Francesco “Frank” Femia is CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks (CSR), and Co-Founder of the Center for Climate and Security. He oversees all of CSR’s efforts, including the Center for Climate and Security, the Center on Strategic Weapons and the Converging Risks Lab. 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, the National Review, the New Republic, the BBC, the Atlantic, Defense News, Defense One, and Stars and Stripes, among others.
Previously, Francesco 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.
Francesco holds a master’s degree from the London School of Economics and Political Science (LSE), where he focused on European foreign policy, security and defense issues, and serves on the Advisory Board of the Nuclear Security Working Group.