Climate-driven natural hazards will continue to affect Department of the Air Force (DAF) installations and missions for the foreseeable future. There is a need for the DAF to consider how installation infrastructure projects that improve hazard resilience may be prioritized. A new approach allows comparison of infrastructure projects based on their ability to improve installation resilience to climate-related hazards.
Accounting for Climate Resilience in Infrastructure Investment Decisionmaking
A Data-Driven Approach for Department of the Air Force Project Prioritization
Published Aug 22, 2023
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Research Questions
- How does the DAF currently prioritize investments in installation resilience to climate change?
- How do other federal agencies and private-sector organizations make these decisions
- What is a systematic approach that the DAF could use for climate resilience investment decisionmaking?
Climate-driven natural hazards will continue to affect Department of the Air Force (DAF) installations and missions for the foreseeable future. There is a need for the DAF to consider how installation infrastructure projects that improve hazard resilience may be prioritized. This report provides the DAF with a structured framework for evaluating infrastructure projects based on their potential climate resilience value so that investment decisions may credibly and systematically consider climate-related risk and resilience at the enterprise level.
Key Findings
- A review of DAF documents provided detailed and grounded understanding of policy and guidance regarding resilience, clarifying the roles of organizations that lead climate-related efforts relevant to installations. Additional review of resilience definitions and existing frameworks (e.g., the Resilience Dividend Valuation Model) provided a basis for the structure of the framework.
- Interviews with key DAF stakeholders and subject-matter experts confirmed the need for a systematic framework for comparing and prioritizing projects based on their climate resilience value.
- A review of other organizations' approaches to climate resilience investment decisionmaking revealed common practices and process elements, which largely align with key components of the proposed framework and further support the potential efficacy of such an approach. Similar to the DAF, comparison federal agencies are primarily in the development and evaluation phases of their climate risk assessment processes, whereas private-sector organizations have incorporated climate into their environmental, social, and governance considerations within their standard risk management processes.
- Climate uncertainty presents a key challenge for resilience planning and investment. Therefore, considerations of uncertainty must be integrated into any prioritization of resilience investments.
Recommendations
- The DAF should use a systematic approach to compare projects with either an explicit or implicit climate resilience focus. The authors present a four-step approach that the DAF can use to compare resilience-enhancing projects. The approach enumerates (and, where possible, quantifies) projects' potential benefits as measured by multiple asset-level and unit-level metrics.
- To implement the framework, the DAF will need to identify specific steps in existing or anticipated project planning, prioritization, and validation processes where such a framework would be most useful; identify project pools within which the framework might be applied; compile, adapt, or generate data and information needed to evaluate projects using the framework and identify appropriate entities for carrying out each step; create concrete methods to inject relevant data into processes; and account for climate uncertainty throughout.
Research conducted by
The research reported here was commissioned by the Air Force Director of Civil Engineers, Deputy Chief of Staff for Logistics, Engineering and Force Protection, Headquarters U.S. Air Force, and conducted within the Resource Management Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE.
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