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Environmental Section

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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 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.

Find out more about our projects and programs.

Fast Facts

USACE manages, designs and executes a full range of cleanup and protection activities, such as:

  • Cleaning up sites contaminated with hazardous, toxic or radioactive waste or ordnance through the Formerly Used Defense Sites program
  • Cleaning up low-level radioactive waste from the nation’s early atomic weapons program through the Formerly Utilized Sites Remedial Action Program
  • Supporting the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency by cleaning up Superfund sites and working with its Brownfields and Urban Waters programs
  • Supporting the Army with the Base Realignment and Closure Act Program
  • Ensuring that facilities comply with federal, state and local environmental laws
  • Conserving cultural and natural resources

Find out more about the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers' marsh restoration and repairs to shoreline protection systems for existing ecosystems along the Houston-Galveston navigation channel.

Corps Connections

Galveston District Environmental Section
Mailing Address:
USACE Galveston District
P.O. Box 1229
Galveston, TX 77553-1229

Email: SWG-P&E@usace.army.mil 
 

Ecosystem Restoration

Serving the nation in Ecosystem Restoration: Ecosystem restoration has become a primary mission of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers, which budgets approximately $400-500 million annually to restore a wide variety of aquatic systems. Restoration investments will continue to grow because human infrastructure and water extractions will expand and many rivers will experience significant changes in flow and sediment regimes due to external stressors such as climate and land use change. The demand for sound science-based approaches and technologies will concurrently increase. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers and the Engineer Research and Development Center are uniquely positioned and prepared to take on a national leadership role in this regard. Learn more about our ecosystem restoration program.