USA TODAY International Edition
Climate change imperils Navy’s reach in Pacific
Changes in Guam a harbinger, with dozens of other bases facing threats
TAMUNING, Guam – The day before May’s full moon, Vic Sahagon, a former Army infantryman, was hanging out on one of Guam’s postcardperfect beaches under a raised blue tent, sucking down Budweisers and mustard-covered hot dogs alongside his fishing buddies.
They had been waiting hours in the intense heat to net schools of juvenile rabbitfish with the talayeru, a circular net ringed with weights unique to Guam’s Chamorro culture. The schools of the minnow-sized fish once were often the length and breadth of a bus but now, he lamented, its lunar calendartied mating and feeding cycles had shifted and the schools were barely as big as a picnic table.
On Guam, signs of climate change are everywhere: In fishing cycles, rising sea levels, declining reservoirs of drinking water and telltale pieces of dead staghorn coral washing ashore, signaling the slow death of the island’s protective coral barrier.
This tiny Western Pacific island is 7,920 miles from Washington but central to U.S. security interests in the region. It is home to two of the nation’s most strategically important military bases — both threatened by the climate change that has already begun to reshape the island.
The Environmental Protection
Agency warned in 2016 that Guam’s air and ocean are warming, the sea level is rising and the ocean is becoming more acidic. Combined, these changes stress and kill the ring of coral that protects against storms and coastal erosion.
Furthermore, Guam is beginning to see a reduction in freshwater during the dry season, increased damage from flooding and typhoons, and an increased average air temperature, which means days when the heat index is dangerously high will become more common and impede military operations.
“If the military is thinking about the security of their bases, they have to think about the security of the land they’re inhabiting, the security of the water they use,” said Robert A. Underwood, a one-time Guam delegate to the U.S. House of Representatives.
Naval Base Guam houses two submarine support vessels and four nuclear fast-attack submarines, which have been used to gather intelligence along the Korean Peninsula and in the South China Sea. Andersen Air Force Base, spread across Guam’s northernmost tip, has served as a launching pad for B-52 bomber runs over parts of Asia. At least one anti-missile defense system is permanently based at Andersen.
The Trump administration has scrubbed mentions of climate change from governmental sites and documents, declining to formally recognize it as a national security threat. However, a 2012 report by the nonpartisan American Security Project found Guam to be one of the five naval bases most threatened by climate change.
Global warming — the effect of manmade and natural emissions of heattrapping gases — threatens not only a way of life on Guam, but freedom for the United States to act unimpeded by restrictions that might be imposed by host countries in the Pacific.
Although South Korea and Japan host U.S. naval bases, those countries’ own political interests leave the U.S. facing restrictions on the number of troops stationed there, and even the types of missions it can launch.
Over the past several years, the U.S. military has sought to relocate 5,000 Marines and their families from Okinawa to Guam to realign forces in the Pacific region and reduce political tension in Japan. That would nearly double the number of forces stationed on Guam and significantly increase water usage.
As Navy leaders grapple with the effects of climate change here, they must
do so throughout the world. The Navy faces disastrous effects on its infrastructure and installations, as well as on human populations displaced by severe heat, rising seas and water shortages.
Many bases at risk
A 2010 report by the Department of Defense showed that more than 30 bases were at risk from rising seas; a 2016 survey by the Union of Concerned Scientists raised that number to 128 in the United States alone. Additional bases face threats from severe storms, warming oceans and the contamination of drinking water.
Guam is hugely important in facilitating the flow of supplies to forces in the Pacific, said Retired Adm. Gary Roughead, a former chief of naval operations who created a Navy task force on the impact of climate change on military operations in the Arctic. However, he said, other Navy sites face even more dire and immediate concerns, such as Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia.
Norfolk, the largest naval installation in the world, is sinking into the ocean after decades of unsustainable groundwater use. Home to 75 ships, 134 aircraft and over 80,000 active duty sailors, Norfolk routinely suffers crippling floods of roads and parking structures.
A 2014 Department of Defense study found 11⁄2 feet of sea level rise to be a “tipping point” for Norfolk; at that point it will suffer significant infrastructure damage and losses in mission performance. Experts predict sea levels will rise a minimum of three feet, three inches within 100 years.
“Unfortunately, there’s still debates about climate science and policy,” said Shana Udvardy, climate preparedness specialist at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “President Trump put out a national security strategy that wiped clean any mention of climate change. While this may be the case, the Navy understands climate change and they’re working to address it.”
In recent decades the Navy has built multistory piers, worked with local communities, revamped training and cut back on construction in flood plains. It deployed the Great Green Fleet in 2016, ships that run on a mixture of regular fuel and biofuels, to cut down on carbon emissions.
But some scientists say the military is still too slow to respond.
“Military planning hasn’t adjusted to some of the new studies at this point,” said Marcus King, a former research analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses and now a George Washington University professor. “They’re not really putting the worst-case scenarios into the planning process.”
An existential threat
Climate change also has amplified threats to U.S. national security, by increasing societal instability and fomenting terrorism in drought-sensitive regions, analysts said.
Drought is a long-term threat to Guam, and it could eventually force the Navy to either relocate or find alternate ways to hydrate its sailors and civilian contractors.
At the same time, the dying coral reefs that ring other low-lying islands in the Pacific are giving up the ghost. Soon they will no longer hold back tsunamis, or even strong waves that would eat away at an island’s footprint. Many of those fleeing such climate change will head for Guam, which would further stretch the island’s finite resources.
“Those people have no place to go,” said Underwood. “The demise of the coral reef and sea level rise means they’re facing an existential threat.”