As the nation’s environmental engineer, the U.S. Army Corps manages one of the largest federal environmental missions: restoring degraded ecosystems; constructing sustainable facilities; regulating waterways; managing natural resources; and, cleaning up contaminated sites from past military or other activities.
The USACE environmental programs support the warfighter and military installations worldwide as well as USACE public recreation facilities throughout the country. In 2002, USACE adopted its seven Environmental Operating Principles, or green ethics, which continue to guide our environmental and sustainability work today.
USACE works in partnership with other federal and state agencies, non-governmental organizations and academic institutions to find innovative solutions to challenges that affect everyone – sustainability, climate change, endangered species, environmental cleanup, ecosystem restoration and more.
USACE works to restore degraded ecosystem structure, function and dynamic processes to a more natural condition through large-scale ecosystem restoration projects and by employing system-wide watershed approaches to problem solving and management for smaller ecosystem restoration projects. USACE’s regulatory program works to ensure no net loss of wetlands while issuing about 90,000 permits a year.
USACE environmental cleanup programs focus on reducing risk and protecting human health and the environment in a timely and cost-effective manner. We are striving to restore ecosystem structure and processes, manage our land, resources and construction activities in a sustainable manner, and support cleanup and protection activities efficiently and effectively, all while leaving the smallest footprint behind.