Climate Change: Considerations for Geographic Combatant Commands PKSOI Paper | Page 15

depends.”15 The USA PATRIOT ACT of 2001 provides
the definition of “critical infrastructure” as “the systems and assets, whether physical or virtual, so vital
to the United States that the incapacity or destruction
of such systems and assets would have a debilitating
impact on security, national economic security, national public health or safety, or any combination of
those matters.”16 Secretary of Defense Hagel advised
his subordinate GCCs: “We must also work with other
nations to share tools for assessing and managing climate change impacts, and help build their capacity to
respond.”17 Across a given AOR, DoD will have critical infrastructure vital to its own interests while also
assisting partner nations to assess their intrastate vulnerabilities to climate change impacts and their particular nation’s most important critical infrastructure.
This paper uses SOUTHCOM’s Caribbean Basin
as a “case-study” location from which any GCC can
extrapolate in considering the implications of climate
change risks within their AOR. Among the many geographic options for study, this paper addresses the
Caribbean Basin for the following reasons:
• SOUTHCOM’s recent experience sharing water
resources management expertise with the nation of Brazil can be expanded to more broadly
address climate change risks with other partner
nations;
• on-going risk analysis by DoD and DHS focused on the Southeastern U.S. coastline's susceptibility to sea-level rise and storm damage
can be extrapolated to the nearby Caribbean
islands
• this “soft power” effort to support Caribbean
nation’s preparations for climate change impacts reinforces U.S. security interests in the
southern Western Hemisphere.18
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