Francesco Femia is Co-Founder and Research Director of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) and the Center for Climate and Security. He has previously served as Co-president of the Center for Climate and Security, and Co-chair of the Climate and Security Advisory Group. He is an expert on European foreign policy, climate change, security and defense issues.
Francesco Femia is Co-Founder and Research Director of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR) and the Center for Climate and Security, as well as Co-Founder and Senior Advisor at the International Military Council on Climate and Security (IMCCS). He oversees all of CSR’s research and analysis efforts, including at the Center for Climate and Security, the Janne E. Nolan Center on Strategic Weapons, and the Converging Risks Lab. He acts as Editor-in-Chief for all the organization’s publications.
Previously, Femia served as Co-president of the Center for Climate and Security, and Co-chair of the Climate and Security Advisory Group – the primary forum for climate and security dialogue in the U.S. national security community. Before that, he was Program Director at the Connect U.S. Fund, where he led programs ranging from climate resilience to mass atrocity prevention and response. Femia is the Co-founder of both the Council on Strategic Risks and the Center for Climate and Security.
He is an expert on European foreign policy, climate change, security and defense issues.
He has published extensively on the security implications of climate change, water stress and natural resource mismanagement in Syria and North Africa, including in the seminal report ‘The Arab Spring and Climate Change’, the SAIS Review of International Affairs, and the Brown Journal of World Affairs. He is also a regular commentator on how national security, defense and intelligence communities address climate change-related threats, appearing on a range of television programs and the feature film documentary, ‘Age of Consequences’. He is frequently-cited and interviewed in both mainstream and niche media outlets, including Fox News, USA Today, Forbes, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Economist, CNN, MSNBC, NBC News, National Review, New Republic, the BBC, The Atlantic, Defense News, Defense One, and Stars and Stripes, among others.
He holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he focused on European foreign policy and security issues, and a bachelor’s degree from Emerson College.
Articles
Climate Change as a National Security Threat and What to Do About it
Francesco "Frank" Femia, Ms. Caitlin Werrell
This article, co-written by two NSWG members, analyzes the Fourth National Climate Assessment, a Congressionally mandated quadrennial review. The pair points out that this report is...