Enabling Strategic Intelligence on Energy and Environmental Security Impacts and Consequences

Abstract

In November 2007, an international strategy design team composed of government, business, and academic experts met in Glasgow to consider the elements, objectives, and requirements for a strategic intelligence capability on energy and environmental security. The discussion built on the proceedings of a workshop held in D.C. on 19 September, which assembled nearly forty experts to consider models for a similar capability (see Annex 1 for this workshop paper).

In developing the concept for a strategic intelligence capacity on energy and environmental security, the Glasgow Group made the following observations:

- At the national level, decision-makers lack sufficient knowledge regarding how key energy and the environmental security relationships can affect regional and global stability

- A viable strategic intelligence capability for energy and environmental security issues does not lend itself to the traditional national security framework

- Today's strategic environment features security-related challenges that are global in scale and systemic in nature, and can best be assessed with a strategic intelligence capability that is similarly global and systemic

- The Glasgow Group suggests building a new global commons security capability; i.e., an energy and environmental knowledge ecosystem in which a broad diversity of entities contribute to knowledge creation, aggregation, filtering and sense-making

- The proposed knowledge ecosystem could fill a current void in communicating to both public and private-sector decision-makers the national and international security implications of energy and environmental issues

- This strategic intelligence knowledge ecosystem will be open to government, commercial, and not-for-profit interests, enabling early warning for informed decision-making about possible energy and environmental impacts on a global scale

- The system will draw on diverse expertise, such as virology, evolutionary biology, network research, developmental economics, disaster management, political science, international relations, and various dynamical systems assessments methodologies in order to consider interdependent security-related phenomena

- There is a critical role for system cultivators who foster and sustain the collaborative, knowledge-creating community by targeting its activities to produce actionable, strategic intelligence on energy and environmental security concerns

What follows in this paper are the views of the Glasgow Group, a team that met informally at the facilities of the Scottish Enterprise Network in a gathering co-sponsored by the U.S. Department of Energy's Office of Intelligence and Counterintelligence's Energy and Environmental Security Directorate. Participants in the meeting included experts from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology's Center for Security Studies, the New School University in New York, Emory University in Atlanta, Idaho National Laboratory, and additional business and academic experts from both Europe and the United States. This paper does not necessarily represent the official positions of any institutions or governments with which the participants are affiliated.

Keywords: energy and environment, strategic intelligence, knowledge ecosystem, national security, global security, environmental turbulence

JEL Classification: D21, D23, D70, D83, O30