The Gulf Time Newspaper One of the finest business newspapers in the UAE brought to you by our professional writers and editors.
When I headed the US Southern Command a decade ago, I took a trip to the Brazilian military’s jungle training site near Manaus in the Amazon River basin. I spent time both in the jungle with Brazilian troops and on the river, meeting with some of the 300 indigenous groups that populate the region, which spans nine South American nations.
I came to understand that Brazilian pride in controlling much of the rain forest is palpable and well-deserved. Now, of course, that pride is being challenged by 60,000 fires spotted there this year. The recent G-7 summit set off a heated international conversation about how to contain the fires. Brazil is being harshly criticized by leaders around the world – French President Emmanuel Macron in particular.
The Amazon is not just a vast body of water – it is the beating heart of a vast rainforest that supplies as much as 6% of the world’s oxygen, and is home to perhaps 2 million distinct species. Let’s be clear, because of climate change, the burning rainforest affects the entire world. As the planet warms, weather patterns become less predictable, and increasingly destructive storms ensue. Melting ice at both the North and South Poles is causing rising sea levels.
For the US, the warming of the planet is a fast-rising threat to national security. And for the US Navy in particular, this is a crisis.
To take just one example, the US military has its most important collection of installations in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia: a vast naval station that is home to nearly 100 warships; Langley Air Force Base, headquarters of the powerful Air Combat Command; and the crown jewel of fleet construction and repair, the Norfolk Naval Shipyard. All are significant, but the most important in many ways is the shipyard.
More than two centuries old, the yard has been a construction site for everything from early American frigates to World War II battleships to today’s nuclear-powered aircraft carriers. But in last decade, it has had nine significant floods, with many millions of dollars in damage. As the sea level rises in the Norfolk area, all this complex infrastructure is threatened.
Almost a third of the Navy is nuclear-powered –all 69 submarines and all 11 aircraft carriers — and there are only four shipyards certified to work on their nuclear systems. The thought of losing one of the two most important of these, and the one closest to a major fleet concentration area, is keeping admirals awake at night.
The other two nuclear shipyards are at Pearl Harbor in Hawaii and Kittery, Maine, and they are smaller and focused only on submarines. Rising sea levels, big potential storms, and a lack of preparation are a bad combination for not just the Navy, but are reflected in the other services as well. There are many other bases that are similarly vulnerable across the US and abroad – notably Naval Station Mayport in Florida and air bases on panhandle such as Tyndall Air Force Base, which was devastated by Hurricane Michael this spring.
The US needs a comprehensive approach to climate that combines a renewal of international partnerships such as the Paris Climate Accords. Americans need to understand how those rising plumes of smoke over the Amazon are a direct threat to our national security.
—Bloomberg
James Stavridis is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist