Budget Issues: Opportunities to Reduce Federal Fiscal Exposures Through Greater Resilience to Climate Change and Extreme Weather
Released: 2014-07-29T00:00:00

Letter

Climate-Related and Extreme Weather Impacts on Infrastructure and Federal Lands Increase Federal Fiscal Exposures

As our past work has found, climate-related and extreme weather impacts on physical infrastructure such as buildings, roads, and bridges, as well as on federal lands, increase federal fiscal exposures. Infrastructure is typically designed to withstand and operate within historical climate patterns. However, according to NRC, as the climate changes, historical patterns do not provide reliable predictions of the future, in particular, those related to extreme weather events.may underestimate potential climate-related impacts over their design life, which can range up to 50 to 100 years. Federal agencies responsible for the long-term management of federal lands face similar impacts. Climate- Thus, infrastructure designs related impacts can increase the operating and maintenance costs of infrastructure and federal lands or decrease the infrastructure’s life span, leading to increased fiscal exposures for the federal government that are not fully reflected in the budget. Key examples from our recent work include (1) Department of Defense (DOD) facilities, (2) other large federal facilities such as National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) centers, and (3) federal lands such as National Parks.

DOD Facilities

DOD manages a global real-estate portfolio that includes over 555,000 facilities and 28 million acres of land with a replacement value that DOD estimates at close to $850 billion. Within the United States, the department’s extensive infrastructure of bases and training ranges— critical to maintaining military readiness—extends across the country, including Alaska and Hawaii. DOD incurs substantial costs for infrastructure, with a base budget for military construction and family housing totaling more than $9.8 billion in fiscal year 2014. As we reported in May 2014, this infrastructure is vulnerable to the potential impacts of climate change, including increased drought and more frequent and severe extreme weather events in certain locations.

In its 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review, DOD stated that the impacts of climate change may increase the frequency, scale, and complexity of future missions, while undermining the capacity of domestic installations to support training activities. For example, in our May 2014 report on DOD infrastructure adaptation, we found that drought contributed to wildfires at an Army installation in Alaska that delayed certain units’ training (see fig. 1). systems in training and decreased the realism of the training.

GAO-14-446. Adaptation is defined as adjustments to natural or human systems in response to actual or expected climate change.

Other Large Federal Facilities

The federal government owns and operates hundreds of thousands of non-defense buildings and facilities that a changing climate could affect. For example, NASA’s real property holdings include more than 5,000 buildings and other structures such as wind tunnels, laboratories, launch pads, and test stands. In total, these NASA assets—many of which are located in vulnerable coastal areas—represent more than $32 billion in current replacement value. Our April 2013 report on infrastructure adaptation showed the vulnerability of Johnson Space Center and its mission control center, often referred to as the nerve center for America’s human space program. As shown in figure 3, the center is located in Houston, Texas, near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico. Johnson Space Center’s facilities—conservatively valued at $2.3 billion—are vulnerable to storm surge and sea level rise because of their location on the Gulf Coast.

The federal government manages nearly 30 percent of the land in the United States for a variety of purposes, such as recreation, grazing, timber, and habitat for fish and wildlife. Specifically, federal agencies manage natural resources on about 650 million acres of land, including 401 national park units and 155 national forests. As we reported in May 2013, these resources are vulnerable to changes in the climate, including increases in air and water temperatures, wildfires, and drought; forests stressed by drought becoming more vulnerable to insect infestations; rising sea levels; and reduced snow cover and retreating glaciers. In addition, various species are expected to be at risk of becoming extinct due to the loss of habitat critical to their survival. Many of these changes have already been observed on federally managed lands and waters and are expected to continue, and one of the areas where the federal government’s fiscal exposure is expected to increase is in its role as the manager of large amounts of land and other natural resources. According to USGCRP’s May 2014 National Climate Assessment, hotter and drier weather and earlier snowmelt mean that wildfires in the West start earlier in the spring, last later into the fall, and burn more acres. Appropriations for the federal government’s wildland fire management activities have tripled, averaging over $3 billion annually in recent years, up from about $1 billion in fiscal year 1999.

Improved Climate- Related Technical Assistance to All Levels of Government Can Help Limit Federal Fiscal Exposures

As we have previously reported, improved climate-related technical assistance to all levels of government can help limit federal fiscal exposures. Existing federal efforts encourage a decentralized approach to such assistance, with federal agencies incorporating climate-related information into their planning, operations, policies, and programs and establishing their own methods for collecting, storing, and disseminating climate-related data. Reflecting this approach, technical assistance from the federal government to state and local governments also exists in an uncoordinated confederation of networks and institutions. As we reported in our February 2013 high-risk update, the challenge is to develop a cohesive approach at the federal level that also informs action at the state and local levels.

Federal Decision Makers

The Executive Office of the President and federal agencies have many efforts underway to increase the resilience of federal infrastructure and programs. For example, executive orders issued in 2009 and 2013 directed agencies to create climate change adaptation plans which integrate consideration of climate change into their operations and overall mission objectives, including the costs and benefits of improving climate adaptation and resilience with real-property investments and construction of new facilities.

Recognizing these and many other emerging efforts, our prior work shows that federal decision makers still need help understanding how to build resilience into their infrastructure and planning processes. For example, in our May 2014 report, we found that DOD requires selected infrastructure planning efforts for existing and future infrastructure to account for climate change impacts, but its planners did not have key information necessary to make decisions that account for climate and We recommended that DOD provide further information to related risks. installation planners and clarify actions that account for climate change in planning documents. DOD concurred with our recommendations.

GAO-14-446. even with the creation of strategic policy documents and high-level agency guidance.

State and Local Decision Makers

The federal government invests tens of billions of dollars annually in infrastructure projects prioritized and supervised by state and local governments. In total, the United States has about 4 million miles of roads and 30,000 wastewater treatment and collection facilities. According to a 2010 Congressional Budget Office report, total public spending on transportation and water infrastructure exceeds $300 billion annually, with roughly 25 percent of this amount coming from the federal government However, the and the rest coming from state and local governments. federal government plays a limited role in project-level planning for transportation and wastewater infrastructure, and state and local efforts to consider climate change in infrastructure planning have occurred primarily on a limited, ad hoc basis. The federal government has a key interest in helping state and local decision makers increase their resilience to climate change and extreme weather events because uninsured losses may increase the federal government’s fiscal exposure through federal disaster assistance programs.

Congressional Budget Office, Public Spending on Transportation and Water Infrastructure, Pub. No. 4088 (Washington, D.C.: November 2010). the national gross domestic product by about $7.8 billion.shows Louisiana State Highway 1 leading to Port Fourchon.

We found in April 2013, that infrastructure decision makers have not systematically incorporated potential climate change impacts in planning for roads, bridges, and wastewater management systems because, among other factors, they face challenges identifying and obtaining available climate change information best suited for their projects.when good scientific information is available, it may not be in the actionable, practical form needed for decision makers to use in planning and designing infrastructure. Such decision makers work with traditional Even engineering processes, which often require very specific and discrete information. Moreover, local decision makers—who, in this case, specialize in infrastructure planning, not climate science—need assistance from experts who can help them translate available climate change information into something that is locally relevant. In our site visits to several locations where decision makers overcame these challenges— including Louisiana State Highway 1—state and local officials emphasized the role that the federal government could play in helping to increase local resilience.

Any effective adaptation strategy must recognize that state and local governments are on the front lines in both responding to immediate weather-related disasters and in preparing for the potential longer-term impacts associated with climate change. We reported in October 2009, that insufficient site-specific data—such as local temperature and precipitation projections—complicate state and local decisions to justify the current costs of adaptation efforts for potentially less certain future benefits. We recommended that the appropriate entities within the Executive Office of the President develop a strategic plan for adaptation that, among other things, identifies mechanisms to increase the capacity of federal, state, and local agencies to incorporate information about current and potential climate change impacts into government decision making. USGCRP’s April 2012 strategic plan for climate change science recognizes this need, by identifying enhanced information management and sharing as a key objective. According to this plan, USGCRP is pursuing the development of a global change information system to leverage existing climate-related tools, services, and portals from federal agencies.

In our April 2013 report, we concluded that the federal government could help state and local efforts to increase their resilience by (1) improving access to and use of available climate-related information, (2) providing officials with improved access to technical assistance, and (3) helping officials consider climate change in their planning processes. As a result, we recommended, among other things, that the Executive Director of USGCRP or other federal entity designated by the Executive Office of the President work with relevant agencies to identify for decision makers the “best available” climate-related information for infrastructure planning and update this information over time, and to clarify sources of local assistance for incorporating climate-related information and analysis into infrastructure planning, and communicate how such assistance will be provided over time.

These entities have not directly responded to our recommendations, but the President’s June 2013 Climate Action Plan and November 2013 Executive Order 13653 drew attention to the need for improved technical assistance. For example, the Executive Order directs numerous federal agencies, supported by USGCRP, to work together to develop and provide authoritative, easily accessible, usable, and timely data, information, and decision-support tools on climate preparedness and resilience. In addition, on July 16, 2014, the President announced a series of actions to help state, local, and tribal leaders prepare their communities for the impacts of climate change by developing more resilient infrastructure and rebuilding existing infrastructure stronger and smarter.

We have work under way assessing the strengths and limitations of governmentwide options to meet the climate-related information needs of federal, state, local, and private sector decision makers. We also have work under way exploring, among other things, the risks extreme weather events and climate change pose to public health, agriculture, public transit systems, and federal insurance programs. This work may help identify other steps the federal government could take to limit its fiscal exposure and make our communities more resilient to extreme weather events.

Chairman Murray, Ranking Member Sessions, and Members of the Committee, this concludes my prepared statement. I would be pleased to answer any questions you have at this time.

GAO Contact and Staff Acknowledgments

If you or your staff members have any questions about this testimony, please contact me at (202) 512-3841 or gomezj@gao.gov. Contact points for our Offices of Congressional Relations and Public Affairs may be found on the last page of this statement. Alfredo Gomez, Director; Michael Hix, Assistant Director; Jeanette Soares; Kiki Theodoropoulos; and Joseph Dean Thompson made key contributions to this testimony.

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