Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future leads DHS and NATO Workshop examining Security Impacts of Climate Change

August 30, 2024

After a year of intense preparation and collaboration, with funding from NATO’s Science for Peace and Security (SPS) Programme and the US Department of Homeland Security’s Science and Technology Directorate (S&T), Purdue’s Institute for a Sustainable Future led the implementation of a four-day workshop, “Unraveling the Cyber-Physical Infrastructure Climate Change (CPSICC) Nexus,” held from July 29–August 1, 2024, at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Conference Center in Washington, DC.

The event leveraged in-depth discussions and understanding of capabilities across the CPSICC Nexus to inform relevant topics and identify R&D gaps by including a mix of subject matter expert talks and scenario gaming exercises. The CPSICC Nexus Workshop represents a collaborative effort to address the critical convergence of climate change, cybersecurity and essential infrastructure, which includes social-economic-political institutions. Key sectors examined at the conference included the water, food, and energy, financial, cyber and social sectors. Understanding the intricate interplay between these domains becomes paramount in preparing for the future as our global challenges become increasingly complex.

Additional Purdue support came from the participation of Purdue’s Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS) and Purdue’s Policy Research Institute (PPRI). The leadership of ISF worked with counterparts from Sandia National Laboratories and Australia’s Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), Australia’s national science agency and innovation catalyst.

ISF director Matthew Huber (EAPS) led the organizational efforts for the workshop, which brought together speakers from NATO countries including Australia, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Estonia, Italy, Poland, the Slovak Republic, the United Kingdom and the United States with the goal of providing a variety of insights from various domains including defense, policy, academia and business. As Huber notes, “We're really trying to think about the feedbacks and interactions between the system components and how to push the system so that it builds resilience, enhances adaptive capacity or facilitates growth rather than moving in the other direction as a system.”

David Johnson (IE/Political Science) led the development of the smart gaming, which was a central aspect of the workshop. More specifically, he and a gaming team that included members from Purdue, CSIRO, and Sandia, established scenarios revolving around solar radiation modification, Arctic shipping and widespread disruption of power grids. Teams explored critical questions about how nations can reduce risk and protect socio-economic, military and physical assets on timescales of the near future (2030) to twenty years later (2050).  As participant Tom Ellison, from the Center for Climate and Security, explains, “Climate change and its cascading impacts are creating openings for bad actors to spread and propagate misinformation in ways that have a whole host of security and stability concerns, of which energy policy and climate denialism is one part, but not the entirety of it.”

S&T’s Senior Science Advisor for Resilience, Dr. David Alexander, provided opening remarks on S&T’s strategic line of effort on emerging security challenges and his closing remarks emphasized the importance of recognizing climate change as a cross-society issue, the need to rethink how we define infrastructure, and outlined next steps, including potential proposals for NATO's Science for Peace and Security program, to continue the advancement of research and to build momentum in addressing climate resilience and related challenges.

James Appathurai, Deputy Assistant Secretary General for Innovation, Hybrid and Cyber for NATO, provided a video introduction that also underlined the importance of these topics. He shared that NATO is focused on the energy transition, security, climate change and undersea infrastructure, with resilience as a central theme. Appathurai described these adaptation measures, which include managing threats, such as sabotage of energy infrastructure, and increased cyber risks due to the interconnected nature of diverse energy sources and AI-driven systems. To address hybrid threats, he reported that NATO is enhancing resilience in civilian and critical infrastructure, focusing on cyber protection.

The workshop strengthened Purdue ties with Sandia, DHS and the NATO SPS program and identified key research areas in which Purdue has strengths. These deepening ties can lead to collaborations and enable identification of key themes for future funding, particularly in areas of: development of strategies for collecting and securing climate data; creation and defense of resilient critical infrastructures; advancement of an integrated approach to food, energy, water security; and integration of heat-related threats into strategic defense planning.

Contact Details

• Lynne M Dahmen
• ldahmen@purdue.edu
• 7654907221