The security blind spot: Cascading climate impacts and tipping points threaten national security

The new UK government has initiated a Strategic Defence Review and is undertaking a review of national resilience. Security threats resulting from climate change should be at the core of the government’s approach. These threats have been consistently and significantly underestimated and now pose major security risks.

The Covid-19 pandemic demonstrated that profound national security threats can result from non-hostile action and not just from malicious intent. This report shows how climate change poses both immediate and long-term threats that are of similar or greater orders of magnitude. These go beyond the traditional defence domain to encompass the full range of human security concerns, including food, economic stability, public health, nature, peacebuilding and geopolitics.

Recent governments have not considered climate change a priority national security issue. But climate-security threats are non-linear and are escalating, posing profound challenges to national and international security.

This report argues that cascading risks and tipping points are not adequately considered in, or are simply missing from, national security risk assessments and strategy. This has led to significant underestimation of the climate threat. There are worrying similarities to the situation prior to the onset of Covid-19, although climate threats pose even greater security challenges.

A new footing is required: climate change should be a core part of national security planning. National security is critically dependent on the resilience of communities, globalised systems and nature, and not just on defence and other traditional security matters.

Our central recommendation is that the government undertakes a rapid national security risk assessment of climate change to establish a full picture of the security consequences of climate change, identifying the most critical threats and choices for improved risk management, and catering for a national security audience at the highest level.