Climate change fuels resource scarcity.
By Joan Michelson
Journalist and Host
Electric Ladies Podcast
Climate change has fundamentally reshaped global security from the types of threats, to how and where military forces operate, to how we fuel and protect our defense infrastructure, military personnel and installations, to geopolitical alliances, according to Sherri Goodman, former Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security, author of a new book, “Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership & Global Security.”
“I coined the phrase ‘threat multiplier,’ which has come to really stand for the connection between climate change and national security,” Goodman explained in an exclusive interview on Electric Ladies Podcast recently about it. “Threat multiplier conveys that climate acts on every other threat we face, whether it’s strategic competition with Russia and China, or terrorism, weapons of mass destruction, biological threats, and other threats around the world,” she added, “because it’s destabilizing our natural systems, and the whole goal of security is stability.” Goodman has been working on these issues for 30 years and is credited with showing how environmental and climate-related security issues can have a profound effect on global military and security strategies.
The concept of a threat multiplier is derived from the military term “force multiplier,” which refers to technologies or systems that increase the effectiveness of military operations. Climate change compounds global instability in much the same way.
