 Hello and welcome my name is Andrea Cameron and this is a virtual conference about hybrid warfare and climate change. This conference explores how China and Russia can use hybrid warfare tactics to further exploit vulnerabilities caused by the effects of climate change. I knew this event would be compelling to my colleagues who work in climate security. The delightful surprise is that this event also appeals to a number of people who are considering the future of warfare. So I welcome everyone to this event. We have over 200 people registered from all around the world. First, let me direct you to the events page where you can download the conference program with all the biographies and the agenda for today. I am so excited about the thought experiment on which we are about to embark. For those who have followed my Naval War College range of conferences, you'll know that they are usually very practical. I've been honored to hear from people in Congress, civilian academics and a range of military people from everywhere that they have found them very worthwhile. This conference is a little bit different, but it's just as important. So what inspired this event. Last fall, I led an event about sponsored research that was looking at the compounding nature of climate change impacts. For example, what if a municipal water system was hit by a storm, and then a cyber attack. What would the community do. What would the military installations do and ultimately how would that affect our mission. I was truly impressed by the academics who are doing this kind of research. And I was surprised that while we keep acknowledging the potential for compounding vulnerabilities. I haven't heard many conversations about how actors might exploit this. So I came up with the idea for this conference, and people have been genuinely excited to have the discussion. I received some great suggestions for what could be included. In the first conversation, I decided to focus it on our two major competitors, China and Russia. So upfront, is this a conversation we can really have. First, let's take hybrid warfare. If you ask any number of people to define hybrid warfare, you will get that many different definitions. And I don't seek to define it or use only one definition today. Speaking hybrid warfare remains a broadly defined term used to decide describe a creative mix of conventional tactics with other overt or covert hostile actions. Now this could be political warfare, law fair, irregular warfare, cyber warfare, information warfare, the weaponization of resources and things we haven't even thought of yet. Today's event will start with a keynote focused on hybrid warfare, and then start each panel about how Russia and China think about hybrid warfare methods. Now let's talk about our second topic, climate change. The changing climate affects every country's national security. In some countries, it is existential. In others, it is more of a form of disruption of some kind. We first dubbed a threat multiplier and more recently a risk multiplier, or a shaping threat, an inhibitor of peace or a contextualizing aggravator. As we continue to find ways to characterize the threat of climate change, one thing is evident. Climate change affects the security landscape all around the world. And as every country will deal with their own climate vulnerabilities and energy transition, they'll do it in different ways. So to have this part of the conversation today, we need experts on how China and Russia's energy and climate policies will reflect their perception of security. We can expect to see in current tensions and in future conflict, the increasing creative use of hybrid warfare. Compounded with this, climate change related effects can exacerbate already insecure political and social situations. Crime actors can seek opportunities when adversaries are compromised and use tactics that make it very difficult to hold them accountable within the existing international system. Therefore, we need to ask the question about how China and Russia could use hybrid warfare tactics to further exploit vulnerabilities caused by the impacts of climate change. We will do this today with two panels that focus on each country respectively. They will both follow a similar format, how the country uses hybrid warfare, followed by explanations of their energy and climate policies, while the security theme is woven throughout. What I challenge everyone to think about today, both the panelists and the participants, is how malign actors can make use of climate risks. As you listen to the tactics and the vulnerabilities, think about how this may manifest in reality. I'm so excited to have this group of speakers together today. Before I proceed, I have to thank my sponsor, Dr. Chris Chispero, the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair of Economic Geography, as well as the Naval War College Foundation for sponsoring this conference. It is through their generosity that today's event is made possible and free and open to the public. As a reminder, the full conference program with the agenda and biographies is at the Naval War College events page, scroll to the bottom and you can download it. The event is being recorded and will be available on the Naval War College YouTube page after the event has concluded. To start us off today, I'd like to introduce our own Naval War College Provost, Stephen Mariano, to welcome us. He has had a distinguished military and academic career. Most recently he served as Deputy Commodant and Dean of the NATO Defense College in Rome, Italy. He has also served on the faculties of the School of International Service at American University, National Defense University, the Royal Military College of Canada, and the US Military Academy. He holds a PhD in War Studies from the Royal Military College of Canada, and he's now our Provost at the US Naval War College. We look forward to hearing Provost Mariano's opening remarks. Thank you for joining us today. Great. Thanks Andrea and welcome everyone to this hybrid warfare climate change conference. I'm indeed Stephen Mariano I'm the new Provost here at the Naval War College I've been on deck for about two months. And I have already found I get to do a lot of fun things in this position, like introducing events and conferences and this is definitely one of the funnest and one of the most interesting. I'm honored and excited to kick this event off on a very important topic, but I would like to do some welcomes and thanks as well. So, first, and I will conclude by introducing our keynote speaker today Colonel Sonke Mahrens from the European Center of Excellence for countering hybrid threats. I would also like to welcome our active and retired flag officers we have CNO fellows here at the war college and others not physically present here, joining in. Also to our very gracious Naval War College Foundation that Andrea already mentioned, as well as many collected connected alumni I'm seeing the count up to 122 now in the zoom room. I would also like to thank our partners our faculty members and particularly students thank you very much for for joining us. I'd also like to add my thanks to the Jerome Levy chair for economic geography, Professor Chris just barrel for his continued to support and the support that flows to us through the foundation. Your contributions made all this work and discussion possible. So thank you very much. Like this doesn't happen by itself I'd like to thank our events team our audio visual shop our public affairs and graphics team. Always making these events a success. And of course you already heard from Andrea Cameron. And you'll hear from her again but Andrea congratulations on organizing this event. Thank you for your committed work. It's noted and appreciated. And you also mentioned another key player from our library miss Isabelle Lopes, who's been a great contributor to your work and I just want to give Isabelle a shout out here. So welcome to this event on hybrid warfare and climate change it's a uniquely organized session and include deep discussions on how Russian China may use hybrid warfare methods to exploit climate change related vulnerabilities. I'm here to kick off this exceptional event because of the dedication work of the faculty here at the Naval War College and the climate and human security studies group, and the students from the climate change and national security elective which Andrea leads. They've been doing great work and helping us all understand the nexus between climate and human security concern and the impacts on our national security concerns. So one role of the naval war colleges to inform today's decision makers and educate tomorrow's leaders. And in today's dynamic security environment numerical and technological superiority or no longer enough. We need to outthink our adversaries, which by the way is one of the six outs and NATO's joint war fighting capstone concept. So in addition to outthink NATO proposes that we out fight out excel out partner out pace and outlast our adversaries. At the naval war college we expand the intellectual capacity of the naval joint interagency and international leaders to achieve that cognitive advantage to be able to outthink our adversaries. Our objective here in Newport as it is around the globe is to deliver excellence in education research and outreach and building and during relationships with our alumni allies and partners, and hopefully this conference goes a long way to achieving all those objectives. We're committed not only to conducting research simulations academic coursework in the field and on changing climate, but when appropriate we also want to be a leading voice within the DoD and international of for a and working to improve our abilities to better understand these changes, because sometimes those big staffs in places like the Pentagon lose sight of the intellectual forest through the bureaucratic trees, and it's events like this that can help provide a clear vision. We also produce graduates who can think critically and creatively and apply military power in the context of all instruments of power so to all you students online for this. Awesome news we look forward to using the information that you're going to gain today as you go ahead in your careers. We develop graduates who have education and foundation to discern the military dimension anticipate and lead rapid adaptation. They're trained to conduct joint operations and have foundation and strategic operations. We develop leaders who can use that same knowledge and skills to discern changes in any campaign wherever they're assigned. The Naval War College climate and human security study is a small slice of what we instruct here, but it's an important study that researches, educates and engages stakeholders all over the world. Our professional military education prioritizes ethics in our studies and increasing younger generations view climate change as an ethical issue. Therefore, the Naval War College sees the value in our climate change and human security study group and our electives to be a great in great demand and the hybrid warfare and climate change conference which includes all of you top scholars in the field. Shortly we'll hear from our keynote speaker Colonel Sonke Mahenz from the European Center of Excellence for Countering Hybrid Thets and I think he's in Helsinki you can see him there on the camera. And under Andrea's clever design my challenge to all of you today is to open your minds and think outside your own area of expertise. Listen carefully to one another and think critically about these important topics, because providing feedback to one another during the session today and making these discussions about hybrid warfare and climate change vulnerability. Hopefully they'll continue long after the conference is over, and you'll continue to discuss them around your institutions. So thank you once again for spending your valuable time with us, have a productive and successful discussion, and I'd now like to introduce Colonel Mahenz. So I've never met him, but we have a few things in common. He's a career military officer. He was trained as a radar controller has held various positions including battalion command and foreign liaison officer to us joint forces command. And he previously serving as the head of research for strategy and armed forces at the German Institute for Defense and Security Studies in Hamburg. He was deployed with NATO. One more thing we have in common to Bosnia and Kosovo and in 2020 he served as a branch head for transition at the headquarters for resolute support in Kabul, Afghanistan. Another thing we have in common. He's a full deployment in computer science and master's degree from the Royal Military College of Canada and Kingston, Ontario, and is a graduate of the Canadian Forces College in Toronto. So more things we have in common. And as the director of the community of interest on strategy and defense at the European Center of Excellence for countering hybrid threats. Okay uses his 35 years of military experience and power of experts around the world to make a reason on the fast change and security environment, where our competitors and enemies are blurring the lines between peace and war in ways we've never before seen. The center is not only a think tank but it's also a do tank. That's foundational research at the same time it provides training and understanding on countering hybrid activities. We're honored today to have him join us and talk about the importance of hybrid warfare. Please join me in welcoming. Okay, my hands over to you. Stephen, thank you very much. And I hope to can share my screen. Like it goes on and thank you for the warm welcome and Andrea, thank you for inviting me. I tried to set the scope about the the idea of hybrid threats and hybrid warfare how we see it in Helsinki and what we provide to our now 32 participant states. And at the end I will link it to climate change but I will leave it to the experts who are following me were really great experts in the same to make more sense of it, what I read just can open the horizon tonight. So follow me on this picture and Stephen was just talking about creativity. So ask yourself which picture do you prefer the one on the left side or the one on the right side. So if I asked you on the rest right side if you follow my me that there's on the upper left corner there's a forest on the upper right side there's some houses and in the middle there's a road going to the horizon. At the end there's nothing. It's modern art from one of the artists which is most expensive you can buy at the moment. But the challenge for you as security analysts for the future is you have to make your own sense out of chaos. If you look on the left side a beautiful walk on the Sunday afternoon a picnic in a park when you're just following the vision of someone else. But this is what I asked you today. Follow me to the right side, because this is where I would often hybrid that takes place. 20 we wrote together with 18 nations under the US Pentagon J9 program of multi MCDC and NATO ACD a paper on leadership challenges for the 21st century. We all agreed that they're living in a book our world, which is volatile and certain complex and ambiguous. One of us signs up for this. But when it's now about solving problems in this environment, everyone falls back to linear thinking, and this is the challenge we are we are living in. And hybridity and gray zone are especially not linear and this is where we go tonight. If there are any questions I'm always willing to take. Where do we come from soft and hard powers of the state the diamond, especially when you're from the United States you know this. And this is how we see the powers of the state. Well, and if you combine them in a matrix now you have action and sources, as at the military, we are military actions with military resources. And sometimes we can help the state for example the economic action of an embargo we can send some free gates, or in the information domain we can provide military hackers, but then we are supporting someone else. Our domain is only our main domain is actions and military resources. And from there also our actual paradigm of symmetric warfare thinking comes. It's our military against the military of our opponents. And this is how we see especially in the West, see the world. This is how we define it. And this is what we have to understanding it's an underlying paradigm. But then suddenly and everything started after 2007 when Hoffman wrote this article about hybrid warfare. And this baller in Lebanon. If you do some research you might find the term a little bit earlier on different occasions. There were hybrid wars in Africa a little bit earlier. But everything started out 2007 and it became to the known to the world after the Russians started to occupy Ukraine in 2014. And they were hybrid wars conflicts almost without the military, only little green blue and men of the future will there be no military any longer. Who is defending the other parts who's defending our soft powers. Because can't be done by the military. And this is where we get attacked through a hybrid threats. Sometimes they really await the military domain. And a lot of discussion talk about that hybrid activities will take place under the red line of military actions, like, for example, the article five case or 42 seven, or even around article 51 of the United in the chart of the United Nations. So if you are a peace researcher until 2014 somehow the world was in good order. And suddenly you saw some something showing up. And so if military means in your domain, which I didn't expect there. So this was one side of the metal. How do we cope with someone is using military in an area where it should not be. And the people started to talk about hybrid states. They try to define it and we in the center skills, saying they're not defining it we just characterize them and I'll come to this later on. So it's a very coordinated and synchronized actions. It targets systemic vulnerabilities and systemic is a lead to complex systems. In a wide range of means, much more than the five domains of multi domain operations the military thinking about. It tries to exploit the thresholds of detection and attribution, but not every time. It exploits the borders between war and peace internal external public and private and even between large organizations. The European Union and NATO, and maybe even United Nations. But then strategic objectives by either influencing the decision making. I have seen when the Finnish MP and you lower Santa Marine was suddenly attacked by a via social media with her dance videos. And it took her out of business for 10 days. She had to do a drug test shared to explain why those videos are existing and what was happening in those videos, and this is influencing the decision making of a minister president of the state. And the impact point was a male politician can do other things as a female politician. Interesting what direction especially by I finished women and this was joined by by other females worldwide, which suddenly then started to pose dancing like Santa Marine on the other side so coping countering this kind of hybrid. So influencing decision making is one or undermining or hurting the target and this might go into your societies. Very to a very low point where you don't expect it. My colleagues from our research department they did this kind of analysis about hybrid threats we saw so we see them from the left to the right side we see actors and non state actors. And we normally say that a non state actor becomes hybrid when there is a state actor behind it. Because otherwise at a certain point in time, every engagement we have worldwide between different organizations become a hybrid activity. So, when the mafia is doing something, it's still organized crime. But if you can identify state actor like Russia or China behind them, then this non state actor suddenly becomes also a hybrid actor from our perspective. You will find at the moment and you can almost put anything new to this list almost anything to this list every day. These were the kinds of attack we identified. Now the most important part of this slide are the domains military in here and the defense is only one domain. You can see the attacks attacks you in 13 different domains. And there stood some people who say we are still missing a human domain, and, and even more, but it shows you that it's a complex challenge we are facing the activity level in different states. And if you take Ukraine of today they are at the coercion level with war and warfare. If you look for for Germany and this is my my my personal assessment we are somewhere between interference influence. If you take what happened last night the sabotage of the two pipelines in the in the Baltic seas, from my point of, it's still an open view but if this is a hybrid egg, then it's on the level of operation. In my opinion, you will always be on the right side, because this is below article five this is below article 42.7 or below the UN Carter, and you are always the target. So for us, we see characteristics of hybrid activity we say normally it's more than one event. The reason behind this is simple. And the French Secret Service, a couple of years ago, went into the computer system of Siemens to find out how much Siemens would bid on the new fast train in Singapore, and get this information to the French company of talis. This is what happening in between Western states. This must be from our point of view more than one event. Well, each beyond ours is not forbidden is only the spy who goes to court at the end. Then we see the necessity to say it must be a malign intent or a malign actor. And this goes with together with our ideas of gray zone. If you have a living in a state environment like we are doing under United Nations Carter. Of course, all of us interpret international laws and international contracts, which we have signed in a different way but this is what we also do in the private sector. All right, if two of us go to court you expect your lawyer to interpret the laws in your way and I expect my lawyer to interpret them in my way that I get at the end, my rights from the court. And if you start to misuse the legal system of you see for example in France and in Great Britain, where lawyers from those state those are go after media people or after scientists, and that's telling them. We will lose every case, but the problem is we will bring you to the highest spot and at the end to be bankrupt. So you're using the legal system of the state to silence criticism critics. And this is a misuse of our system. The problem for us as being legal states. We can't change it because this is how our society is a builder. In fact, if it's also authoritarian regimes versus democratic states, because it's a loss of ruling Machiavelli pure, where this the rules of law. The problem is here that the strong one doesn't need rules, he creates those rules. We as a democratic states, we insist on that those rules are existing. The nations, even from the metric states like I said to the years back in Ashken can take things out of the hybrid toolbox. But at the end, if this comes, we still believe in transparency, and in courts who might look into those cases in Russia and China, you might either vanish, or you might get a medal, or what you have done. In every in the western democratic states, you will go in front of the court, and you have to defend your case. And one of our main findings is one because it's always the saying it's gray zone operation to problem it's, those are our growing zones. It's the authoritarian regime who goes into our, our rules and we are not willing to defend our rules. This is when a gray zone start. I'll give you a short example. After Russia attack Ukraine, 144 nations at the United Nations declared that Russia has broken world peace. And NATO says this is not an article five case, which is legally correct, but nobody's not defending world peace. This kind of gray zone is large enough that malign or authoritarian actors or authoritarian regimes can have a complete blown conventional warfare like we see today in Ukraine. For my personal perspective, the war in Ukraine today is a real war. It's not a hybrid war. It started as a hybrid war and when the Russians failed, the strong resistance from the Ukrainian it turned into a normal war, or a conventional war. Coming from the military and many of your security provides do this the same thing we are living in the war world. But for this, we need politicians who tell us now you are involved, we need the legal case of war. And this is what lacking, but we see our methods and even our, our means used in crisis and peacetime environments. And the problem comes from here. Over the last 200 years, we encapsulated war, we formalized it started with the battle of solferino, when it when it said, okay, now we have to take care of the wounded of the battlefield. Then we created the Harger Land Kriegsordnung, the laws for humanitarian, for the humanitarian conduct of wars. In 1948, every nation on this planet signed the UN Carter. And if you now look in article 2.4 normally people only citing 51. All members shall refrain in the international relationships from the threat or the use of force against the national integrity, or politically independent. At the end, we forbid the 1948 war. Formerly, there could be no war on this planet. Unfortunately, we still see it. And this is when it becomes hybrid. And especially in the United States, people love the world of competition. The problem with competition is, everyone has his own conflict model. So the German conflict model, for example, is there's peace, there's prices and war. And if you want to go from peace to prizes, it needs a parliamentarian decision as well as going to war. The United States have peace, competition, prices and war. So for example, if you take the former US president, Donald Trump, who saw himself always be in the competition mode, the problem was for the Germans to understand him. It was too hard for peace, but not hard enough for a crisis. And this is what I call the incompatibility of conflict models. And if you take the Russian conflict models, they normally declare that Russian boundaries are best defended if they're defended from both sides at the same time. Of course, they are not calling our Western ideas how war should be seen in a legal way. Russian strategic culture is about reflexive control, about deception, surprise, distraction, overload and exhaustion. And a lot of this is what we're seeing in the hybrid world, because they're not distinguishing between these crises and war like we are doing. It's almost similar to what you see in the Chinese three block model. Like I said in the beginning, what we have to understand is that complexity is the new normal. The Canadian framework, which is displayed here, might help you to sort out where your problem is at the moment. The military is quite good on a tactical level, because this is what we do best. These things are complicated. And when McBrister showed so-called spaghetti slide, almost 11 years ago, was one of the best misunderstandings because it was that serious when he said, if we understand this slide we will win the war in Afghanistan. Unfortunately, we didn't understand that slide and we didn't act in accordance with that slide. And this is what resulted what we have seen in 2020, 2021. And now our opponents come up with hybrid warfare, even go beyond the scope of the military. And this is at the beginning, a big problem or chaotic problem. With novel practice, we have to find out where we are. And this is where it takes your creativity. Like I asked you at the beginning and Stephen said also that all of his students, they must be creative. Because it's not about the tacticians on the right side, the strategists are on the left side. So from there going to climate change. These are the so-called tipping elements, which were observed by scientists, which might change the climate, either on the long scale or on the short scale. The idea of so-called tipping points is you add energy to a system, we will change it, either in a way of a Sisyphus effect that you have to bring up the ball to the highest point to come to the next stage, or by amplifying the snowball effect that you put some pressure on the right side. So the ball is running faster. And this creates, because everything is intellect, a system of system. So tipping points are, you see the plus and the minus in this kind of graphics on the slide, are the ways how energy in a certain way is put in our system and how it stresses our natural environment. So now let's talk about what are the results of this. This is also systemic to our human environment. This is human security, social stability and climate system. And they are negatively influenced already now by climate change. We see rising temperatures, we see much harder storms, we see floods where we haven't seen floods before. And so this is already inflicting some stress on our system. And now we have the hybrid actor. And we have seen, especially over the last five to six years already that they were capable to deny that climate change is taking place and supporting politicians who said it's not available. There is no climate change. This kind of deniability is a kind of a hybrid threat, because now the negative effects we are seeing nobody's taking care of them. But of course, influencing human security society stability takes also out our capabilities to react against the results or the system changes of the climate change. This kind hybrid activity might either stop positive movements, so influencing the system on the negative side, or might amplify negative movements on the other side. And this creates stress, extra stress on our system, which at the end them adds to the phenomena of climate change, or we see now as a system of system. The problem for us as security providers is coming from the left side where everything was okay pieces on the low side war conflict is on the high side and then we go back to peace and conflict. We must face, maybe, that we see a paradigm shift from linear peace war thinking to a poly domain instability area security approach. It's not that we fall down into the deepest part, but creating stability might be either on the lower level, or on a higher level. And for this we have to invest. And this is the way I had to sum everything up climate change and hybrid sets and warfare complex, even bigger problems. Climate change provides hybrid actors a lot of opportunities and this will be presented by the speakers after me, they are non linear challenges. So combining them is like tap dancing on an active volcano. They have no clue what is going on or what might be second and third order effects so there's a high risk in there. And by this this makes it a real and actual security challenges. And for this I'm grateful to Andrea to set up this conference. I want to express my deep thanks to Colonel Sonka marins for sharing his thoughts today and leading us into the key themes of the conference. He described complexity is the new normal and introduced us to the climate as a system of systems and especially tipping points. Most importantly, I liked on his final slide how he, he talked about the poly domain perspective, which is a really interesting way to think about this. This conference asks us to explore how climate change may affect China and Russia, and their use of hybrid warfare tactics to execute their foreign policy goals based of this climate context. Now that we've heard from our keynote speaker. I'll briefly describe the order of events for the conference. Next up we'll go straight into our first panel on Russia hybrid warfare and climate change. And a quick break in between and that'll be followed by our last panel China hybrid warfare and climate change. To get straight to the discussions I'll moderate myself and introduce the speakers only by their current title. As a reminder all conference materials can be downloaded from the naval war college events page. We will conclude the event by 1600 today. We do ask you to post questions in the Q&A feature and what we're really looking forward to is pulling together these two ideas hybrid warfare and climate vulnerability to advance our thinking on how they might interact together. So now we'll start our first panel. The title is Russia hybrid warfare and climate change. To start us off I'm going to introduce Dr. Scott Jasper he's affiliated with the Naval postgraduate schools center on combating hybrid warfare threats, and he teaches masterless level courses on hybrid warfare. Welcome Scott we look forward to your presentation today. Thank you very much Andrea it's great to be here. I'm going to go ahead and share my screen. Good afternoon, or good evening to everybody here, anticipating in this panel is quite a pleasure to be here, and to discuss the aspects of hybrid war that are occurring in Ukraine today. I do appreciate Colonel migrants, providing aspects of domains characteristics, I should say of hybrid activities. I do agree with him that the ongoing conflict in Ukraine is a real war from a conventional sense, but you will see I will argue today there are elements that are hybrid in nature. And I will use the definition of hybrid threats in order to present that to you in the next 10 minutes. These are definitions for hybrid threats, as you see here. And it is important to note that the strategic concept for NATO 2022 only released a couple months ago did discuss the Russian Federation. And it says the Russian Federation seeks to establish spheres of influence and direct control through coercion, subversion aggression and annexation. This is a conventional cyber hybrid means against us and our partners, and that partner in this case being Ukraine. The term hybrid has been described previously, and you see here a definition in a concept paper by the NATO strategic strategic communications Center of Excellence from a couple years ago. And you see measures means and techniques disinformation cyber attacks manipulation of national law, terrorism, economic pressure and energy subversion. And it has been defined in the NATO glossary, as you see here at the very bottom as a combination of conventional irregular and asymmetric activities. This is where I'll differ slightly with the Colonel in saying conventional is an element of the hybrid threat, and the warfare aspect is nothing more than the application of these hybrid measures in hostilities, as we see today. What I'm going to do is go ahead and work through various elements and describe how they are occurring in Ukraine, and around the world, and what the impact is. We'll start with conventional force and I pull here a slide from the Institute for study of war that showed the original invasion of Russia into Ukraine back in late February, in order to describe and depict I should say more, the actual lay down of conventional forces. And it was an excellent paper produced by the Naval National, excuse me by the NATO Defense College policy brief in June, and it talked about how Russia fights. And it says very specifically Russian operations have shown a consistent attempt to concentrate manpower, and firepower through operational maneuver. And this is what we saw as the Russians invaded on four different fronts, they stress themselves then, and they left themselves vulnerable to counterattack. But as they moved across those boundaries into a sovereign state, they apply very heavy force tactics, including shelling, as you see here, a picture of a burning building, and we've seen countless numbers of these media releases. They also had aerial strikes. The one you're actually looking at there in the lower left is the drama theater in Miracle that house hundreds of civilians hiding, I should say, seeking shelter. Even in this case here the Russians claim that that theater was being used as a headquarters for the Azov Regiment propaganda will see. So conventional force is clearly the largest element of this conflict that's ongoing. That has continued even in the last few weeks, but it's moved into that category of asymmetry and asymmetric strikes. So after a series of successes by the Ukrainian army in the eastern region, Russia struck back to a campaign of missile strikes. At least you might be following and some you might not. On the right hand side, the first set of attacks was upon this nuclear power plant in South Ukraine. A large missile has struck within 900 yards of a power plant, which produced this large fireball explosion, and you see that here on the slide in a taken from a video of the actual strike. It broke out buildings broke out windows stop production of energy and for hundreds of thousands of residents in the region that were affected, and also damage a hydro structure. A couple days later, we see missiles seven to be exact striking a dam in this area here. In that case there the Russians use a combination of kins all and it's going to its glider missiles can solve being a hypersonic weapon, as you see here underneath a Russian fighter. The Russians use hypersonic technology earlier in the conflict to strike warehouses and other stationary targets. This cause flooding, the intent was to potentially wipe out a source of water or to flood the city nearby cyber as an element of hybrid warfare has been extremely predominant throughout the conflict and before. There have been quite a number of reports and public media releases. I chose to depict for here on the slide. And on the upper left hand side the web the facements struck in mid January, a month more six weeks prior to the invasion, around the 13th or 1470 regional government organizations had their websites defaced with this message that you see here on the left, written in Russian, Polish and Ukrainian warning the people of the worst to come. The same time, a day later I should say, Microsoft revealed a wiper attack on government facilities, the first of many that have occurred in the conflict. A month later, banks were struck, along with the Ministry of Defense and armed forces websites in a denial of service attack, you see one of the two state sponsored Ukrainian banks here. This attack by DDoS, the Nile of Service, knocked out bank facilities, including ATMs for a number of hours. And just prior to that, residents in those regions received text messages saying the ATMs were not available. The lower left is probably one of the most severe attacks, and that was upon your telecom, which provides internet service throughout Ukraine. Its capacity after a DDoS attack dropped to only 13%. And this out its lasted for about 15 hours. It was a category destructive attacks. The Russians did attempt in April timeframe to take down the power grid. As they had done before in 2015-2016, the same group called Sandworm. In this case, employing a sophisticated type of malware called Indistroyer 2, intended to knock out substations. And it was actually time to occur at a certain point on a Friday night as the residents returned home from work. The cyber has been a main part of this conflict. Microsoft has released two reports in this matter, and you see some statistics in the lower slide of the amount of wiper, malware, and the amount of targets that have occurred in Ukraine. Cyber is tied many times to the aspect of disinformation, because cyber means such as social media are used to facilitate disinformation, and in some cases through the theft of information by cyber means. Now the Russians throughout the campaign have conducted a disinformation effort that's astonishing. This example here in front of you, I think was the most cynical as I called it, the most egregious. And in this case here you might recall that a fire broke out in July at a detention center. That fire unfortunately killed 53 prisoners, Ukrainians, that were held by the Russians, primarily those that had survived the onslaught of bombardment in the Azov Reservoir in Miracle. So you see on the upper left the barracks that house those prisoners. Now the Russians claimed that a high Mars missile supplied by the United States had conducted the attack. And they showed in the left hand lower photo, a picture of a serial number of a high Mars that was in relatively good shape. Another reasoning was that the Ukrainians had attacked the facility, because the prisoners were about to confess the war crimes, and this was their way to stop that inside of Russian health territory. Now, investigations into this analysis into this incident should say, haven't have occurred. And I think one of the most compelling pieces of evidence is on the right hand side. The actual damage in the top box to the building they're caught on fire, which was light damage in the roof in compared to a similar strike by actual high Mars in a warehouse that Ukraine had claimed where the entire area was wiped clean. So the culprits for this Ukraine blame the Wagner group and a regular group, another element of hybrid warfare that is a Russian base group for them to have used an explosive incendiary device that spread quickly, and unfortunately took the lives of those heroes. This disinformation has been pervasive blaming the Russians, I should say, starting with the drama theater, this innocent here, and the food crisis has been another example of that the Russia has created. So, back in May, Russia started blocking the seaports, including Odessa for the distribution of grain throughout the world we know that. Okay. Then in July, the UN brokered with Turkey at the helm, an agreement where Russia would allow the export of grain from Ukraine to the world. On this day, caliber missiles from the sea struck targets in a desk. The Russians blamed the Ukrainians for housing of US missiles in those sites, claiming they struck military targets only where here, the audacity to strike the same place that they agreed the day before to release grain. In fact, Putin at a conference claimed that only 3% of the grain exports that he agreed to release were going to the develop world contrary to NATO statistics of 30% going to develop world the rest going to Europe. This information continues, and so do the strikes. In the last week, we've seen Iranian suicide drones, like the one you see here, at least on five different occasions strike into a desk. The Russians have opposed agreements, and yet, of course their actions are counter to their swift arrangements and execution. So next the idea of energy coercion. I could spend the entire period of this conference talking through this but I thought I have a few highlights of the aspect of coercion through this domain. We know of course that Russia has shut off gas that has powered industries in Europe for the last decade. They went down right away after the invasion, and the Russians took Nord Stream one offline for maintenance in July, and have taken it, and at this point, offline under the same pretense of sanctions, denying the ability to run the pipeline. There has been a very negative effect on industry. The Journal talked today about impact in Germany. This is a picture of an aluminum firm in Slovakia that is shut down primary metal production. Meanwhile, from an energy dependence perspective and an impact on climate change, we see coal plants in Germany 20 of these that are supposed to have some point gone offline being resurrected or extend. Meanwhile, in the UK, they've lifted a ban on fracking for gas in order to provide ample supplies. As I finish up, I can see my time's coming to an end. I'd like to talk about law, because we have been witnessing in the last week, an egregious violation of international law, these referendums. We know now that the voting has been completed in the four regions by gunpoint. Supposedly the picture here describes that. And now we await the decision by Putin to annex the regional areas and the impact of that if they become part of Russian territory, according to his decree. So I hope today, what I've done in 10 minutes or so is lay out these various aspects. The connections to climate change are not quite simple, I would say, and the speakers that will follow will do a better job in that I'd imagine. If you'd like more information in this regard, my latest book might be a source for you, and you can follow me on Twitter. I look forward to taking the questions in the Q&A. Thank you, Andrea. Thank you so much to Scott Jasper for this introduction to Russia's use of hybrid workflow tactics. Next, we can't have a discussion about climate without more knowledge on energy. So I would like to introduce Dr. Anna Mikulska, as she's a fellow at the Energy and Energy Studies at Baker Institute Center for Energy Studies. Anna, thank you for bringing your expertise to our discussion today. Thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it. So I'm not an expert on hybrid warfare. I do have, I have looked a lot at the issues of energy and energy use geopolitically as a weapon or in how Scott put it, energy coercion. So I'm going to share my slides and kind of go through what has happened in Europe in terms of access to energy and energy security based on the Russian use of their energy supply to Europe in a very geopolitical way or in a very coercive way. Let me see how I'm going to try to share my screen. Yes, I think we should be now in the full screen mode. So, kind of, you know, before I talk about energy security, I wanted to everybody to kind of understand what I'm talking about right so it's, it's, there are many definitions and they sometimes they are extensive. One of the traditional ones is looking at energy security in the for ace type of structure, where energy, energy secure when it's available accessible affordable and acceptable. And in many ways what has happened in Europe recently actually took away in particular Western Europe but also in Eastern Europe took away all of these, all of these four aspects and made them very, very difficult. So, if you look at the availability. Scott was talking about Russia, taking away some of the cheap gas that it has been used to send to Europe. You've seen the drop in, in gas flows already in 2021. This was not something that occur only after the war and the hot war started. It occur since almost the beginning of 2021. And in a way potentially what could be called this type of a hybrid warfare that already started at that moment to weaken the Europeans, including, including the Ukrainians, but you see the drop has been substantial actually was not portrayed here is it's taking off completely offline Nord Stream one. So there's going to be the drop is actually even further nowadays. And who knows, potentially we might see actually even more drop on the Ukrainian transit, given gas from three cents announcements, and kind of the threat and that. The availability has obviously been constrained significantly. And that has created issues for for, you know, especially for the winter because gas is used as a heating fuel for winter, but also for the industry that much of it uses it especially heavy industry. So there has been a significant demand destruction in industry in Europe which can reverberate going forward for a long time in terms of performance of European economy. So, besides availability actually, you know, in order to for the energy source to be secure you actually also need to be able to access it. It's not enough that there is available energy you have to have a way of accessing it. This access is particularly difficult with natural gas and that's why it is a use Russia's favorite fuel to use geopolitically. This is much more difficult because it depends on infrastructure, and that is a legacy infrastructure that Russia has with the rest of with the Europe, which is which are the pipelines that kind of lead through Ukraine through Belarus, Poland and all the way to Western Europe that where have been built decades ago started working in 1970s, and provided a Europe including Western Europe with sustainable stable source and at that moment in the 1970s it seemed like a good idea to to substitute the oil that was used for heating that seemed to be geopolitically loaded because it was coming from OPEC and that was in after 1973. When everybody was thinking about how do you know that the OPEC embargo, it seemed that the gas from Russia was less geopolitically problematic. Well, little that we know that has become a huge deal of liability nowadays, but what I wanted to show on this map is really how it hasn't been as easy for you for Europe to replace Russian gas, because of the lack of availability immediate availability of infrastructure. So that's why we have seen actually a lot of a lot of infrastructure being set up. In particular, like FSR use so floating storage and regressification units, so more LNG could be delivered to Europe, especially north with northeast Europe, especially Germany which had only connection via pipeline and no LNG terminals. So, of course, you know when we're talking about availability accessibility when there is if both of them are those are impeded gas prices will will will go sky high and that's how what happened in Europe currently Europe pays approximately and wholesale prices are approximately 10 times more than they were in you know in the country. So there's a huge issue with the affordability of the fuel now. If you see he look at here, of course, gas is not only useful heating it's also used for electricity generation. It can be replaced by some, but it also is expensive and some of it is actually significant amount of gas is still used for electricity generation you've seen we've seen the prices of electricity in Germany in particular but all over really European Union skyrocketing. Basically is surpassing $1,000 per barrel of oil off of the of the same energy supplies. So, so that's a huge, huge number that we've seen in Europe and something that the economies will have to deal with or have to deal with already. The last one is acceptability that is very important because it used to be that Western Europe was really kind of you know, willing to accept the Russian gas as one that doesn't provide doesn't doesn't give any issues. It's connected the gas to geopolitical, you know, influence, whereas the East Eastern Europe was much more careful about it and really kind of didn't think this is an acceptable source because of the way that Russia has dealt with that region and how it used gas geopolitically in the in the past. Well, when the Russian Russia when Russia invaded Ukraine that acceptability also on the Western in in West Europe has basically fallen off. We've seen EU sanctioning Russian energy call oil, but interestingly enough, it hasn't sanctioned Russian gas. And that's again goes to the fact that it's very difficult to replace all volumes of Russian gas, all of, or any volumes of Russian gas and Europe was just willing to keep to keep it. Some countries have cut Russian gas earlier that was Poland, the Dwenia Bulgaria Poland and Dwenia in particular were prepared they built up infrastructure for that. But in general countries were willing to accept a lot of accept Russian gas it, but then Russia intervene to Russia actually reduce its imports. In particular through Nord Stream one to Germany, as well as actually through the Ukrainian transit, where much much less of volumes are being trans a transit that then actually Russia is paying for the transit. So, the acceptability is an issue, but still even with this very, these very low volumes that that go to Europe Russia is still making money. So we can if you look at them at June of 2020 and June 2020 2021 and June 2022. You will see that Russia sense approximately one quarter of those volumes but makes the same amount of money at that time. This is just mind boggling and and this is part of the fact that you know that why why there is the push of Europe diversifying from Russian gas, not only the geopolitical part but also the fact that Europe doesn't necessarily want to fund the Russian are Russian military operations. And going to you know what that means for climate, especially Western Europe but in generally general the EU has been on the path of the decarbonization and had the climate agenda has been very well satisfied with the European Green Deal that since 2021 became European law, climate law, the reductions have been set net zero by 2050 has been proposed and fit for 55 has been the proposal how to execute it and again renewable energy was supposed to be at 40% in energy efficiency in 9%. There was a carbon carbon tax adjustment mechanism and new rules for emission trading. So as the war broke out as Europe is going through energy crisis. What, what has been the policy response and the policy response has been particularly included in the recovery you as a short term measure there's short term and medium and long term measures. But what I kind of, you know, not to make it longer than than my allotted time is what we've seen the policy response has been we need to actually get more renewable power online and we need to reduce energy consumption more be more energy effective, rather than less going into the future. It's a short term measure is mostly the reduction of energy consumption in medium term or longer term measure is that renewable targets is pushed up, as opposed to push down in that manner in the hopes that renewable energy can can replace some of that gas or fossil fuels that otherwise provide energy and kind of leave Europe less dependent on energy producing countries. The targets are really, really, though, hi. And we've seen we see that going starting 2022 they really grow quite, quite a lot so it is still a question whether it those targets will be able to achieve some of it might be at issues of technology. If one emerges that can be helpful it's going to be much easier to get there. In the meantime, however, call is king. And that's something that also Scott kind of pointed out that a lot of the mobile call power plants started back generating power. So, more gas can be saved and put into storage for winter, because it's not as easy to replace gas in the heating as it is to replace gas in a gas in generation. Call has become much, much more pervasive already in 2021 because of prices, but in and I don't have the 2022 numbers but they're going to be much, much higher. So, this is going to be an issue in the short term at the very least and it's going to be considered short term kind of setback. Now, how many years going forward will it be considered a short term setback. It will depend again how, how much faster Europe can diversify away from Russia from and potentially from fossil fuel. So, short term impact what can impact the carbonization call use lower energy deliveries if there is a competition with Asia so that's another thing Europe will be competing for energy in Asia if there is a cold winter in Asia there's going to be more competition. Lower nuclear energy production we've seen this transverse technical issues that do that. And there is also going to be a political pressure from you consumers to you do high prices, which might enable more use of fossil fuels for longer time. But there has been short drop a mission from industrial section whether that's good or not that one can kind of wonder because if that's a stay if that's gonna stay that means that there's a lot of our some industry will never come back which will impact negatively economy going forward, which kind of relates to the demand destruction and 9% in the first quarter of 2022, but increasingly and much, much higher going forward to potentially in places like Germany especially. I think I will stop at this and we'll take questions just to fit my, I think I will pass my time a little bit sorry. Thank you Anna. What a great familiarization with Russian energy, especially in the current context. Next we'll talk about Russia and climate change with our speaker Angelina Davidova climate projects coordinator at NOS Berlin. Angelina thank you so much for joining us today. Thank you so much for the invitation and good afternoon and good evening from Berlin. It is indeed a great honor for me to be speaking at this panel, and I should acknowledge my great respect for all the other speakers already spoke before me. I would have quite a lot of comments, but at the moment I will concentrate on my input and then I hope we can engage in a fruitful discussion following my talk. My initialization throughout the last 15 years has been Russia's climate policy and Russia's climate actions. And in my input right now, I would like to give a brief overview of Russia's climate policy and climate actions before the war. Climate policy and climate actions since the beginning of the war in Ukraine, and also an overview of how Russia is globally important to terms of climate change and what kind of global impact would Russia's action or inaction in the area of climate would have in the global situation. I would start by saying that I've been personally working in the area of Russia's climate policies since 2008. And at those time climate agenda was highly relevant for Russia. There was a lot of skepticism towards the topic. There was a lot of skepticism towards whether this topic is really important for Russia. There are very few people working on this area in the country, and overall the topic was considered to be rather marginal. Thus, as someone who's also been participating in the UN climate negotiations and I've been an active observer since 2008. I would say that Russia's presence at the UN level has also been somewhat highly noticeable. However, the situation started changing, started changing from around 2009 when Russia has adapted to its first basic climate legislation in the name of climate doctrine. And in the following years we saw the situation gradually changing. And it finally built up to Russia's joining the Paris Agreement in 2019 and coming up with its first climate target, which was and which is however rather ambitious. I will not go too much into figures right now, but basically Russia's climate target for 2030 is already below what Russia is now. Mainly because to the fact that Russia's emissions as well as emissions of many other Eastern European countries have basically gone down since the full of the Soviet system and the Soviet economy. There was something happening in the area of climate legislation in Russian climate actions in Russia in the last few years, apart from joining the Paris Agreement Russia has also adopted its first climate adaptation strategy. And last year, shortly before the UN climate conference in Glasgow in November 2021, Russian government has also adopted low carbon development strategy before 2050, which also for sore Russia reaching at zero target by 2060. And there was also one region chosen in Russia, which is located in the Pacific part of the country at the very far east of Russia, the Sakhalin region, and that region was chosen to be a location for the so called carbon emissions experiment. So their idea was to introduce tap and trade system on that particular region the region which is also actually famous for oil and gas extractions and until recently, quite a number of international companies including Exxon mobile and further companies have been actually involved in that oil and gas projects in the area. So, to put it shortly, and to give you a very brief overlook of what has been happening and what is happening in reality in Russia's climate actions, apart from all this big words and numbers and targets and strategies. So the practical actions in the area of Russia's climate actions have mostly been concentrated around the following felt. So one major cornerstone was natural gas and you know Russia is a natural, much more natural gas supplier but Russia also uses a lot of natural gas within the country. So an idea was we use more and more natural gas as a bridge fuel that cornerstone number two was using and developing a lot of nuclear and light hydro energy, which in case of Russia were considered to be a low carbon energy solutions cornerstone number four was number three excuse me was energy efficiency and does the war, a number of papers and a number of research being done in the last years, which demonstrated how much energy Russia is using, I mean, and Markin's report back in 2009 has actually came up to a conclusion that Russia's economy is losing as much energy as France consumes, because of their outdated and dilapidated energy systems because of energy leaks and energy efficiency was pretty out of the agenda. And finally, for us, for us and other ecosystems, Russia was looking a lot into their concentration opportunities, and I was trying to see how it can use Russia's forests to both for climate emissions reporting that is use more of the forests and try to account more for forest sequestration, but on the other hand also push for climate projects, that is, that means, for example, reforestation projects. The results of its in in form of emission reduction units could be sold elsewhere also to international investors. Now all of that was the agenda in Russia before February 24. Now, what do we have since that. We have two levels of climate agenda in Russia. So one level is the official level on the official level. The climate agenda goes forward as planned. The Ministry of Economic Development, the Ministry of Energy, keep on working on climate legislation within the country. The climate experiment, the carbon emission trading experiment on the Sahelin Island and in the Sahelin region has been launched. Companies including Russian companies still report on the emission reduction, so it's all there. Another, which I believe very important climate related point which we now observe in Russian climate debate within the country is the fact that nowadays more and more Russian officials are actually saying, well, we'll suddenly stay part of the global climate policy and global climate action, but we feel like we need to develop our own national climate and green agenda and not just follow global climate agenda and global green agenda and and resist pushing pushes from the international community. So there's a lot of talk within the country how the green and climate agenda has been pushed from the so called Western countries in their own interests and now Russia and one was some other countries of the world, which are considered to be friendly countries for Russia needs to develop its own green and its own climate agenda. So, this is what's happening on the online level. Now, if we take a look at another level and what has been happening in reality, we do see that even though Russia stays officially committed to its climate goals, even though they've been very serious as I was saying in the beginning, in reality quite a lot of environmental and some climate legislation has been rolled back. And here I can start by bringing an example of rolling back vehicle standards. So for vehicles produced in Russia, the standards have been rolled back to 20 years time. In European European Union standards, they're back to Euro zero standards. And that is obviously it doesn't look good for the mission situation, both the greenhouse emissions and also political substances emissions, likewise for the air quality in large cities. Now, another issue is an access of oil and oil products, which Russia is having and has been having on the market in the last few months. What's happening with that oil companies say they do not have enough capacities to store that oil and to store or to process this all products. So they've been pushing for quite a number of gas powered power stations to be switched back to oil or to oil products like heavy oil. Once again, not good news for global climate agenda, not good news for Russian environmental situation, especially in large urban centers, likewise with flaring gas. In support of the World Bank and many other international institutions, Russia has some water achievements in the area of flaring gas processing. Before that in the 90s Russian oil companies used to burn quite a large proportion of the flaring gas and recent technological innovations allowed for the flaring gas to be captured and then processed into kinds of plastics which will later exported into the European Union. And even now all these expert tracks have been pulled on hold, and many oil companies are turning back into actually burning flaring gas and have been asking for the permissions from the Russian environmental authorities to allow them to burn flaring gas again. And I'm afraid this is what they're doing again, and this is what is happening again now. So, in a way, to sum that up, we see on one hand the official agenda official climate agenda is still being there Russia says we're still on with the international community in the area of climate. Russia's officials also keep saying that they think that climate and green agenda should stay outside of any other world international conflicts, including military conflicts. We'll have to see with what Russia is coming to the next COP the next UN climate negotiation session, which has actually taken place in a month and a half in Egypt and Sharma Sheikh. I will also go there and actually try to monitor and try to analyze what will be happening in the COP. However, at the on the more practical level we see quite a lot quite a lot of push from the business community in Russia from the Russian companies would say please lower down environmental regulation and requirements and standards because we otherwise we don't make it. Because our priority now is to keep the jobs to pay the salaries so we have to go back on environmental legislation and also on climate legislation. It should also be noted that on the national level throughout the last years, Russia has been one of the very few G 20 countries which did not have a price on carbon. I didn't have any sort of carbon tax or cap and trade system. As I mentioned earlier, there was an attempt and there is an attempt to launch such system in one of the Russia's region. On the federal level, companies and large emitters from the next year on are supposed to be obliged to report on their emissions, however, we'll have to see maybe that legislation will also be scrapped down. And companies can do their voluntary emission reduction projects. Once again, we'll have to see whether that at all be interesting for Russian companies. So there are ideas of Russian experts being redirected to other parts of the world including Asia, including mainly China and mainly India. There's also a lot of thinking about how cooperation in the area of environmental climate will also be more relevant with those parts of the world. I mean nowadays it's usually there are usually talks about China and India and also other BRICS countries. Likewise, the whole idea is that there'll be more cooperation in that area with those parts of the world and maybe climate agenda can be supported by some requirements also from those countries, but we'll have to see the way the situation develops. So far what we've been observing and I'll just bring two very practical examples of the topic is that on one hand China and India have indeed been buying much more oil from Russia than before and in some cases also re-selling it into the open markets. On the other hand, they've been buying it with a serious discount of 25 to 30%. And then likewise China is increasingly interested in buying more wood and wood products from Russia. And China is the market which doesn't ask for any kind of forest certification like FSC has also left Russia. And in a way, China is willing to buy any wood without asking for its origin and whether it's been sustainably sourced. I see Andrea appearing and I believe my time was also running out. If I just can quickly just one minute also comment on the global importance of Russia and everything what happens in Russia. I believe quite a lot of sanctions and quite a lot of sanctions pressure which have been introduced in the last months also had an idea to capsulate Russian, capsulate Russia's economy. However, what we can do in economic terms we cannot really do in terms of environment and climate. We'll still see permafrost melting, Arctic ice melting and the forest burning and wildfires are getting more fierce with every year. And so the really big question is what happens with global impacts of that but also what happens with scientific cooperation. So my very last remark would be about scientific cooperation. Now a lot of scientific cooperation programs with Russian institutions and scientists have been put on hold. And that also means both Russian scientists have very little access to international database, including climate database and vice versa international climate database gets little or no data from Russia. Also in the areas of permafrost melting on changes in forests and also on on the situation tactic. I will stop here. Thank you very much and I'll be happy to answer any questions or address any comments which are out there. Thank you so much to Angelina Davidova for her thoughts on Russian climate policy. Next we'd like to pull the energy and climate together with security context with Dr Rebecca pink is the director of the Polar Institute at the Wilson Center. Thanks for joining us today. Thanks so much Andrea. Thank you all to the audience and the excellent speakers who preceded me. Thank you for your fascinating presentations. I feel like the topic has been well well covered and I know we're running out of time so I am going to chop my comments down as short as I can and try to leave us five minutes for questions. I'm going to try to pull together all of these threads and I think you know the speakers who came before me, Scott, Anna Angelina have given us different perspectives and looking at these two very complex issues of Russian hybrid warfare and Russian climate policy. And I'd like to think a little bit about how they intersect. So thinking first about Russian hybrid warfare how might that take on a climate dimension do we worry about hybrid warfare tactics, entering into the climate domain and I think there's a couple ways we should think about that and some of them are in the news right now. You know, while I will note at the top that we currently have no attribution and no proof at all that the recent explosions in the Nord Stream one and two pipelines can be attributed to Russian actors. We have seen three explosions take place on these two pipelines in the Baltic Sea, just in the last few days. And we are seeing that authorities in Sweden and Denmark, as well as NATO are attributing the attacks to human sabotage. And I will also note that earlier in the year, we saw fiber optic cables to Svalbard, similarly targeted by what Norwegian authorities describe as human attacks. So we're seeing human attributed attacks or damages to critical infrastructure, critical communications and energy infrastructure of NATO allies and we've seen a cluster of incidents like that this year. We don't know who to attribute them to, but we know that they are human induced and so they are likely to be related to some type of hybrid threat, according to you know that great format formula that Scott gave us there's given the capabilities that would be required we can presume that there is some type of state level involvement, and therefore we can characterize this as a potential hybrid threat. As we continue to study issues of energy security and green transition worrying about potential hybrid attacks by state and non state actors to energy infrastructure like pipelines like satellite cables I think is very important and something to keep an eye on. I'll also note that Russia has advanced cyber capabilities Scott also mentioned this thinking about cyber attacks to smart infrastructure to energy grids and to other key technologies for the green transition I think is something to keep an eye on. I'll note also that we've seen Russia weaponized migrants along its land borders where it has pushed migrants over into neighboring countries. I don't spend a lot of time on that but when we think about future climate refugees. I think we should consider the ways in which Russia may be willing in the future to weaponize climate migrants and climate refugees. And the last couple of points that I want to make really really quickly only spend a minute or two on this. You know I think we can see pretty clearly how Russia might employ hybrid warfare tactics and techniques in the domain of climate effects or in the domain of the clean energy transition. Particularly as both Anna and Angelina mentioned Russia is an energy giant and it has used its energy influence as a form of coercion and power particularly relating to energy dependence. And you know we're seeing maybe even some indications that as Russia fails to meet its climate goals, it may use that as a form of leverage against the international community. And it's also important to remember that Russia will stand to suffer harms from climate change that may take the form of hybrid threats against Russia itself right and you know so when we think about the climate harms to the Russian state and the Russian government. I believe that Russian security actors will see climate change as a threat as well. And the, some of the primary and really obvious climate threats that Russia faces are from thawing permafrost. And the permafrost underlies permanently frozen ground which is thawing due to climate change permafrost underlays about 65% of Russia and costs for repairing the damage associated with with thawing permafrost have been estimated to top almost $100 billion. There's an enormous amount of expensive infrastructure in Russia that sits on top of permafrost so that's a huge cost. Also wildfires we're seeing enormous wildfires raging across Russian so there's another significant cost there. And I'm thinking about the extent to which the state will see climate change as an unconventional threat it needs to address versus seeing climate change as another new domain for it to launch hybrid attacks against its enemies I think will be really interesting to play out. And obviously this is all in the backdrop of the worst point in relations between Russia and the West in decades. Welcome back. I hope you've time for a couple of quick questions I'll stop here what a fantastic conference can congratulations Andrea, and thank you for enabling me to participate. Thank you so much to Dr Rebecca pink is I invite all the speakers from our keynote in our first panel to go camera on. I'm in the Q&A to answer any question kind of write an answer down. I'd like to know first before we get into our break. Each of you has now heard from each other and I'd like to give you a quick chance to comment on something you learned about the intersection of hybrid warfare and climate or energy from today's discussion sonka would you like to go first and maybe keep everything to about two minutes each. And we might still get a break. I disagree slightly with the idea of hybrid warfare because what happened to me in Ukraine at the moment is an actual war. There are some symmetries and asymmetries but this is one of our intellectual discussions we are leading in the security environment. What is hybrid warfare at the end. And I totally agree with the last speaker that climate change could be used as a tool for the Russians and we will see maybe also for the Chinese in their portfolio of hybrid activities, either actively or either in a passive way. This is where we will some challenges. This is this my problem of dancing tap dancing on an active volcano, because we are not able to forecast if someone starts to tweak the climate system of the change what are the side effects and then it becomes really dangerous for everyone, even for the for the one who is doing it. And this is for me a real risk. We are facing at the moment. Thank you so much to Sonka. Now I'd like to go to Scott. Yes, I think Becca made some key points at the very end. The sabotage in the last scene in the last couple days, very significant on the nurturing pipelines, although they're not in use. The part that she mentioned in the elements of hybrid warfare to expand upon cyber attacks. We've seen this already right, we've seen Russian based groups, although not necessarily state aligned, such as dark side attack the colonial pipeline United States. And we've seen the group black cat, a rebrand of dark side attack last February oil terminals in Europe. So, there's plenty of opportunity to disrupt the climate's plans of Europe, moving forth in the infrastructure of which they'll be built upon. Thank you. Excellent Scott, thank you, and I'd like to go to you next. I really actually enjoyed listening to everybody because a lot of this is outside of the purview of what I look at the idea of hybrid warfare and how you, how you define it is actually quite interesting, because it gets to the, you know, it's, it's our defining aspect to make a difference on how we treat another country's actions but also how much we escalate and to what extent so it's a very, very sensitive aspect and in that way, extremely important. I like really the, the, the, the, the environment at the consideration by Angelina angle that considered the environmental part because I've, I've tried to put even for my class to look for, you know, the environment and Russia and so on and this is a subject that's not easy to approach. And, and I have heard a lot about, you know, about the legislation on like methane emissions and and and and flaring, but at the same time with I've heard is that there was no measuring system or the monitoring system and there was an all self reported so kind of more of a kind of, you know, more of a set up rather than actual, actual activity, which kind of would, you know, would that on the ground movement now now confirm that that environmental considerations are secondary. And they, they, they are there as long as they serve other, other goals, probably. So I just wonder what, what, what could have changed that or would, would change it and I'm not sure whether there is something at this moment, of course, given this, the situation we in. Thank you. Anna, thank you so much. I'd like to go to Angelina next. Yeah, and I would also on my side would like to express my gratitude to all the other co panelists. I believe I've learned a lot. Once again on my side the questions of hybrid warfare is something I don't work particularly on so it's beyond my area of immediate work and I believe that I've learned a lot and while trying to connect the topic of climate change and the hybrid warfare. I would agree with a lot what Rebecca was saying in her input, and that is the whole connection of energy systems and energy supply and attempts to ruin or with energy supply systems. This is also probably will see the direct consequences of the, where the two factors and where the two areas will be coming together. I still feel like everything which has direct connection with climate is still an open question to me I mean with regard to climate change and the hybrid warfare. I would probably look more in detail into the whole situation with the Arctic and both climate change consequences in the Arctic but also the fact is, Russia is now out of the main international Arctic bodies. What's really happening in the Arctic will actually be less known to the international community and also less international expertise and less international monitoring will be allowed in the area and I also believe it's a major global concern but it might be also a topic for another discussion. So, thank you. Excellent Angelina thank you very much. Rebecca, would you like to share some final thoughts. Thank you. And I see Colonel Martin's on the line as well so I'll try to make it again very quick I think one thing I think a lot about it's just the element of time, the longer this situation goes on. We're right away from meeting her para schools and there's an enormous energy transition underway in Europe that has been jump started. And as our previous speakers on and Angelina mentioned it's it's going in some ways and towards more green energy but also in some ways towards you know more coal. Obviously Russia we're seeing significant backwards movement and so from a climate perspective this is. There's glimmers of hope and also a lot of very troubling actions going on right now and so again the more time the more years this goes on sort of the scarier the prospects get so I hopefully the hopefully forward progress keeps us going in the right direction but I hope you keep attention to this issue and I congratulate you on pulling together this important conference. Thank you. Thanks Becca. Actually I just wanted to add something to Rebecca in Germany the green saying Putin has done more for you know renewable energy within the last four months than 16 years of a conservative administration so let's the other side of the of the coin here. Excellent. Fantastic points. Thank you so much. And I want to thank our keynote speakers on commons. Scott Jasper Anna McCosca, Angelina Davidova and Rebecca pink is what a fantastic way to start this conversation and this thought experiment on how climate and hybrid warfare tactics might interact. We'll take a quick break, and we will come back at 240 1440 and resume with our next panel on China hybrid warfare and climate change. Thanks you for joining us today. We will resume with our second panel today. As a reminder all our conference materials with the agenda and full biographies are of all of our speakers is available at the bottom of the events page and I'll post the link in the chat. The event is recorded and will be available on the naval war college YouTube page afterwards. You can post your questions in the Q amp a feature, and I'll try and get my panelists to respond to them if they think they have a great answer for you. The second panel of our event today China hybrid warfare and climate change, and this will follow a similar panel format to the first panel. To start us off, I'd like to go straight into our first speaker. Dr Derek Solan of the US Air Force China Aerospace Studies Institute and he wrote an excellent paper fight fire with fire, the police PLA studies hybrid warfare. Welcome to Derek and we look forward to your talk today. Thank you for having me. I am not a doctor. I'm not a real scholar actually. So, I'll just get into it. So, China's defense establishment are represented by the People's Liberation Army. That's the military of China. They've long recognized the non military aspects of conflict. So for example, the, the PLA does what they call political work. That's always comprised activities that that we would categorize as psychological warfare civil affairs. Over a decade ago the PLA came up with something called the three war fairs. The idea about attacking and adversaries morale and they would say waging war in the domains of global public opinion and international law. So, the, the notion of hybrid warfare is really nothing new, not to the PLA, but until 2021. So, in 2019, I think this has to do with the unrest we saw in Venezuela. That's where things really changed for them. That's when they published their first, the first general study of hybrid warfare, and they participated and they even organized seminars on hybrid warfare. They published seminars on hybrid warfare in the very same year, and actually in the first half of 2019. And then in 2021. They published a multi issue study is a series about hybrid warfare in their official newspaper. That may not sound like much, but their official newspapers really where you can take the pulse of what they're thinking because that's meant for the entire force. And they have a section there that it, they use it to present their intellectual ideas about warfare. And so while none of it is necessarily doctrinal we wouldn't call it. It wouldn't reach the level of what we would call doctrine. Those are what they consider the right ideas that's it's still orthodoxy. It just isn't set in stone. But I think that they indicated that they no longer regard hybrid warfare as just a foreign concept or a foreign threat. They still, they still see it as a foreign threat but what they're really signaling to their own force is that they believe it's something that they have, they themselves have to adopt. And go any further I really have to talk about definitions, because most of what I was looking at was was really them struggling to define hybrid warfare and so I had to think a lot about these definitions. So hybrid warfare, the concept of how it's generally used or understood that has changed over time. So initially, it referred to a form of warfare, in which an actor combines the tactics the techniques of both regular and irregular forces. At least in the United States had to do with what you're confronting in the global war on terrorism. And we were seeing terrorist groups, you know, use, use the, the access that things like social media the internet gave them to disseminate their propaganda. And do things that, you know, those groups back in the, before they were really unable to do. So we're really looking at kind of the combination of, of methods, and the whole point of it was to warn the US military that in the future, even what we would call a regular force would probably still use the tech, the tactics and techniques of an irregular force, especially if they're trying to, you know, defeat a stronger adversary us. So that's how it was originally used that's what the way we began talking about it. But since the Russian invasion of Crimea in 2014. The use has really changed and it's become synonymous with a with a different term. The reason why is that in 2013, the Russian Chief of General Staff Valerie Gerasimov and don't Russian so put your name I'm sure but he used the term hybrid warfare to describe what he was calling American or Western political warfare against our adversaries and that term came to be regarded as a statement of Russian doctrine. So we were, we were reading his description of us, as if he was really describing Russian doctrine and to be fair, he was actually saying that Russia has to do this to that Russia has to become more proficient in this type of warfare so it's a fair it's a justifiable argument even if it's inaccurate. So, hybrid warfare really became synonymous with political warfare, or, you know, active measures in the, in the Soviet context. What are those things so that those refer to the employment of primarily non military means to influence us or subvert an adversary, without exceeding the threshold war, and that's really the most important aspect of it. So in the 1940s George cannon of, you know, containment fame, he defined political warfare as the employment of all the means at a nation's command short of war to achieve its national objectives. I think that's, it's a good definition of political warfare active measures and hybrid warfare since all these things are really come together. But if you want to distinguish the two, you'd say hybrid warfare is really distinguished by a combination of methods by by which it's waged political warfare is distinguished by its limiting principle, the principle that actions don't exceed the threshold of war. It doesn't exclude non military. It doesn't exclude, I guess non violent. I should say it doesn't exclude violent methods that's the right way to say so. So, for example, I mean you could go back in history and if I knew more ancient history I could probably find all kinds of examples but just in, in recent history during the Cold War we have a lot of it. The USSR came up with a lot of conspiracies about, you know, how the CIA created AIDS and created the cocaine problem in the US. Even today China. They insinuate they basically accuse the US army of creating coven 19. Speaking of biological warfare during the Korean War and even, even now, China still says that the US conducted biological warfare against China. But besides propaganda and disinformation you have the support insurgencies. So, you know, Soviet Union, supported the Viet Cong during the Vietnam War, we supported jihadis in Afghanistan, when the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan. So, it can encompass a lot of things and that's that's kind of one of the problems with with the term. They all describe a mode of conflict that's just below the threshold of war we we talk about these things as if they're sets of distinct actions. But the only thing that really binds them together is this limiting principle that whatever action you take, it doesn't exceed the threshold of war. And I think that's that's what leads to a lot of confusion when we're talking about these things. The PLA's definition of hybrid warfare is essentially the same as George Kennan's definition of political warfare. So they're really, they're not, they don't really have their own interpretation of it. They're following what I would say that is the popular the common conception of put up of hybrid warfare. But they do, there are some interesting aspects of the way that they talked about it. They said that hybrid warfare is the option of first resort in great power conflict. And the reason why is because they said that mutually assured destruction makes it unlikely or just impossible for major powers to resort to the use of nuclear weapons so that's off the table. They also say that, you know, given international legal and cultural restrictions on the use of force. It's just unlikely that major powers are really going to go to war with each other. So this is what's left this is the way you you conduct conflict without leading to, you know, larger wars. But they said that hybrid warfare must be backed by by strong conventional military power. And I think this is an important point, because, even though they never actually stated it they just said otherwise, you know, there will be many difficulties. I think what they're getting at is that this is really the only means to prevent the target of hybrid warfare from escalating conflict, they still see that that danger. The interesting aspect is that they, they said that the best defense against hybrid warfare is a good offense. And so, you know, while they throughout they excoriated America for supposedly waging hybrid warfare against them against. You know, they said that we overthrew the Ukrainian government. They, they heaped praise on Russia. They said that Russia turned the tables on the USA by using hybrid warfare against America. And then, you know, they were just a current or state the amount of the degree that they were impressed with how Russia annexed Crimea. They just seem to think that was just excellent. It was great. The study. It didn't really articulate a concrete doctrine of hybrid warfare and you can't extrapolate a framework for hybrid warfare Chinese framework of hybrid warfare from the study. What I think the study indicates those that they have a lot to learn about this, this is still a new topic for them. I don't really think it is, but they see hybrid warfare as a new thing. And I think more than anything else, they don't, they themselves don't think they're very good at it. I think what they, they must recognize that they, they engage in propaganda they do all kinds of things that would be classified as hybrid warfare. And what I think they see is the missing line because that there's no, they don't see enough coordination. And maybe there's just something that their efforts are sufficient. So, there's that I think that the example of Russia. So, Russia's failure in Ukraine this year is probably actually going to, to make. Maybe the myth of Russia's hybrid warfare success in 2014, make that even more attractive to them if we follow the reasoning of the study. Because Beijing thinks that that we are waging hybrid warfare against them. They always have this is nothing new. If they see that hybrid warfare is the best defense against what they see as as hybrid warfare against them, they're going to try to do this more and more. And I think that they'll ever be as good as they want to be. I just don't think anybody really can be, but I wanted the interesting lessons that you can take from it though is that. So, I don't think Russia's success in 2014 if you want to call it a success. I don't think that was due to propaganda and deception I think it was due to boldness. I don't think that any country would have acted forcefully defend Ukraine in 2014. Even if the little green men had their insignia. So, the Chinese point about the having strong conventional military power backing a hybrid warfare hybrid warfare campaign. I think that that's a valid point and I think it's interesting that the Chinese get that. What that may mean then is that the stronger that they get that doesn't make them any less likely to engage in hybrid warfare it may actually make them more likely to do so. And if they think that hybrid warfare is some sort of magic technique that they can use to achieve goals that would otherwise require military force. They actually end up blundering into into, you know, a war, a conventional war that they don't necessarily want or that no one necessarily wants. Okay, well, I think I've gone over time so I'll stop here. Like to thank Derek so much for his thoughts on the China's perspective of hybrid warfare. I learned a lot and next we will go into our discussion about China and energy and China and climate. So I'd like to introduce our next speaker Dr Edward Cunningham, director of Asia energy and sustainability initiative at the Harvard Kennedy School. Edward, thank you for bringing your expertise to our panel today. Thank you Andrea. I really appreciate the invitation. As a doctoral student I was constantly engaged with people who think about guns and bombs as I used to say and I really enjoy this type of more horizontal discussion that cuts across various disciplines and questions. Perhaps I would share observations on what drives energy Chinese energy policy. And also what incentives and structural features on the supply and demand side. Lead me to conclude that people who need to model understand predict Chinese energy needs really need to privilege the continued use of coal oil and gas and the economy and particularly coal, which then has implications. But first, just speaking to some of the overarching themes of this conference. I think it's a it's a great topic and there are many interesting aspects of the relationship between changes in energy markets that we're seeing and conflict. It interests me, for example, how renewables potentially have many positive strategic attributes potentially enabling mobile assets to be much quieter for example, enabling a more distributed model of energy micro grids that can sometimes you know free island and other geographies from defending complicated supply chains of diesel. Simple engineering simpler maintenance, fuel parts and electronic electric motors. Of course on the other hand we're also starting to see the strategic risks of renewables upstream in terms of lithium cobalt indium and China's dominance there. Could they be cartelized so it could be instead of an oil and gas cartel, rare earths and other cartel. How quickly can the US reshore these environmentally very negative upgrade processes that we really offshored long ago. I think also it's interesting when we talk about renewables how really we're talking about electricity. And so then cyber security becomes a much larger concern. Let's say for a country like Bangladesh that now is trying to meet its sustainability and development goals in a really a land scares country. And that means importing more power from India, for example, so there's a lot there and I find it very interesting. We need to focus just for a few minutes on China and its energy policy. So I think on the one hand, energy policy in China has exhibited significant propensity to change and change rapidly. No question. Successfully, China's built the largest electric vehicle fleet in the world, largest solar market in the world One of the things that I focus a lot on is retired huge numbers a huge capacity of inefficient power plants coal fire power plants at scales, equaling the install capacity of some large countries. And the relative role of coal and China's national energy system has declined. It has declined from 70 about 70% lower 70% of primary energy consumption to under 60% of the longer two decades. Just as one example when I was when SO2 and sulfur dioxide was causing serious local smog during the years I first lived in China in the early 1990s, and then in the late 1990s, the rate of sulfur scrubber installation on coal fire power plants was was incredible. I then part of my dissertation was focused on that and doing a national survey to figure out how to document that rate of adoption. My, my doctoral advisors didn't believe what I was saying didn't believe what I was reporting terms of how rapidly those installations are happening and more importantly just how much growth there was in electric power. And it was happening. Now, why was it happening was a result of different factors, and this will come back later highly subsidized funds to purchase and install capital equipment and ability of power plants to evade monitoring and basically not run them, you know to save on costs. And a lot of political top down urgency to install them, because of a range of pollution driven unrest unrelated to power but to large plants melting chemical processing and others that mobilize a leading group to take in to look at smog and then take action. It's interesting that how did that how did that happen this big shield of SO2 that was in some ways actually cooling temporarily the world. How did that all change and the SO2 was cleaned up. Well it was later through a major technological change which was continuous and missions monitoring by the grid that really ensured they were being operated. When General Secretary Xi Jinping rolled out the 14th five year plan and chose to establish two relative binding targets by 2025. There's no questions in one way that's an important data point about what the leadership thinks is feasible in the short term, when it comes to carbon and energy intensity so just as an example. There are two things one was to reduce carbon dioxide emissions per unit of GDP so carbon intensity of the economy by 18% compared to 2025 2020 so between 2020 and 2025. The second was to reduce energy consumption per unit GDP, meaning energy intensity by about 13 and a half percent compared to 2020 so between 2020 and 2025. Even when you look at the non binding targets, those are the ones that are used as a shorthand by the grid companies, generating companies, local governments to provide the quantitative direction that they all are moving in. Increase non fossil energy sources and it's the proportion of non fossil in the energy mix to about 20% compared to 16% in 2020. That builds on what they call the dual control mechanisms that were launched back in 2016 which limit intensity and total energy consumption. But this is this pit the pivot. The major corporations you know when you when you look at the way they behave and what they say they're quick to note that that plan does not cap total emissions. Therefore, and also does not cap total energy production anymore used to that has been lifted. There's no caps, no absolute limits. People who are the green optimists in China argued that this is because electrification will take over with electrification transport will require unprecedented growth and energy needs. There cannot be a cap, but those energy needs will be met largely through renewables, right. So the pessimists read this as a lack of faith by the leadership that coal and most importantly heavy industry can be reduced dramatically in the short to medium term. So, two camps. There's a wonderful phrase that local government officials and more importantly experienced state on enterprise executives use when they're talking about risk so I just want to talk a little bit about risk. And in Chinese it's butchou you're going down show what and what that basically means is do not seek achievement, instead seek avoiding mistakes. Obviously not everyone holds that level of risk aversion. But particularly in times of systemic stress related to energy supply and stability and particularly among the corporate leaders who are in the state owned firms which of course dominate energy. This risk aversion is profound. It's exacerbated also when incentives are misaligned, right. So, it also leads to predictive behavior, which is minimizing short terms are really focused on minimizing short term supply disruption over achieving any long term, large scale carbon intensity reductions. So, with that in mind let's look a little bit incentives. Let's look at demand demand curve and economic structure. Energy and infrastructure remain critical, not only to China's slowing growth, but more importantly as a mechanism to increase bank loans in what is still a debt driven national model bank driven national model financial model. So the result is that CO2 missions are climbing. They've increased by an average of about 2% per year between 20 even more recently 2015 20 to 2020. And even though coal may have dropped in relative terms 10 or 11% over the past two decades. These responses to downturns the priming of the pump have limited further meaningful declines in the short term median term and transport is also growing which means that it's important to remember that the share of oil and gas has risen 5% during that time about equal to the rising levels and nuclear. So, that's a little bit about demand. The economic system, then really when you sit back and you and you try to characterize it it's one bias towards production, it's still very much is, which is why, even though despite leadership focus on trying to solve that problem, and to flip to a consumption driven growth model like the US has been very limited progress. It remains an investment driven capital intensive and the economy, and those biases become more pronounced in turn in times of crisis so when the trade offs are even more striking so just as quick examples. If you look at when the distress happened 2008 2009 global financial crisis. The deleveraging in 2017 2018 pandemic in 2020 and the drop in demand external demand, the export led growth model. The government eased all these policies designed to increase coal plant retirements like I talked earlier, those were, those were postponed. And also, they also let took took restraints away in terms of building out new coal fired power plants they they actually decentralized a lot of those decisions to local governments, and we saw a big growth in in build out. Similar reversals occurred in terms of fuel during winter heating shortages during the summer heat wave we just had in China. And in 2017 2021 and most recently 2022 so more challenging decisions also require structural trade offs right like electricity pricing reforms. The reason we don't see as much progress as we expect there that would enable renewables is because it would it would then lead to very much more responsive demand reductions. Yes, that's a good thing demand reduction but then it will also lead to price volatility, certainly for industry but even potentially for residents. And so, lastly, maybe a true movement towards consumption driven economic growth model would also require a lot more revenue spent on social policy social services health insurance, and other services that would that would enable people to reduce their savings and consume more, but that hasn't really happened. The supply curve heat and power provision is the foundation of the economy and social stability. So as of 2021 coal still 60% generation, arguably more important coal is 70% of peak load provision. Right, so when when things are really tight and every kilowatt hour matters, even more important. And also other their other supply related issues which is to for new renewables to really start to push through 15 to 20%, they have to really start to be an interconnected grid. Right now the grid is still fairly provincial in terms of the way it's piecemeal. Those interconnectivity investments still haven't happened harder to move those electron green electrons West to East. Occasionally for me it's, I was heartened when the Ministry of Environmental Protection was formed several years ago that has renamed Ministry of Ecology and environment, given a central role in climate policymaking. That was progress, resting control from the super planning agency the NDRC National Development Forum Commission. And that was eventually as was reversed by 2019 2020 and a lot of the levers of control were put back into the arms of the NDRC. Last point is on the technical side, many have written about this. There are deep, deep debates within China still around technological alternatives, not just nuclear, which obviously is incredibly expensive but also there are questions around the built still the ability of Chinese capacity corporate capacity to really build it out. So that's part of why we've seen such delays, although recently a bit more growth in the past decade but still in relative terms delays power market reforms like I talked about. Fundamentally, having spot market pricing, other than the few pilots they have would create series of volatility. That's a major structural challenge, and even hydrogen, which is highly variable in terms of its use case. And so even on the technical side that has those are the other debates that have significant have inhibited the growth of renewables. Thank you so much to Edward Cunningham and your deep knowledge of China and energy and the friction points within the system internally. Next, I'd like to go to China and climate and security experts so we'll start with Ike Freiman. I'm a postdoctoral research fellow at the Columbia, Harvard, China and the World Program, and the Harvard Arctic Initiative and he's also affiliated with the Naval War College and our China Maritime Studies Institute. Ike, thank you for joining us today. Thank you very much Andrea I'm the real pleasure to be with you all virtually. I am here to talk about China's way of thinking about climate security, and perhaps to draw some connections between that and Chinese hybrid warfare doctrine. So I'm going to make a broad argument that I'm then going to develop in three points. The main point is that climate is not really a type of hybrid warfare. It's not a subcategory of hybrid warfare, but climate change interacts with geopolitics and hybrid tactics. And it does so more and more when you look into the future. And some of the PRC's climate adaptation activities, looking ahead to 2035, which is as far as their current national adaptation strategy extends, are probably going to overlap with hybrid warfare and China's geo economic activities in many mutually supporting ways. Climate change generally captures our attention when it manifests as discrete, massive, extreme weather events, floods, droughts, storms. But climate change in general is a very long term phenomenon, which has diffuse impacts on human institutions and societies. And over long periods of time, climate change doesn't unfold in a vacuum, because we are aware of climate change, and our awareness shapes our planning, and our thinking, and our preferences, and our fears and our actions. And over time, states and militaries and financial markets, any institution that has to do this sort of planning is going to respond to anticipated climate impacts before those physical impacts actually arrive. And the history of human institutions in the 21st century is one of co evolution with climate change, and our expectations of what climate change will bring, or might bring. That's my big picture framework for thinking about what climate change is. So if you accept that premise, then you'll follow me to the next stage of reasoning, which is that it's not analytically or operationally to talk about climate issues in splendid isolation. Climate is integrated into every aspect of geopolitics and security, because climate change shapes the environment in which the United States military operates, in which the PLA operates, and it will as far out into the future, as we care to look. In the PLA, I believe, understands this. The Chinese Communist Party understands this the state council understands this. And so we should too. I'm going to develop this through three points the first is, we should begin our analysis of China's thinking about climate security by looking at the 2035 national strategy on climate adaptation. Climate adaptation has long been a priority of the CCP and thinking about its response to climate change. More than a decade ago you had senior officials involved in climate policy negotiations saying that as a developing country. Yes, mitigation and adaptation for climate change are equally important in theory but because China didn't create the problem and has fewer resources and needs to manage its development. China is morally justified in prioritizing adaptation over mitigation. In other words they can think about building seawalls building water transfer systems, securing their resources and their industrial base to thrive in a warming world, and they are morally justified in prioritizing that over cutting emissions, which is a framework that not the only explanatory framework for understanding what Ed just shared with us, which is a view of China's being a laggard in phasing out coal. So in 2013, the National Development and Reform Commission proposed a first national strategy for climate adaptation. This talked in very, very broad strokes about what the big picture philosophy of adaptation should be. One of the most interesting observation was that climate change is inseparable from everything else and therefore, quote, China must integrate the requirements of climate adaptation into the entire process of national development. That includes economic development, social development, military development and hard power development. It lasted for a decade. Now this year in June, after extensive interagency debate the Ministry of Ecology and Environment, which is at indicated as the new super agency for dealing with climate issues released an updated report. It's hundreds of pages long, it goes into incredible detail about every aspect of disaster response sea level rise ecosystem protection and so forth. And what I would suggest again are that there's a primacy of adaptation over mitigation for China that there's an integrated nature of this adaptation policy, it's not a separate policy channel or vertical, it has to be integrated into how China thinks about everything from housing and urbanization to industry. And it implies that there is no limit at the border, because this is being integrated into China's grand strategy of national rejuvenation, it implicitly is connected to China's overseas activities. It's trading relationships, it's geopolitical relationships, the global expansion of the PLA, it's vertical supply chains for getting access to critical resources. And I think this is very, very important to highlight, as this plan is operationalized over the next decade I think we will see climate inflections in more and more PRC policies, some of which have nothing to do with hybrid warfare, but some of which may have quite a bit of overlap with the second point is that there has been a discourse particularly since 2015 in the PRC at the highest level of reframing climate change as a national security issue. Now this is new, as late as 2012. The position was that climate change had nothing to do with national security. They thought this was a US plot to make China accountable for climate change and therefore pressuring it diplomatically to cut emissions. But there was an argument that was developed by Zhang Haibin who's a very prominent influential professor at Peking University, that actually this affects almost every dimension of Chinese national security, and furthermore climate changes systemic level risks, because you could have, for example, natural disasters that cause migration or disruption that cause social unrest which threaten party rule. So, there was an emergence of a doctrine that saw China's national security as deeply intertwined with ecological security, and these concepts of ecological security, such as Shantai Anquan, or ecological civilization, which is a vision for China's future in which ecological security is preserved, has actually become one of the core ideological tenets of the Xi Jinping era. So I would posit that whenever you hear the term ecology, Shantai, it is a euphemism for climate adaptation, and it has an implicit security valence. More and more we're seeing this connected to Chinese foreign aid activities outside of the country. So I think this is insofar as you believe that we can understand China's thinking by looking at the way slogans and euphemisms are deployed. Keep an eye out for this word ecology. I think you're going to see it more and more. And then the third point is just a brief discussion of how these ideas are operationalized abroad. If you look at what Chinese scholars at top universities have written about this, I'm thinking for example of an essay by someone at the Peking University Institute of Oceanography. The basic idea is that climate change interacting with China's developmental arc is going to create more of a scramble for resources in the global commons. So it's not just a question of how China can secure resources in Sub-Saharan Africa, for example. It's also making sure that China has the presence in the oceans, the high seas, the deep sea, but also the polar regions to be prepared to stake its claim to these resources as and when they open up. So you see the emergence of a strategy, both to build a far seas navy and a far seas fishing fleet, but also to build a sensor infrastructure relationship with small island polities around the world, and so forth. So China will have eyes and ears and presence and when, for example, deep sea mining opens up new opportunities to get critical minerals that China won't be cut out that it can get as quote fair share of the pie. So this doesn't necessarily relate to hybrid warfare, but it may, because if we imagine a future conflict between China and other states over resources in the global commons and deep sea minerals is probably a great example of that. All of this thinking and doctrinal work that the Chinese party state is doing at the highest level is likely to shape China's strategy and the presence before power philosophy is probably going to become a very, very relevant to how all of us are thinking about the PLA's intentions. I will stop there, but thank you very much for your time. I thank you so much for your thoughts on Chinese climate security. I really appreciate that all three of our first speakers are really looking at Chinese source documents to inform their their talk today. Our final speaker is Aaron Sikorsky she's the director of the Center for climate insecurity. We're honored to have you join us today Aaron and look forward to your thoughts as you anchor this panel for us. Thanks Andrea and I will like Rebecca in the last panel try to keep my remark short so we have some time for questions here at the end and I really appreciated listening to the three other experts on China talk through these issues, especially the most recent speaker just given the framing of kind of the big picture of how China is approaching climate change. What I want to do in my quick time here is a couple of things. One, I do want to talk about the areas of climate security vulnerability facing China because again as Rebecca noted on Russia it's important, I think to understand the context in which China is operating and the risks it has in its health and its mainland from from climate change. I just want to talk about a few areas of uncertainty. I think going forward that are important, especially from the US perspective as we think about US policy and trying to understand what's happening in China. I think it's important to look at these source documents and adaptation plan, but I also think there's some things missing from those plans that we should think about and examine from from the US analytic perspective. In terms of areas of climate security vulnerability there are three areas three buckets and frankly they're the same buckets I use when I look at any country or region and understanding climate security risks but they can be applied to China as well. So the first are the direct risks to military and critical infrastructure right. So it's risk to military installations and equipment, the country's ports and coastal cities, as well as transportation and energy infrastructure. I'd also argue that the intensity and frequency of climate hazards may strain the capacity of Chinese military and security forces response, just like we're seeing in other countries. They're frequently called upon for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief missions across the country. And we've seen some indications that some PLA leaders have actually complained about the amount of work that they're having to do and how this takes away from other military readiness. We see risks to the islands they have built up in the South China Sea because of the environmental degradation of actually building those islands. When stronger typhoons and storms come through the region, those islands are more vulnerable than they would be. The equipment there is particularly vulnerable. Also, risks from melting permafrost. China has railroads and pipelines that rely or that are built into permafrost that is now melting, that poses a risk there. Of course, the large populations and their river deltas, the shipbuilding and their river deltas, all of these infrastructure risks that are very real and pose real security risks to the country. The second area of risk are the compounding risk to domestic stability. And this is the threats to the economic growth, to food and water security, the country's efforts at poverty eradication and the risks of exacerbating inequality. And here is where I would argue that the adaptation plans we're seeing from China, well, very ambitious and in many ways very innovative. They're very much focused on tangible, concrete things and interventions. And as we have all learned from the COVID-19 pandemic that resilience and adaptation isn't just about things, right? Isn't just about how high your seawalls are or how sophisticated your sponge cities are. But there are a lot of other less tangible aspects that can build resilience. And I think this is a real area of risk for China going forward. And I'm not convinced that their adaptation plan fully accounts for some of these less tangible political stability risks related to climate. And that's a vulnerability for them. Now the third area of risk, of course, is just the amplifying tensions potential in the Indo-Pacific region due to climate change as the key resources that China shares with its neighbors, whether it's freshwater river basins or ocean fish stocks, as those come under threat. And there's amping up competition there. I think this is the area when we're talking hybrid warfare where we will potentially see China leveraging these areas to put pressure on its neighbors, put pressure on the U.S. I think we also see on the geopolitical stage, China, as I mentioned, using climate as a way to put pressure on the United States. Just today, this week, with the Pacific Islands Forum being held here in Washington, we saw the Chinese government-sponsored press pushing back against what the U.S. is doing in a climate framework, right? Saying that these islands in the Indo-Pacific care about climate. The U.S. is putting China first, not climate, but we China are putting climate first. So I think just the role on the international stage, the geopolitical stage of climate will be a place to really watch closely going forward. And I'll just end because I know we only have three minutes here for questions. But as I said, a couple uncertainties. One is whether the adaptation plan really accounts for all of the other aspects of adaptation that aren't technical things. A second is that China is not monolithic, of course, and there are internal tensions around decarbonization, around what role the military should play in all of this, right? And so those, I think, are things to watch going forward. And then the last uncertainty I would put forward, again, looking to the COVID-19 example is kind of what I call the competence versus politics, right? Post-2007, the SARS crisis, China pulled together a very comprehensive and sophisticated emergency response law for how they would deal with health crises like these in the future. And on paper, it was really impressive. But then when the rubber hits the road of the COVID crisis and the incentives at the local level for not reporting up bad news, right? Kick in, you don't get that competence at the local level because of the political dimensions. And I think the same thing is true with climate. And so understanding this as an uncertainty going forward that will shape Chinese behavior and perhaps undermine some of their grand adaptation plans I think is really, really important and something to keep in mind as we watch these climate security issues in the future. Excellent, Erin. Thank you so much. I would now like to oppose a question to all of the panelists. So I invite you to go camera on and we'll go in order. Now that you've heard from each other, I just like to give you a quick chance to comment on something you've learned today or you take away about the intersection of hybrid warfare and either climate and energy. And you can go with each other. You can also refer back to the earlier Russia panel. Derek, can we start with you? We'll go in order. Well, like I said, I'm not a real scholar. It takes me a long time to digest everything that I've heard. Precisely because I'm not focused on climate policy or or some of the broader aspects of international relations when it comes to China I'm focused much more squarely on military purely military matters. So I've learned a lot about just the degree that China has devised different strategies or, you know, policy papers and other things about this very topic and the degree that they engage in in I guess you could go to the debate or the degree that they are actually trying to present their narrative, their narrative about how they're dealing with climate change versus, you know, the US and the West that that's something that I've never really studied before so I learned a lot there. Thank you so much Derek. Edward. I think from my perspective, it's what I'm learning and very interested in is the extent sort of combining I think really what Derek I agree with you should we should all be very skeptical of anyone who calls themselves scholars always be suspicious of scholars so I think that's fine. I think but combining with Derek some things that Derek said and Ike and Aaron is the whole, the overarching story about how the CCP is seeking to create a place at the table is one that's not a new story. Right, so run a meter for someone's going to be coming to the kids go in fact I think next year, I he were a great book called the good war around this issue of how our narratives how are the world wars, how is history, repurpose by the CCP and the CCP's role in these major events to legitimate legitimate and also create space at the table so as part of the, to me what's interesting is this broader issue of how climate has arisen as part of the rewriting of that narrative to create space at a table where they really weren't as, of course as powerful during the post Bretton Woods or Bretton Woods period and post Bretton Woods, and that to me is what's so interesting I've sort of watched it in other realms right so energy obviously but also in on the corporate side as well in terms of what Chinese corporations are trying to do in the other realms that the US and you leave there. But I think the climate piece is an important new public good effectively or at least newly discussed in some ways public global public good where they really are trying to shape things so I think it's important work and I look forward to going more Thanks Edward Ike Well, thanks all I learned a lot from this conversation, I think the, the biggest insight was what I took away from what Derek said, which is a new appreciation for how China might be interpreting US climate diplomacy as a form of hybrid warfare, which is very different from how I think Kerry, and his ilk understand it. I think from the perspective of the US scientific community. I'm right now at at Harvard I work with john Holdren who was President Obama's science advisor, and I think that if you ask him or the people that he's at Harvard, or his colleagues in the Chinese scientific establishment. They would be inclined to see this as a common sense international cooperation we got to solve this thing because it's a threat to both of us. Security geopolitics doesn't even enter into it. And that is a narrative that I think has a lot of sticking power over the way a lot of influential American scholars and policymakers and diplomats think about the climate issue, but it might be the case that parts of the United States, not all but the the PLA, and other more security minded aspects of the Chinese state might see the US approach to climate diplomacy as coercive and a form of a hybrid warfare to force China onto a track in which it uses more expensive and less reliable energy, and to grow slower. And from that perspective, China as a matter of national defense has to strengthen its ties with other developing countries, and stand strong to prevent US coercion from forcing it to kneecap its own economic growth. That is a disturbing idea, but it seems to fit well into the Chinese understanding of what hybrid warfare is and the Chinese respect for the Americans as the latest and greatest practitioners of hybrid warfare. So I find this idea very disturbing. And I wonder how we can break out of that frame, because if we're in that frame, I don't really know how we could get back to a situation where the US and China can sustainably cooperate on climate. Excellent point, I thank you very much well said, Aaron. It's interesting listening to you because I think there's a US domestic contingent that thinks that negotiations with China are exactly that hybrid warfare by China to force the US into a bad position as well so curious to think about the perceptions on either side there. I think, you know, the takeaway for me thinking about how do we this practical for policymakers right and what part of it is just the fact of this conversation that you've convened folks across different disciplines to talk this through and that Derek is saying I don't know about this and saying you're I'm learning something new from Derek. We need to have this more within government as well to understand how to manage these these hybrid risks going forward, and that the climate shops and the climate offices can't be off by themselves in the functional areas that can relate in DoD and NSC, but they need to be well integrated, right that the China team at DoD needs to have folks on its team that are looking at the climate impacts in China, understanding how China itself is viewing this issue and viewing opportunities and challenges and that needs to be not in competition with how we think about other threats from China, but but an integrated part of it so kudos to you, Andrea for bringing us together to have exactly that conversation and I hope this translates then into what folks inside the buildings in here in DC are doing as well. And Aaron, you brought up a really good point you know, when you think hybrid warfare you think naturally every DoD problem that needs a DoD solution. And my biggest takeaway, going back all the way to the keynote presentation and Sonka was how this is kind of we think of warfare in our own domains, you know we have five of them air land sea space and cyber. But if you think of this and this kind of poly domain, it's just much larger than a DoD issue, and definitely needs that more whole of government kind of lens on it. Well, I would like to go ahead and thank this amazing panel. You've been incredible so to Derek Solin, Edward Cunningham, Ike Freiman, Aaron Sikorsky. This has been a great panel on China and climate change you can go camera off and I'll go ahead and close out the event today. So, overall, thanks to all the speakers. It's been a truly rich learning environment I appreciate everyone who dialed in from all around the world. As promised, we've had several definitions of hybrid warfare. And I just a personal reflection I wanted to share is at the last minute I decided to include an energy expert on both panels which is why we were a little bit more tight on time. However, one thing I really learned today is it's just almost impossible to have a great climate conversation without understanding the energy policies that are going with it. And if you're going to have a climate security policy conversation, you really need to incorporate energy and climate and then take it to the next level how it affects the security environment. This was a call to action we really wanted to take our first initial step into thinking about the connection between climate change and hybrid warfare and we've done that today. It's been a much deeper discussion than I ever anticipated. And I challenge all of you to think about how will creative use of hybrid warfare in the future, interact with how climate change is affecting the security environment. And email me I'll put the email and my email in the box if anyone is interested and has thoughts on that, because I'd really be interested in taking this conversation to the next steps. Again, I'd like to thank all my speakers, particularly my sponsor today the Jerome leavey chair of economic geography and then they will work a college foundation. And that's going to be done without them. And while I am on camera. I want to give thanks to our special events team of Karen Michelle and Carolyn, who have been supportive, Dean and Mark in the PAO office here. Alumni programs and the climate and human security team, especially Dr. Michael Bush. Thank you to everyone who participated. This will conclude the hybrid warfare and climate change conference.