The spy service agency of Canada says that climate change poses a serious, continuous threat to the country’s wealth and security, including the potential loss of areas of British Columbia and the Atlantic provinces to rising sea levels.
According to a recently released analysis by the Canadian Security Intelligence Service, both those who want to hasten the development of solutions to the climate change crisis and those who are more concerned with maintaining their current way of life will become more ideologically driven and violent extremists.
Although the brief was created in April 2021, it was just recently made available to The Canadian Press in response to an AIP request made in October of that same year.
The CSIS outlines a number of worries caused by global warming, from impending threats to the security of the Arctic, coastal areas, and borders to significant strains on food and water supply.
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The spy service says its preliminary examination determines that climate change “presents a complex, long-term threat to Canada’s safety, security and prosperity outcomes.”
“There will be no single moment where this threat will crystallize and reveal itself, for it is already underway and will incrementally build across decades to come.”
At a security conference in November 2021, a senior CSIS official mentioned the service’s interest in monitoring the effects of climate change, stating the organization must continue to anticipate “the next threat” in order to support other government actors.
According to Simon Dalby, a professor emeritus at Wilfrid Laurier University who studies climate effects, environmental security and geopolitics, “It’s not surprising that security agencies are starting to pay more attention to this because clearly climate change is starting to bite.”
Will Greaves, a political scientist at the University of Victoria, said the CSIS brief presents climate change as a security issue in a more sophisticated manner “than we find in most other federal government policies and publications.”
Story was adapted from Global News
