War, Meet Climate Change

One SXSW panelist describes climate change as a "threat multiplier" in warfare (Photo via Getty Images)

The Arctic. A place where reindeer is on the menu and Russian submarines lurk, some of them wielding enough explosives for a blast many times larger than the atomic bomb in Hiroshima.

The Arctic is also a place where two of the globe’s greatest threats – climate change and warfare – amplify each other. Sherri Goodman, whose career in the Department of Defense focused on the environment, uses the term “threat multiplier.” That is also the title of her new book.

As ice melts in the Arctic, new shipping routes open up. A recent federal report described the previously low-tension region as tightening up with “the emergence of great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China.” With President Trump reigniting his call for the U.S. to take over Greenland, these tensions are as apparent as ever.

Goodman says increased access to the Arctic is only part of the equation. “Climate change also changes the context in which we fight or operate in any conflict.” Of course extreme temperatures affect troops themselves, but there’s also the issue of weapon and transport design. For example, Goodman says changing ocean salinity can create snags. (Increased salinity in the Gulf of Aden south of Yemen has caused failures in several UK frigates’ turbines.) “We’ve designed our weapons systems to operate under certain assumptions. And now a lot of those assumptions of the natural world, the natural system, are challenged because of climate change.”

Climate change not only impacts military operations, but military operations can also speed up climate change. Goodman – now a senior fellow at the Polar Institute and a senior strategist at the Center for Climate and Security – points out that electrifying fleets not only reduces carbon emissions but also keeps the U.S. competitive technologically with adversaries. “It’s just going to be very challenging to rely on heavily gas-guzzling forces that have to be deployed moving forward,” Goodman says. “We learned the hard way in Iraq and Afghanistan that we were losing American lives having to truck fuel to the front.” Troops hauling gas were targeted with bombs. Now, in Ukraine, the war is largely fought by electric drones. Goodman says as the U.S. continues to build tankers for aerial refueling, which can be targeted by drones, the U.S. needs to consider that “the goal in war is to knock out the enemy and not give the enemy a lot of things to shoot at.”

Meanwhile, ice melting in the Arctic could sink cities far south of the polar tundra. “What happens in the Arctic doesn’t stay in the Arctic,” Goodman says.

Monday’s SXSW panel featuring Goodman and three other Arctic and environmental experts will cover a wide range of the increasing risks – from warfare to natural disasters – that start in the Arctic.

Arctic: An Urgent Call for Climate and National Security

FEATURED SESSION

Monday 10, 4pm, Hilton Austin Downtown, Salon B