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Top Security Experts Identify Ecological Disruption as Major Security Threat
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Relevant to AI safety audiences interested in systemic and catastrophic risk frameworks; ecological disruption is treated here as a converging civilizational risk alongside technological and geopolitical threats.
Metadata
Importance: 32/100press releasenews
Summary
A landmark report by the Council on Strategic Risks' Converging Risks Lab, highlighted by the Wildlife Conservation Society, argues that ecological disruption—including biodiversity loss, habitat destruction, and ecosystem collapse—constitutes a major national and global security threat. The report draws on input from senior security experts to frame environmental degradation as a systemic risk multiplier with cascading consequences for stability and conflict.
Key Points
- •Senior security experts formally identify ecological disruption as a top-tier security threat, elevating environmental issues into mainstream defense and risk frameworks.
- •The report frames biodiversity loss and ecosystem collapse as risk multipliers that can trigger conflict, displacement, and state instability.
- •Published by the Converging Risks Lab, the report connects environmental science with national security policy discourse.
- •The framing aligns ecological threats with other systemic risks like pandemics and climate change, relevant to existential and catastrophic risk communities.
- •WCS coverage signals growing cross-sector convergence between conservation organizations and security/policy institutions.
Cited by 1 page
| Page | Type | Quality |
|---|---|---|
| Council on Strategic Risks | Organization | 38.0 |
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Top Security Experts Identify Ecological Disruption as a Major Security Threat in a Landmark Report by the Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks > Newsroom
News Releases
WCS NEWS RELEASE
Top Security Experts Identify Ecological Disruption as a Major Security Threat in a Landmark Report by the Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks
For more information, click here to download the full report
WASHINGTON
, DC |
February 09, 2021
The Converging Risks Lab of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) released a landmark report today, “The Security Threat That Binds Us: The Unraveling of Ecological and Natural Security and What the United States Can Do About It.” The report, which was made possible by the Natural Security Campaign, identifies the global loss of nature and degradation of natural systems as a major and underappreciated security threat and calls on the United States to reboot its national security architecture to better respond to this evolving threat landscape.
Strains on critical Earth systems -- water, food, forests, fisheries and wildlife populations -- are increasingly contributing to conflict, political instability and economic harm while also heightening the risks of future pandemics. In short, a failure to ensure natural security is undermining our national security.
The report offers recommendations based on three key measures: elevated and enhanced action from the U.S. government to combat ecological and natural security disruptions; a greater infusion of science into national security communities; and a reboot of U.S. national security doctrine and architecture to tackle the modern threats presented by a changing planet and recognize humanity’s reliance on nature and the severe consequences we face from alteration not just of the climate, but of many of the earth’s natural systems.
“The past decade has seen a lot of deserved attention on the security implications of climate change, but the fraying of the ecological networks on which humanity depends, which is both interconnected with and distinct from climate change, poses a commensurate security threat,” said Dr. Rod Schoonover , lead author of the report, Advisor at the Council on Strategic Risks, and former Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council. “The U.S. and international security communities need to treat ecological disruption and climate change as
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