WASHINGTON, DC—Shortly before Washington DC officialdom departed for the July 4th weekend, the Office of Management and Budget announced it would be requiring federal agencies to consider the effects of climate change on the construction and maintenance budgets for federal facilities in fiscal year 2017.

It is a first for the agency.

The news was released in a blog post by Ali Zaidi, OMB's associate director for Natural Resources, Energy and Science.

The requirement is described in the OBM's Circular A-11 for FY 2017. Circular A-11 is essentially the federal government's budgeting playbook that is released each year.

This year, for the first time, "….OMB is asking all federal agencies to consider climate preparedness and resiliency objectives as part of their fiscal year 2017 budget requests for construction and maintenance of federal facilities," Zaidi wrote.

"We are making it very clear that this is a priority in proposals for capital funding. Why? Because making our federal facility investments climate-smart reduces our fiscal exposure to the impacts of climate change."

This new directive will mean different things to different agencies and the buildings they use, Zaidi continued, especially considering the far-flung and huge number of properties in the federal portfolio. The OMB is taking this step "to reduce our fiscal exposure to the impacts of climate change," he wrote, but also in certain cases to protect "critical domestic and national security missions" that could be "vulnerable to climate-related extreme weather events."

Zaidi also pointed to a recent National Park Service report identifying more than $40 billion in national park infrastructure and historic and cultural resources at risk due to sea level rise.

A Revised Social Cost of Carbon

Zaidi elaborated more on the government's approach to measuring climate change in a blog post published the following day that discussed the social cost of carbon (SCC), which he described as a tool that helps federal agencies decide which carbon-reducing regulatory approaches make the most sense. "The SCC is a range of estimates, in dollars, of the long-term damage done by one ton of carbon emissions," he wrote.

The effort to incorporate the SCC into regulatory impact analysis began in the Bush Administration and now the OBM is finally nearing the development of a harmonized SCC after receiving a number of responses on a proposed set of updated SCC estimates that the OMB made in November 2013, he wrote.

The next step the OMB will be taking include, according to Zaidi:

• The publication of a detailed summary and formal response to the comments received.

• The issuance of "minor technical revisions" to the SCC, and the publication of a revised Technical Support Document that explains those changes.

• A request that the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine provide advice on the pros and cons of potential approaches to future updates.