Hearings Highlight Five Ways to Advance Climate Adaptation at the Federal Level | Article

Extreme weather has already caused expensive damages to federal facilities. Two wildfires in New Mexico in 2000 and 2011 caused about $500 million in direct infrastructure damages and lost productivity to Los Alamos National Laboratory. Hurricanes have caused about $52 million in damages since 2017 to the Strategic Petroleum Reserve in Texas and Louisiana. Flooding has caused over $200 million in damages in the past 20 years to National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) facilities.

These damages are projected to increase because of climate change in the absence of cohesive adaptation and resilience efforts. NASA scientists project that sea level rise will flood about 25 percent of the land area at the Kennedy Space Center in Orlando, Florida, by mid-century, converting wetlands into open water, displacing important species, and threatening facilities.

Many federal agencies have developed their own distinct adaptation and resilience plans, prompted by President Biden’s Executive Order, Tackling the Climate Crisis at Home and Abroad, which directed all federal agencies to develop a plan to protect their facilities and operations. However, adaptation practitioners and some legislators have expressed concern that developing multiple plans is inefficient, since it could result in conflicting strategies or duplicative efforts.

Legislation introduced in January 2022 (H.R.6461/S.3531) would require the federal government to produce a National Climate Adaptation and Resilience Strategy that would address issues raised throughout the hearings. To learn more, check out EESI’s article, “A National Adaptation Strategy Could Guide the Way Towards a More Resilient Future.”

Both the House Science Committee and the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis recently held hearings to explore how adaptation and resilience efforts can be improved and what Congress’s role is in supporting those improvements. During the Select Committee hearing, Confronting Climate Impacts: Federal Strategies for Equitable Adaptation and Resilience, Chair Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) said, “The United States has no comprehensive federal approach for climate adaptation and resilience planning. That results in an inefficient, ad hoc system—one that exacerbates risks to our communities, our national economy, and our national security.”

The two hearings identified five main ways for the federal government to support climate adaptation: ensuring interagency cooperation, equity, accessibility of tools, availability of down-scaled data, and metrics and monitoring.

Interagency Cooperation: Throughout the House Science Committee hearing, legislators highlighted that agencies should be cooperating to implement their climate action plans effectively, and witnesses provided some examples of how interagency work already contributes to adaptation. In one such example, the Department of Defense (DOD) Climate Assessment Tool uses National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA) data to assess site exposure and identify regions for additional climate studies. This tool helps DOD determine how to allocate resources for climate adaptation and resilience. NOAA’s data and staff also helped DOD produce a regional sea level change and extreme water level database for almost 1,800 military sites.

Equity: A community’s capacity to adapt is dependent on its resources. During the Select Committee hearing, William Solecki, professor of geography and environmental science at Hunter College-City University of New York, said, “Poverty and inequality both present significant adaptation limits, resulting in unavoidable impacts for vulnerable groups.”

Solecki also explained the “adaptation gap,” or the difference between adaptation action already taken and the needs of the community. According to him, “This gap is largest among lower income marginalized communities.” This underscores why federal resources need to prioritize these communities.

Accessibility of Tools: One way federal agencies can contribute to equity in adaptation is by ensuring that the tools they develop to inform adaptation are accessible. Legislators expressed concerns that decision makers do not know about current tools developed by federal agencies or how to use them. During the House Science Committee hearing, Solecki explained NOAA’s efforts to get its tools into the hands of decision makers while acknowledging that there was still work to do on this front.

The number and variety of tools offered by different federal agencies can contribute to the difficulty people face when trying to figure out what information to draw on and how to put the tools to use. During the hearings, legislators and witnesses discussed integrating these resources or creating one authoritative source for climate change information. Chair Castor called for a “Climate Risk Information Service,” and, during the House Science Committee hearing, Alfredo Gomez, director of natural resources and environment at the Government Accountability Office, said the federal government should “create a national climate information system.”

Down-Scaled Data: Legislators and witnesses addressed the need for tools with down-scaled data. Since climate change impacts vary down to the local level, it may not be useful to local decision makers to have state-wide or regional data. To effectively adapt and build resilient systems, decision makers need to know how climate will impact counties, cities, and even specific streets.

Metrics and Monitoring: Legislators said that the federal government needs a set of resilience metrics to measure progress and identify appropriate goals for sufficient resilience to climate change. A resilience metric could also be useful in cost-benefit analyses to quantify the benefits of adaptation and resilience projects and prioritize them.

Monitoring adaptation efforts to assess progress is also crucial. Solecki said that while monitoring efforts have increased over the past five years, they are still underutilized. He argued that monitoring can provide insights into best practices and avoid unintended side effects like increased greenhouse gas emissions, inequity, and shifted vulnerability to climate change from one community to another.

As federal agencies work to advance adaptation, some projects demonstrate the progress that has already been made. The NOAA Aircraft Operations Center in Lakeland, Florida, was built to withstand and maintain critical operations during hurricanes. When Hurricane Irma passed directly over the Center’s hangar, the building safely housed personnel and assets that could resume operations immediately after the hurricane passed.

In many cases, these adaptation efforts also provide opportunities for mitigation. The National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) installed a solar photovoltaic and battery storage system that will make the lab more resilient to grid vulnerabilities while producing about 20 percent of the electricity the facility uses. NREL’s goal to electrify its entire vehicle fleet within two years will both limit greenhouse gas emissions and allow it to use the vehicles’ battery storage as a backup power source.

These hearings demonstrated that the federal government has made progress on climate adaptation and that it has identified key areas for improvement. There is a significant opportunity for the federal government to protect its assets and lead states and communities in a unified adaptation strategy.

Author: S. Grace Parker