Anessa Kimball

Anessa Kimball is a full professor of political science at Université Laval. Kimball obtained a BA in International relations from Kent State University, OH, USA followed by master’s and doctoral degrees in political science from the State University of New York at Binghamton. Their research expertise includes questions of geopolitics and international security, the design of defence and security cooperation, issues of collective defence and security burden sharing, and NATO.

NATO’s interest security resilience culminated in the establishment of baseline requirements for civil preparedness and resilience over a decade ago that has been combined with the organisation’s recent announcement that its partners will allocate 1.5% of their GDP to security resilience spending by 2035. These baseline requirements reflect the three core functions of civil preparedness that must be maintained even under the most demanding conditions: continuity of government, essential services to the population, and civil support to the military. NATO’s seven baseline requirements for civilian preparedness and national security for its allies call for resilient food and water resources. NATO’s civil-military relations handbook in section 7.2 states. In order to ensure the supply of water and food, three objectives should be met:

1. A system to identify and report contamination of water and food;
2. A plan to ensure that food and water supplies are available from alternative sources;
3. A comprehensive contingency plan that takes into account the loss of some of the required manpower, expert capacity, and necessary resources to produce water and food to maintain supplies. Sectoral interdependencies with the energy supply and transport, as well as the control of central functions of the supply system by foreign owners, should also be included in the planning. (NATO CIMIC Handbook 2026)