Washington, D.C., June 30, 2025 – For decades, the U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) has viewed climate change as a serious national security threat that will create “new and compounded stresses on people and societies around the world,” according to one of the records featured in a repository of U.S. intelligence reports published online today by the National Security Archive. From early evaluations of Russia’s post-Soviet environmental challenges in the 1990s to present-day threat assessments on human and environmental security, the 45-document collection follows the evolution of the IC’s environmental monitoring and its increasingly dire warnings about the security threats posed by climate change.

The bottom line, according to the 2019 testimony of one State Department intelligence analyst: “Fundamental characteristics” about the planet “are moving outside the bounds experienced in modern history.” (Document 36A)

Despite a clear societal interest in knowing the truth about climate change, the U.S. continues to shield important intelligence assessments on the subject from public view. As part of today’s publication, the Archive renews its call for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence (ODNI) to declassify the 2008 National Intelligence Assessment (NIA) on “Climate Change Impacts to 2030,” the only known intelligence assessment on climate change still classified at the “Confidential” level.