Rachel Santarsiero is the director of the National Security Archive’s Climate Change Transparency Project in Washington, D.C.

The U.S. intelligence apparatus has long monitored how climate change will affect U.S. national security interests in the coming decades.

Relying on a broad consensus of open-source scientific studies, modeling, and forecasts, the spy community has intermittently let the public in on its climate change agenda. In large part, however, its work on climate has been kept secret, leading to the disproportionate harm of the most vulnerable populations living in developing countries. 

Last month, the Climate Change Transparency Project, an effort dedicated to tracking U.S. climate policy at the National Security Archive, a government watchdog nonprofit, reported on a climate change intelligence assessment that the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) has kept classified for 17 years.  

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In 2008, a panel of intelligence officers produced a National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) which evaluated the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030,” and was one of the intelligence community’s first ever climate-focused assessments, a departure from its usual research on more “traditional” national security threats like state violence and terrorism.  

Despite the assessment’s reliance on open-source resources, as outlined in a testimony given to Congress by lead study author Dr. Thomas Fingar, the National Intelligence Council (NIC) mandated its classification. In Fingar’s testimony to Congress, Democrats and Republicans alike advocated for the assessment’s declassification, with Democrats arguing that the report could inform government agencies and private industries about the risks of climate change, and Republicans arguing that its reliance on open-source information didn’t contribute anything new to the body of knowledge on climate change. 

At the time, several representatives of key House select committees also pushed for declassification on grounds beyond the impacts to U.S. national security: “Information about the likely impact of climate change in other countries should be made available to help those countries prepare and direct their resources appropriately.”  

The power of climate intelligence 

Reports generated by intelligence agencies like the NIC and the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) help predict specific vulnerabilities of various regions around the world – like which cities are most at risk from flooding or which agricultural zones may soon face extreme heatwaves. If made available to all nations, this information could help governments and humanitarian organizations take proactive steps, design better policies, and protect these more vulnerable populations.  

Unfortunately, classified reports like the 2008 NIA are still shrouded in secrecy- in part, at least, to maintain strategic U.S. advantage. Intelligence officials who worked on the report, like Fingar, maintain that the 2008 NIA should remain classified because it calls out countries most vulnerable to climate change: if specific countries were named in the report, what would stop them from using it to press the U.S. and other developed countries to provide additional aid and assistance for climate-related threats?

But this argument is moot given the level of climate intelligence already out in the open. Specifically, the NIC released a National Intelligence Estimate in 2021 that names two specific regions and 11 countries as particularly vulnerable to climate change through 2040. It predicted that these countries – Afghanistan, Burma, India, Pakistan, North Korea, Guatemala, Haiti, Nicaragua, Colombia, and Iraq – will experience climate-related and exacerbated events that will strain governments and civil societies.

Despite the age of the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, it is imperative that this report is declassified to complement the already available climate data. In interviews with other former top intelligence officials, we heard the 2008 NIA is “far superior” to the 2021 NIE and could potentially provide a better roadmap for countries to mitigate against the worst impacts than the available data does.

Why developing countries suffer the most&nbsp