 Climate adaptation requires global cooperation and investment. One of the key actors in addressing this critical issue is the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I'm delighted to welcome their Climate Adaptation Advisor, Jenny Frankel-Reed, to our virtual stage to share her insights and recommendations. Jenny's experience in the sector is unmatched. She previously spent a decade with the US Agency for International Development, USAID, where she led the agency's Climate Adaptation Team and supported programs in 24 countries. She also coordinated a NASA partnership to equip developing countries with satellite data, applied earth science models, and international collaboratives to strengthen resource management. Jenny holds a master's degree from the Yale School of Environment and a bachelor's degree in environmental science from Williamette University. Welcome Jenny, over to you. Thank you so much. It's a real pleasure to be able to join this really dynamic community and thanks to all the organizers and all the presenters. It has been really a pleasure to hear from many of you over the last two days and the phenomenal panels that we just heard. I'll share some thoughts about the urgency of climate change for our collective work, some partnerships that I have been a part of, connecting science and innovation with the development community, and some lessons learned as we all seek ways to increase our impact. We've heard already some phenomenal ideas, so I'll just add what I can. In her opening remarks, Asha Varghese from Caterpillar Foundation talked about the importance of being responsive to partners on the ground and the potential of innovative partnerships to achieve impact on SDGs. And we've heard a lot of firsthand experience that people have in doing that. And engineers are problem solvers, and engineers possess truly essential and powerful skills. But what I'll reflect on is some of the different skills that problem solving for SDGs requires, and how we can partner to tap into them better. So I'll start with three technical slides so to brace yourself so the first is about how much adaptation, we face. What we have left is the current trajectory of carbon dioxide emissions in that red line. And the most ambitious one and a half degree warming pathway is the blue line. What it shows is that we have to undertake significant decreases in emissions, greenhouse gas emissions, starting now, not planning them now but actually reducing emissions now, in order to meet that 2050 net zero goal. That's a fundamental challenge. On the right, you see what has happened as carbon dioxide emissions have increased that global average temperature has warmed by about one degree over the last about 150 year period from pre industrial times to 2017. We're living in a one degree warmer world. That involves record storms around the world from the Philippines to Central America to the Gulf Coast recurring drought in East Africa floods record wildfires, rising insecurity. So what's worse is we're likely to see another about half a degree change increase in 20 years 2040. This is an enormous adaptation challenge, and it's either about survival or supply chains but it's going to affect us all and it presents really an enormous challenge and opportunity for engineering and science so this really means that adaptation needs this community. So what is adaptation adaptation means adjusting to climate and its effects to reduce harm or exploit beneficial opportunities and this figure from the inner governmental panel on climate change shows the three levers that we have to reduce risk. We can reduce the hazards themselves. We can reduce how exposed we are to those hazards, and we can reduce our vulnerability to them, or increase our adaptive capacity. So those are the options. The risks that are driven by changes in temperature and precipitation sea level rise are truly multifaceted and they touch most of the SDG so you can see, you know, SDG to hunger SDG three health SDG six water and so on, are really all core sectors that are going to be impacted by climate change. In this instance projections show that global demand for food is likely to increase by 50% well yields without adaptation by 2050 would decline by 30%. That is monumentally concerning of course we will adapt but the question is how how well how quickly for whom you know will everyone be able to adapt. And this sets up again some really important opportunities for science innovation and engineering. Can we monitor and predict hazards better. Can we reduce vulnerabilities, how can we reduce vulnerabilities, develop and deploy adaptation strategies. And then as a lot of you have been discussing strengthen the innovation systems around all of these solutions because this will involve, I would say a century or more of adaptation. And the last technical side. This sets up the adaptation opportunity to me even more clearly so this figure shows the time horizons of decision making in the agricultural sector. You can see that decisions about on farm field operations are made over one day to a couple of weeks choices about what to plant are made over a seasonal timescale two to three months. R&D those are 10 to 30 year time horizons and infrastructure of course being 30 or 50 or even, even longer. So those are the entry points for decisions that can be made to increase yields to reduce losses to invest in the right R&D so that we have the seeds and equipment and all the things we need for the future that are roads and irrigation are resilient. Right here we see the time scales of variability. This is rainfall over East Africa in March to May. What this shows is that year to year fluctuations in rainfall are more pronounced than a long term change. So climate impacts will involve long term changes in average conditions, but they will be experienced as extremes from one year to the next or one month or one week to the next. So for that infrastructure that road infrastructure you're interested in the long term change you're also interested in the extremes. If you're, you know, concerned about field operations you need, you know, much shorter term information. So again this sets up a very precise challenge for adaptation and this community. Can we understand the time scales of decisions, those entry points for achieving SDGs, you know, on a day to day year to year decade to decade time horizon, the time scales of the hazards and use science and innovation to deliver insights to inform those decisions. So again, how well we do on achieving the SDGs and food security and agriculture will depend on how well our solutions match again these two, these two dynamics of time. So as I mentioned this is a gathering of problem solvers we've heard it a lot. Problem solving involves understanding the drivers of a problem. This is something Evan just just mentioned the context, the political economy around a problem, the goals of its stakeholders. In addition to and I would say before technical solutions. The steps require different skills naturally than modeling or coding or designing or building things. So don't worry. Those are skills that the development community and development, you know, local partners possess in space. That's, that's their work. These groups are full of problem solvers to, but they lack obviously the ability to design and build things like engineers. So complimentary skills, different objectives. This is what makes for powerful partnerships. But our modes of working as we also heard from this panel are very different, not just our skills and our backgrounds, but our funding, the length of time we spend on projects. The incentives that we have that are driving our work, the languages we speak the data that we use the cultures, these are all different. These are our definitions of impact and success oftentimes what one person measures and another person measures as success are not the same. So it is not easy and I think this is something to appreciate. I have struggled with these partnerships firsthand, but I have seen successes to. This is one and this is what what you heard about in my introduction. I spent eight years working on a partnership between NASA and USA ID called serve your meaning to serve. And the problem that USA to NASA identified involved the fact that most many of the most complex challenges that we've been talking about occur in data scarce environments. So a lot of the countries on those front lines lack the capacity to use satellite data and applied science and technologies to manage those risks. So USA and NASA committed to tapping into their strengths. NASA, the wealth of Earth observation satellite data that it has and its ability to make grants to us. And USA to tapping into its institutional capacity building and local engagement. So this joint initiative was formed that leveraged again the strengths of those two agencies but also the abilities and the mandates of regional organizations on the ground that have deep roots in their regions, and technology in the US to get Earth observation information into the hands of decision makers to improve development outcomes. So this is a map of the server network and this took 15 years to build so this does not come come quickly, but each of these hubs as I said is a long standing regional organization. The regional center for mapping resources for development is based in Kenya, the International Center for Integrated Mountain Development is based in Nepal. Asian Disaster Preparedness Center in Thailand, the Agrimate Regional Center in Niger, and the International Center for Tropical Agriculture in Columbia. So these are the partners that USA funds in this arrangement. And this is the map of US University and private sector partners. These are funded by NASA to work with those experts at the hubs. So we also partner with Esri and Google and Amazon Web Services for the cloud computing and digital imagery that that they provide. And these are pictures of eight of the 16 collaborative teams that worked together on joint projects between 2016 and 2019 so this is the previous set of teams in East and West Africa. There are now 20 teams working in this fashion as co investigators on applied solutions and issues that are determined by the regional partners. So, again, NASA is funding you could see many of the US based researchers here and USA it is funding the regional experts in those on the ground. And I show this because it is people who make partnerships within institutions and we need obviously both. Here's just one very quick example of a severe kind of an activity, and it may not be your kind of engineering, but it does illustrate integrating different scientific and technical expertise to solve local challenges so this is about modernizing crop insurance in Kenya. Kenya was using a 12 year old crop mask which is basically a map of agricultural areas what's grown where, and they didn't have an efficient way to administer their crop insurance program. So RCMRD in Kenya and the University of Maryland helped the State Department of Agriculture in Kenya to update that map using satellite data and machine learning. And they also helped with the GIS sampling frame, which led to a 70% reduction in the costs that they were spending to go out and do field samples in a much less sort of structured way. And that's important because they were able to then use, you know, redirect resources from measuring impacts of of drought on crop failure to providing more payouts to to people when when droughts struck so between over five years the program grew to reach 425,000 individuals so that if there is a drought and a crop failure, people don't lose their income. So actually, I'll end with some lessons learned, and, you know, it's important. So this is about different kinds of impact it's important to recognize what that while SDG impacts are unifying. And there are a lot of different kinds of impacts and outcomes and they're all important. It can be complementary with each other or maybe they aren't sometimes, but we're not always clear when our definitions of impact differ, but, you know, within a team or between partners. So maybe we care about, you know, increasing crop yield or water access, or someone carries about job creation or reducing emissions, or it's about technology transfer that's the goal or in efficiencies gained or curricula, or generating a set or producing a prototype. All of these are valid important impacts and outcomes that you could have from working on these issues. But unless we're clear about what success looks like to each partner, we may be driving toward, you know, publishing our work when you know our partner wants to do it, you know, really wants technology transferred out of it. And we may not be on the same page. So I think we should talk about what our outcomes are what what this looks like and see how to meet everyone's goals. And sometimes it's not about having one common goal but aligning so my goal supports your goal and we can keep going. And finally, this has been said in many ways already but I think it bears repeating that we can all imagine ways that science and innovation can support adaptation or SDGs. But unless those are our losses or our gains or we're the customer, we don't fully know the opportunities from the outside. And we are on the outside for the most part. So we rely on local partners to identify what's valuable, everything from, you know, when is a warning valuable to take action, or how it will benefit women or how something should be designed. But they are challenging, and they are hard to sustain. And so I think funders like the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation can provide support for those gaps that exist between science and innovation and development activities and partners and start to really, you know, take advantage of the wealth of skills that are out there. And all of us, whoever we are can seek partnerships. We can ask the questions that, you know, that that some of the questions that I raised, we can translate our jargon. We can make and seek commitments. This is, this is important, you know, do we know where this will go in the future and is everyone committed to that path. We can, we can understand the problems that we're trying to solve more deeply and test the sustainability of the solutions that we're working on. So even when the answers are inconvenient or slow us down, they are the right questions to be asking and it pays off. Thank you. Thank you so much, Jenny. Your perspectives on climate adaptation, innovative partnerships and technology enabling climate resilience are invaluable to our community. I particularly appreciate your reminder that climate adaptation needs the engineering community to work in partnership with diverse disciplines. This is certainly a call to action for the community that is assembled here at Impact Engineer today. As you mentioned, partnerships aren't easy. So thank you for encouraging us to keep at it, strive for the shared impact, and inspiring us with the examples of beer and the success of the program. So being the closing speaker is one of the toughest jobs. In a typical conference setting you're generally the one between the formal program and the reception where the drinks are served. The defining of the online environment is that our event attendees don't have to wait in line for their beverage of choice. I invite you all to take a minute now to grab your beverages. It is Friday night for many of our attendees after all, and come back to join us for our awards ceremony. Our intrepid MCs are eager to announce the winners for this year's awards. I hope to see you there soon. Thank you.