Engineering With Nature is front and center in DoD’s Climate Adaptation Plan.
Mr. Richard Kidd, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Environment and Energy Resilience, Retired
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Engineering With Nature helps the DoD develop and integrate natural infrastructure solutions that promote resilience, reduce risks, and enhance the well-being of military personnel and civilians. By leveraging nature-based strategies, the program aims to create more adaptable and sustainable systems to support the DoD’s mission.
The U.S. Department of Defense and its 3 million team members operate on more than 25 million acres and nearly 5,000 sites in different regions, climates, and landscapes in the U.S. and around the world. Over the last 5 years, DoD installations have experienced more than $10 billion in damage from natural hazards, such as storms and flooding. Given the complexity of DoD’s mission, there are not many instances where simple, “silver bullet” infrastructure solutions are sufficient. Creating resilient systems requires innovative action. If you have questions or ideas about how EWN can be applied to DoD installations, please feel free to contact us.
This report highlights the unique challenges and opportunities for utilizing NBS at Department of Defense (DoD) installations in the Desert Southwest. The proposed solutions highlighted in this report use NBS to harness the power of nature to support mission sustainment and resilience in the harsh, arid climate of the Desert Southwest. At the same time, these solutions provide considerable opportunities to explore the integrated nature and co[1]benefits of carbon sequestration, biodiversity, and water resources. The examples here are only a glimpse of the much larger potential for use of NBS at DoD installations. They demonstrate a range of possible NBS that could be developed or envisioned for installations facing diverse natural hazards and challenges.
We developed this book to spark thought and conversation about opportunities to engineer
with nature across the DoD. The example projects presented here, from across DoD, illustrate
the potential to leverage nature as infrastructure.
Engineering With Nature supports increased resilience on military installations because natural infrastructure strategies are:
Engineering With Nature® is the intentional alignment of natural and engineering processes to efficiently and sustainably deliver economic, environmental, and social benefits through collaboration.