Key takeaways

  • Growing alignment between climate and national security could signal structural expansion of investable markets – from climate tech to resilient infrastructure to defense-adjacent data acquisition to cybersecurity.
  • As governments shift to treat climate impacts as security threats, capital may flow to solutions that secure resource supply chains and harden critical infrastructure.
  • Convergence of climate and security themes blurs boundaries, favoring diversified investors over single theme strategies.
  • Resilience may reframe spending to mission-critical needs, creating clearer pathways for investment in climate solutions that strengthen national security.

In a world focused on rising energy demand and a race to build AI, recent resilience news has escaped broad awareness. 

  • “Resilience” can be defined as the ability to withstand and rapidly recover from an emergency or disaster, often requiring advanced planning for threats and changing conditions.
  • “National Security” themes relate to migration, conflict, geopolitics, terrorism and threats to economic stability, energy access, and health.

Clients are seeking guidance on how climate and security—especially defense—themes may overlap to drive resilience, potentially creating new opportunities and expanding the pool of capital beyond traditional single-sector approaches. Despite different audiences—investors, corporates, government officials—the underlying message has been generally consistent: climate change is viewed not just as an environmental challenge, but as a potential threat multiplier central to national resilience and especially the economy. Three main themes stand out from recent resilience and security conferencesi and government releasesii:

Climate change itself can lead to physical, biological, and chemical changes in the Earth System, but its impactsiii on an unprepared society can multiply existing security threats.

  • Disaster Response: The increasing frequency and intensity of climate-related disasters has led to military support from overwhelmed civilian emergency management response systems. For example in Canada, the Canadian Armed Forces has seen a doubling of requests to respond to natural disasters every five years since 2010.iv  In response to flooding and wildfires, 17% of Spain’s increased 2025 military spending was devoted to the management of emergencies and natural disasters.v  Disaster response will need to scale with commercial solutions to reduce military support.
  • Resource Management & Instability: Reductions in resource availability highlight management or production inefficiencies, leading to economic loss or migration if pushed to extreme. As an example: Tehran, Iran is currently facing a water crisis after a multi-year drought—if the rain doesn’t come, the city’s dams are anticipated to run dry by year end.vi

Downtime and damage to infrastructure is expensive. Integrating emergency, natural disaster, and security considerations into design can reduce operating costs and protect assets. 

  • Decentralization: Ukraine’s experience shows the value of decentralized and diversified  infrastructure.vii Distributed renewable microgrids have been harder to target and faster to deploy during rebuilding than single-site large-scale energy plants. Similarly post 2025 Hurricane Melissa in Jamaica, solar and battery storage microgrids provided consumers steady power despite larger-scale grid and energy transportation outages.
  • Disaster vs. Accessibility Erosion: Extreme events (e.g. a storm or fire) are often easier to model their outcome than chronic changes (e.g. sea level rise), potentially leading to inadequate preparations for slow changes. For example, sea level rise leads to a gradual annual accumulation of underwater high tide days, which can be a nuisance if once a month (~3% of the time) but can erode operations without resilience planning over time as it reaches weeks and months—anticipated by mid-century. viii
  • Multi-use Planning: Infrastructure should serve daily needs and crisis resilience—think underground carparks and parksix that double as floodwater retention zones. 

Fragmented data sources need to be brought together and analyzed help to create action plans for short to long-range planning. The quality and clarity of information available to decision-makers can influence response options. 

  • Uncrewed Data Collection and Smart Technologies: The cost of gathering information is high, but new technologies—drones, satellites, sensors—are making it easier and more effective. These support operations and can create forecasts or predictions, measurement, reporting, and verification of environmental conditions. 
  • Data Provenance & Cybersecurity: Trust in and protection of data is critical. A data audit trail ensures its origin, alterations, and reproducibility. The threat of misinformation introduced by adversaries requires cybersecurity from information gathering to final use; otherwise misinformation can erode trust, stall risk-mitigating actions, and destabilize security efforts.

While the future is uncertain, we directionally know where the climate is headed due to physics. While perfect solutions may not exist, leaders must choose which risks to tackle today and be ready to incorporate emerging information into decisions tomorrow. Resilience will be built in the near term by identifying opportunities in disaster response, resource management, infrastructure, and smarter data.

 

References

Recent ones include: JPMorgan Sustainable Investing in Defense Summit in London, England; the International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS) Innovation Global Security and Innovation Summit in Hamburg, Germany; and the NATO Climate Security meeting in Montreal, Canada.

ii https://www.icelandreview.com/news/iceland-declares-potential-collapse-of-atlantic-ocean-current-a-security-threat/

iii See Figure 1 flowchart for mapping this concept in https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/sustainability/climate/unlocking-resilience-through-climate-adaptation

iv https://www.canada.ca/en/department-national-defence/services/operations/military-operations/current-operations/operation-lentus.html

https://www.lamoncloa.gob.es/lang/en/presidente/news/paginas/2025/20250422-security-and-defence-plan.aspx

vi https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/11/12/as-the-dams-feeding-tehran-run-dry-iran-struggles-with-a-dire-water-crisis

vii https://www.iss.europa.eu/publications/commentary/keeping-lights-how-ukraine-can-build-resilient-energy-system-and-why

viii https://www.jpmorgan.com/insights/sustainability/climate/future-proofing-ports

ix https://www.nola.com/news/politics/new-orleans-stormwater/article_97394e62-e2ca-4176-9ad9-97c2999da8ce.html

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