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6
Methods for Assessing
National Security Threats
T
he preceding chapters, following the conceptual framework presented
in Chapter 2, examined and evaluated evidence about the relation-
ships and mechanisms that could link climate change and climate
events over the next decade to outcomes of importance to U.S. national
security. This chapter draws upon that analysis to address a core element
of the project’s statement of task: identifying “variables that should be
monitored and ways that indicators of climate change, impacts, and vulner-
abilities might be developed and made useful to the intelligence community
in assessing climate-related threats to U.S. national security.” Our premise
is that the intelligence community needs a monitoring system capable of
(a) supporting a continuing series of assessments of the likelihood and nature
of security threats arising as a result of climate events in combination with
other conditions, (b) informing timely preventive measures, and (c) sup-
porting emergency reaction. An effective system must integrate information
about climate, social stress, and response variables. It must be based on
carefully considered priorities regarding the variables to be included, provide
sufficiently high-resolution measures in space and time for critical locations
and systems, and be actively and continuously managed and improved.
It is important to note that this study deals only with the opportunities
provided by monitoring based on open-source materials. We recognize that
the intelligence community also has access to classified information, but we
do not have a basis for assessing how that relates to open-source materials.
We reemphasize that, as discussed in Chapter 1, there are important
factors this study did not address that will also affect climate–security
connections. In particular, countries adopt policies that may interact with
139
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140 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
climate events in ways that create security threats. For example, U.S. ag-
ricultural price interventions, as in use of corn for fuel, can have a direct
impact on food prices in fragile societies that can be amplified by climate
events that reduce agricultural production. Decisions to protect a country
against climate events can also create or accelerate crises; for example, a
unilateral decision by Turkey regarding the management of headwaters for
the Tigris–Euphrates system could immediately generate crisis conditions.
Another example is climate geo-engineering, which is already attracting
considerable attention (Royal Society, 2009) and may become a source of
conflict. In addition to the monitoring capacity we recommend here, the
intelligence community will need the means to monitor, understand, and
make forecasts concerning such developments.
WHAT SHOULD BE MONITORED, AND WHY
The analysis in the previous chapters, developed from our conceptual
framework which was informed by an analysis of available knowledge,
indicates that from a natural security perspective the climate events of most
concern are those that would create the equivalent of a perfect storm: a
country or region of importance to U.S. national security that experiences
an extreme climate-related event or the effects of a climate-related shock to
a global system that meets a critical need, that has significant human and
economic assets in harm’s way, where those assets are highly susceptible to
harm, where local coping ability is static or decreasing, and where official
response systems prove to be ineffective. In order to assess the likelihood
that a country or region will experience a conjunction of these factors, all of
these dimensions of security risk need to be monitored, that is, data about
all these phenomena need to be repeatedly collected and examined.
Conclusion 6.1: Monitoring to anticipate national security risks related
to climate events should focus on five key types of phenomena:
1. Climate events and related biophysical environment phenomena;
2. The exposures of human populations and the systems that provide
food, water, health, and other essentials to life and well-being;
3. The susceptibilities of people, assets, and resources to harm from
climate events;
4. The ability to cope with, respond to, and recover from shocks; and
5. The potential for outcomes of inadequate coping, response, and
recovery to rise to the level of concern for U.S. national security.
In the domain of climate and biophysical environment variables, it is
particularly important to monitor and estimate the likelihood of potentially
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 141
disruptive climate events occurring in countries and regions of security im-
portance to the United States or affecting global systems that meet critical
needs in those places. Climate science provides considerable expertise for
identifying, monitoring, and estimating the likelihood of single disruptive
physical events occurring in particular places. Other kinds of science are
needed in conjunction with climate science to define the monitoring needs
for events that are more than just physical, such as climate-driven increases
in food prices or outbreaks of infectious disease. These other types of sci-
ence are also important for defining methods for monitoring and anticipat-
ing clusters and sequences of potentially disruptive events that might affect
particular regions of interest and for considering the potential for climate
events to generate shocks to integrated global systems of potential national
security importance.
To monitor exposures to potentially disruptive events requires an un-
derstanding of where events are likely to occur as well as of who and what
is or will be present in those places. Climate science can tell us what to
monitor to foresee where potentially disruptive events may occur; social
sciences that focus on population dynamics, economic development, and
migration can tell us what to monitor to foresee what will be in harm’s way.
Several of the social, economic, and political conditions that contribute to
exposure can be projected with some confidence based on available data; of
those that cannot, many can be monitored at the country level and below.
Monitoring the degree and nature of susceptibility to harm from cli-
mate events should focus especially on places and systems of security
concern. It needs to consider different susceptibilities to different kinds
of events as well as differences among populations separated by place or
differentiated by class, race, ethnicity, religion, or other social cleavages.
Monitoring the ability to cope with, respond to, and recover from
shocks requires measures or assessments of limitations in the capacity of
affected people, communities, or sectors to cope on an informal basis as
well as limitations to the ability or willingness of governments and other
formal assistance organizations to respond after an event occurs. It also
requires measures or assessments of the likelihood that responses to dis-
ruptive events, particularly by responsible governing authorities, will be
(or be perceived to be) inadequate. Past performance in natural disasters
may provide useful indicators for most of these factors; indicators of cor-
ruption or favoritism in the delivery of public services are particularly
relevant for the last. Social science offers a variety of tools and methods for
monitoring aspects of susceptibility, coping, response, and recovery. Nor-
mal techniques of intelligence analysis are also useful for assessing some of
these components of vulnerability, such as the willingness of governments
to respond on behalf of only particular segments of their populations in
the event of need.
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142 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
Monitoring the potential that inadequate responses will rise to the
level of concern for U.S. national security entails estimating and assessing
the ways security conditions in countries and regions of interest could be
affected by climate events. A major potential link involves a combination
of susceptibility and inadequate response leading to a humanitarian emer-
gency, violence, or political instability. Climate events that disrupt the lives
of affected populations are more likely to lead to larger upheavals when
the events are serious, when governments underperform expectations in
responding, when there is pre-existing dissatisfaction with the government,
and when there are organized opposition groups positioned to use dissatis-
factions as an opportunity to mobilize confrontations with authorities. The
monitoring of many of these security conditions is a standard intelligence
function and is related to the monitoring of state fragility.
Monitoring of these five types of phenomena would provide valuable
input for national security analysis. Given that security threats arise from
combinations of all of these, indicators and monitoring systems should
be developed to follow them at various levels from local to national.
Monitoring will also need to take into account the fact that some of the
above types of phenomena are specific to certain kinds of climate events
(e.g., flooding), while others, such as the capacity of emergency-response
organizations, have an effect on consequences for many different types of
hazards. As a rough generalization, exposures tend to be hazard-specific
(e.g., some populations are exposed to coastal flooding and storm surge,
others to inland drought), which implies that the monitoring for exposures
should be differentiated by hazard type. Coping and response factors (e.g.,
funding and organizational effectiveness of disaster-response agencies) tend
to be much less hazard-specific. Susceptibilities can be either hazard-specific
or general. For example, the health status of a population provides an
indicator of susceptibility to a variety of stresses (e.g., diseases and food
shortages), whereas some attributes of infrastructure reduce susceptibility
to only single hazards (e.g., to floods but not wildfires).
It is important to note that although most of the phenomena of all the
types we have highlighted normally change on time-scales of months, years,
or decades, potentially disruptive climate events often give far less warning.
Monitoring of the slower-moving factors makes it possible to use a scenario
approach for considering the consequences of rapidly appearing climate
events. In this approach, analysts posit the occurrence of a particular po-
tentially disruptive climate event the risk of which is high or increasing and
consider how a country, region, or system of interest would likely respond,
given what is known or expected from monitoring and assessment of the
state of other environmental conditions, exposures, vulnerabilities, and
likely responses to inadequacies of coping, response, and recovery. Moni-
toring and assessing these slower-moving variables will enable analysts to
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 143
apply a sort of stress test to target countries, regions, or systems in order to
anticipate the social, political, and security consequences that could arise if
these events affect them. We return to this idea later in the chapter.
CHALLENGES OF MONITORING
Each of the five types of phenomena highlighted above encompasses
many specific elements or variables that could be monitored. Appendix E
presents and discusses a wide range of these. A major challenge of monitor-
ing lies in setting priorities: determining which data and kinds of data are
most needed. This task involves determining which of the many possible
measures of a factor such as exposure to coastal flooding, susceptibility to
malaria, or effectiveness of disaster response will be most reliable, valid,
and useful as part of a larger monitoring system for assessing security
threats.
Setting Data Priorities
Because of the multifaceted nature of the phenomena that might con-
nect climate events to national security concerns and because of the com-
plexity of these connections, setting priorities for monitoring is a significant
challenge. Substantial ongoing monitoring activities may prove useful for
measuring aspects of the key phenomena. Many are already being carried
out by the intelligence community and other parts of the U.S. government
as well as by various international organizations. However, much of this
work has been organized for other purposes. In the area of climate change,
the activities include efforts to forecast climate events and estimate the
vulnerabilities to climate change of various aspects of human well-being.
Outside of the climate change community, monitoring of environmental
conditions and changes is carried out largely by environment agencies, and
monitoring relevant to exposure and susceptibility is carried out largely by
departments and organizations focused on development or disaster assis-
tance. A number of these monitoring efforts are described in Appendix E.
There is strong reason to try to identify a small number of reliable and
valid indicators to cover a great variety of phenomena. Some potentially
useful indicators are already in use or in development in the U.S. intelli-
gence community and elsewhere, and in many cases they are available in
the open literature. It is important to emphasize, however, that the basis for
constructing such indicators is quite uneven across variable types and across
parts of the world. For example, it is possible to develop a map of the
western United States with fairly sharp spatial resolution that indicates the
risk for forest fires and related events as a function of projected increases
in average temperature (see Figure 3-2), but much less confidence can be
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144 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
accorded to similar maps in parts of the world where there are not such
well-developed databases on past fires and on temperatures.
Less well established is the practice of developing indicators for such
things as the coping capacity of communities or the ability of governments
to mobilize disaster response. For many of these factors, however, sufficient
knowledge exists to identify some of the measures that might constitute
an indicator and therefore to begin building and testing indicators. For
example, a recent analysis of the determinants of political instability fea-
tures the effects of political institutions and policies for allocating resources
(Goldstone et al., 2010). That analysis identified 141 episodes of political
instability that occurred between 1955 and 2003 and demonstrated that 80
percent of them could have been predicted two years in advance using an
indicator that combined measures of regime type (degree of democracy),
infant mortality, incidence of conflict in neighboring countries, and internal
favoritism. The greatest likelihood of instability was associated with politi-
cal regimes intermediate between democracy and autarchy that practiced
discriminatory policies.
Despite progress in developing indicators of several of the key phe-
nomena and the connections among them, it is premature to settle on a
small number of variables to monitor that will be sufficient to meet the
needs of analysis. Research, including experiments and pilot studies, will
be required to determine which measures can serve as proxies for which
others and thus to develop an efficient and effective monitoring system. In
many instances, existing knowledge does not yet support reliance only on
quantitative indicators.
Progress can be made by focusing on each class of phenomena sepa-
rately. Appendix E illustrates the current state of thinking about data needs
and discusses examples of current monitoring efforts for climate and bio-
physical variables, exposures, susceptibility to harm, and coping, response,
and recovery. It shows that across these types of phenomena there are
substantial differences in the level of consensus within the relevant com-
munities of experts about which are the key variables from which a small
and useful set of indicators could be developed.
An example of a high level of expert consensus, and one approach to
consensus-building is the work of the climate science community to identify
“essential climate variables” (ECVs). In 1998 the Intergovernmental Panel
on Climate Change and the United Nations Framework Convention on
Climate Change (UNFCCC) established specific requirements for systematic
climate observations and a sustained observing system. The Global Climate
Observing System, sponsored by the World Meteorological Organization;
the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization; the
United Nations Environmental Program; and the International Council
for Science, is charged with advising the community on global climate ob-
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 145
servations and overseeing implementation based on UNFCCC standards.
In 2010 the organization developed a list of 50 ECVs that are possible to
monitor globally and whose observation could yield significant progress
toward meeting the UNFCCC requirements (Global Climate Observing Sys-
tem, 2010; see Figure 6-1). As discussed further in Appendix E, a number
of efforts are under way to use these variables to create a more limited set
of indicators that could be more relevant to policy making. This indicates
a good level of progress in priority setting. However, to our knowledge
there has as yet been no serious effort at priority setting among climate
measurements, or among environmental measurements more broadly, for
the purpose of informing security analysis.
In other domains in which monitoring is needed, there is variation in
the degree to which the relevant scientific communities have defined pri-
orities for monitoring and in the degree to which the monitoring systems
are relevant to the climate–security nexus. Two other examples of active
monitoring efforts that reflect substantial consensus but also suggest the
degree to which such systems learn and adapt by gathering and assessing
data come from food security and public health.
An example of an active monitoring effort where experience over time
has led to a new understanding of key variables and relationships is the
Famine Early Warning Systems Network (FEWS NET). Created in 1985
and funded by the U.S. Agency for International Development, the project
is a collaboration among national, regional, and international partners,
including expert field personnel on the ground that monitor and analyze
relevant data and information in terms of its impacts on livelihoods and
markets to identify potential threats to food security. A range of products
provide alerts, monthly status reports, outlooks, and in-depth studies based
on FEWS NET’s on-the-ground coverage of 23 countries, mostly in Africa,
but including Central America, Haiti, and Afghanistan. Less extensive cov-
erage is provided for 15 more countries through partner-based monitoring.
FEWS NET, which relies on a combination of physical and socioeconomic
indicators to estimate and predict the degree of, and changes in, the food
security conditions of vulnerable countries, was one of the earliest users of
satellite imagery to monitor rainfall and crop conditions in the develop-
ing world. It now also looks at longer-term global climate variability to
help assess future threats to food security and inform priorities for climate
adaptation activities. One result of its ground-breaking use of food prices
and “commodity market networks, market integration, the geographic
and economic distribution of food commodities, and cross border trade”
(Famine Early Warning Systems Network, 2008:1) was the development of
new ways of seeing the nature of socioeconomic threats to food security
in some countries—significantly different patterns of food pricing within
countries, strikingly divergent global food price influences in different re-
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146
FIGURE 6-1 Relationship of extreme phenom-
ena to essential climate variables (ECVs) for
monitoring. Both the phenomena and the ECVs
are color coded to describe the adequacy of the
current monitoring systems for capturing trends
on climate time-scales. Green indicates global
coverage with a sufficient period of record, data
quality, and metadata to enable meaningful
monitoring of temporal changes. Yellow indi-
cates an insufficiency in one of those three fac-
tors. Red indicates insufficiency in more than
one of the factors. In the left column, Y indicates
“Yes, it is adequate,” N indicates “No, it is not
adequate,” and P indicates “Partial adequacy.”
The word “primary” in the colored ECV block
indicates that the ECV is of primary importance
to monitoring changes in the extreme event
phenomenon.
SOURCE: Trenberth et al. (2012). Courtesy of
James McMahon.
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 147
gions, and local prices that track closely with global prices in some places
but not in others.
Monitoring and evaluation efforts for public health began more than
150 years ago. Emerging infectious diseases are receiving increasing atten-
tion because there is a long history of such diseases surprising societies and
causing high morbidity and mortality, sometimes accompanied by social
disruption (Lindgren et al., 2012). In response to a presidential directive in
1996, the U.S. Department of Defense established a Global Emerging Infec-
tions Surveillance and Response System, with the mission to monitor newly
emerging and re-emerging infectious diseases among U.S. service members
and dependent populations (Clinton, 1996). The U.S. Armed Forces Health
Surveillance Center, Division of Global Emerging Infections Surveillance
and Response System Operations coordinates a multidisciplinary program
to support the International Health Regulations (IHR).1 The goal is to link
datasets and information into a predictive surveillance program that gener-
ates advisories and alerts on emerging infectious disease outbreaks (Witt et
al., 2011). Datasets and information are derived from eco-climatic remote
sensing activities; ecologic niche modeling; and arthropod vector, animal–
disease host/reservoir, and human disease surveillance for febrile illnesses.
The program includes 39 funded partners working in 92 countries (Russell
et al., 2011). Other organizations monitoring emerging infectious diseases
include the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the European
Centre for Disease Control, the WHO Global Alert and Response network
(including the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network), and the
PROMED reporting network at the International Society for Infectious
Diseases. These activities could be enhanced to consider how climate vari-
ability and change could alter the risks of outbreaks in geographic regions
of interest.
Recommendation 6.1: The intelligence community should participate
in a whole-of-government effort to inform choices about adapting to
and reducing vulnerability to climate change. One of the objectives of
this effort should be to build the scientific basis for indicators in this
domain.
This effort would support activities by the research communities involved in
assessing exposures and vulnerabilities to environmental change to identify
a relatively small number of key variables relevant to the social and political
consequences of climate events. The effort of the climate science community
1
The IHR, adopted in 2007, establish a mandatory reporting system by all 194 members
of the World Health Organization for events that may constitute a public health emergency
of international concern.
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148 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
to identify a small number of “essential climate variables” suggests the kind
of process that could be used. A recent effort by the National Research
Council (2010b) took an initial step in this direction. The recommended ef-
fort might identify sets of variables to monitor that could become elements
of indicators of exposures to such events, susceptibilities to harm, and of
the likely effectiveness of coping, response, and recovery efforts at the levels
of communities, countries, and systems that support critical human needs.
It would also support research to develop and validate indicators of key
phenomena linking climate and security, as has been done with research on
the phenomena of political instability.
The Role of Quantitative Data
Quantitative indicators that combine multiple datasets are often highly
useful for giving decision makers a broad picture of a phenomenon of
concern. For example, composite indicators are sometimes created to sum-
marize knowledge about various phenomena of interest, such as drought,
susceptibility to damage from flooding, health status of a population, emer-
gency coping capacity, or political instability. Developing such indicators
for the full range of security threats related to climate change presents a
major challenge for several reasons.
Integrating Data Types
Observations relevant to climate-security linkages may come from a
great diversity of sources: scientific instruments such as space satellites
or ground-based sensors, censuses or surveys conducted by governments
or nongovernmental organizations, scanning of communications on mass
media or the Internet, and on-site expert observation of qualitative aspects
of social and political systems, among others. Some of these data sources
are quantitative and others qualitative. Of the quantitative indicators, some
are already well calibrated and validated, others much less so. For example,
data on some socioeconomic factors, such as demographics and gross do-
mestic product, are routinely collected by well-developed methods. Other
data, such as on the ability of a region or country to cope with an extreme
event of a particular magnitude or on the condition of resource stockpiles,
are often collected through surveys. Because the design, conduct, analysis,
and archiving of survey data can be time-consuming and costly, it would be
prudent to determine in advance what types of data are likely to be needed
and how often the survey should be repeated for critical information, tak-
ing into consideration how data might be relevant. This not only would be
good planning but also could offer opportunities to identify surveys already
being conducted to which additional components could be added.
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 149
Monitoring systems will require the integration of quantitative indi-
cators of both environmental and social phenomena, qualitative data on
social systems, and information gathered by traditional security and intel-
ligence analytic methods. Integration will be necessary in part because dif-
ferent methods are necessary to gather different kinds of information. Some
important kinds of information, such as how governments are likely to
respond to disasters, are difficult to collect because many governments will
be responding without elaborate advance planning or training. Also, differ-
ent methods of validation are appropriate for different kinds of data and
information (see, e.g., King et al., 1994; George and Bennett, 2005; Brady
and Collier, 2010). All methods should be used to gain insight. Where the
same kind of information can be obtained by multiple methods, this situa-
tion creates an opportunity to use each method as a check against the others
and thus increase overall confidence in assessments. We note that it may
be possible to advance the objectives of both analysis and risk reduction if
information gathering is done through open dialogue, sometimes with the
assistance of the U.S. government.
Developing the needed broad monitoring system for climate-related
security threats will also require integration of climate science, various
branches of social science, and security analysis. The integration of the
social science of natural disasters and disaster response with other forms
of analysis will be particularly important for assessing the security conse-
quences of climate change because many disruptive climate events will be
perceived and responded to as natural disasters.
Judgment is involved in creating indicators, even when they are built
on highly reliable observations. Expert assessment is needed of the accuracy
and validity of indicators and of whether other relevant information should
be taken into consideration. For example, weather forecasts are only par-
tially based on the vast amounts of data analyzed by highly sophisticated
computer models; skilled meteorologists modify the forecasts based on an
understanding of the complex weather systems that extends beyond what
can be coded into a model and of the performance of a particular computer
model for a weather variable in a specific region.
Coverage and Resolution
Because of the various purposes for which data collection has been
organized, existing data may or may not have the coverage or offer the
degree of spatial or temporal resolution needed to track and analyze the
key variable sets in ways needed for security analysis. In many cases, data
need to be collected at higher resolution than in the past in order to sup-
port improved analytic assessment. High-resolution monitoring will be
especially important for highly significant and highly vulnerable locations.
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150 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
The appropriate level of spatial and temporal resolution for indicators
varies, however, with the substantive domain. Some indicators, such as
of the capacity of national governments to provide response and recovery
support after a disruptive event, are most appropriately measured at the
national level. Others, such as the risk of coastal flooding, may need much
finer resolution, especially in areas of dense population. It may be necessary
to develop indicators of community coping capacity separately for com-
munities defined by geography and for communities defined by business
relationships or cultural similarities. Similarly, risk indicators may require
more frequent updating for some climate events than for others. The need
for temporal resolution is probably greatest during the development of a
slow-moving climate event, such as a drought, and in the immediate after-
math of a disruptive climate event.
For many existing and potential indicators the required spatial and
temporal resolution is finer than what is currently available. In setting
priorities for indicator development and improvement, the intelligence
community should take into account the gaps between the existing and
the desired resolution and should invest in improved resolution for those
indicators judged to be the most needed and the most useful in places of
concern. When considering how to invest in the development of indicators
focused on a particular country or region, it will be worth considering the
extent to which an indicator could be applied elsewhere. It should also be
kept in mind that existing datasets may provide—or may be analyzed to
provide—useful information. Over time, determining the needed data cov-
erage and resolution tends to proceed from an initial assessment of the main
data needs and to evolve as the monitoring system is used.
Validating Indicators
Validation involves determining the extent to which an indicator actu-
ally measures the phenomenon it purports to measure—a task that can be
extremely challenging. Validation is a long-term process, especially for mea-
sures associated with the likelihood and consequences of disruptive events,
which are almost by definition uncommon. A measure of the likelihood
of a climate event that occurs only once in several decades may require a
century or more for full validation, so validation efforts might involve using
one indicator to validate another. For example, a projection of drought risk
from climate models might be tested against a drought severity indicator
and validated even in the absence of extreme drought events. A measure of
response capacity may have to wait for validation until a disruptive event
occurs, but if it holds up in two or three disruptive events, confidence in
its validity should increase. As already noted, the validation of indicators
for many of the factors linking climate change and security will not be a
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 151
mechanical exercise but rather will likely require considerable judgment for
some time to come.2
It is important to develop and validate monitoring systems now in
order to have baseline data for future studies of climate events, for the as-
sociated exposures and elements of vulnerability, and for social and political
stress analyses. Open data sharing, information regarding source codes,
and transparency in the analyses are also essential elements of this process.
Validation is particularly an issue with emerging monitoring technolo-
gies, such as those involving sophisticated data-mining algorithms (e.g., of
Internet postings) or remote observations that are overlaid on geographic
information systems. Such techniques may produce outputs that catch the
eye and are very impressive on first glance, but they are sometimes closely
held by their developers and difficult to validate, especially if they involve
infrequent events. Indicators and monitoring results should be interpreted
with caution until these techniques develop a record of validation.
Improvement of Indicators and Analytic Techniques
Each country presents its own unique mix of exposures, vulnerabili-
ties, socioeconomic conditions, and so forth, and different kinds of climate
events have different associated patterns of exposure and vulnerability.
There is no formula to tell intelligence analysts where to focus monitoring
efforts and which variables are most important to monitor.
As climate change proceeds and its human implications continue to
be experienced, a clearer understanding is likely to emerge of the mecha-
nisms linking climate events to security concerns and, therefore, of the
most important things to monitor. The needed monitoring will be a major
undertaking over an extended period, which should avoid duplication of
2
Several persistent and sometimes specialized statistical issues will also need serious attention
as part of the development of information that will be useful to the intelligence community.
One of particular importance for this study, already discussed in Chapter 3, is dealing with
rare events, which introduce a variety of subtle, although well studied, statistical problems.
Another is the widely recognized but difficult problem of making estimates from data of widely
differing quality when that quality varies systematically rather than randomly, for example,
across regions, types of government, and level of economic development. A third is the so-
phisticated use of statistical controls—both classical control variables and the newer methods
for matching cases—to improve estimation. Closely related to this is the application of quasi-
experimental design methods and identifying cases where these are appropriate.
More broadly, as the Political Instability Task Force forecasting tournament indicated, there
is a need to identify the relative merits of the competing data analysis approaches currently
prevalent: frequentist (relying on significance testing); Bayesian (using probability distribu-
tions); and machine learning (pattern recognition, broadly defined). Related to this issue is the
question of applying an assortment of new, computationally intensive ensemble methods that
integrate the results of multiple models, such as Bayesian model averaging.
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152 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
effort and strive for maximum amounts of synergy and complementarity.
Existing databases should be identified and consulted before new ones are
developed; feedback should be provided to clarify what indices are most
and least useful; and all datasets should be as transparent and accessible as
possible so that analysts working on all dimensions of climate change can
rely on the work of colleagues and use it to address their own questions of
greatest interest—in this case, questions about security issues.
As important as data and monitoring are for assessing the effects of
potential climate events on national security concerns, data in the absence
of effective analytical techniques to process them and produce useful in-
formation are of little help. In some situations, more data could actually
make the situation worse in terms of producing useful forecasts. Some of
the major challenges are associated with two questions.
What analytical techniques are most appropriate for the growing num-
ber of “big data” approaches? Advances in computing power and new
developments in data mining have the potential to allow the intelligence
community to gather more data about more places more quickly than could
be imagined even a few years ago. Perhaps the best example of this chal-
lenge is the explosive growth of different forms of social media via mobile
technology, which is yielding, essentially in real time, potential new forms
of data about political and social trends. The development of sophisticated
algorithms is making it possible to perform machine-based analysis of data
from social media and other kinds of events data instead of relying on the
traditional laborious coding by individuals; meanwhile, advances in transla-
tion software enable the monitoring of many more sources of information
from all forms of media.
Applying these new technologies will require successfully addressing
issues of data quality and reliability, interoperability across databases and
different forms of data, risks of false positives, and the sorting out of
meaningful signals from large amounts of noise. At present it has to be
acknowledged that the capacity to acquire data in many cases exceeds the
analytical capacity to translate the data into useful information that can
improve understanding of trends in key countries or regions. For example,
the development of analytical—as distinct from visualization—methods
for social network and geolocated data is in its infancy, compared with
techniques for the analysis of older forms of data, such as econometric or
survey.
How much data are really needed? Contrary to the assumption that
more is better, with statistical analysis, additional variables may simply
d
uplicate what other data already provide or in some cases actually de-
crease the accuracy of a model because of poor data quality or other
statistical quirks. The pursuit of parsimony, or the “reduction of dimen-
sionality,” is important in numerical analysis. The State Failure Project,
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 153
the predecessor to the current Political Instability Task Force (PITF), began
working with a set of some 700 potential variables and over time reduced
its final model to 4. (See Box 5-1; a list of many of the variables examined
may be found in Goldstone et al., 2010.) Another example of reducing
dimensionality can be found in the work of Cutter and colleagues (Cutter
et al., 2003; Cutter and Finch, 2008) to develop an indicator of social
vulnerability to environmental hazards. Using spatial and county-level data
in the United States on 30 variables relevant to vulnerability (e.g., wealth,
employment structure, demographic composition, and other factors known
to influence a community’s susceptibility and response capacity), they de-
termined that the variables could be represented by 7 underlying principal
components, which were summed to create a single value for each county
of a social vulnerability index (SOVI; Hazards and Vulnerability Research
Institute, 2012).
Conclusion 6.2: Developing an adequate system for monitoring the
conditions that can link climate events to national security concerns
will require maintaining critical existing observational systems, pro-
grams, and databases; the collection of new data; the analysis of new
and existing data; and the improvement of analytic systems, leading
to a better understanding of the linkages over time and to improved
indicators of key variables where quantitative indicators are appropri-
ate and feasible to produce. It will typically require finer-grained data
than are currently available. It will also require improved techniques
for integrating quantitative and qualitative information.
We emphasize that improved understanding and monitoring of the various
elements of climate vulnerability—a key link between climate events and
security concerns—is an objective that the intelligence community shares
with the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) and many other
institutions at federal, state, local, and international levels.
The intelligence community cannot address these challenges alone.
Addressing many of the new and enduring methodological problems is
largely the province of the academic research community. The intelligence
community needs to draw on this knowledge, as efforts like the PITF are
doing, to address the interactions of climate events with traditional intel-
ligence community concerns.
A STRATEGY FOR MONITORING
The United States, like other countries, lacks a national strategy for
sustained, long-term observations for the purpose of informing analysis of
relationships between environmental changes, including climate change,
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154 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
and national security. Multiple environmental monitoring activities and
programs exist, organized by both public and private actors; they have
diverse purposes and are focused on conditions and processes that range
from local to global. Only a few of them are organized to inform security
analysis, however, and it is difficult to know how useful the others might
be for that purpose. Efforts to develop environmental observation priorities
for security analysis should focus on identifying a small number of compos-
ite indices designed for specified purposes of analysis or early warning. The
same can be said for social, economic, and political observations: Multiple
monitoring programs exist, with diverse purposes, and only a few of these
are organized to inform security analysis. Organized efforts at indicator
development for climate–security analyses remain works in progress. Yet
systematic efforts are needed. Progress will require additional work, which
should be conducted through collaborations involving climate scientists,
environmental scientists, social scientists, and security analysts.
The intelligence community should adopt a risk-based strategy for
setting its monitoring priorities. Such a strategy seeks to prioritize the
measurement and assessment of the most significant expected security risks
that may arise from conjunctions of potentially disruptive climate events;
exposures; susceptibilities; limitations of coping, response, and recovery;
and the reactions to revealed limitations. A strategy that is risk-based con-
siders the product of the likelihoods of events and the magnitude of their
consequences. However, because the likelihoods of key events—and even in
some instances the nature of the events—are not well known, monitoring
under a risk-based strategy is not an exact science and must be expected
to evolve as research and monitoring activities improve understanding of
which conditions are most important to monitor and provide increasingly
valid estimates of the probabilities and consequences of key events.
Threat Monitoring as a Long-Term Research Activity
Developing a monitoring system for climate-related security threats is
a long-term enterprise. As noted above, a considerable amount of effort is
already being devoted to monitoring climate events and trends; some as-
pects of food, water, and health security; risks of natural disasters related
to climate change; and certain elements of disaster response capacity by a
variety of governmental, nongovernmental, and international organizations
for various purposes. Such existing monitoring systems, both open-source
and commercial, should be periodically scanned for potential usefulness,
but with critical attention paid to indicator selection, data reliability and
validity, and cross-case and cross-national comparability.
As we have also noted, the connections between climate events and
national security concerns are complex and contingent, with many plau-
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 155
sible combinations of climatic events with social, economic, and political
conditions that might create risks to U.S. national security. These risks are
unlikely to be foreseen by looking only at climate trends and projections or
by looking only at political and social trends and projections. To anticipate
the risks, analysis needs to integrate three kinds and sources of knowledge:
(1) knowledge of political and socioeconomic conditions in countries of
interest, (2) knowledge from climate science about the potential exposure
of these countries to climate events, and (3) knowledge from social science
about the susceptibility of these countries to be harmed by those events
and the likelihood of effective coping, response, and recovery at local to
national levels. These sources of knowledge come from different communi-
ties of experts, which will need to communicate with each other. Making
this happen will take time and continued effort.
Indicators based on monitoring efforts can be used even while research
and development on them is in an early phase if they are interpreted cau-
tiously as one source of insight among many, including qualitative insight
derived from on-the-ground information and experience. Open-source
monitoring efforts can help reduce the risks of climate change by helping
national and international decision makers anticipate potentially disruptive
events and reduce vulnerabilities. Monitoring efforts by the U.S. intelligence
community may also have such broader benefits.
Efforts to develop quantitative indicators need to be improved over
time to maximize their usefulness for security analysis, and achieving this
goal will require a long-term effort with a significant research component.
As such indicators are developed and validated, it will become appropri-
ate to assign more weight to the information and predictions they provide.
The intelligence community should consider the development of the needed
indicators to be a long-range research activity.
A research investment in indicator development is likely to increase
in value over time, both because monitoring systems are likely to improve
through continued efforts and because potentially disruptive climate events
are expected to increase in frequency and intensity in years and decades to
come. It is therefore important to begin now to build and test the capabil-
ity to monitor and anticipate climate-driven security threats. The potential
for disruptive events, the elements of vulnerability, and security conditions
will all need continued monitoring because they are all changing and can
affect each other. For example, responses to recent climate events or other
disasters can affect both the future capacity to respond and security-related
conditions, such as public support for governments. The research effort
needs to integrate monitoring across variable types and methods and should
focus on validating indicators, monitoring the appropriate spatial and tem-
poral resolution, and improving analytical techniques, particularly to make
effective use of rapidly increasing volumes of data.
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156 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
The Need for a Whole-Government Approach
Recommendation 6.2: The U.S. government should begin immediately
to develop a systematic and enduring whole-of-government strategy for
monitoring threats connected to climate change. This strategy should
be developed along with the development of priorities and support for
research as recommended in Chapters 3, 4, and 5.
The monitoring should include climate phenomena, exposures and vulner-
abilities, and factors that might link aspects of climate and vulnerability to
important security outcomes, and it should be applicable to climate issues
globally. It should also include making and periodically updating priority
judgments about when and where high-resolution monitoring is needed.
The recommendation for a whole-of-government approach is consistent
with the recommendations of the Defense Science Board (2011) and the
strong convergence of the climate change monitoring objectives of the intel-
ligence community as discussed here and those of the USGCRP. As noted in
previous chapters, these interagency enterprises have many common needs
for monitoring and for the fundamental science that informs monitoring
choices, but their efforts are not integrated. As the recent National Research
Council (2012a) review of the USGCRP strategic plan noted, “An effec-
tive global change research enterprise requires an integrated observational
system that connects observations of the physical environment with a wide
variety of social and ecological observations. Such a system is a crucial
foundation for identifying and tracking global changes; for evaluating the
drivers, vulnerabilities, and responses to such changes; and for identifying
opportunities to increase the resilience of both human and natural systems”
(National Research Council, 2012a:39). Monitoring for the purposes of the
intelligence community has the same requirements, although information
will be used differently because of the need to focus on threats outside the
United States. It makes sense for these different interagency communities to
collaborate on the scientific analysis required to design the needed monitor-
ing and assessment systems and, as appropriate, on the development and
use of these systems.
Organized international collaboration with potentially affected societ-
ies and governments and open sharing of data will be important aspects of
developing the needed monitoring systems. A monitoring system capable
of anticipating and detecting severe instances of climate-induced social and
political stresses in many countries would be of great value not only to the
U.S. national security community, but also to the affected countries them-
selves to guide anticipatory adaptations as well as to international humani-
tarian assistance agencies and foreign donors for preparing their response
capacities and to security analysts in countries other than the United States
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 157
and the affected countries as they consider the security implications of
climate events. Such a monitoring system with open sharing of data would
thus provide a global public good. The U.S. government would also benefit
from data-gathering efforts in and by other countries.
Open, international scientific collaborations are also desirable on sci-
entific grounds. The development of compatible concepts, databases, and
indicators across countries helps speed scientific progress and improves the
ability to learn from experiences in other countries.
International collaboration is likely to be necessary to achieve accep-
tance of higher-resolution monitoring at critically vulnerable locations, par-
ticularly if that monitoring requires an on-site component. Such a system
would inherently include elements that could be seen as intrusive in the
countries being monitored. Thus its global acceptability would depend on
justifying its purposes and legitimizing its rules. In particular, such a system
would have to be credibly directed to broad common interests rather than
intended to provide some competitive national advantage that might be per-
ceived as hostile. If the capacity of a society to manage internal stress is to
be subjected to detailed scrutiny, the motivating purposes must be accepted
as constructive, access to the data must be equitable, and the benefits de-
rived must be mutual. Given the historical legacy of security concerns, those
conditions will not be easy to achieve, but they will certainly be essential.
As a practical matter these conditions would have to be established
though a process of evolution as the details of monitoring arrangements
are worked out. A mature system would almost certainly have to be
achieved in a series of incremental steps. Nonetheless, transparency would
be a central principle from the outset. To the maximum extent possible,
both the methods used and the data resulting from a monitoring system
must be open to global scrutiny as the best and, ultimately, the only way
to establish legitimacy and to assure accuracy. That does not mean that
access would be completely unrestricted. It means rather that the rules
of access would be based on criteria that are broadly accepted at the
outset, universally accepted in a mature system, and subject to collective
reconsideration over time.
Of course, U.S. government agencies will continue to need to gather
some kinds of information that will not be openly shared, and there will be
questions about which data- and information-gathering methods can and
should be openly shared. There will also be suspicion of the involvement
of U.S. intelligence agencies in international information-gathering efforts
related to security. Such issues will need to be addressed in ways that we
have not had the opportunity to consider in this study. Nevertheless, the
benefits of open, international data development and sharing should be
taken seriously as work on monitoring systems proceeds.
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158 CLIMATE AND SOCIAL STRESS
AN APPROACH TO ANTICIPATING RISKS
Recommendation 6.3: The intelligence community should establish a
system of periodic “stress testing” for countries, regions, and critical
global systems regarding their ability to manage potentially disruptive
climate events of concern. Stress tests would focus on potentially dis-
ruptive conjunctions of climate events and socioeconomic and political
conditions.
The intelligence community presumably already uses an analogous process
to consider the ability of foreign governments and societies to withstand
various kinds of social and political stresses. This recommendation calls on
the community to incorporate climate risks and the associated exposures
and vulnerabilities into such exercises. The concept of a climate stress test
provides a framework for integrating climate and social variables more
systematically and consistently within national security analysis.
A stress test is an exercise to assess the likely effects on particular
countries, populations, or systems of potentially disruptive climate events
to which they have some likelihood of exposure in the coming decade. The
recommended stress tests would involve analyzing the likely effects of an
event at some projected time of occurrence in terms of key variables af-
fecting susceptibility, coping, response, and recovery or the failure thereof,
and the likely responses within regions or countries of interest in the event
that these actions are perceived to be inadequate. The tests would draw on
knowledge about the potential events and each of the other types of phe-
nomena and would provide a major way of making knowledge about cli-
mate events, exposures, and vulnerabilities operational in security analysis.
Stress tests should consider two kinds of climate events of potential
security concern: those that climate scientists can say with some confidence
are increasingly likely to occur or become more severe, and those that
seem increasingly likely to occur based on a fundamental understanding of
climate dynamics but about which available evidence is not yet sufficient
for climate scientists to attach confidence to such projections. Stress tests
might also be triggered by assessments indicating that event likelihood,
exposure, or susceptibility is increasing or that the capacity to respond
adequately to certain kinds of climate events is declining in a region or
country of concern.
The results of stress tests would inform decision makers about places
that are at risk of becoming security concerns as a result of climate events
and could be used by the U.S. government or international aid agencies to
target high-risk places for efforts to reduce susceptibilities or to improve
coping, response, and recovery capacities. The stress testing process would
also help examine and refine hypotheses, such as those presented in Chapter
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METHODS FOR ASSESSING NATIONAL SECURITY THREATS 159
5, about the characteristics of climate events and of the affected societies
that determine whether or not potentially disruptive climate events turn
into security threats. Over time an accumulation of data on potentially
disruptive events and their social, political, and security consequences will
improve understanding and feed back into improved monitoring processes
and improved skill in stress testing.
Countries, regions, and systems of particular security interest should be
prime targets for periodic stress testing. Given the joint criteria of signifi-
cant potential for climate change impacts and importance to U.S. national
security, it is likely that no more than 12 to 15 countries will need to be
monitored and subjected to periodic stress tests over the next decade, many
of which are likely to be in critical, and often shared, watershed areas in
South Asia, the Middle East, and Africa. If the criteria for importance to the
United States are expanded to include foreign policy and humanitarian con-
cerns, the number of countries to be monitored and stress tested regularly
over the next decade may rise to between 50 and 60. Stress testing should
also be applied periodically to global systems that meet critical needs, in-
cluding food supply systems, global public health systems, supply chains
for critical materials, and disaster relief systems, as well as to international
emergency response systems.
Decision science techniques should be used and further developed to
ensure that the stress tests make the best use of the available information.
Stress testing might draw on various methods, including qualitative inter-
pretation of available knowledge, formal modeling, and interactive gaming
approaches. Research analysts, area experts, and others might contribute in
various ways, such as conducting analyses, developing models, and playing
roles in gaming exercises. Decision science techniques should be employed
to design the processes and interpret the input from different kinds of
expertise and modes of analysis in order to make the best possible use of
information. The stress-testing exercises should themselves be monitored
and critically evaluated so that stress-testing methods can be improved
over time.
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