 Good afternoon everyone. Hope everyone's Earth week is off to a good start. I'm Dan for set the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thanks for joining us today. Of course, every day at ESI is Earth week and every day is Earth day, but we still found new ways to commemorate the 50th anniversary, including an interview with activist and author Byron Kennard, who is one of the key organizers for the first Earth day. Web articles about our work to encourage on bill financing and beneficial electrification in Washington state and reflections on climate solutions in the time of coronavirus and an all new video message. Thanks to two of our fellows, Tom Beach and Jeff Overton. All of this is available to our newsletter subscribers and anyone who takes a moment to visit us online at www.esi.org. Happy Earth week. Thanks for joining us today for a virtual briefing about coastal resilience in Alaska. Even though we're not meeting today in person, I'd like to take a moment to thank the office of Senator Lisa Murkowski for their support leading up to today, and also to thank Senator Murkowski for her leadership and support for a wide range of bipartisan energy policies as chairwoman of the Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee. If you're joining us today for the first time, this briefing is part of a series that looks at regional approaches to coastal resilience. In 2019, we brought together panels of experts, practitioners and community leaders from the Gulf Coast, Northeast in New England, Louisiana and the West Coast. Earlier this year, we convened experts who discussed efforts around the Great Lakes in the Southeast States and Hawaii. Last week, for the first time, we held a mini series of five briefings for climate adaptation data week. If you've missed any of our briefings on coastal resilience or any other climate and clean energy policy topic for that matter, you can access briefing summaries and video recordings at www.esi.org. And when you visit us online, please take a moment to sign up for our climate change solutions newsletter to learn about other resilience initiatives, clean energy legislation, and to stay informed about all manner of ESI goings on, including our briefing schedule. Most of us are likely in our second month of teleworking and practicing social distancing to help get the coronavirus outbreak under control. And just as every day is Earth Day at ESI, we're doing our best to remain focused on the threats of climate change. So today's briefing is just one way we continue to bring you opportunities to hear from climate clean energy and resilience experts via webinar. Climate change might not feel as urgent relatively speaking right now, but it is. And our briefing today will cover coastal resilience in Alaska. Every region is special and different, both in terms of challenges and innovations. But Alaska is extra special and extra different. It has a colder, even arctic climate, more shoreline than the rest of the other states combined, a massive string of Aleutian islands, active volcanoes, and just a huge amount of land area. And then there are the people, diverse, a proud heritage, and have a lot harder stock than me to tough it out up there. I'm looking forward to hearing from our panelists, joining us remotely today from the last frontier about their work to protect and improve the resilience of Alaskan coastal communities. One last thing before we turn to our panelists. Because we're not in the same room today, I cannot call on you if you have a question. So please follow EESI on Twitter at EESI online and send in your questions that way. You can also send an email to EESI at EESI.org. But Twitter sounds a lot more fun to me, so I encourage everyone to do that. And when you submit your questions, we'll draw from your submissions after we hear from our panelists. So all questions will be saved to the end. Now let's turn to our panel. Our first panelist is Jeremy Little. Jeremy is a research ecologist with the Department of Interior Alaska Climate Science Center. He conducts research on the role of climate and ecological drought in Alaskan and other forested ecosystems. He also facilitates the use of climate information and planning, adaptation, and vulnerability assessment. And Jeremy, I just want to make sure I pronounced your last name correctly. It's Little or Latel? Sorry about that. Okay, sorry about that. I had it written and the T's and L's combined, so sorry about that. But turn it over to you. Really, thanks for being with us today and I am looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. Good afternoon. My name is Jeremy Latel. I'm a climate impacts ecologist at the U.S. Geological Survey and the lead scientist at the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center. I grew up in Alaska and I live here now and I thank you for your attention today as we discuss coastal resilience in Alaska. I also want to thank EESI for organizing this briefing and for providing a forum for discussing these important topics. And I want to thank my co-presenters for all I've learned from them in preparing for this briefing. I'm going to start our discussion today by talking about current and projected threats to coastal resilience in Alaska. Next slide. But first, I want to take a minute of my time and ask you to try, even if you've never been to one, to imagine a coastal Alaskan community. There are about 6,600 miles of Alaskan coastline and over 100 communities you might choose from. It might be a watershed along in a watershed along southeast Alaskan coast among temperate rainforest trees with glaciated valleys above a rocky intertidal coastline and abundant salmon in the ocean offshore. It might instead be a village along a slew near the mouth of the Yukon River where the few trees around the wet tundra resemble tall shrubs and the horizon line is hard to see because there's essentially no visible topography. Or it might be a village on a barrier island facing the Chukchi Sea where livelihoods are based on access to seasonal sea ice. Whatever community you imagine, chances are you can get there only by plane or boat. It's also likely that local fishing wildlife provide a significant fraction of the food needed by the community. And it's likely that the infrastructure food security and ultimately the resilience of that community are threatened by impacts to coastal resilience. Next, please. Being resilient means understanding and preparing for threats or stressors. The current threats to coastal community resilience in Alaska are diverse because the communities, their physical and ecological environments, the types and design of infrastructure, and the reliance on traditional and subsistence foods are diverse. One thing they all have in common is a long history of adaptation to variation in the environment, indigenous knowledge, and a commitment to maintaining those as an uncertain future unfolds. They're also faced with hazards driven in part by climate change. My task in this presentation is to convey to you the nature of current trends in and projections for some of the main threats to coastal community resilience. If I leave you with nothing else, scientific advances are steps toward better prediction and adaptation to a future that does not much resemble the past we have experienced with. But the rate of change is fast enough that steps are not by themselves enough. We need big strides and that comes from coordinating the science, integrating it for prediction and combining it with indigenous knowledge. In short, working with communities to make what they need with their input, local information for planning and adaptation. Next slide, please. From media and agency reports, you're likely familiar with coastal flooding and erosion threats in some Alaska coastal communities. Kivalina pictured here is a community that figures prominently in such reports as far back as at least 2003 when the GAO highlighted risks to Kivalina and other communities. On the left is before and on the right after a barrier to minimize erosion was constructed on the windward side of the community. From these photos, you can see clearly that the community is exposed to coastal erosion on its windward side and there's a lagoon on what's your right to the shore or leeward side of the community. It's in a pretty precarious position. Next. In these images of Shishmareft on the left from August 2012 on top, August 2017 in the middle photo and November of 2017 in the small bottom photo, erosion can be seen. Note the difference between August of 2017 in the middle and November of 2017, primarily the result of a single storm. You can see the black arrow on the right of each photo is pointing to the same place on that piece of land near Shishmareft. And you can see the relatively large area that has been eroded in front of in the beginning, the coastline and then below where that person is standing and then below that where the erosion has gone all the way back to the road. On the right are historical and projected future shorelines for the community of Newtok. These images make the complexity of this problem more tangible than pictures of buildings falling into the ocean. These are impacts happening with the rapidly changing climate of now in communities around Alaska's coasts, not some impact that comes with climate change several decades from now. The combination of changing sea ice, the combination of changing sea ice, thawing permafrost erosion and the nature of regional storms creates hazards in western Alaska. As the sea ice season decreases due to atmosphere and ocean warming and as the stability of the shoreline is decreased due to permafrost thaw also due to warming, erosion can occur over more of the year and at a faster rate than during recent historical times. This erosion proceeds both gradually but also much faster during large storms that occur during the autumn and early winter months. While there's no currently detectable trend in the frequency and magnitude of these storms, the coastal vulnerability to them has increased because of the sea ice and permafrost changes. The impact is thus one of current not future climate. Okay now. Yes, next slide. More recently synthesis of the community by community vulnerabilities from observations indicate dozens of communities are currently vulnerable to erosion, either river or coastal flooding. Sorry, I'm a slide behind you. Either river or coastal flooding or some combination of all three. The mechanisms vary with the community and location but all are related to combinations of climatically driven weather and ocean hazards. It's beyond the scope of our time today to discuss them all so I'll begin this with a sobering thought. The cost of relocating communities is in the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars each new talks move to metarvic is estimated to cost in that range. Melvin at all in a paper in the proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in 2017 estimated that the cumulative instruct infrastructure impacts between 2015 and 2099 without adaptation would be $4.3 billion for a lower emissions scenario and $5.5 billion for a higher emissions scenario in $2015. According to their analysis adaptation could reduce that by roughly 40%. Okay, next slide. Alaska is warming faster than the rest of the country, but that warming isn't the same across a place as large and topographically diverse as Alaska. So even at a first order, the risks mechanisms and timing of impacts and their adaptation solutions aren't one size fits all. What you see here is a map of Alaska with 13 climate divisions for the state. Each of those climate divisions has a number in it and that number represents the rate of warming in that region of Alaska relative to the rest of the United States. It shows you that in the lower latitudes of Alaska and in the southern coasts, the rate of warming is faster than the lower 48 and it's much faster up on the north slope in the north of Alaska. Next slide. Alaska is warming faster than the rest of the country, but in the future we expect increases in temperature over the state as well. Each of these climate divisions that I spoke about on the last slide also has a number in it on this slide and that number is the increase in temperature in Fahrenheit. Expected for that part of Alaska under a high emissions scenario consistent with RCP 8.5 and averaged across five different climate models for the period 27 to 2099. So the rate of increase in temperature is higher in those faster warming parts of the state than it is in the lower parts of the state. On the other hand, the impacts to things like permafrost and potentially sea ice vary across the state as well and those areas that are closest to freezing historically have the currently fastest rate of impacts. And so it's a mistake to think that only the north slope, for example, would have really large impacts of climate change on permafrost. In fact, these impacts are distributed across the state for different processes. Next slide. In all cases, the rate of warming is likely to continue and will result in considerable further warming. The impacts to permafrost on the north slope, for example, are evident in the rates of erosion that have been calculated on the north coast of Alaska. In the map on the lower right, you can see in the reds the areas of fastest rates of erosion using modern data from maps and from satellite and aerial imagery as well as on the ground measurement. This is the part of Alaska for which we have the best and most consistent record of erosion rates and where they're best able to be established. In places where we have that long history of shoreline and permafrost data, those rates of erosion can be calculated and we're one step closer to doing better modeling of the rate of erosion we might expect with future changes. Much of the western coast of Alaska, for example, doesn't have the observations needed to conduct these kinds of analyses. The ability to project there has lagged behind, for example, that could work on the north slope. Here you see a picture that should illustrate in case you're not familiar with what this looks like. The erosion that occurs on shorelines where there's permafrost underneath, you can just barely see in the middle of that photo the permafrost structure underneath that grassy tundra surface and then the erosion going on in the bluffs below. Okay, historically much of Alaska had a climate that supported permafrost or frozen ground that persists for more than two years. However, in many communities along the coast, permafrost is thawing with direct impacts on ground stability and infrastructure. These trends are likely to continue under a range of future warming scenarios. In this slide you see four different emissions, four different future climate scenarios for two different climate models and two different emissions scenarios. These are from a paper published by Melvin et al in 2017. And the take-home message from them is that especially on the west coast of Alaska and in the southwest part of the state, you see changes in what's called the active layer thickness, an indicator of the seasonal surface melt depth each year. And it's projected to increase in those places with red colors. The near-surface permafrost thaw would be essentially complete in those by the end of the 21st century, resulting in increased threats to infrastructure and hazards. As a result, erosion, subsidence and slumping would continue or possibly accelerate. The thaw is projected over the entire west coast under a higher emissions scenario and a warmer model. So you can see there are a range of possible future scenarios. In many cases, from a community perspective, we don't necessarily know or haven't measured what the impacts are, even though we know from first observation that there are effects on infrastructure and community relevant resources. Next. Historically, shore fast ice protected the coast from erosion, but the ice-free season is increasing and projected to continue to increase. This is a graph from Rick Toman and ACAP at University of Alaska Fairbanks illustrating the observed change in the sea ice-free season. Ice-free conditions in the Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas are projected to increase roughly one week per decade south of latitude 60 north and about two weeks per decade north of latitude 65 north under future climate. The Melvin et al paper makes the case that many hundreds of meters of coastline would erode under those scenarios beyond the historical observations we've already seen. This would result in a considerably longer ice-free season during which the storms, usually in the fall and winter of even historical magnitude, would be more likely to cause erosion and flooding events. So you see the interaction between the sea ice and the permafrost as being important. As the permafrost thaws, the ground structure becomes less stable and then it becomes more exposed to storms due to the sea ice changes. Even if those storms don't increase in magnitude or frequency, you still have a more vulnerable coastline than you did previously. Next. Precipitation over the land surface also contributes to coastal flooding, especially in river slew communities and in short steep watersheds like those in southeast Alaska. Precipitation in general and also extreme precipitation events are expected to increase substantially under climates expected into the 21st century. The maps on the right show you a lower emissions and a higher emissions change in the frequency of extreme precipitation events. What used to be a historically a one in 20 year event doubles in much of Alaska under lower emissions consistent with our CP 2.6. Under higher emissions, the frequency of these events becomes much more frequent one in five in southeast Alaska and as frequent as one in three in parts of the yk delta and western Alaska. So the increase in precipitation, especially extreme precipitation presents an increase in the flooding expected in some of these coastal and river mouth communities where the land surface precipitation provides an element of the flood risk to not just storm surge. Next. The combination of prioritization, for example, the Denali Commission's ranked vulnerability index of communities experiencing erosion and shovel ready. Opportunities to adapt when funding becomes available proceed in a piecemeal fashion. Many of the opportunities in Alaska have not been as well coordinated across the many communities that need access to them as we might hope. Ideally for adaptation perspectives, I think the hazard projections and data would result in risk maps for existing communities and potential relocation sites. On the right is an example from the community of Quinn Hawk in Alaska where the colors represent detailed risk of flooding by elevation in the community. The elevation relief in many of these communities is only a couple of meters and so it's very difficult to do adequate map adequate flood predictions based on certain storm surge heights. If you don't have the local community elevations mapped adequately satellite remote sensing has provided some forward progress on this which I'll talk about in a second, but we don't have it for every community. Much of coastal Alaska does not have adequate elevation data to project community level for flood risks. Shorelines are also changing so quickly both in position and topography that baseline if it existed historically in terms of measurement is now fluid and repeat observation is often required. A number of community collaborations within Alaska combining state and federal and tribal entities are collaborating to meet these needs but the rate of change in the absence of even basic data represent considerable challenges. Next. The solution to these problems aren't just scientific or engineering challenges to be met though that helps. Perhaps first and foremost the same climate climate drivers of geomorphological coastal erosion and change are also changing the basis for indigenous food and energy security as climate changes the habitat and ranges of traditional subsistence species and the transportation options for getting fuel when renewables are not available. And all of these changes are occurring in a context where communities are still emerging from the effects of rapid historical changes that resulted in challenges even in the absence of climate change. Finally decision making for Alaska native communities involves complex interplay between tribal communities native corporations and individuals. The human dimensions of resilience determine the adaptive capacity and the options to respond to the physical and ecological challenges of climate change. So food and energy security and the issues of decolonization and sovereignty also create part of this context and then define the context in which adaptation can occur. Next, please. There are some information successes to help address these problems. Better community level planning and adaptation depends in part on scientific advances. For example, if SAR or remotely sensed elevation information from radar was completed in 2019 for the UConn Cusco Quim Delta and thus completes Alaska's data set for this important elevation information. Funding in the development of elevation data allowed erosion elevation models in many of these regions for the first time. This data is a start to better simulation modeling of flooding, but it's insufficient for most community level needs because of the error even in this modern technology. There are many such steps forward in progress and anticipating piecing them together or integrating them to do better modeling forecasting and to solve problems of relevance to people in wildlife is key. There's also a bright spot in terms of capacity to bridge between Western science and indigenous knowledge. An example is the BIA tribal climate science liaison who's worked hard in our state to better coordinate efforts to put Western science and indigenous knowledge together in order to create better adaptation opportunities for communities statewide. Another example is national weather service service community partnerships with observers in some of the more remote communities to get better understanding of real time impacts of forecasted events. And then scientific capability proceeds with new capabilities all the time our forecasting capabilities are improving and our coastal mapping improves all the time. Thus increasing our ability to put data together and do a better job of bridging between the historical past and being prepared for the future climate change impacts that we expect to coastal resilience. With that, I'll conclude my remarks and pass it back to Dan. Thanks, Jeremy. That was a great presentation to kick us off today. I really appreciate it. Just a quick reminder, I know I had a couple things that I'm looking forward to asking you about Jeremy when we get to Q&A. For those of you who are watching us online, if you have questions, there are two ways you can ask them. The first is to follow us on Twitter at ESI online and submit your questions that way. Second way is to send us an email and you can reach us at esi.org. We're going to save all the questions. They're coming in fast and furious and we'll save them until we finish up with the panel. Our next panelist is Raymond Paddock III. Ray works for the Central Council, Clinkett and Haida, Indian tribes of Alaska as their environmental coordinator. For several years, Ray has coordinated, Clinkett and Haida, sorry, environmental program to provide training activities, educational assistance and coordination statewide and regionally. The Native Lands and Resources Department continues to contribute to the capacity growth within Alaskan tribes and provides a wide variety of services to assist those tribes as they address local and regional environmental issues. Ray is also serving as the Regional Tribe Operations Committee. Ray, I'll turn it over to you looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, Dan. Hi, my name is Ray and Paddock again. I am the environmental coordinator for the Central Council, Clinkett and Haida in general Alaska. I am a Clinkett Indian. I'm Coguantan of Eagles Nest House and my Clinkett name is Custaton. I'm here to talk a little bit about the work that's being done in Alaska, but also to express the concerns and preparation and the lack of resources we have here. Next slide, please. There are 575 federally recognized tribes in the United States. 229 of those federally recognized tribes are here in Alaska. Many along the coast, but we do have several that are in the heart of Alaska. Next slide, please. As stated, there are many tribes within Alaska that are inland, but they are dependent on the coastal resources. As you see on the map there, those colors here, you see the Yukon River. Those are communities that are dependent on salmon that come from, to sustain their cultural and feed their communities. Next slide, please. Subsistence resources. This means hunting, fishing, gathering activities that provide food and a way of life to Alaska Natives. Healthy fish, wildlife and time populations are key to tribal communities. These are just some of the impacts that we have concerns with when talking about subsistence resources. Climate impacts to traditional gatherings on the calendar, maintaining berry species, impacts of salmon and impacts of special forest products like cedar. Next slide, please. I titled this one, Wushin. That's a clinic at work for working together. We are having to do a lot of working together as you'll see later in the slides to offset costs, share resources and develop partnerships. We have to come together to work on common issues across traditional regions, and that is what my work has been over a number of years. It's to fill in the slides where we are lacking some of the resources to build partnerships. I'll get to some of that later down in the presentation as we go on, but again, this is to address cost issues and the lack of resources. Next slide, please. So identifying our issues. We see a lot of stuff in your face as you see on the slides here, erosion, permafrost. For many of us, we do see that and the rest of the world sees what's happening in Alaska. But many of us don't see the issues that are not as in your face as you see with the permafrost and the erosion here in the pictures. People are generally familiar with the needs of villages at risk from coastal erosion and inundation, particularly in western northern Alaska, as Jeremy stated in the previous speaker. And those are super pressing. Next slide, please. Yet there are broader risks less in your face, if you will, from things like harmful algal blooms, ocean acidification that affects security, food security for all tribes, regardless of the locations across the state. As stated earlier, many communities in Alaska are dependent on coastal resources. In this slide, you'll see to the left, those are phytoplankton. One of them at the top is Alexandria, which is the PSP we are typically seeing here in Southeast Alaska and along coastal Alaska as harmful algal blooms. To the right, on that other side of the pick is ocean acidification testing. That's my co-workers and you see at the top, they've been doing some testing for ocean acidification in the junior area. I also added a picture of the Alaska Marine Highway as they have been initial part as data collecting for ocean acidification for a number of years now. Unfortunately, the ferry system is in jeopardy as many may know, so we don't know how that will work. Next slide, please. Barriers. Even with communities and tribes being somewhere prepared with development of adaptation plans, we are still lacking the resources needed to ensure we are addressing these issues. In terms of food security and adaptation capacity, we plan to have that for the future. We plan to slow, we have to plan for slow moving disasters that we don't expect or experience, that we don't expect, pardon me, and we don't have the experience with the bureaucracy that exists. There are mandates and regulations come from past and not future that we are trying to adapt to. Even though we have organizations like Click-In-Hide and Cedar, it's not enough. Even with the tribes in Alaska, even if all the tribes in Alaska have the capacity, it still would not be enough. We are lacking the resources. Pardon me. Next slide, please. And amidst all the entities that are working on coastal relations and it's an adaptation, indigenous people offer something unique. And that is the perspective of being an integral part of Alaska ecosystems for millennia. There's no substitute for the knowledge that tribes hold about the land and the resources around their communities when it comes to resilience and adaptation. Yet many times, this knowledge is not considered when agencies and other governing entities launch adaptation planning efforts to aim to benefit these communities. Next slide, please. So a little bit more about the in-depth stuff of regional efforts that we are doing. And as you see on this slide here, these are just a few of organizations and tribes that are working together to address tribal resiliency, community resiliency. Of course, there are several more throughout the state, but this just was a quick slide we wanted to add in. Next slide, please. So as mentioned, there has been several organizations and tribes doing stuff to address tribal resiliency, community resiliency. Clink and Haida, we just recently developed a climate change adaptation plan based off tribal and cultural concerns. Fish, shellfish, cedar, we're on there just to name a few. And we got all that from a regional effort from tribes who were able to hand in their concerns, talk to us about their problems they're seeing in their communities, and that's how we drafted this adaptation plan. We did so, pardon me, this plan was released to tribes back in the spring of 2019. And we also created a template. Next slide, please. So this, so we do have the adaptation plan for Clink and Haida, but there is a bigger plan. There's a template that we were able to give to tribes throughout Southeast. They were able to take that plan and make it a filler in, if you will, for the rest of their tribes based off their concerns in their communities that their tribal leaders may see. In this slide, I want to talk a little bit about what we're doing next. So this year we're developing another climate change adaptation plan. This one will be based off the social and economic impacts we are seeing in Southeast Alaska. So we, in order for this plan to go through, we are working with municipalities, small businesses, organizations throughout the region that may feel the effects of climate change down the road. Amidst COVID though, we're having a little bit of issues of trying to figure out what that will look like, but we still have to reach out to those communities, to those municipal leaders, to the tribal leaders and the small businesses to get their concerns in order for us to develop this plan properly. Next slide, please. In another organization, CETOR ran from the Sitka Tribe of Alaska with some food security marine programs. We are working with partners like STA here at the Sitka Tribe of Alaska to ensure that we are meeting the issues of our food security. They conduct the shellfish harmful algal blooms and ocean acidification testing that many of our subsistence gatherers in Southeast Alaska use. We send those to Sitka Tribe and they're able to collect and tell us whether it's safe or not. But they're also collecting the data on ocean acidification, so that's a helpful part in the SOAR term. We hope to use that very long. Next slide, please. As mentioned also, I am part of the EPA Region 10 Tribal Operations Committee. We are in partnership with the United States EPA to further tribal environmental objectives at the regional level to serve as liaison, if you will, between the EPA and the tribes, regarding information exchange assistance and to address issues that we see in our region. Region 10 being Washington, Oregon, Idaho, and Alaska. Right now, we are currently drafting and working with the regional director, if you will, of the EPA to create a subsistence initiative. And I'd like to show that more if anyone has any questions, please feel free to ask on here. But we are creating a subsistence initiative that addresses issues such as climate change throughout all of Region 10. And of course, we would love feedback on that in the long run. Two more slides. Next slide. And here, I just made a quick note of what's going on amidst COVID before I ended. I wanted to just put this out there. Current COVID considerations. At least 130 tribes right now have released orders requesting folks from outside of their communities to not enter. If any of this audience please has oversight over our operations in Alaska to result in villages visits. Please, please check in with your programs and urgent to follow the tribal orders. Next slide. And that is all. Thank you very much. My contact info is on here. Please feel free to contact me at any time. Thank you guys. Thanks, Ray. Great presentation. And just as a reminder, everyone's slides are actually already online. So if you need Ray's contact information, if you want to go back and look at his slides, same thing with Jeremy, same thing with Aaron who's coming up next. Everything's available online at esi.org. And the video will eventually be up there as well. Just a quick reminder for those who might have joined us a little late, we're going to save our Q&A for the end. If you have questions you'd like to ask our panelists and many of you are submitting them. You can send them into us via Twitter or follow us online, ESI online on Twitter. You can DM us or you can retweet or you can want to get us in that way. You can also send this email at esi.org. We're going to move to our third panelist and then we'll move into our Q&A portion of the day. Our third panelist is Aaron Poe. Aaron has worked in Alaska for 22 years specializing in natural resource management, partnership development and community engagement. His work focuses on helping managers and communities understand and adapt to rapid environmental change. He currently works for the Alaska Conservation Foundation and he is the coordinator for the Aleutian Bearing Sea Initiative and program officer for the Sustainable Southeast Partnership. Welcome Aaron, really glad to have you today. Great, thanks Dan. Yeah, thank you for that intro. I'm excited to be able to talk with folks today about a couple of these partnerships that I support here from my position at the Alaska Conservation Foundation. And so I guess let's jump right in. Next slide please. And so the one I'm going to spend the most time talking about is this Aleutian Bearing Sea Initiative. It was one of the original landscape conservation cooperatives. So if folks have maybe heard of that or heard of LCCs, essentially these are regional partnerships. They're guided by steering committees and those steering committees include folks from agencies, from tribes, from indigenous organizations, from nonprofits, from university programs, basically really diverse groups of people that are directing the work of these partnerships. I always like to stress first off that they are non-regulatory. They are public-private partnerships, but when you walk through the door and you come to that table of that partnership, that steering committee, you're an equal of everyone there. So whether you work for an agency and have some sort of regulatory authority, that's not important at those tables. And I think this is one of the things that particularly our tribal partners find refreshing as a different way to interact with some of their peers and colleagues that are within agencies. These partnerships focus on large-scale issues, so things exactly like coastal resilience, climate adaptation, basically the types of things that no one can really handle on their own. No entity, no individual has the ability to address these levels of change. I always, basically just to kind of honor the origins of these, there were 22 of these partnerships at one time. They were launched by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in 2010. They covered all of the entire United States. They covered much of Canada. They were in the Pacific Islands, throughout the Pacific Islands. They were also throughout the Caribbean. As of today, there are, and at one time there were five of these partnerships in Alaska. As of today, there are three that are left due to basically changes that were made in funding at the federal level resulted in sort of the erosion of what had been this original network of LCCs. We've now kind of rebranded ourselves. There's kind of Northern Latitudes partnerships is sort of the umbrella we talk about under. So we have that Aleutian Bering Sea Initiative in yellow on your map there. Western Alaska LCC still has that moniker attached to it in green and the Northwest Boreal Partnership. And I just want to highlight that that Northwest Boreal Partnership, the one that you see in purple there, actually has a joint steering committee of made up of Alaskans and individuals from three different provinces in Canada. So it's an international partnership working on these types of issues. So despite the kind of changes that happened in 2017 with funding, you know, these partnerships continue. We currently have about 150 different partners either starting in those steering committee roles or on individual projects. And we continue to build on sort of the nine years of trust, you know, that were launched in 2010 by these partnerships. Next slide, please. So the work of these former LCC partnerships largely had been focused on science to be the ending. So the numbers that you see here on the slide in the first five years, those were actually summary numbers from an evaluation that was done by the National Academy of Sciences in 2015. Basically, Congress had requested a special analysis of this network of partnerships to see if they were actually contributing something new and unique and useful to the U.S. And they were, that was the findings of that analysis. Kind of after 2015, I felt the partnerships particularly here in Alaska shifted more towards this kind of adaptation and these kind of resilience type actions. So we've kind of moved away from so much of the science and more towards trying to help people, you know, adapt to the changes that are happening. And currently, I just want to point out there's about 220 projects under the belt, I suppose, of these partnerships. Next slide. So I also want to just acknowledge the members of the steering committees here. At one point when all five LCCs in Alaska were intact, there were 49 different entities that were serving. You'll see this is a mix of Alaskan and Canadian folks. Currently, with the kind of reduced number of these partnerships that we have, we have three steering committees remaining. We still have about 37 different partners that are active here. Next, please. And so our host organizations currently are the Alaska Conservation Foundation where I work. Alaska Conservation Foundation has been around for about 40 years. We're focused on public lands and waters and the ways of life that they support here in Alaska. The Wildlife Management Institute has been around for about 120 years. And basically they've worked as a nonprofit supporting the needs of various sea fishing game agencies across the country. Our principal funder right now is the Volgenau Foundation. It had been the Fish and Wildlife Service and now this small family foundation is trying to keep us supported. They're based in Washington, D.C. They focus on the conservation of natural resources and the education of children. And we're very grateful for their support that they've directed to the Alaska Conservation Foundation to sustain these partnerships. So I'm just going to transition here, talk a little bit about some of the work that we do within the LCCs. And so this one example shows you stellar sea lions, those handsome fellows that you see there on your screen. Basically, this is a really important traditionally harvested subsistence species. Ray introduced that concept to folks that maybe are familiar with it. But an essential species that the Anangan or Alut people in the Aleutian Islands have relied upon for thousands of years. One of the other things people maybe don't know about a remote place like the Aleutian Islands. It also hosts one of the largest shipping lanes in the United States in the world, basically. Where lots of the stuff that shift between Asia and North America comes right through the Aleutian Islands. So we were able to do with one of our first projects, this kind of proximity analysis, those shipping lanes that you see there in red. Basically looking at the distance between those and some of these haulouts for stellar sea lions. And we're able to basically show kind of both industry and managers that, hey, if you just bump those kind of lines a little bit further away from those haulouts, you could really increase the amount of safety, not only for your crews and your ships and your vessels, but also for the species in terms of risk from oil spills or other types of disturbance. So if you look at the next slide, basically working through this partnership, we were able to give this information to the Coast Guard, which took that kind of analysis that we had done on the previous slide to the international maritime organization. And we were able to get these kind of five voluntary areas to be avoided established in the Aleutians. I'll stress again, this is voluntary, not necessarily regulatory, in that basically we were able to show the insurance companies for these vessels that if you can bump those vessels just that much further away from those islands, you really reduce your exposure of risk and increase the safety of the transit itself. And so kind of building on that, if you go to the next slide. We have this new effort where we're really trying to continue to focus on this kind of dynamic separation or creating more separation between vessels and marine mammals or also in the case of subsistence harvesters. But it's kind of a neat one where it's this kind of high-tech collaboration that allows agencies and tribes to basically establish areas in the kind of coastal environment where they want to learn more about potential risks from vessel traffic and how it works is essentially with these polygons that you can kind of see there on the map or at least the conception of them around the walrus and around the harvester is that every time a large vessel enters one of those, that manager or that tribe can get an email or a text message saying, hey, there's a vessel in this area. And that doesn't necessarily mean that it's going to trigger some kind of regulatory action. It's really just trying to increase domain awareness. And this kind of like dynamic solution I think is really important because as we're looking at changes in sea ice, we're basically seeing vessel traffic in new areas. We're seeing species having to shift to change to new habitats that are aligned with the ways that they have evolved. And so this kind of thing allows managers to kind of keep on top of that, allows tribes to keep on top of that. I also like to highlight this one just because it is an interesting collaboration we worked with industry nonprofits, so nonprofits that serve the maritime industry on this. And my kind of favorite little fun fact about this is it was funded by the Department of Homeland Security and the Wildlife Conservation Society. And I think it might be the only project in the world with that distinction. Next slide. So one of the kind of signature efforts of these former LCC partnerships was in 2016, three of them working with the Aleutian Pribilop Islands Association and a whole bunch of other partners was able to host this series of coastal resilience and adaptation workshops. This occurred in five communities across the state. And essentially the aim here was to try and bring forward as kind of science providers or these partnerships that are composed of science providers, to try and share what information was available in terms of data, information, tools, maybe funding opportunities, try and bring that to the community to share, but spend an equal amount of time really listening to the communities about, hey, we brought you this wonderful stuff on coastal erosion, but what is it that you really need and hearing things that maybe what we really need are sustainable jobs in our community. So really being open to that, maybe kind of shedding a little bit of what we think everyone needs to know and really spending time listening to what they're telling us they need. So this was an enormous effort you can see from kind of the number of participants, but really the diversity of affiliation of those participants I think is what made it pretty unique. Unfortunately, with the changes at the federal level in 2017, a number of the efforts that had been planned to come out of these workshops were derailed. To the next slide, I will just mention one effort that persisted. One of the key things we heard during all of those workshops was that folks don't have a common place that they can go to access tools, data, information, resources about adaptation. So we launched this adaptalaska.org. Again, with grand visions of a number of contributing federal partners here. Unfortunately, at this point, it's basically Alaska Sea Grant that is holding this thing together. They've launched a new version of it. In terms of trying to share basically success stories, tools, resources, but certainly they're doing a great job with the capacity they have and there's a lot of great ways we could develop this site and we're continuing to explore resources for that. Next slide. So kind of one of the last efforts I want to talk about in terms of a project, this is something that's common to all of those former LCC partnerships and this Indigenous Sentinels Network I think is pretty unique and interesting. It was launched by the alley community of St. Paul. So the tribal community that's based in the Privaloff Islands. Basically a picture of the kind of the middle of the Bering Sea in some ways. And it was launched in 2002. Originally it was kind of powered by paper and pencil. It's spread out of that region. It's progressed in terms of its technological sophistication. There's now a smartphone app that communities can use. That smartphone app hosts several different kind of common protocols. Even some of the stuff that like the agencies use, like the Marine Mammal Stranding Network for example, or some of the protocols that the Fish and Wildlife Service uses to document seabird die-offs on beaches. So it has those kind of protocols, but it also has some specific to the needs of communities. So for example, they've developed a protocol that allows people to document the harvest of their traditional foods around their communities. I think it's unique in sort of this genre of kind of citizen science or community-based observer programs for a couple of reasons. I think one is that the focus of what is collected, so the focus of the science, the data question is defined by the individual community. That community also owns the data that is collected and they are able to choose with whom they share or don't share that information. And I think another kind of final distinction is that the sentinels, the folks that are actually doing this work, just like you would pay a biological technician or a biologist or a geologist, those people are paid. And I think that's kind of unique among a lot of these community-based observer programs where the expectation a lot of times is that people are going to volunteer their efforts. And I think that really helps to ensure that this effort has kind of a rigor to it. So I encourage people to check it out. Right now it's in its bearingwatch.net. Something happened with the slide rendering there, but it's NET at the end. So I encourage you to check that out and see how it's kind of expanded into this indigenous sentinels network now that it's in interior Alaska and actually looking at going into Canada as well. So we go to the next slide. And so I just wanted to acknowledge, because one of my other roles is working with this sustainable Southeast partnership. And the Southeast we're talking about here is Alaska. And I think it has some really important lessons to be shared with these kind of former LCC partnerships and kind of key among those that there is this kind of interest in sort of localizing stewardship like we just talked about with the indigenous sentinels network. But I think a key component that this partnership has, and it was a partnership of tribes and nonprofits in that region, is that they have a real focus on sustainable economic development for rural communities. And that's something that we hadn't had in the past with some of these former LCC partnerships. And so we're hoping to kind of facilitate some learning between these folks on how we might tune up and really make those regional partnerships truly, you know, addressing the whole system, which of course includes sustainable economy. So I encourage people to go to that sustainable southeast.net. There's a really great movie. It's definitely worth seven minutes of your time that talks about how this partnership is kind of unique. And I think there's some really good lessons from there, not only for just rural Alaska, but for rural US in general and how these kind of small communities can go forward into this, you know, kind of century, I suppose. So kind of on that theme of lessons learned, maybe I will go on to my last few slides here and share some kind of observations. And I'll attribute this quote that you see there to a friend of mine named Rachelle Daniel who's with Pew Charitable Trust. And I asked her kind of last week, like, hey, what are some key things you would share with an audience if you only have 15 minutes? And she's like, well, I think we might need a month. That was her response. So anyhow, I have this amount of time so I will try my best. But essentially we heard kind of the data needs galore that Jeremy and Ray both have talked about in terms of how many of the common layers that really power adaptation efforts and power kind of scenario planning in lots of the rest of the country really don't exist for Alaska. And maybe I'll just offer one example. So folks might be familiar with something called the National Wetlands Inventory. This is essentially a GIS layer or a map of the wetlands of the United States. It really helps our communities. It helps our industry understand where they can develop facilities and infrastructure. Alaska has about 40% of our state covered by that National Wetlands Inventory. And unfortunately, the places that aren't covered are those that are most rapidly changing. So where communities like Jeremy talked about maybe need to adapt the most rapidly, we actually don't have this basic layer that would really inform kind of their infrastructure. And it's $7 million, which maybe that's a large number to finish out the rest of the state that's two and a half times the size of Texas. But it seems like it would save tens of millions in planning and surveying costs. And it would definitely allow communities to move more quickly in terms of their adaptation efforts. I do want to also share telecommunications. This may be the most consistent thing that we hear. I mean, look at the impacts of COVID, right? We're all talking to one another like this. And we expect this, oh, I can just zoom over for whatever reason. Well, those 229 tribal communities that Ray talked about, a lot of them, this kind of capacity just in terms of internet speed is not there. That limits them for telemedicine, that limits them for sessions like this or many other things that would help them adapt. In some places in the state phones aren't even necessarily completely reliable all of the time. And often it's the school that maybe has the only good source of reliable internet. The final point I'd make on this slide is that there really isn't any clearinghouse. There isn't this kind of simple place for tribes or even agency leaders to be able to go and access adaptation information, data, resources, funding sources. We tried to create this adaptalaska.org with that in mind. But in so doing, we quickly realized that's a three to four person job in order to just stay on top of everything, to stay on top of the latest data, the latest success stories, the latest funding sources. It would take a lot more than what we have to power it currently. So next slide. In terms of barriers to collaboration, I mean it feels so generic to complain about bureaucracy, but it's very real in terms of the financial assistance operations, particularly of the federal government right now are so confiluted and slow and they're getting increasingly so all of the time. It's really hard I think for agencies to be able to deploy their resources in an effective annual fiscal cycle. And they miss opportunities to partner with tribes, with universities, with state agencies because of a number of these controls that are in place. I would also point to the consistent thing we hear that, you know, communities don't have the resources that they need and they don't have access to kind of the venues that they would need to be able to go to and be heard at to share what their real needs are. Communities often are referred to like, hey, go to this annual conference if you want to learn about your adaptation needs or go here or go there. But they're telling us, we're hearing that they don't really feel that the way that conferences and workshops are run really allows for true exchange and ideas and listening and, you know, eventual decision making the way that tribes like to be able to do that. We also hear consistently about communities just being kind of overrun by scientists and agencies who are coming to them with ideas basically saying, hey, we want your input on this idea versus what is your idea of what you need. And being able to flip that just seems really vital in terms of kind of resilience and adaptation. I would also point there really isn't a central authority for leadership on adaptation in Alaska at all. And that's not to blame anyone. I mean, I think people who are maybe passingly familiar with Alaska have heard things that's like, oh, the Denali Commission, that's who's handling all of that. Or maybe it's the, you know, interagency Arctic Research Policy Committee or IARCPIC, you know, they're the ones that are the central authority on climate science. And so that's where these discussions are all happening. And the reality is it's not to put any shade or anything on those people, but that's not what's that's not true. Each one is working on their own little pieces. They still kind of have their own mandates and their own space that they operate on. And there's really not anyone that's putting it all together to understand what the full picture is. Next slide. So just in terms of the adaptations that are out there, I mean, you've heard sort of Jeremy and Ray talk about examples of this. And I just, you know, I hate to, again, to put like a butt on it. But there are some, you know, pretty significant butts in there. And I want to start this off just by sharing, and it's kind of been shared earlier, but climate change is really a lived experience for people, particularly people in rural Alaska. They're literally changing the way that they live because of the changes that are happening around them. And I think people want to do something about that. There's individuals who want to change the way that they fish. Maybe they want to switch to Mariculture because they're concerned about fishing futures. There's a lot of things that they're willing to do. They're willing to like roll up their sleeves and actually do the work. It's just that there's not great information on how to do that as an individual, how to change your business practices relative to the changes in the environment that we're seeing. I do see also that there's this kind of, and it's been alluded to in the past, but are in the past presentations, but there's kind of increased kind of recognition of the value of Indigenous knowledge. I want to italicize like I didn't say increased, meaning it's better than it used to be, but it's not anywhere near where it needs to be. And sadly, there's kind of limited investment from sort of the science community or the agency community or decision maker community broadly in figuring out how could we connect this really important Indigenous knowledge to kind of the science that typically has been driving management so much in the past. Key players in Alaska that basically have been excelling at this kind of stuff have seen funding cuts in recent years. Kind of the exact wrong time when these changes are happening so rapidly. So organizations like Alaska Sea Grant have seen funding cuts. The EPA's kind of Indian General Assistance Program or the ICAP program that powers a lot of the tribal environmental efforts in communities has been cut in recent years as well. And not to, you know, focus on me, poor me or anything, but I think it's just a reality to acknowledge that, you know, even these former LCC partnerships I've been talking about, there originally were 15 permanent full-time staff that were facilitating those functioning and looking for these project and adaptation opportunities. Now there's three folks that are all doing that from inside of those nonprofit organizations, Alaska Conservation Foundation and Wildlife Management Institute. So that's a big sort of cut in terms of capacity. And then I guess maybe my kind of final word on this is that there's a general sense that from especially some of the other private funders, the larger foundations that fund a lot of science and adaptation efforts around the world that Alaska is okay. Like Alaska is generally fine compared to other parts of the globe in terms of what populations there are dealing with. And in reality that may be very true, especially if you look at like the global south, for example, where resources are even scarcer. But it's just a reality that, you know, kind of the types of funding that we used to see from large foundations in Alaska in the early 2000s really just don't happen the way that they used to. One more slide. I guess I'm kind of wrapping here a little bit. And so I just want to make this, you know, I'm not a climate scientist. I've played one on the radio a couple of times on NPR, which was super cool. And once I did a local TV show in Alaska, Dutch Harbor, hence my amazing presence on camera here. But I have a good fortune to work with a lot of climate scientists. And so this is not to disparage any of their work, but it's my observation that the risk is always underestimated in their predictive climate models. And I don't know whether that's kind of the way that science works or whether agencies or universities don't want to release products that maybe are too alarmist and they really just want two or three more peer reviews to make sure that those findings are correct and how that maybe like dampens the reality. But I guess I would just share that, you know, some of the things that our communities are saying they're seeing now were the types of things that were predicted to be happening in 2040. So it feels like, you know, Alaska is not just behind sort of in the investment in climate adaptation. It's maybe sort of ironic and sad that we're also behind the prediction curve in terms of what's happening under climate change. And last slide. So I guess I'll just close by sharing that and reinforcing that climate change and adaptation is a lived experience right now in Alaska. We can't wait for a change in administration. We can't wait for the newest and best science. We can't wait for the best technologies for infrastructure to come forward. The challenges that our tribes and communities are facing the challenges that our natural resource managers are facing are all happening. They have happened already, and they don't really show any signs of slowing down here in the north. So thank you for your time and attention folks. And I guess I think we're back to Dan for question and answer. Yes, I think that's right. Thank you, Erin. And we, I think we'll have, we have a full half hour for Q&A. So I'm really looking forward to this. And I've got lots of questions, but I think I'm going to start actually by first thinking the three of you for joining us today and for your really excellent presentations. One last plug, if anyone in our audience would like to submit a question, you can follow us on Twitter at ESI online. You can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org. But I think I'm going to kick off the Q&A, Erin, by letting or asking Jeremy and Ray if they would like to comment on some things in your presentation. And specifically you identified towards the end of your presentation, you identified three key barriers that you see as getting in the way from coastal resilience in Alaska. And I'm going to paraphrase, but they were roughly the first one was lack of financial assistance, which often made it difficult to partner with federal authorities or federal agencies. The second was again, a lack of resources, but this time to participate in a lack of venues in order to be heard. And then the lack of a central authority in Alaska for a lot of this work being done. And I'd like to ask Jeremy and Ray, Jeremy, we'll start with you since you went first, and then Ray will go to you. What do you make of those barriers? Are those, from your perspective, are those real barriers? Are there other barriers? And, you know, if you have ideas about maybe how you would suggest removing those barriers, changing barriers into hurdles that can be overcome. Interested in what you have to say about that. Jeremy, we'll go to you first. Sure. I mean, I think, you know, and I think Aaron characterized it appropriately, those things are, you know, their limitations on what can be done and how well it can be done, particularly at the community level. And I think that's part of the story here is if, if all these places were the same, had the same hazards and risks, and were subject to the same sets of impacts, it would be easier to look for that magical one size fits all or scalable solution. But the truth is that, you know, there are, there's a lot of texture to those impacts and to the responses and the degree to which the communities are affected by some or all of them, and then also on the impacts to their food security and their livelihoods and so on. And so I think that, you know, you start to add up the requirements, the financial requirements of dealing with those problems, even developing the science that's capable of characterizing those nuances from community to community is an expensive proposition. And so, you know, we also then are faced with an environment and impacts that are changing rapidly enough that, you know, as soon as we've got elevation and shoreline characterization complete, we need to start again because it is eroding or changing. And so there's, there's also that element of needing to keep working on this, you never, you're never quite done. And you know, that's no, not necessarily any less true in other parts of the world, but the impacts are happening so quickly here. And the baseline information is so limited that it's difficult. So from a scientific perspective, you know, the ability to fund and coordinate a wide range of projects to address specifically those community needs rather than merely the scientific curiosity that would naturally move us forward in kind of a piecemeal fashion is, is a limitation. You also characterize the second one is sort of the capacity to be heard. You know, scientists are getting better at this over the decades but historically we attend conferences and work kind of in groups of our own our peers that focus, you know, on the same things that we study so we might go to a permafrost meeting if we're interested in permafrost or if we happen to have the good fortune to collaborate with people interested in permafrost thought impacts on the global carbon cycle it might get a little bit more diverse across disciplines and then maybe, you know, some of the larger conferences we have sessions that are devoted to the interdisciplinary aspects of this including the community impacts and what you do about it. And Aaron's right to point out that the dialogue has to be one of not just scientists, not just community members, not just funding agencies, not just policymakers, but really you need all aspects of that to fully appreciate the dimensions of the problem and then to imagine its solutions because none of them are just scientific technological community resilience or policy, they're pieces of all of that. And then third, you talked about a central authority to coordinate this the, the adaptation efforts, and especially our understanding of how you co produce science that's useful to the people who might benefit from it. That's evolving still, because these are still early days and how we do this there are you know decades of adaptation in some places and in many of these communities if you think about it in the long horizon millennia of adaptation to environmental variability. On the other hand, it's a new kind of environmental variability. There are new, a relatively new, you know, century older at the most century and a half dimensions of land ownership and regulation and management mandates from different agencies to things are relatively novel. And so, you know, you're still working at coordinating all of those different pieces of the adaptation puzzle. And so far it's been more, I don't know if you call it grassroots or bottom up but it's you know Aaron can probably comment better or Ray, but you have different entities coming to the table and carrying on the dialogues and trying to assemble the pieces from the bottom up, and the coordination happens in fits and starts rather than directed. And we've seen some good examples on, you know, some of the scientific challenges, but definitely there's there's room going forward to do more of that. Ray, what do you think what what do you make of the bear the three barriers that Aaron laid out. Pardon me. See, I'm sorry. What do you make of the three barriers that Aaron laid out and that Jeremy just commented on a lack of financial assistance to work with federal agencies lack of resources and venues for ideas to be heard and then sort of a lack of central authority to deal with some of these issues. I don't know if I can have as in depth and amazing answer to the question as Jeremy had, but we do see that there are definitely a lack of resources and a lack of central authority. And that's why we've seen tribes organizations partnership together to to address these issues because we're just not seeing it done on a larger scale. And unfortunately, you know, we're kind of by ourselves right now but again, coming together to offset costs share resources is kind of been the theme we've been doing to to address those issues on that. And we're having some success but and it comes down as a grassroots level as Jeremy was just saying but in order for this to work on a on a bigger level we're going to need the bigger players involved as well. Thanks. Um, Ray I'm going to go to you with this one and then we'll ask Aaron and Jeremy to join in but this is a question I was really looking forward to this as a topic was really looking forward to hearing about today. And it's a question that we've gotten online, and it's a question that that I've had since we've started and that is, all of you have mentioned to some degree, sort of the Alaskan traditional ecological knowledge that has been sort of, you know, part of communities in Alaska for generations centuries. And, you know, Aaron made the comment that it's increased but it hasn't gotten to where it needs to be. I'm wondering if you could. How do we do better how do we better include in the scientific and climate change adaptation conversation how do we do better including traditional ecological knowledge whether it's from, you know, Alaskan tribes, like the ones that you're working with Ray, or just generally speaking, how do we involve sort of a native perspective in sort of a scientific climate change adaptation conversation. Dan, I think that's a question tribes and tribes have been trying to figure out for a number of years, if you will. Right now though, it's kind of an exciting time for for tribes as we're seeing more of the work that we're doing that's had TK involved if you will sorry for there's a lot of people out there that will be upset with me using the words TK indigenous knowledge if you will traditional and indigenous knowledge. We're seeing that happen more and more over the last decade or so. And, and a lot of that has been with tribes being able to build their capacity to to implement western science and traditional knowledge, indigenous knowledge together while developing as much as what we've seen with sea tour or with what we at Lincoln and Hyde have been doing with the climate change adaptation plan. We're not just doing it on a tribal level but we're reaching out to several organizations, businesses, governments if you will to to get feedback on that and and it's bringing truth and light into the work that we are doing. As we've been saying this for a century or more. I mean, you were the one Aaron you were the kind of one who brought up the idea that it's increasing but isn't where it needs to be so sort of what do you have to say sort of in response to raise common and then Jeremy will go to you. Yeah, and I guess, again, not that funding is like the solution to everything. We have two pieces to it though and one of them is funding that you have institutions like the National Science Foundation and so for example there's a there's a letter circulating right now from a couple of tribes and a number of tribal nonprofits sort of basically highlighting a new program that the National Science Foundation rolled out here that the navigating the new Arctic proposal and they basically have some very specific recommendations for how NSF could literally fund kind of the the infrastructure is not the right word but I mean sort of like the the venues the the knowledge exchange opportunities between indigenous peoples and scientists so I think there literally is a funding piece to it. But I also feel like there's a there's an education there's sort of a Western science education that you know I was trained as a scientist and that was a while ago but I'm kind of guessing that it might not have changed that much that there's not a value put on sort of the experience that indigenous peoples have and the fact that they actually do have this knowledge and this information that you might have to spend science effort on they actually have this information. And so finding a way to kind of train or maybe retrain. You know our fellow scientists in how they can do this kind of co-production of knowledge work with indigenous communities is also needed. And Jeremy and from your perspective working with the federal government what what what's your perspective on this how how could the sort of the scientific community, you know do an errand just suggested and what race suggested and sort of embrace this knowledge base that's just sitting there, sort of, sort of demanding to be heard but for some reason not quite being heard yet. I've had the good fortune to work with a small handful of communities in Western Alaska and Southwestern Alaska and listen to the lifetime observations of some of the elders in those communities and then also the traditional knowledge or indigenous knowledge as Ray pointed out that that they carry forward from previous generations. And I've been frequently surprised both at the depth and quality of that information, especially on things like weather dynamics and how they've changed or currents in the ocean or in rivers river river and changes erosion changes things like that that are relevant to our discussion here. And the, my training initially was as a paleo ecologist and we're always looking for records of reliable information or proxies for processes that happened before there were instrumental observations. And we spend a lot of time understanding what that past environment looked like. And in many of these cases, I have, you know, access to and have benefited from information from direct observation that goes back before instrumentation was available on the West Coast of Alaska. So it provides a good context. I think it's a little bit counter to our training that we receive in in what we might think of as Western science are classical training in how to use both kinds of information simultaneously. And it's a challenge to do that. But if you go in with the idea that a scientist goes in with that those are plausible and that the observations that are made are things that get tested against future observations, then there's a very similar framework for how you proceed. And so I think there's a lot of value in using both kinds of information as we move forward and especially given that the future environment that we anticipate and even the current changes happening in many parts of Alaska exceed the kinds of Western science observations in the historical record or are different from those in the in the indigenous knowledge that are described that those changes often give us ideas for the things that we should be looking at before we know that there's a problem. Yeah, it's almost like they should it's not one or the other right it's both right. Exactly. It can be two things, if they say. So we have a lot of questions and we're not going to get to all of them, but thank you for everyone who's contributed to them. Here's one for you. And I know this is a controversial topic. It's one that we sort of wrestle with an ESI about how to talk about with our panelists with our experts with our community leaders but also with policymakers and that is the idea of relocating communities moving away from, you know, coastline areas that are at risk. And this came up, Ray, I think it came up in your slide, Jeremy's as well, for coastal communities that need to relocate. What does that actually look like in Alaska, I, Ray, I think you said it was very expensive. Or maybe that was Jeremy's sorry it was Howard 15 minutes ago perhaps but in addition to sort of the financial requirements of moving a community. You know, communities these these are communities that are so tied to the shoreline and specifically their coast right their portion of it. What does that look like how does that conversation even get started. And, you know, how do you mobilize sort of the resources the vast resources financial and otherwise that it takes to get that done. And anyone can pipe up but Ray since I've taken your slides in vain a couple times maybe we'll start with you and then we'll go to Aaron and the Jeremy. Well, so where I'm from in Southeast Alaska, you know, we're not really seeing a lot of the, the erosion, the, the community this the water taking communities away yet. So that's a hard one for me to answer, but it's still, you know, I'm kind of lost where I wanted to go with that there was something I wanted to say in regards to that I know that to start though I mean, again we'd have to look at Kivalina is just more off and see to that, you know, they knew it was coming but the rest of the state didn't have a plan for that. I just wanted to reiterate though to and this goes back to Jeremy's point of cost of having an adaptation plan could possibly reduce about 40% of, you know, the issues that may arise be it from village relocation community relocation to building, you know, maybe walls or something to the effect but I am bringing it back to the financial part of things just because I, you know, I've not experienced that have not dealt with that part in Southeast Alaska. Fortunately, but it still again doesn't mean that there's underlying issues on behalf of the draft or can't see or can't address my apologies for not answering that. No, not at all. And I should say that the person asked who asked that question also gave you a shout out for amazing plankton slides. So all it's all great. So, Aaron, why don't we go with you to you next. What does it take for some of these communities to, you know, to either get their heads around it or even just to actually make the move. Yeah, it's a speaking of another month long conversation. It's a huge question and topic. I mean, in it, I guess and so there's a whole bunch of pieces to it but I mean one of the guest kind of problems that I would point to is this kind of there isn't, there's there, there's some collaboration around it but there's a lot of competing mandates and sort of jurisdictions that basically make it this really prolonged and painful process. And I think, you know, some of these communities that's taken them 20 years to be able to move. And I think it's, it's in part that but it's also in part that there's sort of going back to this like, disrespecting sort of indigenous sovereignty and indigenous perspective that, you know, agencies have come in and be like, hey, we need to move you here. And here are the steps to do that. But there really, it isn't and I haven't participated in these conversations specifically. These are things I've put secondhand I suppose. So I just want to caveat that and it's not again not trying to detract from the efforts that have happened and the really hard and amazing work that has happened but I think there's a consistent thread here where it's entities from the outside coming to these communities and telling them what they need to do versus asking them to sort of lead that. So I'd offer that I don't I don't have a ton of experience in this arena. Jeremy. Yeah, I think Aaron's Aaron's got a great point there's a lot of dimensions to to that problem. And, you know, one of the, you know, from a western science perspective we often think of this in terms of the timing of impacts. There are, you know, prioritization lists of which communities are experiencing which impacts and at what rates and to try and understand the, the kind of the range of timing by which some of the communities would be impacted in the relatively near future, versus there would be a little further down the line in terms of time and and those those efforts proceed with, you know, engineering input and things like that and so there's there's a fair amount of capability in understanding the current threat. In terms of hazards and then what risks that imposes on infrastructure based on where it's built now. It doesn't do justice to the, you know, the potentially the risks to other aspects of resilience for for communities, which Aaron and Ray both touched on. I think the other thing that that we look at is that we we've talked around the idea of co production the idea of involving those who might use the information and science that get developed to make decisions and when you talk about something as as important and dire as relocation then you very much need the input of those who are affected by it and when you select sites for future locations. There's definitely the work that needs to go into understanding the potential impacts there is as well. So there's a whole lot of things all wrapped up in there that are somewhat sensitive because of the nature of the problem. And I think just from a Western science perspective, if we want to address it that way, we can think pretty carefully about the hazards that communities experience in the locations they exist now and those they might experience in the future based on future projections. But I think the much harder part of that is, is what does it actually mean in terms of community resilience that's much more difficult. Thanks. Um, we're going to we're going to end on time, but we're going to try to fit in a couple extra questions and no ESI is DC based and our audiences policymakers, Capitol Hill, and, and the agencies. As far as takeaways from our policy making audience today and Ray this question was originally asked of you so we'll start with you and then maybe we'll go to Aaron and Jeremy again. What is the, in terms of takeaways what is the most important thing for the federal government to realize about how it can interact with and support tribal adaptation planning efforts better. Is there a magic bullet or, you know, a shot shell of magic buckshot that you would like to see the federal government do a little bit better on and support the efforts that you all are trying to undertake. Let me start with the quote that Aaron has been saying for a little bit and that is, do I have about a month. I, there's a lot to say of what we what we need and I don't know if there's one magic bullet that addresses it but I know that. One thing I can say is with the start of what tribes and organizations are doing throughout Alaska throughout Southeast Alaska is to at least to be able to give the support and the resources that's going to be needed to address these long term, you know, short term issues if you will. As we're moving forward again with the adaptation planning I think having an adaptation plans allows us to see down the road of what we need to plan for. And I hope that in the future having that allows for more resources to be given to to the state of Alaska to tribes organizations that are looking to address these upcoming issues. Thanks and Aaron, what's your perspective on that what's the, what's your takeaway for for policymakers wondering how they can better support the efforts of coastal resilience and all. It's definitely hard to think of like sort of one thing but I will, but I tried well Ray was talking thank you Ray. And I do think that it goes back to this point of actually spending the time and being willing I also to kind of give up the power, if you will, to have real conversations with these communities and asking them what they need. I think it's really hard for agencies to sometimes set aside their, you know, these jurisdictions that they have but quite honestly don't fit a climate change system that's melting. So rapidly like this one to really set aside those mandates and those directives and figure out how they can help communities. I think that's the key. And Jeremy what, where do you hopeful to what what do you advise sort of a policymaking community, whether it's a federal policymaking community or others, you know, it's state regional policymaking in terms of how we can better support Alaska coast Alaska coastal resilience. On that I would, I would say that the, we in the scientific community are are working toward a better model for how we do this kind of work. We're acknowledging that co production of the science is a clear need, and that in many cases that means shifting the basis for an emphasis of our scientific work to the needs of communities and members of society, rather than just the intellectual curiosity that drives us to understand natural systems and the role of humans within them. And so it's a subtle shift in terms of vocabulary, it's a pretty radical shift in terms of how the members of the scientific community propose conduct and, and then communicate their work. And as we transition towards that in Alaska and really globally, I think that, you know, support for that shifting paradigm of how and why we do some of the science that we do not all of it there's clearly a role for basic science, and even applied science but this goes beyond that. And so for, you know, for scientists to have the latitude to work with communities and to, to do more interdisciplinary work with that nature is clearly needed. And while we're making strides and doing that from the ground up, also willingness to acknowledge the training programs that, you know, our scientists go through at the university level, and in federal agencies to accommodate that would be very, very helpful. Great. Thanks. We're going to sort of start wrapping it up. I just want to say thanks to everyone who send in questions. Most of what I asked came right from you so thank you very much for those suggestions. And actually, as I was thinking, we died, we kind of did come up with a magic bullet, and that is, we apparently need a month long briefing about Alaska Coastal resilience. If we could only have that. I don't know whether we do shifts like, I don't know, we'll have to figure that out. So, maybe, maybe that's what we'll shoot for but this was a tremendous presentation set of presentations. Thank you to all of you. I wish I could meet you in person but thanks so much for being remote, Jeremy, Ray and Aaron, wonderful presentations. If anyone missed any of the presentations that you heard today, or if you want to revisit them, everything is available online at esi.org. I hope you'll also take a moment to complete our survey. I think a slide will come up in a little while at the end of the, at the end of the briefing today with a survey link. Please take a moment. We really do value all the feedback. We want to do these even better. And so thanks everyone for taking a moment to do that. You might have noticed that today's briefing looked a little different if you came to our briefing miniseries last week it looked like a zoom meeting. This looks different and that's because we have the support of a wonderful guy named Troy, he's our videographer, and he does all of our AV work at all of our briefings you've probably seen him in the back of our in person briefings, and he was incredibly helpful, bringing you this this new format and I think it looked great. I think it sounded great. And so thanks very much to Troy. Thanks also to Armory, Amber, Anna, Ellen, Daniel, Brian, Sidney, everybody at ESI who helped put this on today, great briefing. Once again, lastplug EESI.org, please send it from our newsletter. And, you know, again, Jeremy, Ray and Aaron, thank you so much for joining us today. I hope you all take care and stay healthy. And I hope we'll have a chance to do a month long briefing sometime in the near future. So thanks so much and have a great afternoon.