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Climate Security Provisions in the 2025 National Defense Authorization Act
By John Conger
One of the 118th US Congress’ last tasks was passing the FY 2025 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA). The House passed the bill on December 11, and the Senate passed it on December 18. As in each of the past several versions of this bill, some provisions relevant to climate and security were included.
The highest profile debate came over the continuing effort by Congress to block requirements and regulations proposed by the Biden Administration requiring Department of Defense (DoD) contractors to track their greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions (Sec. 319). In last year’s NDAA, a one-year moratorium was put in place on requiring a DoD contractor to report its emissions. This year’s measure extended that moratorium by two years (Sec. 316). More significantly, it prohibited the Department from promulgating the regulation at all. While Congress remains concerned about putting excessive administrative burdens on DoD contractors, many defense firms already track and publicly report this information.
Earlier this year, the International Military Council on Climate and Security published Military Innovation and Climate Change, exploring whether the military could innovate its way out of its climate challenges. One of the points made by this report was that while DoD publishes information on its own emissions, it really doesn’t have an estimate for the emissions generated in its supply chain. If it could find a way to minimize the burden, it would significantly help the Department to understand its environmental impact.
In addition, the House had previously incorporated a provision blocking actions based on President President Biden’s climate-related Executive Orders. The agreement dropped this provision, deferring to the President on direction given to the Defense Department and other federal agencies through Executive Orders. President Trump will have his own, and it will be important that they continue to support the military’s ability to maintain resilience to climate impacts.
The bill does not significantly cut the Department’s climate-related investments, though most of the cuts in previous years showed up in the defense appropriations bill rather than the defense authorization. Resolution on appropriations levels will likely have to wait until the spring. It also includes three measures that address climate resilience:
- It extended the authority for the Defense Operational Resilience International Cooperation (DORIC) pilot program through 2027 and increased its authorized funding to $15 million (Sec 1207). This program funds engagement with foreign partner militaries on climate, environmental, and operational resilience efforts to support combatant command priorities.
- In addition, it includes $50 million to repair and restore facilities at the US Army Garrison on Kwajalein Atoll. Recall that this site had been severely damaged earlier this year by abnormally large waves. In a separate section, the agreement requires the Defense Science Board (DSB) to conduct a study on the long-term operations and availability of the facility (Sec 245). While the DSB provision does not explicitly mention climate risk, it has previously been identified as a vulnerable installation in a DoD study published in 2018, noting that sea level rise was threatening the freshwater aquifer on the island and, therefore, its ability to support habitability.
- It expands the National Guard’s FireGuard program, which leverages military satellites to detect and monitor wildfires, allowing it to partner with other federal agencies and outside entities to improve the capability of the program.
In conclusion, this was a relatively quiet year for climate within the NDAA. Congress sent a fairly conclusive signal that it didn’t want to focus on contractor emissions and continued incremental progress on DoD’s resilience efforts. Next year’s dynamics will be different, with changes both in Congress and the Administration, and given that the past is often prologue, we recommend readers review the NDAA provisions from 2017 and 2018—the last time President Trump served with a Republican Congress.
Given accelerating climate risks and their security consequences, we hope the incoming Administration considers the security benefits of, at the very least, maintaining and reinforcing the climate resilience provisions enacted in the NDAA over the past several years. Risks are increasing, and the military needs to be able to operate in a future shaped by climate change.
Climate Security Provisions in the FY24 National Defense Authorization Act
By John Conger
The Fiscal Year 2024 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) was signed by U.S. President Joe Biden on December 22, 2023. The annual policy bill often has a wide range of pragmatic provisions on energy, environment and climate activities, and this year was no exception. However, some of the policies under consideration reflected more contentious debates in Congress. I previewed these in a blog earlier this year, and now there is at least some resolution on each issue, with final resolution coming when the FY 2024 appropriations bills are passed (assuming they are, in fact, passed).
Below is a recap of the three overarching topics I highlighted previously: Emissions Counting; Blocking Climate-Related Executive Orders; and Cuts to Climate Investments.
Emissions Counting: With both the House and Senate passing a version of a provision prohibiting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions reporting requirements for certain Department of Defense (DoD) contractors, it was reasonable to assume something similar would be included in the final bill. The conference report includes a measure that:
- Prohibits DoD from requiring non-traditional contractors (defined as those that have not had a contract with DoD in the last year) to report GHG emissions; and
- Places a one-year moratorium on requiring any DoD contractor to report emissions.
Notably, this allows the Administration to proceed on finalizing and promulgating its rule that incorporates GHG counting into the Federal Acquisition Regulations more broadly across the U.S. government. It simply creates a transition period to allow contractors to prepare for new reporting requirements.
Blocking Climate-Related Executive Orders: The House version of the NDAA carried an amendment (passed on the House floor by one vote) that blocked funds for executing a series of Executive Orders that direct Federal agencies to focus on climate impacts. It was omitted from the final version of the bill.
This is not the final resolution on the issue, as similar amendments were added to multiple appropriations measures, but it provides an inkling as to how those might be resolved.
Cuts to Climate Investments: The most sweeping cuts to DoD climate investments were made by the House Appropriations Committee in its mark-up of the FY24 Defense Appropriations bill, which has yet to pass Congress. The Committee’s cuts reduced multiple accounts with a specific intention of cutting initiatives focused on climate. These include cuts to base operations to reduce resilience investments, to operational energy research accounts that will increase the efficiency of future systems, and to programs focused on the development of hybrid and electric ground systems. In contrast, the House and Senate Armed Services committees, who are responsible for the final authorization measure, neither criticized climate investments nor cut them so dramatically as the appropriators. However, the fact that they did not include such dramatic reductions at the authorized funding levels in FY24 NDAA likely doesn’t predict how the appropriations negotiations will be resolved.
In addition to staving off the worst of the provisions meant to hamper progress on climate security and resilience, the final version of the NDAA legislation addresses climate, resilience, and energy policy in many other ways. Some notable provisions include:
- Amendments to, and formal codification of, the Sentinel Landscapes program, which links DoD with the Departments of Agriculture and Interior (and other federal agencies whom in the future elect to join as full partners) in a partnership to advance conservation and resilience in the landscapes around certain military installations—advancing each of the partner agencies’ missions complementarily (Sec 311);
- A requirement to develop a charging plan at an installation before acquiring electric vehicles for use on that base (Sec 319);
- A requirement to incorporate military installation resilience into formal guidance documents within DoD, particularly those governing installation master planning (Sec 2857);
- A technical correction in the Defense Operational Resilience International Cooperation (DORIC) program that allows DoD to collaborate with partner nations that do not have standing military forces (Sec 1226); and
- Improvements to support extreme weather forecasting (Sec 1090) and the transfer of aircraft to improve wildfire suppression capacity (Sec 1810).
Finally, the FY 2024 Intelligence Authorization Act, which was enacted in conjunction with the NDAA, included a provision that moved the sunset date of the Climate Security Advisory Committee from the end of 2025 to 2024. (Sec 7319)
Looking back at consideration by the Armed Services Committees over this year, it is clear that the connection between the impacts of climate change on the military and the mission and installation protection orientation of climate resilience authorities and actions helped climate security avoid some politicization, particularly in the House. Whenever climate change is made a partisan issue, the military mission suffers for it. Fortunately, the outcome in the FY 2024 NDAA largely maintained the pragmatic approach that has characterized how Congress has addressed these issues in the NDAAs over the past several years. While some of the proposed amendments are and remain worrying, this NDAA is certainly better than it could’ve been on climate security.
Climate Security and the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act
By John Conger
President Biden signed the Fiscal Year 2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) on December 23, 2022, a $858 billion measure setting defense policy and authorizing spending for next year. While the bill includes thousands of provisions addressing issues across the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), its biggest impact on climate security this year is its broad support of the efforts the DoD proposed in its budget request.
In recent years, Congress has used this must-pass legislation to highlight and respond to climate threats to national security. Past NDAAs have directed DoD to deliver strategies and plans addressing climate-related issues such as the opening Arctic or resilience to extreme weather, and have provided a wide range of new authorities to DoD to support resilience efforts. Until now, however, the bill has given less attention to the funding authorization needed to turn the plans into action.
(more…)Backgrounder: Climate Change and the National Defense Authorization Act
An often-overlooked area of bipartisan collaboration in Washington revolves around the security threat of climate change, with Republicans and Democrats agreeing on legislation to highlight and respond to the threat, and putting forward bills that have become law. More must be done to reduce the scale and scope of the threat, but as Congress develops the FY2023 National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA), it is worth looking back at the progress the United States has seen over the past several years, much of which aligns with the priorities described in the Climate Security Plan for America and the follow up report, Challenge Accepted.
In this backgrounder, we track key provisions that have been included in NDAAs from Fiscal Year (FY) 2018 through FY 2022, building from the initial, bipartisan declaration in 2017 that climate change was a direct threat to national security, to requirements for vulnerability assessments, resilience authorities, strategy requirements, and mainstreaming consideration of climate impacts on mission.