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The literature on climate security identifies two basic categories of climate risk. The first relates to extreme weather events and other geophysical impacts that directly affect human lives and well-being. The second relates to the cascading institutional and social consequences of geophysical impacts, which can include migration and conflict. I establish the existence of a third kind of climate security problem: anticipatory adaptation to climate change impacts that have not yet taken place, which triggers security dilemmas between great powers and creates new forms of interaction between great powers and small states. I theorize the phenomenon and characterize it empirically with American, Russian, and Chinese scholarly and policy documents and field interviews in Greenland. 

Eyck Freymann is a joint Postdoctoral Research Fellow at the Belfer Center's Arctic Initiative and the Columbia–Harvard China & the World Program, where he researches the geopolitics of climate change. He is also a Non-Resident Research Fellow with the China Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War College. 

His first book, One Belt One Road: Chinese Power Meets the World, was published by the Harvard Asia Center Press in 2020. His writings on U.S.–China relations and other current affairs topics have appeared in The Wall Street Journal, Foreign Affairs, The Economist, Foreign Policy, and The Atlantic. As a reporter and columnist for The Wire China, he is also the author of “The Warming War,” a series of reports on the breakdown in climate diplomacy and its implications for the planet and the U.S.–China relationship.