How Can Dod Compare Damage Costs Against Resilience Investment Costs for Climate-Driven Natural Hazards?

U.S. Department of Defense (DoD) installations have been affected by extreme weather events, such as wind and flood damage from Hurricane Sally at Naval Air Station Pensacola and flooding from severe storms at Offutt Air Force Base. More-frequent and less-extreme events, such as recurrent flooding or hailstorms, also disrupt DoD missions and result in considerable financial loss. DoD needs a way to compare the damage costs resulting from extreme weather events against the costs of mitigating that damage through enhanced installation resilience. There is currently no DoD-validated model or method for systematically comparing climate hazard damage costs against the costs of investing in resilience options. This report begins to address this gap by assessing the relevance and limitations of this one analytic approach. Climate change is likely to increase the frequency and/or severity of extreme weather events, but it is difficult to predict with certainty which installations will be hit and when, or even by what type of hazard. It is important for DoD to account for this uncertainty by setting priorities for where and how much to invest in installation resilience to climate-driven hazards. Tools such as the Federal Emergency Management Agency's natural hazard analysis tool (Hazus) could be used to further understanding of the value of investing in installation resilience to climate-driven hazards. In 19 case studies, the annualized cost of a resilience option was compared with the averted damage over that option's lifetime under a variety of disaster scenarios to screen for potentially attractive resilience investment options.