Intensifying global changes, caused by human activity, are dramatically affecting human and ecological communities around the world. The individual and collective impacts of worsening floods, wildfires, and deforestation; melting glacial ice and rising seas; and emerging infectious diseases all exacerbate biodiversity loss and threaten human health, economic development, and poverty alleviation, especially for already vulnerable populations [The White House, 2022].
In recent decades, researchers, policymakers, and the public have further recognized that national security and the stability of civil society are tightly tied to the planet’s health. As the implications of global change for national security are better understood, they are increasingly being acknowledged in government policy and guidance.
In January 2021, for example, President Biden’s week 1 Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad instructed the Department of Defense (DOD), the Department of Homeland Security (DHS), and the Office of the Director of National Intelligence to explore the implications of climate change for their respective missions. This policy action recognized how climate change exacerbates existing security challenges, impedes efforts to manage them, and requires dedicated, urgent action and sustained investment to build resilience [North Atlantic Treaty Organization, 2022].
The United Nations recognizes a triple planetary crisis that includes biodiversity loss and pollution in addition to climate change.
Climate change is not the only environmental threat to national security. For example, the United Nations recognizes a triple planetary crisis that includes biodiversity loss and pollution in addition to climate change. Moreover, the 2022 U.S. National Security Strategy states explicitly that national security cannot be isolated from its environmental context, noting the need to support environmental protection and that biodiversity is “vital to food security, clean air and water, a stable climate, and health and wellbeing.”
The global science enterprise has a central role to play in supporting efforts to manage the national security risks posed by global change. Only recently have security practitioners and global change researchers started breaking out of their silos to work together, in part because of the growing evidence of the environmental basis of diverse security challenges.
We contend that these groups must give greater priority to understanding the pathways by which global change adversely affects social, economic, political, and ecological systems.
Expanding the role of Earth system science in characterizing the risk landscape, through efforts of both scientific and national security experts, should also be a high priority. Insights gained from this approach will help identify opportunities to mitigate emerging security risks before they manifest. These opportunities may include improving preparedness for hazards and protecting natural resources that support sustainable livelihoods [National Science Foundation, 2021].
Appropriations by the U.S. Congress in the fiscal year 2023 budget for DOD and DHS accounted for more than half of the federal government’s $1.7 trillion in discretionary spending. This amount underscores the high priority the United States places on security. Interventions developed through coordination between security practitioners and global change researchers have the potential to build long-term resilience and minimize financial risks by reducing the demands placed on defense and national security infrastructure. Below, we identify five research endeavors to bolster national security and promote planetary and human well-being.
Enhance Earth Monitoring Systems
Science, defense, and intelligence agencies can better coordinate their efforts to capitalize on space-based remote sensing and generate a more integrated understanding of security-relevant global change processes.
The proliferation of space-based sensors and the expansion of remote sensing are augmenting opportunities to collect information about global change processes and the behaviors of human populations. However, science, defense, and intelligence agencies can better coordinate their efforts to capitalize on these capabilities and generate a more integrated, systems-level understanding of security-relevant global change processes.
A few programs are already monitoring rapidly changing Arctic conditions, with far-reaching security implications. For example, the Global Terrestrial Network for Permafrost has tracked changes in permafrost for more than 20 years, providing insights into risks to infrastructure and human mobility as it thaws. NASA and DOD’s Meteorological Satellite Program has been monitoring Arctic sea ice, offering crucial views of previously unnavigable waters that the security community can use to anticipate changes in maritime traffic and resource extraction and develop contingencies.
However, monitoring gaps remain for many aspects of global change. Enhancing surveillance of biophysical changes in the Arctic, such as the retreat of winter sea ice, could warn us about security threats in other parts of the world. For example, changes in the Arctic are a leading indicator of the pace of global climate change. They also have the potential to affect global shipping routes.
Looking beyond the Arctic, disruptions related to water (e.g., drought and floods), soils, fisheries, and other critical natural resources can influence people’s behavior, leading to involuntary displacements or damaging resource use practices. The risk of negative outcomes is higher for vulnerable populations, where elevated resource dependency, political marginalization, and social inequities exacerbate the impacts of environmental change and raise the potential for conflict [Ide et al., 2020]. An illustrative case in point is the resource competition and depressed economic opportunities that have fueled maritime piracy in the Gulf of Guinea, which interferes with subsistence fishers’ ability to secure food and livelihoods and has further destabilized the region [Broohm, 2021].
Remote sensing can be used to track the movements of pirate vessels and large distant water fleets that overexploit the region’s fish stocks. Still, social marginalization, inequality, and other aspects of human behavior are not currently observed in ways that can inform security decisions. In this and other cases, Earth observations should be enhanced to better meet security needs by advancing the capacity to observe human-environment interactions at the population level while maintaining the privacy of individuals.
For example, observations of poaching and illicit logging activities in areas with limited health care capacity would help target management actions. These actions not only would help reduce environmental harms but would also lower the risks of emergent diseases that can destabilize communities and contribute to migration. Regularly observing these and other human-environment connections on larger scales, including in areas prioritized by the U.S. Department of State, would yield vital information for security priorities.
Develop Holistic Knowledge Systems
Siloing among research disciplines and practitioners is a persistent limitation in applying science to security challenges.
Siloing among research disciplines and practitioners—especially in physical, biological, health, social, security, and political sciences—is a persistent limitation in applying science to security challenges. It hinders opportunities for discovery afforded by integrating knowledge and often excludes practitioners with relevant expertise and lived experience.
Border security, migration, and human trafficking are a few security issues that would benefit from transdisciplinary approaches. Although these challenges are high priorities for many nations, their underlying environmental drivers are usually overlooked. For example, migration from Africa to the European Union has been linked to the decline of African coastal fisheries due to overfishing, climate change, and pollution [Belhabib et al., 2019]. Similarly, pressure from migrants arriving at the U.S. southern border has been partly linked to climate-fueled agricultural losses in Central America that have eroded rural livelihoods [de San Miguel et al., 2021]. These phenomena are exacerbated by other drivers of human vulnerability, such as poverty, corruption, conflict, and weak governance institutions [Alpízar et al., 2020].
Diagnosing the multidimensional causes of such security challenges requires collaboration among diverse fields of knowledge and ways of knowing. Understanding ecosystem health and changes in the physical environment is crucial, as is understanding the social dynamics and political and geopolitical dimensions governing human responses.
Experts across public policy, Earth science, and other disciplines have called for developing holistic and inclusive knowledge systems with respect to sustainability. These systems serve as mechanisms “to motivate and harness relevant research and development work in support of problem-solving and decision-making activities” [Cash et al., 2003, p. 8090].
In 2022, the White House released guidance to federal agencies recognizing Indigenous Knowledges as knowledge systems that contribute to the “scientific, technical, social, and economic advancements of the United States,” including the understanding of climate change, sustainability, and natural resource management. And the global health and environment communities have advanced the One Health and planetary health frameworks, which emphasize the interconnectedness of human, animal, and environmental health and advocate for integrated and holistic approaches to promote both human and ecological well-being.
We can build on the examples of such models to benefit national security by enhancing the incentives for collaboration across knowledge systems and by developing ambitious, diverse knowledge networks capable of capturing the inherent complexity in monitoring, experimentation, modeling, and other aspects of needed global change and security research.
Improve Reporting of Nature-Security Links
Humanitarian crises are often tied to environmental disruptions.
Humanitarian crises are often tied to environmental disruptions. For example, drought- or pollution-induced water shortages or the collapse of fisheries can erode food security and undermine livelihoods, whereas coastal wetland degradation can leave communities vulnerable to storms. Hence, maintaining Earth’s ecosystems and the benefits they provide offers dividends for human well-being and security.
Strengthening and communicating the evidence base for how nature undergirds security are important in designing and implementing interventions, such as nature-based solutions that sustain ecosystems and enhance social and economic benefits.
The capacity to report regularly on how nature contributes to the economy and society and on how changes in this connection are relevant for security is highly valuable. Such reporting systems are currently in development: For example, many countries are establishing natural capital accounts to track changes in how nature supports food systems, water provision, property values, storm risk reduction, and other aspects relevant to both the economy and national security.
In 2023, the United States published a strategy to expand natural capital accounting in the federal government, accompanied by a commitment to undertake the first U.S. National Nature Assessment (NNA). The NNA aims to complement both the U.S. National Climate Assessment and international assessments conducted under the auspices of the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services, synthesizing the status and trends of U.S. lands, waters, and wildlife and their connection to national security and other societal benefits.
The success of this critical national assessment, expected for release in 2026, will depend on the collaboration between the scientific and security communities beyond traditional silos. Efforts on this front, particularly over the next few years, could significantly improve our ability to diagnose relationships between the environment and security and to prioritize effective interventions where needed.
Enhance Strategic Foresight Capacity
Understanding how strategically important aspects of the Earth system, such as biological diversity, nutrient cycling, and the hydrologic cycle, evolve over time and how they may be affected by policy actions is crucial for successfully managing environmentally influenced security challenges. To this end, researchers and decisionmakers are increasingly applying strategic foresight—a toolbox for exploring alternative possible futures—to anticipate likely outcomes and develop appropriate responses.
For example, the Earth system modeling community has long developed scenarios to project future environmental change and explore alternative pathways through which global demographic, economic, technological, and policy shifts could unfold. These scenarios can also enable a more focused exploration of specific risks or opportunities, such as how major failures in the world’s agricultural breadbaskets could sharply affect global food prices and security [Lunt et al., 2016].
Meanwhile, techniques such as vulnerability analysis, which is used to explore the conditions under which systems like water, food, and energy could fail, can help identify potential national security threats for intervention.
Rapid advancements in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other data analytic techniques are enhancing strategic foresight capabilities.
Rapid advancements in machine learning, artificial intelligence, and other data analytic techniques are enhancing strategic foresight capabilities. Such methods can improve understanding of local disaster impacts, refine climate change projections, and improve pattern recognition, such as in land use change and animal identification and movement. To capitalize on these data analytic techniques fully, researchers and security analysts must be able to access high-quality data and models that skillfully integrate information on environmental, social, economic, and cultural factors relevant to security.
Here again, though, we confront the persistent challenges of siloed research because most existing tools for strategic foresight fail to integrate all aspects of exploring future conditions at the environment-security nexus. Documenting the lived experiences of populations exposed to global change is critical for building more comprehensive and culturally relevant data models. For example, although agent-based models are widely used in both sustainability and security studies, adding parameters to such models to simulate the dynamics of human responses to global change requires an understanding of the social, economic, cultural, and behavioral characteristics of the populations being simulated [Natalini et al., 2019].
Increase Science Coproduction and Translation
Scientists and security decisionmakers working together to coproduce research and translate findings is critical for converting scientific discovery into actions that bolster security.
Information alone does not necessarily lead to actionable security insights. In fact, data and analyses that are poorly aligned to decisionmakers’ needs can undermine the effectiveness of interventions they develop. Scientists and security decisionmakers working together to coproduce research and translate findings is critical for converting scientific discovery into actions that bolster security.
This coproduction should involve developing research questions with the security community and accelerating the pace at which scientific innovation is translated into usable products and decision support tools. Federal investments can facilitate coproduction by creating programs, grants, or other avenues by which the scientific and security communities have incentives to collaborate. Such efforts will enable greater and more immediate scrutiny of security-relevant scientific findings, as well as more robust evidence-based policy interventions.
Translating science for security requires ensuring that data collection and analysis are responsive to needs of decisionmakers and practitioners. The U.S. Agency for International Development’s Famine Early Warning Systems Network, for example, not only provides access to a range of relevant data sources for understanding famine risk [McNally et al., 2017] but also analyzes those data for users to identify priority regions of concern and underlying drivers of food insecurity. This prioritization is instrumental in helping policymakers triage interventions through parallel and compounding global crises.
The growing power of computing and data analytics is accelerating the deployment of such tools. However, the quality and robustness of the information they provide must be carefully managed. Developing a set of best practices for the development and dissemination of knowledge, data, and tools in the interest of national security can aid in creating decision-ready science, improving the accessibility of information, avoiding duplication of efforts, and addressing the information needs of the security community. For example, establishing criteria for identifying high-priority environmental data for specific security challenges and increasing interoperability among disparate data types could enhance data stewardship and knowledge discovery for national security applications.
Toward Unity Among the Earth System and Security Sciences
Continuing human impacts on the planet will almost certainly tighten the relationship between Earth system stress and human and national security.
Continuing human impacts on the planet will almost certainly tighten the relationship between Earth system stress and human and national security. In the meantime, critical pathways can strengthen security and peace building through enhanced environmental stewardship.
As outlined here, many opportunities exist for innovative, novel, and transdisciplinary research that can inform actions to promote human and ecological well-being. In the United States, these opportunities should engage a range of federal agencies involved in intelligence, defense, homeland security, and global change science, as well as academic institutions and organizations in the nonprofit and private sectors. This breadth reflects the need for diverse, collaborative knowledge networks to effect change.
Building such networks requires substantial coordination and investment to integrate physical and social sciences, connect the scientific community with security practitioners and policymakers, and maximize the impact and benefits of research efforts. The payoff will be more robust security science and the evidence base needed for policy interventions that influence people’s lives and livelihoods for the better.
References
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Author Information
Benjamin L. Preston ([email protected]), RAND, Santa Monica, Calif.; Hila Levy, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington, D.C.; Heather Tallis, University of California, Santa Cruz; Rod Schoonover, The Ecosecurity Council, Washington, D.C.; and Jane Lubchenco, White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington, D.C.