Climate Change-Related Security Risks: Protecting People and Property in a Natural-Disaster Prone World

Climate-Related Risks Create Immediate and Strategic Security Concerns

Increasingly hotter weather since the mid-2010s in Alaska’s Denali National Park has resulted in rapidly thawing permafrost and repeated landslides, continuously shutting down the single road that leads to the highest peak in North America. In a much more southern latitude, heavy rains and overflowing rivers in Baños, Ecuador – a popular tourist destination and gateway to the Amazon – killed six and left 30 missing in June 2024. Both of these examples are indicative of recent analysis that extreme weather events were twice as “frequent, longer-lasting and more severe” than the observed average between 2003-2020. These examples also clearly demonstrate the potential human and economic toll of severe weather events and natural disasters, and they help frame our understanding of the immediate and strategic security risks climate has on people and businesses. 

The World Health Organization estimates that over 3.6 billion people live in areas susceptible to climate-related disasters, and climate change directly contributes to “humanitarian emergencies from heatwaves, wildfires, floods, tropical storms and hurricanes.” While 3.6 billion people may feel like an abstraction, that number is comprised of individuals from Philadelphia to the Philippines – and a number of those individuals work for corporations with a duty of care “to protect their employees, clients, and the public from foreseeable risks of harm.” 

In this light, it is important for security professionals to recognize that the cascading effects of climate-related severe weather events and natural disasters, which are increasing in frequency and intensity, have security ramifications that are immediate and extend far beyond the initial event.

Immediate Security Risks to People and Property

This is relatively straightforward – people are injured, and property is damaged during and immediately after natural disasters. Business travelers, tourists, and locals drown in floods; they are buried under tons of earth and debris; and people suffer injuries without the ability to access medical care. Additionally, in the immediate aftermath of a natural disaster, physical assaults and vandalism have been shown to increase by up to 14 and 8 percent, respectively. 

Strategic Security Risks to People and Property 

While the academic debate about the relationship between climate and conflict is unresolved – i.e. anthropogenic climate change vs. no clear causal link between climate and conflict vis-à-vis Syria – the implications for security leaders and leaders is not. As David Kilcullen puts it in his 2013 book on future conflicts, Out of the Mountains: The Coming Age of the Urban Guerilla:

“Whether or not you believe in human-made climate change, … coastal urbanization will, by definition, put more of the world’s population at risk of flooding.”

If you are responsible for executive or enterprise security risk management (ESRM); corporate security or enterprise risk management (CSRM or ERM); governance, risk, and compliance (GRC); business continuity; or if you are unsure of all of your role’s ins-and-outs but hold the title of Chief Security Officer (CSO) or Director of Corporate Security, for example, then there are three important questions you must ask yourself regarding climate risk and your responsibilities:

• How future-focused am I as it relates to security and security-adjacent issues?
• How effective will I be in positioning my organization to endure and overcome (be resilient in the face of) forecastable climate-related events and natural disasters?
• Do I, or do we, have the requisite knowledge and experience to build durable security systems that put us at a competitive advantage vs. our competitors?

If you happen to work in enterprise security risk management for a multinational corporation with significant operations in Guayaquil, Ecuador, what is the potential long-term impact to business operations and employees given an expected 7-15mm increase in single-day rainfall? This seemingly modest increase becomes potentially catastrophic when applied to a city where even 2-year precipitation events cause widespread flooding. This negative potentiality is compounded by data that indicates sea levels around Guayaquil will rise anywhere between 1-3 meters by 2100, and the majority of Guayaquil’s industrial and commercial infrastructure currently sits at 3 meters above sea level.

In sum, recognizing both the immediate and strategic climate risks cited above is important for several reasons. Whether the security context revolves around close and executive protection, corporate security, or facility security is irrelevant – the fact of the matter is that (a) if climate-related extreme weather events are increasing in frequency, intensity, and duration; and (b) people suffer physical harm and property is damaged as a result of natural disasters and severe weather events, then logically (and practically), security companies and security executives must understand, plan for, prevent, and mitigate the risks that these events pose to the executives and organizations they serve. 

Safeguarding People and Property Starts Long Before Natural Disasters Occur

For security professionals, this means understanding that a drought in one region can trigger migration patterns that destabilize urban areas hundreds of miles away, or that rising sea levels don’t just threaten coastal infrastructure, they reshape criminal networks, alter smuggling routes, and change the geography of risk. One must only look as far as Lake Chad, which is nestled neatly inside Chad, Niger, and Nigeria to see how the interplay between climate change, governance, geopolitics, and social dynamics can influence security from the Sahel to Mediterranean. Severe weather events also create immediate logistical challenges with security implications, such as road closures that limit law enforcement and medical response. As detailed in the previous section, people have a higher likelihood of becoming a victim of violent crime after a natural disaster. 

Immediate Security Risk Planning Considerations 

• Create Priority Intelligence Requirements (PIR) specifically focused on monitoring local weather patterns, seasonal threat indicators, regional climate vulnerabilities that could impact your principal’s movements, facility operations, and workforce safety.
• Integrate climate hazards into your standard advance work and threat assessment models/procedures, treating extreme weather events as you would any other security-related threat that requires advance planning and resource allocation.
• Train your executive protection and corporate security teams to evaluate not just traditional security concerns, but also weather conditions, flood zones, evacuation routes, and infrastructure vulnerabilities when conducting site surveys.
• Deploy communication infrastructure that is redundant and can withstand extreme weather events and maintain operational connectivity when traditional infrastructure fails.

Strategic Security Risk Planning Considerations 

• Implement the five pillars of high reliability organizations – preoccupation with failure, reluctance to simplify, sensitivity to operations, resilience, and deference to expertise – to help your organization anticipate, manage, and overcome climate-related security disruptions.
• Move beyond traditional emergency response planning to create comprehensive strategies that address how climate change will affect your organization’s long-term operational security, employee safety, and executive protection requirements over extended time horizons.
• Establish dedicated working groups that bring together everyone from critical infrastructure specialists, security professionals, and risk managers to continuously assess how changing climate patterns will holistically impact your organization’s security posture and operational requirements.
• Develop dynamic resource deployment strategies such as pre-positioned security assets, emergency supplies, and personnel based on seasonal climate forecasts and long-term environmental trend analysis, rather than waiting for crisis events to dictate your response.

Climate Risks Pose Intractable Security Problems, But That’s the Whole Point of Paying for Security Risk Management

One of the major problems with managing future climate-related security risks is that the consequences are presently intangible. Reading that 40 percent of the U.S.’ population lives in a coastal county, and that these “properties’ proximity to water bodies may put them at risk of extreme weather events, hurricanes, sea level rise, and high tide flooding,”  is very different from actually experiencing the security-related effects of these natural phenomena. There can be a big difference between knowing that rising temperatures “supercharge the water cycle and bring heavier rainfall – and elevated flood risks” and having to provide emergency resupply to senior executives stranded in the mountains of Asheville, North Carolina because the security team’s vulnerability assessment did not include a review of Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) flood maps.  

Security risk management isn’t about eliminating all of the possible threats to your executives and your company’s property – that is impossible. But if your Philadelphia or Houston-based executives are traveling to Jakarta, Indonesia, it is irresponsible not to plan for flood-related road closures and power outages. If you’re a security risk management executive for a major energy company that is planning  a re-entry into the Indonesian market, it is likewise imperative to prepare for the future security impact to your organization if Jakarta’s ports and airport are underwater by 2050.

The bottom line is that the risks to executives, as well as company property and operations, are not isolated in a globalized world. The risk posed by street crime, insider threats, nonstate actors such as transnational criminal organizations, nation-states, natural disasters, and imperceptible-to-the-naked-eye sea level rises cannot be viewed through a myopic lens and delineated analysis. Security companies, practitioners, enterprise risk managers, etc. are either holistically assessing the intractable threats they’re responsible for mitigating, or the payment they receive for security services truly is a sunk cost (pun intended).