Chad Briggs, strategy director of global interconnections and lecturer at the American University in Kosovo, spoke with adelphi about the role of diplomacy as well as that of the intelligence and military communities in reducing disaster risk and vulnerability.

adelphi: How can we obtain an accurate assessment of environmental risks?

Briggs: There is a red line between doing the assessment and prescribing policy, meaning that the intelligence community, which was one of the first groups in the US to address climate change and climate security, could give warnings but was not responsible for giving policy prescriptions. I think that is a useful distinction because often, if people want to be influential in policy, they may water down the warnings because they want to make sure there is a clear link between what they are warning and what they are able to accomplish. However, looking only at the most likely scenarios, we end up underestimating the risks. The reason for that is that we base most probabilities on historical records, but we are now outside of the historical records. We have shifted the boundary conditions of environmental systems, we find that disasters are now coming up that have never occurred before.

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