The Pentagon erases ‘climate change’ from report drafted during Obama administration

The Pentagon has edited a report drafted during former President Barack Obama’s term to take out all references to climate change.

The internal Defence Department report was originally issued in December 2016 but remained unpublished, the Washington Post reported after obtaining a copy. A final version was presented to Congress in January 2018 without the draft’s 23 references to “climate change,” leaving just one mention of the phrase.

The move de-emphasises the US military’s focus on adapting to rising sea levels which impact military bases around the world and preparations for increasingly hot temperatures as well. It follows the trend set by President Donald Trump’s administration regarding climate change. The Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) has also removed the term from the agency’s website and reports and the president began the withdrawal process from the Paris Agreement on climate change, signed under Mr Obama as well.

In the final version “climate change” has been changed to “climate” or “extreme weather”. Heather Babb, a Pentagon spokeswoman, did not comment on the matter of the draft report, which included “the results of the department’s first-ever survey of officials at different installations about the effects of climate change,” the Washington Post reported.

It is unclear at this time who made the changes to the draft report before submission to Congress early this year. Ms Babb did say in a statement that “as highlighted in the report, the effects of climate are a national security issue with potential impacts to missions, operational plans, and installations….DoD continues to focus on ensuring its installations and infrastructure are resilient to a wide range of threats, including climate. The Department has a proven record of planning and preparing for such threats”.

The final 32-page report also left out crucial maps of coastal flooding areas; "those sites that indicated possible effects could occur due to increased mean sea level between 0-3 feet,” the paper reported.

A paragraph noting the connection between natural disasters like particularly destructive hurricanes and climate change had stated they are made “more destructive by a reduction in sea ice and an increase in ice-free periods" - the paragraph was deleted entirely from the published version.

Navy Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn told the newspaper that he “could live with” not using the term “climate change” in the report but took issue with taking out “maps of critical areas of flooding, that’s pretty fundamental...And the Arctic, that’s huge, for a lot of reasons, not just for Department of Defence, but for the Coast Guard, and commercial shipping business”.

The Pentagon already faced an uphill battle in combating climate change that affected installations from Norfolk, Virginia, to remote atolls in the Marshall Islands.

As National Geographic reported last year, the Defence Department “has been planning for climate change for more than a decade, often in the face of roadblocks set up by climate science sceptics in Congress. In 2014 and again last year, Republicans in the House of Representatives added language to Defence Department spending bills prohibiting funds from being spent to plan or prepare for climate change. Terrorism is the greater threat, the authors of those prohibitions declared, and federal funding should be steered towards snuffing out Isis instead”.