Climate change will worsen national security: James Clapper

National Intelligence Director James Clapper -
climate change will worsen national security.

Here’s the latest missive on climate change from America’s national security leaders: You could suppress ISIS and solve Syria, but extremist groups and regional conflicts will keep popping up in an unstable future exacerbated by a warming Earth and extreme weather events.

So said Director of National Intelligence James Clapper, giving an overview of global threats as he opened an annual intelligence community conference in D.C. on Wednesday. Increased competition for “ever-diminishing food and water resources” will amplify socio-economically motivated armed conflicts, countries’ difficulties controlling their borders, and instability more generally, he said.

“I think climate change is going to be an underpinning for a lot of national security issues,” Clapper said. It affects “so many things: the availability of basics like water and food and other resources which are continually going to become matters of conflict, and already are, between and among countries.”

Read the Defence One Summit story - “U.S. Intel Chief: Climate Change Is Adding Fuel to the World’s Extremist Fires.”