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Jill Brandenberger
National Security Advisor: Climate Security
Jill Brandenberger
National Security Advisor: Climate Security
Biography
Climate change has a wide range of impacts, including implications for national security missions. Drought can have an impact on energy supply by reducing the output of hydroelectric dams. Rising sea levels endanger coastal infrastructure, including nuclear power plants. Jill Brandenberger provides environmental intelligence to anticipate and plan for such risks.
Changes in global climate, such as the rapid increase in temperatures in the Arctic, can increase the vulnerability of human systems, remarked Brandenberger in a Department of Energy profile. “These global changes have impacts everywhere in our world and pose a threat to our energy security and our national security,” she said.
A coastal oceanographer, Brandenberger began her 25-year career at PNNL leading research to identify natural and human-driven changes to coastal water quality over the last 300 years. She used this information to estimate recovery rates for contaminated coastal systems, such as those affected by urbanization and low-dissolve oxygen, which causes large fish kills.
Brandenberger is now in charge of assessing how national security missions affect the environment—and vice versa. Knowing historical rainfall patterns, for example, could help guide bridge construction. “We are taking that information and projecting forward what rainfall amount and intensity might look like decades from now, so that when we build, we're accounting for changes in our baseline climate conditions,” Brandenberger said.
She is also working on enhancing the ability to observe ocean conditions, which she is doing in part by developing an underwater research testbed at the PNNL-Sequim campus. The testbed is a proving ground for devices that can harness ocean energy to power autonomous ocean-going vehicles or research buoys. “The interface between the ocean and the landscape is a part of the world that is underrepresented by climate models,” Brandenberger said. “It is very dynamic, and we need to understand how it's changing.”