Charts depicting rises in average temperature, future emissions scenarios, climate change projections for 2100. This is not a new report from the IPCC, the International Panel on Climate Change, but the annual report of Italian intelligence — effectively our secret services — which this year devotes a small but significant space, among the most pressing global and domestic threats, to climate, alongside domestic and religiously motivated terrorism, hybrid and conventional warfare, and disinformation.

Why the intelligence services' report addresses climate

According to the report by DIS, AISI and AISE (the Department of Security Intelligence, the domestic intelligence agency and the foreign intelligence agency respectively), climate change, beyond being an environmental problem in itself, also acts as a multiplier of instability — particularly because it generates migration flows which, in the intelligence community's framework, also represent a security matter for governments. A causal chain now solid enough to find its way into an intelligence document.

Sicurezza Nazionale @SicNazionale

𝕏

#Intelligence: "Governare il cambiamento - Scenari della #SicurezzaNazionale Presentata la Relazione Annuale 2026 👉 sicurezzanazionale.gov.it/contenuti/rela…

♥ 55 4 mar 2026 · Apri su X →

The report, in the chapter dedicated to the evolution of migration, describes how climate change is "gaining increasing importance". Floods and droughts "are no longer exceptional events but should be regarded as a recurring normality, one that encourages emigration as a necessary form of family adaptation". So much so that whereas people used to leave after suffering an exceptional event — perhaps after losing their land, their harvest, their home, their livelihood — departure is now becoming preventive and planned, because people know that disaster will come sooner or later.

Bangladesh, for instance, is explicitly cited in the report among the countries generating flows that are "more predictable and more constant, but also harder to interrupt through deterrence measures". The same logic applies to Pakistan, Sudan, Somalia, Yemen: economic crises and conflicts are compounded by severe droughts, deteriorating agricultural productivity, and the collapse of essential services. Intelligence analysts call these "hybrid crises" — not wars, not natural disasters, but a combination of both — and in 2026 they will account for "a substantial portion of the migratory flow affecting Italy and Europe".

Temperatures, oceans, emissions

The analysis is accompanied by charts that, as mentioned, are reminiscent of IPCC outputs. The first concerns trends in land surface temperature: intelligence analysts note that in 2024, the average surface temperature in Europe recorded an anomaly of +1.5°C compared to the pre-industrial baseline (1850–1900).

The historical chart shows a curve that rises slowly until the 1990s, then accelerates markedly. Scenarios to 2100 depend on how many emissions we produce: in the best case ("low" emissions), the anomaly would settle at +1.62°C by the end of the century. In the worst case ("very high" emissions), it could reach as much as +4.73°C.

The second concerns ocean temperature. The Mediterranean in 2024 recorded an anomaly of +1.2°C compared to the 1982–2015 average. And warmer oceans mean more energy available to fuel extreme weather events and sea-level rise. The report makes this explicit: in the absence of mitigation measures, the oceans "become increasingly vast reservoirs of enormous quantities of energy", with direct consequences for the frequency of storms and the geography of coastlines.

The third concerns European emissions, and the picture here is broadly positive: the European Green Deal has produced tangible results, and in 2024 Europe's contribution to global emissions stood at just 5.9 per cent. The problem, however, lies precisely in the irrelevance of that European figure, which is swallowed up by the ocean of rising global emissions: without further containment measures, these will exceed 67 billion tonnes by 2050.

But the real news is precisely the fact that the "secret services" have begun to concern themselves with climate: it is a sign that the boundaries between environmental, economic and political security have already dissolved — when a drought caused by climate change destroys the harvest in Sudan and this drives hundreds of thousands of people towards Libya and then towards Lampedusa.

The report estimates that in 2026 the most likely scenario is one of "stable but sizeable flows", with "constant pressure set to persist in the years ahead". Not a sudden emergency, then, but a structural condition: precisely the current state of climate change.