Richard Smith, director of the Statistical and Applied Mathematical Sciences Institute (SAMSI), is participating on the Committee on Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change on Social and Political Stresses for the National Research Council. The committee released a report recently that looks at climate change and possible security threats that could arise from extreme weather events.

The report describes the need for the U.S. intelligence community to monitor warnings of a wide variety of security threats that may affect the United States. More scientific evidence that the global climate is changing is accumulating, and as more extreme climate events are occurring, there are new stresses on societies around the world that are creating possible security risks for the United States. Some of these extreme climate events, such as hurricanes, heat waves, and droughts, are exceeding the capacity of affected countries to cope and respond to its citizens.

The connections between the harm suffered from climate events and the political and social outcomes of security concerns has had little attention from the scientific community. The report suggests that the United States Global Change Research Program, along with various science and mission agencies, work with the intelligence community to develop priorities for research on climate vulnerability and adaptation. The research should focus on items such as quantifying the likelihood of disruptive climate events, improving the understanding of the conditions under which climate-related natural disasters and disruptions of critical systems of life support do or do not lead to important security-related outcomes.

Committee members also suggest that the U.S. government develop a systematic whole-of-government strategy for monitoring threats related to climate change. “There is already a lot of concern about extreme weather events and their possible association with human-caused climate change. Of course, we are most concerned about events that directly affect us, such as hurricanes or flooding in North Carolina, but this report shows why we also need to think about events that occur in distant parts of the world,” remarked Smith.

The Board on Environmental Change and Society of the Division of Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education released a brief on November 9, 2012, that was based on the report by the Committee on Assessing the Impacts of Climate Change on Social and Political Stresses, which was sponsored by the U.S. intelligence community.

SAMSI has had several research programs covering statistical questions associated with climate change, including the 2009–2010 Program on Space-Time Analysis for Environmental Mapping, Epidemiology, and Climate Change; the 2011–2012 Program on Uncertainty Quantification: Climate Modeling; and the current 2012–2013 Program on Statistical and Computational Methodology for Massive Datasets.

For more information, visit SAMSI’s website for presentations and links to some of the research conducted during these programs.