Military leaders should be very concerned about climate change – that’s the message of a new report released this week by the CNA Corporation’s Military Advisory Board.

The report, authored by a group of more than a dozen retired general and admirals from the U.S. Army, Navy, Air Force, and Marine Corps, is the follow-up to an influential 2007 report that recommended defining climate change as a national security threat.

“This is the second time CNA has gotten very senior-level military leaders together to take a look at climate change and understand what it means for security; not to be climate scientists, which they are not, but to be national security leaders and look at this issue through their lens,” says ECSP Senior Advisor and Ohio University Professor Geoff Dabelko in an interview with Wilson Center NOW. “And in some ways their tools are familiar in applying to climate change – they need to understand about uncertain threats that could have multiple outcomes, and they need to plan for unknown probability, but [with] potentially really high negative outcomes.”

The interactions between climate change and security are complex: “it matters where we’re talking about, and it can manifest in different ways,” says Dabelko. “There are ways to respond but in some cases, because we haven’t been responding and haven’t integrated this additional challenge into what are already some big challenges, they’re rising to the level of security concerns.”

For the complete article, please see New Security Beat.