11 June 2026

The Effects of Climate Change on Security

A new report by the NATO Science and Technology Organisation (STO) analyses how climate change rapidly transforms NATO’s strategic environment. The report was published in January 2026.

This NATO STO report analyses the disparate, complex, and significant ways in which climate change impacts security and defence and how it transforms the strategic environment within which NATO operates. The study of these effects and transformations is done through four case studies: the northwestern parts of Africa, the Arctic, the east flank, and military mitigation efforts. These case studies illustrate the difficulty of developing effective responses to climate change. This challenge stems from the complex and uncertain relationship between climate change and security, as well as the context-dependent nature of its impacts and consequences

Key Insights

The report’s three core insights include: 

  1. Climate change is a systemic and unique problem that cannot simply be added as another item on the list of an ever-growing security agenda because it effectively impacts the whole agenda. 
  2. Context is key. To properly understand the security consequences of climate change, in-depth knowledge of global climate change and its consequences on context-specific dynamics is required, whether the context is defined regionally, nationally, or locally. 
  3. The practice of climate security is found at the intersection of science and policy. The challenges of climate change must be explicitly acknowledged as both scientific and political in nature. 

Key Recommendations 

To enact and enable NATO’s climate security agenda. Two structural recommendations are highlighted:

  1. The CCSAP must be thoroughly updated to integrate its pillars and transform knowledge into action. 
  2. NATO must build a new science-policy model that institutionalises the co-production of knowledge between scientists, defence professionals, and policymakers. 
Photo by Navy Medicine on Unsplash

This text is based on extracts from the report by the NATO Science and Technology Organisation. To read the full contribution, follow this link.