Climate Change: Considerations for Geographic Combatant Commands PKSOI Paper | Page 16

Owing to USAID having the lead role in U.S. government climate change policy, all GCCs need to be familiar with USAID’s criteria for prioritizing its climate
change funds: 1) clean energy criteria tied to partners
most able and ready to demonstrate leadership in
clean energy development, 2) sustainable landscapes
criteria, and 3) adaptation criteria.19 After a GCC and
their interagency partners review the climate change
risk throughout their AOR, they can refine the critical areas that merit responses as part of their theater
campaign plan and related DoS/USAID development
plans. GCC’s should identify synergistic outcomes
in this unity of effort approach; e.g. a USAID development program to support crop diversification in a
climate-change impacted area may support the GCC’s
security end-states by increasing the prosperity of a
population otherwise subject to cooption by transnational organized crime or other violent extremist organizations.20
Defining “What” the Problem is: Risks of Climate
Change
This paper looks at “risk” in terms of the destabilizing human security effects tied to the causes which
are the various physical manifestations of climate
change. The destabilizing effects on humans are potential hunger, economic decline including coastal/
low-lying infrastructure destruction/degradation and
conflict over diminished food and water resources
with sporadic population migrations.21 The causes
are the combination of “rising global temperatures,
changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels,
and more extreme weather events.”22 The 2014 U.S.
Global Change Research Program (USGCRP) publi-

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