The New Dark Age

Friday, 28 February 2025 — National Security Archive

CONFIDENTIAL Report Does Not Reveal Intelligence Sources and Methods

2008 Assessment Could Fill Critical Gaps in Most Recent 2021 Intelligence Estimate

“There’s no secret stuff in here… Just good analysts working with publicly available information and applying good methodological tradecraft”

Washington, D.C., February 28, 2025 – For 17 years, the U.S. Intelligence Community has refused to declassify one of its first investigations into climate change as a national security threat. In 2008, a panel of intelligence officers on the National Intelligence Council (NIC) produced its first climate-focused National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) examining the “National Security Implications of Global Climate Change to 2030.” The full text of the report remains classified as “Confidential,” the lowest level of national security secrecy, even though its findings may offer critical insights into how climate change will affect U.S. national security in years to come.

Today, as part of a public call for the director of national intelligence to declassify the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment, the National Security Archive is posting three related intelligence products—one each from the George W. Bush administration, the first Trump administration, and the Biden administration—detailing the intelligence community’s increasingly dire warnings about the security threats posed by climate change and that call into question the basis for the IC’s continued withholding of the 2008 report. The 2008 assessment may ultimately serve as a crucial reference for how climate-related risks have evolved over time and how intelligence agencies assessed those risks more than a decade ago.

Declassifying the 2008 assessment would fill a critical gap in the public’s understanding of how the intelligence community has historically evaluated the risk of climate change and fulfill the people’s right to know about critical decisions affecting their lives. In 2022, the National Security Archive filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the assessment and in December 2024 submitted an official letter calling for the report’s declassification to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence but has not received a response to either of these requests. It is long past time to declassify this important assessment of the threats posed by climate change.

READ THE DOCUMENTSTHE NATIONAL SECURITY ARCHIVE is an independent non-governmental research institute and library located at The George Washington University inWashington, D.C. The Archive collects and publishes declassified documents acquired through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A tax-exempt public charity, the Archive receives no U.S. government funding; its budget is supported by publication royalties and donations from foundations and individuals.