U.S. Department of Defense 2012 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap
The Department of Defense (DoD) released their first Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap (CCAR) in 2012, detailing the Department’s plan for managing the effects of climate change on its operations and infrastructure in both the short and long term. According to the CCAR, DoD expects climate change to challenge its ability to fulfill its mission in the future, and climate-related effects already are being observed at DoD installations throughout the U.S. and overseas.
The CCAR outlines four broad goals:
(1) Define a coordinating body to address climate change;
(2) utilize a robust decision making approach based on the best available science;
(3) integrate climate change considerations into existing processes; and
(4) collaborate with Federal agencies and other key partners on challenges of climate change.
The Roadmap also provides an analysis of climate change risks - outlining climate change effects and the potential mission vulnerabilities, and identifies ongoing work throughout the Department to better understand and address climate change risks and opportunities.
Some of the DoD’s activities currently underway to address climate change include:
- The development of overlay regional climate models with installation locations, in order to appropriately downscale climate variables for individual locations, and develop an analytical tool that can be used to generate climate projections at the regional level.
- Multiple projects to assess climate change impacts to coastal installations and on coastal ecosystems, with several of these projects focusing specifically on sea level rise and storm surge.
- To address concerns related to climate change’s impact on permafrost freeze and thaw processes and other ecological factors in interior Alaska, DoD initiated a suite of projects in FY2011 that focused on understanding and predicting these changes and the implications for Alaskan training land sustainability.
DoD is already beginning to integrate climate considerations into installation-level planning, as well as training plans, and the Department is starting to incorporate climate change science and strategic considerations into formal training and education. The Military Services are beginning to explore incorporating climate vulnerability factors into installation development planning processes.
President Obama signed Executive Order 13514 on October 5, 2009, which requires each federal agency to issue a Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan (SSPP), setting new sustainability standards for operations, and directs agencies to improve their environmental, energy and economic performance. Under this E.O. and the Council on Environmental Quality (CEQ) Implementing Instructions, agencies were then required to submit a Climate Adaptation Plan for implementation in 2013.
The DoD has updated this plan in its 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, which is also reviewed in this clearinghouse.
Publication Date: 2012
Related Organizations:
- U.S. Department of Defense (DoD)
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- Adaptation plan
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