As the marine environment changes before his eyes, DeVant’e Dawson — a coral postdoctoral researcher from Stanford University’s Hopkins Marine Station — is preoccupied with how to reach partners outside the realm of science to prepare for the climate crisis.

Last year, Dawson was one of 12 graduate students selected as the first recipients of the new Climate Security Fellowship, a joint initiative of Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and Monterey’s Naval Postgraduate School.

The fellowship program is designed to build professional ties between climate change experts and military personnel. After last year’s successful pilot with Dawson’s class, a new group of fellows started this fall.

“I saw this fellowship as an opportunity to see how I could communicate science within this discussion of climate security,” Dawson said. “For climate change, an interdisciplinary approach is going to be the best way to handle the issues that come along.”

Dawson, who has no military affiliation, worked alongside fellows with a range of expertise, including mid-career Navy and Marine Corps officers, a recent Naval Academy graduate and Stanford students specializing in electrical engineering, interdisciplinary ecology and sustainable design and construction.

The graduate students teamed up to author several research papers on themes of their choosing based on their expertise. Topics included preparation for sea level rise and flooding at the Key West Naval Air Station, tropical cyclone disaster response and the U.S. role in food and water security in Southeast Asia. The fellows presented their findings to the NPS Climate and Security Network.

Both the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and NPS deemed the fellowship enriching for their students, effectively cross-pollinating knowledge and building relationships. This year’s cohort began the fellowship in October and includes 20 graduate students from the founding institutions and two newly participating schools, the Naval War College and George Washington University. Several other fellows from last year are forming a senior fellows program.

Mark McVay, the liaison for the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability with the Defense Department, coordinates the fellowship for Stanford. A fitting position, as he graduated from the Naval Academy and Stanford. Ultimately, he said, the Doerr School wants to encourage students to envision how to bring climate resilience ideas to scale.

“The great thing about this fellowship is that we get a Stanford Ph.D. working on ice caps melting talking with a Navy lieutenant who has spent her whole career on ships — they wouldn’t normally be talking,” McVay said. “To me, the essence of why we have this program is to get these students together to talk about impacts of climate change and share, from their different backgrounds, how they might address it.”

The fellowship reflects the Defense Department’s renewed focus on climate. The DOD mobilized to prioritize climate change in response to President Joe Biden’s 2021 executive order, “Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad.” In 2022, NPS and the Doerr School of Sustainability — launched earlier that same year — signed an educational partnership agreement, leading to the founding of the new Climate Security Fellowship, among other initiatives.Kristen Fletcher co-founded the Climate Security Network in 2021 in response to the executive order and leads the fellowship for NPS.

“Whether it has been a Democratic administration or a Republican administration, the DOD has been on record that climate change is a national security threat,” Fletcher said. “We really wanted to start building a network of young and mid-level professionals and within the Stanford community who can reach out to each other and count on each other. No one individual is going to solve these problems.”