Climate Change Security Risks and Opportunities

Interconnection and Cooperation
 

Consideration of climate mitigation and adaptation through the lens of national security in the United States cannot be done in a vacuum. From China’s dominance of the rare earth minerals market that provides them with a near monopoly in solar panel manufacturing to Europe’s action against Russian aggression in Ukraine that is creating energy and supply chain shortages, national energy security depends on understanding and responding to signals and crises in the global market.1 Many of the factors that contribute to national security—such as secure sources of water, food, and energy; effective and resilient supply chains; and environmental justice—are interlinked. For example, low water levels can increase the cost of agricultural production, impact energy generation through hydropower, interfere with cooling for manufacturing and petrochemical processes, and disrupt national shipping corridors.2 Localized direct impacts of climate change often indirectly impact global supply chains, creating additional vulnerabilities for underresourced populations across the globe. Effectively addressing climate change requires adopting a systems-level view.

These interconnections also create barriers to cooperation. In the Colorado River Basin, water sources and uses are regulated by multiple levels of government, creating a complex system with inefficient management and requiring cooperation across states. Competing priorities in federal regulations can also exacerbate existing issues. For instance, the Endangered Species Act may require certain instream flow levels to protect wildlife that depend on those waters, while irrigation districts have obligations to deliver water to their members, and federal reservoirs are subject to management regimes that do not prioritize storage and conservation.3 Along the Gulf Coast, several agencies are actively collaborating on climate data generation, but no one agency has the authority to produce and validate these data.4 Reducing friction between agencies and more clearly defining responsibilities will be crucial for better collaboration.
 

Endnotes

• 1Robert Y. Shum, “Heliopolitics: The International Political Economy of Solar Supply Chains,” Energy Strategy Reviews 26 (November 2019): 100390; Anna Holzmann and Max J. Zenglein, “China’s Leverage of Industrial Policy to Absorb Global Value Chains in Emerging Industries,” in Economic and Social Upgrading in Global Value Chains (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2022), 413–436; and Martin Nerlinger and Sebastian Utz, “The Impact of the Russia-Ukraine Conflict on the Green Energy Transition–A Capital Market Perspective,” Swiss Finance Institute Research Paper No. 22-49 (May 8, 2022).
• 2Christopher A. Scott, Tamee R. Albrecht, Rafael De Grenade, Adriana Zuniga-Teran, Robert G. Varady, and Bhuwan Thapa, “Water Security and the Pursuit of Food, Energy, and Earth Systems Resilience,” Water International 43 (8) (2018): 1055–1074.
• 3The Endangered Species Act as Amended by Public Law 97-304 (the Endangered Species Act Amendments of 1982) (Washington, D.C.: U.S. GPO, 1983); and Frank A. Ward and James F. Booker, “Economic Costs and Benefits of Instream Flow Protection for Endangered Species in an International Basin,” Journal of the American Water Resources Association 39 (2) (2003): 427–440.
• 4Timothy Andrew Joyner and Ryan Orgera, “Climate Change Hazard Mitigation and Disaster Policy in South Louisiana: Planning and Preparing for a ‘Slow Disaster,’” Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy 4 (3) (2013): 198–214; and Austin Becker, Satoshi Inoue, Martin Fischer, and Ben Schwegler, “Climate Change Impacts on International Seaports: Knowledge, Perceptions, and Planning Efforts among Port Administrators,” Climatic Change 110 (1) (2012): 5–29.

Assessing Risk and Proactive Planning
 

Climate change requires accurate risk assessments, from the physical risk to infrastructure because of a lack of preventative maintenance to the financial risk of adopting new technologies or shifting to new crops. A recurring theme from the expert listening sessions was the difficulty of appropriately dispersing and apportioning risk. In the Colorado River Basin, agriculture contributes to 80 percent of water use.5 Advances in technology, including water recycling, desalination, and regenerative agriculture, could alleviate some of the strain on the water system. However, adopting these technologies requires farmers to take on risk.6 This risk is compounded by long growing cycles that create few opportunities for trial and error, have high start-up costs, and are subject to an ever-changing regulatory space, leaving farmers hesitant to adapt today when better options might become available in subsequent years.7

Climate disasters can cause costly, severe, and long-lasting impacts, but the impetus for action is still minimal. For big infrastructure projects in the Gulf Coast, government subsidization of risk can backfire. Many important pieces of infrastructure, such as large ports, are considered “too big to fail” and thus continue to operate under the implicit promise of government intervention in case of climate disaster. If government subsidizes the risk, it disincentivizes forward planning and risk management, which potentially magnifies consequences for surrounding communities.8

Finally, considering risk through a national security lens requires understanding global energy policy and carefully balancing efforts to decarbonize with efforts to maintain energy security. As the world transitions to renewable energy, the United States must consider the national security implications of its dependence on other countries for necessary technologies and resources. Additionally, the U.S. workforce will be impacted by any energy transition. Environmental justice issues, such as taking jobs away from communities with limited economic opportunity, must be centered in strategic plans to avoid risk to individual workers and small communities.

Our listening session experts also cautioned that risk assessment requires specific and clear data that are not currently available. While big data has potential for climate forecasting, data quality problems persist.9 Regional data collection by universities and other research institutions can provide foundational data to help manage risk and adapt to climate impacts while also creating personal connections between scientists and local communities.

The benefits of data go beyond risk assessment and building community trust, however, and can also help with proactive planning. The importance of climate adaptation planning across all levels of government and industry emerged as a recurring theme during the listening sessions. From military bases to large infrastructure projects, climate adaptation planning not only yields better outcomes for the individual project but can create mindset shifts, educational opportunities, empowerment, and lines of stakeholder communication that can make future adaptation projects more successful.10

However, current barriers beyond accurate data make adaptation planning difficult. Federally funded projects often must contend with complex federal processes and bureaucracy, as well as shifting congressional priorities. For military installations, the prevalence of short-term budgets precludes multiyear funding for large, transformational infrastructure projects, complicating and frustrating the coordination of military base improvements with municipal and state projects and investments.11 The consequences of a lack of long-term plans are many, including inefficient use of money and continued reliance on procedures known to be ineffective or even harmful. The repetition of such harmful actions, such as dredging sediment to keep waterways active and disposing of it in places that increase coastal loss, is perpetuated because plans for alternative approaches have not yet been implemented.12
 

Endnotes

• 5Fengwei Hung, Kyongho Son, and Y. C. Ethan Yang, “Investigating Uncertainties in Human Adaptation and Their Impacts on Water Scarcity in the Colorado River Basin, United States,” Journal of Hydrology 612, pt. A (2022): 128015.
• 6John Fleck and Brad Udall, “Managing Colorado River Risk,” Science 372 (6545) (2021): 885, https://doi.org/10.1126/science.abj5498; and Joel Lisonbee, Elizabeth Ossowski, Meredith Muth, Veva Deheza, and Amanda Sheffield, “Preparing for Long-Term Drought and Aridification,” Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society 103 (3) (2022): E821–E827.
• 7P. L. Taylor, K. MacIlroy, R. Waskom, P. E. Cabot, M. Smith, A. Schempp, and B. Udall, “Every Ditch Is Different: Barriers and Opportunities for Collaboration for Agricultural Water Conservation and Security in the Colorado River Basin,” Journal of Soil and Water Conservation 74 (3) (2019): 281–295.
• 8Robin Kundis Craig, “Coastal Adaptation, Government-Subsidized Insurance, and Perverse Incentives to Stay,” Climatic Change 152 (2) (2019): 215–226.
• 9Thanos Papadopoulos and Maria Elisavet Balta, “Climate Change and Big Data Analytics: Challenges and Opportunities,” International Journal of Information Management 63 (2022): 102448.

• 10Austin Becker, Satoshi Inoue, Martin Fischer, and Ben Schwegler, “Climate Change Impacts on International Seaports: Knowledge, Perceptions, and Planning Efforts among Port Administrators,” Climatic Change 110 (1) (2012): 5–29.
• 11Daniel White, “The National Security Implications of Climate Change,” Journal of International Affairs 73 (1) (2019): 321–330.
• 12Ashley Carse and Joshua A. Lewis, “New Horizons for Dredging Research: The Ecology and Politics of Harbor Deepening in the Southeastern United States,” Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Water 7 (6) (2020): e1485.