In the wake of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, then-U.N. Secretary-General Kofi Annan named a high-level panel of international dignitaries to assess emerging challenges in the international system. A 2004 background paper for that project that one of us co-authored, titled “The Security Implications of Climate Change for the UN System,” jump-started a new field, which has come to be known as “climate security.”
More than 20 years later, that field has matured, and the challenges highlighted in the U.N. report have only grown more urgent, but the circumstances that motivated its creation have changed. The so-called war on terrorism is essentially over, and the era of great-power competition is upon us. Amid these changes, the current U.S. administration is attempting to pretend climate change does not exist. The climate security field will need to evolve to stay relevant.
In 2007, several think tanks published studies expanding on the linkages between a changing global climate and U.S. national security, including prominent reports by the CNA Corporation and the Council on Foreign Relations (the latter written by one of us). The emergent field of climate security shared the assumption with counterterrorism that instability anywhere was likely to produce spillover consequences elsewhere, including in the United States and Europe. Conflicts would spread. People would move.
Scholars weighed in and largely focused on the narrow question of whether climate change would cause more conflict, broadly finding that climate change alone is unlikely to result in more conflict but that climate impacts exacerbate other well-known drivers of conflict, particularly in societies facing other risk factors. The foundational 2007 CNA report, borrowing from existing military jargon, described climate change’s role in this intersection of overlapping risks as a “threat multiplier.”
Countering terrorism is no longer the central organizing principle for U.S. foreign policy. Instead, the first Trump administration and the Biden administration both emphasized geopolitical competition, primarily with China and secondarily with Russia, as the core challenge of our time.
In a second Trump administration and beyond, it won’t be enough to claim that a particular country is subject to the destabilizing effects of climate change and thus merits U.S. focus and resources. Instead, prioritization will require articulating a compelling case that the country or region in question is of genuine consequence for U.S. interests in relation to strategic competition.
After 9/11, instability almost anywhere mattered to U.S. policymakers, for fear that it would be exploited by terrorists and other nonstate actors. Under a more transactional U.S. foreign policy, the willingness of the United States to engage can no longer be assumed.
The indications are not encouraging. Climate change appears to be a forbidden phrase within the Trump administration, although that won’t curb its glaringly obvious effects. U.S. President Donald Trump moved quickly to withdraw the United States from the Paris Agreement once more, and he has done away with anything related to climate change across the U.S. government as a kind of political reflex. The administration is trying to dismantle the basic data collection and climate monitoring capability of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and undercut the ability of the Environmental Protection Agency to regulate greenhouse gases.
For the first time in many years, climate change wasn’t mentioned in the annual threat assessment prepared by the intelligence community. The administration has also moved to tear down USAID, which has long been integrated in climate adaptation programs abroad.
At a time when Washington is nominally concerned about China as a strategic competitor, the United States should be doing more, not less, to counter its growing influence across the Indo-Pacific. That means, for example, paying attention to the climate needs of countries in the Pacific that might be needed for access, basing, and overflight—or pre-positioning of military equipment and supplies.
As it happens, many countries in the Pacific, particularly low-lying island nations, are also extremely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. For many of them, climate change is the existential threat that animates their leaders—far more so than China. The United States should be prepared to work with countries in the Pacific on climate change concerns if it wants those partners to be both willing and able to support it on other matters. This is not just a political concern but a practical one, as a Pacific island country with a valuable port or airport might not be able to help the United States in a conflict scenario if its infrastructure has been damaged or destroyed by a cyclone or storm surge.
Fortunately, several of these countries have Compacts of Free Association with the United States, namely Micronesia, the Marshall Islands, and Palau. The Biden administration updated those agreements, which are now set to expire in 2043, and climate security cooperation was a key part of those updates.
However, China is putting forward a more compelling offer to countries across the Indo-Pacific, as illustrated recently by the Cook Islands, whose residents are citizens of New Zealand. The Cook Islands recently signed up for a “comprehensive strategic partnership” with China that included support for disaster preparedness, climate resilience, and infrastructure. The deal followed on the heels of China signing a security pact with the Solomon Islands in July 2023.
China’s Belt and Road Initiative has been criticized as a form of debt-trap diplomacy, but its focus on infrastructure development in places that are facing profound climate risks has an enduring appeal, at least in the face of no meaningful competing alternative from the West. The question now is whether the Trump administration will remain locked into its ideological blindness to climate realities—or if it will come to recognize that failure to assist the developing world in grappling with climate impacts and energy-related challenges poses real risks to U.S. interests.
China’s and Russia’s growing efforts to exploit the geophysical realities of a climate-changed world extend well past their immediate regions. For example, the dramatic decline in summer sea ice in the Arctic has opened that region to more commercial shipping traffic and an interest in controlling those emergent sea lanes. Both China and Russia recognize that a more accessible Arctic could enable them to deploy maritime assets there that could hold at risk the northern approaches to the U.S. homeland.
One challenge the U.S. government has faced is that there have been limited resources to enhance the U.S. offer to friends and allies with respect to climate security.
The Biden administration pledged to triple the financing available to support developing countries for both climate mitigation (to reduce emissions) and adaptation (to manage the consequences of climate change). That number was to increase to more than $11 billion by 2024, with $3 billion of that dedicated to adaptation programs. However, this $11 billion figure was only achieved through creative efforts to count existing commitments.
The recent U.N. climate conference in Azerbaijan, known as COP29, negotiated a new target for increasing finance from the developed world for developing countries, including both foreign assistance and private finance. The standing target was $100 billion per year, which developed countries very much struggled to meet.
The new pledge from COP29 was to increase the amount mobilized to $300 billion per year by 2035. This significant uptick in ambition still paled in comparison to the ask from developing countries for $1 trillion in climate financing per year, which is probably closer to what’s required, although questions remain about how much funding could be absorbed responsibly given existing disbursement and oversight mechanisms.
Rather than raising U.S. ambition to meet the moment, the Trump administration is trying to zero out international climate financing. While some disaster assistance funding may ultimately survive, the amounts are likely to be small.
One impact of inadequate support for other countries is more migration, which the Trump administration has identified as a top national security concern. Climate impacts, including extreme events and weather that is far hotter and drier than historical averages, have made it increasingly challenging for farmers in places such as Central America, the Sahel, and East Africa to make a living.
U.S. military installations are also exposed to climate risks, whether from hurricanes, fires, or floods, and the Defense Department has invested tens of billions of dollars to remediate weather damage to various military bases, including Tyndall Air Force Base in Florida, Offutt Air Force Base in Nebraska, and Camp Lejeune in North Carolina.
Those risks won’t go away even if the department cuts funding for installation resilience and related programs. Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has signaled that may not ultimately happen, but in the administration’s zeal to cut budgets and eviscerate climate-related programs, there is a risk that core investments in resilience won’t be made, even at the Pentagon.
The U.S. military has also been called on increasingly to provide defense support to civilian authorities. For example, from fiscal year 2016 to 2021, the number of personnel days the National Guard dedicated to firefighting grew from 14,000 to more than 176,000. Nearly 2,000 members of the California National Guard assisted in responding to the recent fires in and around Los Angeles.
Because this is an area where civilian authorities are supposed to take the lead, the Defense Department has a secondary role. However, it is the only institution that possesses the unique lift capabilities to get equipment to hazard areas and the standing numbers of disciplined service members who can distribute aid in an emergency.
Without more robust federal and state investments in climate resilience and adaptation, the United States will likely have to spend hundreds of billions of dollars in post-disaster cleanup and recovery. The price tag for damage from the Los Angeles fires is estimated to be more than $250 billion. Hurricane Helene’s damage estimate was nearly $60 billion.
The field of climate and security must evolve to remain relevant. Climate security professionals have begun responding to these dynamics by building consideration of critical minerals and the clean energy transition into their analyses. This reflects growing bipartisan concern over China’s dominant position in the minerals sector and with respect to next-generation energy technologies.
But more must be done. Having focused intently on these issues during our years serving in the Office of the Secretary of Defense, we believe that the countries that lean into the energy transition and support climate resilience at home and abroad will gain immense economic and geostrategic advantages over those that do not.
Next-generation clean energy technologies pose enormous opportunities for profit and jobs over the next few decades, and it is this national wealth that underwrites the ability of countries to maintain large, capable militaries. Without changes to U.S. policy, China is likely to be better positioned than the United States to reap the benefits of the global shift toward the clean energy economy.
However, most of the growth in that sector hasn’t happened yet, and the United States under the Biden administration made a vigorous play to build up its capabilities in this area through the Inflation Reduction Act, the CHIPS and Science Act, and related legislative initiatives.
It is now up to the Trump administration to determine whether it wants to harvest the benefits of these programs, which, incidentally, will disproportionately benefit politically conservative states, or squander the ability to compete with China, politically, economically, or technologically.
The field of climate security has come a long way, emerging from the shadow of 9/11 to build a community of scholarship and practice. But times have changed, and the field needs to change with them.
