 Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Carol Werner. I'm the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, and we are very, very pleased to welcome you here this afternoon for our briefing on climate impacts in the Midwest becoming more resilient. As some of you may know, if you've been following this briefing series, EESI has been engaged in doing several briefings with regard to looking at the different regions that were covered by the National Climate Assessment that came out earlier this spring. And we have done briefings looking at the Southwest, looking at climate impacts in the Southeast. Today we are looking at climate impacts in the Midwest and what that means about resilience, and our panel will have some great stories to tell about how they are beginning to really address those issues. And then next Friday, a week from tomorrow, we will be taking a look at climate impacts in the Northeast and what that means for resilience there. And so we hope that you will be with us for that briefing as well. So as you probably know, and there have been so many stories and studies coming out with regard to talking, thinking about climate change, different kinds of climatic impacts, but I think that we're all very familiar with, we simply are having a lot of extreme weather events and having to deal with them no matter what we think or wherever we are because they are happening. And one of the things that is so important in terms of the people that we're going to be hearing from today is to learn in terms of what are the things that we need to know, what are the trends, what are we seeing, what is projected, and what are some of the ways that people who are having to deal with a lot of issues because of the huge built infrastructure that we're all dependent upon where we live, what are some of the ways in which people are really addressing this because we have state and local officials who are having to respond every day, every month with regard to the issues that confront them. If there's a storm, if there's a power outage, that they have to make decisions, that they have to think about how to anticipate, how to plan because of the populations for which they are responsible. So, to kick off our briefing today, to provide an overview with regard to the science is on the lead authors of the Midwest section of the National Climate Assessment, Dr. Rosina Bierbaum, who is, she was the dean at the School of Natural Resources Environment at the University of Michigan for 10 years and she's currently on the faculty. She's been doing a lot of work with regard to climate and development for the World Bank, for the Global Environmental Facility. She was also at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy for over eight years and was acting director of that for a year. And she has been a first-line person who has been very, very engaged in all sorts of environmental and climate issues for many, many years. Rosina? Thank you so much, Carol. Actually, I chaired the adaptation chapter, but living in the Midwest, I'm intimately involved in what that Midwest chapter says, too. I'm really happy to be the kickoff speaker. The National Climate Assessment was really three years in the making. So, I'm going to give you some of the highest level messages and then Mayor Brainard, Larry Falcon and Jeremy Emmy will probe more deeply into what climate change means for our local communities, for infrastructure, for the economy, and talk about options for both mitigation and adaptation. I thought I would start first and say, why did we do a National Climate Assessment? And it's really because the Congress, you asked for it and you decided it was necessary in 1990, which is 24 years ago. The Global Change Research Act requires that an assessment be done periodically. And the language is really interesting. It says not only summarize the science and synthesize it, but discuss the impacts of global change on a whole range of sectors and analyze trends 25 to 100 years out. And I think it's very interesting to think about that because most of our political timeframes are on the two to six years, not 25 to 100 years. In the 24 years since Congress asked for these assessments to be done, I think it's very clear that the science has gotten much stronger. And the questions we are trying to answer are no longer, is the climate changing? But what does it mean to me in my place? And what can be done to tackle greenhouse gas emissions? And very importantly, much more recently, what can we do to cope with the changes that are already underway and more that are yet in store? So that's really what this newest assessment focuses on, enhancing our nation's ability to anticipate, to mitigate, and to adapt to climate change with a goal to engage the public and the private sectors kind of continuously so that we can share messages and make progress as fast as possible with the best information. You can find any level of information you want in the National Climate Assessment from the multi-hundred page report in its full glory on the web to the highlights document, which is a sprightly 178 pages, to a 20-page overview, to two pages on each region. So I would argue there's something for every reader. And I know it's after lunch, so maybe I'll give you the four highest level messages right now. The first one is that climate change is no longer just a future concern, but we are experiencing it now. With the less than one degree Fahrenheit temperature increase that the world has seen, we are already seeing impacts. And the example of the Cedar Rapids photo from 2008 shows that the extreme events are occurring more rapidly and more intensely as we expect it because as the planet warms up, you speed up the water cycle and we are getting more droughts and more floods, paradoxically. The second message is that we're seeing the effects of sea level rise too, now not so much here for the Midwest, but in general. And the component of sea level rise is exacerbating extreme events. So for example, Hurricane Sandy went much further inland, the storm surge, because of the one foot of sea level rise that New York City had already seen, and so that created more damage. Third, that the impacts are apparent now in every region and we're seeing them in very important sectors in health, in water, in agriculture, in energy, and others. So it's really already beginning to affect our pocketbooks in every region and it's changing the life of farmers and engineers and town planners and doctors and patients and mayors. The fourth is that there are many actions we can take to reduce further climate change and its impacts and to prepare for what's in store. As you know, the world is committed to producing a new climate treaty by 2015. The federal government has developed a climate action plan. The president is listening to the recommendations of his task force of state, local, and tribal leaders on climate preparedness and resilience, on which a mayor brainered serves and he has just come from and will tell us more about. But if you look all across the nation, communities are acting now to try to respond to these observed changes. And I would argue these efforts need to be greatly encouraged and amplified to protect both people and infrastructure. So that's the four highest messages. Now let me delve a little more deeply. Here are the eight states that we're looking at. This is Minnesota, Iowa, Missouri, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Indiana, and Ohio. Did I do everything? I think those are the eight. And let me just say something about the highest level now, science messages and the conclusions in this report. So basically there are ten signs you expect to see if climate change is occurring. And seven of those would be going up. And I show those with the white arrows and five of those increasing our temperature. So there's sea surface temperature, deep water temperature, temperature over land, temperature over sea, air temperature. And then the other two, you also expect the sea level to be increasing and humidity to be increasing as you're speeding up the water cycle. So all seven of those are occurring. And the national climate assessment talks about the multiple lines of data we have for each of these to show that these trends are occurring. You also expect decreases in three areas. And those are shown by the black arrows, glaciers, snow cover, and sea ice. And again, all are occurring today. You no doubt have heard that we're losing ice in Greenland and the Arctic actually far faster than we expect it. And an ice-free Arctic in the summer is likely to occur in a few decades, not a century as we previously thought. In fact, we've seen vessels going through both the northeast and the northwest passage in recent years carrying grains and ore and fossil fuels. So what's happened already? This over the last several decades, the whole world and the United States have gotten warmer on average and some areas have seen bigger changes than others. And this map shows you that the U.S. has warmed about a degree and a half Fahrenheit on average, which is a little more than the global average. But you see that the darkest red areas on this map are more than that one and a half degree Fahrenheit. And concomitant with that warming, we've also seen that the number of frost-free days have increased. So across the whole country, the frost-free days have increased about a week or two. In the Midwest, it's about nine degrees more frost-free days. And you probably know that 2012 was the warmest year on record for the United States. And some parts of the Midwest in 2012 actually had temperatures. The annual average temperature was four to six degrees Fahrenheit above average. And if you remember, we were also in an incredible drought. 60% of the nation was in drought at that period. And so the heat and the drought was really a double whammy for our crops. Almost 5,000 temperature records were broken that summer in the United States. So that's what's happened to date. What does the future portend? Well, on the top left, by mid-century, temperatures could increase by four to five degrees. And that could lead to another five to 25 days above 95 degrees. And several more weeks of frost-free weather, which is not so bad. And finally, though, an increase in cooling degree days, which means that you would need to increase air conditioning to respond to it. For precipitation, this is the trend of the last several decades over our nation. And it's been getting wetter. And the darkest greens, you note, are mostly in the areas that kind of were already wet, like the Midwest and the Northeast. And those that are already dry, like the Southwest, appear to be getting drier. So this is total precipitation change over the last few decades. But another major change is how that rain is coming. And it's increasingly being delivered in heavy downpours. And this is a summary of how those extreme rainfall events have increased by region again over the last several decades. And so you can see that some regions, like the Midwest and the Northeast, have seen dramatic increases in the amount of rainfall that's coming in the heaviest events. And going forward in the future, even the areas that are projected to decrease precipitation will get whatever precipitation they do get in more heavy events. And so these are erosive rains, not conducive to crops. And they also make protecting people from floods much more difficult, as well as infrastructure. So we're seeing the increase in heavy precipitation, and indeed this is mapping into trends of flood magnitude. So this map shows an increase in flood areas in green arrows and a decrease in flooding in brown arrows. So you see there's clearly a connection between this map and this map. And the largest green arrows on this map are an increase of 18% flood magnitude per decade. 18% increase per decade. So that's what's happening now going forward. Again, we expect to see an increase in average precipitation, heavy precipitation, the wettest five-day total. And here's one you might also want to know about. There will be fewer consecutive dry days in a row, so more rainy days. And when you think about how we're trying to have some days without rain to plant things, you can understand how having fewer consecutive dry days during the planting season might be a problem. Let's move then to agriculture. In the near term, we think that the decrease in the number of frost-free days and the warmer temperatures and carbon dioxide, which can be a nutrient to plants, may actually increase yields in the Midwest. That's if the extreme rainfall events or droughts don't get them. But over the longer term, it appears that there will be more negative than positive, because there will be an increase in weeds, in diseases, in insect pests. Some of those insect pests may actually be able to have multiple generations over the longer seasons, as we've been seeing with the European corn borer, and the temperatures at pollination time become particularly important going forward. So over the last several decades, the Midwest growing season has already lengthened, and mostly that's from the nine days of frost-free weather that we're getting. But by the end of the century, we could actually have a growing season that's one to two months longer than it is now. And of course, as I said though, the negative association with climate change starts to outweigh the increased productivity, and I know you know that we're the center for corn and we're the center for soybeans, but I just thought I would put those maps there for you. But as the temperatures increase by mid-century, another four to six degrees in this region, as expected, you can see that the corn yields could drop about a ton per hectare, and the soybean yields could drop about a half a ton per hectare. Additionally, you have higher nighttime temperatures, and those affect the grain productivity and grain quality, and we actually already saw some impact of that in the super heat of 2012 that I mentioned, the hottest year on record for the U.S., where the Midwest was four to six degrees warmer for the entire year on average. So warmer temperatures will also change the ideal range where forests can grow, and the ideal range will be moving towards the poles or up mountains, and our forest happens to hold a lot of carbon, too. So if there is an increase in forest fire, for example, there will be less carbon held in our forests. But the projections are that we're still going to have forests in the Midwest, but likely we'll have an expansion of the oak and hickory, that's the area shown in green, but a loss of the birch, beech, maple trees, and you see them in the high emission scenario here on the right, headed off to Canada, and so that obviously is a different kind of forest. It'll be not as nice for our fall foliage and not as nice for our pancakes, but we will be having forests of a different type. And the ecosystems in general will be disrupted, again, as the parts that crawl and swim and fly and are wind dispersed are trying to keep up with the changing climate, but they can't all move at the same rate, so keeping the ecosystems together becomes problematic. And some estimates are that species would have to move up to 40 feet a day to keep up with the rate of change, which is roughly four times the speed we've seen in the fossil record. And if you think about the Midwest region, we don't actually have a lot of mountains that these species can try to climb up to get to cooler areas, as Colorado does, for example. And if species are trying to migrate towards the poles, we do have a few things in the way, such as agricultural lands or the Great Lakes. Public health will be affected in a number of ways. There will be an increase in heat waves, and that enhances smog and ozone formation and degrades air quality. But there will also be an increase in the viability of pests, such as poison ivy and ragweed and mosquitoes. In fact, there was just a story on the radio today about ragweed. But that water quality will also end up being affected because you've got this increased flooding, and that's leading to runoff of pesticides and fertilizers, not to mention flooding of combined sewer overflows, which is very common in the Midwest. Those are sewers that are designed to collect the rainwater, as well as sewerage and industrial wastewater, all in the same pipe. So when they overflow, it can lead to problems. So already, as I said, the Midwest has seen an increase in our ragweed pollen season of two weeks, and the expectation is that with our one to two months increased growing season that I told you about by the end of the century, allergy sufferers like myself are going to be very unhappy. The heat stress can also cause more deaths, and to date we've seen about one to two more heat waves in the Chicago and Detroit areas in the most recent decades. But going forward, the expectation is that the heat waves could lead to between about 150 and 2,200 deaths a year in Chicago. But for every death, there are also thousands of people who have respiratory and cardiac issues that would be exacerbated by these extreme events. And our precious Great Lakes face threats from climate change, too. So we'll be seeing as the waters warm and Lake Superior is warming really fast, changes in the range and distribution of fish species, increased invasive species, and harmful algal blooms, which will be exacerbated by the runoff from fertilizer, from pesticides that combine sewer overflows. And the picture on the bottom right is actually a sailboat in Lake Michigan near Milwaukee floating at the edge of a sewerage plume that's coming out over it. But less winter ice could lengthen the navigation season. So that is a possible positive. If, however, climate change lowers lake levels, every inch of water depth that's lost reduces the amount that the cargo ships can carry by 50 to 270 times. So the jury is not out actually on whether climate change will lead to decreased water levels in the lakes, which had been thought to be pretty well locked up. But if it does, it will reduce the amount that it can carry. So basically climate change will impact all the natural, the engineered, and the socioeconomic systems in the Midwest. And I guess, you know, now we're saying past is no longer prologue and we can't plan for and manage our cities or our forests or our water supply or infrastructure and ecosystems as if the climate of the past will persist. I mean, it is already changed and it will change more. So we need to be proactive in protecting people and infrastructure and natural resources. And there's a lot that can be done to reduce greenhouse gas emissions, which will slow the rate of these changes. And mitigation, the use of renewable energy and using energy more efficiency, a lot to be gained in these venues. And if we can damp the rate of emission growth, we can also slow the rate of these changes that I'm talking about. But we must also cope, prepare, adapt. And here you see some options, deeper culverts to handle the increase in extreme events, houses on stilts to capture the rising sea, and green roofs to cool cities and capture water. But having chaired the adaptation chapter, I will tell you, adaptation is still a nascent art and science. And if you read the compendium of activities that we put in the chapter, you will see there's a great flurry of activity in the red area, in the first two elements of the circle. In characterizing what's vulnerable, what's at risk, and in planning. But not a whole lot yet in the rest of the circle, actually implementing actions, going on to evaluate them, and then revising plans based on what works and what doesn't work. So we really need to get on with sharing lessons learned so communities can respond to the changing climate efficiently and effectively. But the good news is that we're seeing there are many co-benefits with adaptation efforts. Here Dubuque, Iowa, which is the top picture, has a new green alley program and expanded storm sewers to try to deal with the flooding, which they have had. Reducing the urban heat island effect is something big. It's happening in Chicago with green roofs, and it's happening in New York City with painting roofs white, which is the bottom picture there. And then many other examples of how coastal protection, water conservation, bigger storm pipes, increased forest cover, linking stormwater utility charges to impervious surfaces, or reducing fire risk. All can help with the problems we have today, but simultaneously increase resilience to climate change tomorrow. So a lot is happening more than before, but less than is needed. It's not too late to change our emissions path and reduce future climate change and its impacts. Really, the choices we make or we don't make today will create the future climate for your children and your grandchildren. So the National Climate Assessment identifies ways communities are making progress, the vulnerabilities that they're identifying, the federal government is trying to develop tools and data to help assist our communities, and I'd say it's not a moment too soon for the nation to become more prepared and more resilient to climate change. So with that, thank you very much. Thanks so much, Rosina. And actually, Rosina had organized, I think, the very first adaptation conference that was held in the country at the University of Michigan, what, about 2007, right? And it was the very first time that people came together in terms of really starting to look at some of the issues that we were having to deal with. So as Rosina set this stage, it's now very appropriate for us to hear from someone who is grappling with these issues and is helping lead his community and leading other local leaders as well. And so we are very privileged to have with us today Mayor Jim Brainard, who is the mayor of Carmel, Indiana. And he is also here because he is a member of the White House Task Force on climate preparedness and resilience. And this group has been meeting several times over the course of the last nine months about. And there was a meeting held yesterday. I think it was the last meeting for this Task Force with recommendations coming out from this group. We will hear more about that. And I am going to let Mayor Brainard tell you the story of his community and what they are doing because you need to hear about this firsthand from him. I would just say that he is, for the first time for Carmel, a five-term mayor. Pretty impressive, right, folks? And he also has presided over a time of great growth in his community. His city now has a population of about 80,000. It's increased remarkably in these last 12 years from beginning at 25,000, I think. And Carmel has been awarded the first place in climate protection awards by the U.S. Conference of Mayors, which is no small accomplishment. And he is also serving as co-chair of the Climate Protection Task Force, as well as the advisory board of directors for the U.S. Conference of Mayors. Mayor Brainard has taught at the University of Indianapolis. He's coached sports. And so he brings a variety of experiences in interest to his leadership in Carmel and also to his colleagues in local government. Mayor Brainard. Thank you for that nice introduction. It was accurate until you got to that part about coaching sports. I think it was T-Ball, when my sons were five. And at that point, they'd outgrown my athletic ability. It's great to be here with you today. And I think probably the best place to start is to talk a little bit about cities in the United States and how our cities have grown and changed. You know, not that much changed between several thousand years ago and about 1920, 1950. And it's important to... I was trained as a historian before I went to law school. And it's important to look back at how we started to build our city zone in the second half of the 20th century. What happened? We didn't get over 25 percent car ownership in the United States until after World War II. It's important to remember to talk about our cities. At that point in time, say 1946, the war has just ended, antibiotics are just coming on the market for the public. So cities are overcrowded because there hasn't been any buildings since the Great Depression of 1929. They're still disease-ridden because people are living in closed quarters. Most cities, especially in the Midwest, every house had its own little coal furnace in the basement. Coal got delivered. I remember... I'm old enough to remember visiting Indianapolis when I was a small child with my dad and mom. And asking at the end of the day, what's this black dust in the sink when you're worst, you're facing your hands be covered. And I still remember in these little Midwestern towns being able to walk with my grandparents to market every block or so because once had a grandparents they even have a car until the 50s. And they were middle-class folks, you know, my grandmother was a school teacher and grandfather ran a retail store but towns were designed so that people didn't have to drive. And then the car came along. There had been so much overcrowding. People had this perception in the United States of wanting elbow room, whatever that is. If you ever read a good book to read, Leo Marx's machine in the garden talks about this perception of the industrial age and how it was mismatched really against this recurring ideal that we know about from the time of Jefferson. But so people fled the cities. There's a lot that you could do a whole lecture on why that happened and why it continued to happen through the 60s with court decisions and so on. But people left our cities. And we threw out everything we knew about city planning that had been developed over the course of our civilization. It started over. We started to design for cars, not for people. And I think there's a real trend backward. So when I normally start my PowerPoint I show a picture of San Diego from Coronado Island with the mountains in the background and the sailboats in the bay and, of course, it's 72 degrees because it's always 72 degrees and no humidity in San Diego. And I say, this isn't caramel in Indiana. Then I show a picture of a beach up in Northern California or the Great Lakes. I'm not sure where it is. I pulled it off the net and say, this isn't caramel either. And then ask for the twilight. It's not caramel. Then I show a picture of this flat current field and that's our, I say this is our palette. This is what we have to work with when we build our brand new city and that's truly what our generation in this community is doing. It's building a brand new city out of this little town in 1950. 1950 only had 1,000 people. Today it's about 85,000 people. And then I pop up a picture of Paris and point out that it's very similar. It's a flat plain, no mountains, no ocean, lousy weather and a dumpy low brown river through the middle and they did just fine. But they did it because they focused on the built environment and that's how we're going to compete as a city. Maybe you've read Richard Florida's book, Creative Class, points out that young, smart people getting out of college and graduate school today have options where they go. They're going to go to the city they want to go to because that's where they want to live their lives. Then they're going to look for a job and if a city can't attract that bright young creative class regardless of the field that people are in, artists, musicians, architects, physicians, software engineers, people that create things, that city's not going to succeed because the employers that need to hire people like that aren't going to locate there. So a big part of this economic development that we're trying to do and try to build this brand new beautiful city, so our one chance to do it right, has to do with quality of life and a lot to do with the quality of life has to do with the quality of the environment and how we construct our city so it's not only sustainable economically, but sustainable, environmentally sustainable as well. I've read some pictures of some of the things we've done. We don't laugh. We have built more roundabouts than any other city in the United States regardless of size. We're up to 85 or so I think this week and we have another 6 or so. People are laughing, but now this isn't Dupont Circle. Roundabouts are smaller. They're not rotaries, different animals. What we do is we get an 80% reduction in injury accidents, 80% reduction in injury accidents, 40% reduction in all accidents. Nobody in this room has ever sped through a yellow light. Yeah, right, I didn't think so. The difference is we know one to four cars out of a million will crash in any intersection. What type of crash? Slow-speed crashes are better, greater reaction time. But here's one you probably hadn't thought about. If you remember, I think this physics class is the reason I decided to be a history major and go to law school, but I vaguely remember this class that takes a lot more energy to move a big inanimate object like a car from zero to 15 miles per hour than it does from 15 to 30. It's called momentum. And so the roundabout, nobody really has to stop most of the time. Stoplight, half the cars are stopped. As a result, we save about 24,000 gallons of gasoline per roundabout per year. Add that up, times $4 a gallon. Thank you for the savings of the polynomial. Thank you to the carbon that isn't going off into the atmosphere. We also don't have to widen the roads in between. So many times I think the civil engineering answer to capacity issues is let's add more lanes. All you're really doing is creating a bigger parking lot and more cars through the green cycle. Ever feel like that when you're sitting in traffic? So we've tried to do things differently. We've tried to figure out how to retrofit. We don't have the old-fashioned grid. We have this county road grid. In the city, we used to do it every tenth of a mile. We had these mile grids. So how do you make that work better? That's one of the things we did. Pictures of our roundabouts. We also took the little village area. It was four by eight blocks, pretty beat up, headed downhill fast. We're 50 square miles. Manhattan by contrast. Manhattan is 33 square miles. So downtown isn't big enough. We want a walkable downtown. When I first ran for mayor in the Republican primary in 1995, I now turn about 7,000 doors. And I heard the same thing from people over and over again. We want to be able to walk someplace. We want to walk someplace we need to go. We want to be able to have a downtown. Actually found out the different groups of people in our town had different ideas about where downtown really was. That means you really don't have much of a center if people disagree about it, about where it is. So we took the little retail area, recognizing it wasn't large enough to be downtown for 50 square miles, turned that into an arts and design district, especially retail, did a series of public-private partnerships to get development in that area, made it very walkable, pedestrian-friendly, started to design for people in that car, got the cars underground through the use of tax incremental financing. Redevelopment, by the way, is much harder than greenfield development. But so many times, I'm going to make this point several times during this quick talk, fiscal analysis is not done about what greenfield development, what the true cost are for a city. But we have an idea of what it costs to rebuild one mile of county road into a city street, $7 million a mile in the Midwest. Huge cost. And so many cities have built so much infrastructure. Not only are we, it's because of the way we've zoned their cities and built our cities, all the stores over here and all the factories over here and all the houses over here, bad use of zoning made sense. We had a noxious tannery a hundred years ago, but not today. And so people are driving back and forth between these zones. We have to build all those streets, carbon's coming out of the cars. So we've got to do a better job of city planning so people can either walk or bike where they need to go or if they choose to drive, they drive very short distances. You do that through mixed-use zoning. So we really have to rethink the way we're doing our cities. We also have an issue in this country of farmland, with the exception of the Central Valley and California. Most of our food's grown, most, not all, east of the Mississippi. One study points out if we continue to take down green fields at the rate we are, we're going to be out of those fields east of the Mississippi by 2050, 2060. There's a lot of people in this room that's within your lifetime. Hopefully it's within my lifetime. But we have to figure out how to build a little denser and a little better so that we can make the average American, including all the people in places like D.C. and Boston, New York, Chicago, San Francisco that don't even drive, they may use a car to go or something. The average American is spending two hours a day in their car. And we have to build those roads. And then, of course, you have to use gas on those roads to get people from place to place. We can do better as a city. So we're trying to be a suburb that does things very different. We're trying to look back to history and choose and find things that worked well in the past. Still accommodate the automobile. We recognize that a Midwestern city isn't going to switch from Manhattan overnight where nobody has a car, but at least cut down on the need to use a car. Cut down on the amount of travel time and grow towards a time when maybe our suburb doesn't need that. And what we're finding is that people want this and we have this huge number of companies coming to Carmel. Tremendous amounts of economic development. We're up to 50 corporate headquarters. What we're hearing from people moving to our city is that this is the type of development they want. I did not look at my watch when I started, so just give me the hook when it's time. There's some of our roundabouts, how we separated the gray. Those used to be stop lights, much more pedestrian friendly. That road used to divide the community. One of the things we've done, we've done a lot of bike paths. We have 125 miles of bike trails within our city. So we had the old village area, the art and design district. Then we went and bought just under 100 acres about four blocks south and did a master plan downtown for the city. And we're developing it through the use of public-private partnerships. How many people in this room? Been to Europe? Vacation? Or for fun? Most of you? Okay. What do you do when you get there? You probably find a nice sidewalk cafe, get a cup of latte or drink and sit there and people watch and kind of think, what a beautiful old city. Doesn't that beg the question that why can't we build cities like this? Well, that's what we're trying to do in our city center. We're looking at the scale on the massing and mixed use zoning. There we go. Mixed use zoning so that people can have a different experience that would have in most U.S. cities. So here's some pictures of our new city center. Brand new, that's two years old. It was one of our Piazzas. We find that there's some new studies out about public health that point out all the bad health effects of horizontal spiral. There's also some new ones out about vertical spiral for more than 5-8 stories. They're almost the same effects of not getting out on the street. So we're looking at massing of buildings pretty much the way Europe did up before structural steels invented in the 1800s. There's a picture of our new city center. We didn't have any water, so we built a big reflecting pool. One of the evil earmarks that are now not with us. Let's see, I thought bikeways are important. I'm going to flip through some of this. Utilities, we've done a lot in our utilities. We're using our methane flame to take our sludge. People laugh when mayors talk about sewage and water, but our sewage plant, for instance, was using over a million dollars in electricity, had a million dollars electricity cost per year at one point before we started to use a methane flame more carefully. We're using it now to heat up the sludge to about 900 degrees, so no new energy is being used. We used to dump this stuff in the landfill, had a whole crew, about half a million dollar operation a year putting it in the landfills every day. That's why you tell your kids to go to college, so they don't have to be the sludge haulers. And we eliminated that cost, and we now sell that sludge as fertilizer by using the methane to heat it up in the fertilizer. We have lots of street tree programs, public art programs. These things are important for sustainability of the city, but it's about building a beautiful place to live. Oh, yeah, we did the executive order about 10 years ago for hybrids for a city fleet. We're experimenting with hydrogen trucks right now. We're bike paths. Switched out our LED lights like most cities have. We're getting about a 20 to 23 percent return on investment through electricity savings on that project. I have about a minute left. I'll talk real briefly about the task force. I'm one of the four Republicans on the task force out of 26 people. And it was clearly recognized by CEQ and the President's staff, and I think very astute recognition that mayors tend not to be very partisan people. So we have to get things done. And so we're out with our constituents every day. When somebody's house is flooded or a tornado destroys their house or whatever disaster happens, they can care less what part of you are affiliated with. They just want to see a result. So it's been a very nonpartisan sort of thing. It was very impressed. Sometimes when you sign up for one of these task force, you wonder, is this just window dressing for something the President or somebody else wants to do? I really have to compliment the staff because it clearly had no preconceived ideas. The question was, we acknowledged we're not going to get anything through Congress the next couple years on the environment. So how can we help the mayors who have been on the ground doing environmentally sustainable things for a good decade? How can we help? How can we improve regulations? How can we improve the handbook? What can we do to help you do what you're already doing? Give the President some credibility when he goes to negotiate environmental treaties, the one that was mentioned, that's coming up here in a couple years. What can we do to help you? And it was a great exercise. Right now there's about 500. It was funny yesterday we were at the White House and I could read every one of your recommendations. David Agnew immediately whispers into the zero. There's 500 of them, sir. I could hear them. So I think we need to pair them down. We can't expect them to read that many. We'll be doing that over the next few months. But it's been a great opportunity. One of my roles on that task force real fast and then I'll end has been to try to speak out. We don't have a lot of Republican voices speaking out. I'm trying to remind other Republicans around the country that environmentalism and conservation has been a Republican principle for a long time. It was Republican Teddy Roosevelt who set aside millions of acres of land for public use in our national park system in federal lakeshores and so on, national forest. And it was President Richard Nixon, a Republican who signed the legislation, started the EPA, signed the Clean Water Drinking Act, signed the Endangered Species Act, signed the Migratory Bird Act, and a host of a started Earth Day, a host of other things. There's always going to be a good conversation about which regulations make sense for businesses, which ones don't, and that's a good conversation I have. But I'm not very happy with some of my party who deny the science and who are just saying no to everything. I think more Republicans need to speak out and hopefully this has been my role on the committee to speak out and say that this is traditionally a Republican issue. This should be a non-partisan issue, that one thing that both parties have come together on. So anyway, thank you for having me here today and I'll turn it back back over to you. Thank you. Well, thank you very, very much and we undoubtedly will want to ask you more about some of the task force recommendations and lots of things. But one of the things too that I think is so important about what you were sharing with us in terms of thinking about all of the multiple goals or things that you accomplished through each one of the things that you did to really improve, change your community and make it more what people wanted where you were getting all sorts of benefits, not just one, but many. And that's how we all need to think about how we problem solve all of this and it actually makes it much more exciting and much more fun, right? And we should all be about having fun with regard to this. So I want to now turn quickly to our next speaker, Larry Falcon, who is the director of the Office of Environment and Sustainability for the City of Cincinnati. Larry has been in this role since 2007 and he previously held a comparable role for the city of Kansas City, Missouri and he has worked for an environmental nonprofit. He also worked for EPA Region 3 and so he brings a lot of experience to this and also very much just as you heard with the mayor with very much on the ground having to think about how to make a city work, what are the challenges and the problems that we have and as we look forward and deal with our present day challenges as well. Larry? Good afternoon. Let me start by thanking EESI for the opportunity to be part of this discussion and also to note that I as a flight schedules will have to leave promptly at 4 o'clock so I really like the networking after the program time and so I want to emphasize that my contact information, my web address and my phone number are up here on the screen because I'm going to have to run immediately but while I'm taxiing to the airport you can be like on my cell phone and we can have that after workshop discussion. And we will help you chase him down. Please don't just because they disappear misinterpret that in any way. So I'm going to be talking about mitigation, adaptation and resilience using Cincinnati as a case study and I want to start by making it clear that mitigation, adaptation and resilience are three separate discussions. When we talk about mitigation it's how we reduce Cincinnati's contributions to greenhouse gas emissions. When we talk about adaptation it's about recognizing the changes that have already happened the changes that will be happening to our climate as we go forward and figuring out what we need to do to get ready for those changes and when we talk about resilience it's about the fact that we know that disasters are inevitable in our future and so what are the things we do to enable faster recoveries from those disasters and so I'm going to touch briefly on each of those three subjects. The city of Cincinnati is in some ways a climate leader and in other ways typical of Midwestern cities we've been doing climate mitigation work for a long time. We first adopted our green Cincinnati plan back in 2008 and have been working on the mitigation efforts for a while. We've made some pretty good progress a long way still to go but we're far from the beginning of the discussion for that. When it comes to climate adaptation and resilience those are relatively new discussions in our community. I was really relieved to hear Rosina say that in her presentation because it's like we're not behind everybody's just starting to figure this out so that's where we are also just at the start of the adaptation and resilience discussions. So let me talk a little bit about mitigation. We have a green Cincinnati plan which was adopted by city council in 2008 it sets some fairly lofty goals. We want to reduce our greenhouse gas emissions 2% per year for the next 42 years 84% by 2050 and while we are doing that we want to do it in a way that creates jobs saves money improves public health and improves the quality of life. Cincinnati like most Midwestern cities is not a place where we're going to do something green just because it's green. We're only going to do something green if it makes sense for us and if it makes sense for us it's got to work for our economy it's got to work for our citizens and it's got to work for the environment. So that multi objective perspective is always there. Fortunately it's not that hard when we drafted the green Cincinnati plan and we came up with our wish list of things that we would do to reduce greenhouse gas emissions on Cincinnati lo and behold they were all things that saved money and created jobs not all but if you do it in a smart way it's not that hard to achieve the multiple objectives. So under the green Cincinnati plan so far we've been achieving some results. We went and did a major rewrite of our plan in 2013 a five year update. As part of the five year update we evaluated our progress. We had reduced our greenhouse gas emissions 8% in the first four years. We were right on schedule with our 2% per year reduction. I want to give you a couple of case studies of the kinds of things we did that made a difference for greenhouse gas emissions. One was entering into energy services performance contracts. City of Cincinnati owns and operates about 400 buildings. Most of those buildings like most buildings in the United States are energy efficient, have cost effective things that could be done to make them more efficient and City of Cincinnati like many building owners had no money to invest in its buildings. So we had to figure out how to get the energy efficiency, how to get the utility bill savings without investing any upfront money. We used a tool that's called an energy services performance contract where we say to the world of energy contractors, you think your efforts are going to save us money, bet your own money on that deal. You come bring your own money, spend your money to upgrade my buildings if and when I save money on my utility bills I'll pay your bill for the work that you did. And you know what? There are companies in the United States that are in the business of offering people that deal because it's a slam dunk for them. They know their work is going to save money. So we hired a couple of companies. They've spent $22 million in my buildings. They've reduced my energy bills 20 percent. They created 200 jobs in Cincinnati doing retrofits on my buildings. They've done 70 plus buildings now. They're doing my street lights now and converting them to LEDs. They've reduced my energy bills by about $2 million a year, which is enough to pay off the $22 million that they've invested in my buildings. And so it works for everybody. It creates a bunch of work for the contractors, creates a bunch of work for city residents, reduces my carbon footprint, reduces my energy bills and I got it all done without spending a dime of taxpayers' money. So those are the kinds of opportunities that we're looking for that are win-wins. Second example solar panels work exactly the same way. I needed to find somebody who was going to pay the cost of putting solar panels on my roof. What I would agree to do is buy the electricity that those solar panels produce, which, you know, I'm going to buy electricity anyway. If they'll sell it to me at the same price that the grid sells it to me, that's revenue neutral from my perspective. And yes, there are people who are interested in entering into solar power purchase agreements. I give them the use of my roof. They agree to buy the electricity over the long term. They invest in the panels, they own them, they get the racks, they get the government subsidies, all of that. If they can make a profit off of putting solar panels on my roof, more power to them. So right now I've got solar panels on the roofs of 23 of my city buildings about a megawatt of total capacity, about 40 jobs we created putting solar panels on the roofs of our city buildings and I don't know whether my solar power purchase agreement provider is making money or not. It doesn't matter to me. My utility bills haven't changed. I'm buying the electricity from him at the same rate I was buying my electricity from the grid. So that worked for us. We were able to accomplish some things without spending any money. Final example I wanted to give you is electricity aggregation. Electricity aggregation is like forming a buyer's club for electricity. We got all of our city residents and small commercial customers together went out to the utility companies and said we're going to buy as a group. We want you to give us proposals for what you know I'll deliver to you 60,000 customers you got to give me a price, a good price, and you got to give me a 100% green product. So we took bids for who wanted to supply this aggregation pool and we were able to shift 60,000 customers from the default electric provider in Cincinnati to a new electric provider. In the course of doing that we reduced their electric bills 23% and we gave them a 100% green energy product instead of what we had in Cincinnati which our grid is basically 86% coal. So that in itself reduced our greenhouse gas emissions by a little over 500,000 tons of CO2 emissions a year for this city. That was a big part of our 8% reduction. So those are some examples of some of the things going on in Cincinnati. Let's talk about climate adaptation. We know our climate has changed and it will change more. What will those changes look like in Cincinnati? How do we prepare for those changes? The first bit of news for the Midwest is the good news is we are not ground zero for climate change. In Cincinnati it's not about sea level rise. It's not about coastal storms. It's not about raging wildfires. It's not about acute water shortages. All those things that we hear about in the 5 o'clock news are someplace else. So as we assess climate change in Cincinnati we had a couple of key tools. One is the National Climate Assessment Report. I can't tell you how grateful I am for that report having come around. It was the information that we really needed. And the second is the Hamilton County Multi-Hazard Mitigation Plan. We have emergency responders who plan for and then respond to disasters. What I wanted to do was take the climate assessment report and my multi-hazard mitigation plan and put them side by side and see if they match. Do a gap analysis and see what I'm ready for and what I'm not ready for. So that's what I want to share with you a little bit. As we look about climate change in Cincinnati I think about it at three levels. I think about acute threats. Things that are going to come along in real time and I got to respond to them now like heat waves and wind storms and floods. Those are the acute events that I'm mostly going to experience in Cincinnati. Then there are the chronic threats. The things that I see them come in pretty far away and they come upon me slowly but that might not necessarily make it a lot easier. Things like droughts, like invasive species, like tree loss, crop losses, some of the things that Regina talked to you about. Exotic diseases that previously didn't survive in my latitude but now they're creeping up from the tropics. Then there are local effects of global climate disruption. The fact that climate change is not just happening in Cincinnati, it's happening everywhere. If there's a crop failure somewhere with our globalized markets that ripples through everywhere and causes price spikes and perhaps shortages where I am. Energy the same way. Disruption somewhere can cause price spikes and shortages where I am. Displaced populations, we'll talk about them a little bit more. Regina talked to you about the fact that we're getting more very heavy precipitation and we are experiencing that in our part of the world. About a month ago Dayton, just an hour's drive north of me, had five and a half inches of rain in four hours. That was an unprecedented event. I-70 and I-75 were both closed under three feet of water in locations that were not in a flood plain and had never been identified as being prone to flood threats. You know, I don't know much about highway engineering, but I know that if anything is designed to handle rainwater, it's the interstates. When you've got your interstates under three feet of water, you know you've got an event you didn't plan for. So I went to my emergency planners and said, okay, what would five and a half inches of rain in four hours look like in Cincinnati? And what my emergency responders told me is, I don't know. We've never had it. We never thought about it. We don't have a model that would help us predict it. We don't know. So, you know, winter storms, we deal with all the time. If I told them, what do you do if you're going to get 18 inches of snow? They'd say, you know, we salt and plow these streets first. We close these roads. We do this. We declare this level of emergency. I ask them what to do about five and a half inches of rain. They don't know. They don't know which roads they have to close. They don't know which people they have to evacuate. So as we look to the future, there are different scenarios. If we cut back our greenhouse gas emissions really soon, we get one level of increased emissions. If we keep going the way we're going, we get a very different level of increased emissions. We look at these scenarios. We know that we got to get busy. One of the things that's important is that the increases in rainfall don't happen at the same time every year. Right now we are wettest in the winter and fall, and the projections are that winter and fall will get wetter. We're drier in the summer, and the projections are that we'll get even drier in the summer. And so the idea that we'll have both more rain and more storms and more droughts is very real and it sorts itself out by season primarily. So the other thing that we need to focus on a lot is heat events. And again, the idea is that while you get more small increases in temperature, you get large increases in extreme events. While you have over time a 3 to 5 degree increase in your average temperature, you might have a 15 degree increase in your temperature on the hottest days. Why is that important? That's important because in my community we've got heat vulnerable populations. We've got people that live without air conditioning. We have people like the elderly that aren't very good at withstanding heat events, people with pre-existing medical conditions, and those are the people that are going to be in the emergency room or worse when extreme heat comes, especially if an extreme heat event corresponds to a power failure. What if you've got an extreme heat event and your grid goes down and nobody has air conditioning? We do not currently have an emergency plan for that scenario. And that's the kind of situation you saw Rosina slide that talks about how many increased mortality events you would have associated with heat waves. That's where it really gets bad. Heat is actually the biggest potential killer that we face in these discussions. Food issues are ones that are really important discussions for us. Jeremy will talk about it more. But as we think about food price spikes right now in Cincinnati I've got approximately 50,000 kids who rely on Cincinnati public schools for their daily nutrition. They get breakfast and lunch every day from the school district and on weekends they get a backpack to take home. If they don't get fed by the schools there's a good chance that they don't eat. Let's say that we've got crop failures in various places. Let's say that food prices double or triple or worse. Cincinnati public schools is an organization that's financially on the ropes. If their food prices double are they going to be able to continue feeding 50,000 kids every day that are relying on them? That's where we start thinking about what is our fallback plan. We don't have a fallback plan for that now. Rosina talked a little bit about the shifts in our forests. Trees are critical in cities for controlling the urban heat island effect for water quality and for air quality. In Cincinnati it's slope stability. Cincinnati is the landslide capital of the country. How many of you knew that? We get more landslides than any place. The trees are what hold the hillsides in place. And so we start getting major die-offs in our forests. Then those hills start, the slopes start becoming unstable and we get even more landslides than we have now. And so these forest impacts become real critical issues for us. So let me skip... Displaced populations. This is a map of who moved where in the aftermath of Katrina in New Orleans. And there's a dark gray spot right about here that is us. Cincinnati got about 2,000 families relocated in New Orleans as a result of Hurricane Katrina in New Orleans. And so we think about displaced populations as major coastal events take out coastal cities and we know that one of the things we have to be prepared for as a community is influxes of displaced populations. This shows some things that are what I call synergistic effects with climate change. The fact that we've got an aging population increasing asthma rates increasing rates of respiratory diseases, increasing rates of diabetes. All of those things make us as a population more vulnerable to the kinds of threats that we'll experience as a result of climate change. And so when we start looking at those synergistic effects it makes this even more important. So now let's talk a little bit about the multi-hazard mitigation plan that we have in place. This shows how many disasters are currently occurring in each county in Ohio and this is the distribution of what those disasters look like. Wind, rain, hail, floods, tornadoes. The reason why this is important is because emergency planners plan for the future by looking at the past. If this is what they've experienced this is what they're planning for. One of our underlying assumptions of climate change is that the future won't look like the past. If we plan for the future by looking at the past we won't be ready. In that climate mitigation, in that multi-hazard mitigation plan we rank our threats by how likely they are to happen. Low, medium, high probability and how much damage they cause. Minimum, moderate or significant damage. And then you can put them on a graph like this. You can see what we are most concerned about now and most ready for are severe storms and winter storms. The next here down, flood, extreme heat and tornadoes. Medium ranks, landslide has mad events and fires and down at the bottom droughts, earthquakes and damage levees failures. There's some correspondence between this and the climate change threats but not a perfect correspondence between this and the climate change threats. So this is the chart that I showed you earlier on and sort of the result of our gap analysis. Wind storms we're pretty much ready for. Heat waves and floods, we've done a little bit of work but we're nowhere near ready. Droughts we don't think are going to be a big problem for Cincinnati. We're on the Ohio River, it's abundant water. Exotic diseases we've done some preparations for mostly in the homeland security context, anthrax, that kind of thing. We're not ready but we've done some work. Invasive trees, species, tree loss crop losses we haven't really looked at. Displaced populations we took in 2,000 families from Katrina. We have a little bit of experience. Food shortages, energy shortages, not so much. So what you see here is as we look at adaptation we got a lot of work to do. A lot of things that we haven't addressed yet. And then if I'm going to touch very briefly on resilience how we recover from disasters. UC Berkeley has done some interesting work where they identify what makes a community resilient, what gives you the capacity to recover from disasters. And there's really three factors. One is economic. How strong your economy is, how diverse your economy is, etc. The second is based on your people, what's their education, their skills, their health and the third is based on community, your interconnectedness. They've mapped that for major metropolitan areas all over the country. We know that more Midwestern cities are more resilient than most. But within our metropolitan area we took UC Berkeley standards and took them down to the local level, took them down to the census tract level. And what we discovered is that within our own community we have portions of the community that have very good resilience portions of the city where the resilience is not very good. And not much of a surprise it's the urban core areas that are most vulnerable and the suburban areas that are most resilient. And so we think about experience like New Orleans and Katrina it really is the areas that are in the urban core that are going to need the most help in the aftermath of a disaster. And as we start thinking about what things we do to make our communities more resilient, how we build more connectedness, how we build more economic buffers, how we build more reserve programs it's really our urban core areas that we're going to have to focus our attention on. So thanks for the opportunity to be part of this and look forward to the discussion later on. Larry thanks so very, very much and as we have heard agriculture is a very, very big piece of the economy very, very important to the Midwest and so it's not only important to the Midwest but as Larry made very clear to that economy is different things like agriculture and looking at climate impacts in a particular part of the country may very well have very huge impacts other places that are dependent upon for example, Midwest agriculture. So we are now going to hear from Jeremy Emmy who is the managing director for the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition and where he has been working on national agriculture and food policy he previously had been the coordinator of what was called the Reamp Network which is a very, very important network with regard to renewable energy in the Midwest where he focused on climate change in the Midwest. Jeremy. Thank you. First I'd like to thank the other three panelists for giving me quite a bit of a lead up so I got to skip a lot of the slide so we know what is happening and one of the questions that I get sometimes at the National Sustainable Agriculture Coalition is so we know that things will be getting warmer we know that in all of the climate assessment reports as Rosina mentioned there were basically statements that say that some crops will do better sometimes and when you look at a map of the Midwest you see these areas now this is a map of essentially the value of crops sold in the Midwest but it overlaps pretty well with where the farming activities are and so you'll notice in Northern Minnesota, Northern Wisconsin, Northern Michigan you have these areas where there aren't as many farms right and it's the same for the mountainous areas of Ohio and Missouri and so I've had people ask me well why can't we just move these farms north right so there are a few reasons for that and so here's a quick soil lesson if you look at Northern Minnesota Northern Wisconsin, Northern Michigan you'll see the different colors correspond to different soil types and so the gray colored spot of soils is kind of a sandy soil where the water percolates very quickly through the soil nutrients as well do that which is why currently there are not a lot of farms there now and which is why there won't be in the future and then the dark brown is a histosol which is a very organic material and one of the things about highly organic soils is that they're actually not as good for agriculture as you would think but also they release carbon and so when you look at a map of the globe in the Northern Hemisphere the color coding in this map is slightly different but if you look at the maroon color in the light blue those are histosols and jalaesols which are both released huge amounts of carbon and so in the Midwest and globally if we continue moving northward with our agriculture we're going to release massive amounts of carbon by farming those soils compared to the soils that we have now and this is another great map that shows the soil organic carbon stocks and again you look outside of Florida the upper Midwest has just about the highest organic carbon stocks in the country and so if we release those carbon stocks out of the soil we'll be doing ourselves a great disservice and it will not be resiliency as folks know this is the third national climate assessment and the first one was done in 2000 and I pulled a couple quotes out of that because I wanted to show how things have changed since then and so it talks about the positive impacts of climate change warmer weather more precipitation in the Southwest longer growing seasons and a general sense emerged that American society would likely be able to adapt hopefully we can but this was the third assessment I think is we've built a lot on the knowledge that we've created since then and so one of the things we do at NSAC is we work on policy at the national level and we continue to do that working with things like the national climate assessment as well as science that advances and in fact just since this climate assessment in May there was an article in Nature that many of you may have seen that said not only will increase levels of carbon in the atmosphere lower the yields but they can also lower the concentrations of zinc iron and protein in certain crops so that will also lower the nutrition value so you'll have both lower yields and lower nutrition value and to add to the complexity of that problem the lower nutrient levels part of that is because the the nitrogen assimilation into proteins is reduced and what that would really equate to is more fertilizer which would again cycle back into into the emission cycle so it's a very complex problem so when looking at solutions we work at the national level we work with Congress we work with the executive office and we work with agencies like USDA and so this is just kind of quickly wanted to point out why we can do some of the work that we do and why the USDA has authority and so under the president's executive orders he directs the agencies to focus on program and policy adjustments to focus on the sources of climate change and then the secretary USDA secretary Vilsack he in turn has pointed to the natural resources conservation service which is a USDA agency as one of the existing tools to helping fight climate change and to build resiliency to mitigate it and then the farm bill implementation there was a 2014 farm bill just passed and that implementation gives USDA the authority to actually carry out and revisit how it administers those programs and so kind of a small sliver of the policy work that we do on climate we have eight principles and recommendations that we have put out in a white paper on how to build resiliency to the system and some of this might be a little bit in the weeds but feel free to ask questions during the question and answer period so our first one is that NRCS should be promoting energy conservation as well as increased energy efficiency and on farm solar wind and other renewable projects and so as we know in the Midwest farms take up a huge amount of our land space and they're fantastic places for solar and wind in those recommendations we also say that NRCS should work with farmers to provide them information on other programs and so to coordinate between agencies the rural energy for America program REAP is a fantastic program for that and since Jim is here I thought it would be important to point out that the internet interconnect for the grid that covers most of the Midwest is in Carmel, Indiana and that on farm solar, on farm wind a lot of that happens in rural areas we need to connect that to the grid and so it's very important to be able to build the transmission to move that renewable energy to our urban centers in the Midwest second NRCS should assist producers especially livestock farmers in transition to systems that keep the land in sod and other perennial vegetation and so what this means is that again, working between agencies within USDA NRCS can work with the farm service agency to engage in outreach to conservation resource program landowners, these are farmers that are already engaged in conservation programs on their land and transition those lands to grass based or perennial agriculture which again will help decrease emissions and increase carbon sequestration and then there's a ranking tool which I'll mention again that NRCS uses and it's basically ranking how when farmers apply for certain programs their applications are ranked and most of these are competitive programs and so within that ranking tool basically we would like the agency to reflect the benefits of perennial vegetation and rotational grazing and as I'll talk about essentially anything that helps build resiliency into the system number three is prioritize farming systems and conservation activities that build soil organic matter and what you see here is you'll see cover crops in this photo here and so one of the things that we can do is increase incentives for cover crops legumes are one of the most common cover crops used and then organic inputs like compost and manure which are not as common as you would think education a lot of farmers don't quite understand how climate is going to affect them and how to build resiliency into the system so educating farmers and making applicants aware of the benefits to their own farms is important and diversifying crop systems to build resilience and that's one of the hallmarks of our work at NSAC is a diversified crop system and that's one of the most resilient crop systems opposed to what most of midwest agriculture is right now corn, soy and a few other major crops and then integrate what's called the soil health initiative into working lands programs, working lands programs are conservation programs that are on working farms as opposed to set-asides number four is promote farmscaping and so for those of you who aren't familiar with farmscaping you can just think of the word landscaping and essentially that's more or less what you can think of farmscaping as that promotes resilience through carbon sequestration and so ways you can do that on farm are updating the greenhouse gas ranking tool to reflect the benefits so that when farmers are ranked on their applications they can build in this climate resilience things like buffer strips hedgerows, filter strips into their applications and receive more points on their applications so woody biomass of course the carbon is sequestered in the biomass itself above ground and then deep rooted native perennials have huge root systems and a lot of carbon is stored underground and so those are two of the best ways to sequester carbon and then another thing that we always like to remind the agencies to do is consider the regional appropriateness this is just focused but different areas of the country are very different and so the way you rank those projects across the country should also be very different number five is to encourage practices that reduce methane emissions and we all know that methane emissions are pretty huge in the system and so one of the things that we try to do with the agency is to not support KFO expansion through financial assistance programs prioritizing conservation easements you can see here lands that provide climate benefits more easements to protect more land protect land that has strong soil health management activities promoting conservation activities for their climate change benefits and that includes things like water use efficiency soil management on farm ponds and then in the implementation of conservation programs the agency should account for and reduce impacts on climate change and they could do this by updating the program priorities essentially include climate in everything that they do through this last round of implementation on the 2014 Farm Bill and then more outreach to farmers as well thank you we've got a little bit of time for questions because Larry will have to leave in just a few minutes if there are any questions for him we'll take those first oh my gosh okay we'll start back here and then we'll come up here in terms of municipal oh jeez in terms of municipal mitigation adaption and resilience strategies in what ways can the federal government help and assist these strategies at a municipal level so there's so many things where local work and federal policy intersect sometimes it's grant programs that provide funding for the things that we need to do sometimes it's enabling legislation I talked about the electricity aggregation program that's one of those things that's legal in some places and others we're working a lot on PACE financing which is a tool for being able to do in private sector buildings what we've done in our buildings but the big hurdle to PACE financing is a policy that comes out of the federal home finance administration and so it's hard to answer your question with a broad brush there are specific barriers I've heard somebody talk about the idea of social acupuncture the idea that you find places where there are blockages in the system and remove the blockage it may be a small change that releases a big flow and so my answer is it's not like one big picture answer it's lots of little places where there are blockages in the system that could be cleared jump in on that question for a minute one of the things that would be very helpful to cities is the energy and environmental block grant program this was patterned after CDBG revenue sharing program it was I think passed in 2008 funded only one time that was for the stimulus but it's designed so that it's a big country cities have municipalities have different needs across the country but within the constraints of the program they're able to use that money for whatever is most pressing council creates a reservoir of best practices for cities and to have that funding back and the flexibility of that funding would be an excellent tool Mayor I would definitely second that that energy efficiency conservation block grant program was incredibly valuable for us we got a lot of mileage out of it great to know, okay here hi, thank you so much for giving your presentations it was awesome so I'm currently an intern for a core American Council on renewable energy and I go to a school called Willamette University in Salem, Oregon it's a very sustainable school and a very unsustainable city so I have a question I'm the student representative right now for a committee that's trying to create a sustainability council that advises the city council on possible sustainability initiatives that they can take and we're facing a lot of opposition from the Chamber of Commerce and traditionally conservative people who haven't been enlightened by Mayor Brainerd's comments but we have a whole list of ideas a lot of power purchase agreements that we're trying to work out and I'm just trying to kind of gauge do you guys have a specific way that you attack opposition maybe not attack but you know work with them to try to convince them that sustainability is the right vision for a city you know when we put together the green Cincinnati plan the first thing we did was put together a steering committee that included the president of our Chamber of Commerce the president of Duke Energy the president of the University of Cincinnati and then we put together work teams that included staff members from each of those places when you're looking for the win win win options the places where you can do something that's good for local businesses you can't do it without having the business members at the table from the beginning so my first answer would be don't attack the opposition find the common ground with them and once you find the common ground with them then they're not the opposition anymore I might add that you know businesses' purpose is to return their shareholders often different ways of getting to the same place different paths and I think Walmart's an example was invited to a meeting in Bentonville, Arkansas where Walmart's headquartered recently and it was a meeting of all their top suppliers from the largest corporations in the United States and the whole focus was how they can save money by doing a better job for the environment some of the big corporations like Walmart can get it and I think if you can show them how money can be saved how most times almost every time if when you reduce packaging, when you do this, when you do that it also is good for the environment look for those things where you have common you can get to the same place by a different path and I think you'll get more support from your business community let me also say that in our community most places, most of the largest corporations have serious sustainability commitments sustainability goals so in my community Procter & Gamble, GE, Kroger, Sintos those are the people that are doing serious sustainability work the businesses that don't get it are mostly the small to midsize businesses that don't have anybody who's their sustainability professional and so when you can use the big businesses in your community the small businesses in your community they will hear the message from Procter & Gamble long before they hear the message from me this is a question for Dr. Birba for decades Parmesan Manac has been used as a pretty good predictability model and document for predicting weather almost never has science been accurate with regard to prediction are we to believe today that science has made strides in that direction to the point where we can truly believe what your predictions are well there will always be uncertainties but in the 20 years that I've watched the climate science develop I think the uncertainties have been diminished quite a bit and as I said at the beginning if you look at the first international documents that were put together the intergovernmental panel on climate change and what we thought about climate change then we weren't sure we were seeing a signal by 1995 the second assessment said there was a discernible human influence they were beginning to pick out a signal from the noise by the third one they said that most of the warming in the last 50 years has been related to human anthropogenic induced greenhouse gases because you can't explain the temperature record of the last 50 years without including greenhouse gas emissions given everything you know about solar etc and then the next IPCC report said climate change was unequivocal a word scientists never ever use and in the fifth one which has just come out they've said there's a 95% probability that the global warming we've seen and has been documented especially over the last 30 to 50 years is human cost so if you look at the level of certainty over the 20 years of these big comprehensive studies they've gotten more and more certain that we're detecting change and so the 10 signs that I showed you which you expect all to be either going up or down if climate change is occurring are all going up or down and each of those 10 arrows have multiple data sets behind them showing that these data are changing so I think you can never say every T has been crossed and every I dot it but the science that humans are causing climate change that climate change is occurring now and we're already seeing changes due to that is very very strong your predictions don't come through if my predictions not my predictions is the science community I think what we've been I think what all of us have been saying today is actually that we are seeing a change in the number of extreme events in temperatures extreme events that have been unprecedented and that what we're calling for are ways to make sure society is prepared for these one in 500 year events or one in a thousand year events that are now occurring quite frequently and being prepared for what we are experiencing now will also help prepare us for what we think climate change will bring so I think you know as Carol said for whatever reason you think we're seeing 500 year floods over and over or five inches and four hours I think was we're not ready to cope with this and so communities and cities are on the front lines as we've heard need to be better prepared for these events for whatever reason they're happening so even if you don't believe climate change is behind these we still have a lot of work to do to protect people and infrastructure if I can just add the question brings to mind the punchline of a cartoon that was around recently because we're talking about bringing clean renewable energy, bikeable walkable communities, places where people are more connected to each other the cartoon is what if we create a better world for nothing Turd Mayor Brainerd first of all thank you so much for coming and showing the great things you're doing for Carmel that is really astounding you mentioned that you've been working with mayors across the country to kind of try to expand the influence of the things that you're doing to try to teach them how to also improve their communities and I was just wondering if you I guess a two part question kind of reactions you've gotten from them the kind of feedback there and if you have any examples of other cities changing as a result of your influence yes I think I think other cities are adopting you know we're fortunate in this country because we normally have 50 state laboratories the way I look at it we've got 1200 laboratories called cities and as we all try new and different things we learn from each other sometimes we refer to them as stealing from each other I'm happy if somebody steals something from us that's worked well for us and a little bit of competition that goes with it is also a good thing and so yes we see things that are being borrowed and used across the country that we've done we've borrowed a lot of things from other places as well and we see that increasingly happening did that end here okay hi everybody thank you so much for being here on this wonderful panel for hosting this briefing my question is actually directed to Mr. Emmy I think a great variety of scientific literature is promoting intercropping the broad category of covercropping that you mentioned as being a sustainable and productive alternative to the monocropping culture that we have in the United States what are some of the blockages preventing farmers from reaching out and trying to use sustainable practices on their own farms that's a good question I think some of it was I mentioned education I think that's a large part of it I mean you have a system the now dominant industrial agriculture system that's evolved over at least the last 50 years telling people that's not the way to go and so kind of reintroducing some of the older practices and then combining that with the newer science but as well as policies that encourage that I mean a lot of a lot of the federal policies that exist because they give a benefit to some type of farming or another and so I think that's a large part of it as well and there are people that have been doing covercropping for decades now and so showing that results in yields just like anything else there are cities showing that energy efficiency is a cost saver showing that covercropping can increase your yield that's a sell to a farmer showing that you have to use less herbicides or no herbicides covercropping that's a sell very old passive house institute there's a tremendous amount of well in resiliency we need electricity right that's one of the key things what role is energy efficiency being taken into planning for resiliency there's a tremendous amount of energy in the existing buildings that's not tapped it's there that could be tapped and really change the nature of the grid is there much planning to capture that we need a lot of planning to capture we know what to do most buildings have solar panels on the roofs we need to change state laws in some places we don't have the flexibility that Ohio apparently does and what's called net metering the ability to sell back to the grid and those state laws need to be changed and adopted and modified the it's a matter of financing and getting it done we can make tremendous progress if we look at where carbon is being emitted in this country transportation is the biggest issue now it's heating and cooling of buildings it's the type of power we use to heat and cool buildings we need to especially in the Midwest need to be getting away from coal and towards natural gas as a conversion it's a temporary fuel until we get to renewables it's a step process when we get to the next step the next Step there needs to be a lot of work done on the heating and cooling and powering of buildings how many of them can be self or close to self sustaining if they were built properly number one we need to change state building codes number two we need to get the net metering laws fix in many of the Midwestern states now I was just going to agree that Look at all the global models and how you could reduce emissions. Energy efficiency comes out as the biggest, most important wedge because then you need to build less supply if you've damped how much energy is needed. And huge, huge possibilities for energy efficiency in buildings and transportation and industry that we haven't fully tapped yet nationally or globally. And I think that goes for the agriculture system as well. I mean, if you take something like drip irrigation, it saves farmers huge amounts of energy, you know, the amount less water they have to pump more efficient. And there are a lot of, a lot of these practices in agriculture are also more efficient and save money at the same time. And then overlapping with the transportation system is our, is our food distribution system that, you know, every little tweak we can make to that saves huge amounts of energy. Yeah, my question is for Mayor Brainard. We heard a lot about, from Mr. Falcon, about energy services performance contracts and other way to get capital to put these projects in place. Also drip irrigation, it's expensive to transition to that. And I was wondering, you mentioned public-private partnerships. What are some other ways for smaller businesses and smaller communities to get that initial capital? I think our lending system works, you know, if you can go to your local bank or you're sure, look, I'm going to make a million-dollar improvement and I'm going to save more than enough to pay back that loan, that banker is going to be pretty comfortable with it. And so that system should probably be accessed first to the extent that it's not. There are other programs out there. I'm not an expert on them. And that's an area where I think state government can be very helpful, providing some of that financing as a backup. But I'd look first to the commercial banking system because most of the time there's going to be enough money saved that the capital can be amortized over a period of years. Just switching to LOD lighting, you know, I'm getting a 22 percent, our city is getting a 22, our taxpayers, not me, are getting a 22 percent return on the investment in those lights. It's a $700,000 investment. I didn't have to take that to a bank. I could have, the bank was like, wow, that's fine. Trying to get a 22 percent return on the CD, it's not going to happen. So a lot of the things that we do, I think we can just tap into the regular banking system, assuming the credit for the small business is normal and that sort of thing. Can you tell us briefly what you saw as the key recommendations coming out of the task force yesterday? OK, I want to remind you that we're $500. Can you use the word briefly? That's our job over the next few months. I think get them down to three, four or five talking points. But generally speaking, break down the silos in the federal government, provide more capital funding for government, which has, in many cases, less access to the capital markets, especially in the case of cities that are struggling in the poorest cities. And more sharing of data and information and best practices from the federal government, those would be three. And we divided into sub-groups of transportation and community development. It's different across the country what people are dealing with. Big country in Vermont has a lot of roads that follow riverbeds. And you saw that 71 percent increase in traumatic rain events in New England. And so those roads are now getting washed out. Big question. You rebuild those roads. Defense comes in. OK, and the North Pole melts. We're going to have to defend another, especially given what happened this afternoon. We're going to have to defend that northern boundary of this continent. It's very close to Russia and China. And so Homeland Security becomes an issue. I could go on and on through every department of the federal government is going to be impacted. And so there's a lot of recommendations on a wide variety of topics. It's going to be a challenge over the next three or four months as the members of the Task Force and their staffs really try to prioritize what's the most important. And we're not there yet. Great. We will actually plan to follow up with you and all the other members of the Task Force so that maybe we can do another briefing looking at those recommendations, what that means for everybody. And I want to thank you all for coming. And I also want to thank our presenters today, our panelists, Rosita, Mia Rainer, the chairman, and the speaker. And thank you very, very much. This is really, really helpful. So the presentation will all be up on PESI's website. And then don't forget about the briefing a week from tomorrow as well. Thank you, Chris.