A report released by the German federal government today highlights growing global climate security risks, including international political destabilization, threats to food security, conflicts over resources like water and even the potential for unregulated geoengineering projects.
“The climate crisis is the greatest security threat of our day and age,” German foreign minister Annalena Baerbock said in a statement as the report was released. “Prolonged droughts, severe flooding, dangerous storms and devastating crop failures already cause damage running into the billions each year and claim thousands of lives.”
“Once-in-a-century” disasters are now striking year after year, showing that the climate crisis is real, and that “it destabilizes societies, exacerbates conflicts over land, water and food, creates new flashpoints and increases migration, including to Europe,” she said.
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Thinking about climate is central to Germany’s national security strategy, she said, and will be “integral” to discussions at the upcoming Munich Security Conference, where climate-conscious European security officials will meet their United States counterparts for the first time since American voters elected a president who has rejected climate change as a hoax.
The National Interdisciplinary Climate Risk Assessment was prepared by an independent consortium of think tanks and climate research institutes, as well as the German Federal Intelligence Service. Germany is only the second country worldwide, following the United States, to have commissioned a systematic climate and security study.
U.S. Report Serves as Model
The 2022 U.S. Framework for Climate Resilience and Security recognized that the “climate crisis poses existential threats to American lives and interests … with impacts that erode political, military, economic, environmental, and social stability.”
The Trump administration has already stepped back from identifying climate change as a national security issue by revoking the Biden Administration’s Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, Erin Sikorski, director of The Center for Climate and Security, a Washington, D.C. think tank, wrote in a January 21 blog post. Refusing to acknowledge climate risks “creates a blind spot for US foreign and security policy and ignores years of bipartisan support in Congress for addressing climate security risks,” she wrote.
The Biden-era report was notable, and served as a kick-off for Germany to do something similar, said report co-author Fanny Thornton, who studies the shifting geopolitics arising with climate change risks as leader of the GeoClimRisk project at the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research.
She said the new report is an outcome of Germany’s National Security Strategy 2023, which includes sustainability and climate change as one of its three main pillars. She sai
