 Kate Gai, I'm a senior research fellow with the Center for Climate and Security here in DC and was the principal investigator and chair of the panel that published this report, Security Threat Assessment of Global Climate Change. My PhD focuses on how great power conflict will interact with future climate change. So how we can expect great powers such as the US, China, Russia and other actors to respond to climate impacts when and if they start becoming more frequent and more intense. Climate change has been considered by the security community as a threat multiplier for many years at this point. It is a factor that is changing situations all across the world, making environments more strained, making resources more stressed. And because of that, and you know not to mention the sea level rise and a frequent extreme weather events that will come along with it and they're just getting more and more intense with each passing year. So the way the security community sees that is as a threat multiplier that's making existing threats on the ground that much more intense and that much more unpredictable and potentially dangerous for US security interests and frankly global security interests. So as climate change gets more you know part of daily life as its impacts really take hold across the world we're seeing things like food and water stress turn into famines, turn into massive migrations of people, turn into potential political and institutional collapse at a local level, potentially sparking conflict or violence between groups and regions where these effects are happening and of course leading to loss of life in many many places. So this report specifically looks at how future scenarios of warming might impact security environments, security institutions, and security infrastructure specifically. So we can understand you know as a security community what is the threat really like and how do we better analyze the difference in warming scenarios. The report is pretty seminal in that it looks at this future perspective threat assessment of warming which is something the intelligence community does all the time right and the security community is always tracking threats and trying to understand how they might evolve and how they might change. But you have a threat assessment of future climate change that's also you know open to the public. It's unclassified. It's here for all to look at is pretty seminal. So what the threat assessment finds is that frankly both scenarios of warming. So a scenario in which we reach about two degrees centigrade of average global warming above pre-industrial levels things aren't looking so great and we could reach that level by as soon as mid-century 2015 and what you see happening to security interests even at that relatively you know low level of warming remember we're at about one degree centigrade right now is that fragile regions are just incredibly destabilized and unfortunately fragile reasons of the world are hit first so that's places along the equator in Africa and the Middle East in Central America where you're seeing you know bad extreme weather very quickly rising temperatures desertification and drought and agricultural issues as well so at those kind of near-term scenarios of warming places we already are worried about in the world are getting a lot worse and a lot more dangerous and as that temperature increases over time those impacts don't stay confined to those parts of the world all parts of the world become affected and that was the other big finding of our report is that at those longer-term very high levels of warming there is no region of the world that's unaffected and all regions will face very high to potentially catastrophic threats that are are really putting the social fabric and the security institutions which we take for granted under risk I think and I think the security community that that put this report together thinks that the magnitude of the risks that climate change poses are so extreme that it really needs to be central to all levels of security planning within the US government and international security governments as well and so what we mean by that is first we need to mitigate the threat and we need to do as a society and as a globe everything we can to make sure that those high levels of warming that we we analyze never come to pass and that we quickly as a globe limit greenhouse gas emissions hopefully reach a net zero world net zero greenhouse gas emissions world as soon as possible so that's the first recommendation in the first way we think we can limit the security impacts which we describe in the report the second and third way that we really need to look at these impacts from a security community perspective is first we need to be climate-proofing everything we need to climate-proof the decisions we make we need to climate-proof the missions we take we need to climate-proof our infrastructure our energy systems all of these things because we know some of these impacts are already here and we need to limit the destruction that they can pose and can pose into the future so we need to climate-proof all levels of our life and then the third way that security community need to take this seriously is in its analysis right it can't climate change can no longer be a low priority issue on the sidelines of you know otherwise hard security conversations it is here and present and as I said multiplying threats in every element of security studies so the security community needs to take it seriously and needs to do the research and do the analysis and do the work much like we've begun across all elements of security policy well surprisingly or not surprisingly given what a force kind of the u.s. is as a leader in the world the u.s. security community has been one of the first to taking climate change seriously and has historically you know through the intelligence services through the military through the security forces understood very quickly that climate change could throw a lot of things into bad directions and so a lot of the people that are members of our panel that are here at our event today were within various administrations presidential administrations highlighting this as an issue that we need to pay attention to so the rest of the world actually looks to the as historically look to the u.s. as a leader on these issues now I think what we need to do is continue to develop that leadership we shouldn't be standing out of the international community as other countries wake up to the importance of climate impacts the u.s. needs to be leading that response and needs to be leading the climate security analysis for our own interests and for global security interests and so that's why we are as a security community always very happy when we see bipartisan efforts on Capitol Hill and in other places that is you know recognizing security impacts to our faces understanding that we need to do these analyses and I believe it truly is a bipartisan issue national security affects everyone and an issue like climate change will affect all of us whether we admit it or not so I think it's my time for the Americans to step up again on that leadership stage and make sure we're working with our allies and partners throughout the world on the issue we don't have much time and I think that is one of the more difficult things when you read a report like this is the clock starts now our analysis actually starts now at one degree warming where we're at and honestly I think we all see this when we look out the window or we look at the news and we see crazy high temperatures of 70 degrees in the Antarctic the other week wildfires in our homes in California or across the world in Australia we know that climate change impacts are here and with us now but what we need to do is prevent them from getting worse and the security community the financial communities are waking up and saying we need to do this and we need to take certain actions to make sure that the threat doesn't get worse and every moment that we waste not doing that the impacts get worse so we need to start now we needed to start five years ago but starting now is better than five years from now so hopefully we all do that together