Maine senator grills intelligence director Gabbard on omission of climate change from annual threat report 

Much of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing on Tuesday was taken up by questions about the use of a private, encrypted messaging app by leaders of the US intelligence community to discuss the details of an upcoming attack on Yemen. The Signal chat included the director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, CIA Director John Ratcliffe, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the national security adviser, Michael Waltz, as well as the editor of the Atlantic, Jeffrey Goldberg, who was apparently added by mistake in what many security analysts consider an appalling and even mortifying security breach.

But while concerns about this “sloppy, careless, incompetent behavior” (per Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia) dominated the hearing, there was also a brief, telling exchange between Sen. Angus King of Maine and DNI Gabbard, in which King grilled Gabbard about the 2025 Annual Threat Assessment by the US intelligence community, which made no mention of climate change for the first time in 11 years.

“I’ve been on this committee now for—this is my 13th year,” said King. “Every single one of these reports that we have had has mentioned global climate change as a significant national security threat except this one. Has something happened? Has global climate change been solved? Why is that not in this report, and who made the decision that it should not be in the report, when it’s been in every one of the 11 prior reports?”

In her response, Gabbard implied that climate change was no longer considered a direct threat to US national security.

“I can’t speak to the decisions made previously, but this annual threat assessment has been focused very directly on the threats that we deem most critical to the United States and our national security,” Gabbard said. “Obviously, we’re aware of occurrences within the environment and how they may impact operations, but we’re focused on the direct threats to Americans’ safety, well-being, and security.”

King pressed her again, asking about the connection between climate change and “mass migration, famine, dislocation, political violence.” He specifically mentioned the 2019 annual threat assessment under the first Trump administration, which included a section on “Environment and Climate Change.”

That report stated, “Global environmental and ecological degradation, as well as climate change, are likely to fuel competition for resources, economic distress, and social discontent through 2019 and beyond. Climate hazards such as extreme weather, higher temperatures, droughts, floods, wildfires, storms, sea level rise, soil degradation, and acidifying oceans are intensifying, threatening infrastructure, health, and water and food security. Irreversible damage to ecosystems and habitats will undermine the economic benefits they provide, worsened by air, soil, water, and marine pollution.”

Again, Gabbard responded, “For the intelligence community being aware of the environment that we’re operating in is a given. What I focused this annual threat assessment on and the IC focused this threat assessment on are the most extreme and critical direct threats to our national security.”

King repeatedly asked if Gabbard gave explicit instructions to the authors of the report to not include climate change, and Gabbard eventually replied, “I don’t recall giving that instruction.”

In response to an email asking if Sen. King wanted to elaborate on his concerns about omitting climate change from the threat assessment, a representative replied: “I think the exchange was fulsome and speaks for itself. (At least Sen. King’s side of it).”

Director Gabbard’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

Previous intelligence reports, like the 2021 National Intelligence Estimate, have found “that climate change will increasingly exacerbate risks to US national security interests as the physical impacts increase and geopolitical tensions mount about how to respond to the challenge.”

The 2024 Annual Threat Assessment mentioned climate nine times and stated: “The accelerating effects of climate change are placing more of the world’s population, particularly in low- and middle-income countries, at greater risk from extreme weather, food and water insecurity, and humanitarian disasters, fueling migration flows and increasing the risks of future pandemics as pathogens exploit the changing environment.” Echoing the 2021 report mentioned above, the report went on to say, “The risks to US national security interests are increasing as the physical effects of climate and environmental change intersect with geopolitical tension and vulnerabilities of some global systems.”

For the latest Annual Threat Assessment to make no mention of climate change whatsoever, while the evidence and impacts of climate crisis continue to mount, is a striking change from prior years and a dangerous one, according to security and defense experts contacted by the Bulletin.

“If the last 11 threat assessments by the intelligence community have cited climate change as a significant national security threat, it kind of begs the question, ‘what’s changed?’” said Sherri Goodman, former deputy undersecretary of defense and the author of Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security. “Temperatures keep getting hotter, fire is more intense, sea level rise—all the indicators of climate [change] continue to shine red, and if we ignore it, then we do so at America’s peril, because we know that our adversaries like China, Iran, North Korea, and even Russia are continuing to account for the adverse effects of climate change on our national security and our global security.”

Just because the new report ignores the threats climate change poses to national security doesn’t make those threats go away—it just makes the intelligence community and the leaders of the United States less aware and able to respond to those threats.

“The omission of climate change ignores the hundreds of American lives lost and nearly $200 billion in damage from climate-fueled disasters in 2024, the warmest year in human history,” said Rod Schoonover, co-founder of the Ecosecurity Council and former Director of Environment and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council. “By trading objective reality for ideology, the intelligence community leadership is deliberately handicapping its ability to comprehensively analyze the very security landscape it’s tasked with understanding.”