A House committee hauled Department of Homeland Security officials up to Capitol Hill on Wednesday to lambast them for preparing the nation for the likely impact of climate change.
“I am outraged that the Department of Homeland Security continues to make climate change a top priority,” Rep. Scott Perry (R-Penn.) said during a House Homeland Security subcommittee hearing Wednesday titled “Examining DHS’s Misplaced Focus on Climate Change.”
Perry, the chairman of the subcommittee, took exception with the department’s strategic guide, known as the Quadrennial Homeland Security Review, which warned that “trends associated with climate change present major areas oh homeland security risk.”
He blasted DHS for requesting $16 million in funding next fiscal year to review the effects of climate change on critical infrastructure in the US, claiming that it was “more than the Secret Service requested to improve its training facilities following the high profile breach of the White House last September.”
The chairman was reminded by fellow subcommittee member, Rep. Bonnie Watson Coleman (D-N.J.), that $16 million is only a sliver of the department’s roughly $60 billion budget.
Perry countered that there are “a myriad” of other agencies including NASA and NOAA that are already tasked with researching climate change, and that DHS should instead focus on keeping America safe from terrorists.
“Are the American people to believe that the increased operations by ISIS are due to hot weather or a shortage of water? Such assertions are ridiculous and, frankly, insulting,” he told the witnesses.
Recent studies, however, have linked conflict in Syria, which brought about the rise of the Islamic State, to climate change. One report, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States, found that a drought in the region between 2007 and 2010 led to mass crop failures. The dearth of rainfall destroyed those years the livelihoods of 800,000 people according to the United Nations.
“While we’re not saying the drought caused the war, we are saying that it certainly contributed to other factors — agricultural collapse and mass migration among them — that caused the uprising,” said the study’s lead author Dr. Colin Kelley.
In 2014, the Pentagon published a study that also made a connection between a warming planet and regional instability, referring to climate change as something that “will impact our national security.”
“Rising global temperatures, changing precipitation patterns, climbing sea levels, and more extreme weather events will intensify the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty, and conflict,” said former Defense Secretary Chuck Hagel in an introduction to the Pentagon’s report.
Thomas Smith, an acting assistance secretary within DHS, attempted to assure skeptical Republicans on the subcommittee that countering violent extremism remains a “cornerstone” for the Department.
“It’s a little but unclear to me how the perception is created that we don’t have the proper priorities—I would just assure you that we do,” he told lawmakers, remind the committee of the department’s five primary missions: preventing terrorism, securing the border, enforcing immigration laws, safeguarding cyber space, and strengthening national preparedness.
Democrats on the Committee rallied to defend the witnesses, and attacked the decision to hold a hearing on the topic at all.
“The title of this hearing presumes the DHS program demonstrates a misplaced focus on security risk linked to climate change,” said. Rep. Watson Coleman. “I strongly disagree with this assessment.”
She added that the department’s work on climate change leads to more reliable hazard mapping and risk analysis to support the National Flood Insurance Program, and provides planning and preparedness tools to respond to natural disasters.
