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Adaptation Policy and Plan

Water resources infrastructure, both constructed and natural, manages hydrologic extremes and reduces the risks associated with too much or too little water. Climate change directly impacts temperature, and precipitation, and hence floods and droughts. The US Army Corps of Engineers (USACE) must be able to perform our missions and operations despite dynamic conditions, whether these result from climate change alone or in combination with other global changes such as demographic shifts, land use/land cover changes, world population growth, aging infrastructure, persistent conflict, declining biodiversity, globalization, climate variability and change, and changing social values and economic conditions.

Adaptation strategies and policies are needed to support the continuing ability of water resources infrastructure to reduce the risks posed by climate change. The USACE Climate Change Adaptation Plan and Report 2011 (pdf, 1.99 MB), revised in September 2011, is the USACE response to the Implementing Instructions.

The Report includes an overarching agency Policy Statement about climate change signed by Ms. Jo-Ellen Darcy, Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works. The Report also answers the guiding questions posed by the White House Council on Environmental Quality in the Implementing Instructions and describes our progress and future priorities.

Policy

The Policy Statement signed by Ms. Darcy calls for integrating climate change adaptation into all that USACE does. It also points out that we should do this now based on the best available and actionable science and that we should consider climate change impacts when undertaking long-term planning, setting priorities, and making decisions. The Policy Statement says that "Mainstreaming climate change adaptation means that it will be considered at every step in the project life cycle for all USACE projects, both existing and planned… to reduce vulnerabilities and enhance the resilience of our water-resource infrastructure."

The Policy Statement establishes the Assistant Secretary of the Army for Civil Works as the Agency official responsible for ensuring implementation of all aspects of this policy. Through this Policy, USACE establishes the USACE Climate Change Adaptation Steering Committee to oversee and coordinate agency-wide climate change adaptation planning and implementation.

Mainstreaming adaptation, as described in the Policy Statement, combined with the actions taken to improve energy and water conservation and reduce greenhouse gas emissions as described in the USACE Strategic Sustainability Performance Plan prepared in response to Executive Order 13514, will help us adapt to impacts from climate change and mitigate climate change.

In mainstreaming adaptation, our goal is to develop practical, nationally consistent, legally justifiable, and cost effective measures, both structural and nonstructural, to reduce vulnerabilities and improve the resilience of our water resources infrastructure impacted by climate change and other global changes.

The USACE recognizes the very significant differences between climate change adaptation and climate change mitigation in terms of physical complexity, fiscal and material resources, level of knowledge and technical readiness, and temporal and geographic scale. Because of these differences, understanding and implementing climate adaptation policies and measures requires very different knowledge, skills, and abilities than implementing mitigation measures. As a result, the Climate Change Adaptation Steering Committee is chaired by the Chief, Engineering and Construction.

Planning

USACE is taking a collaborative partnering approach with other Federal agencies that takes advantage of our different perspectives and expertise so our progress on adaptation reflects the best available and actionable science. USACE is also working to help guide the science related to adaptation to better meet USACE needs and the needs of other land and water resources agencies.

Our approach is phased, allowing us to identify uncertainties, whether in climate projections or in systems responses so we begin adaptation in areas where uncertainties are relatively smaller and the risk of adverse or unintended consequences is lower.

We are developing and implementing plans, policies, and infrastructure adaptation in parallel, rather than sequentially, so adaptation begins soonest for projects that are most vulnerable. These efforts include:

• Pilot-testing adaptation methods, sharing lessons learned within and outside the Corps, and refining our adaptation based on the new knowledge gained from those pilot tests.
• Working within a risk-informed framework that considers all of the challenges facing the Corps, which will enable USACE to implement integrated water resources management solutions to the impacts of climate change.
• Conducting a nationwide screening-level assessment of vulnerability to climate change. The results of this assessment will be refined in future phases, including detailed, project level assessments and regional assessments.

Fiscal Year 2011 and 2012 Priorities

USACE highest priorities for FY11 and FY12 include:

• Supporting the National Action Plan to Manage Freshwater Resources in a Changing Climate
• Developing and implementing a framework for risk-informed decision-making for climate change
• Addressing the critical need for guidance in the case of nonstationary hydrology
• Developing best practice guidelines for how to select from the portfolio of approaches to develop climate information appropriate for different decisions
• Refining our vulnerability assessments to include bottom-up approaches at the project level
• Developing metrics and endpoints to measure adaptation effectiveness

Implementing Instructions for Federal Agency Climate Change Adaptation

The White House Council on Environmental Quality issued a set of Implementing Instructions for Federal Agency Climate Change Adaptation on 4 March 2011 in response to the growing awareness that Federal agencies must begin to plan for and adapt to climate change.

This awareness stemmed from a growing body of evidence that climate has always changed and will change in the future, both globally and locally. Extensive records from ice cores, tree rings, sediment cores, glacier lengths and others, as summarized in a 2006 National Research Council report demonstrate the changing nature of climate. These changes can occur either gradually or abruptly. The best available scientific evidence based on observations from long-term monitoring networks indicates that climate change is occurring, with effects differing regionally .

revised 16 February 2012

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