Climate security: Comparison between the counterdrug analog and climate security roadmaps, Part 1 of 3 (Post #19)
Adrian Wolfberg, Ph.D.
Organizational Scientist | Knowledge Transfer | Qualitative Research | Phenomenologist | Change Agent | National Security and Intelligence
Purpose of this Article: After using counterdrugs as an exemplar to run through the entire decision support development framework, a three-part article discusses the similarities and/differences between counterdrugs and a climate change security roadmap towards decision support. This Part 1 discusses the first four steps from a need is voiced to define knowledge producing role, shown in the figure. Part 2 will discuss the fifth and sixth steps while Part 3 will discuss the seventh and eighth steps.
Figure: Comparison of analog counterdrug versus climate security roadmap steps from, Part 1, discussed in this article.
Comparing “Need:” According to the United Nations, there is a need for climate security because increasingly more people are suffering from food and water insecurity, socio-economic fragility, and political grievances, which increase violent conflict in fragile settings. One of the hottest years on record and the greatest number of violent conflicts occurred in 2022. According to the International Panel on Climate Change, as of 2023, almost one half of the world’s population is susceptible to dramatic negative effects from climate change, thus creating politically instability and potentially violent conflict. According to the Global Peace Index, for most of the past 15 years, political instability, violent extremism, strained neighbor relations and displacement within and across borders have intensified.
According to the Pew Research Center, in 2023, about 60% of Americans say global climate change is affecting them a great deal or somewhat whereas about 40% of American say it has little or no impact. However, the Pew Research Center reports that a majority of Americans do not view climate change as a high U.S. priority when compared with the economy and health care cost. More importantly, the need for climate security—as opposed to the negative impacts of climate change—is not being asked of everyday Americans in polling. The concept of climate security exists mainly in the voices of domestic and international government entities, international-focused non-governmental organizations, and think tanks. Climate change is in the minds of the American public, but not climate security.
·????? In terms of the history of American’s perceptions of illegal drug use, according to Gallup, in 1969, almost 50% of Americans said illicit drug use was a serious problem in their community, and by 1995, almost all Americans (94% polled) said illegal drug use was either a crisis or a serious problem. Gallup reported that each year since 2002, about half of Americans personally worried a great deal about illegal drug use.
·????? By the 1980’s and 1990’s, there was an equivalence between individual perceptions of the negative effects of illegal drug use on families and communities, and the rise of public policy debate and the initiation of drug control policy.
·????? For climate security, such an equivalence between individual concern and public policy debate and/or control does not appear to exist yet. No similarity exists. There is a difference, however, between the need for drug control and the need for protecting climate security. It exists for drug control but not for climate security. Hence, they are very different.
Comparing “Policy:” The Biden Administration created a Climate Policy Office headed by a National Climate Advisor under the authority of the Executive Office of the President. Its official title is “White House Office of Domestic Climate Policy,” which means its focus is domestic. However, the Climate Policy Office was created by the 2021 Executive Order on Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad. Most of that executive order, 14008, was focused on domestic climate change support but it also required what became the 2021 IC-produced National Intelligence Estimate on the national and economic security impacts of climate change.
For counterdrugs, both a supply and demand side policy were developed. The supply side dealt with the international illicit activity and the demand side dealt with consumption of illicit drugs in the U.S. as well as trafficking of illicit drugs within the U.S. For the IC, this was somewhat of a limited policy direction since the thrust of the IC’s contribution was to identify foreign threats to U.S. national security, not domestic security, although FBI’s National Office is a member of the IC and it does support FBI’s domestic mission, but its office is focused on the foreign nexus that is incoming to the internal U.S., hence an outward, foreign threat focus.
·????? The 2022 National Security Strategy does identify the nexus of climate change with foreign countries, like China and Russia. It is not clear yet that an analog policy exists of the “war on the instability created by climate change in foreign countries.” Has it reached the same or near crescendo that President Reagan’s policy change did with the “war on drugs” did? No. It is premature to suggest any similarity between policy decisions of the counterdrug analog and climate security.
·????? However, in terms of motivating action from the policy for climate security, there is a great difference from the policy for counterdrugs. They are very different. For counterdrugs, the policy drove policy action and IC support for that action. Both Presidential and Congressional decisions initiated such action against the international transportation of drugs into the U.S.
·????? For climate security, the focus remains, at present, focused on the domestic mitigation and response actions. The 2021 NIE should be helpful in raising awareness in Congress to legislate an action plan requiring IC support. For now, the results from the Congressionally mandated National Academy of Sciences long-term project on the Climate Security Roundtable may motivate the beginning of such action. Note, there is no similarity between the counterdrugs and climate security from a policy perspective as of this date.
Comparing “Budget:” The total FY24 request to support climate change was $52.B, and this included domestic programs such as technology innovation and continued support for the CHIPS and Science Act. More specifically, the U.S. climate change requested budget for FY 24 would invest more than $24B for U.S. resilience efforts, i.e., mitigation efforts to reduce the negative effects of climate change on U.S. property and resources. How much is devoted to the IC is not readily or easily accessible or known. Such an IC effort would be used for understanding the effects of climate change on foreign countries and the resultant possible instability from the effects that would threaten U.S. national security interests.
·????? The federal budget for counterdrugs, for example, in FY13 supported 24% (~5.7B) of the total counterdrug budget for interdiction and international efforts, and in FY17 supported 22% of the total counterdrug budget for these same two functions. These two functions would be where funding for IC efforts would support; the other functions in these two budget years were for domestic functions of treatment, prevention, and domestic law enforcement. How much the IC was funded to support the functions of interdiction and international efforts is not readily available.
·????? Compared to the U.S. climate security budget, it appears that the focus of policy and funding is for domestic purposes, whereas the counterdrug budget had both a domestic and international focus, and the international focus is where the IC provides the support. Hence, there is a major difference between climate security and counterdrug budgets: the climate security budget does not appear to have an international policy priority, hence a lack of priority for funding for the same. They are very different.
·????? Yet, there is an extraneous similarity in that both counterdrug and climate security have budgets focused on the domestic front. However, this similarity is extraneous for the main mission of the IC because the domestic front is not where the IC devotes the vast majority of its efforts, per Executive Order 12333, “United States Intelligence Activities.” Hence, they are not very similar.
Comparing “Knowledge Producing Role:” Climate security deals with phenomena that are radically different from two traditional intelligence concepts: (1) in climate security, not only are actors involved via decisions they make (as they are in counterdrugs), but the natural science phenomena are exceedingly relevant yet are not very predictable, especially not far in advance, and the interaction between the threat or risk of climate effects and decisions and organizations are not well understood (whereas in counterdrugs, the interaction between actor and drug product are much better understood, especially after decades of focus); and (2) the climate security pathways, i.e., the causal linkages between natural science and social science, are highly complex having great difficulty identifying them because of so many moderating factors—both human and nature—that makes identifying interdiction or interventions difficult and figuring out who would do the interventions is also not necessarily understood yet or if understood not under the U.S. control or possible under its influence.
·????? Climate security has a potential similarity with counterdrugs (and any other “counter-“ activity, as well as much of what the IC focuses upon) in the sense that the IC has an intense interest in people and the decisions they make (or do not make). (The idea that something has a potential versus an actual effect/impact is derived from Zahra and George (2002) who used the similar distinction of “potential versus realized” when describing the phenomenon of absorptive capacity.) ?Hence, the similarity is one of a potential, that is, because the IC’s default has been on people and their decisions, the IC has the capacity, but for climate security, it has not yet realized a similarity. For “counter-“ activities the decisions of interest are typically before a threat event occurs, when the threat event occurs, and the response to the threat event. The same would be the case for IC involvement with climate security because decisions are made (or not made) prior to a climate event in the form of resilience or mitigation decisions, and after the climate events in the form of responses. In this potential capacity sense, they are very similar.
·????? On the other hand, what is very different is the level of complexity. For climate security, the pathways, i.e., causal linkages, are extensive and hard to cognitively manage for reasons stated above, whereas for counterdrugs, for example, the causal linkages are reasonably known and constrained, or, for the most part, knowable. Hence, there is a great difference between the two when it comes to understanding and predicting causal linkages. They are very different.
End of Article Question: As an observation, the implementation of an IC knowledge capability against international trafficking of illicit drugs was dependent on key factors such as a shared need, the creation of policy, and the establishment of a budget. These factors then triggered agencies to identify their knowledge production role. When compared to climate security, as of this date, we do not see the existence of a shared need, the creation of policy, nor budget allocation. There is the potential, however, that a knowledge sharing role can be explored once motivated by the precursor steps. Where this similarity does exist—knowledge sharing role—it falls in the realm of methodology as the theory of intelligence, as opposed to mission or topic similarities. On the other hand, there are great differences between the two mission areas. For one, the international side of the climate security threat is dwarfed by the need, policy, and budget emphasis on legitimate domestic concerns, while counterdrugs has understood, for simple and obvious reasons, both a domestic and international focus. For climate security, the linkage between international effects on domestic realities is neither simple nor obvious.
Notes:
Zahra, S. A., & George, G. (2002). Absorptive Capacity: A review, reconceptualization, and extension. Academy of Management Review, 27(2), 185-203. https://doi.org/10.5465/amr.2002.6587995.
Previous Articles in this Series: The scheduled topics remaining in this series can be found in Post #1, below. The previous articles can be found in Posts #2-#18 linked below.
Post #1: Climate security: An introduction to the series https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-security-introduction-series-post-1-adrian-wolfberg-ph-d--7pwne
Post #2: Climate security: A very different concept than “climate change”
Post #3: Climate security: Threats and risks are different concepts.
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Post #4: Climate security: “Unintentional threats” and complexity.
Post #5: Climate security: A framework to develop an analytic capacity.
Post #6: Climate security: Where is the demand signal for national security decision support coming from?
Post #7: Climate security: The imperative of policy prioritization and sustainability.
Post #8: Climate security: Structural and organizational challenges in the budget decision process. https://www.dhirubhai.net/pulse/climate-security-structural-organizational-challenges-adrian-y1ece/?published=t#:~:text=link%20to%20this-,article,-Dialog%20content%20end
Post #9: Climate security: The challenges in figuring out the knowledge producing responsibility when responding to a new knowledge requirement.
Post #10: Climate security: Ways of developing knowledge expertise for new requirements.
Post #11: Climate security: Collection and types of data collection strategies.
Post #12: Climate security: Developing a community of partners, Part 1 of 3, Trust and Common Purpose
Post #13: Climate security: Developing a community of partners, Part 2 of 3, Tensions between Depth and Breadth
Post #14: Climate security: Developing a community of partners, Part 3 of 3, Network view of partnerships
Post #15: Climate security: Consumer relationships, Part 1 of 2, Tensions, Levels of Authority, and Decision Cycles and Space
Post #16: Climate security: Consumer relationship, Part 2 of 2, Examples of Relationship Dynamics
Post #17: Climate security: An analog roadmap – counterdrugs, Part 1 of 2
Post #18: Climate security: An analog roadmap – counterdrugs, Part 2 of 2