The Climate Intelligence Assessment the Government Doesn’t Want You to See

Washington, D.C., February 28, 2025 - For 17 years, the U.S. Intelligence Community has refused to declassify one of its first investigations into climate change as a national security threat. In 2008, a panel of intelligence officers on the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced its first climate-focused National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) examining the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030.” The full text of the report remains classified as “Confidential,” the lowest level of national security secrecy, even though its findings may offer critical insights into how climate change will affect U.S. national security in years to come.

Today, as part of a public call for the director of national intelligence to declassify the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, the National Security Archive is posting three related intelligence products—one each from the George W. Bush administration, the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration—detailing the intelligence community’s increasingly dire warnings about the security threats posed by climate change and that call into question the basis for the IC’s continued withholding of the 2008 report. The 2008 assessment may ultimately serve as a crucial reference for how climate-related risks have evolved over time and how intelligence agencies assessed those risks more than a decade ago.

Declassifying the 2008 assessment would fill a critical gap in the public’s understanding how the intelligence community has historically evaluated the risk of climate change and fulfill the people’s right to know about critical decisions affecting their lives. In 2022, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the assessment and in December 2024 submitted an official letter calling for the report’s declassification to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence but has not received a response to either of these requests. It is long past time to declassify this important assessment of the threats posed by climate change.

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For decades, the intelligence community has monitored climatic effects on the Earth’s planetary surface[1] but its more recent focus on the linkage between climate change and national security was largely seen as a response to studies already being generated by both climate scientists and the military. In the early 1990s, the first United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) Assessment Report and the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) characterized the scale of climate change impacts as a security threat.[2]

During the George W. Bush administration, a 2003 Pentagon-commissioned study titled “An Abrupt Climate Scenario and Its Implications for United States National Security” attempted to “imagine the unthinkable” by creating a scenario that could challenge the routine approach to U.S. national security.[3] Four years later, a group of retired generals on the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board published its 2007 report, “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change.”[4] This report, which coined the now widely used term “Threat Multiplier,” was one of the first publicly collaborative efforts within the military establishment linking climate and security. These reports generated significant media attention and politicized the issue on Capitol Hill, leading Congress to call on the spy agencies to more seriously consider the national security implications of climate change. Senator Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), who had a particular interest in using satellite imagery to monitor climatic and atmospheric effects, urged the NIC to conduct its own geopolitical assessment on climate.

Following a National Intelligence Priorities Framework review and draft congressional language to establish a community-level product on the impact of climate change on national security, the NIC developed its 2008 NIA on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030. However, the NIC intended to keep the intelligence assessment classified.

On June 25, 2008, in place of the NIA’s publication, one of the lead authors of the report, Dr. Thomas Fingar, who also served as deputy director of national intelligence for analysis and chairman of the NIC, testified before the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence and the House Select Committee on Energy Independence and Global Warming about the assessment. (Document 1)

According to Dr. Fingar’s testimony, his panel of intelligence officers developed its assessment using a deliberately unique methodology from that used in an ordinary National Intelligence Estimate (NIE). Typically, the NIC will create an NIE through a highly formalized process to project existing military, political, and economic trends into the future and to estimate for policymakers the likely implications of those trends. In principle, the NIE is the most authoritative written judgement of the IC, but intelligence reports like the President’s Daily Briefs are much more influential on policymaking, while NIEs are typically left to “collect dust on a shelf.”[5] In generating the 2008 NIA on climate change, Fingar states that the 2008 report “used a fundamentally different kind of analytical methodology from what is typical for an intelligence product such as an [NIE],” and its authors “depended upon open sources and greatly leveraged outside expertise.” Primarily, the NIC relied on the Fourth IPCC Assessment Report for its climate science baseline.

During a National Security Archive interview with Dr. Fingar in December 2024, he stated that the NIA designation was “deliberate because there’s no secret stuff in here…this was just good analysts working with publicly available information and applying good methodological tradecraft.”

The report’s key findings, as Fingar details in his testimony, are straightforward: “climate change will have wide-ranging implications for US national security interests over the next 20 years.” While climate change alone may not trigger state failure, the NIC assessed that the impacts would worsen existing problems: “poverty, social tensions, environmental degradation, ineffectual leadership, and weak political institutions.” Fingar also mentions increasing levels of migration, global temperature increases, sea-level rise, food and water shortages, increased health problems including the spread of diseases, flooding, coastal erosion, interruptions of the flow of trade and market access to critical raw materials like oil and gas, and disruptions to Arctic infrastructure. The second half of Fingar’s testimony focuses on regional climate trends and culminates in sections about “Winners and Losers” of regional climate trends and “Implications for the United States.”

Finally, he concludes his testimony by stating that the NIC could improve its analysis if it had “much better understanding and explanation of past and current human behavior,” calling on the IC to continue to partner with members outside the classified sphere like academia, scientists, or non-IC components of the U.S. government.  

At the time of the hearing, House Democrats and Republicans alike expressed concerns that the 2008 NIA was issued as a classified document. From the Democrats’ perspective, the declassification of the report was imperative to inform government agencies and private industries about the risks of climate change, while Republicans argued that the NIC’s analysis relied almost entirely on open-source information and didn’t contribute “anything new to the existing body of knowledge on climate change.”[6]

In the years since Fingar’s testimony before Congress, the NIC and other branches of the intelligence community have published various public facing reports that discuss the consequences of climate change, including Annual Threat Assessments, Global Trends reports, and the National Intelligence Strategy. In 2021, the NIC published what it calls its “first NIE on climate change”: the “National Intelligence Estimate: Climate Change and International Response Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040.” (Document 3)

While this most recent NIE is an important contribution to understanding the increasing challenges to national security, other former intelligence officials believe it downplays the risks.[7] In another National Security Archive interview from December 2024, Dr. Rod Schoonover, a former intelligence official at the State Department’s Bureau of Intelligence and Research (INR), stated that the IC focuses too heavily on geopolitical tensions in the newest NIE. According to Schoonover, this report is “representative of the problem” that the spy agencies are “allergic” to talking about the United States’ own role in exacerbating the worsening effects of climate change.

Schoonover, who is currently Co-Founder of the Ecosecurity Council and Adjunct Professor at Georgetown University, served for a decade as a Senior Analyst at INR and for two years as the Director of Environmental and Natural Resources at the NIC. In 2019, under the first Trump administration, he testified before the Senate Special Committee on the Climate Crisis on the “numerous ways climate change is currently affecting U.S. national security interests around the world and how to plan for future impacts.”[8] (Document 2A) In the lead up to his testimony, however, the White House attempted to censor Schoonover’s testimony (Document 2B) and refused to approve his written testimony for entry into the permanent Congressional Record. Shortly thereafter, Schoonover resigned.[9]

In both December 2024 National Security Interviews, Fingar and Schoonover separately shared their thoughts on the 2008 NIA’s continued classification. Despite the 2008 NIA’s reliance on open-source data like the 2007 Fourth IPCC Assessment, Fingar continues to advocate against the release of the 2008 NIA because it identifies the specific countries most vulnerable to climate change impacts. From Fingar’s viewpoint, the report “isn’t classified because of the information, but because of the judgements [the NIC] made.” By publicizing specific countries, “we didn’t want to start the rush for money or technical assistance until policymakers figured out how they wanted to respond” and “cause embarrassment to those countries.”[10]

However, in his testimony, Dr. Fingar never makes explicitly clear as to how this would affect U.S. national security.

Unlike Fingar, Schoonover advocates for the declassification of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, asserting in the interview that the rationale for its retention is weak. Fingar makes the point that naming specific countries and regions most impacted by the effects of climate change would lead to an increased demand for aid and funding from developed countries. However, the 2021 NIE released during the Biden administration names two specific regions (Central Africa and the Pacific) and 11 countries: Afghanistan, Burma, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Nicaragua, Colombia and Iraq.

Additionally, the “2008 report is far superior compared to the 2021 estimate [released by the Biden administration],” Schoonover stated. Although the more recent 2021 NIE discusses the “massive” impacts that the U.S. will undergo from climate change, the “warning was buried on the last page of the report.”[11] Generally, the report relies on a state-centric, geopolitical lens, and continues to be “straightjacketed” by the military’s “threat multiplier” language.

Declassifying the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030” would fill a critical gap in the public’s understanding of how the intelligence community has historically evaluated the risk of climate change and fulfill the public’s right to know. Given the report’s reliance on open-source methodology and the indication, from its “Confidential” classification, that it does not contain intelligence sources and methods, it is time to declassify this important assessment of the threats posed by climate change.

Stay tuned for the Climate Change Transparency Project’s next climate intelligence installment: a repository of all publicly available climate change intelligence reports.