 Good morning! So lovely to see everyone back here today. Thank you everyone for joining yesterday as well. It was such a rich discussion and so wonderful to connect with so many of you. So yeah welcome back to day two of our Climate Crossroads Summit. I'm just going to take a moment for those of you who may be joining us just today in person to orient you with the building in case that there is any sort of emergency. We're going to ask that you exit through the door you came in at the middle of the auditorium here. There are a few major exits to the building but the easiest thing to do would be to proceed directly through the Great Hall and exit out through the exit that goes out to Constitution Avenue. The restrooms are marked here in blue on the map so if you exit the auditorium head to the right you can get to the facilities near the C Street entrance or if you go into the Great Hall and to the left you can find those opposite the East Court. And of course if you're having trouble locating anything just flag down one of the staff and they'll be happy to help you. And just wanted to walk through our plans for today. We have two wonderful panels planned for during our plenary sessions here. We'll be getting started in just a minute with a panel on intersections of climate and other societal challenges. After that panel we'll be going into breakout sessions for those of you in person and we'll provide some instructions about where to go and how to do that at that point. We'll have a lunch and then we'll return back to the auditorium for our final panel on emerging challenges and opportunities. I'm very excited about that one too and we'll then close the day with some reflections and just a few notes about our next steps for the climate crossroads. Again we'll be live streaming the plenary pieces of the agenda and we have the opportunity to participate through Slido. So if you haven't already gotten access to that that's the QR code there. You can go to the website and access it with that event code. We'll also have some online prompts and if you guys if anyone was on the Slido yesterday there were a few surveys and other things that came came up through the day. So I encourage you to participate in that as well. And so with that I'm delighted to invite our first panel to join me here on the stage. Come on up. Thank you. And I think we're waiting for one of our panelists to come and so we might have one joining us in a nick of time. So we'll get started. Michael and we'll go with that. Okay. Thank you. Yes. Good morning everyone. It's such a pleasure to be here today and this morning we had a great conversations yesterday that really touched on the need and urgency of having the National Academies engage in this issues of climate at the crossroads. My name is Michael Mendez. I'm an assistant professor of environmental policy and planning at the University of California Irvine. Also have the pleasure and honor to be a part of the advisory committee of the Climate Crosswords Initiative here for the National Academies. And today we're going to be elaborating a little bit more on topics and themes we talked about yesterday around looking at populations that are disproportionately impacted from our changing climate and specifically marginalized communities, communities of color, looking at issues of intersectionality. So we talked a lot broadly about these impacts, but we didn't get more explicit about who were these individuals, what communities are we talking about. And these are multiple communities plural that we're going to be highlighting here today and trying to put a more human centered, a human face to these impacts of climate change. So I'm honored to have a distinguished panel here that really shows the breadth of this sort of intersectional human centered approaches or human dimensions approaches to climate change and its impacts and how communities are also responding and providing valuable input and decision making and innovation around climate change. So let me begin with introducing some of our panels. Today we'll be starting to hear from Shacoby Wilson, who's the director of the Center for Community Engagement of Environmental Justice and Health and a professor at the Maryland Institute for Applied Environmental Health at the University of Maryland. And he'll be joining us shortly. Maryam Gaye Antaki, assistant professor of geography and environmental studies at the University of New Mexico. And Husa Mahmoud, the George T. Abel professor and infrastructure and director of the structural laboratory at Colorado State University. Each of our panelists will offer some brief opening remarks to get us started and then we will engage in a constructive conversation. We will also leave time for Q&A with the audience both in person and online. For those tuning in virtually, we encourage you to submit questions in the Slido box below the live stream at any point in the session. And we'll have staff to help feed those to the discussion here. So let's dive into our conversation this morning. And again, it's designed to push our thinking around how to conceptualize climate change impacts and potential solutions and how they intersect with issues of race, gender, class, age, immigration status and other type of demographic factors. And we really want to dig in on what do these intersections mean for how we should approach finding equitable and effective solutions to climate challenges. So our panelists are working at these intersections and we'll explore these insights. So we're going to begin with Maryam. Your work has really focused especially on the intersection of gender and climate change and how societal structures shape the development and implementation of policies. Who participates in decision making and how to help people take up those decisions. We love to hear your perspectives from the ground from your research and your field of work on these intersectional approaches to climate challenges and solutions. And thank you for being with us here today. Thank you so much for that introduction, Michael. Yes, so I started intersections of gender and climate change, but very broadly, I'm interested in power relations around knowledge production around climate change. So if I lose you along the way, the key takeaway of my research and what I want to get through today is that we must step away from one size fits all solutions that are devised by people who think similarly. So my research explores processes by which some voices are heard and some are silenced in the climate debate. I analyze this not only at the community or local level, I think there's some issue there calling something local. I think there's a lot of local spaces, even in what we think of as international spaces. So I go and look at power dynamics in scientific spaces, such as the drafting of reports of the intergovernmental panel and climate change to climate policy meetings, such as the conference of the parties. And definitely, I try to assess or evaluate the impact of the science and the policy in the communities where that are targeted, where these projects are targeted. And I have found that unless we focus on the intersections of structural inequalities and climate related pressures, our knowledge around climate change remains incomplete and we will fail and we have failed to build resilient communities. So while climate change is the most pressing issue of our time and it has shown and it will continue to show differential impacts around gender, race, sexuality, class lines and location and geography, gender plays an ancillary role in how to think about the problem. So rather than just thinking about impacts, what I try to do with my research is to say, if we use gender as an analytical category to study power relations, it would be much more powerful than just trying to assess how gender impacts some women in some parts of the globe. The problem around how gender is conceptualized in the climate debate is that it's usually very essentialized. It usually is reduced to mean women versus men, but not even that, like in the discourse or in the image that we have, we're usually, you know, imaginary or women from the global south is depicted and as some having to go and collect firewood, right, and walk further for that in the face of climate change. So then one of the solutions to resolve gender inequality in the face of climate change would be the distribution of efficient woodstills. But what I try to stress is that not all women's lives will be improved by efficient woodstills, right? I mean, this is a bad joke, but some women might want induction stuff. I mean, it's a bad joke. But some women don't even want any of those. So that's sort of like one of the issues around how we're thinking about gender and climate change. And so these simple, short-sighted solutions really overlook the complicated and sophisticated web of intersecting barriers that women also face when accessing science, policy and action. And this is why intersectionality is so important. It reminds us that a narrow focus on gender, right, just focusing on the women aspect constraints what we can know and do about climate change when other forms of social difference and oppression are important in how we think about climate change, responsibility, vulnerability and governance of the problem. Yet we pretend, or in terms of how we use gender in the climate change debate, this is not the case. And I'll just give you an example from my research. I was at the conference of the parties in Lima, Peru, and I attended the Women and Gender Constituency, which is the constituency that is responsible to advocate for women in climate change. And I observed how a young woman was asked to read a speech that was written by the leadership of the constituency, yet this woman had not been participant in writing the speech. And this speech was going to be given to the entire plenary, to the entire conference of the parties. And while she accepted that she had no decision-making influence in the report, but her body served as this visual representation of the mainstream gender and climate change narrative. There was no discussion of whether she agreed or what she thought of the speech. And there was also no space in the constituency to argue or to think about how gender could be operationalized in that space. So while it is key that the constituency does exist in the gender debate in the conference of the parties because otherwise gender would be completely forgotten, the way that it is allowed in needs to be very domesticated. There needs to be one single message that needs to be palatable for such a space. So rather than using gender as a tool to sort of like challenge the structures, it actually has to be fit into a mold. And this mold is very rigid. And I think we've mentioned this implicitly, but I'm just going to talk about this explicitly. The structures that shape the mold are patriarchal, colonial, and capitalist. And if we do nothing to change these structures, then the messages that go in there will have no real impact, right? But we pretend that we can achieve climate justice without changing these structures. We pretend we can achieve climate justice without challenging them. And this silencing does not only occur at the conference of the parties and with gender, it can happen from an IPC scientist that feels unheard because of their gender, race, location, command of English, or whatever knowledge that they want to say about climate change to the impact of their lack of knowledge in the science to how it's going to be implemented in the policy to how it will hit the ground. So I use feminist and colonial insights in my work because these are key to understand patriarchy and colonialism, right? It's the feminist and the decolonial scholarship that is key here. And this highlights intersecting systems of domination that really maintain oppressive and exploitative relations, creating different opportunities for women and people of color that exclude them from actively participating in that debate. So I'll just end here. So this scholarship has shown time and again that knowledge produced without women and people of color remains incomplete. And thus, we are then at a disadvantage when this exclusion of people continues. So thank you. Well, thank you, Mary. That was an excellent overview and introduction to this issue of intersectionality, power relations and systemic inequalities. And I really appreciate you pushing scholars, practitioners and other experts to move away from reductive logics, particularly when studying gender, women and disproportionate climate impacts and trying to tackle the larger structural inequalities. And it reminded me of critiques of what is happening in Bangladesh with the flooding and women and the newspaper headlines were these women are said to because of the flooding forced into human trafficking. But people are pushing back. It's the existing inequalities before these climate induced disasters happen that are making these disproportionate impacts exasperated when a disaster like extreme storms and flooding do occur. So thank you for that. And look forward to hearing more about your intersectional approaches to climate change research. And I'd like to welcome our third panelist, Chacoby, that will be speaking to us momentarily. But next I'll move on to Hussam. And I'm really interested in hearing about your work, which focuses on the intersection of communities and the built environment and specifically on resilience to and recovery from extreme events. As we imagine an increase in the frequency and intensity of these events with climate change, tell us how you think about the intersections you see in the social, built and natural environments as people face these challenges. And thank you for coming. Thank you so much for the kind invitation to be part of this panel and offer maybe some thoughts on this very interesting topic. So I think as a community for us to be talking about climate and the interface between climate and societies in my opinion is the first step that we need to have to be able to find solutions to the problems we're dealing with. Problems are very complicated and we all acknowledge this now. And it's interesting, if you came through the literature and start to look, we actually did this. We have a paper on the review on this topic. We started to look on at climate related papers that have been published by four major publishers, which I would not mention the names. And we find that the world resilience, for example, adaptation, excuse me, and so on is mentioned about 30% or so in these papers, which is very good. It's not great, but it's a good step. But then we looked further and tried to find papers that actually talk about risk informed models or tools that might allow you to inform resilience and adaptations that are mentioned in these papers. And we found that only 2%, 1 to 2% of the papers have anything to do with, for example, Bayesian updating or functionality assessment or life cycle analysis. So we're talking quite a bit about complex problems and issues that relate to these complex problems, but tools to address them are, in my opinion, lacking. And because they're lacking, we have to actually start to think about models that allows us to intersect social, physical, ecological, economic systems in a way that makes us able to develop decisions that are actually effective. And I'm not arguing that every single model has to be complicated or that interface has always to be a complex interface. In some cases, it doesn't have to be. So maybe I'll give you a couple of thoughts or examples on maybe a symbol versus a more complicated. So take, for example, the idea of an incoming hurricane with sea level eyes that is going to hit your community. And you're interested in looking at how the physical system behaves, how damage will manifest itself in the community, and what the impact would be on the community, on people, on which social groups or demographics will be impacted more. This, I'm a structure in GM by 20. I can tell you this is a straightforward exercise. And despite the fact that it's straightforward exercise, it hasn't been done much. It has been done, but not to the level that you would think it should be. So that's number one. And that's an example of a straightforward idea of what that interface would look like. Another, what I would call also an obvious interface, but to my shocking surprise, it wasn't done at all. And the reason why I know it wasn't done is because when we started to do it, we didn't find anything in the literature. Take, for example, the sea level is rising. There's salt water intrusion, and that salt water intrusion makes its way into the groundwater. Now the groundwater has chloride in it, and that rising groundwater, because the groundwater follows the sea level rise, hits your foundation from the bottom and causes tremendous deterioration to foundations. Now every time you find somebody who's talking about hurricanes or talking about extreme events, they talk about damage from outside of the building, right, which what we see, but that's what I would call slow death that we're not paying attention to, is very important. And there hasn't been any studies that looked at this, and when we looked at it, we found tremendous impact on marginalized communities in Mobile Alabama, that's one of the areas we looked at. So these, again, that's in my opinion is straightforward in the sense it's not difficult to do. It's tedious, requires time, but somebody has to think about it. Now there are examples of much more complex system interaction that we have no choice but to do it, because there's no other way to develop effective policies without this complex system interaction. So for example, consider for example healthcare systems, which we're working quite a bit on healthcare systems. So in order for you to model healthcare system functionality, you have to include what we call the three S's, space, staff and supplies. And so obviously the staff is a social component of your element, the space is the physical system infrastructure and the supplies. But when you talk about, for example, the physical system, the infrastructure, we're not just talking about a hospital building by itself. We have to look at all supporting infrastructure, power network, water network, transportation network, telecommunication network. And when we consider the staff, we're not just thinking of how many people are working at the hospital, we have to actually look at damage to their homes. Can they come to work or not? Can they actually drive to work because the transportation network is not functioning? Right? If their homes are damaged, would they even stay in the community? And if the homes are not damaged, are the homes functional? Do they have power and water and so on? Do they have to move somewhere else? So it becomes a very complicated system. Even with the supplies, you need to look at supplies availability, not just medical supplies but also food, contamination to food for example. You know, I don't know if people know this but Puerto Rico is essentially the most of the production of the IV bags that we use in our hospitals and the mainland in the U.S. are produced in Puerto Rico. So when Puerto Rico is hit by a hurricane, that impacts the IV bag supplies in the U.S. And not to mention another event that we get somewhere in the U.S., right, that compounds this lack of supplies. So it's a very complicated system and we have to think about it this way. Education systems are very similar by the way and I'm not going to get into the education systems but interdependencies between healthcare system and education system has not been looked at. And this is very critical and without education system, people cannot send their kids to schools and if you cannot send them to schools they cannot go to work. So cobbling of education system in my personal opinion with all other systems period is key to start to address some of these issues related to recovery. And of course when you talk about education systems there's a lot of complexities there as well. Again I'm not arguing everything has to be complicated but I'm saying we have to embrace this complexity when needed in order for us to develop these effective solutions that allows us to have these level arms that we can play with not only for physical infrastructure but also for the social component of the functionality and resilience and for the economic and so on. So I think there is a lot for us to do. I don't think we're there yet when people talk about we have solutions and we have some solutions we can implement but we're absolutely far from finding the right solutions and we need just keep hammering this idea idea of complex system. Thanks a lot. Great well thank you that I really appreciate you bringing in those ideas of how do we have a resilience frame focus on solutions and specifically how do we analyze these communities that are really engulfed in complex systems and complex problems and have sort of a domino effect for the rest of the nation. So I look forward to hearing more examples of your intersectional approaches to marginalized communities or multiple communities. So next we're going to hear from Chicago. It's nice to meet you. I've seen a lot of the events that you've been in and I think we've been on a couple of them together and great to have you here and really interested in hearing about your work since it's focused on engaging and partnering with communities around issues of environmental justice and health such as air quality and water quality. Many of these issues stem from historic and and current racism. How do you think about the intersection of race class and other factors that result in disproportionate impacts of climate on health and well-being in many communities of color? Yeah thank you and hopefully you can hear me all right. Sorry for being late. Murphy's Law went to their own building. So I went to the other building. I was on time there. I jumped with a lift driver. So that's why you double and triple check folks. So when you think about these issues you know I think you can't at least in the U.S. context. I have an undergraduate EJS calls program and in the climate justice calls program and we talked recently about you know you have to understand the social culture and social political processes that that drive you know kind of these different disproportionate impacts and it could be overlapping processes across countries but what are the things that undergird? What are the root causes? So if you think about you know for me the climate change you cannot really get at addressing climate change without addressing racism in my opinion and so you think about in the U.S. context because of the history of you know you you know segregation you know redlining you know Jim Crow 1.0 2.0 you look at the file in this country I like to say in my lectures you know the stolen lens of indigenous brothers and sisters women lens right now that I think that's got away people and the stolen bodies of my African ancestors right that that legacy still lives today you the panelists talked about mobile y'all know african town in the hotel though you know that community uh was was surrounded by industry it's an example of what I call environmental slavery so you were impacted by slavery right and then you actually they're using that community to host these hazards they wouldn't put any in part of the mobile right so that's an example of the connections the legacy contempt uh you know historic racism and contemporary racism we know the work of Shondas and others when it comes to redlining and heat issues and urban heat hours right and how you see differential temperature uh levels and areas that are redline versus non-redline areas we know the history of the federal highway act and and and how those highways and byways will build through black and brown communities so now you're looking at purpose surfaces uh the amount of concrete and asphalt and you wonder why some places say hotter than other places one of my colleagues Dr. Lawrence Brown wrote a book on Baltimore called The Black Butterfly so those of you know about Baltimore from Baltimore driven through Baltimore the but the uh the wings are hyper segregated with folks of color okay the body of the butterfly are primarily white wealthy residents so the hyper segregated areas with folks of color that's where you have lower home values you have more lead cases right you have more air pollution you have more issues with heat you have more poverty and so you can see the associations between you know segregation and redlining and heat poverty health there was a study done a few years ago by students from a college of journalism at University of Maryland at on Baltimore and a project called cold red and they went into the community science and put up temperature sensors and you know we talk about the differences you know in the butterfly wings versus the body when it comes to temperature but even on the same block in some of the neighborhoods just the power of one tree they've shown that 20 degree to 30 degree differences in temperature when you have a tree and y'all know trees are great for a lot of things heat mitigation stormwater mitigation noise pollution mitigation right air pollution mitigation playability mental health etc I like to go and I know and I'll have a lot of time I talk about my own house while I have a micro farm I grow stuff I mean growing food having a food force that's the important of those things and if you think about you know environmental justice and going to my fellow parents about resiliency Antonofsky talks about solutagenesis so how they promote health well-being and wellness across all of this environment built environment you know natural environment economic social environmental environment the spiritual environment if you really want to have a frame to address these issues and the communities I'm talking about you really have to apply solutagenic framework environmental justice framework is that the 17 principles of environmental justice are really about the people you know really drive and change one principle talks about self-determination in those 17 principles we talk about human rights sustainability you know mother earth right we talk about indigenous peoples we talk about worker rights that framework is very much a framework that'll be very useful because it's very intersectional and it gives you a comprehensive frame for actually how the community driven solutions so we're going to address this issue intersectionality right you really have to think about you know I like to say that you know climate change impacts all of us but you may not believe in climate change but it believes in you if you're poor if you're black if you're latino if you're an Asian-specific outlander if you're indigenous if you're living on the flood plain right if you have underlying health issues if you're dealing with health disparities if you don't have health insurance if you're uninsured if you you know if you don't have a lot of resources and infrastructure look at the popes in cyclical we're bringing a little bit of religion in on climate change that in cyclical talks about climate change not really it talks about the poor it's really not a lot of use of the term climate change in a cyclical it talks about the poor how do we uplift the poor so the idea is if you're going to address you know climate change and the differential impacts from various climate hazards and perturbations you have to prioritize those are most vulnerable right and those are most susceptible that separate vulnerability from susceptibility right susceptibility is intrinsic so children and the elderly susceptible populations vulnerable population we those have some extrinsic factors economic and social vulnerability so those of you in public health we're talking about the social and social health framework right so how do you address issues of transportation at unjust housing right unjust food systems people dealing with food apartheid I'm going to use the word apartheid several times wait just give me a second food apartheid recreational apartheid medical apartheid right right and that was exported from the states to South Africa I'm from Mississippi so we're talking about apartheid I know apartheid like systems right so you got pollution politics a part of the problem too you got plantation politics we're talking about societal changes so politics so where do the hazards go where do the landfill go why do all the landfills incinerators the chemical plants the industrial call for those in eastern North Carolina remember Hurricane Floyd and Hurricane Florence but those of you live down in Houston Houston ship channel why do all those petrochemical operations go on the poor black communities the poor Hispanic communities whatever the modern operations impact our indigenous brothers and sisters what's happening to a low income white brothers and sisters that deal in the appellation when it comes to extraction so you think about all these communities that being impacted intersectionality about power right how they've been disempowered how they've been invisible lost by our policies it's not by accident for those of you who are planners it's called planning not accident folks it's not by accident it's by design so you think about these issues of how some communities do their race do their class tend to be overburdened by these hazards they have more risk when it comes to climate change so we're going to address climate change we're going to really get to resiliency now I know speak more about this we actually have to move beyond resiliency too because do we expect these folks to always have to bounce back all the time we have to do better so how do we move beyond resiliency use the solutionic framework and really have an empowerment framework and the last point when we talk about empowerment not with the EM power because we're not giving people power helping them build power helping them build their voice helping them apply that voice to make sure we have solutions that come from the people that has to be the central focus if we're going to address climate change in the U.S. and abroad great thank you for that and that amazing reminder about having that people-centered approach and really understanding that if we want to tackle climate change environmental justice climate justice we have to tackle the root causes racism and other historic disinvestments as you mentioned before it's not by coincidence or accidents that these communities are always at the front lines of climate induced disasters it's because specifically urban planning by design and the historic disinvestment that has made these communities vulnerable so thank you for that and so we want to dig in a little bit more with some examples where you are providing some of these intersectional lens in practice that can make a concrete examples for our audience to understand what does an intersectional approach to climate change research and practice look like so I'm going to be asking each of the panelists to talk a little bit from their own research experience on the ground what that intersectional approach again moving away from these abstract notions of impacts abstract notions or homogenization of communities to really understanding who are these people putting a human face to these impacts so we'll start with you first Maryam thank you sure I guess I use intersectionality in sort of like thinking about scale right so when thinking about gender again I stress it's not gender doesn't just occur on the ground in the global south right so when I look at gender and climate change this is why I stress power relations around knowledge production because there is gender relations everywhere so this is why I focus in gender relations in science production in climate policy and on the ground right and then once you sort of like leave this essentialized narrative around gender and climate change then you have like to to sort of like really be intersectional you need to incorporate race and class and sexuality and in my work this is why I use the decolonial framework because I did like it's you know it's feminist through and through but the decolonial framework is very necessary because it really highlights how the world is not only divided by gender but it's also divided by race right so then if you want to understand if you want to be intersectional using gender you have to think about race right so if if for instance just like an example I I have one from the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change and the responses from scientists there and one of the research that I have conducted was a survey assessing women's participation and how they felt writing or being part of the reports and overall like if you just look at the numbers the statistics I could have reported that most women or the majority of women think that it's great right that they feel represented and that they felt that they could talk but once you sort of start digging in once you also allow a different method of analysis like more qualitative once you sort of like allow a voice you start seeing that that's not the case there are many people that feel that they're not heard and they're not seen and that and that's when you know their location starts coming up their command of English their race their age starts coming up so if you really want to say anything about any population I mean it's in a way I think the category of women is just a very complicated one because there are so many other systems above sort of like gender that sometimes are more important in oppression than than gender right so for instance we can stay here in the United States but white women middle class right this was sort of like the second way feminist movement there was very little commonality with women of color in the United States right they were like well our problems are not that we're staying home and once like equal wage our problem is that we've always been working and there's no other option so there's sort of there has to be in order to be intersectional you have to talk about both at least at least gender and race and of course there's sexuality and all that's what all stuff here agreed that that's some excellent examples of how to look at those those complex issues within communities and populations Hussam we'd love to hear a little bit from your work yeah I mean it's this is interesting and I have a lot of thoughts on on natural disasters and how they impact communities but we you know the bring back mobile which we looked into for some of our analysis and this idea of looking at how sea level rising backs the foundations of many homes you know for context 50 percent of mobile are African Americans and definitely socially very vulnerable we look at the social vulnerability in mobile and we find that 44 percent of people in mobile are age 65 and older and low income so it's really not a good you know not a good situation for them and that idea of sea level rise we found that the the majority of them back to impacts low income and vulnerable population for sure and interestingly I was talking to one of the one of the people in mobile who's really this guy is amazing and he's white for by the way then since we're talking about race and I give him credit and he's doing a lot of this without even getting paid and he was telling me about some of the issues they're facing talking about you know starting with the communities and what the communities have to say and I was shocked to hear that one of the main issues that they look at now is that they have certain areas of mobile that gets flooded all the time and that flooding in that area causes a cemetery nearby to flood and the body's float that people have buried and this is not something I've ever thought about you know someone sitting in my office and float Collins thinking about you know how the power network interacts with that with the transportation and the water and so on and he's somebody telling me bodies are floating on the surface and so I you know I was talking to him and I said well this is a very simple civil engineering problem an undergraduate student at any university should be able to crunch the number and come up with some sort of design that says this is how you guys you know should should mitigate this problem and he said nobody's helping us so starting from the community starting from the people to understand what their needs are not necessarily and this is a very important issue not necessarily looking for them to provide solutions the solutions have to be acceptable for the communities they have to actually look at the solution and say yes we can do this this is acceptable for us but we need to listen to them to understand the issues and we can start with this sort of ground level information from the communities to be able to build the sophisticated models that allows us to develop you know solutions that that are not necessarily intuitive otherwise people would have done it already and then say hey look these are the solutions right and I think doing it this way to understand the complexity of how different systems interface giving the need of the community is very important but another example related to this we actually looked at healthcare system in mobile and to your surprise we ran Hurricane Katrina with sea level rise we found that hospitals in mobile in general are not near the coast actually they have like 36 hospitals and healthcare is quite a big sort of industry there not too many hospitals were impacted and interestingly the impact on the non-vulnerable or social non-vulnerable was high so I think we have to do this together we have to look at marginalized people but we have to also look at non-vulnerable they depend on each other somebody who's well off who has a factory of some sort and if that gets smacked and he or she would have to leave the community then the social and vulnerable don't have places to go to work we cannot just look at one group and leave the other we understand that people are being marginalized but we have to look at the whole community in order for us to develop system-level solutions that work for everybody and keeps everybody safe great well thank you for those points and I really appreciate you bringing in this idea of community engagement and collaborations as researchers and the research questions and putting communities at the forefront of not only identifying the problems but being active participants in the solutions and having those community voices integrated into the work that we do and that we engage with the policy makers at the same time to implement those solutions Shikopi, next we'd like to end this question with you on your perspectives of intersectionality and working with diverse communities Yeah, I like your last comment about community engagement I can talk about I'm not sure how much more time we have I can talk about just talk about that a lot so I think when you look at the work that we do we do a lot so I do way too much stuff y'all it's part of the reason why I need to be spoon-fed like where's the location again but there's too much going on so we are I've been doing a lot of work in on the air quality side building hyperlocal air quality monitoring networks so what we usually do you know there are communities that are dealing with air pollution issues of course there's greenhouse gas associated with that and also heat issues associated with that as well so we're we have these networks we're using purple words I know some of you may use the purple words since for a particular matter it's not the best sister it's a signal great sense it's not a federal reference method but it provides opportunity at least as a starter sensor to give folks and you know understand what they've been exposed to we actually have captures on the wildfire smoke too with our network and then done report back to our community partners and so you know we build these partnerships and we build these networks and collaboration with community we train residents to be community scientists so they know how to use the sensors they can deploy the sensors right and also check we do a lot of co-location for calibration purposes we so a lot of technical stuff y'all but I think that's an important way to bring in communities and we're working with people across age ranges so we work with youth we have a we have a print we're doing a monitoring at some of the Prince William County high schools we have some Latino youth that we've engaged in the past and an air quality monitoring as I mentioned before we have an undergraduate EJ scholars program so we're engaging folks who come from various communities different racial ethnic backgrounds who come from these communities and they're learning about these projects from a religion perspective we have a project where we're doing air quality monitoring with the AME church the United Church of Christ one of my long-term partnerships again bringing the religion as well and also a little bit of intersection of race, class, and religion we're working with a Muslim group black Muslim group and Charleston I've worked with them since 2007 they're a little country lots of model communities the point of Charleston thinking about goods movement you know greenhouse gas and thinking about all the goods with the issues y'all in the country we have whether it be airports coastal ports river ports warehouses and the motor facilities and the greenhouse gas emissions and impacts you know so we've been working with them for a long time so we really do a lot of work to get tools into the hands of the community and I said before we do empowerment science so we help build capacity so communities can do their own work we also have developed some screen tools some of y'all may be familiar with US EPA EJ screen or CEQ's climate economic just screen tool we developed a Maryland EJ screen tool we built the climate equity health mapping tool for the state of Maryland we built the park equity mapping tool for the state of Maryland we're building a climate equity mapping tool for the region 3 to EPA we've also worked with the national academies on their grand challenges their climate communities network probably talk about them in another session and help to do some mapping there so mapping tools will be called public participants toward GIS PPGIS is the big thing that we do as well in addition we've done a lot of photo voice with communities again another way to bring in qualitative data photo voice that can collect data on stormwater impacts right also looking at food justice issues so it's a set of tools that we can use to empower communities collect data related to climate you know climate issues and then use that data to inform policy I'll say this last point because I know where it looks like we're out of time so last point we also because you said it engage policy makers we work with communities I'm a co-founder of the Minute Leonard Justice Coalition Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia Delaware, DC, Maryland, Virginia primarily we haven't got the tools to say where's Virginia yet or not New Jersey yet but we're trying to but we work with our legislators on bills so we take a lot of the data to inform bills so we work with community on these issues and we work with legislators on bills and on policy so I'll stop there but I think that that's the structure and that's replicable and that's scalable what I just outlined on those multiple projects thank you for that such exciting and important significant work you're doing across sectors from academia as a teaching to working with community partners and of course policy makers so thank you for that work and I think we have about 10 minutes left oh 20 minutes okay perfect so then I can ask I'm going to ask one more question and then we're going to go to audience in person and online so we're here today with these two-day event to launch the the National Academy's climate crossroads initiative and each of you provide an important perspective as scholars and experts and community advocates as well on integrating climate change research and action with diverse voices and community perspectives as the National Academy's rolls out this new initiative across the various academies to engage communities what type of advice would you give the president of the National Academy's as well as the advisory committee and all the program officers let's start with Hussam first so yeah that's a that's actually not an easy question so I guess you could make recommendations for internally within the academies in terms of how the academy functions and and how they they seek to perhaps you know look deeper into the climate issues but also externally I'll start with internally first and I think the academies are my personal opinion having been observing you know the different workshops and different convening they have been that have been taking place the academy is doing a great job interfacing different programs within the academies and I think that's important when we talk about complex societal issues and you can't just work in silos even within the academies and that's happening not to the level that I think it should be at but it definitely sitting in that direction which which seems that that's where they they want to go underground with communities I think it's critical that they engage with the communities first to find the problems you know there's again there's a lot of workshops and convening and and summits and things like that engage with communities to define the problems what their needs are and then establish maybe discussions around these I know that in some some of the programs within the national academies have funding for research maybe surveys or things like that even even conduct the massive surveys across different states and communities to look at a specific issue so for example if you look hypothetically at the health care issue right what are the main what are the main elements so main components that people are considering when they talk about health care and climate change or health disparities and climate change and if you have you know surveys that would go out and collect feedback from communities that would actually inform some of these complex models that I was talking about and I'll tell you how we started because we didn't start with the community we went online we looked at all the news articles that talks about dysfunctional health care or problems and so we collected all these online news articles that tell you what the main issues are and we started to take these little pieces and build our model with it so maybe we can do better if we can go to the communities from the beginning and ask them what was the main issue with your hospital or system I found out later that one of the main problems with hospitals in flooding events is actually the basement flooding because the basement is with the laundry machines all and if you don't have any laundry then you shut down because obviously everything has to be clean so let's start there with communities and then build it up and when I think the national academies have a major role to help with that next what got you Shikobi yeah so do not reinvent the wheel please don't do that there are a lot of folks I mean I was part of a group with the association schools of public and public programs and we did a framework on climate and health and a big part of that framework is talking about research you know training and practice and you know I'm on the more the action side the more the practice side so that community engagement I think it's on the practice side there's a lot of infrastructure it's already out there and I think it's important to engage with that infrastructure so you think about some of the associations that are out there like the American public health association their infrastructure you have AGU the American geophysical union their infrastructure they're doing some work in the space speaking about a lot of president by the executive order 14608 as we move from dirty energy economy to clean energy economy 40% of those beneficiaries go to disadvantaged communities that's like the justice 40 framework that's other of course executive orders on climate change a lot of it has led to new dollars and more infrastructure out there right so for example you have the environmental finance centers you may know about that you may not they're doing a lot of work to provide finance and to expand access to water infrastructure so you think about that's a big deal talking about infrastructure you look at the EPA's TicTac program driving communities technical assistance center TC TAC I'm the co-director of the region 3 TicTac of the EPA that's infrastructure that you can engage with Waverley Street Foundation other founders like Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and many others Kresky they're doing they're funding a lot of climate action hubs community based hubs community climate partnerships so connect to the infrastructure that's already out there and then bring additional resources or expertise to fill the gap those infrastructures and then as it relates to the federal family you know of course there's a lot of work happening as I said earlier with at the federal family level so how can you be an asset an ally to the federal family as they implement you know develop their climate change program doing that modeling so whether it be NOAA whether it be FEMA whether it be EPA Health and Human Services there's a lot of opportunity to engage with the family family as well and being a you know partner network and then we'll end this question with Miriam and I guess I would say that science is not neutral and science has been constructed by power relations and while it can mitigate and help us adapt to climate change it can also exacerbate difference like it you know historically science has been extremely violent toward women and people of color and so if in this sort of like era of like technology and technocratic solutions toward fixing societal problems if we're not it's not about remembering because these structures are continuing today but we if we just pretend that science is neutral that's one of I think the first issues and this is why I take a little bit of a step back when we're talking about the difference between knowledge between communities and scientists because I think that communities are knowledge producers right so there's some value there in trying to think about what would it mean if we put both types of knowledges like on the same platform right just because you don't have the resources that scientists might have in a lab doesn't mean that their knowledge is more valuable I think what needs to be assessed here is why is their knowledge more valuable and why is that sort of like the legitimate way of knowing right and when we're thinking about who's the scientist we think of like the normative image that comes to mind right like when I tell you scientists right maybe I think most of us might think of like a what white western male so I think is really pushing back against who's the knowledge producer and how we're legitimating that and how we're not pushing back against who's allowed to know who's allowed to be the subject and who is the object then it'll be very difficult to resolve the crisis thank you for that quite important to understand that having diverse knowledges on on these committees and these processes actively centering these communities is quite important and also acknowledging the work that we do many of us work in the communities and we talked about this yesterday a little bit the academy our schools oftentimes don't value this type of work it takes longer it's a heavier lift as scholars to gauge in this work and changes need to be made to continue to support this and ensure that many of our universities are able to facilitate some of this work and be pushing the envelope as well so we have about 10 minutes left so I have more questions but I'd like to give the audience a chance to ask our esteem panel some direct questions so the person right here in red yes oh can you hear me okay yes my name is Renee Collini I'm with the Gulf Center for Equitable Climate Resilience and I've been working on applied applying climate science working specifically climate resilience in the Mississippi and Alabama Gulf Coast for the past 15 years so I was excited to hear a lot of examples from that region one of the things that jumped out at me though was your comment about the need for more tools and models and so working on the ground that is the opposite of what we've been told people do not want more tools I actually built a tool for climate resilience tools called Gulf Tree just to help as a demand from our partners to help them sift through what knowledge exists and how it can be applied and so I'm curious if y'all could speak to the intersection of diversity equity power dynamics in science delivery and making sure that we're not just turning to let's produce a model or a tool and throw it out there and how that all comes together yeah and in general I would wholeheartedly agree with you that there's a really good number of models and tools out there I'm not obviously talking I'm not in a position to assist every single one of these tools but you know I can tell you that and I can understand completely why communities say that because there's a lot of tools but has anything happened or changed absolutely not we still have the same disproportional impact we still have the same level of damage we still have the same problems and they haven't seen anything improved so if I was them I'd say I don't want any more tools that's actually absolutely a valid point but I can tell you from the work I do we absolutely have almost none so I can even elaborate further you know the impact of extreme events on the belt environment is very poorly understood you believe it or not the only hazard that we understand really well is actually earthquakes beyond that we don't have a really good understanding of how extreme events impact the belt environment I would say after earthquakes maybe went sustained went for example tornadoes are not well understood that much hurricanes a little bit wildfires none there's absolutely nothing that will tell you and I'm not talking about even interfacing different layers of social infrastructure so just damage to the belt environment there's nothing that tells you aside from recent work that I'm familiar because we've done it we just received the very very large grant to push that work further we can now tell which building will be damaged in a wildfire event but aside from that work that we started there was nothing so communities can't say we don't want any more tools because they're not seeing any change but in reality we need more tools that allows us to understand how the impact would manifest on the community and what is the best way to actually develop solutions because when we don't have resources it's not you know we can't just we don't have the money to apply solutions and wildfire is a very important actually one I'll mention really quickly the reason wildfire are very important is that when you actually mitigate one building or remove a tree somewhere that impacts the risk to another building or a tree flub few blocks down the road and if people say I don't want any more models is because they're frustrated with what they see but without a model that can tell you what happens when you harden the structure move this tree what happens to the whole community you can't make decisions so your point is really worth taking and I was hoping we could move past maybe the making of the tool to the other space because field of dreams really hurt us if you build it they will not come that is not how that works and so how do we make sure that as our science and our knowledge advances how do we deliver that in an equitable and empowering yeah it has to be done equitably and we have to do it with the community you know we have to we can present them with solutions based on a very complex model but they have to accept it you know I agree yeah let me jump in because I know we're getting low on time so I think the communication part is really important I'm gonna say there's one point and I'm gonna say something's probably bad but let me say one point so I'm a editor-in-chief of the journal Environmental Justice we finally got an impact factor whoopee okay for me when it comes to science communication in the words of Yoda peer review publications not science communication make so if you're gonna communicate science and merely have impact you gotta take that information from the tools that actually communicate in a way that actually has impact the best way to communicate is not a peer review publication it's directly talking to the decision maker so I think that's part of the problem the tools that have been used we're not actually you the advocacy and organizing to have the impact and the fit for purpose of the tools and the organizing advocacy and communication to get the impact that's what's missing and that's why you have a lot of frustration particularly communities I've worked with so I know we're getting low on time so I'll stop there I think that was an excellent answer thank you for that all right we'll go here I think you have an online question or Andy Revkin not online I've been writing about this stuff since the 1980s mostly for the New York Times my biggest mistake was writing all my stories about climate change and not about climate risk meaning putting risk in the foreground and I was on the committee helping to design the pathway to this initiative I wanted to get your reaction the panelists because this is a fantastic panel and it really reveals to me the importance of going forward at this crossroads to centering on climate risk there actually should have been an intergovernmental panel on climate risk with climate change being one driver of risk and I just want to get your sense of that you remind me so much of the work of destiny knock at Carnegie Mellon who from Arizona to Pittsburgh has shown that energy poverty for example which can come from you know lack of even fossil fuel energy people who are poor households who are poor turn off their conditioners or leave them off and they die quicker than people who are not poor so if you start with risk and trying to make it an intersectional conversation around climate change to me feels like it misses this simplicity that comes from starting risk risk is the hazard heat flood whatever times exposure how many people and factoring in their vulnerability susceptibility or resilience this I just want to get your sense of whether that if you for the next 10 years if you wanted to focus on policy information informing policy would you start with climate change wedging in these other things or would you start with climate risk I know in little time I'll say real quickly folks on differential climate risk and I was in the EPA works up a few months ago we thought about climate communications that was a big part of us how do you tell the narratives that's a positive narrative the world is going to end if you're already in the environment just been poisoned every day that doesn't help me out give me some mitigation give me some solutions so talk about risk but bringing mitigation solutions and some hope in your narrative I'll stop there yeah and I think that's an important point to move away just from problems to a solution-based approach and then really enjoying the change in the news media about solutions-oriented journalism and this is I'm asking a slightly different question see it ends up being about solutions to climate change not solutions to solutions to how you reduce risk and to reduce the risk you have to still get the root cause your example would still get at root causes so you have to address races you have to address the social terms of health you can't address the symptoms we're doing stuff on the surface you got to get to the root cause and to get the root cause is harder to do right can I just start for a quick comment on this this is a great point and a new wildfire is a perfect example when you look at it we look at communities and we don't understand how the probability of ignition interfaces with vulnerability to give you the risk that you're talking about so for example you have a community that probability of ignition is very high right because there's a lot of heat and there's a lot of human activity but the fire is not going anywhere there's no wind homes are spaced apart there's very little vegetation risk is very low right why should we worry that's not how we look at things now because as I mentioned earlier in my remarks we'll focus primarily on the hazard we're not focused on how the hazard interfaces with exposure and so on and to determine the risk and you might have a community where ignition probability is very low but if it starts the whole community is gone right so we need to look more into risk and to be able to develop these effective policies to lower the risk yeah great great thank you and I think we have time for one more quick question the question is and I thank you for the panel I want to take the intersectionality one step further and I like the reference to Pope Francis's Laudato Si on care for our common home encyclical he talked about integral ecology we can't talk about just the environment or just people we have to be talking about everything together the systems and I want to find out what is the role or what's the perceived role or future role or current role of the climate crossroads initiative and academia in general and helping us address the problem of livelihoods and I have a couple of examples one is if we see any documentary on Amazonia after owing an eyeing of all the beautiful wondrous stuff inevitably towards the end there's a dude with a chainsaw cutting it all down he's not doing it out of malice he's trying to make a livelihood currently in the Colombian Amazon where I work the people I work with have been having trouble selling their fish because the narco market is down people aren't buying as much coca for a variety of reasons and because the narco trafficking is collapsing momentarily the whole economy is collapsing so the question really comes down to how is the role what is the role of academy in addressing that central problem of livelihoods that central problem of resources I'm thinking also Dr. Marsha talked about how she has solar panels and batteries because she owns her home and the person next door to her doesn't own their home and therefore they get $250 monthly energy bills while she has a $50 a year bill and Dr. Raj yesterday mentioned the assign of gentrification is a new house that has solar panels and a Tesla so again it comes down to the question of of you know what is our role in addressing that question of livelihoods that flow of resources I was asked by somebody oh aren't you isn't your NGO just creating another dependency and in recent days I've thought oh you mean as opposed to the dependency on narco trafficking well thank you thank you so I think that's an interesting question we're just about time but maybe someone can comment this issue about livelihood maybe the just transition kind of framework I'm not sure anyone yeah yeah so I know we are out of time so really powerful question I think you know you know again the social terms of health economic determinants of health is really important I mean environmental justice at the at its hardest that economic justice movement Dr. King was assassinated you know when he was in Memphis think about that sensational workers right he was moving to a poor people's campaign Reverend Barber has continued their poor people's campaign we have to we have to address economic opportunity structures and with the justice 40 initiative and just energy transition not just people going to lose their fossil fuel jobs it's just an example but what about people who have never been able to get in the fossil fuel you know economy but for those who are getting the clean energy infrastructure how it makes them get benefit and that the communities who've been dumped on extracted from they should deserve they should get the clean energy stuff first so those at the front line should be at the front of the line with those investments and this is the US context but creating opportunity creating energy sovereignty that should be the frame where when it comes to clean energy clean energy sovereignty to move away from fossil fuels and also cross a supply chain and I think that will lead to some of these economic justice and deal with as we talked before that that that long term economic inequality that we see in the country that has to be part of the multi-pronged approach and emphasizing we have to get to you know economic equality so I'll stop there no we're over time thank you great thank you for this amazing panel I think we've really pushed the envelope of being a little bit more explicit about what an intersectional and justice-oriented approach to climate change should entail so thank you for this opportunity and I'll turn it over to Amanda we'll give instructions about the breakout sessions happening next thank you