“Water is a huge problem, as you all know, in Pakistan and Afghanistan. And Tajikistan has one of the greatest water potentials in the world. . . we have got a water resources task force now set up in the Department to examine how we can additionally help the countries of the area, and particularly Pakistan with the water issue.”
Special Envoy for Afghanistan and Pakistan Richard Holbrooke, Briefing on his Recent Trip to Afghanistan, Pakistan, Central Asia, Georgia and Germany, March 2, 2010.
Over the last several months, Dr. Jay Gulledge and I have been exploring the gap between climate science and security policy through our Lost in Translation project. The central tenet of our project and forthcoming report is that there are fundamental ways in which the climate science and policy communities operate that make it very difficult to get the right information they need from each other in order for the two communities to work together in a mutually supportive effort. And though the scope of our project focuses more narrowly on climate scientists and the decision makers who are increasingly using climate science to guide policy decisions, what we have come to notice through our exploration of the relationship between science and policy writ large is that, generally speaking, the foundation of our argument rings true for the broader science and policy communities. Indeed, there are specific aspects of climate science that make it unique compared to the broader gap between science and policy, but that scientists and policy makers tend to have difficulty working together is not an unfamiliar claim.
With that said, over the last several weeks we have met with folks who actually confound this paradigm and facilitate collaboration between the two communities. I wrote last week on the blog that we were on travel in Colorado where we visited with officials at U.S. Northern Command and the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. During our visit we met with folks who have demonstrated that there are indeed strong relationships between scientists and decision makers at these places, relationships that cross this gap between the science and policy communities, in support of addressing serious national security challenges.
The Department of Homeland Security released its inaugural Quadrennial Homeland Security Review (QHSR) last week. According to the report, the QHSR will "Describe more comprehensively the Nation’s homeland security interests, identify more clearly the critical homeland security missions, and define more completely a strategic approach to those missions by laying out the principal goals, essential objectives, and key strategic outcomes necessary for that strategic approach to succeed."
I thought it might be useful to pullout a few of the natural security-related statements from the review. Perhaps most importantly, the QHSR describes today’s security environment and includes long-term trends linked to energy security and climate change that could threaten American interests:
Dependence on fossil fuels and the threat of global climate change that can open the United States to disruptions and manipulations in energy supplies and to changes in our natural environment on an unprecedented scale. Climate change is expected to increase the severity and frequency of weather-related hazards, which could, in turn, result in social and political destabilization, international conflict, or mass migrations. (p. 7)
Indeed, recognizing that climate change is a long-term trend that could threaten American interests should be kept in mind when reading Mission 5: Ensuring resilience to disasters:
The strategic aims and objectives for ensuring resilience to disasters are grounded in the four traditional elements of emergency management: hazard mitigation, enhanced preparedness, effective emergency response, and rapid recovery. Together, these elements will help create a Nation that understands the hazards and risks we face, is prepared for disasters, and can withstand and rapidly and effectively recover from the disruptions they cause. (p. 59)
While the Department will likely need to consider climate change along all elements of the emergency management spectrum, integrating climate change into its hazard mitigation and enhanced preparedness elements could prove to be the most beneficial. Indeed, as the Department strengthens its efforts to build local, state and federal capacity to respond to disasters and to mitigate disasters that could threaten communities, integrating how climate change will affect individual communities could help bolster that resilience and to help mitigate future risks.
With the Quadrennial Defense Review and the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review both describing current and future security environments that could be shaped by long-term trends associated with climate change, it will be interesting to see how the forthcoming National Security Strategy will integrate climate change into its assessment. As Christine Parthemore and I write in our working paper, “It is very likely that President Obama’s National Security Strategy will describe a more complicated national security environment, characterized by non-traditional threats and responses, with climate change explicitly identified in that context.” Indeed, the QDR and QHSR may just preview the National Security Strategy. We’ll see.
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) announced yesterday that it would reorganize its climate services so it can provide Americans with more information on how climate change could affect trends such as drought and sea level rise. As part of the reorganization, NOAA announced a new climate services website, http://www.climate.gov:
With the rapid rise in the development of Web technologies and climate services across NOAA, there has been an increasing need for greater collaboration regarding NOAA's online climate services. The drivers include the need to enhance NOAA's Web presence in response to customer requirements, emerging needs for improved decision-making capabilities across all sectors of society facing impacts from climate variability and change, and the importance of leveraging climate data and services to support research and public education. To address these needs, NOAA embarked upon an ambitious program to develop a NOAA Climate Services Portal (NCS Portal). Our goal is for the Portal to become the "go-to" website for NOAA's climate data, products, and services for all users.
I want to focus particularly on NOAA’s response to the “emerging needs for improved decision-making capabilities across all sectors of society facing impacts from climate variability and change.” Dr. Jay Gulledge and I have been exploring these emerging needs in our forthcoming Lost in Translation report. What is clear is that there is not a lack of data, but simply a lack of data that is useful to stakeholders who need the information presented in a form that can help them make decisions as they relate to the impacts of climate change.
I thought it would be super fun to spend a Wednesday night comparing the intelligence community’s threat assessment language on climate change from last year and this year (pdf links, both). It turned out to be more useful than I’d guessed it would be.
First, categorization. The 2009 assessment places energy and climate change under the umbrella topic of “Environmental Security,” along with global health and demographic changes. “Regional Impacts of Climate Change” is its very own section this year. (Energy is considered in the regional/country-specific sections, and is a sub-section under “The Changing Threat to the Global Economy.”) This likely just reflects the National Intelligence Council’s work in the past year to analyze specific regions with greater fidelity.
Next, placement. In 2009, the Environmental Security section was the last topic before the conclusion. In this year’s assessment, it is fourth-to-last. Take that, health challenges, state and non-state intelligence threats, and international organized crime!
On leadership: the 2009 assessment specifically discusses a U.S. leadership role in international climate diplomacy:
Multilateral policymaking on climate change is likely to be highly visible and a growing priority among traditional security affairs in the coming decades. We observe the United States is seen by the world as occupying a potentially pivotal leadership role between Europe, which is committed to long-term and dramatic reduction in carbon emissions, and a heterogeneous group of developing states wary of committing to greenhouse gas emissions reductions, which they believe would slow their economic growth. As effects of climate change begin to mount, the United States will come under increasing pressure to join the international community in setting meaningful long-term goals for emissions reductions, to reduce its own emissions, and to help others mitigate and adapt to climate change through technological progress and financial assistance.
The 2010 assessment points only to the climate-related leadership of India:
The President released his Fiscal Year (FY) 2011 budget yesterday alongside the 2010 Quadrennial Defense Review (QDR). (For a solid analysis on the budget and the QDR, check out my colleague and officemate Travis Sharp’s policy brief, Vision Meets Reality: 2010 QDR and 2011 Defense Budget.)
In last week’s State of the Union Address, President Obama’s message centered on the economy and creating new jobs in 2010. The president pointed specifically to fostering a new energy economy with investments in clean energy infrastructure and energy efficiency and innovation – investments that would generate new jobs for Americans while reducing our dependence on foreign oil and contributing to our national goals for mitigating climate change.
Not surprisingly, the president’s FY 2011 budget puts money behind these initiatives. To get a sense of what is in the budget to support these goals, the section on investments in scientific research from the budget overview is worth quoting in full:
Investment in science and basic research is critical to long-term economic growth. That’s why the Budget invests $61.6 billion in civilian research and development, an increase of $3.7 billion, a 6.4 percent increase, and an amount that continues the commitment to double funding for three key basic research agencies—the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, and the National Institute of Standards and Technology. This funding includes $1.8 billion for research in basic energy sciences to discover novel ways to produce, store, and use energy to address energy independence and climate change and $300 million for the Advanced Research Projects Agency-Energy, to accelerate game-changing energy technologies in need of rapid and flexible experimentation or engineering. (emphasis mine)
Interestingly, the president emphasizes through the budget the need to better understand climate change and the impacts that it could have on our economy, security and nation as a whole: “While climate policies are developed and investments in clean energy technologies are made, investments to understand the impacts of climate change are also crucial.” The budget outlines several possible consequences from climate change, including that “Coastal areas, floodplains, and water systems will all be affected by the changing climate, and it is vital that we understand the potential effects of climate change so businesses, farmers, ranchers, and the entire Nation can prepare for them now.” (This need to better understand the impacts of climate change and to translate those impacts into economic, political and social consequences is, in fact, the focus of our ongoing Lost in Translation project.) Nevertheless, it is important to note that the president is putting money behind the study of climate change: “That is why the Budget invests $2.6 billion to deepen our understanding of climate change and its impact.”
CSIS Senior Fellow and energy über-analyst Sarah Ladislaw released a short policy paper last week, “A Post-Copenhagen Pathway.” (Our colleague Dan covered CSIS’s related event, “Post Copenhagen Outlook” with Jonathan Pershing, for the blog last week.)
She breaks down the basics of the Copenhagen agreement’s agreed-to measures into about three pages. Next she explores the institutional barriers to a global agreement through the UN, including this morsel:
…the inclusive role of the UN process, which is excellent for giving a voice to all sorts of causes and considerations that deserve recognition and global attention, only serve to exacerbate the differences between developed and developing countries and raise expectations for an agreement to such a large extent that the perfect really becomes the enemy of the good. The management of the UN process has to be responsive to all of these outside concerns and promote transparency and fairness in the process, which makes leading effective negotiations nearly impossible. All of these challenges would be surmountable if it was clear that the vast majority of countries were really willing to compromise and move forward. The Copenhagen meeting, however, indicates that this is not necessarily the case.
Later, she outlines three possible futures for the process set out for this cycle of climate change negotiations: “Brazil, India, China and South Africa… decide to hold-fast with the developing country block in the UN and insist negotiations continue to take place under the UN process as planned”; “Support for the UN process wanes and major emitters choose another venue for working together”; or “Fragmented multilateralism prevails.”
Ladislaw emphasizes that the United States is not about to completely give up on climate negotiations through the UN, but does a great job of explaining the utility of the Major Economies Forum (MEF) and G20 for the purposes of emissions reductions negotiations. One of the best parts of this paper is a great table on page 7 that charts G20 members, which are MEF members, and each country’s contribution to world greenhouse gas emissions, which gives you a clear picture of what possibilities might lie in those arenas.
The author also poses just the right question, and I’d dare to say just the right answer: “So which alternative forum is the right one? The most obvious answer is: the one in which the most major players are willing to negotiate” (italics mine). A toast to this pragmatic approach. I’m not an adherent to any single international relations approach, especially for confronting mega-challenges such as climate change. Results matter most. Ladislaw did the heavy lifting for us all on breaking down post-Copenhagen results and issues into 10 pages. Give it a read – you’ll be glad you did.
A satellite image of South Cascade Glacier, Washington in the fall of 2006. This image was collected from the U.S. Geological Survey’s Global Fiducials Library, advertised as “a collaborative effort between Federal Civil Agencies, Academia, and the Intelligence Community.” (emphasis mine) On Monday, The New York Times reported that the CIA is reviving its partnership with climate scientists in an effort to share declassified intelligence photos of scientifically important sites that could help scientists' climate change research. The program is being revived after its predecessor MEDEA, Measurements for Earth Data for Environmental Assessment, had been discontinued under the previous administration. Photos archived in the Global Fiducial Library are made available in part because of the MEDEA program.
Photo: Courtesy of the U.S. Geological Survey.
If you put your ear up to the Oval Office and listen very carefully, you can hear the gentle sound of ocean waves lapping. That’s because the presidentially-mandated Interagency Ocean Policy Task Force (hereafter “the task force”) has just released its full report to supplement the interim report (pdf) already released in September. We have covered issues relating to the task force periodically on this blog, but I wanted to create a one-stop reference on the task force for you, dear readers.
President Obama authorized the task force on June 12 (pdf). It is an interagency effort, guided by the Council on Environmental Quality and consisting of representatives from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the Department of the Interior, the U.S. Coast Guard, the U.S. Navy, and other agencies. The task force was charged with “developing a recommendation for a national policy that ensures protection, maintenance, and restoration of oceans, our coasts and the Great Lakes. It will also recommend a framework for improved stewardship, and effective coastal and marine spatial planning.” (Note: though I hail from the greatest city in the country, I’m not going to focus on the Great Lakes here). To this end, task force members traveled the country and held a series of public meetings (pdf all) to gather information on ocean issues. These matters may appear to be solely the purview of environmental policy makers, but the world’s oceans raise major security issues for U.S. national security policy makers as well.
This week’s Reading Old Magazines returns to another topic I have been researching lately in conjunction with our Lost in Translation project and sparked by the recent news that the CIA will be standing up a Center for Climate Change and National Security: the nexus of national security and climate science. In a recent post I assessed some of the failures in imagination of an October 1995 op-ed in the Washington Times that argued against the Central Intelligence Agency playing any useful role in studying the implications of climate change. For today’s post I took a look at a March 16, 1998 U.S. News & World Report piece by Bruce B. Auster, “Enviro-intelligence: The CIA Goes Green,” which discussed the greening of the CIA and the opportunities afforded to the United States for using its intelligence assets to study the implications of climate change.
