Natural hazards pose an ongoing threat to Department of the Air Force (DAF) installations and the enabling infrastructure that supports DAF missions. The authors of this report describe an approach to improving the DAF's ability to assess installation energy and water system vulnerability to the combined effects of natural hazards.

Understanding Risks to DAF Installations from Cascading Hazards and Interconnected Energy and Water Infrastructures

Kristin Van Abel, Scott R. Stephenson, Anu Narayanan, Rahim Ali, Chelsea Kolb, Sophia Charan, Tim Wu, Avery Krovetz, Li Ang Zhang

ResearchPublished Aug 28, 2024

Cover: Understanding Risks to DAF Installations from Cascading Hazards and Interconnected Energy and Water Infrastructures
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Includes Research Summary

Natural hazards pose an ongoing threat to Department of the Air Force (DAF) installations and the enabling infrastructure that supports DAF missions. But understanding the full risk to installations from these threats is a complex undertaking. Not only are there cascading relationships among hazards—whereby one hazard might increase the likelihood of another occurring—but infrastructure systems themselves are also interconnected, often to regional suppliers outside the installations. Disentangling these connections to understand installation risk from natural hazards has been a resource-intensive endeavor.

The authors of this report describe an approach to improving the DAF's ability to assess installation energy and water system vulnerability to the combined effects of natural hazards.

Key Findings

  • There is potential "hidden" risk stemming from cascading natural hazards and from interconnected infrastructure that is not systematically considered in existing climate resilience planning but can ultimately affect mission assurance.
  • The primary resources used to assess military installations' exposure to natural hazards consider only single hazards in isolation.
  • Not accounting for the complex risk profile at DAF installations associated with cascading hazards could lead to an underestimation of risk and could result in inefficient and ineffective use of DAF funds to bolster resilience.
  • The Hazard Interaction Workbook, developed for this study, provides a first-order assessment of the exposure of energy and water infrastructure at DAF installations to cascading hazard pairs. Hidden risk may be especially high at installations that have not planned for large increases in exposure to a secondary hazard as a result of historical low exposure to their primary hazards.
  • Civil engineering staff organically consider infrastructure interactions at installations during planning and risk assessment efforts to some extent, but no guidance or policy directs such assessments be conducted in a standardized way.
  • Simplified assessment of potential risk stemming from infrastructure interactions based on key attributes of such interactions might be sufficient for initial screening of installations where these interactions merit close examination.
  • No evidence of a quantitative relationship between hazard events and unit readiness was identified in readiness data except in cases when readiness is already relatively low, but the need to understand this relationship and where there is potential to impact mission still stands.

Recommendations

  • Update DAF installation climate resilience-related policy and guidance to account for cascading natural hazards. The DAF's Air Force Civil Engineer Severe Weather/Climate Hazard Screening and Risk Assessment Playbook and installation energy plans should be modified to account for cascading natural hazards and, as applicable, notable infrastructure interactions. The Hazard Interaction Workbook, developed for this study, could be provided to civil engineering personnel to assist in these assessments.
  • Update DAF installation policy and guidance related to climate resilience to explicitly account for infrastructure interactions and the potential risk they may pose to installations and missions. Planners should use simplified risk assessments based on key installation attributes and metrics that describe infrastructure interactions to identify those installations that merit close examination.
  • The Deputy Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Environment, Safety, and Infrastructure and the DAF civil engineering community should work with the operations community to develop a process to systematically track impacts to mission that result from disruptions in service from enabling infrastructure. This effort should identify what information is necessary to track, how it should be collected, and from whom and by whom, and then look for the right system to support gathering this information. Ready access to this information could better inform prioritization of deep-dive risk assessments, natural hazard impacts on readiness, and, ultimately, resilience investments.

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Van Abel, Kristin, Scott R. Stephenson, Anu Narayanan, Rahim Ali, Chelsea Kolb, Sophia Charan, Tim Wu, Avery Krovetz, and Li Ang Zhang, Understanding Risks to DAF Installations from Cascading Hazards and Interconnected Energy and Water Infrastructures, RAND Corporation, RR-A2453-1, 2024. As of September 4, 2024: https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2453-1.html
Chicago Manual of Style
Van Abel, Kristin, Scott R. Stephenson, Anu Narayanan, Rahim Ali, Chelsea Kolb, Sophia Charan, Tim Wu, Avery Krovetz, and Li Ang Zhang, Understanding Risks to DAF Installations from Cascading Hazards and Interconnected Energy and Water Infrastructures. Santa Monica, CA: RAND Corporation, 2024. https://www.rand.org/pubs/research_reports/RRA2453-1.html.
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This research was prepared for the Department of the Air Force and conducted within the Resource Management Program of RAND Project AIR FORCE.

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