Episode 121: Climate Change and National Security

Climate change can create national security risks, test military resilience, and redefine how countries pursue their geopolitical interests. Sherri Goodman, author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security, joins The Zeitgeist to discuss how the Department of Defense is addressing and adapting to the challenge of climate change and the role of allied military cooperation. She also offers perspectives on the role that climate change is playing in the Trump administration’s approach to Greenland and the Panama Canal. Host Jeff Rathke, President, AGI Guests Sherri Goodman, Senior Fellow, Polar Institute and Environmental Change & Security Program, Woodrow Wilson International Center; Secretary General, International Military Council on Climate & Security (IMCCS) Peter Rashish, Vice President and Director, Geoeconomics Program, AGI Transcript Jeff Rathke Well, I’d like to welcome all of our listeners to this episode of The Zeitgeist. We’re speaking on February 5, 2025, with Sherri Goodman. Sherri, thanks for being with us. Sherri Goodman It’s a pleasure. Jeff Rathke Sherri Goodman is a senior fellow at the Woodrow Wilson International Cente’s Polar Institute and Environmental Change and Security Program. She’s also the Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate and Security, and she’s the author of a book called Threat Multiplier: Climate Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security, which was published just last year. And she is one of the foremost thinkers on climate change and national security. And so we are going to talk about that today. And where I want to start is, we are just a couple of weeks into a Trump administration, which has a decidedly different view than its predecessor on things like the role of climate change in international security. How is this going to matter now and in the coming years, Sherri? Is this something that can disappear from the thinking of an American strategist and foreign policy practitioner? Sherri Goodman Well, thank you, Jeff, and it’s a pleasure to be with you and the listeners on The Zeitgeist. There’s Trump’s rhetoric, and then there’s the reality. Even in his first term, when he considered climate a four-letter word, there was a lot of climate action that occurred in the Department of Defense and in a bipartisan way in Congress on the major defense bill, the National Defense Authorization Act. So in Trump’s first term, the Department of Defense created the Defence Climate Assessment Tool, which was first developed by the Army to screen military facilities for climate vulnerabilities like sea level rise, wind, flood, heat, and other perils and other risks. That tool’s since been adopted by the entire Department of Defense, and it’s even been shared with some of our allies and partners. So that work is going to continue. When you think of climate risk as a risk, and militaries are all about managing and reducing risk: risks of instability around the world and also risk to troops and forces and bases. When you think about the fact that sea level rise, floods, fires, storms, all the climate perils that we experience today, many on an almost daily basis now, affect how we operate our forces around the world and affect how our bases are stationed and our troops are trained, that work has to continue, and indeed much of it is already baked into the Department of Defense directives and into guidance documents that will continue in this administration. It may be reframed as climate resilience rather...