NATO’s Threat Multiplier: Why and How the Alliance Is Adapting to Climate Change

• In Event: Climate Change and International Collaboration

Abstract

From flooding of naval bases to forest fires threatening troop movements, climate change is damaging NATO’s ability to collectively defend the U.S., Canada, and Europe. Despite member states’ pledges to adapt NATO, initial reports indicate few changes to policy, planning, and training yet scholarship on the subject remains sparse. Therefore, this paper introduces and tests a new theoretical argument on task proximity to answer the following question: why have member states adapted NATO to some climate threats across the organization’s domains (i.e. land, sea, air, cyber, space) but stagnated when confronting other threats. Thus far, there exist few relevant studies across relevant disciplines (security studies, international organization studies and organizational sociology) examining international security organization (ISO) adaptation. Aside from one (i.e. Lippert 2019), most international governance studies on climate decision-making have also overlooked the ways that NATO’s unique structure affects such decision-making. We therefore employ an original in-person survey experiment on and interviews with 100 U.S., allied, and NATO elites who have climate change within their respective portfolios. Our findings provide a new theoretical argument as to why ISOs adapt, unique empirical insights into political barriers and progress within NATO and policy insights into which negotiation strategies are overcoming adaptation challenges.

Authors

• Jacqueline Burns

• Heidi Hardt, University of California, Irvine