Dr. Michelle Covi encourages collaborative coastal resilience efforts between military installations and coastal communities. She brings expertise to compatible land use planning, conservation, and other coastal resilience efforts and facilitates the transfer of tools and resources between Sea Grant and military installations and communities.
Find updates from Sea Grant’s Coastal Resilience Liaison, Michelle Covi, below.
August 2024
Climate Resilience and the Department of Defense
Military installations can be intimidating. For people who do not have a direct connection to the military through their own service or their family, installations can seem like an island within the community, closed to those without a security clearance. And it is true that they are not open to the public unlike most of our public lands, such as national parks, national forests, marine protected areas and national estuarine research reserves. But while they are primarily supporting the mission of protecting our national security, they also serve the nation by protecting natural resources and ecosystems like other public lands. Installation commanders have increasingly recognized the importance of climate resilience on their lands and for their host communities, and the Office of the Secretary of Defense has been supporting coastal resilience, conservation and restoration projects across the country through funding initiatives with partners.
I had the opportunity to see this in action in Mississippi recently. The Department of Defense (DOD) supports a large landscape partnership in the Southeast that brings together DOD leaders with environmental leaders in state and federal agencies. The mission of this group is to find areas of collaboration and mission overlap, such as protecting at-risk species and sustaining the quality of life and resilience of supporting communities. The partnership met in Gulfport, Mississippi and toured Keesler Air Force Base in Biloxi in May. We toured the planes of the “Hurricane Hunters,” the 53rd weather reconnaissance squadron, a unit of the Air Force Reserve. They work closely with the NOAA National Hurricane Center to provide real time storm data. One of the missions at Keesler is to support the 20 air crews assigned to the squadron. However, the installation is challenged by eroding shorelines on the Back Bay and periodic flooding that impacts the main entrance gate.
Last year, I worked with Mississippi-Alabama Sea Grant Consortium to host a workshop that brought together installation personnel from both Keesler and the nearby Gulfport Naval Construction Battalion Center to identify infrastructure problems and seek solutions together with community and university partners. Eric Sparks from Mississippi State University is leading the design and building of a 2.5 mile living shoreline/breakwater system that will protect the Keesler shoreline from erosion, and other colleagues are working with the installation to address flooding issues that affect the gate and nearby residents.
Sea Grant programs across the nation engage with installations and gain funding for coastal resilience and restoration projects through various DOD programs. The Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program and the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation fund partnerships between community entities, such as local governments and state universities, with installations to address climate resilience needs in communities that affect military missions. The Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration program funds nature-based solutions, such as living shorelines, stream restorations and all stages of development of the projects through a partnership with NOAA in the National Coastal Resilience Fund. The program also works with USDA and the Department of the Interior and other federal agencies. Additionally, the Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation assists units of government to support military missions by supporting projects that help them to understand, analyze and plan actions necessary for community and installation resilience. The office will fund studies as well as infrastructure needs that installations agree are high priority.
Working with the military is substantially different than working with a local government, however, many of the community engagement principles are the same. It is critical to understand installation priorities and their challenges in which Sea Grant research or extension might be able to assist. While installations vary in their missions, concerns, and relationships to the community, there are guidelines and best practices that can assist engagement. Moreover, installations play an important role in local economies and land use, as well as local history and culture. Many of the installation employees are civilians. It is essential in defense-supporting communities to work across fence lines for the resilience of residents and supporting ecosystems.
