 My name is Charles Lester, and I'm the Director of the Ocean and Coastal Policy Center at UC Santa Barbara. What is resilience? That's a tricky question, but in thinking about it for a number of years now, I think it really is the balance, or maintaining the balance between cost-effective risk reduction to life and property with environmental protection and stewardship and social equity. So it's really the challenge of trying to find that sweet spot where those three things come together in a way that meets our community values. Well, my primary experience has been with the California Coastal Commission for 20 years before becoming the Director at the Center at Santa Barbara, and in that experience I was a Planner and a Manager, and ultimately the Director of the State Agency involved with land use planning and regulation along California's coasts. So many of the issues we dealt with were related to coastal hazards like erosion and flooding and storm events, that sort of thing, and how to best plan and maintain and develop along the coastline in light of those hazards. So a lot of my experience has been with the proper siting and design of development on a high eroding bluff, for example. The need to try to minimize and avoid seawall development, which can have really adverse effects on beach environments, and in the larger scheme, how do we continue to support development along the coast while protecting those coastal resources like beaches, access, recreation, sensitive habitats, all of the sorts of things we care about along our coastlines. Well, they face a lot of challenges. Sea level rise is the one that I've been focusing on primarily, and related to sea level rise we have increased and exacerbated coastal erosion, so the likelihood that we're going to have increasing numbers of developments and infrastructure placed in danger from erosion and flooding. Flooding is the other major impact related to sea level rise and high storm events, and so even though we think about sea level rise as its incremental problem, an increasing problem, yes, but incremental, actually what is concerned is the episodic events like the storm events, the El Nino years where these forces of the sea are going to be that much greater, and on top of that we have sea level rise, so when you put all that together you've got more development, millions and millions and millions of dollars of development in danger, you've got people in hazardous locations, and you've got on the other side the environment, which tends to get second thought often when we're thinking about risk reduction, so that's the challenge we face primarily in California. Well, that's something that we've been trying to accomplish for many years, but in my experience with the Coastal Commission, it became clear to me that you can have both, and the key is understanding how a healthy environment, a protected environment actually supports your economy, so you do development, but you do it in places that make sense. You do it within the environmental constraints that we have identified, like sensitive habitats or wetlands or hazardous locations. It doesn't mean you can't develop, it just means you don't develop in those places, and if you do that, then you've protected things that people want to continue to appreciate and visit, and so California's coastal economy is a $40 billion a year enterprise, right? We've done that, and we have this huge environmental bureaucracy that restricts all of this development activity. No, it's a win-win. We have environment and we have economy in California. Okay, so in this question about how to achieve resilient development and resilient coastlines, one of the ideas that people have been talking about are living shorelines, green infrastructure, nature-based solutions, which are an effort to respond to the risks of coastal locations like erosion and flooding with softer solutions. So instead of building a seawall, can we develop an oyster reef or a wetland system that will buffer the forces of erosion in the sea in a way that's much more environmentally friendly than like a seawall? So these solutions can be useful and it really depends on the location and the type of hazard you're talking about. One of the solutions that's often embraced and has been done a lot on the East Coast and is starting to be more popular in California is beach replenishment and sometimes people talk about that as a softer nature-based solution which is building a beach back up as a buffer, but it also has its limitations and so you really need to look at each place you're examining what you're trying to respond to and whether the nature-based solution is actually going to work or achieve your objectives over time. So again, in California, for example, some of these ideas aren't going to work just because you're on an outer coast, high-energy wave environment where you're not going to put in an oyster reef, for example. Those conditions aren't ripe for that sort of solution. On the other hand, beach replenishment might be a solution, at least for the short term, although we know already from sea-level rise projections that even with replenishment the beaches are going to stand a high likelihood of being inundated and swamped by 2100 depending on your assumptions. So even that as a solution, it's got its challenges and so I think the broader way to think about this is what are the objectives we're trying to achieve over a certain period of time, what are the costs and benefits of those different solutions and which is the most cost-effective and best meets our social objectives also. So one of the questions for any solution, whether it's nature-based or not, is who's paying for it and how are those costs get distributed. So beach replenishment, again, for example, much of that funding comes from the federal tax base. So you may not know it, but when Florida replenishes its beaches or North Carolina or California, a lot of that funding is coming from everybody. Well, I'm most familiar with the federal coastal zone management program and so the program that I worked for in California was part of that federal CZM program and that's been a great way to support the planning and management efforts of all the coastal states in the United States. It's mostly a funding program and a technical services program but that's a great function for the federal government to play and continue to play and I think increase that role hopefully in the next few years in terms of giving states the capacity to do this kind of work. Even in California, while we have statewide policies that need to be met, we also recognize that the rubber hits the road at the local level so the program is designed in California to have local governments do the implementation on a daily basis. So that dynamic of federal, state, local needs to be recognized and the strengths of the federal government are to support with funding, support with technical services and that will provide some amazing technical services like the ability to do mapping and use new technologies to help us figure out what's going on. USGS, who we're going to hear from today also is a great player in providing those kinds of resources and the states can really use that help.