NATO War-Games Climate Collapse

It’s the 11th hour for countries to respond to irreversible climate change, experts agreed at the fourth annual Montréal Climate Security Summit — mere days after the city broke another seasonal heat record. The gathering, co-hosted and co-organized by the NATO Centre of Excellence (CCASCOE) and the Conference of Defence Associations (CDA) Institute, a Canadian defense and security think tank, brought together 280 attendees at the Palais des Congrès on Oct. 8-9 to war-game climate change doctrine, strategy and procurement priorities for the world’s largest military alliance. 

The impacts are varied. On the ground, military bases, especially in remote regions, are vulnerable to extreme weather and eroding coastlines. In the sky, climate chaos threatens satellites with signal failure. Despite decades of warnings from scientists, defense actors describe the national security sector’s engagement with climate change science as “immature.” And with militaries responsible for approximately 5.5% of the world’s greenhouse emissions, inaction is deepening existential risk and increasing calls from the scientific community for arms control and conflict prevention. 

“We view climate change as a transnational challenge alongside terrorism and uneven global demographic change,” said Lt. Gen. Peter Scott of the Allied Joint Force Command in Naples, adding that rearmament must strike a “balance between the correct capability, the speed of acquisition and protecting our planet.”

“There are now hardly any credible projections of security risk that do not place climate security among the most pressing issues of our generation,” he said, emphasizing increasing civil-military collaboration through NATO’s Science for Peace and Security program. 

As the alliance looks toward the Arctic, the polar region is warming four times faster than anywhere else on the planet. Spring cyclones are intensifying and rates of warming, rainfall and ocean acidification are even faster than previously predicted. For Canada’s Department of Defense, mitigation means pursuing low-carbon fuels and developing decarbonization plans for all fleets by 2027, with 80% of emissions coming from aircraft, 19% from marine vessels and 1% from land vehicles.

“Defending the Arctic mustn’t come at the expense of the very environment we’re actually trying to protect,” said Canada’s Minister of National Defence David McGuinty, describing protecting nature as a form of deterrence. “In the end, something is only worth defending if we can ensure there will always be something left to defend.”

Just two days earlier, Canada confirmed the purchase from the U.S. of F-35 fighter jets, which have been deemed “pipelines in the sky” for emitting more carbon emissions in a single flight than a typical car emits in a year.

A critical moment on Arctic environmental protection passed in May 2019, when former U.S. Secretary of State and CIA director Mike Pompeo refused to sign an Arctic Council joint statement to prevent rapidly melting ice — unless all mention of climate change was scrubbed. A month later, Canada had declared a national climate emergency. Republicans in the U.S. have been nailing the coffin shut ever since, and security actors are increasingly “flying blind” on climate intelligence. 

When the U.S. withdrew from the Paris Agreement, 91 social science and climate-related studies by the Pentagon were halted. The Pentagon’s climate change team, brought in under President Joe Biden, was axed in the spring. Polar research at the U.S. Arctic Research Commission and the Wilson Center are also imperiled. Reviving cuts to NASA studies from his first term, Trump again threatened to cut the agency’s $25 billion funding by a quarter, endangering satellite programs including carbon dioxide monitoring — tipping the public institute deeper toward privatization. A recent scandalous Energy Department report denied the impacts of climate change on the country, even as Pentagon findings previously warned that nearly half of all U.S. military sites are threatened by climate change. In Montréal, CCASCOE is “compiling and preserving climate data” and calling for “equitable access to data,” but experts avoided discussing the national security impacts of Republican anti-science policies and cuts to public research.

“We’re in a really dangerous moment right now for climate security, where the gap between the threat from climate change and our preparedness is growing,” said Erin Sikorsky, national director at the Washington-based International Military Council on Climate and Security, which is jointly run by the U.S. Council on Strategic Risks and institutes in France and the Netherlands.

“The institutions that we’ve designed for the national security community are state-centric. We still have a tough time, when discussing security, at being willing to make the comparison between heat deaths, for example, and global terrorism,” she told Truthdig. “Where we make our security investments, where we choose to put our attention — is it commensurate with the threat?”

The U.S. military is the world’s single largest institutional greenhouse gas polluter, and accounts for over 60% of NATO’s total spending. This is undermining a sustainable future, the United Nations Office for Disarmament Affairs has warned. The World Economic Forum’s latest Global Risks Report finds that short-lived carbon pollutants, like black carbon from burning fuels, are increasing and responsible for up to 45% of near-term global warming

Even as a core NATO member undermines defense by slashing climate-related studies and institutes, scientists are demanding greater accountability from military actors. Francesco Corvaro, climate envoy of the Italian government, urged defense actors to engage with the climate and peace initiative launched at last year’s climate change summit in Azerbaijan.

Renowned Ukrainian climatologist Svitlana Krakowska called for a mechanism to account for and report conflict-related emissions. “From a security perspective, the carbon budget is nothing less than a constraint for peaceful social functioning,” she said, urging international cooperation “at scale.”

“Peace is a climate policy, and ending hostilities reduces emissions and preserves the capacity of economies to invest in low-carbon transition. It is not merely a technical exercise, it is a moral imperative,” she said. 

Whether governments will adopt scientists’ call for peace as the best defense strategy, history will show.