Biden's Intelligence Director Aims to Put Climate Change at the "Center" of U.S. Foreign Policy

The director of national intelligence, Avril Haines on Thursday during a virtual global climate summit, said, the Biden administration sees climate change as an "urgent national security threat" that will be at the "core" of the country's foreign policy.

Haines made the remarks at a digital two-day summit held by the White House on Earth Day, at which President Joe Biden vowed that the US would reduce carbon emissions by at least half by 2030. The transition will be a significant move forward for the nation and an important step toward assisting the planet in reducing climate-change-causing emissions. 

The United States is the world's second-largest emitter of greenhouse gas emissions.

Speaking at this conference, Haines struck a note of concern that contrasted with those of her predecessors, who downplayed the role of rising sea levels, droughts, crop failures, explosions, viruses, and increasingly severe extreme weather events.

“To address climate change properly it must be at the center of a country’s national security and foreign policy,” she said, echoing the words of Lloyd J. Austin III, the defense secretary, who addressed the conference a few minutes earlier, NY Times reported.

“It needs to be fully integrated with every aspect of our analysis in order to allow us not only to monitor the threat but also, critically, to ensure that policymakers understand the importance of climate change on seemingly unrelated policies,” Haines said.

This week, the Biden administration worked to make climate change action a central tenet of its work, upholding scientists' warnings for decades that the planet must reduce pollution and set ambitious deadlines to curb them entirely as quickly as possible.

The CIA announced on Thursday that it would add a new environmental category to its World Factbook, which will provide statistics on temperature, emissions, infectious diseases, and food security for various countries. 

According to the intelligence community's most recent global threat report, extreme weather exacerbated by climate change will likely push people to abandon areas when they become inhabitable, potentially leading to an increase in migration and instability. All of this will "exacerbate global insecurity and humanitarian crises," the report states.

“The impact will not be evenly distributed, disproportionately falling on poor and vulnerable populations,” Haines said. “Warmer temperatures could push tens of millions of people … to migrate in the coming decades.”

She added that as director of national intelligence, she intended to make climate action “a whole of government effort, working not just to protect national security for America but to protect human security around the world,” HuffPost reported.

“Climate change knows no boundaries, respects no national borders, and cannot be addressed … by any one nation on its own,” Haines said. “We must work together on the challenge before us.”

Picture Credits: NYT