BRIDGING GEOLOGICAL SOCIETY OF AMERICA SCIENCE AND NATIONAL SECURITY

Post Cold War national security concerns extend far beyond national defense. Today, national security includes topics as diverse as food security; adaptation to climate change; global water quality; natural hazards response; mitigating sea level rise and coastal erosion; finding rare and critical mineral commodities; and supplying clean energy for a global population. Today, our national security community, comprising agencies tasked with our nation’s defense and intelligence gathering, needs reliable and current science from beyond their narrow community walls to guide their decision-making and to find solutions with respect to the above topics.

Realizing that both the largely academic Earth and space science community, on one hand, and the U.S. intelligence community (IC) national security agencies and their Federal-civil agency cooperators on the other, all deal with these topics and clearly have valuable information related to these topics for each other, a small group of U.S. Government scientists and their U.S. academic cooperators, have been trying to develop an effective, two-way conduit for exchanging this information.

Since 2021, members of the interagency Federal Civil Applications Committee (CAC) and the IC Environmental Security Working Group (ESWG) partnered with the American Geophysical Union (AGU) to host Union Sessions and make presentations at the last three AGU Annual Meetings. This ultimately led to a January 2024 Eos article titled “Bridging Gaps Between the Geosciences and National Security”. This abstract is the first attempt to expand this cooperation to members of the Geological Society of America community.

Working cooperatively, we need to open doors and quickly and skillfully build connections and bridges that produce significant collaboration and facilitate ongoing exchanges of information, education, and dialogue among the diverse academic and commercial scientific community, represented by the Earth science professional societies; the U.S. IC agencies, their Federal-civil cooperators; and policymakers representing entities at a number of operational levels.

By improving communication, valuing and sharing quality science and research, and considering the needs of decisionmakers and scientists alike, we can ensure that the best available—and most needed—science is accessible and utilized to enhance national security.