U.S. military installations along the East and Gulf Coasts are at risk of flooding and losing land due to storm surges and higher tidal flows caused by climate change, according to a Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS) analysis released Wednesday.
The UCS study of 18 military installations found that with a moderate rate of sea level most would flood hundreds of times every year by 2050. In addition, half of the installations could lose a quarter or more of their land under the highest sea level rise projections, according to the report, as the lowest-lying areas may see permanent inundation.
Florida’s Naval Air Station (NAS) Key West, Joint Base Langley-Eustis and NAS Oceana Dam Neck Annex in Virginia, as well as the Marine Corps Recruit Depot in South Carolina are considered the most at risk. “Depending on how fast sea level rises in the second half of this century, tidal flooding will become a daily occurrence in some areas; that is, those places become part of the tidal zone as opposed to useable land,” Erika Spanger-Siegfried, lead author and senior analyst at UCS, said in a statement. “This also depends on how installations respond and whether they have the resources to adapt.”
The UCS said these 18 sites are representative of coastal installations nationwide in size, geographic distribution, and military branch. The study is based in part on two scenarios of sea level rise that come from the National Climate Assessment, a government interagency effort that looked into climate change impacts in the United States. What the UCS report called the intermediate scenario assumes a moderate loss of ice sheets and a 3.7 feet sea level rise above 2012 levels globally by the year 2100. The highest scenario assumes a faster ice loss and projects a 6.3 feet of sea level rise.
Sea level rise is the result of human-caused climate change that is now warming the planet and the ocean, according to multiple studies. Warmer waters melt glaciers and ice sheets, increasing ocean volume worldwide. The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, an intergovernmental group of scientists backed by the United Nations, has said global mean sea level rise will continue for centuries beyond 2100, unless greenhouse gas emissions are scaled back.
Under the intermediate scenario, the median number of floods per year for all the military installations increases from 10 today to about 260 by midcentury. That rises to about 480 floods per year by 2070, according to the study. In the highest scenario, flood-prone sites experience a median of roughly 370 floods per year, or about one flood a day. By the end of the century, more than half of the sites would see constant flooding, while already flood-prone areas are projected to be underwater permanently.
“Many of the installations we looked at can expect to lose a great deal of their land to the future high tide line,” Astrid Caldas, a UCS climate scientist, said in a statement. “And when a hurricane strikes, the flooding is projected to be substantially deeper at many sites. Flooding obviously won’t be confined to the installations.”
NAS Key West is just east of the island city of Key West, which has seen sea level rise increases for years, according to published reports. Some 25,000 people live in Key West.
Joint Base Langley–Eustis is adjacent to Hampton and Newport News, two Virginia communities that together comprise some 300,000 people. Many of the military sites like Naval Station Norfolk in Virginia are also near communities with high poverty rates and large percentages of African American and Hispanic residents, according to the report.
But some bases are making plans to withstand the rising waters. The Langley Air Force Base in Virginia partnered with NASA to design a high-resolution flood risk mapping tool. This lead the base to implement flood risk mitigation measures like raising electrical equipment, installing flood barriers, flood storage, and pump systems. That comes as the Department of Defense (DOD), which manages more than 1,200 military installations around the country, has said it considers climate change a security risk.
Furthermore, the DOD has the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program or SERDP, which considers many facilities are under the threat of climate change, and has conducted sea level rise research projects on both ends of the country. SERDP has said in reports that the Pacific Islands, Alaska, the Southeast and Southwest are already experiencing climate impacts.
The DOD agrees with its research arm and instituted a “climate change adaptation and resilience” directive this year. However, that plan is now at risk as some in Congress are trying to defund this effort.
Indeed, lawmakers have voted in the past to stop funding DOD’s climate adaptation plans and those attempts continue to this day. Just last month Congress attached an amendment to the defense spending bill that stops the Pentagon from studying and preparing for climate change. This amendment could die in the Senate.
Lawmakers behind the amendment say they want the DOD to concentrate on fighting terrorism and other threats, not climate change. Critics say climate change is a major threat, too. “It’s kind of hard to attack the enemy when your base is underwater,” said Rep. Bobby Scott, a Southeast Virginia Democrat, to the Virginian Pilot.
Update:
A previous version of this article erroneously listed NAS Key West as being west of Key West when in fact, the station is east of the island city.