Our national politics is unprepared to adequately address the global ecological disruption facing us. That was the disquieting feeling that sank in after watching the last round of Democratic Presidential Primary Debates last month.

My unease doesn’t arise solely from the paltry attention paid to climate change in these venues. After being a zero-profile concern in numerous previous election cycles, I’m actually somewhat grateful that the needle has moved enough on climate such that many viewers complain when the issue is not covered adequately.

Last Wednesday, Vice President Biden referred to climate change as “the number one issue,” while Sen. Sanders called it a “national emergency.” Most candidates indicated climate change was a priority issue in their closing statements. Mr. Steyer indicated, as Governor Inslee did earlier in the summer, that combating climate change would be the organizing principle of his administration. As a former member of the U.S. intelligence community and State Department, any talk of reorganizing the government towards this goal certainly catches my attention, and I’m generally left wanting to hear more.

Our political discourse on climate change generally orbits around curtailing the use of fossil fuels, upping investments in green technologies, and rejoining the Paris Agreement. These are undeniably important discussions to undertake, as they lead to policies and actions that determine the state of our climate in the mid-21st century and beyond.

But what about the next few decades, the era of committed global warming?

Past emissions of greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide geophysically commits the planet to a temperature increase perhaps as much as 0.5°C on top of the 1°C rise we’ve already experienced since industrialization. And that’s if we go to zero emissions instantaneously. Considering that global carbon dioxide emissions have actually returned to an upward slope over the past few years, we seem increasingly certain to reach, if not surpass, the 2°C target of the Paris Agreement.

What do candidates have to say about risks to infrastructure from nuisance flooding and sea level rise, or from heatwaves? What policies do they propose about farmers suffering from floods, or people losing their homes from wildfires or coastal inundation? What do they suggest about addressing changes in infectious disease patterns? Our politics needs to pay more attention to offsetting the effects of a hostile climate in the short term.

Growing up in the Kansas City area, my family often drove through the nearby small riverside town of Mosby, Missouri. Mosby was the subject of an Associated Press article a few weeks ago about federally funded home buyouts to reduce the risks and costs from future flooding events. My heart broke reading accounts of community separation and disintegration as the financially-strapped town was forced to shutter its school and police department and seek federal assistance. We all know similarly vulnerable towns and cities like Mosby peppered throughout the country. Where do candidates stand on such issues of federally funded mitigation and managed retreat?

While the heightened political attention to the dangers arising from climate change is long overdue, our political discourse neglects other ecological issues that pose equally worrisome problems for humanity.

Global ecological disruption, the complex set of interdependent human-driven changes to Earth’s systems, includes climate change, biodiversity loss, water and food insecurity, pollution, plastics, nutrient imbalances, and invasive species. I don’t view these ecological stresses as mere environmental “add-ons” to our domestic and foreign policies, but rather as a threat to our human and national security.

The deep interconnectedness of Earth’s systems that support and include humans renders hopeless any attempt to address one manifestation of ecological disruption in isolation. In other words, if the nations of the world somehow came together to seriously combat climate change without also addressing ongoing biodiversity loss, humanity would still face serious jeopardy.

Many ecological stresses have a direct human cause with a minor, but growing, contribution from climate change. Water insecurity is often a case of resource mismanagement rather than drought or insufficient rainfall. Global fisheries have been driven towards unsustainability by overfishing, overconsumption, and fisheries crime. Toxic blooms of algae that kill millions of fish and degrade economies are fueled by nutrients from agricultural runoff as much as warming waters. Where do candidates stand on these issues that are marginally related to climate change?

In May 2019, the Intergovernmental Panel on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES), a multinational body formed to scientifically assess the state of biodiversity, issued a report containing this grave warning: “The biosphere, upon which humanity as whole depends, is being altered to an unparalleled degree across all spatial scales. Biodiversity — the diversity within species, between species and of ecosystems — is declining faster than at any time in human history.”

That such a statement could be made with no political reverberation is astonishing. What do the candidates think about this biosphere instability, which some consider the other emergent existential crisis facing humanity?