Climate change poses a risk to the Navy’s bases if sea levels continue to rise, but it also changes the service’s responsibilities today, the Navy secretary said on Monday.
Ray Mabus said Navy bases, many of which are coastal, are at risk from rising sea levels that could put all or part of them underwater.
“We’re the Navy. We tend to have bases on the sea,” Mabus said at an event hosted by the Center for a New American Security. “Norfolk is at risk over the next few decades if we don’t do something to slow down sea level rise.”
But while climate change poses a risk to bases like Norfolk, it also changes how sailors must do their job today.
“The storms are getting bigger, the Arctic is getting ice free. Our responsibilities are increasing all the time,” he said.
Mabus talked specifically about humanitarian assistance or disaster relief in the wake of major storms where there is often flooding. The Navy and Marine Corps are called in to perform these roles on average once every two weeks, he said.
He also pointed to the Arctic, where new shipping lanes are opening and the Russians are already claiming international waterways as their own sovereign sea lanes.
“Climate change and things like that, it’s a risk to things like Norfolk and our bases, but it’s here today in terms of increasing our responsibilities, in terms of what we got to respond to, in terms of how we have to position ourselves and how we have to think about our roles,” Mabus said.
