U.S military preparing for security risks of climate change

In case you missed it, Keith Johnson with Foreign Policy recently published an article that strikes at the heart of where the United States is in assessing and preparing for the security risks of climate change.

While much of the discussion on this topic is about carefully parsing lines of causality, and waiting for certainty before raising concerns about these connections, a quote from Marc Levy in the article makes the case that this is a luxury:

“I think we’re woefully far behind…Sometimes people get accused of being overly alarmist…I think the warnings being given about the security threats from climate change are overly timid.”

Rhetorically, however, the current Administration has not been timid on this question. In a recent interview with the Atlantic, President Obama noted. “Climate change is a potential existential threat to the entire world if we don’t do something about it.”

This rhetoric has been shored up in recent months with one of the most significant responses to climate change from the Department of Defense (DoD Directive 4715.21: Climate Change Adaptation and Resilience), which is the latest and most robust output on climate change in a long line of assessments, strategy and planning documents from the Pentagon which stretches back to 2003, during the first half of the George W. Bush Administration. As noted by Johnson:

Read the Centre for Climate and Security story - “How the U.S. Military’s Not Waiting to Find Out if Climate Change is an Existential Risk.”