Biden’s Intelligence Community Must Focus On Climate Crisis

President Elect Biden has signaled that he is going to treat the climate crisis as a national security issue by appointing John Kerry as his Special Envoy for Climate and making him a member of the National Security Council. For Kerry to succeed, he will need intelligence. The climate crisis is a national security issue and the Intelligence Community (IC) must respond with the same focus and investments it makes into other national security issues.

Not only does climate change create significant security threats to America through multiplying global instability, it is also a major component of the great power competition with China and Russia. The incoming Biden administration can do much to address climate change as a national security issue. An important first step would be to make changes in the IC so it has the capabilities and focus to help policy makers preserve American interests.

One war appears to have started and been fought over climate change in Darfur, Sudan. UN Secretary General Ban-Ki Moon labeled the conflict as such because water scarcity played such an important role in causing that conflict. The UN is not alone in seeing the threat. A past Quadrennial Defense Review noted that the effects of climate change “…are threat multipliers that will aggravate stressors abroad such as poverty, environmental degradation, political instability, and social tensions – conditions that can enable terrorist activity and other forms of violence.” Recent testimony by the Office of the Director of National Intelligence noted implications of climate change ranging from effects on the stability of countries to competition over resources to human migration.

Climate change plays a central role in the great power competitions unfolding between America, China and Russia. The melting of the polar icecaps has already led the three to jockey for position for trade and military usage of the Arctic. Changing weather patterns and rising sea levels will require new infrastructure that can either be filled by China’s Belt and Road Initiative or Western approaches. International responses to climate change, such as China’s goal to achieve carbon neutrality by 2060, are now part of a great power information competition to attract the hearts and minds of people around the world.

The threats from the climate crisis are significant and much needs to be done. One place to start is ensuring that our nation’s decision makers have the intelligence they need to make decisions. Today, we are not doing enough. A recent congressional report on competition with China points out that “[t]he Intelligence Community places insufficient emphasis and focus on “soft,” often interconnected long-term national security threats, such as infectious diseases of pandemic potential and climate change…”

Previous attempts by the IC to address the geopolitical aspects of climate change have been shut down. The CIA set up the Measurements of Earth Data for Environmental Analysis (MEDEA) program in the 1990s. It provided scientists with security clearances and allowed them to access classified information, such as historical satellite imagery, to support their climate change research. The CIA also set up a Center on Climate Change and National Security, which studied just what it said it would. Both of these offices were closed years ago, although the threats posed by climate change have only grown.

The Intelligence Community’s mission, in its own words, is to “collect, analyze and deliver foreign intelligence information to America’s leaders so they can make sound decisions.” To carry out its mission, the IC must provide climate change intelligence, whether it’s to a president who must make a decision on environmental policy, a diplomat who must negotiate international agreements, or a war planner who must determine how to preposition troops for potential future conflicts.

To do this the IC must develop several capabilities to address the geopolitical consequences of climate change.

First, the IC must double down on efforts to use open source information, work with non-governmental organizations and share information like the aforementioned MEDEA program once did.

Second, because there is so much open source information and it differs so radically from traditional intelligence reporting, the IC will need to continue on its path of incorporating AI and data science techniques so that analysts can understand the wide-scale change over time caused by climate change and thereby forecast potential geopolitical effects.

Third, the IC requires new expertise and new public private partnerships. The CIA and other agencies need to hire cadres of environmental scientists and experts. New partnerships need to be formed with global organizations focused on climate change data collection and science. Doing so will require that the IC works hard to rebuild trust after years of bad perception by some of the public.

Of course, there will still be secrets that will need to be collected and analyzed. For example, the Chinese Communist Party regularly withholds or changes political, social and economic data. To understand climate change’s effects on China or the party’s true plans, the IC will need to use traditional secret information collection approaches. In other cases, the IC may need to devote classified resources, such as imagery satellites or submarine data collection, to collecting climate change data which can contribute to understanding the details and outcomes of climate change.

Finally, a sign of the Intelligence Community’s seriousness would be to assign an executive agent and create a mission center devoted to climate change. While it may seem that the intelligence community may not have the mindset for such a public mission, one option to consider is the National Geospatial Intelligence Agency (NGA). NGA’s focus on global imagery, geospatial datasets and mapping, as well as its comfort with working with open source information, the academy and the private sector, make it a good candidate. For example, NGA led a project with the National Science Foundation, the University of Minnesota and ESRI to map the arctic and then released that digital elevation map (DEM) to the public.

President Elect Biden, Special Envoy Kerry and the rest of the US government need the right intelligence to make the right decisions in a world confronting a climate crisis. The IC must carry out its duty to provide this intelligence.

Anthony Vinci, former associate director and chief technology officer of NGA, is an adjunct senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS).