Climate change poses unique challenges to U.S. national security and interests. Yet current approaches and methods for understanding climate change and its impacts fall short in their efforts to help us anticipate and prepare for these eventualities. This white paper is intended to help imaging potential impacts of climate change and to develop alternative analytic approaches for understanding climate change disruptions.
In this paper, we explore several of the possible impacts of continued, reltively unrestrained greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions over the next half-century. These impacts, although not always highly likely, are plausible. In particular, we focus on already stressed systems that are vulnerable to being driven over the edge or past a tipping point by either radical or gradual shifts in climate. By doing so, we offer an alternative, analytic approach – a “system vulnerability approach”- to understanding and anticipating climate change disruptions. We conclude by considering both the security implications of the climate impacts discussed in this paper, and the analytic opportunities provided by the systems vulnerabilities approach.
