 Hello, and welcome everyone. Thank you for joining us today for the special briefing, Climate Adaptation and Resilience, The Road to COP26, Raising Global Ambition to Address Climate Impacts. I'm Dan Bresset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. We'll be joined in a moment by leaders and big thinkers in climate adaptation and resilience. But because so many of you watching today are new to EESI, let me say a few words first about what we do. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers. More recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. We go about our work in several ways, including by hosting briefings like this. We also publish a bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. And whether for policymakers or the public, we do our best to provide informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics in written materials and on social media. The best way to keep track of our work and access our resources is to visit us online at www.eesi.org and sign up for Climate Change Solutions and follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Our discussion today, excuse me, I'm reading this so that I wouldn't mess up and it just disappeared. Together are with our co-sponsors, the 2021 UN Climate Change Conference to British Embassy Washington and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. Our panelists will help describe the current state of global adaptation and resilience planning, financing and disaster preparedness. On behalf of the EESI, I would like to thank our co-sponsors, the leadership of the British government and experts and practitioners of ASAP and its membership for their efforts to promote adaptation and resilience to date, connect stakeholders and share best practices, country to country, state to state and city to city and the assistance and support to make possible our briefing today. Often when we talk about these topics, it's accompanied by a sense of the challenge before us. But I feel like today's briefing is coming at a time that's also defined by a sense of opportunity. This is the week of the 51st Commemoration of Earth Day. The Biden-Harris administration is about to host the Leader Summit on Climate and will unveil the new greenhouse gas reduction goal, the United States nationally determined contribution under the Paris Agreement. We expect the summit to focus on how the US and other major emitting countries can redouble efforts in an equitable way to reduce greenhouse gas emissions across all sectors of the global economy. Along with the other official actions taken by the US government and other nations this week, there'll be a host of events, panels, discussions, commitments and commentaries that collectively will contribute to the momentum leading to the next meeting of the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP26. The goal of this briefing are modest contribution to the conversation leading up to the summit and eventually to COP26, is to highlight the complementary global efforts to advance climate adaptation and resilience. Adaptation and resilience feature prominently in EESI's policymaker education. About two years ago, we initiated a 16-part congressional briefing series about coastal resilience issues that featured success stories and innovative approaches from US coastal communities from Hawaii to Maine and from Alaska to Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. We recently released a comprehensive report based on the findings of the briefing series that featured 30 specific policy recommendations for Congress to consider. Together with our co-sponsors, excuse me, our report, A Resilient Future for Resilient Communities, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities, I'm having a terrible time today. This is my first briefing of the week, so apologies for that, is built around six guiding principles that generally inform our approach to climate adaptation and resilience policymaker education. The sixth principle listed, climate adaptation and resilience work should complement and contribute to a decarbonized clean energy economy is what motivates us today. Our report leverages the work of state and local adaptation programs which would benefit greatly from more financial resources and more and better data, coordination, and technical assistance. There are some significant steps in the right direction by the federal government, including the authorization of the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program managed by the Federal Emergency Management Agency. And more and more is being done, including the work carried out under the January 27th executive order on tackling the climate crisis. But in the US, federal climate adaptation and resilience efforts lag behind plans and proposals to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. I wanted to share this perspective, especially for policymakers and their staff and our online audience today. Congress in particular must understand that any progress we realize at the international level to advance adaptation and resilience will support federal efforts here at home. And that means states and local governments will be better equipped and prepared to manage and respond to threats. And communities, especially those on the front lines of climate change and the most vulnerable due to past and present environmental injustices can be safer, more secure, and better able to withstand and recover from increasingly frequent and severe climate impacts. We will hear in a moment from representatives of the United Kingdom and the United States governments about the significant work underway to advance climate adaptation and resilience, including by coordinating and strengthening international cooperation. And then joined by two leading adaptation and resilience experts, we will look ahead to COP26 and beyond and define the scope and scale of our challenges, as well as a pathway to success that will deliver planning, preparedness, equity benefits here in the United States and abroad. Before I introduce our first panelists, let me just make a note about how you can engage with us today via the live stream. Of course, we're not all together, but there's still an opportunity for you to ask questions and you can do that in two ways. The first way is to follow us on Twitter at EESI online. The second way is to send us an email and the email address to use is EESI at EESI.org. We will take the questions that come in from our online audience and incorporate them into our Q and A discussion at the end. And now it is my privilege to introduce our first panelists. Andrew Jackson joined the foreign and Commonwealth office in 1990. He has held a wide range of positions in the FCO and across the government. He was deputy ambassador in Argentina, counselor for the knowledge economy in India and held other overseas roles in Algeria, Italy and Norway. Other recent positions include head of science innovation and the climate department and deputy chief scientific advisor in the FCO, deputy director in the cabinet office, joint anti-corruption unit, deputy director of golf projects, department for international trade. Andrew, thank you so much for joining us this morning. I'm really looking forward to your presentation and I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Andrew, I think your video is, there you are. Welcome. Thank you very much for the introduction and for the invitation this morning. And congratulations to the environment and then to studies institute ESI on the initiative for this event at the beginning of what is a very important week for our collective efforts on climate change and then move on up to COP26. I think we will be wishing every success for this week's leaders summit. Please that you've chosen the theme of adaptation and resilience. It's a key pillar in the UK's approach to hosting the COP26 in Glasgow. And in this short presentation this morning, what I'd like to set out is some of the ways that we're trying to facilitate engagement on adaptation and resilience as a campaign in the one up to COP26. Putting that into context in line with the Paris Agreement, we are prioritizing the three pillars of raising ambition on mitigation as we try and keep temperature increases to the 1.5 degrees target, raising ambition on adaptation, which I'll go into in more detail and raising ambition on finance for both mitigation and adaptation. That includes the $100 billion commitment but also ways in mobilizing more private investment. And as well as all of this, it's a high ambition for collaboration between countries, international organizations, business, civil society, all the things that we need in order to build success. I'll be focusing this morning on three main areas. The ways that we improve planning to achieve adaptation and resilience, practical actions in particular sectors and finance for adaptation and resilience. But briefly, just to recall the context, I think we all know that the impacts of climate change are being felt now and that our response cannot wait from flooding to forest fires to certification already a direct impact on millions of lives. And even if we stop emissions today, the world would still need to deal with significant climate disruption. And then sadly, of course, as the impacts are felt right across the world, it's often the most vulnerable communities that hit the hardest. Indeed, climate related disasters are estimated to cost the global economy some $520 billion and could push 26 million people into poverty. So as we think about adaptation and resilience, I think we already have an increasingly good basis to understand the challenges. The 2019 Climate Action Summit included a call to action on adaptation at the beginning of this year, 2021. Climate Adaptations Summit hosted in the Netherlands set out an adaptation action agenda. The UK and a number of other countries launched an adaptation action coalition. But I'll speak about it in a moment. And most recently at the end of March, the UK hosted a climate and development ministerial meeting focused on the country's most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. There's also then a growing awareness of the opportunity for investment in successful adaptation and resilience with the net benefits and investment far outweighing the costs. For example, it's been calculated to strengthen the early warning systems as part of disaster risk responses as a cost-benefit ratio of nine to one or the global commission on adaptation. We have assessed that investing 1.8 trillion in climate adaptation over a decade in areas like disaster preparedness, water, agriculture could result in benefits as much as 7.1 trillion. So what we're trying to achieve in the UK's as the incoming COP presidency is to ensure that adaptation resilience is right up there on a level of mitigation and the other actions that we're promoting. So how are we approaching this? We're working with a lot of different organizations globally that are contributing to this agenda. And I think it's fair to say that even beyond the direct work we're doing this fantastic work we've done more widely in these areas. And these are the things that we're trying to galvanize and bring together. But at the start, one very important area is the things that we can do to improve adaptation planning. This can be the national adaptation plans or national adaptation communications under the UNF frequency. And these are critical ways for countries really to integrate a mainstream climate risk in their planning. So we want to work with countries to help bring forward ambitious plans and communications and where these already exist to work together on ways to implement them. And in this, it's a model where we're encouraging inclusive approaches. So it's the national level of planning and the sub-national level of planning. Finding ways to get down to the most effective locally led adaptation. The UK and others are supporting principles put together by the International Institute for Environment and Development. The principles for locally led adaptation to show how transformations can be achieved. And in doing it in this inclusive way, also taking into account the position of women, girls, young people, indigenous populations. Those were often directly affected by the impacts of climate change and also often with knowledge and experience that can really help us to catalyse effective change. In this space as well, promoting the leadership of least developed countries, including, for example, the least developed countries initiative for effective adaptation of resilience, known as LIFE AR, which is consistent with the LDC's 2050 vision and aims to set out a long-term vision for planning and delivering the climate resilient future. So this is one part of the planning piece. The second part is very specifically improving the focus on disaster preparedness and responses. And this is an area where we know from looking at the impact of natural disasters in recent years where there has been progress in areas like Bangladesh, significantly reducing deaths from the cyclones affecting that country, where we can really learn and really make a difference. So one part of our work here is working with the platform of the risk-informed early action partnership, or REAP, which has set a goal to make a billion people safer from climate risk and disasters by 2025 through expanded early action financing, improved early warning systems and better capacity to act on risks once they're identified. And that also means bringing together members of the development, humanitarian, climate and environment community, private and public and local community actors, these kind of inclusive platforms to improve disaster risk planning and responses. The UK has already contributed to the work of REAP and we're encouraging other countries to do so, building on this good practice. In this space as well, organizations such as Insure Reliance, a public-private partnership supporting developing country businesses, helping improve climate risk assessments of informed decisions in terms of preparedness as well. So this is the second part of planning, very specifically to ensure that we can deliver improvements in disaster risk responses. The next part of the approach is around practical actions. And I mentioned the Adaptation Action Coalition created early this year, initially launched by the UK in partnership with Egypt, Bangladesh, Malawi, the Netherlands and St. Lucie, and now a number of other countries joining, which we're very keen to encourage. And this is a state level initiative to focus on building a high level of ambition and understanding of practical real-world actions and implementation to deliver adaptation resilience. And in order to do that, some of the initial work that we'll be doing in the coming period includes a focus on water, climate resilient health systems and climate resilient infrastructure that have been prioritized by the countries involved. So why water, for example, is this one of the most in-demand sectors for developing countries in national climate planning, coping with the pressures of floods, droughts, increase in water scarcity. And the sort of tools that have been considered a water tracker, for example, that helps mainstream risk management in the water areas across low-income government ministries with an environment, finance, economic specialized water ministries. Getting this really joined up approach to short the vital investments are put in place and de-risked. Why health, impacts on global health, everything from air quality to food and water and security, increasing interest diseases, health impacts with stream weather events, risks of reduced access to public health services. Again, a very significant area that we want to explore in more detail. And particularly at the moment as we struggle with the COVID-19 pandemic and the need for resilience has been very clearer than ever. This is one where we bring together the climate and health experts. Infrastructure, the third of the initial ones, significant annual damage already costs to road and rail transport by extreme weather events, some of the highest costs in middle-income countries, but also the indirect costs. It can be even larger than direct energy. It's ways that we bring resilience and infrastructure investments as well. This work is kicking off next month as part of the Peterborough Climate Dialogues and we'll continue and run up to COVID-19 diseases. As we think about these different areas of the planning and of the sector-based initiatives, we're also promoting the new Adaptation Research Alliance launched in January this year that brings together research funders and funders of practical programs to create future research, identifying knowledge gaps and priorities by sector and supporting innovative examples of best practice that we can scale up. So the picture from this part of the practical actions is that we are understanding more where there is the role for investment technology innovation that can create opportunities for practical actions and the compliment to the Adaptation Action Coalition is the Race to Resilience that has been launched as a global campaign. It actually sits along the Race to Zero put together by the UN high-level climate champions that's also then aiming to bring together initiatives from non-state actors to build the resilience of 4 billion people and communities vulnerable to climate risks by 2030. And this is already collecting a wide range of proposals and initiatives from private companies, other non-state institutions to drive forward opportunities here. I mentioned as well the importance of agriculture. Here, the UK's campaign model for COP26 also includes a specific nature campaign and here the cross-cutting nature of adaptation and resilience we're seeking to support the Just Rule Transition Initiative that was launched at the Climate Action Summit in 2019, again, promoting improvements in policy action, innovation and investment, building more on the transition to sustainable agriculture. So this gives a range of an illustration of the range of the ways that we are prioritising and understanding sectors where adaptation resilience can be improved. The third pillar of the work is finance and here the goal to help increase total amounts of finance, but also make sure that it is more accessible and efficiently deployed. So working with donors, multilateral development banks, investors to encourage these flows of climate finance. I said at the start, this includes our commitment to raise a hundred billion dollars a year for international climate finance. The UK's already doubled our national contribution on climate finance to 11.6 billion pounds over the coming years and we're encouraging others to follow suit. But also working with development finance institutions to create a new collaborative to accelerate investment in adaptation and resilience and working with private sector initiatives such as the Coalition for Climate Resilient Investment, which is already helping with the modelling of risk and investments that can help shift more private investments, for example, into resilient infrastructure, supporting vulnerable communities to attract more investment. So the finance work is very key to the whole approach here, but as I say, we're keen to complement that with the practical solutions and the planning tools. And I mentioned that in amongst the recent initiatives, the UK hosted a climate and development ministerial meeting and bringing together a range of countries and multilateral institutions focused on hearing directly from the country's most vulnerable to climate change. And out of this meeting, a range of ideas and initiatives being taken forward that includes seeking new access to adaptation finance that the UK working with teaching countries will enter deliver. And then also a recognition that there's some climate impacts that no amount of adaptation will suffice to deliver. And this is the issue of loss and damage, which can be a damaging one in the negotiating context. And the UK will be organising a series of consultations to operationalise the Santiago network on loss and damage, which was set out at the COP25 meeting. And again, looking at what are the practical solutions in these areas that we can put together. Another point coming out of that climate and development ministerial was consultations also around the global goal run adaptation, again making the link into the border in preparation of the COP meeting. So the picture that I've tried to illustrate here and it's a lot of organisations and a lot of partners, a complex one, and I think it reflects that adaptation of resilience is different in every country. There's no single solution for effective adaptation of resilience. The finance is an essential component, but very important that we're raising awareness of what can be achieved in specific sectors. The importance of planning so that climate risk is fully integrated. The particular opportunities in disaster risk response and management. And the new models that we can promote that accelerate private investment, improving opportunities for the application of new technology and innovation. So this is just a brief overview of the work in hand, but I hope it illustrates the level of importance attached to achieving progress around adaptation and resilience. It's been a pleasure to run through this introduction to this work and really looking forward to hearing from the other presenters and I know a lot of work being done here in the US and to hearing questions on this as well. So thank you very much. Thank you so much, Andrew, for an excellent overview of all of the work that's going on around this topic. Thank you very much for that great way to kick off the panel. We are going to introduce our second speaker, second panelist in just a moment, but before I do, Andrew just mentioned looking forward to the Q&A, so am I. If you have questions, you can ask them in two different ways. The first is by following us on Twitter at EESI online. You can also send us an email EESI at EESI.org and we'll do our best to incorporate them into our discussion. Our second panelist is Leonardo Martinez Diaz. He is currently senior advisor to special presidential envoy for climate John Kerry. Previously, Leo served as global director of the Sustainable Finance Center at the World Resources Institute. And I think in that capacity, Leo, that you were a panelist at an EESI briefing, I think in late 2019, that was delay and pay or plan and prosper, one of the best briefings we did that year. So thank you very much for that. He is author along with Alice Hill, who we'll be hearing from in a moment, of building a resilient tomorrow, how to prepare for the coming climate disruption. Leo, it is wonderful to see you this morning. Thanks again for being an EESI briefing panelist and I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Dan. Can you hear me right? Yes. Great. It's a pleasure to be part of this event again. As you mentioned, the last presentation we did with EESI was, I think really, really satisfying and helpful, I hope. So it's great to be back in this forum. I want to talk to you today about the administration's efforts on resilience and adaptation. And just as an introduction, I want to say that having served with Alice, seven of the eight years in the Obama administration, it is clear that for this administration, resilience plays an elevated, more prominent place, a more prominent role than it ever has in the U.S. And I think that's a function of a couple of things. One is obviously the urgency of the moment. It's now clear that the impacts of climate change once thought to be in the distant future are now squarely in the present. And that degree of understanding of the impacts is now, I think, permeating society and has penetrated quite deeply, including in the policy world. So adaptation now has a degree of, is a coordinated degree of importance that I've never seen before in government. But also adaptation and resilience, I think fits really well with a couple of the President Biden's priorities for his government as a whole. One of those is equity and the importance of environmental justice, climate justice. It is very clear that the impacts of climate change do not affect everybody equally. It is clear that not everybody has equal capacity to adapt and to recover from climate impacts. And so we're going to address issues of structural inequality, of racial disparities. We're going to have to deal with this, the very uneven way in which climate impacts affect people. And therefore there's a, I think, a natural union between the issue of climate adaptation and advancing environmental and climate justice. The second priority for the President is, of course, jobs. The stimulation of the economy and the recovery after COVID. And here again, although often the conversation is about jobs in the green space, sort of renewable energy jobs and energy efficiency employment and so on. I think oftentimes we underestimate how important resilience related employment is going to be for this recovery. Not just in the United States, but abroad. The fact is there's many different technologies, services and know-how that are going to become essential to the new economy, the post COVID economy. And just as important as the solar panel installers and the wind turbine maintenance workers, you're going to need an army of resilience advisors and resilience workers who are going to be integrating climate into infrastructure, into services, into urban planning, into health policy, and so on. And so I think there's also a natural dialogue there between the President's focus on jobs, good paying jobs, union jobs, and resilience. And so in sum, there is now a special importance accorded to this topic. The first example of that is the summit coming up on Thursday and Friday. This is the, of course, the leaders summit on climate. It's the administration's first major international event on climate change. In the old days, this would have been an extension of what we used to call the major economies forum that is a group of 17 or so largest economies and largest emitters. And the conversation would have been dominated as it was in that forum in years past on mitigation. We focused very much on reducing emissions and on the NDC elements that were all about controlling the emissions of carbon and greenhouse gas emissions. And so this time around, it's going to be different from the beginning. It was clear that this wasn't just going to be about emissions. It wasn't just going to be about the largest 17 or 20 economies. It was also going to be about the impacts about resilience and adaptation. And so as a result, you'll see that the lineup for the summit, which now includes 40 heads of state is not just about the big and the economically weighty but also about countries that are on the front lines of climate impacts that are highly vulnerable to climate change. And so that will be adaptation and resilience will be very much a part of the summit across all the sessions. It will be woven into the conversation throughout whether it's on finance or jobs or innovation or indeed ambition. And in addition, there will be a ministerial level session as part of the summit, which will focus exclusively on resilience and adaptation. There will also be a ministerial session on climate change and security, which also touches, I think, on many of the issues that folks here care about. So the summit will, I think, be the first example of how we are now in a different age where mitigation and adaptation are now seen as really co-equal parts of the solution. It also turned to the larger policy frame that the president has put in place. It involves really an all of government effort to advance climate solutions. And so as you saw from the executive order issued back in January 27, adaptation and resilience are very much part of all the homework that the agencies and the federal government have been assigned by the White House. So let me just give you a few examples on the domestic side. A national climate task force has been created headed by Gina McCarthy, and part of its mission part of the task forces work is to very much focus on adaptation across many different domains. The executive order also calls on the Department of Commerce to provide a report on ways to expand and improve climate forecast capabilities and information products for the public. So you'll see, I think a lot of work there channeling NOAA and other of the science agencies capabilities. The Department of Interior has been tasked with providing a report on the development of a federal geographic mapping service that can facilitate public access to climate related information. So a lot of the issues that we could sense were going to become very important back in the Obama administration are now really being rolled out and structured as whole government efforts. The infrastructure bill that the jobs bill that was sent to Congress as being discussed with Congress is also a reflection of how important resilience and adaptation have become. There's many parts in the bill that incorporate adaptation and resilience into infrastructure, including for example in the upgrade of our electrical grid. Of course, most folks still remember the impacts of extreme weather on the Texas energy grid, and like that there's many other examples, California of course, with the wildfires, where there's serious gaps in the resilience of our infrastructure, including our vital systems for power, water and transportation. And in this bill I think shows you the new generation of thinking in which climate is very much baked in, not just in terms of reducing the emissions of this infrastructure, but also in terms of how that infrastructure is resilient to the impacts of climate. And finally at the domestic front, there's going to be as the media has reported a focus on climate related financial risk. There's now I think a very wide appreciation that climate change, both the physical impacts of climate change, as well as a transition to a zero net zero economy itself, present challenges to companies, the company's business models to companies bottom lines, and to financial institutions that may be heavily invested in either assets that are vulnerable to climate impacts, or in assets that are carbon heavy, and therefore could become so-called stranded assets in the future, in the future once we move the economy moves away from high carbon solutions. And so there's a real need to look at those risks and to manage them effectively, to measure them because they are often not measured at all in the system, and to figure out how do we ensure that the transition is smooth, that financial institutions are able to continue to function effectively, even in the presence of these risks. And so I think you'll see more action coming on the front. Let me turn to the international side briefly. We are I think very focused on adaptation here at home, and that's certainly a big change from from the past, but also in the international space there's I think renewed bigger and renewed energy, as Andrew has just mentioned. And I think, let me, let me talk about a couple of elements here. One is as well in finance. I think you're going to see increasing interest in growing the quantity of finance that is being devoted to adaptation and resilience, but also the quality of that finance, namely how do we spend it, not just how much we spend. To what extent is it reaching beneficiaries to what extent is it really building long term capacity of governments and businesses and communities to manage what's ultimately a highly localized set of risks. You know, to what extent are we making data information and research available, not just to those who can pay for the state of the art modeling. But for communities around the world that are unable to afford the most expensive bespoke products that will be put out in the advanced economies. I think at the heart of adaptations no longer just about financing individual projects here and there, and the proverbial sort of seawall or elevated road. It's about how do we get communities to better understand the risks that they face, and to better make their own choices that allow them to become a resilient and more adaptive to climate, and that is I think requires a slightly different set of tools. We'll be working will be releasing very shortly as per the executive order is so called climate finance plan. This will be a first the first document of its kind in the US government, it will lay out a strategic vision for how the government approaches international climate finance. And it will identify a number of concrete steps that different agencies that work internationally will be taking to ensure that they are working together better, and that we are making our climate finance, more effective. Those include those agencies include of course USA ID State Department, the Treasury Department in its role overseeing the multilateral development banks, and also the development finance corporation, which works closely with the private sector around the world. I think for all of us, for all of these agencies. We're still learning. It's still a learning process, trying to measure impact in the adaptation space, trying to quantify some of that that progress, and we need to get beyond metrics, such as number of people made resilient right which can become sometimes do simplistic but rather how do we measure more effectively the degree to which we have actually reduced the risk, or the degree to which we have actually increased the capacity of a community to manage that risk. And that is, I think the next generation of thinking about how do we measure progress in this space. The G seven coming up this summer is going to be a crucial moment. As you know the UK presidency has. Thank you to all of you from the UK government who have been part of this have put a very strong emphasis on adaptation and resilience in the G seven. I think it's the right decision. And I think it's going to help catalyze action in both quality and quantity of climate finance. Finally, I think it's worth talking about standards for how we do things, including infrastructure. I think it's interesting to see across the system, a number of different standards are emerging or initiatives are emerging for how do we incorporate climate into infrastructure so you have, for example, India the India led climate disaster resilient infrastructure initiative. You have a climate coalition for a resilient infrastructure you have the blue dot network you have the G 20 principles for high quality infrastructure, a whole series of different approaches to try with all of them with the same goal, which is to ensure that when we have a major piece of infrastructure that are going to be around for decades that they are systematically designed and adapted and constructed to withstand future impacts of climate change even if we don't understand precisely how the climate is going to There are certain features that can be put into infrastructure as Alice and I speak about in the book that you mentioned them that can be put in place now, and which can then allow you to adapt as the situation evolves through time and that's something we see now internationally as part of all of these initiatives, which is really quite important. I think it's really close by by stressing the importance of investing not just in the ex post finance, that is to say, the money that is there to help people and communities rebuild and recover after the impact of extreme weather, but also to invest heavily in the ex ante, that is to help communities and businesses prepare for those impacts before they actually happen. I think and as I've argued with some colleagues in my previous previous life. There is perhaps too much emphasis right now on the ex post. There's a lot of money going to clean up and not enough going to preparedness. And that is, I think a disequilibrium that we need to address, especially given that is as we just mentioned, the investments in ex ante preparedness are often much much more cost effective than cleaning up after. And so that is, I think an important principle will continue to follow. Let me just close by saying that mitigation and adaptation are no longer in competition with each other. It's clear that they need to be at the table together. And in fact, we need to find ways to ensure that solutions work on both at the same time. And that is, I think, also part of the next generation of thinking. Let me hand it over to you then. Thank you Leo for that wonderful presentation and overview. This is obviously an extremely busy time in Washington and around the world on these issues and means a lot to ESI to have you and our other panelists join us during such a busy time to bring all this information to our audience. Thank you so much. Our third speaker is Alice Hill. Alice is the David and Rubenstein senior fellow for energy in the environment at the Council on foreign relations, where her work focuses on the risks consequences and responses associated with climate change. Alice previously served a special assistant to President Obama and senior director for resilience policy on the National Security Council staff, where she led the developments of national policy to build resilience to catastrophic risks, including climate and biological threats. Her new book the fight for climate after COVID-19 will be published in August 21 2021. And of course I've already mentioned the book she's working on with Leo. Alice, thank you so much for joining us this morning I will turn it over to you I'm really looking for your presentation. Thank you so much for having me really a pleasure to be able to join you here today. And I want to thank Dan for your leadership and the British Embassy for their leadership. It's wonderful to hear from you Andrew and Leo, my partner and partner in fighting for resilience in the Obama administration and clearly he is continuing to lead that fight in the Biden administration so really a delight to be here with you this morning. And since this is a congressional briefing I think I'll frame my remarks in terms of what Congress can be thinking of with regard to this challenge of adaptation. I wanted to add in the remarks that adaptation has been like the poor cousin of mitigation, the, or the cousin that's sent to the kids table during Thanksgiving or mitigation negotiations climate negotiations. As the husband said that clearly needs to change you in the midst of a pandemic last year 2020 was tied for the hottest year ever. And if you look at the impacts across the globe. There's no question that climate change has definitively arrived. We had zombie fires in the Arctic. Temperatures reach over 100 degrees Fahrenheit in the Arctic in the aptly named death valley we saw temperatures probably the highest temperature ever recorded 130 degrees. We got a new word gigafire, because so many acres burned in the West we had to turn a fire that burned more than a million acres. We had those 30 known named storms along our Atlantic coast, which forced us to turn meteorologists to turn to the Greek alphabet. And as we're having this session right now. There is a super cyclone headed towards the Philippines the earliest in the season ever recorded with wind speeds of over 190 degree miles per hour and of course last year. The Philippines was hit by a cyclone with a wind speed of 195 miles per hour at the highest ever recorded. So we can't wait anymore. We're already seeing very heavy damages across the globe. Munich re the large reinsurer has estimated it was 210 billion last year of that 95 billion was in the US. So to the extent we think we are exceptional we will not be exceptional in terms of avoiding losses from climate change. So as we head towards the cop, one essential element that the cop and the Paris agreement already recognized is that the best way to start adjusting to a different future is to plan. One of the reasons why planning is so essential is because the risk that climate change brings is so unfamiliar. We have built all of our systems transportation communication health housing, based on an assumption that the past will resemble the future. The past can safely guide our choices as to how and where we build, but that's no longer true. We're going to have bigger worse extremes in our future. And we need to account for those now as we build and as we make choices and it's not just human built structures that will collapse in the face of climate change it's also our natural systems. We need to figure out how we're going to cope in that very changed world and as we make investments today. It's important that they're better as has been referenced. There are a lot of different analysis, but at a minimum it's somewhere above four degree four dollars for each $1 we spend in reducing risk before a disaster occurs so there's a huge financial incentive to get this right. That helps you incorporate that into your future choices. One area where the United States is lagging is we do not have a national plan. That's one area where Congress could help with leadership or the Biden administration could also choose to put forward a national plan. China has one, France has one, the EU just issued one, Canada is working on one and many developing nations also are working on them. So we're an outlier, but without a plan it's very difficult to make sure that you're making those correct decisions in a whole of government and then really a whole of community approach so that both the private sector, state and local governments, tribal governments as well as the federal government are all rowing in the same direction as we make these important decisions about how to better prepare for very changed future. One of the other things that we could look at is our cost benefit analysis both overseas and here in the United States to better incorporate the fact that we have a long time horizon when it comes to climate change and we have historically discounted investments for future protection in favor of lower cost as typically to be better protected it's going to cost slightly more but we know if we invested in that now would save us a lot of money in the long run, and that cost benefit analysis needs close attention it seems like a wonky issue, but it's really an issue that will determine how dollars flow, and that's something that the federal government the OMB's current discount rate is is perceived as hindering our ability to make better investments for our own safety here in the United States. And we it's really important that we get this right now, we do not currently have a set of climate resilient building codes. We are further along and certainly have called out the need to do that explicitly as Leah was said there have been a number of efforts done, but we don't really have an easy place for for interested parties to go to to figure out how do you build for greater storm surge for hotter, more vicious fires for higher wind speeds, it's difficult to do that, but the US puts up, at least pre pandemic we put up with that over half a million houses every year we're doing a lot of building every year as we replace and retrofit we need to figure out how do we make those investments also sound going forward. One of the things also that we've seen front and sever center as we've all experienced this COVID-19 catastrophic event. It's given us a chance to each see how catastrophic risk unfolds. And that FEMA telling me, you know, we just never imagined that we would have to respond to all 50 states plus the territories that once during a pandemic, plus have all these other events that happened last year. So seriously think about emergency management and it's wonderful to hear about the different efforts underway certainly there is a lot of opportunity to cooperate internationally, because we know that the demands for example on the military will increase from the need for humanitarian missions. When typhoon high and hit the Philippines several years ago the US government was the first to respond. And we are known for our willingness to help out and lend a hand helping hand, but we're going to have a lot more of these conditions going forward and we need to plan for those. Similarly historically, we've cooperated with Australia, we've sent firefighters to Australia during their fire season and they've sent firefighters to us during their fire season, but the seasons are now extending last year around. In fact, right now, California is definitely in drought, it's snowpack has been melting, and it may face a much earlier fire season now so we have to figure out how we will coordinate better in the future to have the surge capacities that we need to respond to these acute events. An additional area for us to all be thinking about is the fact that climate change ignores all borders. It's like a pandemic. Humans have carefully crafted jurisdictional borders that determine decision making across the globe. In the United States we have some 89,000 different governmental entities making decisions. But the climate impacts just like COVID-19 just sweep across those borders. And we need to come up with a serious plans, serious plans on how we're going to plan regionally, both within the United States and across borders and that would include in our overseas development work to be better able to withstand. The acute places this will occur quickly is in our river basins, because as we experience frequently to little water in areas that have had long standing agreements how to share that water. Those agreements don't yet reflect the change conditions brought by climate change and if they don't there will be folks downstream who may be hurt as the upstreams entities and and governments use that water to take care of their own populations but there's left less left at the end of the day for the downstream downstream neighbors. Of course, COVID-19 has taught us a lot about vulnerability and how these impacts as has been stated so eloquently fall very unevenly. And we've learned a lot about gender, how the women, both in the United States, as well as overseas often pay a higher price as to the We know that we've seen more we will see more stunting as a result of climate change that's when kids simply don't get enough nutrition. So they don't reach their full height they don't reach their full mental capabilities which can have a long term impact on the health of the nation and the economy. There is stunting within the population so we need to tend to how are we going to make sure that we have helped those who most need help prepare for these events and that takes some careful planning to get there. I want to talk about one issue and Leo touched upon this and this is incredibly important. In my experience in the world of climate change, the adaptation community and the mitigation community have been fairly separate. Some in the mitigation community did not look on with on favorably adaptation effort because they viewed it as an admittance of failure on the mitigation side. It's similar to what we may be experiencing when we start talking about geo engineering. There's a concern that that also signals that we fail. But the fact is, we need to adapt now. As Andrew said, we've baked in impacts for the future. That's just the delayed way the atmosphere works. So we are going to have further heating, which brings these events flooding droughts extreme heat, sea level rise in the foreseeable future, even if we're incredibly successful at cutting our emissions. We have a lot ahead of us that we need to prepare for. So the last thing I'll say is that as we think as a nation as Congress as we work with countries overseas what we need to be thinking about and move beyond the thinking that I think where I was for much of the Obama administration. We need to go beyond and the Obama administration we've focused a lot on how can we make particular infrastructure assets, a dam, a bridge, a road climate resilient. And that Biden administration has echoed that in its infrastructure plan. But that's not all of it. Let's think about how do we gain resilience through these investments, meaning that we actually end up with a community with people more resilient, making an asset sturdier may not get us there. And we have to understand that that requires us to look at land use issues and other issues to really determine whether at the end of the day we will be more resilient as a result of that risk investment. And that is an important change in our thinking that we have to get to how do we achieve resilience through these investments rather than simply making sure that the investments that hard structure itself is resilient, because at the end of the day, it may not be resilient to the kinds of impacts we will see could be that the seas rise too much, and we need to make choices that are different in the face of those risks. So I want to applaud this session. Everyone's interest in these matters and particularly the Biden administration for putting this front and center, the need to do both that we have to improve. And for their expressed ambition in trying to make sure that we have a safer outcome for all of us, including in the United States. So I look forward to the questions. Thank you so much for having me. It was our pleasure Alice thank you so much. I like the framing of the beyond. If you missed it for this is for our audience, if you missed any of Alice's presentation if you'd also like to go back and revisit what Andrew said what Leo said, just wanted to mention a quick reminder that all of this will be archived online at www.esi.org will also provide written notes as well or summary notes. And there's still time to ask questions. We will do that after our final speaker who will join us in just a moment. You have a question follow us on Twitter at ESI online, you can send us an email ESI at ESI.org. Now it is my privilege to introduce Rachel Jacobson. Rachel is deputy director of the American Society of adaptation professionals. Rachel leads the development implementation and continuous improvement of ASAP program. She connects adaptation people and ideas by overseeing the ASAP connects program advances effective adaptation practice through the adaptation careers program supports adaptation leadership development and field wide capacity building through the ASAP serves program. Internally Rachel also leads ASAP monitoring and evaluation efforts and ensures that new activities aligned with member values and ASAP priorities should also just very briefly mentioned when I talked about the resilience report ESI issued last week. Rachel was a part of that effort, as well as Beth Gibbons at ASAP just wanted to quickly plug that once more and to say thank you for all your help making that report a reality. Rachel I'll turn it over to you take it away. Thanks so much Dan. Thank you to ESI and to the UK foreign Commonwealth and Development Office for inviting me to speak today. I'm going to share my screen because I'm a visual learner and I'm sure that there are others out there as well who are so you can have the benefit of a few visuals as I speak. Alright so as deputy director of American Society of Adaptation Professionals, I'm really witnessing every day the successes and the needs of climate change adaptation and climate resilience practitioners workers and scholars. So adaptation professionals are doing everything from developing community climate adaptation plans to making changes to corporation supply chains, choosing new crops to plan to investing in resilient buildings. We're working at every scale and in every sector to help communities, ecosystems and economies adapt to climate change and build resilience to climate impacts. And you can see here the map and the sectoral breakdown of the ASAP membership. As adaptation professionals, we're keeping the needs and desires of individuals and communities who are on the front lines of climate change first always and so I think it's really important for you all to see and hear what that means to us and my fellow panelists have alluded to this in their remarks as well. People and communities on the front lines of climate change are those that are experiencing the consequences of climate change first and worse. And they include people who are both highly exposed to climate risks because of the places they live and have fewer resources, capacity, safety nets or political power to respond to those risks because of widespread discrimination. And they include black people, indigenous peoples, people of color, people with low incomes, as well as many other individuals and communities such as immigrants, people at risk of displacement, people with disabilities. And at ASAP, it is our responsibility to ensure that our members have the enabling environment to do their work well. And while the breadth of work that's required to adapt to climate change is vast, I think that there are three themes that really summarize the changes that need to happen in the federal policy space to create this enabling environment for adaptation work. And those three themes are funding, implement known actions and strategies, reforms of existing policies to avoid maladaptation, and then transforming, looking ahead to envision problems and solutions that we haven't yet experienced and rising to the challenge to meet them. And in order to address the needs that fall within each of these themes, we really need strong leadership on adaptation and resilience at the highest levels to lead to a unified adaptation and resilience strategy across the federal government, and better coordination and among all federal agencies to tackle adaptation and resilience. And Leo outlined some of the ways that the Biden administration is making progress on this front, but as I will outline for you all in just a second, I think there's a lot more that we need to do. In the next few minutes, I'm going to share some examples and principles related to each of these three themes, focusing on the work that we need to do here at home in the US and I really appreciated Alice what you said about the US not being exceptional when it comes to the way that we experience climate impacts. So I hope that this will paint a picture of the type of changes that we need across the board to meet the challenge of adaptation resilience, both domestically and internationally as well. So first, let's talk about funding. So I'm sure it is no surprise that the most cited need of adaptation professionals is more funding to implement this work on the ground. And there are a lot of strategies and a growing body of technical assistance to help communities use public, private and blended finance to obtain capital for local adaptation plans and projects. At the end of the day, though, it will simply be impossible to implement the scale of work that needs to happen on the ground without significantly more federal dollars allocated to directly to adaptation work through mechanisms such as grants and revolving loan funds. And of course we don't just need more money for this work we also need better principles for how it's allocated and spent. And the three things that I want to highlight are that people and communities impacted by climate change and by the actions that we take to adapt to climate change must be in control of how this money is spent. Agencies have to remove burdensome prerequisites and applications, not remove applications entirely but remove burdensome elements of applications so that federal funding doesn't only accrue to the communities that have the resources to apply for it and access it. And the funding must be able to be flexibly applied to community determined priorities, such as in the case of HUD's Community Development Block Grants. I just want to speak briefly about another way to get more money into the hands of communities by harnessing a model pioneered by the state of Massachusetts that we're now seeing in North Carolina as well. These states have used executive action to create programs that provide technical assistance and funding for climate resilience planning and implementation in cohorts of local communities across the state. And with more federal funding to pass through the state programs such as these, as well as of course incentives for more states to enact them, a greater number of communities, and all different types of communities would have both the foundation for sound climate adaptation, i.e. local vulnerability assessments and climate adaptation resilience plans, as well as resources to implement projects that of course reduce those vulnerabilities and protect the assets that are identified by those communities and those plans. So the second theme I want to touch on is the need to reform existing policies to avoid maladaptation, which the IPCC defines as actions that may lead to increased risk of adverse climate related outcomes, increased vulnerability to climate change or diminished welfare. Now we're in the future, things like failing to anticipate expected climate change or trading long term vulnerability for short term benefits. Now, there are a lot of existing laws and policies that can and should be leveraged to meet adaptation and resilience needs. This is where the Biden administration has really put most of its focus thus far is leveraging those things like our existing federal environmental laws, incentives for conservation, and our robust climate monitoring research and assessment programs, these are all crucial tools, existing tools for incentivizing and enabling adaptation resilience, but there are many existing laws and policies that promote maladaptation. And they do this by, for example, not incorporating forward looking climate information, or by inequitably allocating risks and benefits. So for example, engineers and planners throughout the US use NOAA's Atlas 14 statistical data for infrastructure design, but Atlas 14 doesn't have rainfall data that integrates future climate projections. So you have the lifespan of a bridge of 50 to 75 years. Design requirements using Atlas 14 have to be able to take into account both today's rainfall and anticipated future rainfall. And then, you know, Alice talked about cost benefit analysis. We have to consider where risks and benefits are accruing due to federal policies. And for federal programs that use benefit cost analysis that's tied, for example, to property values, that means that adaptation and adaptation projects in places with lower property values get passed over or devalued when often those are the places that need those projects the most. And finally, we have to acknowledge that climate impacts are transitioning us to a new reality, one without precedent. And my fellow panelists illustrated this well. And so we, if we merely use existing federal programs to protect existing assets against the dangers of the past, that will obviously not be enough. We need a distinct set of policies designed explicitly to address current and future climate impacts. So let's take, for example, individuals and communities contemplating or experiencing the need to move to a new place to sustain their lives or livelihoods as they experience climate impacts. This will be the reality for millions of people in the US displaced by sea level rise, for example, not to mention hundreds of millions more across the globe. And it's already the reality for communities like New Top Alaska, which has been waiting over 30 years to relocate. And individuals like Olga McKissack in Louisville, Kentucky, who waited over 10 years for a buyout of our home that had been repeatedly flooded. Adaptation professionals are working tirelessly to help communities design and navigate local buyout processes develop community relocation plans, implement local regulations to discourage building and hazards areas. And to try to understand when, from where, and importantly to where people will move as climate impacts worsen. What we need is a federal strategy and guidance that provides national level objectives to envision and enact climate migration and manage retreat as just equitable effective climate adaptation strategies. And we need coordinated technical assistance and dedicated funding that's accessible to all the people and places that need to use manage retreat and climate migration as adaptation strategies. And we need to understand that the places people move to, and the question of whether there will be housing jobs and communities in those places is just as important of a question as where and when people will move from climate impact places. So we've covered three themes that are important to consider for federal adaptation of resilience policy here in the US. Funding the strategies and actions we know we need reforming existing policies to avoid maladaptation and envisioning this new reality and the needed policies to address and embrace it. And I really hope that this has painted a picture of the type of changes we need across the board to meet the challenge of adaptation resilience, certainly domestically but internationally as well. So finally, I just want to close with some thoughts on how to prioritize what to do first. Of course, climate action is needed now. In the midst of economic recovery, a racial justice reckoning, an ongoing health disaster. And so here at American Society of Adaptation Professionals, our 2021 policy priorities are designed to illustrate how adaptation professionals are thinking about what to focus on this year. And they are to create federal standards for climate data and mandate use of future climate projections and agency decisions. Treat climate change as a crisis and prioritize justice and equity in that crisis response. Overlay climate resilience needs and all infrastructure decisions preserve and manage natural systems for climate resilience. And then really importantly, and I really appreciate Leo for focusing on this and part of his remarks define develop and train the climate change adaptation and climate resilience workforce. And that includes investing in and increasing the consistency of education and training for climate change adaptation and climate resilience professionals and workers. And these priorities, which were created by and for ASAP members don't just signal what we'll advocate for in 2021 they also represent where ASAP members have deep expertise. And there is obviously a whole lot of work to be done. And our members are ready to partner with decision makers at all scales of governance to provide adaptation insight, and ultimately to raise the ambition, and most importantly, the impact of our collective work. So thank you very much. Look forward to the questions. Thank you Rachel and thanks for that excellent presentation. Thanks also to Andrew, Leo and Alice for their presentations as well we have a lot to cover and about 20 minutes or so the covered in the Q&A. So I will invite the panelists to turn their audio and video on or at least video I guess we can mute and unmute as we go. We have a few topics I want to get to and also we're having some questions come in from the audience as well so thank you for sending those in. Andrew, I would like to turn to you first, and then we'll go through the order of the presentations. All of you touched on one way or the other issues around equity and justice and how we advance climate adaptation and resilience. I would like to use the first part of our Q&A to expound a little bit on that to explore how that can be done. I think there are examples, whether it's in the United States or the United Kingdom or from elsewhere, if there are approaches that you think could provide sort of the maximum benefits in the near term when it comes to equity and justice as we make our communities more adaptable and more resilient. Andrew. Thank you. I think the points I made in the work I'll focus on the international is that everything we're doing is about building inclusive approaches. So prioritizing and driving the action for those who are most vulnerable to climate change, as mentioned in the presentations might be women, girls, young people, Indigenous people, disabled, all groups who can be marginalized or exposed. This is why one element of our approach has been endorsing the principles for locally led adaptation and encouraging others to do the same. So we think that that is certainly part of it. And perhaps another example is particularly working with some of the least developed countries. Those countries to be owning the initiatives that we're promoting and that was a distinctive feature of the LIFE AR, the least developed countries initiative for effective adaptation and resilience that I mentioned. So just very briefly, I think those two, the inclusion and particularly when it comes to developing countries, the developing country led model. Thank you. Thank you for that. Leo, how can we ensure that we're advancing adaptation and resilience in an equitable and just way from your perspective. Just a couple of ideas that we included Alison I included in our book on this is a chapter specifically on the issue of equity and inequality in the face of climate change. Just a couple of thoughts here. One is, we should not forget the importance of strengthening the existing social safety nets. As we are you in the book, it's clear that when climate disaster strike. One of the most essential first lines of defense is your traditional social safety nets, your ability to rely on those for continued employment in the aftermath of such a disaster. The ability to move relocate was essential for example in the aftermath of Katrina. Thanks to a number of safety nets that allowed people the resources necessary to relocate in the immediate aftermath was really important. And so an investment in our social safety nets broadly will also help our resilience in specific localities. So that's really crucial. One thing has to do with the relationship between business and government. I think there's a lot of corporations now around the world that are getting very smart about resilience and adaptation. They're investing heavily in climate resilient facilities and climate resilient factories and climate resilient transportation networks. The problem is that if the public infrastructure around you fails, if your workers can't get to work, if your suppliers can't deliver you the goods, if you can't get your products out to market, because public infrastructure has failed around you. It doesn't matter how much you invest in your own private infrastructure. And so what we need is a set of efforts between local governments and the businesses in which they are embedded. The businesses that are embedded in that community to figure out how to work together to ensure that they have mutual resilience to climate, not just kind of private resilience, which ultimately depends on public. And finally, the distribution of adaptation resources is really crucial. I remember, we remember talking to a planner in New York City who said, look, if you wanted me to deploy adaptation resources focused exclusively on reducing losses, financial losses, I would put all my money in Southern Manhattan, because that's where the assets are. That's where the wealth is. But if you did that, of course, it would have terrible impact on equity. And so what we need is a different approach. It can't just be about avoiding the losses, the economic losses. It has to be about ensuring that you're protecting a broader set of people. And that means changing the lens we use when making these financial decisions. It means having different voices at the table when these allocations are made. Alice, I'd love to hear a little more from you on sort of what's working and what perhaps we could double down on to advance equity and justice in these efforts. I think that many important topics have been spoken to, but I think to hone in on disasters and how they impact communities across the world and including in the United States, we need to improve early warning. And it needs to be based on forecasting. The further out we can get that forecasting the Biden administration has indicated they want to move that so it's longer term forecasting allows people to prepare in advance before disaster strikes. If you couple that early warning more robust early warning systems with some kind of parametric or disaster insurance or social stronger social net, you'll have a lot better outcomes. And one of the growing tools used in development, often with donor dollars so people have to give them money for this to happen is parametric insurance and that is insurance that has a trigger so for example if there's a storm morning it's based on a forecast we get the forecast strong. If there's a storm morning, the community is given an infusion of cash through their phones through other ways in the developing world that means that the goat doesn't have to be sold the girl isn't pulled out of school the children aren't pulled out of school and steps can be taken to protect the home, the livelihood, and really ensure that there's a better outcome. So we've already seen many of these programs developed across the globe. And similarly in the United States we have many many Americans who don't have even $400 to evacuate. They don't have the cash available. So as we improve our early warning systems we need to figure out ways to help people get out of harm's way. It's a very first and basic step, but many of our most vulnerable populations are at the greatest risk. If you look at the recent information about redlining. We put people of color blacks in areas that were more flood prone and many of those communities are still in those areas. So we need to give them better help in advance as we have longer term plans about how we'll address these threats. Thank you. Rachel, from your perspective, any things that our audience should know in terms of approaches. Yeah, one thing that I want to highlight first and foremost is the US recently released a strategic planning framework for action for community empowerment. And so that is leveraging existing education communication workforce development civic infrastructure to mobilize all of society for just community driven climate action. This is such a great example of using bottom up grassroots approaches, even in the context of a national strategic planning framework that was developed of course in the context of an international framework. And so I think that ACE, our US strategic plan for ACE is such a great example of where to look for some principles and best practices. I just want to give three more examples here. I first and foremost, I want to acknowledge the people who are doing this work on the ground, particularly through community based organizations that are rooted in environmental justice principles and the environmental justice movement because it's really important to know that worth that's happening under the banner of environmental justice is often adaptation resilience work, but it's not always labeled as such. So as we're thinking about what is a holistic national strategy for increasing our ambition for just an equitable adaptation resilience. We should be looking at the people who have been doing that work on the ground for decades under the banner of environmental justice because that's where the best practices are, and that's also where the implementation is. Two more quick examples of the state of California partners advancing climate equity program, cohort of local leaders during the past few building. And then the Northern Institute of applied climate science really has been such the standard bearer of so many things and adaptation resilience, especially as it relates to ecosystem adaptation. But I want to particularly highlight their work with tribes with indigenous peoples and incorporating traditional ecological ecological knowledge into climate planning frameworks is has been truly exceptional. So the tribal climate application menu is a great example that brings together all that work. Thanks for that. Very much. I want to go through the panel once again and ask sort of give everyone an opportunity to comment. It's been referenced a few times this is the week of the leaders climate or summit on climate. And one of the goals, I think we've all said of this briefing is to raise awareness of adaptation and resilience, sort of this week, but I'd like us to look beyond, and here, everyone's thoughts about how we collectively increase the profile of adaptation and resilience. We move forward as on the road to COP 26 between now and when that event takes place Andrew, happy to turn it to you first for your comment and then we'll go through the line again. Thank you. I agree from this. And I think in terms of the the directly 26 will continue to hear from the UK, as was mentioned is the adaptation resilience is a big priority and G7 presidency as well as the COP 26 will be using the different multilateral platforms to promote this agenda. And specifically encouraging more countries to join the adaptation action coalition or businesses and other institutions to support the the base to resilience. And then I think more generally, there are so many very powerful examples that we've heard some in the US today, but right around the world of countries who are implementing new approaches to adaptation resilience application of new technologies. It's quite an exciting space to be working in. And I think the more that we can be telling that story and engaging people in it, the better to really, really raise this awareness. Thank you. Thank you, Leo. I think coming from the summit the key is to ensure that it's not a point in time that it's not just a one off but rather a destination on the journey to something bigger and so we're hoping the summit will raise the elevate the importance of these issues will hopefully encourage governments including of course our own to make some important announcements and commitments. But then to use the Petersburg dialogue coming up soon the G7 Glasgow itself and and then of course next year to begin to solidify some of that consensus and to put into place a new burst of energy into this agenda. And that's ultimately what we would like to do with this approach. Thank you. Well, because I tend to think in terms of what the federal government can do. The Biden administration could first of all has been as I've said, create a plan, create a strategy, and that would drive better decision making across the federal government in terms of incorporating climate risk that is solely within the power of the Biden administration to do that. In anticipation of that I would recommend that they set out to educate their workforce. I think Rachel has put her finger on a very difficult problem. Most decision makers across the federal government don't have any formal training and climate change. They don't understand of what's going to happen and that's not just the federal government that's across the board. So we need to make sure that those who are drafting the plans that Biden has already called for much less an expanded plan and strategy, have the necessary knowledge and we've got to make sure that we have a level playing field because right now, you could have someone who's very sophisticated and then someone who's questioning, which I've seen, why do I even need to care about this now, we need to answer those questions before we can really get to the kind of level of understanding and drive to make sure that we have adaptation both planning for internationally as well as domestically. Rachel. Of course, couldn't have asked for a better said way and of course we have Alice as one of our esteemed ASAP members. And that's what we do here, you know, we build the capacity of adaptation professionals and adaptation professionals are the people integrating with us so future climate information into their day to day work and that can and should be everyone across the federal government. I think really what we need as not as a result of but I mean, you know, in conjunction with this summit, we need an integrated conversation about mitigation and adaptation and I think that all of the panelists here have made that point in one way or another. So let me just end with that. I mean, we have time running out before irreversible feedback loops set in. It'll take all of our collective efforts, not to just avoid dangerous overshoot through mitigation, but adapt to the impacts that are locked in and adapt to the unknown scale of impacts that will result from whatever trajectory or mitigation efforts put us on. That's the message. And until we have that message blaring loud and clear from the administration and everywhere else, then we will have missed the mark. But I think we can do it and I'll just close with a really brief personal story. When the election happened in 2020. It was this weird time for me where all of a sudden, I needed to start checking the news for climate stories that have not been the case for four years. I started checking the news for climate stories. And then I stopped checking the news, because no climate stories were about adaptation of resilience. So when we talk about raising the ambition, I'm just from my little corner of the world. I want to be checking the news and seeing that integrated conversation represented in those climate stories. And as I just said, I really think we can get there. And I'm excited about that. Well that Rachel thank you for that and it's a great sentiment and I'm afraid we may have to end on it or not afraid we'll have to end on it I'm afraid we'll have to end. And that is a good place to end that's probably a nicer way to put that. I, we are at 1230 which is the end of our panel. And so I would just like to say thank you. Once again to Andrew to Leo to Alice and to Rachel for your remarkably. Speaking of integration. How much perfectly could you integrate for presentations across two different continents. Thank you so much for bringing your expertise and perspectives to our audience today. I want to end with a few sort of logistical and housekeeping items but before I do that. Before I wouldn't want anyone to drop off the live stream before I once again, thank our sponsors, the 2021 UN climate change conference, the British Embassy Washington American Society of adaptation professionals. Thank you for helping us bring this information to our audience today as well couldn't have done it without you. I just want to take a quick moment to acknowledge my new friend Amy Spall for helping us pull all of this together. I think I might even go so far as to say this was Amy's idea. And so thank you Amy, very very much. This couldn't have been a better way for ESI to kick off this week. And this is an incredibly interesting but also an incredibly important topic. So thank you very much for that. I'd also like to thank everyone on team ESI for all their contributions for pulling this off. I'd like to thank Dan O'Brien, Sidney O'Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov, Hannah McGinn, Omri Laporte, and a special shout out to our five fabulous interns, Celine Hamza, Jocelyn, Kimmy and Rachel for all of their work live streaming collecting questions, all of that. Thank you so much. Our next slide is a survey link. We would really appreciate if you have a moment or two to fill out our survey, it helps us reorient our programming to make sure that we're responsive to the needs of policymakers and others in our audience. We read every bit of feedback you provide. And so if you if you fill out the survey if you take the two minutes, you can be assured that we will take a look at it for sure, and do our best to incorporate your suggestions for improvement. So thank you so much to our audience for doing that. This is the beginning of a busy week to be, we've had a very busy first few months of the hundred and of the new Congress and the new administration. I would like to plug two upcoming briefings. One is tomorrow at noon, rethinking reduce reuse and recycle policies and programs to address waste that is going to be a really interesting session. We had an opportunity to RSVP you can do that by visiting us online at www.esi.org. And next Friday is the fourth installment of congressional climate camp. During Alice's presentation she mentioned building codes. We love building codes to and actually we will be featuring building energy codes in particular during that climate camp session, which is all about mitigation and adaptation win-wins or as I like to call them double whammy term that advance climate mitigation and at the same time advance climate adaptation so very very much along the lines of what we've heard from our panelists today about what policymakers need to be paying attention to. That is next Friday, April 30th at 2pm and all of our times are listed in the eastern. Thank you so much once again for joining us today. I hope everyone has a great Earth Day and a great rest of your Monday. We will go ahead and end it there. Thank you again to Andrew, Leo, Alice and Rachel. I hope you have a great day. Thank you.