Geohazards and Climate Security and Resilience at United States Diplomatic Missions

The US Department of State, Bureau of Overseas Buildings Operations (OBO) manages a portfolio of over 25,400 properties spread across 290 foreign missions, for which it is charged with a broad range of responsibilities including acquisition, design, construction, and operations and management. Central to OBO’s mission is providing safe, secure, functional, and resilient facilities that represent American values. At all of OBO’s global missions, there is an emphasis on keeping properties secure from natural hazard-related risks including geohazard threats. Ground subsidence, karst, and landslide hazards were managed during projects at high-risk posts in Bangkok, Merida, and Caracas through early geotechnical involvement, design team coordination, and design and construction modifications to mitigate risk potential. Future forecasts anticipate climate change to increase exposure to natural hazards at these and other missions intensifying the need to modernize current risk management techniques. OBO’s evolving Climate Security & Resilience (CS&R) Program will facilitate integration of improved data-informed strategies into risk management processes to better ensure OBO facilities are secure from and resilient to a changing climate and risks posed by natural hazards. The CS&R program is developing a dashboard to display exposure information of multiple natural hazards (flood, earthquake, tsunami, extreme wind, extreme heat, and water stress) and an overlay with vulnerabilities to capture risks to overseas missions. This information will then be utilized to develop more efficient planning strategies and processes to evaluate and mitigate risk. Future goals for the CS&R program include seeking out and incorporating geohazard exposure and vulnerability information into the dashboard to assist OBO in managing cost-effective methods for characterizing and reducing geohazard risk alongside other hazards. Geohazard predictive modeling would allow OBO to improve current practices of assessing risk based on past events and more accurately map effects of climate change.