CNA Hosts "Climate Change, State Resilience and Global Security Conference"

ALEXANDRIA, Va. — CNA today hosted a major conference on building resilience to the security threats posed by climate change in the U.S., China, and Latin America. The day-long forum, featuring senior security officials from around the world, explored the potential destabilizing effects of climate change-related events and how nations must adapt.

"This conference is a substantive effort to explore the possible impacts of climate change — and, more importantly, to understand the threats they pose to our security and that of other nations," said conference speaker Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn, USN (Ret.), CNA Military Advisory Board (MAB) member. "It would be the height of irresponsibility if we sat by idly and simply hoped for the best. We have to develop a thorough understanding of these potential threats now, and how we can build resilience if we're going to effectively confront them in the future. That's what this meeting is all about."

Other featured speakers among the 23 analysts, scholars, policy experts and military leaders participating in the conference were: former U.S. Senator John Warner; UK Ministry of Defence Climate and Energy Security Envoy, Rear Admiral Neil Morisetti; Director of the British Royal United Services Institutes (RUSI), Michael Clark; Director of the Climate Change and State Stability Program at the National Intelligence Council, Major General Richard Engel, USAF (Ret.); Maria Blair, White House Council on Environmental Quality's Deputy Associate Director for Climate Change Adaptation; Major General Eduardo Behar Benitez, Chief Representative of Colombia to the Inter-American Defense Board; Admiral John Nathman, USN (ret), CNA MAB member, and Sherri Goodman, CNA Senior Vice President, General Counsel and MAB Executive Director.

The forum also featured a gaming exercise developed by CNA analysts — "Future Landscape for International Humanitarian and Disaster Crisis Relief from Political, Military, and Interagency Perspectives"— which high- lighted the challenges nations may face in the future given a scenario of increased climate impacts and scarce resources, and explored what can be done now to allow us to adapt and prepare to better meet those challenges.

The game, set in 2040, employs a scenario where many nations are feeling the increasing strain of climate change, and with developed nations beginning to realize they lack adequate resources to help stabilize the more fragile parts of the world, suggests that a new paradigm is needed for how to deal with this changed world.

"Gaming exercises are used by military and security planners to deliver a dose of reality to the strategy-development process," said CNA's Goodman. "It moves discussions away from the theoretical and toward the practical by testing scenarios against real human-decision making. The exercise CNA set up for the conference did that, giving people a new perspective on how issues can play out when you introduce competing interests, viewpoints, and goals into an equation for action."

(Click here to view conference agenda)