Addressing and Adapting to National Security Implications of a Changing Climate in Coastal Regions

Long and episodic environmental changes in coastal regions have been posing a risk to U.S. National Security, pointing to the need for anticipating the response of coastal systems and for informing the decision-making process of actions to mitigate the threats. A large number of military facilities and national critical infrastructures, such as electrical power, lie on the U.S. coastlines. Hurricanes and sea level rise have been threatening these systems with great economic losses and National Security consequences.Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory lead the development of a new multisector adaptation science to model the coevolution of the natural-human-engineered systems in coastal zones integrating physics to decision making. The process includes the development of new components in the Energy Exascale Earth Model (E3SM) to simulate the evolution of the coupled wetland-ocean interface and the integration of high-fidelity models of the power network within an optimization algorithm capable of identifying optimal strategies to mitigate the impacts on the system. The developed model enables to estimate the impacts on critical infrastructure of future environmental changes and inform decision-making on how to mitigate the risk.