Ecological Futures Group works at the intersection of Earth system science and national security. If you’re new here, this page is a guided path into the thinking behind EFG’s analysis and work.
1. Understand the Framework
Conventional security thinking focuses on states, militaries, and human adversaries. Ecological security widens the aperture — examining how disruptions to Earth’s living systems create cascading risks to human societies, economies, and political stability. Climate is one part of this, but the framework also covers biodiversity loss, disease emergence, food and water stress, pollution, and the interactions among them.
→ Read: About Ecological Security
2. Read the Key Works
Three pieces are the best entry points into Rod’s analysis:
- Updating Mental Models of Risk for a Complex World (Issues in Science and Technology, 2025) — On why existing risk frameworks fail to capture cascading, systemic, and ecological threats.
- Understanding the Polycrisis (Cambridge University Press, 2025) — A contributed chapter situating ecological disruption within the broader polycrisis framework, co-edited by Adam Tooze and Thomas Hale.
- The Security Threat That Binds Us (Council on Strategic Risks) — On ecological disruption as a foundational shared security threat that transcends geopolitical divisions.
- Five Urgent Questions on Ecological Security (SIPRI, 2023) — The foundational questions the field needs to answer: scope, causation, thresholds, response, and governance.
- Societal and Security Implications of Ecosystem Service Declines (Council on Strategic Risks, 2022) — How the decline of pollination and seed dispersal cascades into food system fragility and security risk.
→ See all Research & Key Works
3. Follow the Signals
The Signals Hub aggregates external reporting and scientific developments organized by ecological domain — biosphere, climate, disease, forests, oceans, and more. It’s updated continuously and is a good way to track how the situation is evolving across each domain.
4. Go Deeper in the Blog
The blog contains original analysis, commentary, and synthesis on ecological security topics. The longer-form pieces are a good starting point. From there, the archive covers specific domains, current events, and the policy landscape in more depth.
5. About Rod Schoonover
Rod Schoonover is a scientist and former senior U.S. intelligence official who helped bring ecological and climate-related risks into the core of U.S. national security institutions. He is Founder and CEO of Ecological Futures Group, an adjunct at Georgetown University, a nonresident Fellow at CSIS, and affiliated with SIPRI.
If any of this connects with what you’re working on — whether for a keynote, advisory engagement, or research collaboration — the Connect page is the right place to start.