Military Energy Resilience Models and Climate: Do Our Models Adequately Consider Climate Risks?

Abstract

Military bases must be operationally available to complete their missions regardless of the operational and physical environmental conditions. A key component of maintaining operational availability is a secure and reliable source of energy, which is resilient in the face of a variety of possible threats both natural and man-made. Towards that goal, the U.S. Department of Defense has supported the development of analytical and simulation-based resilience models to support facility managers in assessing and improving the energy resilience of military bases. This paper examines how well these models consider climate change into their analyses with a focus on near-term and medium-term climate changes. The paper presents a framework describing what it entails for a model to consider climate risks. The evaluation found the resilience models generally do not sufficiently assess risks due to climate change. The paper proposes model characteristics of scenario-based risk assessment to handle the increased uncertainty of climate change, and for models to consider second and higher order effects of climate change.