization and diversion of military assets.
