 And let's come back from our break and start the second panel. I'd like to address the poll that we asked right before the break. Who does this audience think is the most important partner to address climate change? So I'm sharing the results with you right now. As Colonel Cameron stated, just because we compete in some ways, we have to cooperate in others. And it looks like many of you agreed with that by selecting China as the most important partner to address climate change going forward. Thanks to all for participating and sharing your thoughts. As a reminder, all conference materials are available for download at the bottom of the events page and there's a link to that in the chat. During the second panel, remember that to enter your questions in the Q&A box at any time and upvote the questions you like most to help the moderator identify the questions with the most interest. This event is being recorded and will be available to the Naval War College YouTube page after the event. On that note, I'm going to stop sharing our panel results and introduce our next moderator. Our second panel is the impacts of a changing climate on fragile states around the world. Our moderator for this panel is Dr. Annalise Bloom. She is an ACS science and technology fellow in the Office of Secretary of Defense Policy, Stability in Humanitarian Affairs. In her role, Dr. Bloom leads RECESS, the Resource Competition Environmental Security and Stability Group, which is guiding DOD strategic thinking on the national security impacts of environmental change. Dr. Bloom has led multi-disciplinary research projects focused on water security around the world. She holds a master's from the University of North Carolina and a PhD in environmental and water resources engineering from Tufts University. Please join me in welcoming Dr. Bloom as she leads our second panel today. Thank you so much, Commander Cameron. I'm delighted to moderate the second panel today focused on the impacts of a changing climate on fragile states around the world. I'll give short introductions to our three panelists, but I recommend that you read their full impressive bios in the workshop program. First, Dr. Joshua Busby is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs and Distinguished Scholar at the Robert S. Strauss Center for International Security and Law, University of Texas, Austin. Dr. Busby is also a non-resident fellow at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and a senior research fellow at the Center for Climate and Security. He has published extensively on climate and security for academic outlets and think tanks and was a lead researcher funded by the Department of Defense on climate change and security. Next, we'll have Dr. Marcus King. He's John O. Rayken Associate Professor at George Washington University's Elliott School of International Affairs. Dr. King directs the school's master's of arts program, the largest of its kind. Previously, Dr. King held appointments at the Center for Naval Analysis and in the offices of the U.S. Secretaries of Energy and Defense where he represented the United States in the negotiation of treaties including the Kyoto Protocol. His research focuses on the security implications of environmental security. And last but not least, we'll have retired Vice Admiral Ben Beckering. He retired from the Royal Netherlands Navy in 2019 after 40 rewarding years. This culminated in three commands of a frigate and amphibious ship and one of NATO's standing naval groups. His staff jobs ashore were mostly in the field of plans and policy. Since retirement, he has advised the Netherlands Ministry of Defense and works with the Netherlands industry and research on how to position the European landscape of capability development. Thanks so much for joining us today. Now we will go to their opening remarks. And as a reminder, as you watch, please feel free to enter your questions in the Q&A box and vote for your favorite questions. So first, we'll hear from Dr. Joshua Busby about the importance of thinking about climate beyond the threat multiplier terminology and about the intersection of state exposure and fragility. I'm Josh Busby, I'm an associate professor at the LBJ School of Public Affairs and I'm delighted to be with you to talk about the next decade of climate security. I've been working on this issue for a long time since 2004 when Nigel Purvis and I were tasked by then-U.N. Secretary General Kofi Annan to write a short brief. And our understanding of the issue has matured in the past 16 years so much. For much of that time, the academic community has been hung up on the question of does climate change cause violent conflict of different kinds? The policy community for its part has finessed the issue of causality by talking about climate change as a threat multiplier that conjoins with other factors to make conflict or instability more likely. And the policy community for its part cares about other security outcomes like the effects of climate change on bases or the need for military mobilization for humanitarian emergencies. What I'd like to do in my time today is talk about why we need to move beyond the language of threat multiplier in our policy discussions and how we should think about fragile states and where to focus our attention. These themes are explored in a new piece in the journal of peace research that just came out and I have expanded on them further in my book on climate security that I hope will be out from Cambridge University Press later this year. I wrote a blog post last year talking about why I think we need to move beyond the language of threat multiplier to address climate security. So maybe we should go back and think about where the idea comes from. In 2007, the CNA Corporation issued a groundbreaking report on climate security. And I think this concept has served us well in many respects. That effort was organized by Sherry Goodman, one of our conference speakers, and the authors included CNA's military advisory board of retired U.S. generals and admirals. And the language of threat multiplier is shorthand for thinking about how climate change on its own doesn't drive conflict. And it can help folks avoid the charge of privileging climate change above other causes. But saying climate change is a threat multiplier doesn't tell us where and when we should expect bad things to happen. And I think that leads us to try to identify what are some common risk factors, known risk factors for climate and conflict and instability for different kinds of hazards. And Neenavon Exfuel and co-authors had a terrific 2016 article which showed that the risks of conflict when there were rainfall deficits in the growing season were greatest in society's highly dependent on agriculture and those that had high levels of political exclusion. And I thought this was a fascinating way to think about the issue. And so in 2018, I wrote a short piece with Neenavon for foreign affairs. And we mapped which countries had high employment in agriculture or recent history of conflict and had exclusive political institutions to show chronic sources of risks. And the 20 countries that emerge are mostly in Sub-Saharan Africa but extend across the Middle East to South Asia. And we combined that with data on countries that recently experienced severe water deficits or were projected to over the next nine to ten months. And that showed just nine countries in darker blue that were facing imminent problems at the time. And I think this kind of foresight analysis would offer a productive step forward beyond threat multiplier language to help us concentrate the minds on what we should be worried about. And there may be other kinds of risk factors for different hazards. So if we're worried about cyclone risks and security, we might look to populations in cyclone prone areas, combined with data on building codes, early warning systems, cyclone shelters, and governance. And while I think that nuanced hazard specific explanations like these are useful, I also worry about a proliferation of arguments about the risk factors for conflict and instability. And we might lose sight of some common risk factors. And so in my forthcoming book, I focus on three factors that I think especially important explaining when states are likely to face negative security consequences from climate change, namely state capacity for service delivery, the degree of political inclusion, and the role of foreign assistance. And in brief, I make the case that countries with weak state capacity, highly exclusionary of political systems where groups lack political representation and where foreign assistance is lacking or delivered in a one sided manner are most likely cases for negative security outcomes. Another way to think about this problem though is thinking about multi hazard exposure to climate risk and where that intersects with state fragility. And in a 2018 report for USAID, and collaborators came up with a way of mapping those joint risks or what we think of as the double burden that states face. And this is akin to the idea of threat multiplier, but it's taking a further step away from causality to recognize that climate effects can emerge in countries already experiencing violence and stability. So we map subnational historic exposure to a variety of climate hazards, negative rainfall shocks, chronic water scarcity, cyclones, wildfires, floods and low elevation coastal zones. And we combine that with a separate national index of fragility based on USAID methodology that separates fragility into two components of effectiveness and legitimacy and each of those are composed by multiple indicators. So the map here shows a representation of the exposure of just the highest fragility states, and all other states are obscure. And the dark areas represent the pockets of high climate exposure in those most fragile states. But these maps of global maps of fragility and exposure can be a little bit deceptive. So if we look at the highest fragility states and the next category down of high fragility states, we can see that in terms of sheer numbers, there are states like India and Nigeria that have a large number of people highly exposed to climate risk. You could also have issues if you're just looking at these global maps because very small states don't show up. And so the smallest states in the international system populations of less than 500,000 also don't have fragility data. So if you look at this table, this top table, some of these island states have a high proportion of their populations facing high exposures. It's not a lot of people, but it's a proportion of their total population. It's a lot. And even less fragile states, so if you look at the bottom table like China, Bangladesh, Vietnam and the United States, they're less fragile, but they have large numbers of people who face very high exposure to climate risks. So all of this suggests that the process of mapping risk and identifying countries of concern is a complex and fraught one with different answers depending on what you think is important. And even if you've chosen some metrics to guide choices about what you think are or are likely to be hot spots of concerns, you still face questions about what to do, either to resolve ongoing problems or prevent new ones. And thus far we have little definitive evidence about what works in the climate security space. So many of the programs have a slide here of the climate security mechanism, which was created by the UN in 2018 are simply too new. It's mostly focused on just trying to build awareness within the UN, institutions about the need to mainstream climate concerns and wider peace operations. Its next task is to translate some of these ideas about risk factors into practical advice. Now, if you agree with me that state capacity and political inclusion are key risk factors for negative security outcomes, then the challenge is what can outside actors to do to build state capacity or foster political inclusion. And for some hazards like droughts and cyclones, we have some experience in countries like Ethiopia and Bangladesh, very good and successful experience in building state capacity, but trying to build sustained political inclusion over time is a real challenge as we're seeing in Ethiopia at the moment, which now may be coming apart at the seams. So where does that leave us in terms of policy advice or what's the one thing I would counsel the US government to do? So I've been heartened to see that we have a potential vehicle for addressing these concerns through the 2019 Global Fragility Act, which is intended to align development diplomacy and defense policy in fragile states and authorize some serious money for prevention, stability and for complex crises. And I think that act could be an important vehicle for incorporating climate security concerns. Unfortunately, the recently released strategy doesn't mention climate change and only mentions natural resource management and passing. So I would have the Biden administration revisit the strategy and issue an addendum or update that integrates climate and natural resource management. And I would hope that the new UN Ambassador, Linda Thomas-Greenfield and her team really engaged the climate security mechanism at the UN to see how the Global Fragility Act can complement wider multilateral mechanisms in this space. Finally, if I had one piece of advice for folks in this audience, I would encourage everyone to acknowledge that runaway climate change itself is a security threat. For many years, the climate security community is focused on climate impacts and how to adapt to them. Reducing greenhouse gases is likely seen as controversial and risk politicizing the climate security space, which is enjoying more bipartisan support. However, unless we move swiftly to clean energy and to decarbonize our energy systems, the effects of climate change will prove unmanageable and beyond the coping capacity of even rich countries like the United States. So I'll end there. I look forward to the live discussion. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Dr. Busby. Now we will hear from Dr. Marcus D. King, who will discuss connections between instability within states, water stress, terrorism, and migration. Good morning. I've been asked to talk to you about the connection between instability within states, climate-driven water resource scarcities, and migration. The connections are clearest in the Middle East and Africa, where states are most fragile, but also apparent in certain regions of Asia, particularly Southeast Asia, where instability within states can also be a factor. In the Middle East and North Africa region, which is principally relying on agriculture for food and employment, this says areas see low crop yields and increasingly parched farmland, which has increased migration to urban areas and triggered widespread food shortages in certain regions. Water shortages are stressed by desertification, salamization of the soil, drought, high temperatures, and also sea level rise in some areas. Significantly, these issues came to a head in Syria and Iraq as part of the Eastern Mediterranean climate system, which experienced its worst drought and instrumental record in 2007 to 2010. The desertification that resulted from this drought impacted serial harvests of wheat in Iraq and Syria, as well as the country's overall crop productions. In 2014, UNESCO reported that Iraq was losing substantial fertile land as a result of these factors. Prior to the start of the Syrian Civil War, drought that was also impacting Syria had already displaced 1.5 million people. Many Iraqis who migrated to Syria before the drought then remained in Syria with a population of 1.5 total internally displaced people. Now, all these dynamics were felt in 2011, most strongly in the northeast area of Syria, where agriculture is the predominant sector, and this sector experienced up to 75% crop failure. After 2011, the collapse of this agricultural sector pushed two to three million people into conditions of extreme poverty and created an untenable political atmosphere. The drought's impact on the sector triggered mass migrations to other areas of Syria. Internally displaced, a tide of 1.5 million people flowed from the agricultural northeast to these urban areas. The total number of displaced Syrians and Iraqi refugees peaked at three million right on the precipice of the uprising in 2011. Some environmental migrants settled in the countryside outside the smaller towns, which saw a particularly large influx of young unemployed men. These cleavages in society were also very important because not only was there unemployment, but these were largely Sunni Muslims, not the Alawite minority, which were privileged in society at that moment. So frequently it's underlying social cleavages with impacts of climate change that combine to create these situations. So Dar al was one of the cities where this happened in security forces, open fire on protesters that were originally children writing on walls against the regime, but was followed by a crackdown in a subsequent military assault on the city. So also interestingly, protesters began to direct their ire to the Assad regime itself, and the allocation of licenses regulating groundwater was another one of the one of the policies that actually favored the elite constituencies of the Alawites. So in the end, climate change is not a cause of the war in Syria. It is a perhaps necessary, but definitely not sufficient cause of the war. It's clear that the protests that did break out in Daraa and subsequently in other locations were very much centered in areas that experienced large influx of environmental refugees. So that's my point. Outside of Middle East North Africa, outside of Middle East and Northern Africa, in another part of Africa, the Lake Chad region provides an example of how these dynamics have also unfolded. Therein, water stress has created some systemic outcomes such as the stress on food supply, famine in that area, migration, which has lowered the resilience of people, and also led, among other factors, to the rise of an insurgency there by the Boko Haram extremist organization. So in October 2017, the world's most extensive and humanitarian crisis, probably since 1945, unfolded in the Lake Chad region. The situation had roots in environmental change because, again, Lake Chad, originally straddling Nigeria and Niger, Chad and Cameroon, had receded at an unprecedented rate with the surface waters reaching only 10% of the previous levels. This desiccation of the lake was accelerated by the impacts of climate change that year. So drought and related factors led to a collapse of agriculture, and the resultant famine sparked migration in Nigeria as well. Those who remained had little capacity to resist, attacked by the extremist group Boko Haram, and the government did not maintain effective control of vast areas of the north, water scarcity, but also the lack of response in the form of providing water by the government. Better water governments contributed to the popularity of Boko Haram and likely caused Boko Haram to gain more adherence. Despite their efforts, Boko Haram, despite the support that they had, Boko Haram occasionally attacked the population itself for access to water. Boko Haram also weaponized water itself in the conduct of the war, but mostly they preyed upon a population that had been displaced by water scarcity. So internally displaced people are not the biggest issue in Nigeria, but Nigerians have continued to flee to Europe in search of economic and political and educational opportunities, and Nigerians comprise the largest sub-Saharan African population of migrants to the United States and Europe at this time. I'm often asked about a scenario that would be, what keeps me up at night? What's my nightmare scenario that has to do with climate change? Well last November I joined a team from Foreign Policy Magazine's analytical group to play out a scenario in a peace game which featured the rapid environmental collapse of Egypt in the year 2030 due to a confluence of the aforementioned climate impacts, which affected the Deltaic agricultural zone. There were truly no good options for the resulting environmental migration due to the confluence of climate impacts, especially knowing that Israel was not an option for migration, especially understanding that southern Europe was also not possible due to the populist and nativist politics that existed at least at this time and possibly in the future. So this leads me directly to the second topic that I was expected to discuss this morning, and that has to do with climate refugees. The World Economic Forum estimated in 2019 that 16 million people are already displaced due to climate-related factors, but predicted by 2050 the number will jump to 150 to 200 million people. 30 million IDPs are expected in China and India, and 15 million in the Deltaic area of Bangladesh who are now putting pressure on the province of Assam in India, which is predominantly Indian. The point here is that climate refugees is a rhetorically provocative but legally meaningless term. The International Organization of Migration defines environmental migrants as people who are compelled for reasons of sudden or progressive changes in the environment that affect their life where conditions oblige them to leave their homes or choose temporary or permanent shelter within another country. In contrast, the UN Convention on the Status of Refugees of 1951 presents the authoritative definition of refugees as a person who, owing to well-founded fear of persecution for reasons of race, religion, nationality, or membership in a political group, are outside of their country and unable to or unwilling due to fear to avail themselves of protection of their own country. So under this statute, the Refugee Convention makes countries compelled to accept individuals as asylum seekers who are suffering persecution, but legal scholars have resisted including environmental degradation as a source of persecution for refugees, fearing that it would dilute the idea that refugees are actually fleeing political persecution. Therefore, environmental migrants do not have legal standing for asylum under international law the way refugees do. A practical consideration also is formal recognition of environmental refugees would overwhelm the absorptive capacity of countries to handle relocation of people even if the political will existed to do so. On a legal level, the UN's reasoning has been that migrants have the ability to seek remedies politically to environmental problems within their own countries if their governments are able to act, but I would maintain that fragile governments do not necessarily have this capacity to act. So finally, there are three mechanisms that can at least begin to address this issue. The first is United Nations action. The UN could take as a starting point the 2009 Kampala Convention by the African Union. This imposes protection measures for IDPs uprooted by man-made and natural disasters. Certain African countries are a party to this. Also, the 2018 UN Global Compact for the Safe Orderly and Regular Migration lays out a framework for safe and successful voluntary migration, including four environmental reasons. These are still a patchwork of regulations in environmental environmental conventions. Secondly would be the Nancin Initiative. The Nancin Initiative was launched in 2012 by the government of Norway and Switzerland, and it's built on a consensus agenda to protect people displaced across borders for reasons including disasters and environmental degradation. It recognizes the need for protection of cross-border displacement of people related to climate change, but I feel that rather than building an international norm, this Nancin Initiative really relies on individual countries and their individual legal systems to decide how to absorb refugees. And mostly it's only signed at this point by northern European countries, and I think it's sort of lost its steam as an initiative, frankly. Finally, there's the UNFCCC, UN Framework Convention on Climate Change process that does have an existing mechanism within the Paris Accords, which has to do with the principle of loss and damage. Climate migrants are recognized in the Paris Agreement, and large emitters would pay for damages related to their environmental mobility as they put it. Also there could be payouts to individual migrants for relocation. The small island states not surprisingly due to the fact that climate change and sea level rise represents an existential threat, and there should be, we expect there to be, a lot of migration from these AOSIS countries. They raised this in the opening of the UN General Assembly in 2016. So finally my two bottom line recommendations relate to these issues. First, crisis mitigation about climate change must be coupled with long term investments. The fact of responsibilities must balance the immediate crisis response to climate change with longer term investments by national and international organizations in the area of development to build resilience to climate change and to, before mitigation becomes necessary and problematic to stop the flow of refugees. Second, we should designate if possible a globally recognized classification for climate related migrants. Whether they are formally referred to as refugees does not matter as much. And what this would do would be to ameliorate the gap in prevention protection, which currently exists under the 1951 refugee convention and does not allow these people to seek asylum. So finally, I look forward to discussing these remedies and my entire presentation in greater detail. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you so much, Dr. King. A quick reminder to enter your questions related to this session focused on impacts of the changing climate on fragile states around the world. Our final speaker today for this panel is retired Vice Admiral Ben Beckering, who will speak to us about how the Dutch military considers climate considerations and strategy, policy and operations. A good day to you all. It's really a pleasure to be taking part in this conference, although for most of you I'm on the other side of the ocean. But let me thank first Admiral Chatfield for inviting me over and then also the Naval War College and in particular Commander Cameron for organizing this very timely and very relevant conference. What I would like to do is share with you my thoughts on how climate change and security are linked and also what the military could do to incorporate climate change considerations into their plans and policies. My own first-hand experience on what climate change means for security but also for the existential livelihood of people was when I was operating off Somalia in 2012. There the change in monsoon patterns really affected the people, not just because their crops were destroyed, their wells were silting and the fish were fleeing the waters, but also because climate change through changing monsoon patterns set off a whole chain which really affected security in the region. It aggravated an already very fragile situation and it accelerated political instability, it slowed down economic progress and it caused social unrest. And as such it triggered a large movement of people. It saw terrorist and criminal organizations zooming in on the area and even it became a playground for interstate rivalries and sometimes even conflict. Now Somalia is not the only place in the world what this happens. Also in places like the Sahel or Central Asia we see similar patterns develop that climate change in the end aggravates security or even causes insecurity to become insecure. But not even not only in those areas where we consider many deserts present we see similar patterns also in areas like the South China Sea or the Arctic are affected. Rising temperatures and rising sea levels will make land disappear, will make routes more available and will make resources more accessible. That will lead undoubtedly to discussion, debate over ownership and over who is responsible and ultimately will affect the balance of power in those regions. May even become a playground of strategic competition. So even in our wealthy nations if we feel that climate change is something that is mostly affecting unstable countries with lots of deserts and even if we consider that we have the wealth and technology to deal with the things that are hurting us and even if we ignore the increasing amount of floods, droughts and wildfires we see in our own countries then still through insecurity climate change will affect us. Therefore it becomes clear to me that we need a comprehensive integrated approach to deal with these these matters of climate change and security and thus the military has a role to play and if I may there are five areas where I feel the military could really make a difference. First is in the way we equip ourselves. For a long time the military has always been a big spender of taxpayers' money and we need to spend that money wisely so we need to embrace green technologies and by become by acting as a test vet a launching customer by adding operational experience and operational requirements to the table we may be able to direct and steer research and industry to pursue green technologies and those technologies will not only make us look better as a military but also and I'm convinced will give us operational leverage if only through a vastly reduced logistic footprint but it will also give our nations a technological edge which is something I think is much needed. So that is how we should equip act as test vet launching customer and foreign partnerships with industry and research to make sure we embrace green technologies. The second I want to mention is how we base and train in most of our countries the military in times of crisis is seen as a first responder and a last line of defense at the same time but how can we do that how can we deliver ready units if our air stations our naval bases and our barracks are being threatened by floods drought storms and wildfires in that case if we can't ensure readiness in times when it's most needed what can we do and therefore we need to make our infrastructure and our establishments more resilient and we need to better prove our training programs to make sure that we can deliver readiness when it's needed and I think we should not stop at that. I also think that by 2030 and even by 2050 there will still be lots of ships aircraft and vehicles around in our inventory and that will burn fossil fuel we need to find ways to offset that and I think by making our installations our infrastructure establishments net positive we may find ways to offset the greenhouse gases that we still exhaust. On the third point is how we operate I think our classic separate tasks of collective defense crisis response and support to civilian authorities will all come together and in any given theater our armed forces will have to deal with the effects of strategic competition they will have to counter terrorist and criminal organizations they will have to train local forces they will have to work together with other government bodies but also non-governmental organizations and all under very adverse climatic conditions and often with very little host nation on offer so our forces must be resilient they must be adaptive to being connected closely connected with a very limited logistic footprint and an information dominance only then can we guarantee the security so that other partners of us can deliver their goods. The fourth thing I want to mention is how we understand the military has a big bonus here because we most of our organizations have a military intelligence organization they're already closely monitoring what is happening in unstable regions or regions that are bound to be unstable by adding climate considerations into their assessment they should be able then to provide a comprehensive view of what is happening in a region climate wise economic wise but also security wise and I think by adding that to the table the military can play a very important role in understanding what it is that is needed in a certain region and here I would make a strong plea for a need to share and also need to know and then finally advocacy I think the military can play an important role here as well abroad and at home abroad because in a lot of countries where our tensions are high where climate change effects are noticeable strangely enough nations do not have do not see climate change as a priority yet as I mentioned before it's a global effort it needs all hands on deck and I hope through mill mill diplomacy mill mill contacts we will be able to convince also those countries that feel they have a higher priority problems on their plate to join the effort as well and it shouldn't stop just at abroad also at home I think the military by adding a pragmatic and rational approach to the issues of climate change and security will be able to what I find the very much polarized debate on climate change steered in the direction of solutions and not so much polarization that is I think what I see happening and so how to equip how to operate how to base ourselves how to understand and how to advocate now I come to the conclusion of my presentation and the organization asked me two things a piece of advice and a piece of recommendation well my recommendation would be if we have to start somewhere in the five issues I mentioned let's go for a greening our defense force I think by doing that we become an honest and a true partner in all the other fields that I've mentioned so in fact investing in that part will also act as a catalyst in the other fields and then my final bit a piece of advice who am I to advise you but I've always been a fan of the Atlantic Charter drafted by President Roosevelt and Prime Minister Churchill back in August 1941 it was a very simple one one pager eight bullets explaining how the world should look like post World War two and I think now 80 years on we need a similar simple all-encompassing one pager as well it will still have the rules based international order high on the agenda it will still seek political and economic inclusiveness it will still seek to end or prevent conflicts through our iteration but it will have climate change at the heart of it and I think such a compelling message would really be helpful that was it for me I'll be back to answer any questions you may have later on thank you for your attention great thank you so much to all of our panelists for these excellent and thought provoking opening remarks we'll now move on to Q&A first we have a question about our interconnected world the questioner writes the focus of this discussion has been overwhelmingly on local environmental stress slash climate impacts on local instability and fragility but we live in an interconnected world where markets can transmit shot shocks in one part of the system to others for example drought and wildfires in Russia leading to food export bans causing food prices to spike and contributing to the Arab Spring is this another way outside influences affect the climate security slash stability nexus let's go first to Dr. Busby this is a great question from a friend and colleague Colin Hendricks who's done terrific work in this space and absolutely these cascading risks are really important for us to keep in mind and I did a short piece for Council on Foreign Relations in an edited report with Amy Myers-Jaffee in 2019 that looked a little bit at them because we often think about countries as independent cases but really we have to think and acknowledge that they're embedded in wider regions and globally and so they can be affected by climate disruptions whether it be trans boundary rivers or supply chains or disease vectors or migration patterns or financial flows the so part of our risk analysis is a need to assess whether external climate disruptions could lead to cascading risks for other countries and where would responses to climate disruptions such as the export grain bands that Russia instituted in say 2009-2010 in the wake of drought how that can influence and radiate either regionally or globally as we saw in the lead up to the Arab Spring so you had you know export grain ban in response to a drought that then led to global food price hikes and that in turn may have increased the pressures for protest movements far away in the Middle East and so being acknowledging those cascading risk potentials and having some foresight analysis that anticipates where those risks may conjoin in places around the world is really got to be a part of our sort of threat analysis that we carry out on a regular basis to stress test the international system to see not only where the homeland may be affected by these kinds of cascading risk but where other countries that are strategically important to the United States or other countries may be affected by these cascading effects great thanks so much I just want to open it up if either of the other panelists is interested in answering this question or we can move on to the next one I'd like to weigh in on this so again I'd like to thank Colin for his leadership and scholarship in this area of political science and climate change but you know I just wanted to raise the issue that's probably most prominent on our minds right now which is the COVID pandemic as one of the global influences and so what I see that doing is reducing the societal stability and resilience in countries where the vaccine will reach them later right and so given that that unevenness countries that are slower to to get the vaccine on the one hand it's so we have the emerging disease factors but also we've got the factors related to COVID where countries are more apt to close their borders and so getting back to this issue of environmental migration we've got the COVID pandemic which is sort of feeding these nativist feelings and in reducing the capacity for migration and so this is a global trend you know sort of away from the neoliberal world order of regional organizations that are being put together in regional collaboratives that are being established to address these issues such as migration and so the legitimacy of the UN, the legitimacy of the EU as seen by the Brexit development you know it was another set of developments which called a question and the other thing I was thinking of is just related to the markets that was part of Colin's question is the idea of supply chains for multinational corporations so we found that the impacts of climate change are interrupting supply chains in countries where climate impacts have diminished the resilience there as well and so what we've seen is the tendency of countries multinational corporations and countries to sort of consolidate their operations into a single country in order to reduce their you know the length of their supply chain and so some of the impacts of that again are on developing nations that were part of the supply chain and in the economic effects you know they're in that will that will happen for these countries and some of the the fallout of those issues so looking at multinational corporations supply chains and also the spread of the COVID pandemic as two of these global forces that are that are drivers of this instability. Thanks so we have about five minutes left so that you still have a short break we'll take a second and final question that will go first to Vice Admiral Beckering the questioner asks given the underlying importance of stable states for avoiding climate conflict and displacement what are the specific ways we should be thinking differently about climate related instability compared to other kinds of political instability so as I mentioned we'll go first to Vice Admiral Beckering and then to the other panelists if they'd like to answer. Thank you very much I hope you can hear me and okay a very good question but what I was trying to bring across is that there's a whole chain of events from climate change to to insecurity in region caused by a number of factors that can take place and and therefore you can't look at it at in part it must be a holistic view a comprehensive view of a situation that is happening and just to make a link to the the previous question I honestly feel that what we should be watching out closely is that affected regions will become a playground for for for great power competition with food or other resources or commodities being used almost as a blackmailing tool and that is also the reason why I thought that not perhaps for the US China is the primary partner to go in but if you're looking at from a perspective of strategic competition as the question that Paul was earlier then I honestly feel that the 40 or maybe 50 democratic countries in the world should really get close together get their act together and form sort of a force for the good to help out those other 140 countries that are still making up their minds about the which turn they should make so I think don't look at this problem as the military's one to solve that leads us down a really problematic path that most of the instruments to deal with state fragility are ultimately going to be civilian tools of development diplomacy and so if it becomes the military's problem then lots of other things have failed and so we should keep that in mind and also you know I don't think we should hive off climate stability concerns from other kinds of concerns I think as Shari Goodman noted earlier that we need to have a full climatization of our security analysis which allows us to incorporate in our existing thinking how are the ways that we kind of conventionally do business whether it be military operations or humanitarian emergencies how are those affected by climate concerns and how do we need to sort of climate proof our our mindset and our strategy so that we're not affected by unanticipated consequences that we can't handle and I think that means mainstreaming and bringing climate security concerns centrally into how we do things and not sort of thinking thinking about how how is this going to be a separate or different category well said yeah I completely agree it looks like Dr. King did you want to respond very quickly as well no I just wanted to absolutely associate myself with Josh's remarks because that's exactly what was on my mind great well thank you thank you so much everyone keeping with time um we please join me in thanking our three panelists for these insightful remarks um and this will conclude this panel and I'll turn it back over now to Commander Cameron thanks thank you so much to Dr. Annalise Bloom, Dr. Josh Busby, Dr. Marcus King and Vice Admiral Ben Beckering this is a wonderful panel about state fragility and what militaries around the world can do for the panel you're invited to turn off your cameras now as I transition to the break before we go to the next break you have the second poll opportunity again we will launch the poll for one minute if you'd like to provide an answer after that we'll be on break until 11 20 so we'll get back on schedule so our poll question today is which of these is the most dangerous you have one minute the halfway point in the poll and I'll close the poll in 10 seconds and that concludes the second poll for today please join us at 11 20 and we'll be back on schedule for the next panel you