 the room. So I'm Alex Ruyan again. I'm going to talk a little bit about what we did within the IPCC. One of the whole motivations for this meeting is to take all of this effort that Rosh just outlined. There was a huge amount of administrative, collaborative, other investments that were made in terms of understanding and building frameworks so that we could do this assessment. And the authors I think were just kind of brimming over so many things that we wanted to share with the community about what we'd learned in this process. That was the motivation for this workshop. So I'm going to in many ways focus on kind of how Working Group One made new findings and the frameworks we used to get there. But in general we were tasked with going much further in connecting the dots between human actions and the observed changes in average and extreme climate conditions. So to make sure that we could follow the pathway all the way from the physical science information down to the things that matter to people and nature. There was therefore a new emphasis on regional climate changes and actionable climate information. That means we had to bring information down to the regional level, make it more targeted towards the systems that we care about, and apply these clear confidence levels so that the information could be used. And of course Working Group One, that physical climate science basis is just the start of a much larger and more complex process by which we understand not just the physical changes, but the vulnerability, the exposure, the risk, and the solution spaces of climate change. So we very much understand that that the climate information is the start of a bigger process. So if we kind of take a big step back, I see my titles have been blocked a little bit by the Zoom links here. But from a very kind of broad standpoint, we know that there's climate phenomena out there. There's climate changes, climate information. We also know that the systems themselves are vulnerable and exposed. And somewhere these things come together so that stakeholders and other decision makers can actually make their decisions. I think many of you in the room come from that community. When we actually try to figure out how do we do it, we actually kind of come from the other direction. We think about what are the risks or the benefits of climate shifts or climate changes. To understand that, we have to trace back and think about the actual hazardous conditions or maybe even boons, things that could be beneficial in terms of conditions. And then this brings us back to the climate phenomenon. We realize that not every single piece of climate information is actionable. Climate scientists talk about upper atmosphere vorticity, upper atmosphere winds, other things like that. That might not be useful for you as a farmer on the ground. So we want to select the specific set of information from the climate system that drives impacts. So this is motivating a new term that we call climatic impact drivers. And this is a framework that was developed within the IPCC in this last assessment, where a climatic impact driver is a climate condition that directly affects elements of society or ecosystems. Climatic impact drivers and their changes can lead to positive, negative, or inconsequential outcomes or some mixture of all of those. So this basically means we are selecting from all the climate information that is out there the specific elements that we know drive changes in the systems that we care about. That allows us to focus and carry the climate information as far as a climate scientist can do on their own. Bring it to the point where we really now are asking the questions about these arrows, these linkages into the systems themselves, so that we can understand whether that shift is actually hazardous or not. It might be hazardous for the farmers, but not hazardous for the people in the cities. Who knows how it might work. But we have to track that information, answer those questions, and collaborate across these previous disciplinary boundaries. So we're going to use this term a lot, the CID, climatic impact driver. This is one of those definitions we hope everybody will come out of this workshop more comfortable with. And another thing that's maybe important to note here is that these are really one part of many types of impact drivers. We're fully aware that there are things causing impacts, changes in your systems that are not just from the climate system. So we can think of many non-climatic impact drivers. Could be a volcano. It could be some kind of technological revolution. It could be a socioeconomic change. Any of these things can drive. But here, of course, being climate focused, we want to look at these climatic sides. So of that huge amount of climate information out there, we sought about organizing into particular categories of information that will allow us to kind of get a practical approach on how we attack climate change and climate information. So these are many different types of climatic impact drivers. We've organized them into these broad types around heat and cold, generally related to temperature, wet and dry, wind, snow and ice, some other things that are like chemistry and radiation, coastal and open ocean. So some of you may immediately move your eyes to one part of this diagram here because you know that your system, you know, if you're an open ocean fishery, you're going to be looking on the right. If you're agriculture, you might have been attracted to the wet and dry. Who knows how you're doing this. But one of the things we want you to do is look across this whole system because many times people are hyper focused on certain pieces of information or only certain pieces of information are available and we need to look across the whole spectrum. So we'll go into these over the course of the workshop. I'm not going to read everyone now. But I want you to notice again, if you remember the definition here, we're looking not just at, we're not just looking at the average conditions or extreme conditions. It's a mixture of both of these. So one of the things we can do with this same set of climatic impact drivers is we can cross list them with different systems that we might be responsible for. So I'm an agriculture person like I said. So I cross listed this with the major systems that were identified in working group two around food systems. So there's kind of crop systems, row crops, livestock and pasture systems, forestry and fisheries and aquaculture systems. So for each of these rows, we've asked how important are these different pieces of climate information? And the way we've determined that is by looking in the literature and finding out which studies are noting specific responses. So for example, cropping systems, if we imagine a maize field, a cornfield out there, it's going to respond to the average air temperature, the mean air temperature, but it'll also respond to extreme heat. And the biophysical processes between the average temperature and the extreme temperatures are actually different and require different types of management, different types of adaptation. And you can go across the board here and see many, many different types of climate information are relevant. And this is one of the big notices here. Each climate factor can affect multiple sectors if we go down here, but also that each sector is affected by multiple climate changes. And by tracking this information, we cannot actually game plan how we understand and plan for climate change. We can also take these broad categories and develop specific indices, specific analyses that help us understand threats. So for example, when we talked to people in the health community, they told us to look at particular combinations of heat and humidity that could be important for human tolerance of outdoor agricultural laborers, construction workers, things like that. And we were able to develop an index under that heat CID that allows us to look out into the future at impacts. We'll get more into this in the health day. But what I wanted to point out here is that we are interested in changes not just in the total temperature, but the intensity, the frequency, the duration, the seasonal timing of events can be very important. And also the spatial extent. Even one day at an extreme temperature in a place that's never experienced it before can be devastating. Just maybe another way of thinking about this, I'm going to skip this because of time here, but there are examples and we'll make these slides available if you want to see what we're really talking about when we're talking about intensity. If the current peak gets to here and under climate change it gets higher, we want to know about it. But we might also look at the duration. How long does an event last? Or the seasonal timing if something is coming earlier in the year that could be very important for agricultural development. So for every one of these we can of course also elaborate in terms of the specific metrics that we might look at. So we have definitions for each of these. There was a paper that we published last year that defined each of these climatic impact driver terms very clearly. You'll notice for example we separate hydrological drought, which is availability of water resources from agricultural and ecological drought, which is more about the soil moisture availability for agricultural and ecological processes. You can read about those definitions, but also recognize that we have many different metrics that we can look at. And one of the goals for this week is to encourage everybody to figure out what metrics are most useful for what you need to do and what research might be needed to better pin down what thresholds and operational ranges we need. So what you'll see if you go into the IPCC reports is we have many assessments of the changes in each of these climatic impact drivers in each region of the world. And in many cases we're talking about very broad areas. This is the Eastern North America region, which includes much of the Eastern US and Canada. So if we follow that same row here we can see what is the change in mean air temperature according to the literature. And what is the change in extreme heat all the way across the board. And this is a combination of the strength of the changes, the confidence and the certainty in what we see. So there's a lot of material here. I would encourage you to go look at that IPCC chapter 12 and the Atlas to find your own region as a starting point of what you might see. So just to summarize before I turn over to Erica, the bottom line here is that to produce relevant climate information for impacts and risk assessment, we need to identify the types of climate conditions that actually drive responses in the things that we care about. They are going to be contextual. We can't make universal judgments about whether things are hazardous or beneficial. So we can't say that increasing temperature is a hazard. It depends on where and what you are talking about. To do this, of course, climate scientists have to work closely with stakeholders and expert partners to determine those metrics and thresholds. And then we need to close these gaps and recognize the strengths and weaknesses in systems climate risk understanding. And I have just this final figure here because this is how in my own head I think about this. There is this fire hose of climate information out there. So many data sets, so many models, so many different people talking about it. But what we need to do is figure out how to draw out the important streams and make some real decisions. Thanks.