After years of planning to deal with climate change at some of the country’s military bases, local Northern Virginia government officials are seeking funding for climate adaptation that, at this point, may or may not materialize.

Robert Lazaro, executive director of the Northern Virginia Regional Commission, said climate change is a reality that manifests itself most frequently in rainstorms that dump inches of water across the region. “It goes without saying,” he added. “We see it all the time.”

The NVRC, a collection of governments from the counties of Arlington, Fairfax, Prince William and Stafford, earlier received about $2.4 million in funding from the Department of Defense’s Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation for Military Installation Resilience Review planning at several locations. All sit along the Potomac River: Joint Base Myer-Henderson Hall, the U.S. Army Garrison Fort Belvoir and the Marine Corps Base in Quantico. 

The funding has gone toward two phases of the MIRR process, which have been completed and identified 129 “strategies” and about 50 “guidelines” to deal with increasing temperatures, rising seas and large volumes of rainfall. Military installations are required by law to plan for resilience. 

What remains to be seen, given the Trump administration’s efforts to cut federal spending and stamp out work on climate change, is whether funding will progress for a third MIRR phase, which could deal with energy demands.

As Northern Virginia deals with increased strain on the electric grid from data center development, and hotter and colder seasons needing air conditioning and heating, the MIRR Phase 3.0 could help with implementing switchgear technology to prevent power outages at the military’s wastewater and drinking water treatment facilities, Lazaro said.

The Northern Virginia commission has been “authorized to apply,” Lazaro said, referencing a vote the commission took in January amid questions surrounding the cutbacks from President Donald Trump and Elon Musk’s intention to bring Department of Government Efficiency cost-cutting to the Pentagon. 

“No idea,” Lazaro added, on the amount needed for the third phase, as the request is expected to be finalized in “late spring or early summer.”

The U.S. military, which Trump and both parties have expressed uncompromising support for, has identified climate change as a “threat multiplier.”

“Improvements to master planning and to infrastructure planning and design are recognized as vital for reducing current and future vulnerability to climate hazards to installations, missions, and operations worldwide,” the Department of Defense concluded in a 2021 report. 

While the resilience review plans provide a range of ideas for how to deal with the climate events, Lazaro explained, those plans identify additional grant funding under the heading of Readiness Environmental Protection Integration, or REPI, that is supposed to help design adaptation projects. 

The Northern Virginia commission has already received such REPI grants for two projects. One is to address flooding at the gate at Quantico, which prevents service members who live off base from driving into the facility. The other deals with an eroding shoreline project with the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences, adjacent to the airfield at Quantico that houses the president’s helicopters. 

Those designs are then supposed to lead to a third round of funding with the federal government that actually implements the adaptations, though the commission stopped seeking that funding for the helicopter airfield after the Navy decided to look at “another program,” Lazaro said.

According to data from the National Oceanic Atmospheric Administration, which Trump is also slashing, the Quantico area could see an increase of more than a quarter-inch of rainfall from 3.12 inches in 2020 to about 3.4 inches by 2070 over a 24-hour rain event. 

“It’s just going to get worse and worse,” said Skip Stiles, a senior advisor with the environmental group Wetlands Watch, while questioning if the facility’s stormwater infrastructure can handle the increase. 

Data from the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences shows that Quantico has had about 200 yards of shoreline erosion, near the runway where the president’s helicopters are housed, between 1937 and 2021. 

Erosion is a process that can happen naturally from waves crashing against the shore. But it is happening at a faster rate in areas of Virginia, Donna Milligan, assistant research scientist at VIMS, said Thursday morning at a Virginia Department of Environmental Quality workgroup on living shorelines.

Further south in the Norfolk area of Virginia’s Hampton Roads region, home to the U.S. Navy’s East Coast operations and the world’s largest naval station, the Hampton Roads Planning Commission is also carrying out resilience review planning.

Rapid sea level rise coupled with land subsidence make the Norfolk area the East Coast’s most existentially threatened region by climate change. 

“These are real issues that need to be dealt with,” Lazaro said, regardless of people’s beliefs on climate change. He pointed to the military’s $54 billion economic contribution to the country and region in 2022.

In Northern Virginia, the design-phase grants include funding from localities and the state government, Lazaro added. “It’s been a great partnership,” he said, recognizing cooperation across all levels of government and utilities like Dominion Energy.

When asked if the commission would look to local or state funding to make up the difference if federal funding for future efforts were to fall through, Lazaro said, “I think the work would continue some way, somehow.”

Charles Paullin

Contributor

Charles Paullin is a Richmond, Virginia-based reporter focusing on energy and environment issues. He’s won several awards for his previous work covering state policy with the Virginia Mercury and local news with the Northern Virginia Daily in the Northern Shenandoah Valley. His first reporting gig was with the New Britain Herald in Connecticut, a couple years after attending the University of Hartford, where he first studied sports journalism.