Climate Change: Potential Effects on Demands for US Military Humanitarian Assistance and Disaster Response

How will climate change affect military humanitarian and disaster response operations? Answering this question requires answering a number of other, related, questions. How will climate change affect the frequency, type, and nature of disasters and humanitarian emergencies? How will pressures from climate change affect social and economic factors that determine the security situation at the scene of the response? What types of disasters do US military forces respond to today, and how do they compare with those types of disaster most affected by climate change? Why does the US commit military forces to a disaster response operation? And what unique capabilities do they bring when they arrive?

To answer these questions, we examined the climate literature in order to determine projected changes in frequency, intensity, and location of large-scale events. We also examined the type, location, and nature of US military commitments, by using extensive databases of past US response operations. Finally, we examined the possible ways in which climate change might decrease stability in already-marginal countries, by using existing measures of country stability and projections of future climate impacts on fragile nations.

All of these sources suggested that there was a great degree of uncertainty about how future disaster response and humanitarian assistance operations will change. Climate model predictions lack the resolution to identify the precise increase in storm landfall, intensity, or frequency of occurrence just 20 or 30 years into the future. Instead, we found general principles such as “storms will increase in intensity but not number.” Models of nation-state stability are even more problematic: they identify key attributes of stability but have a limited ability to project as far into the future as is needed for an analysis of climate change effects.

Because of this uncertainty, we used the available data to derive some general principles that will most likely shape military and civilian policy in the future. These principles can be used to guide broader policy efforts, and identify areas where additional detail or research is needed.