 Good morning, or good afternoon, good evening, wherever you might be. I'd like to welcome everyone to today's event, the nexus of climate change, fragility, and peace building. My name is Joe Hewitt, and I'm the Vice President for Policy, Learning, and Strategy at the United States Institute of Peace. The U.S. Institute of Peace, if you're not familiar with our organization, is a national, nonpartisan, independent institute founded by Congress and dedicated to the proposition that a world without violent conflict is possible, practical, and essential for U.S. and global security. I'd like to start by saying first, we are very pleased for the opportunity to partner with the Wilson Center to bring you today's event. The Wilson Center, chartered by Congress in 1968 as the official memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, is a nonpartisan forum for tackling global issues through independent research and open dialogue to inform actionable ideas for the policy community. Today's discussion builds on a foundation of work that both the Wilson Center and the U.S. IP have steadily deepened and strengthened over many years. The Wilson Center, through the extraordinary decade-long work of its environmental change and security program on climate fragility connections, and U.S. IP, through its work to advance research, policy recommendations, and field practice to prevent and resolve violent conflict. At U.S. IP, we are fully committed to supporting implementation of the Global Fragility Act, an ambitious law that, if implemented robustly, will improve the coherence and effectiveness of USG peacebuilding and stabilization policy in vulnerable countries. Addressing the link between climate, conflict, and environment is a critical piece of the new USG framework for addressing fragility. And as the Biden administration scales up its efforts to center climate change in its foreign policy and national security agendas, it's going to be essential to consider the linkages between climate action and opportunities to build peace. I am delighted to share that, in the last few months, the U.S. Institute of Peace has begun building its own portfolio focused on those linkages, those linkages between climate, environment, conflict, and peacebuilding, an effort that senior advisor Tegan Blaine is currently leading. We hope that today's conversation will be the first of many to bring together people and organizations working across disciplines on the complex and increasingly intertwined risks posed by climate, environment, and conflict. Before we begin our program, I really want to express my gratitude to the Wilson Center, the Council on Foreign Relations, the Alliance for Peacebuilding, Mercy Corps, and the Center for Climate and Security for their tremendous partnership on this agenda. We really look forward to continuing this work with our partners into the future. So now I'd like to hand things over to Cynthia Brady, who will introduce today's speakers and moderate today's event. Cynthia is currently a global fellow at the Wilson Center. Before coming to the Wilson Center, she worked with USAID on peacebuilding and resilience, and with the State Department on climate change. In fact, while we were both at USAID, she and I worked closely together to develop some of the agency's first analytic tools on climate, fragility, and peacebuilding. That work, my God, 10 years ago helped us learn a lot about what we worked, what worked, what didn't work, and what was really needed to help the development field move forward on these issues. So today's conversation will be another really important step in that continued learning process. And so with that, let's now turn to Cynthia. Cynthia, over to you. Thanks very much, Joe. Good morning, everyone. It's a real pleasure to be here with you today. As you know, with Earth Day just over a week away and a new US administration that is energetically undertaking a very ambitious climate agenda, it really feels like we're on the precipice of something. Environmental change is on everyone's radar. The huge attendance at this virtual event this morning indicates just how many of us around the world are interested and I think excited about the possibilities. There are very real opportunities on the horizon for the Biden administration and for all of us here today to innovate on our own and in support of the new administration. To that end, today we are going to focus on how to build better bridges between the realms of climate, fragility, and peacebuilding. It's definitely time to take action. And today we hope to walk away with some clear advice and recommendations resulting from the conversation with the experts. Interdisciplinary thinking, adaptation, and creativity will be the hallmarks of how we get this done, which means we have to lean across some nontraditional lines of thinking and operating in order to work together in new ways. We are very fortunate to have the perspectives of the four panelists joining us today. Together, they are honestly an absolute powerhouse of knowledge and experience. And together they're an example of how we can harness sectoral policy expertise and field expertise to work together more effectively across different communities of practice than also across different organizational mandates. I'm going to introduce, sorry, I will introduce you to our awesome panelists in just a minute. But first I wanted to say a few quick words about framing for today's conversation. The Biden administration has made climate change central to its foreign policy and its national security agenda. This is clearly a welcome and a critical step. But there's a component of that agenda that so far remains pretty glaringly unaddressed. And that's peace building. Not just conflict risk avoidance, but true peace building. Many of the countries around the world that are most affected by fragility and conflict are the same places where we face the steepest climate-related challenges. Well, that's a daunting reality. There's also an opportunity there, and one we cannot afford to miss by staying in technical silos of work. We should be seeking opportunities to explicitly integrate attention to climate change into the peace building agenda at the same time that we are elevating attention to peace building priorities into the climate agenda. These are not separate agendas in the real world where countries can be affected simultaneously by climate change, conflict, famines, pandemics, on and on. Clearly the vulnerabilities are mutually reinforcing, and some of the solutions may be mutually reinforcing as well. I think it helps to put ourselves into a systems thinking mindset. Imagine risk and opportunity pathways that are intersecting. As we explore these issues this morning, I'd like to consciously shift the narrative to one of climate as a risk multiplier rather than a threat multiplier. We want to move beyond framing climate as a traditional security issue. We should be thinking about the ways in which climate affects social, political, and economic factors like social cohesion, livelihood security, governance, and resilience. Framing the conversation less around causality and more around potential risk pathways also highlights that both climate change and fragility are actually dynamic systems they can interact with and influence one another. And it's not always in expected ways. There's never going to be a simple policy solution to these complex types of challenges, but understanding the specific risk pathways between things like fragility and climate. For example, resource competition, food insecurity, extreme weather events, livelihood insecurity, and migration, and the unintended effects of climate policies and programs helps us think about how to better integrate different areas of our engagement and to figure out where the best opportunities might lie to reduce vulnerability and also to shore up resilience in the face of a range of shocks and stresses that may occur in a particular country context. Ensuring that we're always trying to understand the local context of conflict and fragility is an essential component of that picture. The ability of institutions of governance to manage these political, economic, and social processes can impact whether a population becomes more or less vulnerable to the risks of climate that it faces. We know from early efforts to integrate climate change and peacebuilding outcomes, which the panelists are going to share with us today, that well-designed climate action can foster collaboration and serve to promote peace. And strategic investments in peacebuilding can absolutely yield improved climate resilience. But it's not going to happen without mindful intervention. It won't happen without bringing development, diplomacy, defense, and intelligence perspectives to the table together. And it won't happen if we don't diagnose problems more holistically and develop policy and programming solutions that are more comprehensive and integrated. It won't happen if we don't actually invest in a shared peacebuilding and climate resilience agenda. So let's get to it. Let me introduce our speakers this morning. I'll start with Dina Esposito. Dina is the vice president for technical leadership at Mercy Corps, where she oversees a large team of subject matter experts, including a team working on resilience, peacebuilding, and climate change. Prior to joining Mercy Corps at USA, Dina served as the director for Food for Peace and the acting deputy assistant administrator for the Bureau for Democracy Conflict and Monetary Assistance. Dina has well over 25 years of experience working on all of these issues, humanitarian assistance, food security, post-conflict reconstruction. She's worked for state and aid. She's worked in Ethiopia and Kenya, where she focused on peacebuilding and governance. And very relevant for today, Mercy Corps co-leads with the Alliance for Peacebuilding, the GFA Coalition that worked for passage of the law and advocates for its implementation. Our next absolutely amazing panelist is Alice Hill. Alice is a senior fellow for climate policy at the Council on Foreign Relations. She previously served as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for resilience at the National Security Council staff. Earlier in her career, she was a judge and a prosecutor in Los Angeles, California. Alice has published extensively and co-authored the book, Building a Resilient Tomorrow, Preparing for the Coming Climate Disruption. And I commend to all of you, all of Alice's publications. The next panelist, Liz Hume. Liz is the acting president and CEO at the Alliance for Peacebuilding. She's a conflict expert with more than 20 years of experience and she has extensive experience in policy and advocacy. She has overseen enormous and complex peacebuilding programs in conflict-affected and fragile states spanning from Asia to Eastern Europe and Africa. Prior to joining the Alliance for Peacebuilding, Liz held a number of positions inside and outside of the U.S. government and both in the United States as well as overseas. And it's been under Liz's leadership that AFP has been a leader of the GFA Coalition with Mercy Corps. Our final amazing panelist whom I look forward to hearing from today is Erin Sikorsky. Erin is the deputy director of the Center for Climate and Security and she's the director of the International Military Council on Climate and Security. Previously, she served as the deputy director of the Strategic Futures Group at the National Intelligence Council. She co-authored the Quadrennial Global Trends Report and led the U.S. intelligence community as environmental and climate security analysis. She's also the founding chair of the Climate Security Advisory Council. Thank you deeply to all of our panelists for being willing to join us today. Each one of you has just an absolutely incredible amount of experience working on these issues from lots of different perspectives and I know that today we're gonna have a really helpful conversation about integrating some of that work across these shared spaces. I'm going to begin the conversation today with a series of directed questions for each panelist and then we'll have an opportunity for the panel to engage with one another in a more fluid discussion around these issues. I'll be sure to reserve some time at the end of this session for questions and answers from the audience. So please feel free to chat your questions at any point in the discussion in the chat box below this video. It would be very helpful if you would indicate your name and title and affiliation with your submitted question. I'm going to move my screen around so I can see everybody well. All right, so let's jump into this conversation. My dear friend Liz who, yeah, I'm gonna just start with you Liz. I'm hoping that you can help us get a sense of the peace building, the fragility space and we'll talk about the GFA also. The Global Fragility Act I think is on everyone's mind but I would also like to hear from you about kind of the larger peace building space. So let me start with a specific question for you. What are some of the key issues that you think are influencing the conflict and peace building community of practice today? And as we think about integrating climate change into the peace building agenda and peace building into the climate agenda, what do you see as some of the critical priorities in the coming months and where do you see some of the greatest opportunities? Over to you. Okay, well, I wanna start by saying thank you to Cynthia because I think, I'm not sure everybody knows this but Cynthia from the early 2000s has been working in the US government and pushing this agenda sometimes single-handedly and she really is one of the foremost experts on this issue. So we can't thank you enough, Cynthia, for all your amazing work as well. But I wanna start and go back to kind of get us on the same page. And one of the things you said, Cynthia, is that we talk about climate change as a threat multiplier. Let's get out of that space and talk more about how to solve the problem. But the problem is, I don't think everyone understands that we have a violent conflict problem right now globally. Since 2010, the number of major armed conflicts have tripled and just to give you kind of a sense of what this is, in 2019 alone, one barometer counted 196 violent conflicts, 38 of them either full scale or limited wars. And we know once a country experiences violent conflict, it's highly to erupt again. In 2020, nearly 168 million people needed humanitarian assistance and protection. That's one out of 45 people. We know there's more than 80 million people who have been forcibly displaced globally and we haven't seen these figures since World War II. So war is development in reverse, we know that. But we also know right now, we're in the midst of a global pandemic. And what AFP has been saying is this is stabilization in reverse. And in mid 2020, a study found that the pandemic's devastating impacts could plunge 13 more countries into conflict through 2022, which is a 56% increase compared to pre-COVID forecasts. And this report predicted that an additional 35 countries would experience instability between 2020 and 2022. And this is more than any other point in the past 30 years. It's not just a health crisis, we're seeing black backsliding in democracy, violent extremists are taking advantage of it. But this is our new baseline now. So this is where we're starting from. And to make matters worse, climate change we know it's a threat multiplier for conflict-affected and fragile states. But there's articles out there and research out there that people are still skeptical about this. So we do still have to make the case and the point that we know climate change is a threat multiplier. It is impacting conflicts, it is making them worse. And we also have data that shows, for example, that the Darfur conflict is considered the first entirely climate change driven conflict. So we do have some of that data, but we still have people that are not sure about that. So what do we know? We know the World Bank estimates that the effects of climate change could push an additional 100 million people below the poverty line. We know that there are clashes over land, natural resources, access to critical services caused by the effects of climate change, and it is exacerbating existing social, economic and environmental tensions in fragile and conflict-affected states. And I think one of the scariest things is that some of the studies show that just a half a degree Celsius, another degree temperature change is associated with, will be associated with 10 to 20% height and risk of deadly conflict. So when we were thinking about the Global Fertility Act, this is going back into 2015, we were saying we have a conflict problem. And what we are doing is not working. Our foreign assistance, our diplomacy is not working. And so what do we need to do about that? We need to change the way that we're working. The peace-building field though has its own issues. We have not done a great job at evaluating our work quantitatively, of not publishing our work, of not sharing our work, we're not great sharers. And so that has had a significant impact in pushing our field forward and in a sense, really being taken seriously. I mean, some people argue that we're still not even a field. So I think that's a really important point. And then the rise of these armed conflicts puts these fragile countries in this, again, this vicious cycle as crucial climate change adaptation goals, they become impossible to achieve. It's just trapped in this cycle. So what do we know from before? We know that President Obama's Global Climate Action, which was first adopted in 2013, it proposed this reduction in carbon dioxide emissions, preserving forests. We know that President Trump canceled this on day one of his presidency. And fortunately, President Biden has really committed to fully integrate this climate change into US-born policy and our national security strategies. But as Cynthia has rightly said, these are great words on a paper, but what do they mean in practice? And what that really means is we have to elevate our climate offices, both at USAID and state and have it be a critical piece of our NSE strategies. Having former Secretary of State John Kerry serve as the special presidential envoy on climate, this is huge because this is the highest ranking position that has been devoted to this issue. But our knowledge, our technical assistance has been decimated within the US government, especially over the last four years. That has to be incredibly and very fast rebuilt. We were very pleased to see that the president's skinny budget that was just released had a 2.5 billion increase for international climate programs and 690 million for climate mitigation and adaptation. But what's one of the biggest issues we have? We have siloed programs and the peace building field has not done a great job again integrating our work throughout other sectors. And pre-COVID, we sat down and we talked to, we looked at DRC and Ebola and said, what did we do wrong? Well, how did we not integrate better into the system, the peace building field? And what we were told is we make our work at a PhD level. We're constantly beating up on other sectors and telling them when they've done something wrong, but we don't actually tell them how to do it and how do we integrate? So one of the key pieces of the GFA that we worked really hard to get in is requiring this integration of humanitarian prevention and development programs. Call it the triple nexus, call it, there's different terms out there, whatever it is, we have to do it. So if their climate programs, for example, they don't just cause harm, but they're also, can promote conflict prevention and stability. So this is really, I think the critical point in terms of how we are going to integrate climate change, it's going to require a couple of things. This increased focus on climate mitigation and adaptation to address climate change as a threat multiplier. The three big polluters, the US, India and China are not going to reduce our emissions in the next 10 years. We know it's going to get worse before it can possibly get better. We're going to see increased food insecurity, severe droughts, floods, waterborne diseases. And we need to understand how do we mitigate and adapt those? Again, working with the peace building fields and the climate change programs. We have to incorporate a risk-reducing conflict prevention programs to ensure these climatic hazards do not exacerbate violent conflict. Going back to the data we talked about. And again, the most important piece is for once and for all we have to integrate conflict, governance, humanitarian programs, peace building to really look at risk, but also adaptation. Because we know climate change is coming and we do know it is acting as a threat multiplier. So those are really, I think some of the key points understanding we have a conflict problem, we know climate change is part of it. We have a decreasing conflict and how we have to integrate these programs in ways that we can do it. Liz, that was a fantastic opening. Thank you so much. I suspect that there is a pretty wide variety of people participating on today's call that are working in different components of this nexus of climate, peace building and fragility. So I think the background that you provided for kind of the lay of the land on conflict and fragility is really helpful for those who may not be in that space to think about what, for example, as you mentioned these massive budgets for climate adaptation and mitigation that will be distributed around the world. What does that look like when intermixed with this context of countries who are already mired in conflict and fragility and who as you pointed out may actually be at an increasing risk of those dynamics and that will be coupled with the impacts of climate change that they need to absorb as well as some of the outside interventions including financing in those places. Thank you for laying out those key issues. And before I let you go, let me just follow up with another quick question. If you have any thoughts about the actual implementation of the Global Fragility Act and the strategy at this time and opportunities to best leverage the Biden administration's climate priorities in that process. So just really quickly as, you know, I live and breathe the GFA but I need to remember that not everybody else does. So just to give you a quick overview of it is that it was passed in December, 2019. And the goal was to fund to develop and test new ways of reducing and even preventing violent conflict. The GFA must be piloted in at least five countries regions two of which will be prevention focused. So, you know, again, this was being done during the Trump administration and climate change didn't, it wasn't at the forefront of this. You'll find it in the strategy, you'll find it sprinkled in a little bit but it wasn't in the forefront of the thinking. And so that does need to change pretty significantly. There is a strategy that was released last December. You know, we don't, we think it's a great baseline strategy but we don't, and we don't want it completely reopened but we do want some changes and at some revisions. And we've made it clear that climate change is one of those that we wanna see more highlighted in that strategy. And country selection hasn't been done yet. So some of these timelines are lagging but what we would also like to see when countries are selected or regions that climate be part of at least one or two of them. Remembering that some countries are gonna do better under climate change. So not all, you know, just because you don't go into a country or a region and say, what's the climate change problem? Because there might not be one there. And the reason why that's important is because the GFA is really about testing and applying how we're working and how we're working differently. And then allowing us to align other countries and strategies. It's not a point to say, okay, we're gonna wait for 10 years and then start applying some of these lessons learned. So I think that that's really an important piece of the GFA. And again, whether it's climate change or any, you know, our programming, our programming is just incredibly siloed. And that's one of the areas where the peacebuilding community has to start putting out ways that other sectors can be looking at these issues. If they don't wanna call it conflict, that's okay. Call it risk, we're okay with that. But looking at how we adapt programs, you know, we are stuck in the short-term five-year strategies, programmatic work plans. They're difficult, time-consuming to modify, you know, and the GFA would really require US foreign assistance to be adaptive and flexible over this 10-year period. Learning from what's working, what's not working, and more importantly, having an overarching strategy. If you go into a country strategy right now, you know, it talks about, you know, moving up peace and stability and prosperity and the middle, you know, but it doesn't say, are we reducing violent conflict? Are we actually creating a more sustainable peace? And how are we measuring that? And that is the key to the GFA. It's this overarching strategy. It's looking at longer-term goals, and it's saying, how are all these programs working together? How are we leveraging each other so that an education program isn't just an education program. And a climate change program wouldn't just be a climate change program. But at the same time, the peace-building field has to be clear about what those indicators are, how they would do it. We cannot turn it into a PhD program. I mean, that was one of the major criticisms from the health community under the DRC Ebola. And we have to stop beating up on other programs and just telling them what they're doing wrong. And again, this evidence piece. So while these concepts seem pretty obvious, they would revolutionize US foreign assistance. But we also have to look at, you know, the earmarks, the notwithstanding authorities. And this is all what's required in our report that needs to be delivered to Congress, which also wasn't done under the previous administration. So, you know, looking at the GFA, it's not just about more money, although that's important. Each country would need about $10 million of funding that is not allocated or earmarked to a specific program. And diplomacy is a big piece of it, how we're working with other multilaterals and bilateral donors. So these are all, you know, pieces of the GFA. Timelines need to be re-established. It needs to be fully funded. Climate has to be a big piece of it. And we have to look at these authorities, staffing, resources. So there's a lot to do, lots of timelines in there. And climate change has to be at the forefront. So I'll leave it at that and we can go back and talk more about the GFA. Thank you so much, Liz. Wow, so many great points in there. I'm going to pull out just a few. The last point you made about all the different authorities and funding streams, I'm sure Alice will have a lot to say about that experience. You talked a lot about data. And one of the things you mentioned in the context of GFA was partly a mismatch between traditional development programs having a shorter-term five-year time horizon and the need, which is articulated in the GFA for these longer-term time horizons. I suspect that Erin is going to have quite a bit to say about how that actually translates into the world of data management, trend forecasting, managing two entirely different, not only programming cycles, but data approaches and the world of climate change and the world of conflict and fragility are not neatly matched up when you try to find the variables and indicators and data points to put together and try to look at a problem more holistically. And you mentioned one other thing in there that will lead very nicely into our next panelist, Dina's world, which is that we constantly struggle with the siloing of programming, right? And it's within the communities of practice writ large, not just in the world of programming, but also in policy. And I know that Dina has worked in a variety of different organizations as well as a number of these different operational spaces and will probably have a lot to share with us and hopefully some suggestions as well as we look at blending climate change and peace-building more effectively about how to get beyond those silos and how to make some changes operationally and on the process side as well. So Liz, thank you very much for all of those great opening thoughts and all of the markers you laid down for us to discuss later in the conversation. I'm going to move now over to Dina and in terms of getting beyond siloed programming and moving towards integrated programming, Mercy Corps has done absolutely groundbreaking analytical and fieldwork at the nexus of peace-building climate and environment. There are not a lot of organizations like Mercy Corps that have that experience and have taken that approach. So we're very lucky to have the benefit of Dina's experience here. Dina, could you talk to us a little bit about what you and Mercy Corps have learned and not only the lessons from Mercy Corps but maybe also blending your experience with USAID and state and in the field where you were working on some of these issues very directly. And what do you think is most critical to move the integration of climate and peace-building forward as you look back on some of that experience? Thanks, Cynthia. Thank you to USIP and the Woodrow Wilson Center as well for hosting this conversation and inviting me and Mercy Corps to be part of it. And also just a real shout out to Liz as our partner in crime on the Global Fragility Act Coalition. It's been a tremendous group of some 65 organizations that have really been pushing hard for the passage of this legislation, which as she mentioned was passed with big bipartisan support, which was really welcomed back in 2019. Mercy Corps, for those of you who don't know, was an organization and nonprofit that works in some 40 countries, many of them that are characterized by fragility and crisis. So think places like Syria and Yemen, Ethiopia, Somalia, South Sudan, for example, Nigeria. We do have a very large peace-building portfolio. I think we have some 50 programs ongoing now around the world, but we are fundamentally an organization that works across these silos, as you say, humanitarian peace and development. We think that gives us a really unique vantage point and opportunity to integrate approaches in ways that not only meet immediate needs, but also begins to assess, understand, and respond to some of these underlying systemic issues that really perpetuate the conflict and fragility in the first place. So we do this by connecting all of our programs through this resilience lens that you mentioned. We think of resilience that can get a little wonky, but in a simple term, strengthening capacities of people and systems to cope and adapt to the shocks and stresses, the various risks that define fragile context. So ultimately they can continue on their development journey and secure a better future. And we think that by focusing on the resilience as an outcome rather than the stovepipes, we're looking beyond programming and projects to how do all of these things add up to delivering on the resilience agenda. We bring, it becomes very quickly, much more multidisciplinary. We're bringing a lot of different ideas to solve complex problems. And for those of you who are interested, we did just recently produce a brief on towards resilience and protracted crisis, which puts not only economic wellbeing, but peace at the very top. So all of these different activities contributing to an outcome, which includes peace, which I think is what we've been talking about here. But that's how we've come to look at the climate conflicts in Nexus, which is something we've explored in what we call strategic resilience assessments in our programming and our research. And what do we hear when we engage communities in some of the world's most fragile contexts? I mean, I've recently been to Nigeria and DRC and a number of these countries where we're working. And we hear communities bemoaning the fact that the weather is now so variable, unpredictable and extreme that they can't grow enough food to feed their families. We hear about this disillusionment with government, which cannot meet the needs of these communities that are increasingly stressed. We hear about young men who are willing to take increased risks to provide for their families when livelihood options drive up. And that includes taking up arms. We hear about a willingness to fight for resources, particularly land and water in places where land and water, productive land and water is increasingly scarce. So in short, it's as I think others have been describing from more of a data point of view, but we see it in the communities as well, that you've got climate change creating profound stress, which is potentially fueling conflict and definitely creating tensions. On the other hand, you've got climate and insecurity precluding much needed work in this area of climate adaptation, helping deal with climate risk, such that we're not able to minimize the impact of those big climate shocks we know are coming and then in turn creating more conflicts. So this unvirtuous cycle, if you will. So the first lesson that I have, and Cynthia, I think you stole my thunder in the original in your opening remarks, but really in many of these fragile places, it is not sufficient or appropriate to dress climate change and conflict as two disconnected global challenges. We need to look at the two together and in a much more intentional way. And you've asked me to share some stories from the mercy for world, and I can think of two where we've had important programs delivered big results, but which were those results mitigated by the failure to think about these two things at the same time. The first is in the Somalian or Nia region of Ethiopia, we were implementing a USAID flagship drought resilience program. And that was focused very heavily on livestock market system strengthening, range land management work, increasing access to Sharia compliant, innovative financial services. And by all accounts, we had tremendous success. We had the 2015 El Nino drought, which was a massive drought in 2015 on par with the drought of the 1980s in Ethiopia. And we found that the communities in these program areas were able to sustain their food security, even in the face of that enormous weather shock. But these programs were operating in highly contentious internal border areas where ethnic groups have historically both shared and clashed over resources. And this program did not have any peace components in it. And what we found was that eventually these cross border without cross border dialogues, which are signature to peace programming, resource management, resource sharing agreements, which are also signature peace programing that some of our results in this climate smart market work was diminished because of growing insecurity in that border area. And I am happy to say that the next round of those five year cycles of programming you mentioned was explicitly incorporating now peace programming, conflict mitigation in a program that had been exclusively focused on climate shock resilience, drought related resilience. So we're beginning to see some integration which is really positive. Conversely in Nigeria, we had the reverse. We had a standalone peace programming that was working in the middle belt with the of Nigeria to mitigate land conflicts between farmers and herders. And we have very strong impact evaluations which show that tensions have been reduced, trust has been improved, freedom of movement very notably expanded, but there is no work that's really addressing the underlying environmental challenges or governance issues that are creating the conflict in the first place. So you're really at that mitigating and managing and not preventing situation. And I will say that a lot of our research and our program right now is showing that a focus on governance work is the foundation for both improved climate adaptation and sustainable peace outcomes. And we are seeing some bright spots where USAID is making that natural resource management piece and governance connections in ways that we think will improve prospects for sustainable results, but that's an area that we're increasingly interested in looking at. My second lesson just relates to an observation that maybe some of our other panelists will also speak to. And that is that really today's peace building and climate work is focused on addressing near term shocks. So how do we improve land access today? How do we mitigate conflict over water resources today? We really don't have the analytical tools and approaches that are more future oriented understanding how are the choices we're making today going to reduce, how is it going to impact climate conflict risks of the future? So value chains for agriculture, does it make sense to promote maize production in Southern Malawi? What are the implications of that 10 years from now if the land simply wants to support that kind of agriculture? Are the number and location of water points that we're choosing really reflective of our understanding of long-term rainfall patterns and future groundwater availability? And then conversely on the peace side, do the fragility markers that we all look to, the global peace index or others, are they really considering what countries and governments will be least or best equipped to manage the future effects of climate change? How does that inform our thinking about fragility and our projections of fragility? Have we really thought about climate risk within that framework? So those are some of the things that I think we could be working on as a community to that climate and conflict experts could come together to have conversations around some of these issues. Thank you, Dina. It is indescribably helpful to have the examples of how these dynamics are actually playing out in particular country context. I think it helps give everybody a more clear sense of what we're talking about when we say impacts of climate change and when we say peace-building, how does it look between who and over what issues? And you really helped us see how those dynamics are, as we described, they are already in the real world, a shared agenda. We can choose to describe them in one set of terminology, but it doesn't separate them from influencing and interacting with one another in the real world that we all live in. Whether we're talking about Nigeria or Texas, we saw all of these dynamics right at home just over the last couple of months. I want to highlight two particular bullet points that you said that I wouldn't want us all to lose, and you said at the very beginning to think about resilience as an outcome. And I think that the work you were describing of Mercy Corps on the ground really drives that point home. Resilience is a condition that is reducing vulnerabilities to a variety of threats and allowing the affected communities, the affected people, the affected countries, this ability to adapt and absorb and respond, not just to a specific threat like drought or a specific threat like violence between pastoralists and herders. It's more than that, and we need to be thinking, again, as you said, about not just an immediate term, resiliency, but that longer term picture as well at the same time. The second thing that you said, and I know Liz Hume says all the time, and I suspect the other two would reiterate is governance, governance, governance can't get around it. We really need to keep that front and center. So as we all support the really invigorated agenda to focus on climate change, I think it is the job of all of us here to keep bringing that perspective to bear when we're talking about governance in places that are affected by fragility. We're talking about formal and informal institutions of governance and how they interact with the populations affected by the dynamics of climate change is just critically important. And I know that Mercy Corps and Alliance for Peace Buildings work on the Global Fragility Act and the strategy is going to help us bring that conversation forward. So Dina, before I let you go, last quick question moving you up real quick to that level of policy and thinking about the Global Fragility Act and strategy. You have so much experience at the most senior levels of policy in the US government trying to implement policies and legislation of that nature. Do you have any thoughts about really key opportunities that we have or risks that are relevant for this conversation? Thanks, thanks Cynthia. Well, I think as Liz has already said, the Global Fragility Act in itself is a huge opportunity. It comes at a time when it's never been more urgently needed, at a time when the president has laid out a climate agenda, when Samantha Power has called for a focus on fragility, on democratic backsliding and conflict. So it provides a new set of tools that the administration can really harness for its full agenda. So I think that's super exciting. I think that the other thing I like about that I see as an opportunity is this whole of government approach in the Global Fragility Act. We do spend a lot of time at Mercy Corps talking about getting out of silos and looking at the outcomes that you can get if you better integrate relief development and peace programming for a shared outcome of resilience, looking at whatever manner of risk is in that environment that would preclude us from reaching that and trying to address it. But fundamentally, if we don't harness the diplomatic engine and the security systems to have a mutually reinforcing agenda, there's not a technocratic solution to peace. And so I do think that that's a huge contribution of the law and a real opportunity for the Biden administrators to think about how do we get that right? So I'm really looking forward to how this unfolds. I do think that the long-term time horizon is also super important. I mean, we talk about five-year development programs but peace building programs have often been two or three years. So we really want to think about that 10-year program cycle if we can figure out how to move it in that direction but also the kind of research one can conduct in a 10-year period when you're focused on a dedicated agenda in a single country. And I will say, at least from Mercy Corps perspective, we think that the climate conflict research is still really nascent despite the fact that we're talking a lot about it. We don't have, there's a lot we really need to learn in terms of getting that research done and out there and building the evidence base around not only the nature of the problem but the nature of the solutions. And as you've said that both Mercy Corps and many others have been really actively working on laying out that research agenda which is available for people who want to see what some of our early thinking is on that. I think that we, the near-term risk is as Liz pointed out is that there were a whole series of timelines that have been missed already for the Global Fragility Act. So having the administration do the revisions but do them quickly and try to reset a timeline to raise expectations with Congress that the administration is committed and ready to move and ready to move and really wants to see how this Global Fragility Act can contribute and be reinforcing with the larger Biden agenda which I think is fantastic. In terms of my prior experiences and like where, what I think about when I think about what I've learned from other programs and what to bring to this, I would really call those working on both climate and peace programming to really think about the successes and challenges of the Obama era, Feed the Future Global Hunger Initiative. That was a whole of government initiative that received widespread growing support, sustained funding, consistent reauthorization of legislation and really significant results. And I think some of the factors that I see as having really contributed to the success of the Feed the Future Initiative, strong leadership, high level focus, the White House, the National Security Council, the State Department, USAID, all delivering on an important message that this was a high priority. It not only galvanized the interagency, but it galvanized the global community. And likewise, the Global Fragility Act is calling for a global engagement, a multi-stakeholder bringing the global south, bringing the global north together in a conversation about preventing violence, not just mitigating or managing it. The Feed the Future also had a very strong spokesperson in the USAID administration who was absolutely passionate about Feed the Future. The Global Hunger Agenda was active on the Hill, constantly talking to members of Congress about the initiative, engaging them about their concerns, their interests, what they wanted to see and reporting back regularly. And then finally, the really robust monitoring and evaluation and learning agenda there. The Feed the Future Initiative developed early on a set of shared metrics to try to codify the global impact of the work. They had impact evaluations, regular reporting to Congress that reaffirmed regularly the vital importance of the agenda and the ability of USG leadership to actually move that agenda forward, which had a mutually positive, reinforcing benefit that people want to do, to do more of it. So as part of the Global Fragility Act Coalition, there is already a strong group, external constituency, eager to support, advocate for, but engage in the process of figuring out better what works to prevent violent conflict and to help stabilize areas that are already in conflict. So I would really sort of mind that Feed the Future experience of the Obama administration as we think about how to successfully roll out the Global Fragility Act. Those are incredible nuggets of wisdom. As always, thank you, Dina. That was really helpful. You said one thing that I would pick up on before we turn over to Erin that, so you mentioned there's not a technocratic solution to peace and you pointed out the need to bring different government and non-governmental agencies and organizations together around that goal. Erin has spent a lot of her career getting different organizational voices around a table together to find shared meaning around the information that they all need to be able to take back to their respective organizational spaces and then apply. Dina, you also mentioned that from where you sit, the climate and conflict research is still extremely nascent. Erin has been as deep into that space as just about anybody else. So I look forward to hearing her perspective on that and maybe what could be better brought out of the spaces in which she's been working and maybe brought into other spaces, for example, in which Mercy Corps has been working. So thank you again to Dina and let me turn over to Erin with a question. Given your extensive work on trend forecasting and developing the analytics and tools that help us better integrate our work across the climate and security spaces, where do you see the most important opportunities and risks right now? Sure, thanks Cynthia. It's really nice to be here and it's nice to be out of the intelligence community where we just talk about problems a lot and actually talk about solutions with this panel of smart women today. So I have four opportunities I would highlight in this space and some of them have already been touched on so I'll keep it a little brief but the first opportunity and this one is perhaps self-evident is obviously the new leadership that you all have talked about. We've gone 180 from where we were with the Trump administration and you're seeing this leadership not just in the White House though but also from the Secretary of Defense up in New York from Ambassador Linda Thomas Greenfield just last week, the United States joined the Friends of Climate and Security at the UN. So you really see it across the whole of government. You see it in the executive order and the budget request. This is all great, it's necessary but I'd say it's not as Liz have already touched on. So what are the other opportunities? How do you take this leadership and turn it into something in this peace building and climate space? I think the second opportunity again is something you mentioned Cynthia is that we're in a moment where folks are asking new and better analytic questions I think around the links between climate and conflict and climate and fragility. We're not just asking this question is it a climate conflict? Is that the thing that's driving the conflict? That's the wrong question as you said Cynthia but instead we're looking how do climate affects shape, conflict and instability, fragility and prospects for peace building? And I like to think of it as layers, right? How do you add this climate change lens and layer onto conflict and onto fragile states to better understand the drivers? And I think the new global trends report actually from the National Intelligence Council which just came out last week sets this up really nicely. It names climate and environment issues as a structural force, right? That will be shaping the landscape over the next 10 to 20 years. Climate sets the parameters I think for everything in countries around the globe. And I would give, I think here it's useful to look at an example. I mean, Dina gave some great ones from their work on the ground but I've been thinking a lot about Ethiopia lately actually I've got a lot of experience in East Africa. I was chatting with someone last week and they were saying, well there's no climate linked to the conflict there. That's driven by ethnic and political issues, right? And this conversation I was like, no, absolutely climate plays a role. Is it the proximate cause of the current conflict? No, but is it shaping the landscape in the region and the eventual prospects for peace? Absolutely, climate scientists have documented their increasing temperatures, decreasing rainfall, increasing drought in the region due to climate change. The vast majority of the population relies on rain-fed agriculture. You've got low resilience and adaptive capacity, high sensitivity to shocks and variations which is a key component of what we see from climate change is that variability. You can't rely on past practices anymore for what's coming in the future. They also had the locust plague this year which was climate driven in large part. And so when you add all that to the mix you absolutely have to understand the links between climate and the conflict they're particularly in the peace building space, right? If once the conflict is over and we're moving forward how do you link in these climate issues? So those analytic questions are being asked which I think is really good. And I think that brings me to my third opportunity which is the new predictive capabilities that are being developed all the time that can help us understand how climate will be shaping these worlds. And as you all know, climate models are already very good and getting better and more precise. And there's a lot of work in the academic and think tank world to create risk tools and scenarios tools that can allow government practitioners and national security practitioners to use these models in their work. The Wilson Center has done some great work in this area. We've done work at Center for Climate and Security. There's a couple of European think tanks, the Hague Center for Strategic Studies and Adelphi in Germany that are building really robust models and tools to help policymakers understand the lakes which brings me to my fourth opportunity which is these tools are all great but you have to put them into policy, you have to put them into practice, right? And you need people within government that can understand and use them. And I think as we're talking about today the Global Fragility Act is one tool but there are others in the executive order in particular, you know, they've called for this climate risk assessment from the Pentagon to be then integrated into wargaming and the national defense strategy, the mainstreaming of climate risk across all agencies. I think those are great opportunities if policies makers take them and use them and hire people and bring people in the government and who can use these tools successfully which brings me to the risks. That was the second part of your question, right? And here again, similar to what other folks have said, remaining siloed. I would say not just siloed in the functional areas though but siloed from regional and country policies as well. And I saw this all the time in the intelligence community where the climate folks were over here and the people doing the analysis on the Middle East, they were over here and they didn't necessarily talk and you didn't have people on those Middle East teams that understood peace building and conflict or climate risks. So those two things need to be brought together. Also, another risk is remaining under resourced as others have talked about. And then finally, I would say a third risk is remaining focused on technical fixes but something other folks have talked about. But in the climate space, since we're talking about science and physical effects, we often look to these technical fixes without understanding the governance issues that have been brought up, trust in government, local dynamics, all of these things that are more intangibles but actually will make the difference as to whether things on the ground work out or not. And the last thing then I'll say on this too, sorry, one more thing is that I wanna make sure that when we frame these issues as security risks, we don't just see then military solutions. I think that's another place here, especially, it's great to have Secretary Austin and the Defense Department so focus on this issue, but we need to remember all of these other tools of government that we have on these issues. And just because it's a security risk, it doesn't mean that the military is the one that holds the solution. Oh, Erin, every time I hear you talk, I am enamored. You just took what was such an incredibly complex problem set and articulated it in a way that is completely understandable and accessible and you do that every time. It's amazing, thank you. I want to highlight a couple of things that you just said too before I follow up with another question. One, you mentioned that climate, this was coming out of the recent global trends report work that climate and environment are seen as a structural force that will be shaping everything. Because we are so focused on climate today, I wanted to pick that up for the benefit of everyone listening and remind us all that we are quite interested in environment, not just climate. And in Liz's remarks and Dana's remarks, we've already heard the specific dimensions of that. We're talking about land-to-neuron property rights. We're talking about livelihoods related to fisheries or to other specific natural resource-based sectors. These things are not all climate specific by any stretch of the imagination. So that was a really helpful thing to just bring into our vocabulary for today. You talked about sensitivity to shocks and variability and the reality of this governance question, right? To the extent that institutions can and cannot deal with variability, to the extent that the systems in which people live and work can adapt to variability, those things are so prescient with respect to climate change and the dynamics of change that it is introducing into these systems. Great point for us to keep a hold on. The last point you just mentioned as well, when we talk about security, we need to be cautious not to militarize the answers to that. I think Liz and Dina also spoke to this point and hopefully I did in the outset as well. I think it helps when we talk about national security or even just security to keep tagging on and human security to remind us of all of those other dimensions of both the challenge but then also the windows of opportunity for how you might be able to get at solutions, right? They don't live in one lane and that's a very helpful framing point for us to keep in mind. So here's another question for you. What, you talked about the improvement in some of our analytical questions and some of our analytical tools as well. In your view, what are actually some of the best data or tools that we have at our disposal in the climate community of practice that might be able to helpfully inform, for example, the implementation of the global fragility strategy or is there something specific that's really missing that you think would be necessary to help improve the cross integration of these things in a space like that policy space? Sure, it's a good question and I don't wanna oversell the predictive capabilities, right? Some of the challenges that Liz and Dina laid out, the timeline horizon and the precision in local regions is still a challenge, but like I said, it's getting better all the time and if you'll let me be a little nerdy for a minute, I think when you look at machine learning and big data capabilities, there's actually a lot of really exciting developments that are allowing some of these tools to become more precise. And I also think this is an area where the private sector is really ahead of government and there's, I mean, when you look at some of the risk work that insurance companies are doing now, I think we need to look to that and figure out how we bring that to government, but there's a couple of examples that I'm excited about in terms of the modeling. One is what's called large ensemble assessments where they're doing multiple runs of the same climate model using slightly different starting point conditions and doing this allows scientists to better predict the potential regional climate. And some cases it's still really large due to natural climate variability, so it's not particularly useful, but in other places it's becoming narrower and these large ensemble assessments because of big data capabilities are, you can do that. There's also a new generation, high resolution convection permitting model, sorry for the jargon, but this allows you to get more granular in the, to include convection events which are related to extreme weather. These are already used, these models are already used in weather forecasting, but now increases in supercomputing power means they're becoming more affordable for long-term climate projections. And there was actually a great article in carbon brief yesterday about this. I'm excited about these because they're allowing more precision and more regional specificity, but I think the more important question is the one we just talked about, how do you get these models and data into the hands of those who can use it for planning and how do you get those people to understand and be able to use these? That's the missing step in government. There's a couple opportunities from Congress in the past few years, they've passed in the defense authorization bill, this climate security advisory council, which I led before I left government, which was meant to link the intelligence community with climate scientists within government to make sure they were sharing information and trading best practices. There's also the creation of a new climate workshop at the national academies, which is supposed to do something similar. That's just getting off the ground. Of course, Congress passed these provisions without any funding behind them. So I think that's a challenge to make them really work. But I think if we can leverage tools like this, and I know Alice is gonna talk about the workforce issues, I know this is one of her main concerns, but you need scientific literacy within the national security community and figuring out how to best integrate and use these tools, because they're out there and they're getting better, but we need to bring them in to the bureaucracy. Thank you, Erin, and I have no doubt that you just introduced a whole bunch of ideas that there were a lot of people scrambling to write down that they had never heard of before. Thank you. And you're also right that our next and final panelist, Alice, has had to deal extensively and for many years with some of these challenges around how you ensure that the US government and the different actors around the table will have the access to the analytics that they need, to the information that they need, and then the skills and abilities to actually apply them and to work together. We are going to wrap up this panel, fortunately with Alice, who has been an incredible leader both inside and outside of the US government in thinking about the sort of broad dimensions of climate and resilience, many of which the first three panelists addressed today, but also in some additional and adjacent spaces. Alice, you have done a lot of work specifically on security risks, consequences, and responses associated with climate change, which again moves us, I think, into a really nice complimentary space from where Liz and Dina otherwise sit. Can you talk to us a little bit about why you see it as such a priority to integrate climate resilience and national security? And looking at the lay of the land today, where are the opportunities for the US government to make real progress on that? Well, thank you for that very kind introduction. It's such an honor to be on this panel with these superstars, including you, Cynthia, but really what a wealth of intelligence and insight perspective. So thank you, and I want to thank USIP as well as the Wilson Center. Just a delight to be able to join and learn today from everyone. Your question and the discussion put me back in 2009 when I had just joined the Department of Homeland Security. I was senior counselor to the secretary. Cynthia, you mentioned I was previously a judge and a prosecutor, so I had no background. And climate change, maybe some insecurity because I've been in criminal law, but not a great deal. I received an assignment, an assignment that I'm confident no one else at the Department of Homeland Security wanted. It was to create the first adaptation plan for the department as was ordered by President Obama in one of his early executive orders. So to do that, I didn't know enough about climate change to answer the question whether we even really needed an adaptation plan. So we assembled a task force with leading scientists and we have some unbelievable scientists, the ones that remain in the federal government that doing climate science, including and then resources in the Department of Defense and intelligence agency, we assembled a task force at DHS and asked ourselves the question, do we need to care about climate change in 2009? I mean, DHS was anti-terrorist security agency, 270,000 employees mostly focused on terrorism but also border responsibilities, Coast Guard, FEMA. And all of us listening to that evidence and it took quite a while, it took at least six, seven months of regular meetings. Each of us, despite some skepticism expressed initially, had what I call the aha moment where we realized that our climate is affecting everything. It will affect every human-made system, every choice where and how we live, how we grow our food, water access, everything is affected by climate change and then all of our natural systems are affected by climate change. And once we stepped back and looked at that, it was, wow, this changes our entire understanding of how we need to perform in these changed conditions. Since 2009, unfortunately, and on my observation, we still are at that starting point with many of our decision makers, including those that are currently in government and including some of those who are joining government now. If you look at the education system in the United States, it really has not ensured that we have a well-informed workforce on the issue of climate change. A 2016 survey of the core requirements of the 100 top U.S. news and world report colleges determined that a student graduating had less than a 20% chance of taking a single course on climate change. So when you walk into a room of career officials and political appointees, how do you know what level of there they have of climate change and the risks that oppose the threats that it poses? Maybe just what they saw on the media, probably likely just what they saw on the media. And as you've heard, climate change influences everything. It's a nuanced topic. It's a long-range topic that occurs over time. There are acute events, floods, heat extremes, and then there are these slow-moving earthquakes, not an earthquake, but a drought. It's like a slow-moving earthquake. It's so disruptive. But do they know that? And do they know that for the region that they're responsible for? When I was working in DHS, I was part of, had responsibility among my other responsibilities for the first wave of kids coming from the Northern Triangle, Guatemala, El Salvador, and Honduras. And the more taking what I learned about climate change, understanding some of the threats that those areas have from drought, coffee rust, food insecurity, and many other issues that are violence, extremism. I was pretty confident that climate change was contributing to that flow of kids. Not, it wasn't identified as a factor, but the fallout from climate impacts were causing more children to be on the move, often young boys, around 14 to 17. And now here we are again, and we've had that area suffered two back-to-back hurricanes. We know hurricanes are becoming stronger, bigger. And we're seeing huge flows again. And we need to get to understanding how do we help these countries better withstand and build resilience, but we need to make sure that the decision makers really understand what's at stake. And I'm not sure we can have entire confidence on that yet. So that would be my very first call-out for all of us is, and we should create common scenarios against which the federal government is planning for itself, including in President Biden's new, he did a similar executive order to what President, excuse me, what President Obama did, requiring all agencies to plan for climate change. But that just gets those agencies resilient. It really doesn't get to the heart of the issue is how do we have a resilient globe? How do we have a resilient country? And to do that, we need the whole government approach and we need to make sure that we have a national resilience strategy that will feed into conflict issues in our international work and domestic issues here. We're still a ways away from that. And I think the reason is that we still don't have uniform understanding of what's at stake. So we need to start at the beginning, in my opinion. Oh boy, start at the beginning. Alice, thank you very much for that perspective. And I wanted to follow up with a question that's specific to your experience, which you just referenced, at your experience at the NSD and the new executive order on climate change, which includes a reinstatement of the executive order on climate and national security, which you spearheaded the process of developing that under the last administration. And I know that that was not easy to get done. And I am quite sure that you have a lot of lessons for the current administration on what could be done better and differently to support the USG agencies and the partners of those USG agencies and to really help them coordinate better across the communities of practice in the way that they will need to do to support the implementation of the global fragility strategy. Yeah, could you just help us understand any lessons about the sort of process side of that that you would pass on to the current administration and maybe some risks that you see as well? Well, thank you. And I was honored to lead the development of the national security and climate change executive order under President Obama. And that order actually was not something that the national security advisor said, you must do. It really grew out of concern among those working on climate change that decision making for regions was not reflecting what we knew was ahead with climate change. And this was brought home by that groundbreaking work by Caitlin Weirall and Frank Fumia on Syria as well as others that we have a 1200 year drought which causes thousands of young men to migrate to cities. There isn't work available, unrest follows and there were many other contributing factors including mismanagement of water resources by the government. But we saw that migration of about 5 million people, how challenging that was for European allies and then wondering why are we focusing on these issues and in discussions with the intelligence community? It came back, there isn't a demand for those kind of requests. No one's asking us to do this kind of work on climate change, which again reflected in my opinion a lack of understanding of what was at stake and among policy makers and then the analysts are performing, doing analysis at the request of the policy makers ultimately. So there were gaps. So we attempted to work through that and develop the gaps. So I guess the couple of things I learned on that, the first meeting we had among the interagency, the crossed arms and the body language, everybody leaning back. We don't need any order on national security and climate change. So we worked through that, we did try and ran our exercises of trying to have them understand and think through each of these agencies, what do these impacts mean for you going forward over time? We got the 20 agencies that signed off on it to reach unanimity. So that's working through the education process, just getting people familiar with what's at stake. And you have to have them believing that this really matters before they're gonna move forward. That's just, and for an executive order like this, you need to have unanimity. You can't have one agency like State Department of Defense saying we don't need this. This isn't gonna work for us. We got to unanimity and here's just a small footnote. I'm working it up the chain higher up above me and I get back a request. We'd like you to run this IPCC or the PC, the DPC, which is the Deputy Principles Committee again because we did it and we had paper returns. Everybody said we love it, we're fine with it. There was skepticism. Really, people are signing off on this thing. So we ran it again. Again, everybody said, yes, we're ready to go, we want this. But it was a lesson to me that it's just not, it wasn't then and I'm not sure it is still now because we've seen many people depart from the federal government. I'm not sure now it's fully understood. I hope it is, but I think we all have to start with understanding when we're working through these systems and these bureaucracies that we start with people are and we need to make sure that they understand what it really is before we can move forward given how polarized in our current polling shows that this is a huge split depending on which party you belong to or you identify with if you're a Democrat by a high identification that climate change is a risk. If you're a Republican, it's a much lower identification. So knowing that we have both Democrats and Republicans working through the government, we need to make sure that we're sharing the science, the information in a way that helps people understand what's at stake. Yeah, thanks, Alice. I think developing that shared narrative to help actors among different agencies even conceptualize the same version of the problem is a really important place to start. And unfortunately, I think, yeah, we already need that to have happened. We need that to be done because this administration is already pushing for the now what, how, right? We all at the top have agreed what the challenges look like. And as we've discussed today, that's a really multi-dimensional nature of risk pathways and how they intersect. And now the government needs to move. It needs to start addressing those things. Yeah, it's not a small challenge given your experience. So thank you to all of you. Let me first ask having, unfortunately, this Zoom format is just not ideal for cultivating conversational dynamics. But I know that those people watching this at home have benefited enormously from listening to each one of your perspectives and hopefully have found the threads between them to be meaningful despite the challenges of this kind of weird panel format. So let me first ask whether having listened to one another, there is anything that one of you wanted to jump in on and highlight or further elaborate or make your own point related to? Let me just give you a minute of space if there was anything that you were all sort of chomping at the bit at home to be able to contribute to. Floor is open for anyone so might have one of those. And if not, that's okay too. Liz, I was just gonna say on Twitter, someone asked a question, what did I mean when I said the GFA at least, one or two countries have a climate issue at the forefront of their issues. Not all countries, again, some countries and regions might not have, the climate risk might be minimal, for example, or they might do better under climate change. So I think that that's a really important piece is that you have to look at the context of what it is and assess what is happening there. So we wanna make sure when these five countries or regions come out that climate change is a part of that selection. So I think that that's what I was trying to say about that. Thanks, Liz actually reminded me that I would have loved to emphasize the point you made there that climate change is not a monolithic threat. It just isn't. It is a series of influences that will land in very particular ways in different places. And the impact of those things are also highly dependent on the circumstances in the place where that impact lands. Drought does not have a universal impact on people and societies, right? It's context dependent. And it's very helpful I think to our goal of focusing on in what ways peacebuilding first can support a climate resilient agenda and in what ways focusing on climate adaptation and climate mitigation can actually be supportive of stabilization and peacebuilding when we think about that complexified notion of what climate change really looks like in its individual impacts and manifestations in the world. And exactly as you rightly said, they are not universally negative. It can open the impacts themselves can open up opportunities for example to collaborate around shared water resources that may not have been as required. Not that that's a good or a bad, right? It's just an objective reality that can manifest itself in different directions. So thank you for sharing that. Before I move on to some listener questions, the other three panelists, did you want to add anything or respond to any other questions? I'll jump in. I just wanted to react to Alice's comment and her great story about Syria and the drought in Syria and its potential connections to the conflict that ensued and has been ongoing. And it reminds me because that same conflict creates huge food security crises, right? And this connection, we haven't really talked a lot about food security but it's something I'm super passionate about. And it feels like when we think about where in the government are we going to find our champions? Alice is really concerned about that. And I think her comments got me thinking about that. Where are the champions for this climate conflict connection? And again, I think the food security community is really, really clear on that relationship because they're both trying to grow more food and they're seeing the negative effects both in terms of food aid and in terms of the crises that they're trying to clean up after. So I do think there's more work we can do to be thinking about how do we harness people whose energies may not be climate-specific. That's not, they're not their expertise but that's certainly get it and have resources that can be brought to bear that are beyond the peace-building communities. The just in general, the IG investment works of AID I think are usually important as we think about how to both mitigate and adapt to climate. So just a reflection from what Alice was talking about. Can I just make a really quick interjection with that, Dina, I just wanna say and Mercy Corps is doing a phenomenal job. You do the research and you share and you put it in practical terms so that you can help build those champions. And I say this all the time, if all organizations did what Mercy Corps did, the field would be elevated at an incredibly fast pace. Thank you, Liz. I second that. All right, I noticed that we have three minutes left. So for those of you listening at home, I just want you to know that I have been reading the chat questions and trying to integrate them as we went along, but a ton of questions came in. So there just isn't enough time to get to every one of those but I want you to know that I've been trying to integrate as many questions along the way as I could. And I just got chatted to notice Alice who wants to jump in as well. Alice, did you want to add something? And then I have one final wrap up question for you all. Oh, I just would urge us all to look at a lay down of where conflict we currently are identifying conflict occurring and then look at the lay down of the risks. The countries that Dina listed are particularly at risk of climate change if we look at the lay down. And I think it's important to keep that in mind. Often areas that already stressed are gonna have even greater stress than they have the least means to address this. And particularly after the pandemic, the debt loads that some of these countries are have taken on and is gonna make it nearly impossible for them to adapt to climate change in a meaningful way, which will exacerbate, I believe, existing tensions that are there. So it's just important for us to understand because I think many of the countries suffering a conflict now will suffer negative effects from. It's a much smaller percentage. Canada and Russia will have some, probably some positive impacts, but for many others, the fisheries are moving. They're seeing their resources in the tropical countries diminish and heat will be a killer worldwide. So really important to get the lay down, the scenario analysis for each of those countries. Great point. Thank you, Alice. So dear panelists, we are at the end of our hour and a half and I know that we, along with those watching from home who are sending in some amazing questions would really love to have more time with all of you. And truly there was so much interest expressed in joining today's event that it tells me how much interest there is moving forward in working on these issues together inside, outside of the government context. I think lots of people were tuning in to hear your recommendations. And I know that lots of people watching this have a lot of other great insight to add. So I hope that this will be the first of an ongoing conversation about this topic. I am deeply profoundly grateful to each one of you for your work in this field. I have had the true honor of working with each one of you for a lot of years now and I know how valuable your work and your own personal contributions to moving the work forward are. I appreciate you. And I wanna thank you all for joining us today for really a very thoughtful conversation about a very complex set of issues. And I want to let everyone know that the recording of today's event will be available on both the USIP and the Wilson Center event page in the next day or so, along with a summary of today's event that will be available on the Wilson Center blog, The New Security Beat. So please go check there. And I would like to thank everybody for tuning in and being with us today. And I look forward to working together with all of you to ensure that climate change and peace building have a future of improved integration and impact. Thank you to all of our panelists. Thank you so much.