President Barack Obama will once again highlight the “immediate risks to our national security” posed by climate change as part of his commencement address at the Coast Guard Academy in New London, Conn., on Wednesday.
“I am here today to say that climate change constitutes a serious threat to global security, an immediate risk to our national security, and, make no mistake, it will impact how our military defends our country,” the president is expected to say, according to excerpts from his speech distributed by the White House. “And so we need to act, and we need to act now.”
The speech, accompanied by the release of a new White House report outlining the varied security threats of global warming, marks the latest stage in the president’s efforts to make climate change a top national and international priority.
“No challenge poses a greater threat to future generations than climate change,” the White House said in a statement, echoing remarks in Obama’s State of the Union address in January. “Climate change does not respect national borders and no one country can tackle climate change on its own.”
In February, a report on the administration’s national security strategy declared climate change “an urgent and growing threat to our national security,” and this December the U.S. will join more than 190 nations at a U.N. summit in Paris where the administration hopes to achieve an international agreement addressing global warming.
Last summer, a Government Accountability Office report reiterated the findings of a “Climate Change Adaptation Road map” released by the Defense Department in 2012 showing the nation’s 7,000 military bases, installations and other sites around the globe are threatened by rising seas, eroding coasts, thawing permafrost or worsening wildfires.
These changes are “contributing to increased natural disasters and resulting in humanitarian crises, and potentially increasing refugee flows and exacerbating conflicts over basic resources like food and water,” the White House said in its statement Wednesday.
“You are part of the first generation of officers to begin your service in a world where the effects of climate change are so clearly upon us,” Obama plans to tell the graduates. “Climate change will shape how every one of our services plan, operate, train, equip and protect their infrastructure, today and for the long term.”
