NASA Office of Strategic Infrastructure: Integration of Climate Data in Planning Processes

The role of the Office of Strategic Infrastructure (OSI) within NASA is to operate, revitalize, and sustain NASA’s infrastructure, reduce risk, and optimize services by strategically managing environmental, facilities, and logistics programs. In response to increasing climate risks that threaten this mission, the Climate Adaptation Science Investigations (CASI) initiative (2021 to present) was created, which is a partnership between NASA's Earth Science Division (ESD) and OSI to enhance climate awareness and knowledge, understand Center-level impacts, develop tools for planning use, and develop strategy based on data. OSI is an essential CASI partner, as OSI actively participates in the co-generation of climate risk products, ensuring these products are both relevant, understandable, and usable for ongoing and future projects. OSI is also able to implement these climate risk products to protect NASA infrastructure against current and future climate risks.

A core function within OSI is Agency and Center master planning. This community develops important strategy for the Agency that are captured and integrated into an Agency Master Plan (AMP), Center Master Plans (CMP), Agency and Center Resiliency efforts, and the Climate Adaptation Plan (CAP). Fundamental to planning is the alignment and integration of these documents into a clear and concise path forward for the Agency with measurable and trackable goals, metrics, and targets.

The AMP is an integrated, data-driven strategy to affordably address NASA’s real property portfolio over the next 20 years. It reflects an iterative process involving close consultation between the Centers, Mission Directorates, technical capability portfolios, and OSI to ensure alignment with the Agency’s short- and long-term strategic direction. It addresses the Agency’s biggest risk—aging infrastructure—and introduces sustainable and affordable steps to improve infrastructure needs and enable missions. A core goal of the AMP is risk mitigation that is partially achieved through alignment to the Agency’s resilience efforts and CAP. The CAP provides NASA’s vision for adapting to climate change effects on mission, facilities, infrastructure, natural lands, and other assets, now and in the future. It identifies opportunities to further incorporate consideration of climate risk into management functions and other processes to prioritize those risks, apply resources and track progress. It also acknowledges NASA’s role of providing the nation and world with unique climate observations, analysis, and modeling through scientific research.

The AMP and all CMPs align with and integrate CAP priorities into their long-term planning and project priorities. Strategic priorities in NASA’s CAP include:

• Ensuring access to space. NASA identifies climate change-related vulnerabilities that threaten access to space, perform risk assessments, and develop risk reduction strategies to enable prioritizing adaptations.
• Integrating climate adaptation into NASA’s master plans. The Agency works to better integrate climate risk analysis and adaptation strategies into facility and infrastructure project prioritization processes.
• Integrating climate change into risk analysis and resilience planning. The Agency integrates the results of resilience planning into the master plans for its centers, and into operations and maintenance processes.
• Updating climate modeling to better understand threats and vulnerabilities. The Agency develops next generation climate models, generate improved data on Earth’s water and energy cycle, and create a connection between NASA climate science data and the Agency’s Geographic Information Systems. These actions will assist other agencies and help NASA improve its risk planning.
• Advancing aeronautics research to reduce contributors to climate change. The Agency collaborates with partners to develop and implement aviation solutions that enable climate adaptation, while supporting the aviation community’s goal to aggressively reduce emissions of carbon dioxide.

How does all this tie to the CASI initiative and use of NASA Earth Science data? CASI is developing tools and information that assist OSI personnel in better understanding climate impacts and key hazards at the Center level. Data and tools connect to key planning focus areas including fire risks, extreme weather events, energy and water budget, sea level rise and coastal flooding. The CASI initiative focuses on Earth Science personnel and OSI personnel discussing data, the foundational climate science behind the tools, and how they can be used in planning efforts to make informed decisions. The OSI Master Planning community has become a key point of contact for CASI, as they served as hosts for monthly center focused stakeholder meetings. This community continues to provide the communication link between CASI and their center. This allows both the planning community and CASI team to expand their understanding of useful and meaningful data through collaboration. This will continue to be an iterative process – consistently improving OSI access and awareness to data and tools, training, implementation into plans, and ultimately the best selection of projects to mitigate risk.

Benefits of this partnership have already been realized. CASI and Earth Science data is being used by Centers to inform the design and improvement of their stormwater utilities, understand groundwater impacts on underground utilities, purchase of equipment based on changing ASHRAE climate zone projections, low impact development planning, process improvements, informed architecture standards, resiliency project planning (mitigation), and sea-level rise impact planning.

In summary, climate variability and climate change have an important impact on NASA’s ability to fulfill its mission and thus merit a proactive and integrated response. As such, NASA implements and continues planning proactive measures to execute its mission and reduce the Agency’s environmental, institutional, programmatic, and operational risks. As a global leader in the field of Earth science, NASA also recognizes that it has a unique role in monitoring, forecasting, and informing the public about climate change. The genesis of this abstract is the marriage of NASA Earth Science data into OSI’s planning processes.