“Rather than securitizing climate, we need to think about climatizing security.” Alice Hill summed up her view of the role of climate in the national security landscape in the U.S. during the panel discussion titled Climate Change as a Threat Multiplier put on by American Security Project. During her career in the Department of Homeland Security and the White House under the Obama Administration, she has been struck by the lack of integration of climate change into national security decisions and has made it her mission to change that. Organizationally, she believes that our current governmental structure reflects a post WWII approach which allows regional interests to dominate the conversation rather than issue-based ones. Since climate change has not been part of the discussion, there has been little planning into the future of security as it relates to climate impacts in favor of reactionary action. One of the major problems she highlights, as a result, is the limited emergency management infrastructure and capabilities that we have as a nation, which typically lead us to turn to the military for disaster relief. If the status quo continues and as climate change rapidly increases the disasters that we will have to deal with domestically, the U.S. military will have less capability to focus on their main mission of national security threats from outside our borders.
Although seemingly tangential to the topic of climate change negotiations, I found her insights to be relevant in the holistic approach that is necessary from a governance perspective. Firstly, her perspective provides an argument that appeals to different audiences than the ones who are already on board with climate change adaptation and mitigation. In order to move forward with climate change negotiations, we first need people to vote for representatives who are committed to making strong commitments around climate change. As climate change becomes further recognized as a national security issue, an opportunity exists to bridge some of the partisan gap and create pressure for diplomatic action and increased mitigation targets. Secondly, it points out that in order to be able to both influence other countries and commit to agreements that require increased action by the U.S., we must also set up our government to evolve with the impacts we are experiencing and incorporate climate change into our policy decisions. Otherwise, there may likely be a point where we are so far behind in the U.S. that we must forgo our role as an international player to focus solely on reactive emergency management and increasing our military capabilties. It is high time to begin climatizing our security, for the sake of not just our domestic interests but our ability to influence and respond to the international arena.
