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With an increase in the climate change-linked frequency and intensity of severe weather events that affect electric distribution infrastructure, there is an urgent need to define power outage resilience and identify methods to assess and certify whether and how planning actions and project implementations have made communities more resilient. Accordingly, the Massachusetts Clean Energy Center initiated the Clean Energy and Resiliency (CLEAR) program to provide technical services to nine community sites in the commonwealth, which formed the basis of a convenience sample for this study. A RAND team-comprising Converge Strategies, XENDEE, and Ridgeline Energy Analytics-conducted stakeholder interviews and a literature review to articulate power outage resilience metrics, piloted a certification program, and used focus groups to assess pathways to the CLEAR program's operationalization and administration.

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Social equity has become a key concern among public agencies. In 2020, the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) adopted D. 20-08-046, Decision on Energy Utility Climate Change Vulnerability Assessments and Climate Adaptation in Disadvantaged Communities. This ruling requires utilities to engage disadvantaged communities and assess their vulnerability to climate impacts. It also requires utilities to evaluate how their climate adaptation efforts can promote equity. Southern California Edison (SCE), the sponsor of this work, is one of several investor-owned utilities regulated by the CPUC that must adhere to this rulemaking. The authors developed an illustrative set of context-specific equity metrics that SCE could build on and incorporate into its ongoing work toward climate adaptation. These metrics can help inform utility regulators and electricity utilities as they begin grappling with energy equity. It offers a straightforward methodology and a starting set of equity metrics that are intended to be adapted to different contexts.

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U.S. Transportation Command (USTRANSCOM) manages the Defense Transportation System, which provides peacetime transport for U.S. Department of Defense customers and maintains surge capacity required for wartime needs to project and sustain military power. Most of USTRANSCOM's operations are funded by the Transportation Working Capital Fund (TWCF). The National Defense Authorization Act for Fiscal Year 2020 created a requirement for an independent review of the TWCF, with the purpose of assessing the TWCF's current structure and offering recommendations to improve the fund's effectiveness and efficiency through changes to its cost-recovery structure. This report describes that review. The authors found that improvements to the TWCF are possible. Specific recommendations vary by USTRANSCOM line of business, but, overall, the authors recommend adopting a Variable Cost Pricing model. This model, preferred in the business and economics literature as the best way to guide customer decisionmaking to support enterprise objectives, suggests that customers should pay for the costs that they impose on the system (variable costs) and that other costs should be recovered separately from rates for movements. For most business lines, this model preserves the workload that USTRANSCOM relies on to generate readiness while improving cost-control incentives for both USTRANSCOM and its customers. However, a more detailed analysis of USTRANSCOM business processes, information systems, and personnel requirements is needed to inform implementation decisions.

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National Critical Functions (NCFs) are government and private-sector functions so vital that their disruption would debilitate security, the economy, public health, or safety. Researchers developed a risk management framework to assess and manage the risk that climate change poses to the NCFs and use the framework to assess 27 priority NCFs. This report details the risk assessment portions of the framework. The team assessed risk based on a scale that the National Risk Management Center uses that ranges from a rating of 1 (no disruption or normal operations) to 5 (critical disruption on a national scale). A rating of 3 (moderate disruption) on the national level, although it still allows normal functioning on a national scale, should be regarded as highly significant and includes the potential for major disruptions or failure of NCFs at a local or regional level and for significant economic loss, health and safety impacts, and other consequences. Using this risk rating scale and projected changes in eight climate drivers identified in the analysis (flooding, sea-level rise, tropical cyclones and hurricanes, severe storm systems, extreme cold, extreme heat, wildfire, and drought), the researchers examined how NCFs could be affected by and at risk from climate change in three future time periods (by 2030, by 2050, and by 2100) and two future greenhouse gas emission scenarios (current and high).

Infrastructure (Economics) --- Climatic changes --- Public works --- Forecasting. --- Economic aspects --- Evaluation. --- Protection.

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This report introduces the Aim Point Investment Model, an optimization model for portfolio-level resource allocation across U.S. Army programs and time. The report is intended to provide a technical overview of the model and its capabilities while also detailing the motivation for creating the model and recommendations from related research. The recommendations should be of interest to decisionmakers and those interested in improving decision support tools for asset allocation problems. In brief, the project's objective was to develop a method and tool to support quick-turn exploration of modernization investment portfolios in light of changing budget constraints and operational priorities in order to develop rough-order optimal investment strategies across a preestablished set of investment options and set of budget and requirement assumptions. Given the enormous complexity of the decision space, some sort of automated decision support tool was required. To develop that decision support tool, the authors explored alternative approaches to extracting the information needed about programs' relative utility and any constraints on the Army's ability to procure the capability from existing Army data sources. This report describes one of these approaches, which uses Army prioritization guidance—synthesized from several sources—combined with plausible constraints to produce resource allocation solutions that are consistent with the Army's stated modernization strategy.