Carbon Removal Offers Strategic Risk Compression for NATO

Tucked inside NATO’s latest 5% defense spending pledge is a once-in-a-generation chance to redefine what national security means over the remainder of the 21st century. National security is no longer just about who has the most advanced weapons, but who has the technology needed (or can develop it) to meaningfully reduce long-term global instability and avert conflicts from arising in the first place. Investing a small amount of NATO’s increased defense spending in “national security related” technology offers critical long-term risk reduction in this regard.

Pursuant to that line of reasoning, one essential category of technologies to focus on is carbon removal solutions—i.e. negative emissions technologies that remove existing carbon dioxide directly from the atmosphere. Without removing excess carbon dioxide emissions, the world will remain at risk of catastrophic climate change and of triggering tipping points in climate systems that, once crossed, are not reversible. What will remain reversible is the stock of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere that’s accumulated since the Industrial Revolution.

Responding to climate emergencies if and when they happen is not what carbon removal is for—other adaptation and intervention-focused measures will be necessary for that. But, when paired with significant global emissions reductions, carbon removals will accelerate the world’s return to safer atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations. Carbon dioxide is a long lived atmospheric greenhouse gas (on the order of centuries), so even if the world achieves net zero emissions soon, waiting for natural systems alone to restabilize the climate allows for too much warming for too long. When dealing with a stock problem, cutting off the flow isn’t enough.

Hence, unlike adaptation or emergency response, carbon removal operates upstream of future crises. By reducing the severity of long-term climate stress on water availability, agricultural productivity, and extreme weather, removals act as a form of strategic risk compression, quietly lowering the background conditions that give rise to humanitarian disasters, forced migration, and military conflicts. It is not a silver bullet, but it reduces the likelihood that what are today’s already close to unmanageable stresses don’t compound into tomorrow’s national security emergencies and large-scale force deployments.

Scaling global carbon removal capacity from millions of tons where it sits today to billions of tons in the future will require significant resource allocation. That said, the dislocations and instability climate change could pose to NATO, and the extent to which this could benefit NATO adversaries that thrive on instability above all else, could prove far more costly. As such, the long-term stability of the NATO alliance depends on averting serious climate destabilization this century; this in turn demands NATO member governments allocate a small portion of their defense- and national security-related spending commitments to carbon removal today, which will also create high-quality jobs and drive cross-sector and cross-region investment in member nations.

Where carbon removal intersects with NATO security

National security planners are accustomed to thinking in decades, not election cycles. From water and food systems to energy infrastructure, long-range assessments, such as the U.S. National Intelligence Council’s (NIC) “Global Trends 2030: Alternative Worlds” report from 2012, repeatedly show that sharp increases in resource demand (e.g. in food, water, and energy), often on the order of 30–50% over a single generation, create conditions for instability, state failure, and conflict.

Intelligence community analyses have long warned that water stress and resource scarcity in regions such as the Middle East and North Africa can and likely already are driving mass migration, destabilize governments, and increase the likelihood of military confrontation escalating into war. Intelligence assessments, including the NIC assessments from 2020, highlight severe water scarcity in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) as a major driver for potential destabilization, increased conflicts (both interstate and intrastate), and mass migration, impacting food security, health, and driving displacement, with Iraq, Syria, Yemen, and Jordan cited as particularly vulnerable. As such, carbon removal should be understood in a comparable strategic register to these other security concerns, not just as a necessary tool for climate change mitigation.

Further, both within and outside the bucket of climate-focused prerogatives, NATO members are more exposed to a changing climate than key NATO adversaries and autocratic countries in general (some of which welcome the chaos to global order associated with climate change, others of which use repressive tactics to control change in a way liberal democracies can’t). We already see far right political parties using increased migration as a path to electoral success, suggesting that climate-induced migration may pressure liberal democracies disproportionately.

Specific climate system threats, such as the slowdown or a complete collapse of the Atlantic meridional overturning circulation (AMOC), also pose unique physical risks to NATO members. Iceland recently declared the slowdown or collapse of AMOC a national security threat; a slowdown in AMOC need not even be incredibly pronounced to cause significant cooling that would be especially pronounced in Northern Europe, wreaking havoc on agriculture both regionally and globally. Many of these physical climate risks to national security, often referred to as “tipping points,” are effectively irreversible once triggered.

Finally, climate-driven economic shocks, migration pressures, and infrastructure stress don’t merely destabilize societies. They strain the political consensus required for collective defense, sustained defense spending, and coordinated foreign policy. As climate impacts intensify unevenly across NATO members, national priorities will diverge, public tolerance for shared security commitments may erode, and consensus-based decision-making could become more fragile. In this sense, climate change is not only an external threat multiplier but an internal stressor that weakens alliance solidarity, which is precisely the condition NATO’s adversaries have long sought to create.

This internal vulnerability is unlikely to go unnoticed by NATO’s adversaries. Russia and China already exploit political polarization, resource dependence, and economic shocks through hybrid tactics ranging from disinformation to energy coercion; climate-amplified crises simply expand the attack surface. Food shortages, migration surges, and climate-induced infrastructure failures create opportunities for adversaries to deepen divisions within and between NATO states, extract political concessions, or distract from collective security priorities. In a world of accelerating climate disruption, instability itself becomes a strategic domain, one in which NATO risks ceding advantage if it treats climate change as an incidental stressor rather than a contested security environment.

Meeting the moment by building on existing foundations

NATO member countries are already global leaders in carbon removal innovation, policy, regulation/standard setting, and in developing markets for carbon emission reductions and removals. Building on this existing foundation is an opportunity to reap immense economic benefits.

What’s required to avoid the most catastrophic climate risks is scaling removals to the multi-billion ton/year level. Doing so will require significant resource allocation today but will avoid exponentially higher future costs of climate-driven externalities. It will also open new opportunities for job creation across industrial, rural, and coastal communities, many of whom rely on extraction and fossil fuel-focused industries today, even as they sit at the frontlines of climate change’s impacts. The National Academies and the Rocky Mountain Institute have conducted independent analyses that estimate roughly $2-5B/year in innovation funding will be required to scale removals and make them cost competitive over the next decade. While no small sum, that’s a fraction of a percent of the ~$1.5T in total allied annual defense spending.

Nuclear energy provides a useful historical parallel to which we can compare national security-related public investments in carbon removal. Nuclear energy did not emerge solely as a civilian power source; its early advances were tightly coupled to military needs, most notably the development of nuclear propulsion for submarines. That dual-use foundation accelerated technological maturity, supply chains, and institutional competence that later supported civilian deployment. Today, initiatives such as the U.S. Department of Defense’s Project Pele, which is advancing mobile nuclear reactors for forward operating bases, show that security-driven investment can again catalyze broader energy innovation. Carbon removal can occupy a similar position: a civilian technology with direct relevance to long-term military stability and operational resilience.

Further, NATO member governments already have a playbook to support carbon removal commercialization, namely advanced market commitments to direct forward purchases. Canada is a leader in this field, with a $10M pledge for removals as part of their military aviation decarbonization efforts. Germany recently announced similar funding for carbon removal credit purchasing in 2026 and the European Commission is planning to launch an EU-wide “Buyer’s Club” for removals, shaped in part by successful voluntary corporate advance market commitments for removals like the Frontier and Symbiosis initiatives. Even the U.S. hasn’t formally canceled the Biden Admin’s $35M Carbon Removal Purchase Prize pilot program.

Part of the appeal here is that from a defense investment perspective, carbon removal technologies can be dual-use. Direct air capture, for instance, relies on advanced materials, sensors, and energy systems with relevance to military logistics and base resilience. Ocean-based approaches intersect with maritime domain awareness, port security, and naval operations. Large-scale land restoration improves border stability and rural economic resilience, while the monitoring, reporting, and verification systems required for removals build capabilities in satellite intelligence and atmospheric sensing.

Defense institutions routinely fund technologies with civilian spillovers; carbon removal fits squarely within this tradition. NATO members can also leverage their collective economic and diplomatic power to ensure that carbon removal is scaled globally, supporting both wider markets for American and European removal providers and avoiding the free-rider problem of having to pay for other countries that choose to approach emissions reductions more slowly than others.

What’s at stake as carbon removal scales

Scaling removals from the early startup phase it’s presently in is far from guaranteed. The voluntary carbon credit purchases that have catalyzed the field to date are plateauing, with few fast followers willing to pay the premium for high quality removals without a regulatory mandate more imminent on the horizon. Compliance markets are also too low priced to support removal innovation with government subsidy in the near term. And natural markets for removals are too niche and challenging for most developers to finance commercial-scale projects.

Recent history offers cautionary tales with respect to what happens when NATO members fail to to support critical emerging industries, such as in the critical mineral sector. Had the U.S. and European leaders better understood and responded to the centrality that critical minerals would increasingly play across economies and militaries alike as they electrify and integrate new hardware systems—such as drones, which depend on batteries (and countless other electrical systems and infrastructure)—we would hopefully have raced to avoid allowing China to corner many components of the market for production of key input minerals. Shuttering domestic critical mineral production would have been a nonstarter. And yet, we’re now tasked with restarting these industries domestically from scratch. Private sector efforts to do so, replete with government funding, have, in some cases, already failed. In the race to control these supply chains with clear and long-term military and civilian relevance, we are woefully behind.

The same need not happen in the carbon removal industry. To encourage that it not, leadership in carbon removal should be seen as simultaneously an economic opportunity and a geopolitical lever. Countries that develop scalable removal capacity will shape the standards for measurement, verification, and accounting that govern future climate and trade regimes. They will possess a form of soft power, offering removals or the know-how and resources to develop removal capacity as part of development, reconstruction, and stability packages, and as leverage in diplomatic negotiations. In particular, as the US looks to reenter global diplomatic forums in future administrations after the self immolation of the current administration, carbon removal could offer a path for the US to credibly offer a valuable resource for our allies abroad.

If NATO members do not lead, others will. China and capital-rich Gulf states are well positioned to fill the vacuum, capturing technological advantage and influence in a domain that will increasingly shape global economic and security relationships.

If and when NATO members do work together to scale funding and harmonize carbon accounting standards, it will be catalytic for the entire field as well as member economies generally. Costs for emerging removals technology will fall over coming decades to levels where many national carbon pricing mechanisms can incorporate removals without significant additional government funding, enabling the field to mature to the climatically-relevant scale. Plus, the security rationale for carbon removal does not stand alone. Investments that reduce long-term instability also create high-quality jobs, strengthen rural and coastal economies, and build industrial capacity aligned with a net-zero future. These co-benefits will help cement the political durability of the investments and NATO’s cohesion.