By Kea U. Duckenfield, Ph.D., National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency, Analysis
It can be easy to forget that sometimes the biggest threat to national security is nature. Environmental conditions can be unpredictable, and unexpected changes can cause secondary consequences. When a change of a river’s course destroys a key local food source, for example, food shortages can lead to price spikes that in turn can contribute to civil unrest. A famine can trigger mass migration, which can lead to any number of unanticipated and potentially very serious consequences.
Environmental security analysis means understanding national security threats that stem from human interaction with the environment. This topic encompasses short-term disasters such as hurricanes and tsunamis to slower phenomena such as desertification; it includes possible conflict over shared natural resources and examines multifaceted issues such as the warming of the Arctic region.
In addition to its breadth, environmental security is also complex. Environmental security questions cross operational, tactical and strategic scales, as well as spatial and temporal ones, and they frequently ignore manmade boundaries. Accordingly, the National Geospatial-Intelligence Agency and its mission partners take several approaches to monitoring issues related to environmental security.
Threat multipliers
NGA analysts study intrinsically spatiotemporal aspects of environmental security issues. Challenges arising from environmental security typically act as threat multipliers, aggravating existing problems such as political instability and regional tensions. They also tend to indirectly threaten U.S. national security by consuming finite security resources — military, economic, political, etc. — that might otherwise be available to cope with other threats.
Understanding environmental security can provide intelligence analysts with indicators and warnings of emerging or worsening problems, however; as when the water supply begins to decline in a basin shared by two countries with a history of tense relations. NGA analysts study the dynamics of shared natural resources — especially water resources, which are particularly well-suited for use as diplomatic leverage or even as a weapon against a downstream neighbor. They measure food security and monitor critical infrastructure — such as water control features — in conflict zones in order to assess how civilians and military personnel in different areas of influence may be vulnerable. They evaluate the extent and impact of events such as major floods, contaminant spills and humanitarian disasters. Analysts also consider broader security implications, such as impacts to economic security or our global defense posture.
Complex Issues
The Arctic region represents a prime example of a complex security issue. Two key characteristics of environmental security issues are their tendency to interact with other security issues and the power that perceptions hold. Nowhere is this more true than in the Arctic, where environmental, economic, diplomatic and military concerns collide.
As one example a cruise ship carrying more than 1,000 passengers traversed the tortuous Northwest Passage last summer, anxiously escorted by a chartered ice-breaking logistics vessel. Given the scarcity of search and rescue infrastructure in the Arctic, the success of the cruise is raising concerns among thought-leaders that future years will bring other risky trips along with the potential for an emergency event in an area where there is little ability to respond.
On another note warming appears to be driving fish habitats northward. This may lead to clashes between fishing fleets in the Arctic, as the fish move between different countries’ economic exclusion zones.
Similarly, while only two countries currently have oil-producing platforms in the Arctic — Russia and Norway — prospects for future oil exploitation in the area have caused some to ask what consequences a major oil spill in this fragile and dangerous setting might bring.
NGA’s senior Arctic analyst coordinates and conducts analysis and production on these and similarly intricate topics.
Resources, methods and tools
NGA intelligence officers work to identify, produce, acquire and improve a wealth of relevant geospatial datasets to support analysis of environmental security issues. Some of these datasets are created within NGA, such as environmental data used by the agency’s human geography effort, and a suite of geotechnical datasets for soil, water, seismic activity and other phenomena. NGA also hosts the National System for Geospatial Intelligence meteorology and oceanography team, known as METOC, and representatives from the Pentagon Air Staff that help NGA analysts find, understand and use valuable meteorological and oceanographic datasets. In addition, the agency commits resources to commissioning commercial vendors to create key environment-related geospatial data for analysts’ use.
Elsewhere in the agency image scientists created and continue to improve on the Time Series Analysis Toolkit, a suite of time series tools for visualizing images. Using TSAT, analysts can determine changes over time in water, vegetation and other environmental parameters. Changes can be measured remotely by applying these tools to a broad range of multispectral imagery and other kinds of remotely sensed information.
NGA also worked in partnership with the Australian Geospatial- Intelligence Organization to create a tool that harnesses the Google Earth Engine to identify areas that have undergone abrupt change in vegetation at some point. This tool, called the Worldwide Activity Locator through Disruption of Organics, or WALDO, can be applied to environmental security questions ranging from landslides to droughts, to mining and other land-cover disrupting activities. It gives analysts access to a huge volume of open-source imagery.
In all of its analytic activities NGA emphasizes continuous innovation and planning for future GEOINT needs, and much of this effort will benefit environmental security analysis. The agency’s directorate responsible for research recently reorganized into seven focus areas, one of which is devoted to environment and culture. The environment and culture ‘pod,’ as it is called, will perform research to improve our understanding of how the complex interaction between humans and their environment can be modeled to address problems of relevance to the intelligence and defense communities, and other U.S. government agencies. Other researchers within the agency are identifying and pursuing innovative new tools to advance environmental security-related GEOINT tradecraft and technology, and management supports future GEOINT needs analysis relevant to environmental security.
Partnerships
Collaboration with multiple partners — both inside and outside of NGA — is critical for effective GEOINT assessments, because environmental security touches other intelligence issues. During one targeted effort, an Army chief warrant officer teamed with an NGA spectral scientist to analyze agricultural and climatological elements contributing to food security, in order to estimate the severity of a potential hunger crisis.
Groups across all organizational levels and disciplines within NGA coordinate and collaborate to support and make use of environmental security analysis. For instance, regional and functional analysts might join forces with a human geographer and a data scientist to examine environmental factors affecting the selection of a site for a military or humanitarian endeavor. Experts from multiple analytic specialties work together to understand how environmental hazards might play into a critical political event such as a national election in a strategically important country, or how counterinsurgency operations altering access to natural resources might be affecting a region’s economic health. Even the most senior intelligence officers nurture collaboration and communication; in one case a naval officer detailed to NGA coordinates and aligns disparate groups contributing to environmental GEOINT, with a view to optimizing the use of their resources.
NGA analysts also team with other national and international counterparts in the intelligence community. In addition to the NSG METOC team, military partners such as the 557th Weather Wing and the Naval Oceanographic Office provide support to GEOINT analysts in the forms of data, expertise and specialized products. NGA personnel coauthor National Intelligence Council-published community-level assessments relevant to environmental security, and the agency’s senior Arctic analyst has fostered a vibrant community using social media tools.
NGA also fosters collaboration by bringing together environmental security experts from across the public and private sectors. In the last three years the agency has held interagency symposiums on water security, climate change and national security, and wildlife trafficking. These and other efforts involve building partnerships with colleagues in academia and industry.
Notable among NGA’s interagency activities is the civil applications committee, which was initiated to foster collaboration with scientists and program managers at civil agencies, such as the U.S. Geologic Survey and the National Science Foundation. NGA’s visiting scientist program also brings state-of-the-art expertise on environmental issues in house; cooperative research and development agreements and other outreach programs make it possible for external partners to offer their research and technical solutions to solving environmental security challenges.
Multilayered support
NGA’s contribution to environmental security analysis operates in almost every level of effort at the agency, from data production to intelligence analysis, to tool and tradecraft development. It extends to NGA programs that innovate and shape future GEOINT capabilities, and includes expert support to national policy development.
NGA representatives participate in community-wide groups dealing with
environmental security, including all four subcommittees of the climate and national security working group. In September of this year, NGA contributed to language for a presidential memorandum on climate change and national security.
It is this kind of collaboration that is key to the successful mastery of the complex and extensive field of environmental security. Ultimately, it is through interaction with each other that we can best understand the intricate dynamics of human interaction with the environment.
