About the speaker

Sherri Goodman A pioneer in sustainability and national security, Sherri Goodman is among the most respected international voices on emerging global risks, including energy and climate security, environment and public health. The Pentagon’s first-ever Deputy Undersecretary of Defense (Environmental Security), Sherri led efforts to transform the Department of Defense into a leader in sustainability, climate resilience and advanced energy. Today she serves as Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate & Security. Sherri is a Distinguished Fellow at the Atlantic Council's Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security and the Global Energy Center and a Senior Associate at the Harvard Arctic Initiative. Her book, Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership and the Fight for Global Security, gives readers an inside account, from the Pentagon to the battlefield, of today’s military on the front lines of a changing climate, the energy transition, technology upheavals and new health challenges.

About the book | Threat Multiplier: Climate, Military Leadership, and the Fight for Global Security

Threat Multiplier takes us onto the battlefield and inside the Pentagon to show how the US military is confronting the biggest security risk in global history: climate change. More than thirty years ago, when Sherri Goodman became the Pentagon’s first Chief Environmental Officer, no one would have imagined this role for our armed forces.

Indeed, for much of the twentieth century, the Department of Defense (DOD) was better known for containing the Soviet nuclear threat than protecting the environment. And yet, today, the military has moved from an environmental laggard to a clean energy and climate leader, recognizing that a warming world exacerbates every threat—from hurricanes and forest fires, to competition for increasingly scarce food and water, to terrorism and power plays by Russia and China. The Pentagon now considers climate in war games, disaster relief planning, international diplomacy, and even the design of its own bases.

What was the key to this dramatic change in military thinking? What keeps today’s generals and admirals up at night? How can we safeguard our national defense and our planet? No one is better poised to answer these questions than Sherri Goodman, who was at the vanguard of environmental leadership among our armed forces and civilian representatives. In Threat Multiplier, she tells the inside story of the military’s fight for global security, a tale that is as hopeful as it is harrowing.