A mundane challenge of menacing proportions? How NATO member militaries address the climate-security nexus

This article systematically reviews NATO militaries’ fast-growing responses to climate change. Military responses to climate change have been criticized as a menacing effort at militarizing climate policy. This analysis identifies only a few publicly documented efforts at militarizing climate security governance. However, by drawing on the wider climate security literature, this article identifies another menace. Military forces’ efforts at adaptation and mitigation are constrained by mundane challenges of policymaking. Specifically, defense administrations aim for insufficiently low-hanging fruits, seem to lack the necessary capacities to simultaneously fulfill conventional defense tasks and respond to climate change, and they always prioritize the maintenance of military capabilities over climate protection. These prioritizations of defense are understandable in light of geopolitical escalation. However, the mundane difficulties resulting from the attempt to simultaneously rearm NATO forces and to reduce their military emissions amounts to another menace: Military climate security policies, particularly related to mitigation, might remain critically insufficient. The menace, then, is not so much that NATO militaries react to climate change, but that they do not react enough .