“The demand for water will not be linear,” said Vice Admiral Lee Gunn (USN-Ret,), currently vice chairman of the CNA Military Advisory Board, at a recent Wilson Center event on water and security. As people’s quality of life improves, “the demand for water will increase as well. And so the stresses that we already see around the world—the arguments over basin rights for water, the depletion of water in major cities around the world—we think will aggravate problems that already are beginning to manifest themselves,” he said.

The Australian government’s recent Foreign Policy White Paper has been criticized for its underwhelming climate change section. Penny Wong, the current opposition leader in the Australian Senate, said that its acknowledgement of the need to support a more resilient Pacific region “rings hollow in light of the Abbott/Turnbull Government’s massive aid cuts.” But despite these criticisms, the Australian government continues to support a range of climate change initiatives in the Pacific. Increasingly, Australian Aid and its fellow donors, including USAID, JICA and GIZ, take a community-based approach to climate adaptation. Germany’s GIZ, for example, carries out community-level adaptation activities for all beneficiaries in the Pacific; and USAID has highlighted its community-level projects as important models. Our recent evaluation of some of these community-level adaptation programs in Vanuatu and Kiribati found that they provide some development benefits, including increased awareness, empowerment, cooperation, and self-esteem, but that it is too soon to tell whether this approach can reduce long-term vulnerability to climate change.

Scholarly attention to the links between climate change and conflict has increased. But which places are analyzed most frequently by researchers, and what are the implications of their choices?

The effects of climate change on an abandoned U.S. nuclear project in Greenland could create not just environmental problems, but also disrupt military politics and spur diplomatic conflicts. My new article in Global Environmental Politics finds that climate change will eventually expose toxic waste, long immobilized by ice, at Camp Century, which the U.S. military left in the 1960s. This situation—which has already spurred the dismissal of Greenland’s foreign minister—could be the canary in the coalmine signaling that climate change will further complicate the already contentious politics of military bases.

I pulled my horse to a stop along the banks of a little stream, which was wedged between two grassy hills speckled with wildflowers and pika holes, to admire the view of the Tibetan-Qinghai Plateau’s rolling hills evolving into snowcapped mountains.

As senior military officers, we see water stress—the lack of adequate fresh water—as a growing factor in the world’s hotspots and conflict areas, many of vital interest to the United States. Our earlier reports have identified a nexus among climate, water, energy, and U.S. national security. We have previously shown how emerging resource scarcity across this nexus can be a threat multiplier and an accelerant of instability. With escalating global population and the impact of a changing climate, we see the challenges of water stress rising with time. It is in this context that we now seek to provide a better understanding of the mechanisms through which water factors into violence and conflict.

For the first time, the Joint Doctrine of the Indian Armed Forces acknowledges that the “environment has emerged as a critical area of the security paradigm,” and warns that if environmental degradation and related issues increase security risks, the military will need to respond. Released in 2017, the doctrine lists a series of non-traditional security challenges linked to the environment that could influence conflict and war, including “climate change, ecosystem disruption, energy issues, population issues, food-related problems, economic issues of unsustainable modes of production, and civil strife related to environment.” While the military has taken steps to address its impacts on the environment, it can do much more to support the nation’s environmental goals and mitigate environment-related security risks.

The Trump administration’s first National Defense Strategy, which was released last Friday, outlines the U.S. Department of Defense’s national security goals in a world it describes as rife with great power competition between the United States, Russia, and China. Climate change – which some military leaders warn poses a looming threat to the effectiveness of American military power – was not mentioned, in stark contrast to the previous administration’s strategic priorities. National security and defense strategies issued by the Obama Administration highlighted the dangers climate change poses to national security, including “increased national disasters, refugee flows, and conflicts over basic resources like food and water.”