The U.S. Department of Defense released a "Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap" on Monday, detailing plans to combat both "immediate" and future national security risks due to climate change.

U.S. Secretary of Defense Chuck Hagel (R) stressed the urgent nature of those risks in the report's foreword, saying that a lack of scientific consensus on future climate change projections "cannot be an excuse for delaying action" by the Department of Defense in mitigating climate change related impacts that the military is "already beginning to see."

Hagel's comments, paired with the report's emphasis on the immediacy of climate change, mark a landmark shift for the military, which, in the past, largely treated climate change as future risk. But now the military sees climate change through a much more dire lens.

According to the report, four specific effects of climate change will have the biggest impact on the U.S. military: extreme weather events, temperature and sea level rise and changes in precipitation patterns.

Specific impacts from those effects stretch beyond the obvious, like the damage sea level rise would cause to coastal U.S. military installations -- for instance, Hampton Roads, Virginia, an area Hagel said already sees recurrent flooding and will experience more than a foot of sea level rise in the next 20 to 50 years -- to the obscure and indirect, like economic and social instability due to famine brought on by changes in global precipitation patterns that could spark international conflict and thus involve the U.S. military.

"Climate change does not directly cause conflict, but it can significantly add to the challenges of global instability, hunger, poverty and conflict," Hagel said at the Halifax International Security Forum in 2013.

"Food and water shortages, pandemic disease, disputes over refugees and resources, more severe natural disasters – all place additional burdens on economies, societies and institutions around the world.”

Other impacts include an increased need for military aid due to extreme weather events, increased shipping and military traffic through formerly frozen Arctic areas and changes in amphibious military landings due to sea level rise.

As a result, the Department of Defense says it's close to completing a survey of specific climate change related risks to every military base, installation and facility, the report notes. The survey will serve as a launching point for implementing training, infrastructure and policy changes detailed in the Pentagon's climate change adaptation roadmap,the full text of which can be accessed by clicking here.

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Muir Glacier and Inlet (1895)

In the photo above, the west shoreline of Muir Inlet in Alaska's Glacier Bay National Park & Preserve is shown as it appeared in 1895. Notice the lack of vegetation on the slopes of the mountains, and the glacier that stands more than 300 feet high. See the glacier as it looked in 2005 on the next page. (USGS/Bruce Molnia)