Scientists can, to varying degrees of accuracy, model the climate. They can predict the rate at which greenhouse gas emissions grow, sea levels rise, and ocean temperatures warm. It is also possible to predict the direct impacts climate change will have to infrastructure, including to U.S. military bases. But modeling how societies will react to these climate-driven changes is arguably much harder, and was the central problem at a recent Climate Change and National Security Workshop.

The workshop, jointly organized by MIT Lincoln Laboratory and the MIT Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering and hosted at MIT, brought together science and policy experts from campus, the U.S. Geological Survey, the World Bank, the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), and several other organizations to discuss how to predict social and political conflicts that may be caused or exacerbated by the impacts of climate change.

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