Project CASA members among speakers at the Montréal Climate Security Summit 2025
8-9 October 2025 – Montreal, Canada
The Montréal Climate Security Summit 2025 held on 8-9 October 2025 was characterised in a Linked-In post by Georgios Zisis, Staff Officer Energy Security, Resilience, Environmental Protection, Climate Change JFC Naples (NATO), as a “powerful reminder that climate foresight is now a pillar of defence readiness.”
In his post, “Reflections from the Montréal Climate Security Summit 2025” Mr. Zisis quoted various key speakers who said that “This summit is not just discussion; it’s about action—there are no passengers here;” that “Everyone must actively test assumptions in war games, workshops, and follow-on projects;.” that “Climate debates must remain evidence-based amid politicization” and that climate is a “direct security driver - citing €44.5 billion in annual European losses.
The post by Mr. Zisis provides a streamlined, logically ordered summary of the summit’s highlights and every principal speaker’s key insight.
Several GMACCC / Project CASA members were among the speakers including Dr. Tom Deligiannis, Vice-President of the Climate Security Association of Canada.
In his own post on Linked-In Tom wrote that “The conversation with my stellar panellists Dan Doran, Jessica Yllemo, Eva Cohen, and Lloyd Chubbs, touched on many of the key challenges and opportunities to build resilience and cooperation to face climate risks. It's not just a government job, but requires a whole of society effort.”
Tom continued by pointing out that “There's tremendous opportunities for civil society, the private sector, and government to work together to build resilience before climate hazards strike, a theme illustrated in this interview today in the Globe and Mail with Kim Connors the former director of Canadian Interagency Forest Fire Centre calling on local communities to take action and not just wait for the government to build resilience. Clearly there's a key role for the federal and provincial governments in building disaster resilience. But a great deal can be done now by local governments and civil society.”
Georgios Zisis quoted Jessica Olcott as saying, “You can’t surge trust—continuous data transparency builds lasting readiness.” Jessica shared lessons from Project CASA on embedding civil-military data collaboration into operational planning, using grants and partnerships to protect critical infrastructure.
Keynote addresses and other highlights from the Summit will be forthcoming on the CCASOE site: https://ccascoe.org/