 Let's take on the right thing, if you could say who you are. Yeah, Josh Busby, University of Texas. My question is for Amy. For your mapping of road data, do you recommend a particular data source, for example, that has comprehensive Africa-wide continental data? And how do you compare road types between countries? We had done some previous work to try and incorporate that into vulnerability maps, and we noticed that Category 1 road, and I may be getting the differentiations wrong, but Category 1 in the DRC was a dirt road, and that same road might have been a multi-lane paved highway in South Africa. And so if you do a representation using ArcGIS or any other kind of mapping software, you have wildly unrepresentative maps of the actual road networks if you did it that way. So I'd be curious to see if you have some great data source that I'm unaware of. So, yeah, I mean that's obviously an ongoing question you're working in developing countries. We were lucky to obtain some really great data from the International Road Federation, based in Geneva, and they have kind of taken the, or I guess I don't know if we modeled our approach off them or just happened to match up quite well, but they had, they have the nine road classifications, so paved, gravel, and unpaved primary, secondary, tertiary, and then based on country road inventories, they actually put the kilometers into their road classification, so if, you know, a level one in DRC is really a secondary gravel road, that's how it's sourced. Some of it we estimated based on population data, road density data, geography, and we have, I have a paper actually I can show you some more detailed how we did that, yeah. Okay, we have to have a little structural adjustment here. I've been asked that the presenters can come and answer questions from here so we can get them on film. So, Innocent, can you come up here? Thank you. Let's, while they're coming, take, Adam, next question in the middle. Yeah, Tarek? Thank you all for your talks there. Again, very, very, well, put a lot of more questions than I have answers in my head right now, so I'm going to stick to one question. And maybe it's just I misinterpreted your statement, Amy, so maybe it's more of a clarification question. At one point in your talk you said something along the lines of that the threat, I guess, of climate change on infrastructure is far greater in developing countries than developed countries. And I guess the devil's advocate in me sort of throws out this thought, is that in developed countries we have such a dense infrastructure and with that I would maybe contend that it's a very costly infrastructure to repair that is it a case of quantity over expense? In other words, yes, developing countries are certainly more vulnerable to the threat of an extreme event in terms of destruction, but in terms of the actual sort of loss of productivity or work hours or just in the cost of rebuilding, do the developed countries, are they just as vulnerable, susceptible to damage? This is my question. Before Amy, sorry, can you say who you? Oh, Adam Slosser, I'm at MIT. Yeah, no, thank you for the question. That's a good clarification. I think you definitely are right in that given the amount of infrastructure in developed countries, there is a potentially huge cost burden and it is something to be concerned about. I was speaking more from both the opportunity cost and also looking at the development priorities and kind of from a more holistic development perspective. A lot of my research is really focusing on the social impact of infrastructure and how does infrastructure affect development. I think that what I mean by that really is that developing countries face a huge burden because they don't have a lot of roads. There's not a redundant network, so if a flood does come and wipe out one of the major roads, what does that mean to commerce, to transport, can be a greater impact than a developing country. Obviously, if a highway is wiped out, that's bad, but we have the ability to repair that. It may only take a few months, a few weeks, ideally, to get that back online and there's other routes that can be used. In developing countries, if there's only one or two major roads that are wiped out, your transportation can stop. I know in Mozambique in 2000, there was significant flooding and it took, I think, close to a year to repair some of those networks. So I think that's what I mean by more of the relative threat, not necessarily a completely less costly threat or that it shouldn't be of a concern to a developed country. So thanks for the clarification. Thanks. And this question is back. Can you say who you are? Thank you very much. My question is about He-E-Harsey. I want to find out He-Far, how do you become a member of the He-E-Harsey network? Is it hopon or is it by invitation? And the other thing is how do you, talking about the training, web training, how do you access it? Is it an ongoing process or how do you participate in it? Thank you very much. Now, the membership to the ARC network is open and it's ongoing. We always have new members coming on stream and the application process is very, very simple. You need to go onto our website and have a project idea that is tractable, that will be reviewed and then you join what we call our thematic research groups that accept applications on an ongoing basis. Now in terms of the training, the climate change training, this was one session. As I said, we were hoping to just have one session of about 25 participants. But the demand was such that we ended up having to run three sessions. And how we did that was we basically sent the expression of interest, not only to network members but also to all of the institutions affiliated with ARC. Unfortunately, we couldn't advertise in countries, in the local press, but the advert was on our website. And that also was linked to the UNUIDA website, I think. Thank you. This is a question in the middle. Thank you very much for the very excellent presentation. Can you say who you are, Wisdom? My name is Wisdom Aqbalu and I teach at the State University of New York and I'm a Ghanaian. So my question is to Amy. We know that as we look into the future, we try to forecast the climate, we may have an average number which you might have used. What does the bounce look like? Because these numbers may be based on maybe the average climate projections into the future. So did you do anything to calculate the bounce of these values that you gave because these are just average numbers? Because the bounce could be important. The second thing is that are these numbers discounted because we're looking into the future and if they are discounted, how were the discount rates chosen? Because some countries are obviously poorer than others and they may have different social discount rates. So were these considered in your computations? Firstly, for the 10 countries study, the Pan-African study that I presented, we did not use a discount rate. I think that's something we could have definitely improved on and that we work to incorporate. When we have used this with specific country studies, we've used a discount rate they want. So some countries and some we use with the Asian Development Bank, they had a specific discount rate that they consider kind of their institutional standard. And for the other question, I want to clarify what numbers, when you say the averages or the means, which ones are you referring to? I'm referring to the fact that to compute these values, you have to use some projected numbers for the climate or what you expect the climate to be. And these numbers have bounce. You have variation around these numbers. Yeah, so we get specific climate projections. Say over a monthly rainfall for the 2020 decade, and we use those variations and then we say, based on that one GCM, what does that do and what are the numbers? And then we run it for several GCMs. So the numbers that you'll see generally will use the quartiles. We'll use the 25th percentile, 50, 75 and the most extreme, and represent those numbers. The ones that I displayed, some of them were the most extreme and some of them were the mean. Usually we run anywhere from 6 to 50 GCMs and then we do the histogram presentations or look at the mean and the most extreme and what are the variations. And that's really where we see those histograms and some of these other metrics being really useful because from what I understand the climate science side of it is there's a large variation in GCMs, but that doesn't mean that anyone is more correct than the other. And we think that those, depending on the policy, if you want to reduce your risk completely or have a no-regret situation, and that's completely adjustable, we have all the results and kind of what you're looking for can be displayed. Yes, my name is Krishna Tiwari from Nepal. I'm the post-presenter about the... My college also started the climate change course, but you talk about the course and the research for the cap city enhancement, how the new, like our college, to participate, like our external faculty can participate, this type of course. So I want to ask. So we've done the course, we've run the course for three sessions with the UNU wider and the AARC. So now we're looking towards the spring. It will be offered for a small fee now that we're going to put out. The climate and civil systems group is going to take it over. We're revising some of it, improving some part of it. And you can see me to make sure that I have your email and we'll be revising it to put it out for a fee and then hopefully try to advertise in different networks. So I would be great to get your information. Thanks for that. Phillip Adams, I'm from Australia. I'm an economist. That just marks me as somewhat separate from scientists, for example. And I know nothing about roads, but I'm going to ask a question about roads. So if I thought about roads and the future, one of the key variables perhaps I would be thinking of is population movement. If an area is going to experience rapid population movement compared to what it otherwise would have, one might have thought that its infrastructure and road needs, et cetera, would be increased. Now climate change potentially will have population movement effects. Your Vietnam example is probably a good one where possibly people will be moving away or to Mekong or away into the Red River Valley, et cetera. To what extent does your analysis go from climate change to population movement to infrastructure need changes? I think that's a good point. The analysis for Vietnam that you saw, we ran based on current road infrastructure. We didn't assume any new road infrastructure being built. We have designed the system so that if a national planners are saying we anticipate growth in this area, what would that look like under climate change, you just change the road stock input. We don't do specific modeling in population growth or population movement. It's not our area of expertise, but the system is built to be very flexible in the sense that if that is something that is of a particular desire for a planner, we can easily incorporate that information and do projections. We've become the planning tool, saying if we are anticipating growth in the Mekong area from the south, how would that investment look? How would that affect if we're going to invest 10% versus 50%? What is the climate change impact there? What do we need to be aware of? Should we build gravel roads or paved roads? The system is designed to be completely flexible, although we don't do that part of the analysis. Thank you. Are there other questions? I'm from Leibniz University, Germany. I'm a geospatial analyst by training. My concern is you talked about integrating GCMs. Did you also try parallel analysis with RCMs or local climate models? Because as you say that GCMs introduce a lot of uncertainty at a regional or local level, and another alternative would be also to see that you use a bit of ensembles. That's multi-model ensembles, which have a particular emphasis on climate factors that impact infrastructure to a better extent than the climate factors that impact other systems. I think those could be useful. We don't use those right now. One of the ways that we have dealt with avoiding the overly particular results, given that it's a higher level modeling, in an administrative region, say at a provincial level, we assign the percentage of roadstock and the GCM projections. So if there's a certain increase in rainfall, it's projected to increase a 2% degradation. We do that over 2% of the roadstock in that area. So averaging out to reduce some of that in a way that we feel doesn't get so specific that we're giving false results, but does average out the impact of climate change, especially because in roads, generally the budgeting is done at a very high level. So if you can say, you know, this region is going to experience more degradation, therefore it will require more funding. That's very different than saying this one road will be wiped out this one year. And we look at it more from, I guess, more of the average perspective over a planning period. If that makes sense. Thank you. I didn't see other hands going up. I want to, I don't know, use or abuse the chair since we've got a few minutes left. Partly addressing it, I think perhaps a naughty question or irresponsible question to particularly Alyssa and Innocent. In a way, connecting yesterday, those of us who went to Lance Pritchard's lecture raised these kinds of issues. And I was thinking about it also in the plenary this morning when there was a talk, several people said there's a need to make things accessible to the policy makers. There's a complaint that particularly economists are too complicated for policy makers to understand. And really one of the issues that comes in, in fact Innocent, you mentioned, disconnect between policy makers and analysts and so on. One of the questions comes with capacity building. We focus on the supply side, but there's a question of the demand side. How do you build up the demand so that, in my experience, politicians don't want a big model. They want a number and they want a sound bite. How do you get politicians to get serious? Isn't there something we should be addressing on the capacity building side with your program? Maybe you should have a program just for policy makers. Politicians. I don't know whether that's a question or a... You're right. It was a naughty question. I think actually the ARC has long been trying to do this through the senior policy seminar series where only senior politicians and technocrats at a very high level are invited every March around the last weekend of March. And issues to do with not only the technical bits where we give results of the work, but also where we try to raise consciousness about issues is done. So I think in a way you could say, yes, we try to do that. The only problem is that politicians think in four or five-year cycles. I get elected today. I have four years or so. I want to see the number that can assist me in that period. So sometimes it's very difficult to get traction for issues that have a slightly longer term than their terms of office. But we certainly try to do that. And unfortunately for climate change, we still some way off to building real understanding of what the issues are and what the numbers are. But part of the reason why we mounted this course was because Africa is involved in all of these discussions. But there is very little capacity to actually participate in these discussions. And so we have a dual problem. A, to create the capacity and B, to get that capacity to be useful to the policymaker whilst at the same time we're trying to build consciousness in the policymaker. So it's quite a task, but we're trying the best we can. Well, I think we've managed to use our time. I don't know if we've beat the other rooms to coffee, but I think I'm going to stop it there. It is time to stop. Coffee upstairs. Thank you to our presenters and to you for the time.