Steven Mana‘oakamai Johnson, a Cornell University professor who grew up on Saipan, has devoted his life to studying the ocean and how people in the Pacific depend on the fish in it to feed themselves and support their economies. Lately he’s been studying when they fight over them.
He has been working on a Pentagon-funded project called “Future Fish Wars: Chasing Ocean Ecosystem Wealth,” for which the military awarded a grant in 2023. It was looking at how illegal fishing, climate change and changing migration patterns of fish species could contribute to new conflicts between rival fishermen that could escalate into much larger confrontations — looking mostly at the Pacific and the Arctic.
“All the fisheries climate research shows that there’s going to be a reshuffling of the deck of where these trans-boundary fish stocks are going to end up,” said Johnson. “It might be important to understand, you know, what is the texture of that scenario? Who’s involved? You know, where has fisheries conflict happened in the past, what was driving it?”
The South China Sea, once considered among the world’s richest fishing grounds, has been depleted by years of industrialized fishing methods. Today, Chinese fishermen — backed by the Chinese military — have clashed violently with fishermen from neighboring countries, creating an increasingly militarized standoff. China has also sent its vast state-subsidized fishing fleet across the globe, with large groups of vessels descending on South America’s coastlines.
“There’s just a fundamental understanding that we need to improve on knowing when and where these sort of disputes can escalate out of control, and that then might lead to much larger concerns,” said James Watson, an oceanographer at Oregon State University who served as the project’s lead researcher. “And so this is the work that we proposed, and it was really readily accepted and welcomed.”
But this month the team received word that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth had ordered funding terminated for their study and several other projects. On March 7 the Pentagon announced that it had “culled” several projects supported by the Minerva Initiative, which began under the Republican administration of George W. Bush to support academic work related to issues that military planners believe is relevant to threats they might face.
The projects highlighted in the cancellations included studies into how climate change, human migration trends and food shortages could fuel instability and conflict — including several focused on the Pacific.
Among the other “culled” projects highlighted was a study that was to be led by Anamaria Bukvic, a geographer at Virginia Tech’s College of Natural Resources and Environment, that would have looked at how rising seas and changes to coastal areas could have strategic implications for regional security.
In a September news release, Virginia Tech said, “The interdisciplinary team will evaluate how coastal maladaptation — or failed efforts to adapt to climate change — affects population mobility in coastal areas of U.S. allies and territories in the Indo-Pacific, either pulling people in or pushing them out. … The Department of Defense relies on these allies and territories to conduct joint exercises and deployments essential to its strategy of integrated deterrence in the region, which includes the South and East China seas and Taiwan.”
“This award was my first experience with the DOD Minerva Initiative, and I did not even start with the research,” Bukvic told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “The grant was just processed and then terminated. The situation is very unfortunate.”
President Donald Trump has vowed to end diversity programs and to heavily cut or dismantle many environmentally focused programs. In particular, anything involving climate change, which Trump calls the “climate hoax,” is a particular target.
In its March 7 announcement, the Pentagon said that “the Department (of Defense) recognizes the value of academic research but — in response to President Trump’s Executive Orders and Secretary Hegseth’s priorities … recognizes that funded research must address pressing needs to develop and field advanced military capabilities.” But days later Hegseth was much less diplomatic, making a post on social media platform X on March 9 declaring that the Pentagon “does not do climate change crap.”
For nearly two decades military leaders have been referring to climate change as a potential “threat multiplier.” Analysts have warned that drought and other disasters risked fueling displacement and competition over resources, destabilizing countries and possibly entire regions. In 2013, Adm. Samuel Locklear — then top commander of U.S. forces in the Pacific — told The Boston Globe he believed climate change was the greatest threat to the Pacific region and that it “will cripple the security environment, probably more likely than the other scenarios we all often talk about.”
During Trump’s first administration the Pentagon continued to study and track climate change — at least initially.
A Pentagon study in 2018 found that nearly half of all U.S. military sites were threatened by weather linked to climate change. But following the resignation of Defense Secretary James Mattis, the Navy quietly disbanded its climate change task force that started under the Obama administration and that Mattis had kept open. When Joe Biden entered the White House in 2021, the office reopened.
But under Trump 2.0 the president and his Cabinet are taking a much harder line on climate and other environmental issues, with sweeping rollbacks on environmental regulations and monitoring programs.
During Hegseth’s Senate confirmation hearing in January, Sen. Dan Sullivan, R-Alaska, asked whether Hegseth would commit to firing his Navy secretary if he began to talk about climate change. Hegseth replied that “my secretary of the Navy — should I be confirmed, sir — will not be focused on climate change in the Navy.”
But in Hawaii, military leaders have told the Star-Advertiser that regardless of terminology, issues like rising sea levels are realities they have to confront — man-made or not. One senior Army official told the Star-Advertiser that regardless of whether the administration wants to use the term “climate change,” polar ice caps are melting, and it is changing the strategic environment in both the Pacific and Arctic as the U.S. competes with China and Russia.
As the ice melts, China and Russia are looking at the opening of new trade routes and staking out undersea oil and mineral deposits. The Northern Pacific and Arctic are also home to rich fisheries that American and Russian fishermen have already been competing over. Johnson said that “as we’re losing the polar ice caps, and we have more days of the year that are ice-free, we’re expecting, potentially, that you might see more conflict arising there. And so we were trying to unpack that situation as well.”
The U.S. is also competing with China for influence in Pacific island countries, where fisheries are central to the economy and where many island leaders now consider climate change an existential threat.
“We always talk about how historic drought and sea level rise are going to be the ruin of the Marshall Islands, but they also won’t have their fish anymore, right? And like, that’s just like another death by a thousand cuts,” said Johnson. “Fisheries resources, we hypothesize, could be a back door way to curry favor with these countries and have them flip allegiances.”
The Minerva Initiative has long been controversial, drawing critics from many directions.
When it first began in 2008, many academics raised concerns that it threatened researchers’ neutrality. Those critics noted that academic researchers working internationally already had to fight allegations that they were using academic credentials as cover for espionage and argued the program would only fuel more suspicion. Some also expressed concern there would be pressure to skew findings to please Pentagon officials funding the studies.
Other critics have charged that it’s a waste of taxpayer money funding passion projects for academics better spent on weapons. A column published in the conservative Daily Signal on March 5, just days before the Pentagon pulled the plug, argued that “much of the DOD’s budget goes toward ‘research’ that props up left-wing causes.”
The Daily Signal piece singled out Future Fish Wars for special derision, charging that the project “claims to analyze the economic and national security impact of climate change on fisheries. This project relies on the assumption not only that catastrophic man-made climate change exists, but that it affects the migratory patterns of certain species of fish. … Whether or not the subject of these projects constitutes any real problem that the world faces, they certainly do not provide any advancements in warfighting capabilities.”
Watson argued that the money that the administration says it saved by rescinding the Minerva research grants is a minuscule portion of the Pentagon’s enormous budget. He said that while he and other researchers will find other ways to continue to pursue these topics — and that he agrees there are places the government can cut spending — he said he’s troubled by the tone and attitude of critics who dismiss his team’s research as left-wing activism.
“We have mathematicians, we have computer scientists, we have undergraduates from oceanography all the way up through senior postdocs, doing hard science,” Watson said. “This is weakening the U.S., stepping away from our leadership intellectually. … We should be leading on all fronts, and that’s creating a vacuum for other nations to step in.”
Fishery competition has in recent years come to Hawaii and American Samoa as crews of U.S. fishing vessels have reported seeing large numbers of Chinese and other fishing fleets on the high seas around the islands — and experienced occasional clashes.
In March 2020 the Western Pacific Regional Fishery Management Council in Honolulu sent a letter to the U.S. State Department after a violent encounter between a Taiwanese fishing vessel and a Honolulu longliner. The council demanded that officials “follow up on complaints of assault by foreign fishing vessels on the Hawaii-based U.S. longline fishery and take appropriate diplomatic actions.”
During Trump’s first presidency, the Coast Guard declared that rampant illegal fishing had eclipsed piracy as the No. 1 global security threat at sea. The Coast Guard — working closely with the Navy — has stepped up its efforts to fight illegal fishing. The U.S. has also agreed to increase joint fishery enforcement patrols with Japan, Australia and India.
“A lot of (fish migration is) going to go into the high seas, and we already see how China operates in the high seas. They’re pretty opportunistic about this stuff,” said Johnson said. “If I can figure this out, they’ve probably got the whole weight of the (Chinese Communist Party) behind them figuring out where the fish are going to be.”
