Pentagon’s R&D Funding Sparks Benefits for Climate Change Fight

As the White House and private sector rush to develop the next breakthrough in climate technology, two small offices inside the Pentagon are funding research into everything from solar panels to building efficiency systems that could someday be commercialized.

The Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program (SERDP) and the related Environmental Security Technology Certification Project (ESTCP) have a strategic aim for their work: to help defend US national security.

But “if we can get leverageable value out of our investment that we make for the military mission, that is a win for everyone,” said Kimberly Spangler, executive director of both SERDP and ESTCP. “That’s a win for the American people.”

SERDP funds research and development work done in the lab, and is the Defense Department’s only environmental R&D shop. ESTCP funds the demonstration and validation of environmental and energy technology in the field, to help technology developers overcome the barriers to commercialization, according to Dorothy Robyn, the Pentagon’s former deputy undersecretary of defense for installations and environment.

Together, the offices’ combined $211 million budget is a tiny fraction of the Pentagon’s budget of roughly $800 billion. Yet they provide a vast range of projects that seek to conserve coral reefs, protect military equipment from extreme temperatures and corrosion, quickly detect heavy metals in drinking water, model the impacts of saltwater intrusion in anticipation of sea-level rise, retrofit vehicles to reduce fuel use while idling, develop low-cost photovoltaic devices, and more.

Return on Investment

The ultimate goal of SERDP and ESTCP is to help projects get to the commercial market so the military can buy and use them, said Robyn, now a senior fellow at the Information Technology and Innovation Foundation.

“There are certain requirements that we know we’re going to need—let’s say, in volume or at scale—that we cannot afford to do alone,” confirmed Michael McGhee, acting deputy assistant secretary of defense for environment and energy resilience. “We literally cannot afford to pursue boutique solutions to a unique set of requirements. So we’re looking to find the commercial applicability at the same time, to see if that technology is transferable, so that we can then find it in the marketplace and buy it back.”

“We have to have a return on investment dollars,” Spangler added. “It may be a different return on investment than the commercial sector would seek. Ultimately we’re looking for installations to be resilient so that we can project power from the homeland.”

In some cases, the Pentagon’s environmental work to support the military mission can cross into areas that don’t immediately seem relevant. For example, managing endangered species on DOD-owned land can help avoid regulatory restrictions that would limit the use of the land for military training, McGhee said.

Path to Commercialization

It’s notoriously hard to predict the commercial viability even of well-proven technologies, but the Pentagon has a strong track record of seeding research that later found wide use outside the military, such as GPS, satellites, jet engines, and microgrids, according to Robert Atkinson, a former program director at the National Institute of Standards and Technology.

And while other agencies—most notably, the Department of Energy—may be bigger spenders on research and development that could help decarbonize the economy, the Pentagon’s advantage is that it has the buying power to prop up a new product or technology, Robyn said.

“The problem for DOE historically has been that they don’t have a clear customer,” she said. “They’re trying to anticipate the commercial market, and that’s hard to do. For DOD, you have supply and demand under one roof. And they’ve also got a budget with which to buy the stuff. It’s hard to beat that within the federal government.”

That strategy has worked in the past, according to William Hartung, a senior research fellow at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft.

“Just because the Pentagon is such a big purchaser, if all they do is solarize their facilities and buy some EVs, that could bring some things to scale that would be harder to do otherwise,” he said.

Some of the military’s work has also been driven by Congress.

For example, lawmakers recently asked DOD to act on climate change issues, so the Pentagon produced a greenhouse gas mitigation plan earlier this year as a statutory reporting requirement. The military has also started developing tools to capture the possible impacts and consequences of climate change on its planning cycles, McGhee said.

Those types of investments are likely to grow even more in the future. The Pentagon started a new installation climate resilience program area in fiscal 2023, pouring $14 million into the development of advanced technology, and recently started a national innovation landscape network that looks at the impacts of different climate threats on military installations across the country.

“Right now, we can’t keep pace with climate change,” Spangler said. “We need to at least achieve parity, if not get ahead of it.”