Many thanks to the Ambassador, to the Prime Minister, to our friends from Canada for hosting us here today.  Your leadership in establishing a new NATO Center of Excellence on these issues in Montreal is to be applauded.

I was born in Edmonton and I’ve been waiting 55 years to formally thank the Canadian government for welcoming my family to Canada, where I learned to play hockey at a very early age. I know it’s too soon to be talking about Edmonton and hockey, so I’ll let that go. 

Let me thank everyone who spoke on the panel, for all the leadership you’ve shown over many years. 

To my friend and colleague John Podesta, with whom I had the most intense education on climate change I could ever have as U.S. ambassador to India in 2015, when John said, “your only job and principal job is to make sure that India signs up to the Paris agreement.” Thank you, John, for making that very clear.

As Deputy Secretary for Management and Resources, it is my job to manage the overall workforce – our 80,000 State Department employees – and to work closely with our climate team and make sure that we integrate climate considerations into the core of what we do.  

And let me just say: we have modernized the State Department under the Secretary’s leadership. Climate is now one of our six critical mission areas. We’ve created 20 new climate foreign service officer positions. We’ve created six new climate training courses at the Foreign Service Institute. We have a new climate data hub that we can access around the world for all our employees. 

So we are really integrating climate into what we do. 

And as everyone has already said on the panel and in the opening remarks by Prime Minister Trudeau, which is why this all-of-government – or all-of-State Department in my case – approach is essential. 

This is the kind of challenge which our Director of Central Intelligence Bill Burns would call, “a problem without a passport.” This is a problem that can only be solved through international cooperation; and if we don’t, it upends security across the globe. 

That includes the security that the Transatlantic Alliance relies upon.  And as we’ve heard, the climate crisis is already wreaking havoc with all our NATO Allies and is posing new global vulnerabilities and burdens on our militaries.  These are strategic and pacing threats that we have to address.

The United States has been focused on this intersection of climate change and security for a long time.  We’ve asked our national security leaders to better understand the impacts. 

But the time for just understanding the problem is over.  We need to join together to adapt, overcome, and build resilience to these threats.

That’s exactly what we’ve heard today that NATO is doing: implementing the NATO Climate Change and Security Action Plan. 

And I am pleased to announce that John and I are actively working on joining as a sponsoring nation ourselves, and we look forward to working together with you on these priorities. 

I can say unequivocally, the Department of State has made this a priority.  We’ve elevated climate security into our work. 

That includes the provision of foreign assistance. 

When I travel around the world – I’ve been in this job for 16 months and have been to over 50 countries – every leader is always asking me to help them meet their green energy, climate, and resilience goals.

So we’re working on that. 

How can our diplomats work to preserve stability across the Sahel in NATO’s southern neighborhood, for example, without taking into account the rapid drought and conditions that the region is experiencing, and how extremist groups are taking advantage of food and water insecurity across populations?

How can we have security dialogues with our partners across the Indo-Pacific without addressing the growing toll of sea level rise and more extreme weather?

Just in the past few months, we have stood up new dedicated climate security dialogues with our partners.

We have implemented programs that build early warning systems, bolster coastal infrastructure, and expand drought resistant seeds for those geographies who increasingly need them.

Our climate adaptation investments are ultimately a direct investment in U.S. national security.

And all of this work will soon be tied together in an overarching strategic framework on climate security and resilience, which will be announced by John and the team at the White House later this summer. 

So we are going to continue to work on this as a top priority. President Biden has announced this as a priority. That is why, in 2021, he announced PREPARE, or the President’s Emergency Plan for Adaptation and Resilience, which aims to support developing countries and communities in vulnerable situations around the world in their efforts to adapt to and manage the impacts of climate change.

Ultimately, these are the investments that our partners are asking us for assistance with.  They are not just “climate issues,” but critical security and economic priorities.

So, let’s leverage the unique capabilities of the NATO Alliance and meet these problems head-on.  Doing so will save all our countries’ resources, will reduce global conflict, lower pressure on our forces, and improve livelihoods globally.

These sorts of defining global challenges are exactly what generations of security leaders who came before us created this historic Alliance to confront.  They might not have been able to envision climate change as a threat – but we can, and we must.

Thank you all for your leadership.