Naval Facilities Engineering and Expeditionary Warfare Center (NAVFAC EXWC) awarded $20 million in contracts for innovative projects to increase mission resilience and mitigate impacts of climate change.
The nine contracts are for coastal and western landscape resilience to mitigate impacts of flooding, sea level rise, drought, and wildland fire to installations and ranges.
These contracts are part of a range of investments the Department of the Navy is making in natural infrastructure. The deployment of these solutions will improve water resilience in drought prone areas, mitigate erosion from extreme rainfall, improve water quality, and reduce the risk of flooding and wildfires that threaten training and testing ranges and installations.
“We are experiencing more frequent and more significant damage to infrastructure in all environments – at our coastal and island installations, and on training and testing ranges across the arid West,” said Assistant Secretary of the Navy for Energy, Installations, and Environment and Chief Sustainability Officer Meredith Berger. “These innovative solutions are an example of how the Department of the Navy is leaning forward to protect our assets, our people, and our readiness.”
The contracts are being executed through Other Transaction Authority (OTA) that allows federal agencies to enter Other Transaction (OT) agreements that access research and development (R&D) projects or prototypes from commercial resources that provide more flexible and faster options than traditional government acquisition contracting.
"The award of these nine OTs has strengthened coastal resilience and landscape management, enabling the Department of Defense to bolster protection and sustainment of its environmental assets,” said EXWC Commanding Officer Capt. Dean Allen.
“This milestone demonstrates our unwavering commitment to fostering innovative solutions and promoting environmental stewardship, fully aligning with NAVFAC EXWC’s mission to deliver cutting-edge technology and best practices in life-cycle management to the Navy-Marine Corps team,” said Allen.
The critical range of projects covered by these OTs spans nature-based solutions and coastal resilience with focused investments in areas such as shoreline and infrastructure resilience, embankment stabilization, Light Detection and Ranging (LiDAR) monitoring, and the creation of a comprehensive programmatic planning framework.
The projects focus on developing nature-based solutions across coastal and desert ecosystems, to include coastal resilience prototypes at Marine Corps Air Station Cherry Point, North Carolina; Marine Corps Recruit Depot Parris Island, South Carolina; Marine Corps Air Station Beaufort, South Carolina; and Marine Corps Support Facility Blount Island, Florida; and landscape-scale nature-based solution planning and implementation at Navy Region Southwest, including in California at Naval Air Weapons Station China Lake, Naval Base Ventura County, and Naval Air Station Lemoore.