This op-ed is part of a Special Series on the 4th Montreal Climate Security Summit (8-9 October 2025), co-hosted by the CDA Institute and the NATO Climate Change and Security Centre of Excellence (CCASCOE). The series features written reflections from Summit speakers, bringing key insights from this invitation-only event.
Debates over the security impacts of climate change typically focus on what is happening on Earth. This includes rising temperatures, extreme weather, food insecurity, and displacement. Yet, many of the tools used to understand, anticipate, and respond to these risks sit far above the atmosphere. Satellites underpin climate monitoring, disaster response, humanitarian coordination, marine navigation, and communications. As discussions at the 4th Montreal Climate Security Summit highlighted, anticipating and addressing climate security risks increasingly depends on space-enabled systems that connect Earth orbit to the ground, and vice versa.
The panel on space and climate security brought together perspectives from defence, policy, and technical communities to explore the growing intersections between these domains. The headlines of the discussion were twofold. First, participants emphasized the risks that the physical impacts of climate change pose to critical space infrastructure — from ground stations and launch facilities to power, cooling, and communications systems. Second, the discussion highlighted growing concern about how environmental harms in orbit, including congestion and debris, threaten the ability of space-based capabilities to support climate monitoring and response on Earth.
Beneath these headline risks, however, lies a deeper operational reality: “space security” and “climate security” are deeply intertwined. Climate change is increasingly stressing the terrestrial infrastructure that space systems rely on, while weaknesses in space governance threaten the continuity and reliability of the space-based capabilities that addressing climate risks depends upon. Climate change, in this sense, reveals how artificial the boundary between space and Earth security has become.
Space infrastructure is not just in orbit
Space is often associated with awe and an instinct to look up. Even those working on space security and governance tend to focus primarily on orbit, overlooking the fact that most of the capabilities that enable space use—and on which security and climate resilience depend—are firmly grounded on Earth.
These include launch facilities and associated supply chains; ground stations and computer networks that control satellites and receive data; data centres that process and store information; and the power, cooling, and communications networks that sustain continuous operations. Human operators and maintenance personnel are also part of this infrastructure, operating within environments increasingly shaped by climate stress.
Climate change is already affecting these capabilities in tangible ways. Extreme heat strains power and cooling systems; flooding and storm surge threaten coastal launch sites and low-lying infrastructure; and wildfires and severe weather disrupt operations, delay launches, and lengthen recovery times. These impacts do not need to destroy infrastructure to matter: even short-term disruptions can cascade across services that depend on continuous space-enabled data and connectivity, particularly during crises.
From the perspective of military readiness, these vulnerabilities matter because space capabilities are no longer specialized, auxiliary, or nice to have. As the 2022 NATO Strategic Concept makes clear, space systems are integral to operations across domains, supporting situational awareness, communications, navigation, and coordination for land, maritime, air, and cyber forces alike. Space now underpins defence capabilities and activities across domains, while climate change increasingly conditions the environments in which those operations, and the infrastructures that support them, must function.
Tools and frameworks used to plan for these risks remain nascent. Climate risk is still too often treated as an external stressor rather than as an element that needs to be integrated into core risk and readiness planning. This gap is particularly consequential in the space domain, where military operations increasingly rely on commercially-owned and operated systems that are not designed, regulated, or insured against climate stress in a consistent way.
While NATO has rightly framed climate change as a threat multiplier, the discussion at the Summit highlighted that, in the space domain, it increasingly shapes baseline conditions for military readiness by directly affecting the infrastructure and environments on which space-enabled capabilities depend.
The Climate-Space Feedback Loop
The interdependence between space and climate security also runs in the opposite direction. Climate monitoring, early warning, and disaster response increasingly depend on sustained access to space-based capabilities operating in a stable orbital environment. Yet, that environment is under growing strain from congestion, debris, the rapid deployment of large satellite constellations, and climate-driven changes originating on Earth.
Space-based capabilities support three core functions shared across civilian, humanitarian, and security communities to anticipate and address climate-security risks. They enable early warning and situational awareness for extreme weather and disasters; provide continuity and trust in climate data over time and across regions; and inform planning and decision-making regarding mitigation of, and adaptation to, climate change, including in strategically sensitive regions such as the Arctic.
These roles make sustained and predictable access to space a climate security concern in its own right. If space-based systems become less reliable or less accessible, the ability to anticipate environmental stress, coordinate response, and manage cascading risks on Earth — including by defence and security institutions — is diminished.
At the same time, the orbital environment is under strain from debris and growing congestion—the cumulative result of decades of activity and long-lived fragments from past collisions, breakups, and weapons tests. In 2024, the European Space Agency’s Space Environment Health Index showed that even without new major debris-generating events, key orbits are becoming progressively less stable. Renewed concerns about potential nuclear weapon capabilities in orbit raise the prospect that entire orbital regimes could be rendered unusable due to debris generation and the creation of artificial radiation belts.
These baseline environmental risks are being intensified by the rapid expansion of large satellite constellations. Although commercially owned and operated, such systems are increasingly intertwined with security and military activities on Earth, supporting communications, navigation, and intelligence functions on which states rely in both peacetime and crisis. The scale of planned deployments — with regulatory filings pointing to satellite constellations in the hundreds of thousands — amplifies congestion, collision risk, and the consequences of failure across an increasingly interdependent orbital environment. Yet, governance has not kept pace: space traffic management remains fragmented and nationally uneven, with limited mechanisms for coordination, deconfliction, and accountability in increasingly crowded orbits.
Less widely recognised is that climate change on Earth is already altering the orbital environment itself. Recent research shows that rising greenhouse gas concentrations are cooling and contracting the upper atmosphere, reducing atmospheric drag in low Earth orbit. As a result, debris and defunct satellites remain in orbit longer than they once did, increasing congestion and collision risk over time and reducing the number of satellites that can safely operate in key orbital regimes. Climate change, in this sense, is not only increasing reliance on space-based systems: it is actively narrowing the margins for safe and sustainable use of the orbital environment on which those systems depend.
Implications for Climate Security
Taken together, these dynamics point to the need for a more systemic way of thinking about climate and security that treats Earth and space as a single, interconnected system. Space is not simply a domain we use to observe and manage climate risk; it is itself an environment increasingly shaped by human activity and environmental change. Climate impacts on ground infrastructure, congestion and debris in orbit, commercial expansion, and climate-driven changes to the upper atmosphere are interacting in ways that place the reliability of these coupled Earth–space systems at risk.
This has implications for how security is understood and pursued. In a space-enabled world, climate security cannot be addressed through traditional military tools or domain-specific planning alone. It depends on sustaining the conditions that allow critical systems — civilian, commercial, and military — to function reliably over time. That means paying attention not only to threats and hazards, but to resilience, governance, and stewardship of shared infrastructure and environments.
These challenges also expose a persistent gap in risk planning. As several panelists noted, climate risks affecting space systems are often treated as external stressors rather than as factors that need to be integrated into core planning assumptions. This is particularly consequential where defence and security actors rely heavily on commercially-owned space infrastructure that was not designed, regulated, or insured with climate stress or systemic disruption in mind.
Why this matters for Canada and allies
For Canada and its allies, the implications are clear. Defence operations now depend on space-enabled systems across domains, while climate change is reshaping the environments and infrastructures that make those operations possible. Treating space security and climate security as separate policy conversations risks missing how vulnerabilities accumulate across systems, and how failures in one domain can cascade into another.
Addressing these risks does not require new technologies so much as more integrated governance: connecting climate-risk assessment, space sustainability, commercial regulation, and defence planning in ways that reflect operational reality. As the 4th Montreal Climate Security Summit underscored, the challenge ahead is not simply adapting to climate change or managing space congestion in isolation but recognising and governing the climate–space feedback loop as a shared security concern.
Dr. Jessica West is a Senior Researcher at Project Ploughshares specializing in space security and governance. Her work examines how space systems shape global security, including their role in climate monitoring, crisis response, and humanitarian protection.
