 Good afternoon. I'm Dan Bresset. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and it's my pleasure to welcome you here today. Co-sponsored, today's briefing is co-sponsored with our friends at the Center for Climate and Security and presented in partnership with the Henry M. Jackson Foundation. Thanks to our panelists who represent a tremendous amount of expertise and experience in the nexus where climate change and national security come together. I'm certainly looking forward to hearing them talk about the security threat assessment of climate change as described in their report release today. Many of you hearing me now are following along via our webcast. Thank you for joining us remotely. I don't always call you out, but I know you're there, and thank you very much. ESI sponsors public briefings on Capitol Hill and a wide range of climate and clean energy topics to help provide policymakers the critical timely information they need. We happen to maintain a full archive of our briefings at www.esi.org that includes, for example, to stay with today's topic, the September 2019 Climate and National Security Forum, and an overview of military installation resilience from March of last year. Visit us online and take a minute to sign up for our climate change solutions newsletter. So our briefing schedule, legislation tracker, fact sheets and articles are all delivered right to your inbox. This is the point of my introduction when I remember to do this. I always forget to do that. The report that you'll learn about today adds new urgency to the already critical imperative to address climate change. But the report lays out scenarios of what might be, not what will be. The difference is what we do about it. As an organization focused on the United States, today's discussion is a good reminder that when we talk about this, we're talking about global climate change. The actions we take here in the United States matter a lot in terms of our own environment and resilience. But the actions other countries and non-state actors take will affect us too, at home and abroad, in peace, and when conflict breaks out. Reading this report makes it clear to me that we will fare much better if we accept a global perspective when characterizing the threat of climate change and marshaling our resources to address it. Now it is my privilege to introduce the honorable John Conger, the Director of the Center for Climate and Security. John previously served as the Senior Policy Advisor with the Center, and as the, this is a whole list of titles, and it's very impressive. He said, you don't have to read it. I'm like, no, it's pretty impressive. We're going to read it. And as the Principal Deputy Undersecretary of Defense Comptroller at the U.S. Department of Defense, before that John oversaw energy installations and environmental policy throughout the Defense Department in different positions. As Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy Installations and Environment, as Acting Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment, and as Assistant Deputy Undersecretary for Defense. Oh, I'm sorry, I missed that one. And as Assistant Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Installations and Environment. John also logged 12 years on Capitol Hill, including with the House International Relations Committee. He has degrees from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the George Washington University. John, on behalf of ESI, thanks for the opportunity to join you today to bring the findings and recommendations of your report to the attention of the public and policymakers and help ensure it informs the work of Congress as it increasingly turns its attention to climate change. Thank you. All right. How are we all doing today? Good? Monday afternoon. What could be better? We're going to sit down and talk about climate change and how it's going to impact national security in the years ahead. My name is John Conger. As Dan mentioned, I'm the Director of the Center for Climate and Security. We're a think tank with an advisory board of distinguished retired military and security leaders that's focused squarely on the challenges posed by climate change and by climate change to our national security. CCS is an institute of the Council on Strategic Risks, which is a nonpartisan organization dedicated to anticipating, analyzing, and addressing core systemic risks to security in the 21st century. Thanks to Dan for his introduction and for helping us pull this together. We really have formed a good partnership and done a series of events together. We bring a lot of the reports in here, and Dan's folks are instrumental in being able to pull off events on Capitol Hill, and I just appreciate so much your work in this regard. I also wanted to thank the office of Chairman Adam Smith of the Armed Services Committee who sponsored this room for us today without whom we couldn't actually be sitting here talking to you about this. Now, I had a couple of introductory sort of scene set of remarks that I wanted to get through. I wrote things down which is uncharacteristic of me. I normally wing this. But I just wanted to give you a little bit of a sense of why we're talking about climate and security just to start to give you a little bit of a foundation for the stuff that we're going to be talking about in a little bit. So if you're new to the issue, climate change has been recognized as a security issue for many years. DoD has been thinking about this for a very long time. It's been in worldwide threat assessments since the Bush Administration. The fact of the matter is that widespread, the effects of climate change on stability, on infrastructure, on the Arctic and how it's opening up a whole new ocean, all of these pieces of the puzzle are very important to the security priorities of the country and get the focus of the security infrastructure apparatus community. So as we think about the big picture and as we bring this all in, it's affecting our security today. We see as hurricanes take down military bases in the Panhandle, Florida or on the coast of North Carolina have floods impact the bases in Nebraska, wildfires out west. There are impacts to national security across the board already. There's the Syrian Civil War. I could talk about at length. I'm not going to get into detail. But the fact of the matter is that climate change helps to drive instability. It's not the sole cause of any particular conflict, but it helps to drive that instability and serves as a threat multiplier in this context. And so CCS, the Center for Climate and Security, has done reports on this for many years. We've done reports on the impact of sea level rise to the military mission. And last year we published a climate security plan for America that outlines dozens of recommendations for the administration, whether it's DOD or the State Department of the Intelligence Community or the White House, things that one can do to help address this issue. So today, and also a couple of weeks ago in Munich, we released the first World Security Report as part of the International Military Council on Climate and Security. So today we release a security threat assessment of climate change, which is unique in that it looks forward at the projections associated with global temperatures and increases of two degrees and four degrees roughly. And ask security experts to evaluate the impacts of these effects. So if you think about, we're not the scientists per se. We're sitting there saying, okay, the science community said if it gets up to two degrees above pre-industrial levels, if it gets up to four degrees above pre-industrial levels, what is the situation? Then we look at what the impacts are and say, all right, what are the security implications of that effect? And that's what this report details. This report gets into the, we ask the security experts to say, if this happens, then what? And fundamentally you're going to hear a lot about this and you're not going to hear me outline all the details of the report. That's what this panel is going to be here to do. But you're going to hear one inescapable conclusion that catastrophic climate impacts cause catastrophic security implications. The world must find a way to avoid these catastrophic security implications. The fact of the matter is that while we are not the energy experts or the tax experts or the regulation experts or the innovation experts, we are the security experts and we sit here and say, you've got to avoid this. We are outlining a situation where if you let the situation get to the future of four degree temperature increases, that the security implications are untenable. And so the policy makers across this nation should find a way to avoid that if at all possible. We're not going to say how, we're not going to, it's not our job to offer the policy solution in that regard. But what we are looking for is going to put, what we are looking for though is a, we're essentially saying, let's find a way to get to that point. Let's find a way to head that off because the alternative is untenable. All right. Now that I've given sort of the preamble, hopefully you'll hear less from me as we go on. I also did want to recognize the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for providing the funding for this effort. And we are lucky to have the president of the foundation here. And so I wanted to say to Craig Gannett, who's going to be, I'm going to call him up here to speak in just a second. We're pleased to have Greg Gannett, the president of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation to make some comments here at the outset. Craig is an attorney in Seattle where he focuses on electric utility regulation, renewable energy and climate change related regulation. Early in his career, he actually worked for Senator Jackson through the Senate Committee on Energy and Natural Resources. And now he's going to be here and he's able to help support our effort. So let me step aside and invite Craig Gump to speak. Great. I forgot mine. Thank you, John. And thank you for attending this important event. For over 35 years, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation has continued the work of Senator Jackson. And two of the matters that he worked on, two of his highest priorities were protecting the environment and enhancing our national security by strengthening our military. And both of those fundamental bedrock policies are jeopardized by climate change. And that's why the foundation for the last six years has focused on the intersection between climate change and national security, attempting to bring in some of the military voices who can broaden the dialogue. We've also urged that the debate on this topic be conducted in a civil, bipartisan, fact-based manner. This is the way Senator Jackson did business on a whole range of topics, everything he worked on, but it's particularly important here. The other thing that Senator Jackson did is he loved to rely on seasoned experts in a field. And that makes it even more appropriate that we're here sponsoring a panel of experts in this area. There was a time not so long ago when protecting the environment and national security were bipartisan issues. For example, Senator Jackson co-sponsored the National Environmental Policy Act of 1969, which was signed by President Richard Nixon. And in urging action on that, I just want to read Senator Jackson said, today it is clear we cannot continue to perpetuate the mistakes of the past. We no longer have the margins for error and mistake that we once enjoyed. To date, over a hundred nations have adopted statutes based on the National Environmental Policy Act. For those of you who aren't familiar with it, NEPA requires a hard look at the long-term cumulative impacts of our actions on the environment. This is a topic for a different conversation, but suffice it to say that the proposed rollback of the NEPA regulations that's now ongoing is deeply concerning, particularly as it relates to climate change. I want to highlight one key recommendation of the report that's only briefly mentioned, but extremely important, and that is that we reach global net zero emissions as soon as possible. For perspective, this is more ambitious than what the nations of the world have so far committed to doing under the Paris Agreement. And it's more than would have been done under all of President Obama's climate change regulations had they been fully implemented. So why recommend that we get to net zero carbon as soon as possible? Because according to the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, the scientists, that gives a shot at limiting the increased temperature to no more than 1.5 degrees. Not a certainty by any means, but it gives us a shot. This is not only a goal of the Paris Agreement, but it keeps us within the lower temperature range that our experts are going to be discussing and thereby reducing the overall impacts. Because spoiler alert, the lower temperature range that you're going to hear discussing is very bad, but the higher temperature ranges are much, much worse, including catastrophic. As John mentioned, the report doesn't attempt to prescribe a regulatory strategy, whether it be cap and trade or a carbon tax or some other approach. And it doesn't attempt to figure out how we should reduce, we should capture carbon. So in order to get to net zero carbon, you've got to reduce your emissions and then you've got to do some carbon capture. But whether that be done through reforestation or a direct carbon capture or some other technology, all of that is beyond the scope of this panel. It's beyond their expertise. But what this report does say is that by whatever means, we must get to zero net emissions as soon as possible in order to prevent the worst effects of climate change and thereby preserve national security. Any further denial or delay will only make the lives of our children and grandchildren less secure. As Senator Jackson put it in 1968, the survival of man in a world in which decency and dignity are possible is the basic reason for bringing man's impacts on his environment under informed and responsible control. A half century later, our failure to bring those impacts under informed and responsible control is jeopardizing our national security. We still have time to limit the harm, but our margin for error and mistake is shrinking fast. So for all these reasons that Henry and Jackson Foundation is pleased to partner with the Center for Climate Security and the EESI on this important program. With that, I'll turn it back to John. Alright, so now I want to get into the meat of the report and that's going to be our panel. It's fitting that we have a panel of folks to talk about the report because really we had a panel of folks put together the report. In fact, we had a group and we get no points for acronyms on this one, but we had a national security military and intelligence panel, NISMIP. Now, you know, normally you'd try and figure out a word that goes along with, but no, no, it's fine. So anyway, we had this group, this panel that put together the report of security experts and you'll find it in the front of the report. We have several of them here today. They're each going to talk about different aspects of the findings, but fundamentally, once again, they were there to analyze what's going to happen to different parts of the world and to the security of the world based on the scientific results that were an input to this report. What happens at two degrees, what happens at four degrees, then what happens, you know, from those physical implications. You know, what happens when, you know, you have parts of the world that become unlivable, what happens when water stress becomes too severe, et cetera, et cetera. So what I'm going to do next is introduce the panel all at once rather than introduce them all as they come up to talk. So I'm going to go through some bio here and then once we're done with that, I'm going to invite each one intern to come up and we're going to talk. I'm not Craig Gannett, by the way, hold on a second. I'm going to learn by the end of this session, I'm going to learn how to do this. So the videographers, normally I have everybody sit at the table and stay at the table, but for the video, we're going to have everybody come up sort of to the podium as they give their introductory remarks and then we'll take questions and answers from the table. So just so you know how this is going to flow. Also, I appreciate everybody's forbearance, the temperature in here is getting pretty warm. I don't think that's supposed to be symbolic of anything, but we've got a pretty good, pretty full room which I appreciate just dealing with the heat. So anyway, now we're going to have the panel, let me do the introductions. First, we're going to hear from Kate Guy. Kate is a senior fellow at the Center for Climate and Security and was the principal investigator for this report. She led a panel, I just went through this, we called the National Security Military and Intelligence panel, but if I keep repeating it, you're going to remember what it was. And that was a group of 15 national security experts that is responsible for this effort. She's currently pursuing a PhD in international relations at the University of Oxford. She flew in for this, where she researches the intersection of climate change, national security and global governance. Second, we'll hear from Dr. Rod Schoonover. Rod is a member of the Center for Climate and Security's advisory board. Dr. Schoonover is the founder and CEO of the Ecological Futures Group, which focuses on the security implications of global ecological disruption and climate change. And he is an adjunct professor at Georgetown University School of Foreign Service. He served for a decade in the US intelligence community as a senior analyst and senior scientist in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the US Department of State. And as the director of environment and natural resources at the National Intelligence Council. Then we're going to hear from Sherry Goodman. If there is a single central figure at the intersection of climate change and national security, it's Sherry. She is the chair of the Council on Strategic Risks, our parent organization. She is the secretary general of the International Military Council on Climate and Security. She's a senior strategist at the Center for Climate and Security and a member of our advisory board. I won't read her entire biography, but I did want to point out that she is also a senior fellow at the Wilson Center and has served as CEO and president of the Ocean Leadership Consortium and senior vice president general counsel and corporate secretary at the Center for Naval Analysis. She was also deputy under secretary of defense for environmental security. Last but not least is former ambassador Richard Kuzlarich. Rich is a regular member of our climate security working group and is currently a distinguished visiting professor at George Mason University, as well as co-director of its Center for Energy Science and Policy. He has had a long career in diplomatic and intelligence circles, including serving as national intelligence officer for Europe on the National Intelligence Council and ambassador to Azerbaijan from 1994 to 1997 and to Bosnia and Herzegovina from 1997 to 1999. Each of these speakers, like I said, was a member of the panel that crafted this report and will speak to the issues we considered and the assessments we made. Kate is going to go first and present the scope and conclusions of the report. Kate? Great. Thank you, John. Thank you, Craig. Thank you, ESI. I won't go on with all the acknowledgments, but there are many because as you can see, looking at this report, it's long and it's hefty, which meant that we as a panel and as an organization relied on many incredible inputs to form the basis of this analysis and months of work to get it to this point. So a hearty thanks to the incredible people. This is just a small sample of the expertise that we worked together to write the report that's in front of you, and I think it really shows just the caliber of folks we had weighing in on this report. So what are we looking at here? Both Craig and John gave a really good framing as to why we thought this was an important analysis to do, but just to give you a bit of background of what this threat assessment is and where it falls into the current conversation of climate insecurity. These 15 panelists have truly spent their lives analyzing threats to American interests, to American livelihoods, to global security, and generally doing so without public knowledge of those efforts, right? And so people in front of you today have compiled many of those threat assessments for a variety of issues, everything from conflict to terrorism to nuclear war, and this panel together now in different parts of their lives, all collectively identified climate change as one of those issues that was a unique one, I suppose, from a threat assessment perspective. So when we brought the panel together, it was clear that this uniqueness meant that we needed to do something a little bit different as we were thinking about how to assess these threats for a public audience. So the reason why climate change is a different threat is in part because of what John said. It is a threat multiplier. This is a term that Sherry helped coin, but it's one that is so evocative that it bears repeating, which is that every threat that we are currently facing, and we, meaning Americans and frankly humans around the world, are going to get worse or going to get exacerbated or going to get more dangerous, more unstable because of the natural and social effects of climate change as it intensifies across the century if we let it. But the other reason that climate change is an interesting threat is because we in a way know more about it than any threat we ever have faced before. And this is because we have decades at this point of incredibly sophisticated and vetted climate and natural system science through the IPCC and through researchers at universities across the world who have been collaborating to say, okay, what might happen if we let temperatures rise to certain levels? And that's not just, you know, how much will sea levels rise, that's also how to those climate systems, those environmental systems, those weather systems interact with social stability, interact with our food systems, our economic systems, our political systems. And increasingly you have researchers across the world that are putting these issues together. So from the security perspective we had a great basis to go on. What we didn't have was that compiled in any comprehensive way for us. So together as a panel we set about doing a thorough analysis for each region of the world. And we classify, categorize that under the US combatant commands. So if you're curious about one region or another you can flip to that part of the report and focus in depth on that. Or you can spend an afternoon diving into the depressing reality that is the entire world together that's up to you. But in looking at each region of the world we decided, as John alluded to, to look at it under two different scenarios. And this is because the panel very quickly realized that not all climate change is the same. And different scenarios of warming mean different security impacts. And so because of that we classified our work into two scenarios of warming. The first is a near term, relatively near term scenario in which the temperature rises by mid century by about two degrees centigrade. Which for the Americans in the room is about three and a half degrees Fahrenheit. In the second scenario, which is more of a medium to long term scenario. So between 2015 about the end of the century, which is quite long term for security community to look at the effects of, is about four degrees warming or higher, which is about 7.2 degrees Fahrenheit. And the or higher aspect on that is because we don't know enough about tipping points. We don't know enough about hidden emissions and permafrost and other areas that it might be more than four degrees centigrade of warming by the end of the century again if we let it. And just to put these numbers into context because I think they seem innocuous. Remember we have allowed the temperatures to rise globally by about one degree centigrade thus far from pre-industrial levels. And if we continue on with implementing the policies that we have in place, the latest science says we will probably reach about 3.2 or 3.2 degrees centigrade, 5.8 degrees Fahrenheit by the end of the century. And that could be anywhere on a range of about 2.5 to 4 degrees. So that lower end, higher end warming scenario which is in the report is what we are currently on track for. And I think that's important to highlight again and again. If we change nothing about what we do, that catastrophic scenario which seems so far off and so distant is what science says we're on store for. Okay, so that's the framing of the report. Now what did we find? So we did an analysis of those scenarios of warming. We compiled the great IPCC literature that's out there, more recent scientific literature into how these effects actually come into contact with societies in each region and assessed those security threats as they evolved to security environments, security institutions, and security infrastructure. So recognizing that security threats take different forms, we decided to look at how those evolve in different areas. And from that assessment tried to do a categorization of what is the level of risk. Now, John's kind of stolen my thunder on this a little bit. It's not pretty. And one of the main findings of the report which we had a hankering to think it might go this way, but I think it was very clear when we looked at the security environment and the scenarios that we laid out that even at a low near-term level of warming, the threats and the impacts are very, very severe. It's different in different regions of the world, but no region of the world is unimpacted even at low levels of warming near-term scenarios. And when you start looking into that end-of-century warming trajectories, things get out of control. They spiral as our societies, as these impacts mount and mount. And our institutions, specifically our security institutions become unable and under-resourced to handle them, which is what we would expect current security communities to face under those scenarios of warming. So I encourage you to dig into the detail of the report to see how issues you care about or regions you care about are likely to be affected. Recognizing that none of this is prediction. This is not saying this is what will happen. It's saying based on the best science and the best expertise of the panelists, this is what is likely to happen. And I want to pull out another element which is this only happens if we let it. And we, as a security community, as the panel of this report, think there is nothing more convincing than reading this report to recommend swift action. And that action is for society at large, for the world, but also for the security community itself to take these threats very seriously. So the three main recommendations of the report, the first has been mentioned to achieve net-zero global emissions as soon as possible. An important caveat, I think, to that is that we do so in a way that is ambitious, of course, but also safe, equitable, and well-governed. Because if our approach to achieve net-zero emissions is not those things as well, that could also lead to unintended security consequences. Meaning, you know, geoengineering technologies are those kind of things. So we want to make sure that that path that we choose is also a secure path to lower our emissions. But then also as a security community, we need to start taking these threats much more seriously than we have so far. So we need to rapidly build resilience to the impacts that are already here, to the impacts that are soon to come if we follow along these trajectories, and really climate-proof all of these environments, institutions, and infrastructure that we outline in the report. And climate-proof means being future-oriented in the way those are designed. And finally, our last recommendation is that we prioritize, communicate, and respond to these threats as we track them. This is a bipartisan issue. This is a national security issue. And if we are not prioritizing the effects at that level, we're not doing our due diligence as a security community, as a policy-making community, et cetera. So I'm going to stop there and let the next three panelists dive into some of the scary details. But thank you so much for being here. And please do have a look through the report. There's a lot of important things in there, whatever your background. So thanks very much. Thanks, Kate. Rod. Hi, everyone. Thanks to the hosts for inviting me to the panel. Thanks to the audience for coming. Thanks to Kate for spearheading what I think is really an incredible report. And just, I've been asked to talk about the science and intelligence piece of this. But before I start, let's just make certain we understand this is a very serious situation. From a security standpoint, from humanitarian issues standpoint, we're really in an ecological predicament. And we really need to take on board the seriousness of the situation before us. So one of the questions is, so I spent a decade in the intelligence community, the underbelly of the U.S. government, probably. And one of the questions that I was asked to speak to is, really, how do you take a complex and uncertain threat like climate change? How do you take the science and draw security outcomes from it? And so this is what I did for a long time in the intelligence community. One of the things that's important, one of the things that the IPCC report endeavors to do is project the future. But we in the security community are not trying to do that, as was mentioned in the Teof comments. We are trying to assess risk and write a threat assessment. And so a good way to do that is through the development of scenarios. One scenario leads to this outcome, another scenario leads to another outcome. And what this does is helps the policymaker imagine and visualize different futures and makes those worlds, those futures, real for them. I think that's really a powerful thing that scenario work does, and scenarios were something that we did quite a bit in the intelligence community. But when you're looking at climate change, what you have to do to really think about the threat is look at all the different parts of the natural system that are affected by climate change. And so what that meant for me as an intelligence analyst is to read beyond the summary from policy makers and get into those thick, you know, several thousand page reports. Because that's, as everyone knows, that's where all the good stuff is. And dig through the science. What is the science saying? Not original science, what are the scientists saying in the IPCC reports? So what phenomena are changing from climate change? That's step one. And there's a lot. There's sea level rise, but there's also impacts on agricultural pests and ocean acidification and jellyfish, all kinds of things at the same time. And so then you take a step further. What are the effects of these changes on people and nations? And then you take a step further. What are the security, possible security outcomes for those changes? So that's an audit trail of how you get from science to security. So one of the things that's important to recognize, I think most of us know this, but you have to say it from the very beginning, is that the natural world has been influenced and stressed by direct anthropogenic action before the effects of climate change have even come. So, for example, substantial changes to habitat, deforestation, overgrazing, overfishing, over farming, imbalance in biogeochemicals like nitrogen and phosphorus and direct exploitation of organisms. One of the reasons why it's important to say that is when you look at those temperature plots, that's just temperature. As if there's nothing else happening in the world, but these effects fall on a natural system that is already stressed. So just talking about greenhouse gas emissions leads to two major pulses that I think everyone's aware of. There's atmospheric warming, which does not stay in the atmosphere. It goes into the ocean throughout the hydrosphere and to the biosphere. And also ocean acidification from the dissolving of CO2. These are both pulses in their different systems that have several knock-on effects. And we talk about many security outcomes that are possible. So, for example, I study political instability quite a bit. Political instability and social discohesion. It's a good thing to focus on because the arguments can be made for human migration as well, unrest, etc. So political instability, social discohesion, amplification of grievances, and widening of ungoverned spaces. So ungoverned spaces used to be something that the security community cared deeply about. We're kind of in a return to great power dynamics currently. But those ungoverned spaces are a great petri dish for what are called public bads. The Office of Public Goods, public bads. So things like crime, terrorism, disease often come out of these ungoverned spaces. And ungoverned spaces come along with political instability. So countries with weak institutions, low governmental legitimacy, or potential for conflict or actual conflict already exist. These places have increased risk of instability. And so, for the intelligence community, not just the United States intelligence community, but the intelligence communities worldwide, I think there is a challenge, an ongoing challenge in how to bring in the disparate effects of climate change in addition to really getting a handle on second and third order effects, which I think are very difficult to ferret out. I think especially those effects that are not easily modeled by computers, right? In a lot of cases, I say this as a physicist here, a lot of the easy work has been done by the physicists because there are equations and partial differential equations to be solved and we can give you good temperature and humidity graphs. But the hard work are those things that are not easily modeled, like what is the effect on this biological system? What is the effect on this particular disease? What is this effect on mass psychology or sociology? Those are hard. But because it's hard, that means we have to redouble or re-triple our efforts to understand those connections. Inside of the intelligence community, one of the things that I was happiest about was strengthening the science and security discussion. It's a discussion, ongoing discussion between security experts and the people who do first line scientific research. One of the things that we have to do when we think about all the different ways that climate change is affecting the natural world, we have to bring in some of the non-traditional scientists to have these discussions. A lot of these are represented in the report. But going forward, ecologists, epidemiologists, social scientists, psychologists probably help us better understand what the effects of climate change will be. And I also think just returning to the scenario work, I think a lot more work can be done and I think this report goes a long ways towards imagining a world where little or no action is taken. What are the security effects of doing nothing? I think that is something that really needs to be communicated more falsely to policymakers. And my time is up. Thank you. Hi, I'm Sherry. It's a pleasure to be here with you all today. First, I want to thank Dan and the great EESI team. I've worked with you all since Carol was your leader and over a number of decades now and you've done great work to elevate attention to environmental and energy issues on the Hill. So thank you. It's a great, great public service. I also want to thank the great team at the Center for Climate and Security and the Council on Strategic Risk, Frank and Caitlin, the co-founders. You guys have just done marvelous work and great leadership. And John, you really bring it all home. I see one of our team there in the back, Steve Brock, there may be others. The person who really gets the kudos and is the great star of this report is Kate. So she is really a leader in this field now and brought this all together. And so I want to really give my hats off to you, Kate. Great, great work. And it's a pleasure to be here with my colleagues, Rod and Rich. I always learned something new from you. Thank you very much for your years of public service and dedication. And Craig, you know, thank you, Craig and Ed and the Jackson Foundation. You all, we wouldn't be here without you. You have been instrumental in this field and as you described, you know, your first boss, Senator Scoop Jackson, he cared most about national security and environmental security, our defense and our conservation. And that's really come together in the climate security field. You worked for Scoop in the same era when I worked for Senator Nunn on the Senate Armed Services Committee many years ago. And to many of you who are here in the room today, maybe you're young staffers on committees or serve in the executive branch or in think tanks. And I've been in all of those realms and so I'm going to direct my remarks today in a way that I hope is about how you all can make a difference because what you do actually really matters, okay? And how you use this and this report matters. So I've got a few, I couldn't help myself, I have to have a few slides, okay? So I want to start, it's a bit of a history lesson now, although we're all really young at heart and the chairman and the founder, first chairman of our military advisory board is here, General Gordon Sullivan, former chief of staff of the United States Army who really brought the Army through the Cold War period into today. And so he served as our first chairman when we issued really the first report on climate change as a national security threat in 2007, climate change and the threat of national security. Now this was, like this report, scientifically sound research with actionable ideas. And it was in that report that we coined the phrase threat multiplier, climate change as a threat multiplier for instability in fragile regions of the world. We issued that report in April of 2007, okay? That's almost 14 years ago now and that report, the week after that report was issued, the very first recommendation of that report was enacted on the defense authorization bill by the Senate Armed Services Committee in the markup of that bill jointly sponsored by then Senator John Warner of Virginia and Hillary Clinton, Senator Clinton at the time. And it was included, you know, and it required that the Department of Defense and the intelligence community addressed the national security applications of climate change in all their key reports from the national defense strategy, the president's national security strategy, an important document called the Quadrennial Defense Review, as well as a national intelligence assessment produced by the intelligence community. And that, as you see, has led to, these are just a sampling of the many documents that have been produced since 2008 that have included an assessment of climate impacts on security. And I think that's very important because then you see how you can take reports like this and others and convert the recommendations into provisions that can be included in bills that then direct the government to do something that is meaningful. Now, I take all those, those documents are all important, they're important guidance. I see many people in the room, my colleagues from DOD and elsewhere and other parts who are actually working and have been working on implementing that. And that has been incredibly important. And here you can see some of the statements made by senior leaders in both former Secretary of Defense Mattis and former chairman Joe Dunford in this administration about the importance of climate impacts reflects their understanding, not necessarily of all the details that Kate and this report present here today, but an understanding of the threat multiplier impact of climate change. Now we sometimes say, unfortunately, that strategy without resources is hallucination. So this is all good, we still need to resource a lot of what we've been talking about here. So as we look to the future, and I want to be mindful of time so I'm really going to go fast here, I'm going to just tell one story here about, you know, a scenario. And I'm going to pick the Arctic, I know we've got some Arctic experts here in this room as well. So the Arctic, you know, is an area where we are now seeing geopolitical competition emerge because of the changing climate. Okay, because the long-term sea ice is retreating, the permafrost is collapsing, the ocean temperatures are rising. And because of that, some say there's a race for resources to extract the fossil fuels that are there, the minerals. China has got its polar silk road strategy where it hopes to shorten shipping times from Shanghai to Hamburg and see that as part of its longer Belt and Road Initiative. Russia is remilitarizing in the Arctic and we may see the next hybrid warfare, Grey Zone conflict emerge in the high north. And we in the U.S. are now just building our first next generation icebreaker. We need, we're building one, we have a plan to build three, we probably need quite a bit more and much more other capability as well. So we took a look at a future, okay? What would the future bring on to various warming scenarios? We did this scenario, a scenario, many sort of tabletop demonstration exercise looking at a nuclear shipping incident in the Bering Strait where Russia and the U.S. are only 30 miles apart at their closest point. In 2050, when the sea ice, and these are various, you can see projected sea ice decline and 21st century shipping routes opening up at various timeframes here on the right side. And we looked at a potential Russian nuclear icebreaker colliding with the Chinese LNG vessel that's escorting through the Bering Strait. And what do we need, if that could happen in 2050, what do we need to understand now to prepare for that potential future that we hope very much to avoid? So that we did, and that's up actually, you can find the report on that on the CSR website. It was part of Arctic Futures 2050 done with the National Academy of Sciences and Sandia Labs back last September. Okay, so what does this all amount to? It amounts to, we really need to climate-proof our future. Climate-proof, that's the theme. And here are the ways these were included. These are actually recommendations from the Climate Security Plan for America which CCS released last year. They are many ways parallel some of the recommendations in this report. The net-zero emissions goal is, in fact, hugely ambitious. But you know what? The Army has had a goal to be net-zero in its basis. And that's been very important because I want to say that in my experience serving both on the Senate Armed Services Committee and eight years as a Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security in an era where DOD really went from being seen as an environmental laggard to being seen as an environmental leader, that DOD can lead by example because it is on the front lines of climate threats and because it is a large energy user. And our military has led by example in so many other critical areas of our life over many generations, whether it sounds social issues from integration of a variety of types or whether it's in technology issues in sort of developing the next generation of technology that's led us into have the innovation prowess and the domain awareness and the dominance that we expect from our own country. And so to me there's no reason we shouldn't be leading in this area particularly as it relates to building climate resilience for the future whether it's our bases or our communities and also better integrating our understanding of climate security across the board. So we can't wait, we shouldn't wait as General Sullivan and I said in an article last year we should not wait for the next 9-11 or the next Pearl Harbor before we begin to act. We need to act now. You all are the next-gen leaders in this field. I hope you will take up the recommendations of this report and put them into action. Thank you. Good evening. I'm not going to put up PowerPoint slides since I got to teach a class at 7.30 at George Mason and I've got all my slides tied up there so they won't be available for this. But thank you very much for including me. Kate, this is just such a terrific piece of work and I'm not going to repeat anything that anyone else has said about how much effort you put into making this a real success. But thank you very much and to those who've supported the work, it's good. It's very good. Last Thursday I was at George Washington University and Skip Ghanim who's a former colleague of mine, senior State Department official was Ambassador in Kuwait. Naus is in the Middle East Institute there at George Washington and he gave a speech about U.S. policy in the Persian Gulf and he used the analogy of being in a ship in the middle of this horrible storm with a very experienced crew and no captain. And there are times as a former diplomat when I look at U.S. policy as it relates to the things that we're talking about and the report talks about that it's really hard to fall back on past experience, what previous administrations did or didn't do to be able to predict what is going to be the response of this particular administration. Facing these challenges that we all recognize. And I just kind of make an assumption in all of this that the Trump administration is for whatever reason determined it's not going to deploy diplomatic intelligence and military resources to deal with this crisis as these challenges relate to climate. And so it's kind of hard for me as a former diplomat to kind of say well this is what we did during the Bush administration or the Obama administration what we can do now. And so I start with this very uneasy position of not being able to draw on that kind of experience to be able to say what are the policy steps that can be taken at least in the short run. For 32 years in the State Department in Africa and the Middle East and former Soviet Union we were always sort of focused on two things. How do you help countries develop so that they can achieve a level of economic stability and prosperity so that they are more stable. And the second thing was when you end up in a situation like Bosnia how do you build resilient societies coming out of a civil war? And I think that the game has changed as we deal with these issues. And as I read the report Kate I keep coming back to the things that weren't addressed not because the report wasn't done well but because they raised questions in my mind. And I'm thinking here in particular of the situation in Africa not so much it's clear what will happen if we don't do something about the climate impact of these security challenges. But I worry about what happens if we do do something. You know there are a billion people around the world who don't have electricity and Kate hinted at this. You know there are these collateral effects if we do take steps under the current situation how do these people achieve their goal of just having electricity to live under these circumstances. The second thing I was thinking about too and it's in Africa and countries like Azerbaijan where you have Mozambique, Angola, oil and gas producers which now suddenly are left with stranded assets and no way of achieving that growth that we thought was so important for their future development. And then the security challenges that are created as we shift from a carbon based energy system to one that is more renewable based the whole question of rare earth minerals, cobalt, lithium. Now suddenly the Democratic Republic of the Congo which when I joined the Foreign Service we were worried about for copper. Now we're worried about for cobalt. So there's a whole lot of changes that are going on that are going to create or intensify security threats because we do begin to act. I really like the way this report looked at the problem based on combatant commands. It's a much more manageable way of trying to decide if we reach the point where we're trying to do something policy wise how to do it. The thing I came away with we can't expect the military to do all this. I mean it just it just isn't going to be enough. I mean we do need diplomacy. We do need USAID. We need international partners if we're going to have any success at all. And I think we do have to be concerned if we are interested in national security about the impact of diverting resources to do with deal with many of these challenges that are so clearly laid out in the report that takes away the combatant commanders and their resources from the mission they're there to do. And I think that has to be a real important issue. We have to spend more time working on individual countries and developing the capacity to cope with migration issues and to adapt to climate change particularly in countries like the ones in Africa. One specific issue which I think is worth thinking about because it kind of runs counter to what I started with is the new renaissance dam project in Ethiopia. And here this was identified in your report too I think is one of the African challenges of access to water resources. The Trump administration for whatever reason has decided they're going to help mediate between Egypt and Ethiopia in resolving the conflict which is obviously there partially caused by climate. Here's an opportunity in fact to make progress on an issue that may not directly take on the climate causes of the conflict. But do allow us the United States to begin to play a role on some of these these crises which are largely but not entirely entirely climate based. So on the one hand I'm pessimistic on the other hand I think there are opportunities where even we can in this this administration take some steps that really do address the issues that this report is so clearly laid out. Thank you. All right for the for the next part of our program we're going to do this from the table and we're going to do a couple of questions and answers. You know I will say that my instinct was to do most of the questions from the room but I'm going to take moderators prerogative and hit a couple points that I think weren't necessarily covered in this discussion. So let me let me throw this one out there. We talked a lot about how the future will be catastrophic but we didn't actually share with you what's the catastrophic outcome. What is the what are we afraid of. I could ask the panel to talk a little bit. Give an example you don't have to go into into great detail because we only have a little bit of time but tell me something from the from the report. One of the discussions of something at the higher degree scenarios that could be avoided that really scares you. Discuss. Whoever wants to go. Rich go ahead. I think what scares me because I've read the newspapers today I still read newspapers by the way about the pandemic is the intersection of these climate caused crises including the public health dimension with a unpredictable wild card. And you know a global global issue that makes makes these things even worse and you end up with a complex system of responses that we're not prepared for. Okay. You want to give an example. Well I think the one I used is one that keeps me up at night you know of a nuclear shipping a nuclear scenario in the Arctic. I said that Russia doesn't have the best nuclear safety record from Chernobyl to the Kursk submarine and as we increasingly nuclear right now I just want to be very clear. I do think nuclear safe nuclear power has to be part of our clean energy future. But I am worried about over militarization by uns by by those who don't have a record of good nuclear safety operations. And particularly if you if you look at you know the the potential sort of black swan incidents or the tipping points of a Greenland ice sheet break collapsing or parts of Antarctica breaking off. And then you have global sea levels rising much more rapidly within matter of a couple of decades that combined with the likes of the you know possibility of these increase. Incidents you also have many parts of the planet including our own country you know major cities and coastal areas becoming uninhabitable because of increasingly rapid sea level rise coastal erosion and storm surge from extreme weather events. Rod. I'll add another one to the pessimistic conversation. Both of those are wonderful examples of terrible things that can happen. I hope you're going to end on a positive note. No chance. I will return to the issue I brought up at the podium. And that's political instability. So when you look at the effects of climate change and climate change effect climate change linked effects on labor on agriculture on fisheries on insurance on public health. You start to paint a picture of real serious impacts on not just the vulnerable the vulnerable and the unlucky. And that the people affected in that you know in that Venn diagram grows with time. And so we are are already seeing pockets of instability in Africa and Middle East. Climate effects and climate linked effects will likely add to the list of if we don't call them outright state failures will probably talk about them as fragile states. At least but we're adding to that almost certainly adding to that list of fragile and and failed states. But also the countries that are already struggling climate has an effect on keeping them from recovering. And so we've invested a lot of US and Western resources in places like Iraq and Afghanistan. And climate change may be a press that keeps these countries from fully recovering. And so the United States does best when there are pockets of stability when when not more than pockets when the world is stable that that is the arena in which the United States and its values do best. And so we're really looking at a bleak future if we see more and more countries become fragile. All right Kate you want to jump in. Sure how do I choose. No I think my what keeps me at night the most is the extension of Rod's point and the interaction of the others. Which is what happens when you have this more frequent and more intense instability at the political level even across the world. How do our international institutions survive that. And what I mean by that is how do things like migration crises or even just you know resettlement of populations lead to ethnomationalist responses in those societies which are taking in people who are adapting to their circumstances and moving. And how do those political waves unseat places like the European Union places like our alliances with each other our cooperation that states have at the international level. And beyond that how do the tenants of democracy which our nation rests upon and our liberal international order also rests upon also become unseated by these impacts. What does it what do we learn from the situation happening with coronavirus right now but it's always too tempting for countries to respond to very scary shocks with authoritarian responses with responses that that don't uphold human rights across the world. And don't keep free movement of people shut down down interaction and capitalism in order to contain the shock and I worry that the Democratic project is at risk. I worry that the international project which our country has really led is at risk because of climate itself. All right. And I'm going to add one. As we look at the future and as we look at what the scientists project for climate change we already have what I would characterize as unlivable spaces in this world. You don't find a lot of farming in the Antarctic or in the Sahara Desert. But what the science predicts is that we're going to have unlivable spaces where people currently live. We're going to have unlivable spaces in the Middle East. We're going to have new unlimited unlivable spaces in Africa. We're going to have new unlivable spaces in South Asia. And so as people run out of water as people have food insecurity as people experience temperatures in which you cannot be outside or without air conditioning for any length of time or you will die. There will be new unlivable spaces in this world and those people will have to move someplace else. And that will create a ripple effect throughout the world. And that is the four degree scenario that we're all really concerned about. That is the scenario we have to avoid. And we can avoid. That is the avoidable scenario. Will we avoid the two degree scenario? Maybe not. Will we have the capacity to avoid the four degree scenario? I think so. So as you read this report, you think through what is possible to avoid and what is not possible to avoid. And you hope to God that you're able to avoid the stuff that's the worst in here. Now that I've got you all in a good mood. The last part of our program and before we finish, we have the great honor and benefit of having Gordon Sullivan here in the audience. And Gordon Sullivan, as Sherry alluded to, was the chairman of that 2007 report from CNA. He was the 32nd, I have it in my notes here, 32nd Chief of Staff of the Army. It was a long time ago. He served as, you know, for 18 years leading the Association of the U.S. Army. Gordon Sullivan is a giant in this town and he was one of the early people that came out and said that climate change affects national security. And Gordon, if you might come up to the podium for just a couple minutes and give some thoughts as we close out the meeting. You can tell this is not a surprise. We have a name tag for him. I feel like I've heard this song before. 13, 14 years ago, I got a call from Sherry Goodman. And I hadn't talked to Sherry since we were battling the deserts toward us out in the desert. The Mojave Desert and a woodpecker who was living with the Marines and the Army at Fort Bragg. And we were trying to get all of that under control. And the next thing she wanted to talk about was global climate change. And did I want to be on a panel? And I said, sure, whatever. I had retired by that time. And there were 12 of us, all flag officers, senior flag officers, not necessarily scientists or even oriented that way. And the mission was to take a look at the world and what are the consequences of global climate change? I heard some of them here tonight and I'm not surprised. The one that keeps me up at night, given my background in NATO, is what happened with the mass migration. And the welcoming attitude of the Federal Republic of Germany, which caused truly, truly chaos. A lot of people all at once and the social impact of it was huge. Now, then if you go back down towards the Balkans, coming up, Hungary put up fences and you just keep seeing it all the way up. And the extreme right in the Federal Republic of Germany, that's something to worry about, I think. Now what we said in the report was what has been said here. Private projected climate change poses a serious threat to American national security. I could make an argument that what's going on is south to north migration, which is causing money, serious money, to be taken out of one budget where we probably could use it, defense, to build a structure. I'll let you fill in the blanks. You know, it's America, right? Okay, so anyway, this is a no-joke phenomenon that we're faced with. Now, let me just say a couple of things. The national security consequences of climate change should be fully integrated into the national security and national defense strategies. Interestingly enough, they were. They were in the sinks, the floor stars out there around the world were directed to put in their plans what their response is to global climate change in their area of operations. When Somalia blew up, so to speak, and people started going down into Kenya and various other places, fish started disappearing out of the ocean. And they have some of these countries in the eastern part of Africa have no coast guard. I mean, it would take rubber boats. It would take rubber boats and a couple of machine guns to police it. And I think the Coast Guard did jump in and did that. But, you know, when people are hungry, they're going after protein and fish are a source of protein nourishment to them. But they're not the Somalis fish. They're somebody else's fish down the coast. And that causes turmoil and so forth and so on. The U.S., I say this, we said it, but it didn't turn out to be that way. The U.S. should commit to a stronger national and international role to help stabilize climate change at levels which would avoid significant disruption to global security and stability. I picked up the paper yesterday and right on the paper in Africa, we have ISIS and the Taliban. Try that one on for size. I don't mean to be a doomsayer, but this is bad stuff, bad stuff. So here it is, 14 years later. And the question is, is the U.S. going to leave or are we going to stand around and watch? Because somebody has to, somebody has to operation on this. This wonderful, I haven't read it, but I know because of the people who are here on this panel and what I've heard. But the question is, who's going to step forward and leave? That's my contribution to this. It takes someone to say, okay, folks, this is what we're going to do. And this is what we're going to achieve. I think you all thought of it. You all, everybody who participated, Jackson Trunks and the panel and the work of these who made it happen. Because what you're doing is you are continuing a crusade. Next time you hear from me, at any rate, we need someone to step up and say, I'll do it. Send me. That's Biblical, you know, send me. You've got to find someone who can do it. Thanks. All right, I'm going to wrap us up. Thank you, General Sullivan. I appreciate you giving those remarks to close out the meeting and the thoughts for all of us here. I want to thank each of you that are here today that braved the heat inside this room. And our report will be available online at www.climateandsecurity.org. Finally, let me once again thank EESI for their partnership in supporting this event. The Henry M. Jackson Foundation for their support in producing the report. To the entire national security, military and intelligence panel for their work in developing the report and to each of our speakers and to each of you. The event is now concluded. Our speakers will remain in the room for a little bit, particularly if there are any members of the media. Please feel free to engage with our panelists after the event. Thank you very much.