OCTOBER 25, 2022 – This fall, Hurricane Fiona tore through the Caribbean and battered Puerto Rico, followed shortly by Hurricane Ian, which decimated parts of Florida. Taken together, the two storms serve as the most recent reminder that ever-more-frequent climate shocks threaten people’s lives, livelihoods and stability.
Daniel P. Erikson, the deputy assistant secretary of defense for Western Hemisphere Affairs, and Principal Deputy Director for Logistics, Joint Staff, Kristina O’Brien, helmed a tabletop exercise, dubbed Precipitous Storm, to assess opportunities for DOD and the U.S. interagency to deepen partner engagement in Latin America and the Caribbean to prepare, respond and reduce climate change-related security and defense risks.
The exercise brought together representatives from across the Office of the Secretary of Defense, Joint Staff, U.S. Northern Command, U.S. Southern Command, Department of State and the U.S. Agency for International Development.
Precipitous Storm underscored that in the near and medium term, environmental security challenges will threaten U.S. national security interests and adversely impact partners by exacerbating state fragility and fueling conflicts while contributing to large-scale instability and migration, creating conditions that state and non-state actors can exploit.
Speaking at the Conference of Defense Ministers of the Americas in Brazil last July, Secretary of Defense Lloyd J. Austin III declared “No country can find lasting security without tackling the climate crisis. From the rising dangers of soil erosion to the growing number of Category 4 and 5 storms, climate change is making it harder for all of our forces to operate.” According to Erikson, “Exercises like Precipitous Storm can play an important role in enabling DOD to refine its tool to engage with hemispheric partners on how the changing climate impacts regional defense, especially in Latin America and the Caribbean.”
DOD, the military and security forces in Latin America and the Caribbean often support civilian agencies in humanitarian assistance and disaster relief operations. Given the increasing frequency, scale and complexity of military missions and demand for defense support, it is important to identify the ways that climate change is “irrevocably altering the context in which DOD operates,” Erikson said.
The exercise presented significant climate change-driven catastrophic conditions 15 years out to 2037, including direct impacts, such as degraded critical infrastructure, environmental damage, economic decline and food supply insecurity. The exercise also examined longer-term secondary effects on security and defense, such as conflict and instability, economic realignments, migrant flows and competition among major powers.
Participants recognized that DOD’s personnel and logistics capabilities are often the difference between life and death for those affected.
Participants also noted there can be a tendency to focus on climate change mitigation (reducing greenhouse gas emissions) and recommended a greater focus on directing resources to support climate adaptation measures, including building resiliency throughout Latin America and the Caribbean.
The exercise underscored the need and willingness for DOD to work with and within the interagency to deepen collaboration with regional partners to help further develop their capabilities and interoperability.
As a next step, Southcom plans to host a tabletop exercise with regional partners in 2023 focused on providing humanitarian assistance and disaster relief in the context of climate stressors impacting the Caribbean.
These initiatives build on other exercises, like Elliptic Thunder set in East Africa. “We’re trying to increase understanding of all the ways climate change is impacting the missions of the Department of Defense — and particularly how it impacts the warfighter,” said Iris Ferguson, deputy assistant secretary of defense for Arctic and global resilience.
Erikson noted that these exercises help DOD “adopt a more climate-informed posture, enhance security cooperation to increase military capacity to support civilian authorities’ humanitarian assistance and disaster response, and facilitate even deeper cooperation regionally.”
The U.S. and the DOD are accelerating and broadening efforts to address the climate security implications. But “climate change is not a problem the United States can solve on its own. We need to work with the international community to build the capabilities we all need to meet the climate crisis,” said Joe Bryan, senior climate adviser to the Secretary of Defense, who will lead a DOD delegation to the 27th United Nations Climate Change Conference in November in Egypt.
DOD, along with several federal agencies across the government, recently released its 2022 Climate Adaptation Plan Progress Report summarizing the significant steps DOD has taken to address climate-related threats across the five lines of effort outlined in the 2021 Climate Adaptation Plan the Austin signed on September 1, 2021.
These initiatives align with the National Security Strategy President Joe Biden released on October 12 , which identifies the climate crisis as the “existential challenge of our time.”
DOD News