On March 8, 2023, Director of National Intelligence (DNI) Avril Haines and senior leaders of the U.S. intelligence community appeared as witnesses before the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence for this year’s hearing of the Intelligence Community’s 2023 Annual Threat Assessment. The written report to Congress, highlighting the most pressing threats to the nation, is drafted by the National Intelligence Council (my old shop) and coordinated through the rest of the intelligence community (IC).
This year, the term ecological security was used, to my knowledge, for the first time in a Congressional hearing of any kind, coming when New Mexico Senator Martin Heinrich raised it while questioning DNI Haines. The Senator also called out the ecological security report that I co-authored with Christine Cavallo and Isabella Caltabiano for the Council on Strategic Risks, which was supported by the International Conservation Partnership. Following are some annotated comments on snippets of their exchange (video found here, remarks beginning at 01:29:29):
Sen. Heinrich: “Director Haines, as you know earlier, I shared with you a report by the Converging Risks Lab called The Security Threat that Binds Us which outlined, among other things, the need to elevate ecological security in U.S. national security policymaking.
This is a great tee-up question! (And humbling/rewarding/stunning/strange to hear national leaders discussing a report that I poured myself into for many months during the disquieting first year of the pandemic, much less during Congressional testimony).
Among the eight pillars of action recommended in the report, Senator Heinrich is likely referring to Pillar 6: Amplify Ecological Security Issues in the U.S. Government and, in particular, 6.3 Increase Capacity of Ecological Security Issues Within the Intelligence Community. That recommendation says (p.83, emphasis mine):
The U.S. intelligence community (IC) has the capacity to analyze a handful of environmental security issues, such as negative outcomes that can arise from water stress or climate change. However, the ability to analyze the negative effects of ecological disruption, such as harmful ecological regime shifts and declines in ecosystem services, is largely absent.
More analytical positions toward ecological security are needed in the intelligence agencies, such as the Central Intelligence Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence should create a Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Ecological Security issues, housed at the National Intelligence Council.
In addition, a footnote to that last sentence states:
Ideally, this Deputy National Intelligence Officer would support a badly needed National Intelligence Officer for Environmental Security that would oversee analysis and intelligence support on climate change, ecological disruption, and other environmental and ecological issues.
First, see this post if you want to learn more about the term ecological disruption.
As for the recommendation, to my knowledge, no position currently exists for Deputy National Intelligence Officer for Ecological Security, nor does a National Intelligence Officer (NIO) for Environmental Security, at the National Intelligence Council (NIC).
The NIC does, however, have a Director of Environment and Natural Resources (my former position) overseeing a portfolio chock full of important [and often planetary-scale] issues: climate change, biodiversity loss, water security, food security, IUU fishing, wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, mining, strategic minerals, Arctic and Antarctic issues, marine debris, pollution, plastics, and others.
While at the NIC, any of these issues could have occupied my time for many weeks, if not months. The position is housed in the Strategic Futures Group, so this officer is also tasked with contributing heavily to the NIC’s flagship product Global Trends. All this is clearly too much work for a single person to perform effectively, and the issues are vastly too important to be spread so thinly.
DNI Haines: “Yeah, absolutely Senator. I did see the report, and I thought it was actually excellent. We’ve given it to our National Intelligence Manager for Climate and Global Issues, who is focused on these issues.
Having the report validated by DNI Haines is gratifying. For context, the National Intelligence Manager (NIM) for Climate and Global Issues is a position in the NIM Council (which is separate from the NIC, housed in McClean rather than at CIA Headquarters, and has comparatively closer contact with the DNI and the White House). NIMs coordinate all activities of the 18 intelligence agencies on a particular topic and interact with policymakers to ensure that those activities are in line with security objectives.
From my perspective, having a NIM at least partially dedicated to Climate is definitely a good thing, and long overdue. But that progress is somewhat undermined by the Global Issues add-on (and this is coming from someone who spent the entirety of his time in the IC in a global issues office of some sort).
The problem is that Global Issues is a catch-all/miscellaneous/soft power-y term for issues that don’t have other homes, such as humanitarian issues, democracy, human rights, war crimes, migration, labor, refugees, global health, and the entirety of environmental and ecological issues.
Notably, there are a number of global issues that don’t find themselves wedged into a Global Issues office, such as cyber security, weapons of mass destruction, and terrorism; this is presumably because these issues have been deemed important enough to merit their own set of officers devoted only to these issues.
Frankly, it’s a bit crazymaking to see civilization-altering issues like climate change and biosphere destabilization (and infectious diseases, for that matter) languish as second-tier issues in the security community.
Sen. Heinrich: “And one example that they really go into a lot of detail about is China’s aggressive fishing activities and how those have contributed to overfishing more than any other nation. This has led to increasingly hostile fishing disputes between China and its neighbors, as well as along the coasts of Africa and Latin America, threatening economic and food security, and sovereignty.”
In her answer, the DNI says:
DNI Haines: … and I absolutely share your concern about unregulated, unlawful fishing that the Chinese have been doing in a variety of areas we have seen them strip resources.“
This is a compelling exchange on illegal, unreported, and unregulated (IUU) fishing, a deplorable set of activities with significant security implications. The IC had even included mention of IUU fishing In its accompanying written report to Congress, where they argued that IUU fishing practices “are contributing to the decline of marine fisheries—eroding food and economic security in coastal areas, particularly in Africa and Asia.”
This and other statements align well with those we (the NIC) made in our unclassified National Intelligence Council memorandum called Global Implications of Illegal, Unreported, and Unregulated (IUU) Fishing published in September 2016.
However, it’s important to take a moment to distinguish between China and Chinese-flagged fishing vessels, which may or may not be operating under Beijing’s tacit approval. It is undoubtedly unpopular to recognize this in many national security corners, but in several important ways, China has improved its IUU regulations and laws, including signing and ratifying the Port States Measures Agreement in 2019. For the United States and its partners, adopting a strategic rather than blunt instrument approach to addressing bad behavior by the Chinese is probably more effective, on this issue and a number of other transnational challenges.
Raising IUU fishing is a great entry point to discuss serious ecological security issues outside of climate change (although, assuredly, climate change will have enormous consequences for fisheries migration and stability). However, most ecological security issues are much more serious than IUU fishing, even if they don’t fit as neatly in traditional security discourse. As we say in the ecological security report, in the paragraph following the one cited above (p.83, emphasis mine):
Offices or individual analysts often justify working on issues such as wildlife trafficking or IUU fishing by tying these activities to “more serious” and traditional threats to national security, such as political instability or terrorism, and minimizing the threat to the very ecological systems responsible for human existence and global security in the first place.
It’s important for the United States and our partners to vigorously combat IUU fishing, wildlife trafficking, illegal logging, and other ecological crimes. From experience working on these issues within the intelligence community, I know that their security implications are “harder” than most people realize.
As bad as corruption, transnational criminal organization activities, and threat finance are, they nonetheless pale to the dangers to people and societies that would accompany potential local ecological collapse. If the intelligence community approaches ecological security in a shallow manner, it will be unable to properly gauge the dynamic threat landscape ahead. Moreover, as stated in the ecological security report:
The low prioritization of environmental and ecological security issues in the intelligence community is a persistent, long-standing barrier to deeper engagement on these issues, despite frequent calls for assistance from some of the seniormost levels of government.
Lastly, here’s an abbreviated list of the ecological security report’s recommendations, relevant to the intelligence community, that Sen. Heinrich asked DNI Haines to help work with him to (try to) implement (and with her verbal commitment):
3.2 Bring Together Ecological Security Communities
6.3 Increase Capacity of Ecological Security Issues Within the Intelligence Community
6.5 Add More Ecological Security Issues to Military-Military and Intelligence-Intelligence Engagements
6.6 Augment Ecological Security in U.S. Defense and Intelligence Academic Curricula
7.1 Deepen Understanding of Ecological Disruption and Security
8.1 Deploy Effective (Ecological Security) Advocates
These are still good ideas!
Each recommendation is meritorious in its own right and would help secure the nation, with 6.3 and 7.1 as perhaps the two with the greatest potential impact. But, above all, the U.S. government needs to rethink its national security doctrine. As we say in the report:
A nation with a significant defense budget will still be vulnerable to threats for which it does not adequately prepare and prevent. The existing U.S. national security architecture must adapt to the threats presented by a changing planet and its embedded socio-ecological systems.
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Below is the full, unedited exchange between Sen. Heinrich and DNI Haines from the March 8th hearing:
Sen. Heinrich: “Director Haines, as you know earlier, I shared with you a report by the Converging Risks Lab called The Security Threat that Binds Us which outlined, among other things, the need to elevate ecological security in U.S. national security policymaking.
And one example that they really go into a lot of detail about is China’s aggressive fishing activities and how those have contributed to overfishing more than any other nation.
This has led to increasingly hostile fishing disputes between China and its neighbors, as well as along the coasts of Africa and Latin America, threatening economic and food security, and sovereignty.
In the view of the report’s authors, the IC needs greater capacity to analyze the negative effects of illegal fishing activities as well as a whole host of other causes of ecological disruption.
And it needs to elevate the relative importance of ecological security issues within the IC prioritization framework.
Have you had a chance to look at that, and can you commit to work with me to try to implement some of the recommendations included in that report?”
DNI Haines: “Yeah, absolutely Senator. I did see the report, and I thought it was actually excellent. We’ve given it to our National Intelligence Manager for Climate and Global Issues who is focused on these issues.
I think one of the things it does say, very much in line with what you just indicated is that it’s not just about collecting more analysts, it’s about prioritizing it, it’s about ensuring we have access to the outside folks.
That is something we are trying to do. In other words, get expertise both from the Federal science community and work with them, but also with academic communities, and also with partners who have access to academic and other resources on these issues.
And I’ll absolutely commit to working with you on this question, and I absolutely share your concern about unregulated, unlawful fishing that the Chinese have been doing in a variety of areas we have seen them strip resources. “
Sen. Heinrich: “Thank you, Director.”