 Hello and good afternoon, welcome to our briefing, Natural Climate Solutions. I'm Dan Berset, Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. The Environmental and Energy Study Institute 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 that provides technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for energy efficiency, renewable energy, and beneficial electrification for their customers. ESI provides informative, objective, nonpartisan coverage of climate change topics in briefings, written materials, and on social media. All of our educational resources, including briefing recordings, fact sheets, issue briefs, articles, newsletters, and podcasts are always free online at www.esi.org. If you would like to make sure you always receive our latest educational resources, just take a moment to subscribe to our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Our briefing today is the third in our series, What Congress Needs to Know About COP 27, and we're very proud to present it today in partnership with our friends at U.S. Nature for Climate. Thanks to Nathan Henry and his contacts and colleagues who helped us assemble this excellent panel today. We began our briefing series with a discussion of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change's most recent findings as presented in the sixth assessment report. Last week we focused on loss and damage or climate impacts that cannot be adapted to, which will be one of the most talked about issues at COP 27. If you missed either briefing, you can watch the archive webcast by visiting us online at www.esi.org. And be sure to sign up for the fourth briefing in the series on Wednesday, November 2nd, which will cover what's on the table at the negotiations. Natural climate solutions, which are conservation, restoration, and improved land management strategies to help remove carbon from the air while also keeping our air and water clean and our soil healthy and productive will be discussed in the context of the upcoming international climate negotiations. Here in the United States, farmers, ranchers, foresters, and other agricultural producers are already incorporating natural climate solutions into their land use and conservation practices. As an example, farmers who practice regenerative agriculture realize multiple economic, climate, and societal benefits and have for a very long time. To learn more about regenerative agriculture, check out our June, 2022 briefing that was presented in partnership with the Natural Resources Defense Council. We anticipate that natural climate solutions are primed for robust discussion when negotiators and observers arrive in Sharm Elshake, Egypt in just over a week for the 27th Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change or COP 27. And this is one area where US leadership demonstrated by Congress on a bipartisan basis could set a very positive example of showcasing forestry, coastal management, and sustainable agricultural practices that contribute to climate mitigation and adaptation while also helping to feed people and producing valuable crops and commodities. To keep up with natural climate solutions at COP 27, along with all the other key issues like loss and damage and international climate finance, I encourage you to sign up for our special newsletter, COP 27 Dispatch, that will be published every day while the negotiations are taking place. You can visit us online at www.esi.org forward slash subscribe to sign up for COP 27 Dispatch as well as our regular bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Before I introduce our panel, let me remind everyone that we will have some time today for questions and we will do our best to incorporate questions from our online audience. If you have a question, you can send it to us via email at ASK or ask at esi.org or even better, follow us on Twitter at EESI online and send it to us that way. The first of our four panelists today is John Verdig. John is the Director of International Climate Policy at the Nature Conservancy. In this role, he works to improve policy coherence between international climate change rule sets and national level action in the land sector. John formerly worked at the US State Department where he negotiated work streams related to forests, carbon markets and the Paris agreements rule sets for nationally determined contributions in greenhouse gas accounting. John, welcome to our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Dan. Really appreciate the opportunity to be here and appreciate all the interest from everybody out there and what's gonna be happening with COP coming up and how it relates with natural climate solutions. I'm gonna share my few slides here and walk you through thoughts of where we're gonna see NCS play and how we kind of increase ambition going forward and build international trust. So as Dan said, COP's gonna in about a week get started. So why have a COP? Why even do this? We now know and we've known for a long time that climate change affects the entire globe that no country can solve it alone as hard as they might try at home. We're gonna need international cooperation to make sure that everybody is reducing their emissions as much as they can and building more resilience for the future. Many countries in the negotiating groups also link up their climate change negotiations along with trade actions and things like that. So we need to make sure that countries are moving together. And the one way we really know to do that is through the United Nations. It's not always pretty getting 190 plus countries to come to an agreement. I'm sure those of you that work in Congress know this as well, that sometimes it's extremely hard to get that many people together, agreeing everybody's making some different compromises, but even if things stall and it takes a while, you need to come back, keep talking and keep moving. So what are the good pieces that we know now after this many cops and the 27th coming up here is that most of the Paris rulebook, most of the rules are agreed. We know what to do. But sometimes we still don't have the means of implementation. And by that, I'm gonna talk to a little bit of how do we do the work on the ground and how do we get the finance for it? So what is in the Paris rulebook? Well, just a couple of things. There's a lot of things in there, but a few that are really important for this discussion today and natural climate solutions is we know that countries have to submit a pledge called a nationally determined contribution in NDC. The NDC basically comes out of what is in the country's greenhouse gas inventory and you build it up and you make the forward-looking projection that becomes your pledge. Now, the language all sinks in all sources of greenhouse gas emissions exists already in the Paris agreement. It was written in their own purpose. We wanted to make sure that we're looking at different sources of greenhouse gas emissions. That means emissions coming out of whether it be energy, transportation, et cetera. So we also wanted to look at the natural sinks that can go into countries reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. Are you improving your natural habitat enough that it's actually absorbing and reducing emissions? And the other thing, kind of really basic, but you need a couple of years. You can't just say, we're going to reduce our emissions by 30% and not say between which two years. You need two data points to draw a line to make that kind of projection going forward. So we know from the United States it's 2005 through 2030 at the moment and it was the previous NDC that was through 2025. Really important because then we start to see the bending of the curve as we go forward into the next NDCs. And with that, countries also have to report on their NDCs. You put out a pledge and then every couple of years you have to come back and actually show, are you meeting that pledge? Are you on track to meet it? And then each five years we want countries to come back and make a better pledge to enhance the last one. We're learning, we're getting better. And then each time the hope is that we ratchet down emissions by all these different countries kind of collectively seeing each other take action and then jumping in there and reducing their own emissions as well. Now, natural climate solutions. As I mentioned the sinks and sources. Natural climate solutions, if we look at this graph, we came out with a kind of a seminal research study back in 2017 from Nature Conservancy and numerous other partners that came out and looked at where are the business as usual emissions going? And that's the top line that you see going across. And we saw it growing and growing and it's not great. But we're trying to look at what are the different solutions? How can we get to the reductions that are needed to keep us below the two degrees Celsius pathway? And if anybody has the question as well to the 1.5 Celsius pathway works in this as to but we had to pick a number back then. So it's kind of the same calculation. But if you look in the middle of this graph and you see the green wedge in there, the green wedge is all from natural climate solutions. It's forests, it's agriculture and it's land use pathways. We know that we're that dotted red line of 2030 is that about 37% or greater than a third of the emissions needed to get on that two degree target can come from natural climate solutions by 2030. So these are very near term emission reductions. As we look at the wedge as it builds out further, you'll see the wedge of fossil fuel mitigation, energy, transportation, et cetera, grows and becomes more and more important. So not to say that's not important, but this is an and we need all of the different sectors to do the most they can. Within this we also broke it down to how many emission reductions could we get globally each year? And starting to look at this, we see reforestation is the largest wedge. This is globally, so not just the United States and we break it down by countries as well and I'll show you that in a second. Another thing to highlight is on the left, you see the green circle with forests, you see the yellow with agricultural lands and grasslands and wetlands. All of these together are what makes up eventually that third of greenhouse gas emissions that are needed. Now, other important things in this chart, when you look at the bottom right corner of other benefits, there are all these different benefits that come out of natural climate solutions and they're not just reductions of greenhouse gas emissions. We get cleaner air, we get better biodiversity impacts. We have cleaner water and we have the healthier soil. So within this, you see all these little dots kind of towards the left side with the names of the different categories and pathways that we've looked at this and nearly all of these have all sorts of external benefits that come into it as well. So as we look at implementing this on the ground, natural climate solutions on the grounds, we're also implementing all of these other co-benefits as well. This NCS Atlas, we tried to break this down by state as well too, looking at the different possibilities from where we could get how many reductions. And then another thing that's kind of interesting and this is all available on the Nature 4 Climate website under the US mapper. And you look at the 770 million tons of CO2 equivalent per year that can be reduced in the United States if we took all measures possible. This is also looking at about $100 per ton when you come out with this larger number. But we've included these slide bars to the left if you look at the mitigation pathways box and you can kind of look by state or you can look by the whole country and look, do you have a budget that is looking at carbon valued at $10 per ton, $50 per ton or $100 per ton? And then you can kind of start to toggle this a little bit to look at locally impactful areas where it might be best for you or your state or your country or anybody to start really start pushing and finding where the best impacts you can get are. Now, going back to COP, we saw in the United Nation where the United States is new NDC, 50 to 52% reductions by 2030. Very exciting thing to come forward. It really spurred on COP26 last year. When we saw the United States come back into the Paris Agreement and put out an ambitious new NDC, it wasn't a surprise to also see China come and provide more information and kind of an upgrade to their NDC. Canada came out with a new one. Japan came out with a new one. EU was right about within a week of that. None of this was on accident. All of the countries that are doing this and we need to reduce the emissions globally are doing it together because nobody likes to go out there and be alone and have the different constituencies at home say, well, what about this other country? Why aren't they doing it? We don't want to go along. So building it up together and building trust is extremely important. If you look at the chart, coming out of the United Nations, I think environmental program or climate action tracker, but you nipped at this graph I think last year, we see the different wedges coming in. All these different countries coming forward with different amounts in their NDCs is going to start to bend the curve globally, getting us towards that two degrees for 1.5 degrees Celsius that is needed to actually make it. The third bullet point here on this slide, when we look at the pledges that came forward, the new NDCs last year, we had previously before those pledges been in a trajectory of looking at 3.7 degrees Celsius since pre-industrial times. With all these new pledges, it bent the curve and brought us back to 2.4. Obviously not enough, but it starts bringing us back to where we need to be and where we need to start pointing. Now this is if all the targets are fully implemented. So what do we need in the future? We need better pledges, we need more pledges, but we also need to implement the pledges. What are we going at this year? Well, not just NDCs that are looking at a five-year cycle, but we're also looking at 2050 net zero pathways. Last year, we saw 70% of global emissions for 130 countries were covered under net zero pledges. This year, we've had a couple of different major economies come forward as well. So all of a sudden we have 90% of global emissions are now under these net zero pathways. And net zero is not possible without natural climate solutions. If you're not absorbing and improving your country's national sink and reducing your emissions at the same time, you're never gonna get to that zero. We have a chance to move forward on this. We have a whole bunch of new momentum also built. The United States passing the IRA the other month was extremely important. Many times in the UNFCCC negotiations, many countries will actually question the United States. You know, in the first NDC, how are you gonna make that 26 to 28% pledge? In the second NDC, how are you gonna meet that 50 to 52% pledge? Well, now we have legislation, we have budget. All of a sudden this enhances the United States' ability to negotiate and make sure that other countries are coming forward as well. Canada all of a sudden passes a new budget. Again, it helps as well because all these different countries seeing that there's chances to meet the different NDCs means that we have that chance to walk forward together again. Lastly, talk a little bit about finance. This is a little bit less about the United States implementing its pledge, but how do we start to look at foreign assistance budgets? Last year we saw, we fell short. In COP 15, in 2009 in Copenhagen, there was a pledge to support developing countries from both public and private finance of a up to or basically of $100 billion per year by 2020. Obviously we didn't make it by 2020. We didn't make it last year either, but we were at about 85 million last year. We're probably around 95 billion this year. Sorry, I said million, but I meant billion. So we're almost to that 100 billion. But if you look at these different colors in this projection, take a look at the bottom is public bilateral public funds. So from USA to another country or something like that, the middle blue is multilateral development banks, mostly from public funding as well. The pink on the top is the private sector. So if you look at that 2019 year, you start to see forever about $3 of public funding. We're leveraging $1 of private sector funding. I think what we really need to do is we know public budgets are always gonna be under pressure. There's many different competing needs. How do we flip this? How do we make sure that we start to use different financial products and use public sector funding even smarter? How do we use development finance corporations ability to de-risk loans to mean that the private sector can then come in and improve and make that pink bar much, much larger, get us to the pledges that are needed and the amount of finance that are needed internationally. Now, others are gonna talk a little bit more about the agriculture, the forest and the wetlands perspectives here, but last year with COP26, we saw all sorts of different financial and political pledges. They can talk a little bit more about some of these, but one thing I'd like to point out is pledges aren't always going to help. We need the pledges to be met. So as budgets start to move, we start to get funding into the, and onto the ground is where we actually start to see the action. Now, a couple of last things that we're focusing on going into COP is we know that there's gonna be African leadership with Egypt being the COP president. We know that there's gonna be a very strong on climate adaptation and that $100 billion finance pledge. So a couple of questions to focus on is how are we gonna pay for that? You know, one idea I just mentioned is flipping that public for a private sector, a wedge of public finance to private finance, how can countries and private sector organizations meet their own pledges? Make sure we really are getting to net zero. And then lastly, how do we make climate action more equitable? Both at a domestic context and internationally. With that, I'm gonna stop. Thank you all very much. For this opportunity and I'll pass it back to you, Dan. Thank you, John. Thank you so much. You presented some great slides just as a reminder to everyone in our audience, the slides that John presented, the slides that our other panelists will present, everything will be available online at www.esa.org. Also the archived webcasts, if you'd like to go back and revisit any of John's presentation or any of the rest of the briefing today, you can do that. And after a little bit of time, we'll have written summary notes available online too to help you skim through and find the information from the different presentations. So thank you, John. I really appreciate it. Our second panelist is Trey Lorde. Trey is the Senior Technical Manager for 1T.org US and American Forests. That's a global initiative to catalyze the conservation, restoration and growth of a trillion trees by 2030 in partnership with the public, private and civil society sectors. In this role, Trey leads the 1T.org US community of practice, working groups and provides technical expertise in the research and implementation of these natural climate solutions, and particularly internationally. Prior to this, he helped positions and consultancies with a number of US Agency for International Development Contractors and Environmental Organizations, mostly focused on Red Plus, Indigenous Peoples Engagement, Climate Smart Agriculture and Sustainable Development. He's lived and worked in multiple countries in Africa, Latin America and Asia. And he's with us today. Trey, it's great to see you. I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thanks, Daniel. All right, so let's just fire off here. Let me share my screen and we're going. Is everyone able to see that? Okay, great. All right. So first and foremost, thank you for having me. So I'm gonna be addressing forests and forests as they relate to climate change and that COP 27. So, forests play an integral role in everyone's lives and in human experience. They're essential in our own personal narratives. For those who are fortunate enough, you can probably look out your window right now and see at least one tree with some beautiful fog callers. They are paramount part of our cities, our states, our leisure time. They're important in our economy. They're important in our history. They're important in our future. And perhaps most importantly, they for that future in our climate. Forest play a natural or a natural climate solution in removing carbon from the atmosphere. As I'm sure most of you know from high school science glasses how they absorb CO2, store that carbon and to grow. So here's some basic numbers on the roles that they play in climate change. Forest themselves are roughly about 70 to $100 billion provide about 75 to $100 billion annually in values of goods and services. But they also can contribute significantly to conserving and absorbing greenhouse gas emissions. But they also can be a source of emissions. Roughly about depending on how you calculate it, roughly about 20% of global emissions come from deforestation for segregation annually. They however, as they can be a positive means of natural climate solution, they currently can absorb by 15% of fuel emissions in the United States, fossil fuel emissions annually. But they also have the potential through means of some of the actions I'll describe in a bit to mitigate against climate change. Roughly about 27% of current US emissions can be absorbed by forests and by trees. Globally, when you scan out, they can roughly be about 30% of the absorption of global greenhouse gas emissions. However, they only account for activities of route for the conservation restoration of forests only account for 3% of the share of global climate change mitigation. Again, one of the main reasons why forest is so important is not only is there their ability to act as a sink and absorb greenhouse gas emissions, but they also can be, when not conserved, they are an irrevocable source of carbon for as emissions. Here's a graph to kind of demonstrate that as you deforest, as forests are degraded, they are a source of carbon that cannot be recaptured. And again, some of the sources for deforestation, some of the drives of deforestation are primarily through agricultural and agricultural frontiers, roughly to the tune of 861 gigatons of carbon. Equivalent to, annually, equivalent to roughly the net worth of nearly a century's worth of fossil fuel emissions at the current rates. And again, some of the major drivers of this, being agriculture, mostly in agriculture frontiers and the time of agricultural Congo, Indonesia and Brazil, mostly in cattle farming, palm oil, soy, cocoa, rubber and coffee. But again, that's not an issue of domestically, but it's also an issue abroad in our agricultural commodity chains and our consumption. And we have our own drivers of deforestation as well domestically, being forest fires, development, blight and pest such as the certain kinds of beetles and so on. Here's again, here's a good graph that John showed us a minute ago. Here's that represents some of the potential for mitigation of climate change. Again, reforestation being the largest opportunity for sequestering and absorbing more carbon as trees grow and previously deforested land. Again, then there's some other means of mitigating climate change such as avoiding forest conversion, improved and natural forest mitigation, improved plantations with agroforestry and then avoided wood fuels fire management and so on activities such as that. But broadly speaking, the best opportunities for action for mitigating against climate change is in actions we can take to conserve and restore and grow forests or through combating deforestation forest agronation, restoring forest landscapes enabling right space land use and unlocking the benefits of economic benefits and social benefits from forest conservation. Forests again also play a very important role in climate adaptation along with mitigation. Here's a graphic that kind of shows some of the various natural climate solutions that my colleagues will discuss later but specifically in forests, they play an important role in mitigating against forest fires. They pay a role in mitigating against flooding and in coastal regions, they mitigate against some storm surge issues and same going with riparian buffers and so long rivers or long lakes. These are some of the paramount issues that you may be thinking of recently with extreme weather events such as forest fires, hurricanes, flooding and so on. So forest play an important role and by restoring our forest, we can help mitigate against some of these losses and have to do so in a more costly means such as dams and storm barriers and things like that. So I would first like to highlight and applaud some of the action that's been going on domestically. This has been the most significant year, this past year has been the most significant and impactful year for forest and climate in our nation's history. I'd like to highlight the bipartisan infrastructure laws was got the ball rolling initially and here's some numbers for plant act under that. Second major piece of legislation or piece of action was President Biden's Earth Executive Order. And then most recently the Inflation Reduction Act. My team at American Force has been very involved in getting some of this legislation across the line and helping design some of the ways that this finding will be going forward. But chief and principally the two main areas I'd like to highlight is and an applaud is the money that's been appropriated for urban and community forestry. That would go a long way towards addressing some of the lack of access to forests that marginalized communities have in urban areas and the effects of not having such as heat island effects which is significant for some of these communities. And then beyond that some of the funding that has gone to restoring forest and mitigating against forest fire risk. Again, and in doing so help building some action at the state and local levels towards small businesses for nurseries and for replanting and so on. So I'd like to thank you all for getting that this legislation passed and doing so in a bipartisan way. So again, then moving from there to looking at the international perspective. So in the UNFCCC at the UN, these UN negotiations forest has been on the agenda that have been a major part of these negotiations for since roughly around 2007 when forests were formally put on the agenda with the leadership of Papa New Guinea. And that's when my former colleagues and bosses at environmental defense fund. There they were put on, it was brought on in the Bali road map and then it's been advancing since then through the Cancun agreement in 2010 through the Warsaw framework for red in 2013 and it's been advancing since. And if you're looking for how this, the framework, how this will be taking shape in the, as far as forests go in this venue, it's really in this acronym, R-E-D-D, red plus. And that stands for reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation. And then, and plus is other activities that can contribute to this as through conservation, sustainable forest management and enhancing forest carbon stocks. And roughly speaking, I won't go into too many of the details but it is a framework to build towards moving of results-based finance such as carbon markets and other types of overseas development assistance towards empowering local communities and local forest and countries that have significant forest such as Brazil and the Amazonian countries, same with the Congo, Indonesia and so on towards building enhanced capacity to keep their forest standing, to enhance the forest carbon stocks and empower these local communities that do so with results-based finance. And even in a phase approach to get to this results-based finance, there's many steps towards building capacity and seeking investment from the public sector, and it's something to keep an eye out for in the new year negotiations. So moving on from there, the big successes last year at Inglasko have kind of taken up kind of the, for lack of a better term, the oxygen for why forest won't be at kind of in the top, on the primary stage in COP 27. But again, it's kind of due to the success of these negotiations have happened. So Inglasko, 140 countries signed on to the Glasgow decorations on the forest and land use. And those 140 countries account for roughly about 90.4% of the forest, local forests are covered by this agreement and which is in a couple of different ways these countries have pledged to conserve and restore forest going forward. And in doing so, look, not only at how they can do it at the UN in the form such as the UN, but also doing so at the G7, at the World Economic Forum and within the halls of Congress in other countries ministries at state houses in boardrooms and within our own personal consumptions and spending decisions. So looking not only at national actions, state level action on how to get forest to a slow deforestation and land degradation, but also looking at how we can improve supply chains improve and create incentives for zero deforestation supply chains. Looking at means through legislature and other innovative ways of leveraging the private sector to look at how we can do sustainable land use looking at biodiversity and other climate goals. Along with that, Inglasko, they also pledged to put forward $19.2 billion to help protect and restore forest globally by 2025. And again, the US is a part of this and so we have a lot to get going as far as this funding and this actions. So the US specifically that the action that was taken since then was that releasing the plan to conserve global forest at critical carbon sink which came out earlier this year at the beginning of this year in that a couple of objectives were put forward specifically to incentivize forest and ecosystem conservation and restore forest landscapes, finding ways to catalyze the private sector and finance from the private sector to conserve these global carbon sinks to build long-term capacity, both domestically and internationally to do so. And then also then to increase the ambition of not only our own government but our state level governments and then other governments abroad. So finding ways to leverage our action towards moving that forward. And in doing so, they pledged to put forward the US government has pledged to put forward up to $9 billion of international climate funding to support these actions. And that mostly be led by and be appropriated through agencies such as USAID, the State Department, the US Forest Service International Programs but also in smaller agencies such as the MCC, the Development Finance Corporation, so on. And then also to multilateral, so funding going to the World Bank, to the UN and then to regional development banks such as the Inter-American Development Bank. So these are important actions to get things going and I would encourage everyone to help see this through. So again, an important part of that which I mentioned is getting that the State Department and the US government has identified is finding ways to catalyze the private sector to engage on these issues. This is paramount as federal government budgets and state level government budgets and also internationally are always money is short. So we need to find innovative ways to not only leverage the funding that can come from the private sector but also to encourage and catalyze action within their own supply chains. So a couple of ways that for this to happen is that which we at 1T at Oregon also with American Forest and broadly within the environmental community is to look for finding sustainable forestry standards and zero deforestation supply chains. There's many ways to do this and we encourage you to look into how to take action and reach out to us or some of my colleagues and how to do that. And then finding catalyzing large-scale investments for direct finance or finding market-based mechanisms for financing such as carbon credits and there are also crediting systems that can go beyond those such as biodiversity credits which are in the kind of exploratory stage at this point. And then again, finding public-private partnerships at the national level, international, state level, city level and so on. Finding ways to leverage those public-private partnerships to bring to do this and that can be in a number of ways of either matching funds, innovative partnership schemes or finding ways for governments to de-risk private sector investments towards sustainable commodity chains and sustainable production. And we encourage those work streams at the UN and at other various venues and finding those means of moving beyond unsustainable business models and land use practices which the private sector can go. And in that same vein, I would encourage everyone to then to look at organizations such as MyOwn1T.org, U.S. and that is exactly what we do is to find, is to leverage the private sector and sorry, and leverage the private sector and moving forward and doing so. So specifically at COP this year, we would look to kind of help fulfill the Glasgow Declaration on Forest and Land Use and to help meet those pledges for climate finance. Again, that was 19.2 billion that the OECD countries of the 140 countries from the Glasgow Declaration have signed onto have pledged at $19.2 billion by 2025. And so we really have to get going to meet those pledges. And we also have to get policy agendas forward to meet the goals of the Glasgow Declaration for Forest and Land Use. So meeting those and raising ambitions beyond that. These, some of these actions, especially the importance of forest for not only mitigated against climate but also potentially exacerbating climate further if we continue to cut them, burn them or convert them at the current rate. And if we continue to support supply chains that do so as well. So again, leveraging the private sector to play a key role in this action and to financing zero deforestation for a spot of action is important. And then finding those costs effective and equitable natural climate stations will help move our agendas forward not only in mitigating against climate but also in some of our broader sustainable development goals internationally. So again, like I mentioned before, I would encourage everyone to check out initiatives such as OneTed or US. We are a convenient organization, convenient body where, and we work with Evan from the federal government to the Girl Scouts. And we're a movement working hand in hand with federal state and local governments to leverage capacity, expertise, finance and action threading together the public and private sector and NGOs towards finding multi-sectoral approaches for addressing climate change by conserving, restoring and growing a trillion trees by 2030. And so we would engage everyone to come and check us out. We've been working closely to build this movement with bipartisan stakeholders on the hill within the administration as well as in state houses and local governments to engage action everywhere from planting trees locally and planting trees in urban centers, reforesting areas that have been cleared out from forest fires, but also looking at how to improve, again, those sustainable and zero deforestation supply chains going forward. So I would like to thank you for having me and I look forward to speaking with Evan further. So please check us out. And thanks. I look forward to hearing from my colleagues. Thanks, Trey. That was a great presentation. Really appreciate it. As a reminder to our online audience today, we are taking questions. You have two options to send us questions. And actually there's a bunch coming in. So it's really exciting. We'll do our best to incorporate them into the Q&A. You can send us an email. The email address to use is ask at a, no, wait. Ask at EESI.org. That's ASK at EESI.org. Can also follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Our third panelist is Courtney Durham. Courtney leads Pew's engagement in United Nations negotiations on climate change and supports efforts to incorporate and strengthen climate considerations in Pew's conservation projects. Courtney's previous work at Pew included authoring or co-authoring numerous articles on protecting coastal wetlands and coral reefs in Central America and finding nature-based solutions to rebuild economies after the COVID-19 pandemic. Before joining Pew in 2019, Courtney worked on global climate policy with the World Resources Institute, the Yale Center for Environmental Law and Policy and the German Development Corporation. Courtney, welcome to our briefing today. That's a great looking first slide. I'm looking forward to seeing the rest of them too. Thanks, Dan. Hi, everybody. I'm Courtney Durham. I work for the Pew Charitable Trusts on Conservation and Climate. This is my ninth consecutive COP and I find myself strangely maybe still in love with the whole UNF Traficy process. So I'm excited to be here with you today to talk through some of the blue elements of this upcoming COP 27. So ocean and coastal issues really have had burgeoning amount of interest in the last five or so years. Chile and the UK, the most recent climate COP presidencies put a lot of political support on blowing the COP per se. And we know there's certainly gonna be some activity on these issues at COP 27 in Egypt. So what I'm gonna try to do today is walk through some ocean and coastal solutions, describe how they're considered during COP's. We'll walk through a concept called blue carbon, underscore how it's uniquely situated for policy makers, and then we'll spend a bit of time looking through some concrete examples about how policy makers are currently using wetlands in their climate priorities. So oceans, first off, just as you've heard from Trey and we'll hear on agriculture in a bit, terrestrial ecosystems play a significant role in stabilizing our planet, but so too do our oceans and coasts. They are massively influential in our planet's carbon cycle, having long maintained balance, constant exchange with our atmosphere, thinking about the oceans absorbing 90% of excess heat, 40% of CO2 emissions. But as these emissions continue to rise, the capacity of the ocean to continue to play that stabilization role is in jeopardy. But we shouldn't, I'd be remiss in just conceptualizing our ocean and coasts as falling victim there, of course also a place to turn to four solutions. Now, on one hand, I have here, they're useful for both mitigation and adaptation. On one hand, adaptation, ocean climate solutions can help people in nature facing the impacts of climate change right now, meaning they help to adapt against those impacts with benefits like shoreline stabilization, water filtration, livelihoods, et cetera. On the mitigation side of this climate coin, coastal ecosystems, those places where the ocean meets the land are special because they provide those adaptation benefits, but also they help mitigate against emissions at disproportionately high rates, I'd say, compared to other habitats. So that's why we're gonna spend some time focusing on these coastal areas in the next few slides. I should say science tells us that a healthy ocean can contribute up to 21% of the emissions reductions needed to meet the goals of the Paris Agreement. And that's huge, that's a fifth of the potential. We can look to the ocean for that. And this can be achieved with both technical solutions, things like decarbonizing shipping, expanding offshore renewables, but also it includes in that pathway, nature-based solutions like protecting coastal wetlands habitats. And I do have to say that, the best overall solution for the ocean is to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. That is the best thing that we can do for the ocean truly. But while we are working to decarbonize trickier sectors like transport, like buildings, we can utilize natural climate solutions today. So let's walk through a little bit of what our coasts are able to provide for us. So here I have what is blue carbon, right? When we think of natural climate solutions utilizing our oceans and coasts, the real powerhouse ecosystems are coastal wetlands. And these coastal wetlands are commonly referred to as blue carbon ecosystems because they're really good at keeping, taking carbon out of the atmosphere, keeping it in their soils for a very, very long amount of time. Coastal wetlands are salt marshes, they are mangroves and they are seagrass meadows. So those three are amongst the most productive and sometimes most threatened ecosystems on the planet. And those three together are what we refer to as blue carbon ecosystems. And again, what makes them especially interesting for policy makers is the fact that they can store more carbon per equivalent area than many, many other habitats and provide at the same time, numerous other climate related benefits to people in nature. So really it's a pretty significant bang for your buck in a relatively small land use area. Now important caveat here on blue carbon, right? So these coastal wetlands, those three places, those three ecosystem types, they have internationally recognized science and guidance from the United Nations, guidance from the US CPA about how to count the carbon in those three habitats. This makes them actionable in a sense for policy makers looking to reduce their emissions with the help of nature. All other marine ecosystems, those beyond our coasts do not yet have this level of scientific rigor and certainties are right now, they haven't been approved ecosystems for by the UN for carbon accounting, but we can and still see policy makers stressing the adaptation importance of those places while the mitigation value is sort of further explored in the years to come. So I'm gonna walk us through a bit about how are we seeing blue carbon crop up at various policy levels, right? We're starting to see a trend emerging, leaders realizing that protecting and restoring wetlands can be a critical natural climate solution amongst a variety of tools in their toolbox, one that policy makers at all levels really from subnational to national and international can leverage and support of their climate goals. So I'm gonna walk us through starting at the subnational level up to the zoom and out to the international some concrete examples for you. So subnational, let's start with a subnational actor pulling their weight on climate action, that would be Oregon. Oregon's updated climate plan is one of the first in the US to account for blue carbon benefits of coastal habitats and their state strategy, how they did it can serve as a blueprint for other states that are looking to leverage those ecosystems in their climate plans. Pew supported this work helping the state establish a greenhouse gas inventory, what it's called. It's basically a snapshot in time of the carbon in those wetlands so that the state was able to realize, wow, this is an ecosystem that's a carbon sink for us, meaning it's helping to take out more carbon than it's emitting. So we should really protect and restore this place, these habitats because it's gonna aid us in meeting our statewide climate goal for 2030. So as many of us know here, state action does matter for domestic emissions reduction. So it's promising to see subnational actors also stepping up to the plate with blue carbon. At the national level action on blue carbon, let's look at the USNDC and recent congressional action that we've been speaking about as many of you know the Biden administration submitted a new NDC, a new climate target for the US to achieve a 50 to 52% reduction of emissions by 2030. And in the text of this NDC, which I put up on the slide here, there's a specific nod to how blue carbon ecosystems can be part of that pathway. And that is a useful signal to send out to the international level, underscoring the role that nature will play in getting us there alongside the other important emissions reductions that we'll need to be doing across our economy. The NDC also does the same for our friends in the forestry and agricultural sectors. And then also following that stated ambition from the administration in the NDC itself, there's been all of that exciting movement for implementation with funding to realize this nationwide climate goal. Both Aija and Ira have billions in funding for coastal and marine based solutions, which will help us prioritize the sorts of protections and restoration activities that will aid us in reaching this 2030 goal. And as John said in the opening, that really puts the US in a strong position at COP 27. This momentum at home will really help to speak volumes in the negotiations, trying to sort of ramp up ambition from other world actors. And then internationally, I wanted to nod, obviously we're not the only ones working on this, of course. The US is part of a group of 71 countries that included ocean-based measures in their updated climate goals, their NDCs under the Paris agreement. And that's great to see really this groundswell of recognition at the international level about the role that natural climate solutions, marine and coastal can be playing. And with adequate climate finance and capacity building, it would be great to see all 151 countries that have coasts recognize the role that ocean-based climate policy can play. But progress has been notable and sustained since the 2015 Paris agreement. So it's good to see those 71 countries reflecting that. One of those countries, Seychelles, the island nation, for example, committed to protecting rather impressively, 50% of its seagrass and mangrove habitats by 2025 and 100% by 2030. And so the USP was working closely with the government of Seychelles to advance the research necessary to deliver on this commitment and will be showcasing that work at COP 27. So with all of this said, I'm trying to make clear that leaders at all levels can and have been harnessing the power of these blue carbon coastal wetland ecosystems to help address their climate ambitions. And COP 27 is one of those very useful stages they can seek to sort of amplify that action. And then lastly here, I'm just gonna walk us through quickly some expectations on the ocean climate nexus at COP 27 to be aware of. So like I said, countries will be there to showcase what they're doing at home. We expect several statements and signals of future ambition on ocean climate solutions from head of states to be made in the first two days of COP during that World Leaders Summit. So keep an eye out there. We're also hoping to see progress on ocean and coastal considerations being included in what's known as the global stock take process. This is basically just a periodic progress report that countries will have to discuss how they're doing in meeting their climate goals every few years. So it's gonna be useful because natural climate solutions are part of that equation, you'd really want to see lessons learned shared widely in this for going forward. So we'll be looking to get oceans and coast incorporated in that process. It's also been a bit of a newcomer on the ocean climate dialogue, we call it. It's a new process at the UNFCCC that will now take place every year, every June going forward. And on the heels of a very successful first session this last June in Germany, you could imagine that the Egyptian presidency would reflect the outcome from that session in its COP decision text and the end negotiating recap, that would be useful to see. And we do know of over 40 ocean and coastal side events that'll be happening alongside the negotiations throughout the two weeks. Happy to share info on those pieces to whomever. And of course, you'd expect to see announcements of new funding and initiatives launched at COP, but I won't spill any teasers on that front. Yeah, so that's my talk. Ocean climate next is especially ripe for policy action and we're looking forward to see how things unfold at COP 27 in Egypt. Thank you, Courtney. That last slide that you presented had a whole bunch of things to look ahead to. A great way for our audience to keep track of all of those announcements is to sign up for our daily newsletter during COP 27, COP 27 dispatch. We'll also be compiling announcements as well to help keep track of all of the different goings on over in Egypt. And we'll be making those available for free online just like all of our other resources as the negotiations progress. Also, if anyone in our audience would like to go back and revisit Courtney's slides or the other slides from today or rewatch everything is available or will be soon available online at www.esi.org. I'd like to introduce our fourth and final panelists for today. Brett Grussman is the Vice President of Climate Smart Agriculture at Environmental Defense Fund where she helps create environmentally effective and economically sound solutions for working landscapes including farms, ranches and forests. Her experience spans from reaching deforestation in Brazil, reducing deforestation in Brazil to supporting low carbon rural development in India. Previously in her career, Britt served as EDF's first European Union Director in London focusing on fisheries reform. She's an economist recognized for her wide-ranging expertise in environmental policy and most notably climate and conservation policy. Britt, welcome. Looking forward to your presentation. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you so much, Daniel. And it's always a little bit daunting speaking as the last one because all your other colleagues have been giving such amazing presentations already. So thank you, John, for a fantastic sort of really good overview of what we're really trying to do at the COP and why and obviously Trey and Courtney for your deep dives. So I am also going to try and share some slides. I do say try because that's always a little tricky. I hope that these work. And I think I can't actually see anybody else with they don't work. Somebody will have to come off mute to let me know. They look good. Yep, we can see them. Great. Fantastic. Thank you so much. So yes, so the question I was asked was to talk about sort of agriculture and climate smart agriculture in this conversation and the US situation and then COP 27. And the first thing to really say is finally, finally we are talking about climate and agriculture in the same context. Finally, we're talking about agriculture at the same time as forests and oceans. It's notable that this is COP 27, so 27 cops, 27 years, and that this is going to be the first time that there's going to be an official pavilion that will be looking at food and agriculture, which I think is going to be run by the one with FAO. And that's really quite notable. And having worked in the field of climate change for a long time, it's really not that surprising. Agriculture has for the longest time in the third rail when it comes to discussing climate policies, just considered too hard, too many diverse stakeholders, politically very controversial, et cetera, et cetera. What we're now seeing is that we're in a different time. First of all, farmers and agriculture, they are literally at the forefront of impacts. Doesn't matter whether you live in the US or in Kenya or in India. If you're a farmer, you rely on weather. You rely on temperature, availability of water, absence of big weather events, et cetera, to literally be able to grow the food that is your business, that is your income. So it's really, really important that agriculture and climate get looked at for the adaptation side. Now, for the mitigation side, we know that agriculture, for instance, the US is estimated to be about 10% of emissions. However, if you look globally and you include those parts of deforestation that are led by clearing forests for agriculture, it very quickly jumps to 30% so about a third. So it is a really, really important sector. As we are looking at a growing population that we need to feed, we need to make sure that we do that in as efficient way as possible. So we'll need to grow more food. We'll also need to ensure that the food we grow isn't wasted. It's always very distressing to read that about a third of all the food that is produced in the world never actually makes it into anybody's mouth or belly because it either gets wasted during the transportation process or others or people like me wasted in our fridge. So there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in this space if we wanna really address that as well. Now, I know most of you are in the US and this is a congressional staff in presentation. So I wanted to talk a little bit about what the US is doing. Again, I've been working in the climate field for a long time. I was actually first started working at Environment Defense Fund when we were looking at Waxman Markey, the first hope for a federal bill back in 2008. And at that time, the agriculture sector was not very supportive of that policy and that's probably the understatement of the century. Now we're in a very different situation. Back in 2020, Environment Defense Fund with the Farm Bureau, the National Farmers Union and the National Council of Farmers Corporation got together to have a coalition that's called the Food and Agricultural Climate Alliance, we call it FACA for short, that has since grown to include many other groups including TNC and many other farm groups. What was this group was set up to discuss together policies for food and agriculture sector on climate, climate policies, food and agriculture sector. You know, unheard of, would have been unheard of 10 years ago, even just three years ago. Now the times are changing and we've seen that this year very much with the Biden administration's regulations. So I wanna thank everybody who is online who has been part big or small to the two pieces of policy that I've got here on the screen, the Inflation Reduction Act which sets aside about 20 billion for the agricultural sector and the partnerships for climate smart commodities which at the moment has assigned about 2.8 billion but we expect that to go over three billion when the smaller projects get announced. That's a lot of money that this administration is rightly investing into climate smart ag in this country. I can go into more details of exactly what that will look at. Many of you will know this very well and I'm also happy to answer some of those questions. Questions you may have around this in the Q&A later but I wanted to bring this up because as I think John and Courtney alluded to when you show up as a country delegate to the COP you need to bring the goods. You can't just be demanding other countries bring, make big declarations and targets and not be able to back that up yourself. So having these investments is showing that showing the world that the US believes in the importance of the climate sector of the agricultural sector for fighting climate. Sorry, I knew I was gonna blow up at some point. So here we are from national to global ambition. So US has kind of really sort of put a line in the sand and shown this is what we think. We think the agricultural sector is really important for fighting climate change and we're putting our money where our map is. What does that mean when you go to Shamal Sheikh? Well, one of the things that I think the government will be talking about is methane. I was just looking on Twitter earlier today and there is a great feed by climate news that is looking at what are the different heads of stage and the different foreign ministers, state departments going to be talking about how can we therefore define the people? And John Kerry was referred to as the methane solver or the methane implementer. The methane pledge was signed last year. It's a big priority for the US government and the many parties that have signed it so far. And yes, methane matters. Methane is a very potent greenhouse gas. So if you look at it over a 20-year greenhouse warming potential, methane is one of the most important gases. This graph here shows that if we take ambitious action only on CO2, then you have the sort of the lighter blue which you see peaks and then slowly goes down. If we take ambitious action and include methane now, we can peak earlier and sort of the tail end will also be flatter. So it's really, really important that we focus on that. So I was really happy to see that John Kerry will be the sort of state department representative known as methane. About 40% of methane comes from the agricultural sector. It comes from cow burps, cow manure and rice fields. This is really important to address this. Now we know that climate impacts are already here. So I'm talking a bit about mitigation. Most of the IRA funds are for climate mitigation, but climate impacts are already here. And we're not just talking about other regions, we're also talking about the US. EDF last week at World Food Prize, we launched a new report that by 2030, climate change will significantly impact the big commodities that we are growing in this country. Our analysis looked at soybeans in Minnesota, corn in Iowa and wheat in Kansas and found some significant reductions of productivity. Now the thing to really understand with these effects is that they're going to be very locally felt. So our analysis looked at a very small scale of about 4,000 acres and saw that within one state there will be winners and losers. There will be those whose productivity actually improves because of climate change, but those where it will reduce and on balance, there will be a sort of a reduction. So not only is it important that the US and other countries invest in climate mitigation because yes, we do need to bend the curve on the emissions and keep the emissions below two degrees. It's also really important that everybody starts investing in adaptation. There's going to be a lot of discussions in Egypt about the financial needs for adaptation in the global south. They are crucial, but it also will be important that even in the US and the EU, we do not lose sight of what needs to get done there. Tray was talking a lot about trees and one of the most important things that the agricultural sector will need to focus on is to avoid further land conversion for agriculture. As I said, the global population is increasing unless we figure out how to grow food in a more efficient way. We call it sustainable intensification. So with a low environmental footprint, but high output, we are going to see further land conversion and that includes grasslands, certain wetlands. So Courtney was also talking about definitely forests and they all store a lot of carbon. So if you really want to look at where do we get those big wins in terms of the ag sector ensuring no further land conversion should be one of the biggest priorities and it's something that I think they will be talking about at MacCarp as well. So a lot of threats, but also some big opportunities. Talked about the methane already. Happy to talk about that some more. We, our analysis showed that we'd be able to get a 25% reduction in the US by 2030. Other countries can actually do more because ironically, their beef and dairy sectors might not be as well developed, might not yet be as efficient. So there's a lot of headroom, a lot of reductions that can be had by increasing productivity. And then there's also things like nitrogen use. When we think about the emissions of the agricultural sector, methane is a big one. Nitrogen use, sort of overuse of fertilizer, whatever the plant does not actually use to grow gets lost either in waterways or in the air. Big opportunities to focus on that as well. We'll leave you with two, with, you know, they're linked to two of our recent reports that I mentioned. One is our climate pathways that looks at what opportunities there are in the agricultural sector and they are primarily those avoided conversions, agroforestry and methane. And then the climate proofing agricultural report that shows how the US will be affected. But I do wanna sort of close by thanking all of those that were involved in either the IRA or the Climate Smart Partnership because they are great investments in our future and in the agricultural sector. Thank you. Thank you, Britt. That was a great presentation. We will now transition into a question and answer. So I'll invite John and Courtney and Trey to turn it on their cameras. We are gonna be, well, there she is. To help us with the question and answers today is my colleague Anna McGinn. Anna had worked tirelessly to put all of our COP 27 briefings together along with our policy and communications teams. Anna and I will actually be going to Egypt next weekend and we'll be there for about a little bit more than the first week. And so if anyone in our audience would like to link up or learn more about what we're doing, I hope you'll feel free to reach out to either one of us or both. And it would be great to touch base when we're over there. But without any further ado, Anna, I'll turn it over to you to get us started on questions and answers. Great, thanks, Dan. And thank you to all of our panelists. I learned a ton from all of your presentations and got me even more excited about COP next week. So really appreciate it. And we're gonna jump right in because we have a lot of questions and a lot of questions came in from the audience. And what I wanna start with is you all kind of touched on the mitigation and adaptation potential of natural climate solutions, but I wanna give us an opportunity to share some more of those specific examples and kind of what those, really calling out what those co-benefits are. So I think John will start with you and then we'll go through the order of presenters. If you could speak to kind of one of those examples and calling out some of those benefits we see on the adaptation and the mitigation side. And one other piece of it that I'll add is kind of if we saw natural climate solutions more scaled up, would that have made a difference for communities in recent kind of climate impacts that we've seen? So recent hurricanes or forest fires, how would communities have been impacted differently if we had more robust natural climate solutions in place? So John, turn it over to you first. Yeah, thanks, great question. Scale is really important for both the adaptation and the mitigation side. Thinking of it in scale as far as what kind of program we build up, but also geographic scale. I mean, think of some of the work that we're doing that protects upscale watersheds and make sure that the water is coming into certain areas that is making all these different natural solutions better. We have more trees, we have better productivity, also reducing the risk of fire, right? And so you start to bring in all these different opportunities and it's just gonna help more and more. So we currently have enough money and enough legislation to pinpoint certain places that we're gonna work and if we can keep building that out larger and larger, it's gonna help so many different ways. The other piece that goes into it, the resilience against wildfires, but also resilience against food supply. This is the United States. It's also, I mean, thinking about the supply shocks that are going on in Eastern Africa right now, along with the invasion of Ukraine, all of a sudden we're seeing wheat, two of the largest wheat exporters are not exporting. Cop's gonna be in Egypt where it's just the largest wheat importer. We need to start building up all these resilient supply chains, not just for natural climate solutions, but also for food production, but also for some of these political shocks. Thanks, John. Trey, we'll jump to you next. Yeah, so I mean, trees and forests in general have a lot of potential for not only globally as far as their ability to absorb carbon, absorb and store carbon, which can have long-term benefits not only for their sustainable means of using stored carbon, such as sustainably harvested timber and so on, as a means of long-term absorption, sequestration of carbon, but also on a local scale, local and regional scale, there's many benefits that can come as far as mitigation adaptation. So trees, for example, they create their own kind of small-scale weather pattern. So if you look at the Sierra Nevada's, there's rain depending on which side of the Sierra Nevada as you're looking at. And trees, just through a process of transpiration, they actually create their own types of weather patterns and can cause rain elsewhere. So that's an important role they play as far as keeping and it's kind of mitigating against their own risk for forest fires. And again, so that's something for a key example out west that you might be able to see, but then even on the East Coast, looking at some of the issues around flooding and storm surge from hurricanes. So trees are a natural storm break, especially I'm sure Courtney will touch on this as well. Mango forest can stop storm surge and they can also stop flooding upstream. So if you're looking at some of the flooding that may happen in Appalachia or in Tennessee and in a place like that. So as flooding, as rain happens upstream, they can actually absorb and store water in the soils to stop them from flowing downstream and pulling together and causing flooding. So there's many exciting ways they can do that. So it's again, that global scale of absorbing carbon, but also local scale and local benefits for adapting to climate and adapting to the shocks that are caused by climate. Great, thank you. Courtney, over to you. Oh Courtney, I think you're muted still. There we go. Yeah, I would also reference our forests on the other coast there, mangroves especially, but also salt marshes and seagrass meadows in supporting the reduction of that impact that storms can have on human lives and ecosystems. In addition, as we've talked about to the carbon that they can store and sequester, at the same time provide habitat for fish, birds, other plants. And I think an interesting example amidst all of the unfortunate destruction in Florida from the hurricane recently, mangroves that were planted along the coast in the Punta Gorda area especially provided significant amount of like shoreline, buffer against storm surge, wave attenuation. And so those places saw less damage than those with gray infrastructure or marinas that were unprotected, et cetera. So that's just one sort of pithy place to look towards this happening concretely on the ground. Thank you, Britt. Yes, thank you. Well, I think my colleagues have said most of the great things already when it comes to agriculture, we see a lot of opportunity in agroforestry. So again, trees that are on agricultural land for all the benefits that Trey has already, Trey and Courtney already mentioned, including reducing runoff, nutrient runoff from agricultural land, floods, et cetera. Also just avoided conversion of these native range lands, wetlands and peatlands. That's where the carbon is currently sequestered. So you have the mitigation right there, but they also provide you with all the adaptation benefits around it in terms of things that you guys have been discussing, mainly sort of floods and then also food production, healthier soils tend to provide better yields without having to have too much extra fertilizer on stock and stuff in addition. So then you get this kind of circle where you're helping with mitigation by also becoming resilient in terms of food production. So lots of both sides of the coins in a lot of options. Great, thank you. So we've been talking a lot about natural climate solutions in the context of COP 27. That was the goal of the briefing, so that makes sense. But we also have the Convention on Biological Diversity coming up in December, less than a month after COP 27 will wrap up. So I'm curious kind of how you see biodiversity entering into the conversation at COP 27, kind of in that lead up to COP 15 for the Convention on Biological Diversity and kind of hope that we can also touch on for Congress specifically kind of what's important for them to think about in terms of the climate biodiversity nexus, especially in the context of these upcoming meetings. So Trey, maybe we can start with you and then we'll open up to the other panelists. Yeah, thanks. So I mean, first and foremost, I mean, a biodiverse habitat is one that's resilient. It's one that'll survive. And frankly, it's one that's dynamic. If you have everything ranging from different kinds of elephants, different kinds of that mega flora, mega fauna, but all the way down to having a very biodiverse seed stock for trees, having a biodiverse range within your forest, everything from again, the animals down to the mushrooms. So I mean, if we have the biodiversity in stock and we're not going to have a monoculture of trees or a monoculture of soils, if we have everything bacteria to again, that mega to the dynamic animals will have a resilient habitat that can survive the stresses and shocks from climate change. But again, it's also one that can be productive and one that we can pull resources from. So there are many examples of pulling new medicines, new types of habitats, new types of resources for pollinators from. And those are, the biodiverse habitat is also one that is economically dynamic and one that'll help us see through, help our economy see through those shocks. And so as far as the role that it plays in both the COP 27 in Egypt next month or in November, then also the COP in December in for the Convention of Biodiversity. The US could play key roles first again by making sure these habitats stay intact for biodiversity for the climate conference. But then again, but then uniquely at the Convention for Biodiversity in December and that the US is the only member of the UN to not be signed on to this convention. And it's something, if the US wants it, the biggest contribution the US can play is to finally sign on to the Convention for Biodiversity and to play an active role because this COP 15 is where the post 2020 global biodiversity framework will, we anticipate will be signed. And that is will be the equivalent of the Paris Agreement for the Convention on Biodiversity and set the stage for the next 20, 30, 50 years for action around finding for every country to work together to create those plans to conserve biology and create strategies to do so across borders and even within borders as well. All right, let's jump to you next and then we'll go to Courtney. Thank you. Yes, I just wanted to sort of touch upon what Trey was saying absolutely. It is very odd to me that the US has not signed the Convention on Biodiversity and it is a really important adaptive measure to have, you know, biological diversity. And just to be very specific, for instance, in agriculture, when we are seeing these climate impacts that are already happening and that will get worse no matter what we do in the next 10 years, we might need access to more diverse crop varieties, for instance, right? So there's a lot of gene banks now for seeds and varieties and that's great. But a lot of the more adaptive varieties may actually be indigenous varieties that we have stopped growing. And we've gone through these monocrops that will be more fragile to increased heats, increased pests, et cetera, et cetera. So I just want to sort of touch up on that real quickly. And then of course, you know, I keep hammering you on the avoided conversions, but you know, that will give you both mitigation and biodiversity benefits. So you can hit two goals with that one policy. Courtney. Yeah, I'd say maybe from a little bit more of a policy wonk point of view that interlinkages between the processes of CBD and UNFCCC and others are important. Like how their respective agendas and rules can reinforce each other rather than dilute is super important. Shifting from like the traditionally siloed approaches to more integrated ones across international policy processes, including CBD, right? Can help enhance ambition. It can help with clarity on implementation and high quality outcomes. It's just, it's interesting sometimes that we negotiate the atmosphere apart from our lands and waters at the UNFCCC versus CBD or maybe IMO, but frankly, the planet doesn't care about any of our arbitrary distinctions and parties can call for sort of enhanced collaboration, information exchange alignment between those places. And as we've been hearing from Trey and Brittley, there really is no Paris without Montreal. And we're looking forward to strong outcomes at CBD 15. I would only just add that the administration has shown some encouraging signs by appointing Monica Medina to the State Department to basically be the biodiversity czar. And so I would say that if for anyone on the Hill wants to create some action around this, they have a partner in Monica Medina. Dan, I think it's over to you for maybe an audience question or one of our next questions. Thanks, Anna. Yeah, so we actually multiple people have written us with basically the same question. And so I'm gonna blend those together. This question's coming from Capitol Hill. It's coming from research institutions. And so I think it's a really interesting one and probably one that's on the minds of many other people in our audience. And the question revolves around the idea of how permanent natural climate solutions are. And so Trey, maybe it's fair to start with you since our questioners are mainly talking about trees and you're our tree person today. But how much should we actually be counting on natural climate solutions to deliver long-term sequestration benefits? What happens if we're counting on these, counting on forests and trees, but as climate change is getting worse, they become more susceptible to wildfires and all of those carbon sequestration benefits are wiped out. How should we think about the permanence of what we've been talking about today given sort of the severity of climate impacts? And then after we hear from Trey, I'm really interested to hear what other panelists have to say too. So I would say that there's permanent as far as we protect them. They, as long as we are continuing efforts to conserving and restoring the forests that are that have been degraded, the longer the effects will go. So there are, and not all forests are created equal. So for example, the tropical forests have significantly more carbon sequester and have significantly more adaptive capacity and also ability to sequester carbon and also have the ability to sequester carbon in unique ways, not only in the tree biomass themselves, but also in their soils and specifically for such as peat forests. Can sequester more carbon than others? So if we're looking to pick and choose forests, we want to conserve the standing forests. And like I showed before in one of my slides, how certain kinds of forests and the carbon within them are, once we lose them, they're gone. So I would say we really need to focus on that. And even in areas such as boreal forests and forests that aren't in tropical regions, they still will have the adaptive capacity to grow regardless of climate shocks. Trees can adapt to it and we may be having to choose and select different types of trees and different types of forests and kind of design the natural habitat to address some of these shocks. So doing tree selection for reforestation after a forest fire could be something that we need to do in an intentional way, but they will always have the capacity to do so. So long as we take care to not allow too far conversion to allow desertification to happen, that's something that's happening across the Sahara and the Sahel region of Africa, for example. So there are ways to kind of re-inject the right nutrients in order to regrow those forests, but it's something we need to do now and you need to do fast, we need to do it in an intentional way. So yeah, so that would be my answer. I'd love to hear what my colleagues think. Britt, you unmuted. I'll take that as a sign you have something to say and then Courtney and John interested in your perspectives as well. Yeah, sure. For my sins, I can't help it, but I'm an economist and so my main thing here is it will be permanent as long as we make it worth people's while that they stay there, right? Make sure the forest is worth more standing than cut down. Make sure that we keep giving incentives to farmers and ranchers to keep the carbon in their soils. Make sure that we figure out ways to make the wetlands and the peatlands as valuable. So it's a really sort of, this is a call to action for policy makers, right? It will not be permanent if we take away the incentives, if we make it more valuable to put a strip mall somewhere. So anyway, that's my little call to action as an economist. Yeah, similar line of thinking here in that I think permanence perpetuity is a challenge with any policy. It's not limited to natural climate solutions. So I would just couch it in that sort of perspective, but I do know that there is going to be a need for high integrity with all sorts of these schemes, right? And making sure that permanence, the adequate amount of buffer is included in project sites so that in case there is a hurricane or wildfire that there is maybe an over-conservative approach to maintaining the carbon stock and integrity in that transaction is going to be really important. Thanks, Courtney. John, I think this gives you the last word in our briefing today. Yeah, like I totally agree with all those answers. And the only thing that I would add on top of that is we can't wait to see, you know, we keep seeing more United Nations and more IPCC reports coming out. This says we have less time and less time and less time to deal with climate. We need to do everything we possibly can if we're going to reach two degrees or 1.5 degrees. Well, unfortunately that brings us to almost the end and I know we have to wrap up. It's been a really, really interesting briefing. I've been really looking forward to this topic and I think, you know, going to Egypt next week or next weekend, really interested to see how this topic comes up. How has it dealt with, how has it addressed and really interested in following along and your four presentations were a great introduction to the topic and also what to expect. Speaking of what to expect next week, November 2nd will be our final briefing in this series specifically looking at what's on the table for the negotiation. So if you want to know about, you know, what to look ahead to, there it is right there at 11 a.m. We'll be talking about all of the issues not just natural climate solutions. So I encourage everyone to tune in. And then after COP, we will come back and we will look backwards and we'll have a recap. What happened? What does it mean for US policy? What does it mean for Congress? And that will be December 2nd. We will be getting briefing notices out and reminders but the best way to sign up for all of our resources is to do just what this slide says which is to sign up for our COP newsletter and to RSVP for our briefings. Those are great resources and I think everyone will find them really useful. Like to say thank you to John and Trey and Courtney and Britt for four really tremendous presentations. Thank you for joining us today. It was awesome to get to know you a little bit during this process and to learn from all of your various expertise and perspectives. I'd also like to once again shout out our friends at US Nature for Climate. Nathan, Henry and his great colleagues were really instrumental in helping us pull this briefing together, organize it, come up with sort of the approach to how to talk about this issue in a way that's meaningful for our congressional audience. So thank you so much for being our valued partner today but also our valued partner even when we don't have a briefing. It's great to work with those folks over at US Nature for Climate. So I'd like to thank Anna for helping us with the questions and answers and everyone else here at EESI who helped pull together or put together our briefing today that includes Daniel Bryan, Omri Laporte, Emma Johnson, Allison Davis, Anna, Savannah Bertrand and Molly Brindemore. Thanks so much for all of the hard work. Thanks to also to our fall interns, Alina, Shreya and Nick who are helping us with the live tweeting and the notes and everything like that. We're at 230 but one last thing, my colleague Emma just put up a slide with a survey link. If anyone in our audience would like to take two minutes to share with us your experiences today. Did you have any audio problems, video problems? Was the closed caption not working? Do you have ideas for future briefing topics? Any feedback at all, we are more than happy, more than appreciative to receive it. We read every response and so it means a lot to us when people in our audience take a few moments to share feedback with how today went. We'll go ahead and wrap up. I hope to see everyone next week for what's on the table for the negotiations on November 2nd. And until then, TGIF, have a great weekend. Thanks again to our panelists and we'll see you next week.