Last April, Congress directed the National Intelligence Council to issue the first ever National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on climate change. Expected to be completed in May, the NIE is a comprehensive analysis of national security threats prepared in concert by all 16 branches of the federal intelligence and military establishment. How much if any of the report will be released to the public is unknown.

Though Congressional Republicans opposed it, the commissioning of the NIE was supported by prominent members of the military and intelligence communities, including high-level officials appointed by President Bush. In a letter leaked to the Washington Post, Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell wrote that it was “entirely appropriate for the National Intelligence Council [NIC] to prepare an assessment on the geopolitical and security implications of global climate change.”


The climate NIE is the most visible evidence of growing concern in the defense and intelligence communities about global warming’s consequences to international stability. “It’s very clear, especially when you start looking at future projections, that climate change is going to have serious national security implications,” said Sharon Burke, a veteran of two decades in Washington working on national security issues. In November, the Center for New American Security, a Washington-based think tank where Burke is now a senior fellow on energy policy, joined the Center for Strategic and International Studies in publishing The Age of Consequences: The Foreign Policy and National Security Implications of Climate Change. This, to date, is the most comprehensive study of climate change and American regional security interests.

Its panel of contributors, including a former CIA director, found that, “left unaddressed, climate change may come to represent as great or a greater foreign policy and national security problem” than the war on terror, the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, energy security, and current economic instability. The catalog of security implications cited by The Age of Consequences and other recent studies is too long to recite, but chief concerns include massive population migrations and resulting political destabilization, permanent loss of arable land, and multiple, concurrent wars over resources, particularly water.