In planning for the future, has the Pentagon started to conduct any climate-related war games?
That’s just beginning. I think we’ll probably see more in the future. I did participate in a war game last year that CNA cosponsored with a number of other think tanks. It was not about force planning; it was more at the diplomatic level, dealing with a series of concurrent natural disasters seemingly caused by climate change. Representatives from China, India, the United States, and the European Union all played different parts — their governments, the private sector, non-governmental organizations. So in the context of a war game we role-played the ways in which these countries would reduce greenhouse gases and address other elements of climate change, such as migration. We’ve already talked about South Asia, but climate change is likely to present security threats in other parts of the world, too, such as the Middle East. The Middle East is abundant in oil and scarce in water. I think water may be as important in the next 50 years as oil has been in the last 50. I’ve been to Israel
