Wednesday, 27 January 2021
Following US President Biden’s new orders that establish “climate considerations as an essential element of U.S. foreign policy and national security,” the Secretary of Defense released a Statement which said that “[Climate change] is a national security issue, and we must treat it as such”.
Secretary Austin’s Statement confirmed that the Department of Defense “will immediately take appropriate policy actions to prioritize climate change considerations in our activities and risk assessments, to mitigate this driver of insecurity”, and that it will “include the security implications of climate change in our risk analyses, strategy development, and planning guidance… [and] will also support incorporating climate risk analysis into modeling, simulation, wargaming, analysis, and the next National Defense Strategy”.