After 10 Yrs, Navy's Task Force Climate Change Disbanded; Few Of Its Recommendations Were Adopted
The Navy has quietly stood down its Task Force Climate Change, created in 2009 to plan and develop "future public, strategic, and policy discussions" on the issue. The task force ended in March, a spokesperson said, and the group's tab on the Navy's energy, environment and climate change website was removed sometime between March and July, according to public archives. There is still a climate change link in the lower right corner of the site that led, at last check, to an empty page titled "Climate Change Fact Sheets."
Since it started, the TFCC released several reports on the strategic challenge climate change poses, taking a close look at what the melting Arctic means for strategic planning, and the dangers sea-level rise and extreme weather pose to many naval installations. Alice Hill, a research fellow at the Hoover Institution and former senior director for resilience on the National Security Council under President Obama, said she created a Department of Homeland Security task force modeled on the one created by the Navy. "They did great work; they were the first task force within the Department of Defense," Hill said. "We viewed them as a model of how the government should initially focus on the problem of climate change."
In an email, the Navy spokesperson said the TFCC was ended because its processes are "now duplicative as functions have been transitioned to existing business processes; therefore, the original components of the task force are no longer needed."
Retired Navy Rear Adm. Jon White, who ran TFCC from 2012 to 2015, said its goal was "never meant to be a never-ending thing," but to "get things down" and have climate change considerations incorporated into the Navy's planning. But he said he sees "little evidence" that the task force's work has been fully incorporated into the Navy's decisionmaking process. "Across all of [the Department of Defense], it is hard for me to see that climate change is taken as seriously at it should be," said White, who is currently president of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. "The task force ended, in my opinion, without full incorporation of climate change considerations."
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