Track: B4. Navigating Climate Risks: Modeling and Risk Assessment

Background/Objectives

The Department of Defense (DoD) is experiencing impacts of climate change at home and abroad. Long life cycles for installation facilities, infrastructure, and platforms, on the order of 20 to 50 years, require climate adaptation planning decisions now. Challenging decisions need to be made based on the information available today. These tough choices include: Do anticipated climate changes necessitate adaptation for DoD installations? Should they adapt in place, change the mission, or relocate? What is the time period over which these decisions must be made?

Approach/Activities

As part of the Installation Mission Adaptation project being conducted for the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment & Energy Resilience, we are developing a suite of analytic capabilities and conducting climate mission impact analysis to tackle the set of questions above. To provide insight on these strategic choices, we develop an analytic workflow that in part consists of: 1) categorizing DoD sites based on current and future climate exposure using the Department of Defense Climate Assessment Tool (DCAT), 2) characterizing the sensitivity of missions located at these installations to climate hazards, and 3) identifying those installations for which adaptation options should be further investigated. Finally, we present example edge cases highlighting instances for which the decision to adapt, change the mission, or relocate is either nuanced or obvious.

Results/Lessons Learned

Our analytic workflow demonstrates how DoD may tackle installation mission adaptation decisions given an evolving and uncertain climate hazard environment. Findings from the effort provide insight into whether, when, and how DoD installations might make mission adaptation decisions, providing a blueprint for both strategic DoD and installation-level mission climate adaptation planning.