Should Climate Change Force Some Military Bases to Close?
Sharon E. Burke - 1h ago
This article is part of a series form Future Tense and New America’s Future of Land and Housing Program on reimagining how America will adapt to climate change and sea level rise.
On May 11, Rep. Betty McCollum, a Democrat from Minnesota, set off a minor congressional temblor at the very end of a hearing about the defense budget. But the matter at hand was not Ukraine, China, extremism in the military or anything else that you might immediately identify as a live-wire issue. It was just BRAC, or Base Realignment and Closure—the process by which the U.S. Department of Defense decides which military bases live or die. McCollum, the powerful Defense Appropriations Subcommittee chair, suggested it was time to revive the dormant military procedure to save “billions of dollars” for taxpayers and fund higher military priorities, such as more ships. Her Republican counterpart, Ken Calvert, allegedly agrees.
Usually, BRAC is a matter of shedding excess property or unused land, and as McCollum pointed out, the Pentagon has identified around 20 percent of its holdings as excess. But in a hearing back in 2019, other Members of Congress floated a different metric for deciding which bases to close: vulnerability to natural disasters. If climate change were to become a BRAC criterion, that could mean consequences for communities—for which bases are often an important source of jobs and economic activity—and also for the way military forces train and deploy.
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https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/should-climate-change-force-some-military-bases-to-close/ar-AAYMdqc?ocid=msedgntp&cvid=5d16b47e32b54389bf73b8c19fb14f04
