Spying on Climate: Inside the Intelligence Community’s Environmental Legacy

Washington, D.C., June 30, 2025 – For decades, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has viewed climate change as a serious national security threat that will create “new and compounded stresses on people and societies around the world,” according to one of the records featured in a repository of U.S. intelligence reports published online today by the National Security Archive. From early evaluations of Russia’s post-Soviet environmental challenges in the 1990s to present-day threat assessments on human and environmental security, the 45-document collection follows the evolution of the IC’s environmental monitoring and its increasingly dire warnings about the security threats posed by climate change.

The bottom line, according to the 2019 testimony of one State Department intelligence analyst: “Fundamental characteristics” about the planet “are moving outside the bounds experienced in modern history.” (Document 36A)

Despite a clear societal interest in knowing the truth about climate change, the U.S. continues to shield important intelligence assessments on the subject from public view. As part of today’s publication, the Archive renews its call for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to declassify the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on “Climate Change Impacts to 2030,” the only known intelligence assessment on climate change still classified at the “Confidential” level.

The assessments published here today grow increasingly sophisticated over time in their analyses, evaluations, and warnings about the risks of climate change to U.S. interests, with more recent reports placing greater emphasis on complex threats like ecological degradation and biodiversity loss. Still, from 1999 to present, the IC has generally overlooked the domestic impacts, human-driven causes, and systemic contributors to climate change.

These analyses also reveal a deeply siloed approach to climate intelligence, the result of a state-centric analytical framework that typically focused on “hard” security issues like terrorism and great power competition. By structuring its climate focus around regions and nation states—such as extreme heat in the Middle East and flooding in Southeast Asia—U.S. intelligence agencies treat climate change like a nonstate, tactical actor, rather than a borderless, existential threat. The IC’s focus on geopolitics reflects a “narrow understanding of national security” that ultimately “downplays the risks” of climate change, according to the former State Department intelligence analyst, Dr. Rod Schoonover, who resigned in 2019 after the Trump administration blocked congressional testimony he prepared on the risks of climate change.[1]

The repository below offers a comprehensive look at how the IC has collected, monitored, and assessed its findings on the national security implications of climate change. The intelligence products published today include:

• National Intelligence Estimates, Assessments, and Memoranda (Documents 1, 4, 28, 37, and 39)
• Annual Threat Assessments produced for Congress (Documents 7, 9, 11, 14, 19, 23, 24, 26, 30, 31, 33, 40, 41, 42, 43, 44, and 45)
• Global Trends Reports (Documents 2, 3, 6, 10, 17, 29, and 38)
• National Intelligence Strategies (Documents 8, 22, and 32)
• Testimony before congressional intelligence committees (Documents 34, 35, and 36A-36B)
• And intelligence reports, conference reports, and IC-commissioned research reports (Documents 5A-5L, 12, 13, 15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 25, and 27)

The collection concludes with the most recent Annual Threat Assessment (ATA) published by the ODNI, the agency responsible for coordinating all other intelligence agencies. (Document 45) Under current DNI Tulsi Gabbard, the 2025 ATA is the first assessment of its kind that does not mention climate change since 2009 (see Document 7), raising concerns among former officials and policy experts about national preparedness and whether the IC is in alignment with scientific consensus on the issue.[2]

This posting comes at a time when critical environmental resources and datasets are being scrubbed from federal agency websites.[3] Since President Trump’s inauguration, large swaths of government data—including information on climate change, extreme weather events, greenhouse gas emissions, energy production, and environmental justice—have gone dark. In May, the ODNI website was down for several days. When it came back online, its Freedom of Information Act page “was visibly slimmed down,” with various investigate reports, case processing notes, and inspector general reports missing.[4]

The National Security Archive would like to thank the Center for Climate & Security for publishing the core documents included in this repository under its U.S. Government Intelligence Resource Hub. This collection also includes additional reports produced or commissioned by the National Intelligence Council (NIC), marking the first time all 45 intel products are being published together.

Among the NIC documents are two Global Trends Reports projected to the years 2015 and 2020 (Documents 2 and 3) which are the first Global Trends reports to discuss or mention climate change; a Global Governance Report projected to the year 2025 (Document 10), the first unclassified report jointly developed and produced by the NIC with a non-U.S. body; and two special NIC-commissioned reports exploring global food security. (Documents 12 and 21) The Global Trends and Governance reports capture early collaborative efforts within the intelligence apparatus to develop comprehensive scenarios about how ongoing planetary warming, fossil fuel consumption, and environmental degradation might impact natural resources, energy demand, and other environmental challenges. The NIC global food security reports from the mid-2010s reveal an IC less constrained by the “hard vs. soft” threat narrative and more willing to explore the complex intersections of climate change, food and water scarcity, agriculture production, infrastructure, and changes in disease patterns.

Key takeaways from the full 45-document intelligence repository reveal that:

• The IC’s focus remains skewed toward geopolitical impacts on countries outside of the U.S., with little attention to domestic security or humanitarian risks, such as impacts to health, food, water, infrastructure, and the military within “the homeland.”
• Climate risks are often discussed as “threat multipliers” without addressing the root causes of climate change.
• The IC frequently relies on external open sources, such as scientists, NGOs, academic scholars, and workshops, signaling both openness and a lack of internal capacity or prioritization.
• CO2 and other greenhouse gas emissions, particularly through fossil fuel consumption, are absent from the IC’s official threat language despite focusing largely on the global energy supply and threats of a potential energy crisis.
• The IC heavily monitors international climate negotiations such as the 2015 Paris Agreement but avoids scrutiny of domestic policy gaps in reducing emissions.
• U.S. contributions to climate change—including those of the Department of Defense, which is exempt from key environmental treaties—are not acknowledged.
• Multiple intelligence products rely heavily on the classified 2008 National Intelligence Assessment on the National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030 and the 5th IPCC Assessment Report, indicating the significance and rigor of these original reports, as well as a lack of capacity building in more recent reports.[5]

A Cold War Legacy

The Intelligence Community’s environmental awareness dates back to the Cold War, when, from 1960 to 1972, the CIA operated a top-secret satellite program codenamed CORONA, which produced imagery of Soviet military installations. The program dramatically improved U.S. knowledge of Soviet capabilities and activities and cataloged a range of Soviet defense systems. In total, the program produced almost a million images of the Soviet Union and other regions of the world.[6]

Then, in the 1990s, at the urging of then-Senator Al Gore, the CIA established the Environmental Task Force (ETF) to review the classified CORONA satellite imagery for information that could help to understand the changing climate. The task force, which would later evolve into the MEDEA program,[7] found that the images could fill critical gaps for the environmental science community and be studied without revealing sensitive intelligence sources and methods. In 1995, President Bill Clinton signed Executive Order 12951, effectively releasing all 850,000 images captured during the CORONA program. Clinton’s signing marked one of the largest declassification efforts in U.S. history.[8]

Early Environmental Assessments

In conjunction with the CIA’s review and declassification of the CORONA program, the IC’s growing emphasis on the environment became more apparent through its National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) products. The NIE is a classified document published by the NIC that assesses a national issue and provides information on likely future events. Through a formalized process, the NIC produces NIEs to project existing military, political, and economic trends into the future and to estimate for policymakers the likely implications of those trends. Nominally, NIEs are perhaps the most authoritative written judgements of the IC, but other intelligence products, like the President’s Daily Briefs (PDBs) are generally considered to be more influential on policy decisions.

In January 1999, the NIC published its first environmentally focused National Intelligence Estimate, which assessed that Russia would be “unable to deal effectively with the formidable environmental challenges posed by decades of Soviet and post-Soviet environmental mismanagement.” (Document 1) The estimate—while not referencing climate change—highlights pollution, hazardous waste, and ecological degradation as pressing issues that could destabilize the region, a departure from the IC’s usual focus on adversarial threats. This report signaled the beginning of a broader understanding of environmental factors as relevant national and regional security concerns.

Shortly after, the NIC prepared its “Global Trends 2015” report, the second publication of its kind, which provided policymakers and citizens with a long-range view of an array of possible futures.[9] (Document 2) Rather than make specific predictions about the world, Global Trends reports are designed to provide an analytic framework for policymakers as they craft national security strategy and navigate uncertain futures. In general, Global Trends reports are comprehensive, detailed, and less constrained by the “hard vs. soft threat” dichotomy that hampers other intelligence products like the NIE.

The Global Trends 2015 report, published in December 2000 under the Clinton administration, included an entire section dedicated to “Natural Resources and Environment,” which discussed world food production, water scarcity, global energy efficiency, and environmental issues. In it, the NIC cites the successes of the 1987 Montreal Protocol in restoring the ozone layer as well as the importance of new environmental agreements and the “challenges the international community” will face due to global warming, “such as meltbacks of polar ice, sea level rise, and increasing frequency of major storms.”

Under the George W. Bush administration, the Intelligence Community continued the Global Trends tradition with the publication of the “Mapping the Global Future” report on scenarios to the year 2020 (Document 3) and “Global Trends 2025: A Transformed World.” (Document 6) Through consultations with “leading outside experts” like Ged Davis, former head of Shell International’s scenarios projects, the NIC established a methodology for its scenario development process.

Both reports emphasize concerns that greenhouse gas emissions from countries like China and India will grow, but they vary in confidence in how they attribute the impacts of climate change to natural disasters and resource degradation. For example, the Global Trends 2020 report concludes its climate change section stating that “there are likely to be numerous weather-related events that, correctly or not, will be linked to global warming.” Meanwhile, the Global Trends 2025 report asserts that “climate change is expected to exacerbate resource scarcity…[and] harmful effects, particularly water scarcity and loss of agricultural production.”

The Classified 2008 NIA

It wasn’t until the mid-2000s that the intel agencies began to explicitly link climate change and national security concerns. In 2007, the Center for Naval Analyses (CNA) Military Advisory Board published the “National Security and the Threat of Climate Change,” one of the first publicly collaborative efforts within the U.S. military establishment to acknowledge climate as a national security issue.[10] The “Retired Generals Report,” as it was colloquially known, was the first report to describe climate change as a “threat multiplier,” a term widely used throughout future intelligence products.

Shortly after, in part due to pressures from Congress, the NIC produced its own National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030.” Although the assessment relied heavily on open-source resources, the NIA remains classified at the “Confidential” level to this day. Earlier this year, the National Security Archive publicly called for its declassification.[11] As this report remains unavailable, the National Security Archive is once again publishing the 2008 testimony of Dr. Thomas Fingar, chairman of the NIC, before the House Committees on Intelligence and Energy Independence and Global Warming, in which he discusses the still classified report. (Document 4)

Over the next two years, the NIC embarked on research efforts to explore the detailed national security implications of climate change on six countries and regions: India, China, Russia, North Africa, Mexico and the Caribbean, and Southeast Asia and the Pacific Island states. Inspired by the 2008 NIA, the NIC produced various global research publications and organized a series of workshops and conferences of experts outside the IC to discuss the effects of climate change (Documents 5A to 5L). Beyond this series, future intelligence products would go on to cite the 2008 NIA as their foundation, indicating the rigor of this original report, while simultaneously calling into question its ongoing classification.

An Evolving but Siloed Approach

Early in the Obama administration, the IC for the first time ever integrated climate change into its Annual Threat Assessments, the reports produced by the DNI for public hearings of the intelligence oversight committees in Congress. Often referred to simply as the ATA, these reports provide an unclassified summary of the IC’s evaluation of current threats to U.S. national security. From 2009 to 2016, the IC under President Obama regularly evaluated the implications of climate change and environmental degradation in sections of the report with titles like “Environmental Security,” “Regional Impacts of Climate Change,” and “Natural Resources.” (Documents 7, 9, 11, 14, 19, 23, 24, and 26)

In some years, climate change is infrequently mentioned in the ATA (Documents 11, 14, and 23), while in other years, especially toward the end of Obama’s second term, the ATAs include dedicated sections on climate change. (Documents 7, 9, 19, 24, and 26) Of the assessments that do discuss the security implications of climate change in detail, the NIC does so through a regionally focused lens, concentrating on country-specific capacities for human displacement and migration, food supply, and extreme weather resilience. The reports increasingly draw the link between climate change and other global threats, such as infectious diseases and ecological degradation, but maintain a traditional, state-centric framework. According to one former intelligence official, these reports specifically remain “straightjacketed” by “threat multiplier” language coined in the original 2007 CNA retired generals report.[12]

During this period, the Intelligence Community also published a series of special reports on a range of topics including key drivers of global food security (Documents 12, 15, and 25), water security (Document 13), climate extremes (Document 18), natural resources (Document 20), and fisheries and illegal fishing. (Documents 21 and 27) The commissioning of these special reports, while not necessarily representative of IC consensus or the views of the U.S. government, demonstrates that the Intelligence Community recognizes and wants to understand the relationship between climate change and other complex security threats.

Duplication and Censorship

Despite the actions of the first Trump administration in rolling back numerous environmental regulations, withdrawing from the 2015 Paris Agreement, and reducing funding for climate-related programs, the IC during Trump’s first term continued to integrate climate change into its intelligence products and published several reports on its implications for security. While publication of the Global Trends Reports stopped altogether, the NIC published Annual Threat Assessments in 2017, 2018, and 2019, all of which included a section on “Human Security” discussing the negative effects of environmental degradation and climate change. They even explicitly mention biodiversity loss, a first for any ATA report. (Documents 30, 31, and 33) However, from 2017 to 2019, each iteration of the “Human Security” section is nearly verbatim from the 2016 ATA, released in the last year of the Obama administration, and recycles the same language. (Document 26) In 2020, no Annual Threat Assessment was released.

Apart from these three ATAs, the ODNI produced the 2019 National Intelligence Strategy, emphasizing climate change as a “pressure point” potentially leading to increased migration and urbanization of populations. (Document 32) In 2020, the NIC produced a special memorandum on the intersection of water insecurity, global economic growth, and political stability. (Document 37)

In our previous climate change intelligence installment from February 2025, the National Security Archive reported that the White House, under President Trump, regularly contradicted the findings of its own Intelligence Community and in 2019 even attempted to censor IC congressional testimony warning that human-caused climate change could be “possibly catastrophic.”[13] (Documents 34, 35, 36A, and 36B)

First Climate Estimate Ever Falls Flat

As a response to President Biden’s call for the Intelligence Community to assess the national security impacts of climate change, the NIC in 2021 published what it called its “first NIE on climate change,” a 27-page report entitled the “Climate Change and International Responses Increasing Challenges to US National Security Through 2040.” (Document 39)

According to some former intelligence officials, the 2021 NIA is a “powerful document by itself” and an important contribution to understanding the increasing challenges to national security.[14] However, some critics feel it “undersells the risk” of climate change because it once again relies too heavily on geopolitical tensions. Additionally, the estimates of the risks are “almost certainly too conservative,” according to one analysis, and the report’s judgements about the “massive” and “wrenching” impacts aren’t mentioned until the very last page.[15]

Likewise, in the four Annual Threat Assessments released during the Biden administration, one former intelligence officer, as well as the House Intelligence Committee,[16] argued that “the Intelligence Community places insufficient emphasis on…interconnected long-term national security threats, such as…climate change.”[17] (Documents 40, 41, 42, 43, and 44) Notably, the 2023 ATA is the first to ever discuss rising geopolitical tensions “over climate financing,” the first and last time this topic is mentioned in a publicly available intelligence product. (Document 43)

Climate Change: The Security Threat Missing in Action

After over two decades of integrating climate change and environmental degradation into its publicly available and unclassified reports to the policymakers and the public, the Intelligence Community under the current Trump administration has sent a clear message with its most recent Annual Threat Assessment: that it does not consider climate change to be a direct or serious threat to the United States. (Document 45)

During a March 2025 Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on the publication of the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment, Senator Angus King (D-ME) questioned DNI Tulsi Gabbard about the omission of climate change from the report. Gabbard responded that “we’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being, and security.”[18] While the report explores the economic implications of the Arctic region and melting sea ice, the assessment includes no mention of the words “climate change” or “global warming.”

It remains unclear whether the Intelligence Community under a second Trump administration will continue to censor its own evaluations and analyses of climatic impacts on U.S. national security. Only months into its second term, the administration has already wiped mentions of climate change from websites across the federal government and removed climate change and environmental datasets from the public domain.