Climate and Social Stress

de Assessing the Impact of Climate Change on Social and Political Stresses Committee, Board on Environmental Change and Society Staff, Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, National Research Council, Jo L. Husbands

In recent years, with the accumulation of scientific evidence indicating that the global climate is moving outside the bounds of past experience and can be expected to put new stresses on societies around the world, the U.S. intelligence and security communities have begun to examine a variety of plausible scenarios through which climate change might pose or alter security risks. As this study developed we focused our efforts in three specific ways. First, we focused on social and political stresses outside the United States because such stresses are the main focus of the intelligence community. Second, we concentrated on security risks that might arise from situations in which climate events (e.g., droughts, heat waves, or storms) have consequences that exceed the capacity of affected countries or populations to cope and respond. This focus led us to exclude, for example, climate events that might directly affect the ability of the U.S.^ military to conduct its missions or that might contribute directly to international competition or conflict (e.g., over sea lanes or natural resources in the Arctic). We also excluded the security implications of policies that countries might undertake to protect themselves from perceived threats of climate change (e.g., geoengineering to reduce global warming or buying foreign agricultural land to ensure domestic food supplies). These kinds of climate-security connections could prove highly significant and deserve further study and analysis. They could also interact with the connections that are our main focus; for example, an action such as buying foreign agricultural land might go almost unnoticed at first, only creating a crisis when the country where the land is located experiences a crop failure it cannot manage with imports.^ Third, we concentrated on the relatively near term by emphasizing climate-driven security risks that call for action by the intelligence community within the coming decade either to respond to security threats or to anticipate them. Although these choices of focus helped bound our study, they left it with some notable limitations.