 We'll go ahead and get started. Good morning, everyone. I'm Dan Brousset with the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thank you for joining us and spending the morning of the 1st of November with us. I hope everyone had a happy Halloween and got lots of good candy, whatever you like. We did pretty well. Thanks again for joining us this morning. We have a wonderful panel, and we're going to be learning about the Global Commission on Adaptations Flagship Report. Adapt now a global call for leadership on climate resilience. The urgency of climate change might feel more acute these days because we're seeing and feeling more cases of extreme weather. But in fact, the issue of climate change has been with us for decades. ESI, for example, stated all the way back in 1988 that addressing climate change is a moral imperative. And many scientists and public policy experts, including our panelists, have been working on the issue and proposing solutions all the while. Instead of just more frequent and destructive storms, I hope what we're actually seeing and feeling is momentum to act on these solutions. I think there is some evidence that this is the case. Last week, I testified before the Senate Energy Committee and climate change and the need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions was front and center. That probably would not have been the case a few years ago. And Speaker Pelosi and the members of the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis is another example. Again, not something around a few years ago. At ESI, we know, and our panelists know, and hopefully you know too, that in action on climate change is making the solutions we need to limit global warming harder and harder to achieve. We have to act now. And we need to contribute to the momentum to act and reinforce it, constantly reinforce it. And this is where ESI comes in, to inform policymakers with the best and latest data and cite examples of best practices and share lessons learned to help them understand the urgency and, most importantly, that we can make meaningful progress in the race to address climate change. All we need to do is start. This morning's panel is very special. We have many friends at the World Resources Institute to thank. And we're joined by one of ESI's true champions to present and moderate and help moderate. Rosina Birbaum focuses her research on the interface of science and policy, principally on issues related to climate change adaptation and mitigation at the national and international levels. She holds appointments at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan and at the School of Public Policy at the University of Maryland. She ran the first Environment Division of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. She's lectured on every continent and in more than 20 countries. And I wonder how many rooms in the Rayburn Office building. So we're getting started with that today. Rosina is, most importantly, a member of ESI's Distinguished Board of Directors. And we could not do the good work that we do without her guidance and leadership. Rosina, I'll turn it over to you. And I'll come back up when it's Q&A time. OK. Thank you very much, Dan. Good morning, everyone. I am really happy to be on ESI's board and to be advising the Global Commission on Adaptation. So let me set the stage. Oops, there. We call the Global Commission on Adaptation Report delay and pay or plan and prosper. Because, as Dan said, coping with changes already apparent from climate change is urgent. And I would argue, in fact, we have already delayed and we are paying. So time is of the essence. Attention to adaptation has been a long time coming. And half my life ago when I worked for the Congress for the Office of Technology Assessment, I led this first and only report that the Congress ever asked for on adaptation. One on built environment, which included water, coasts and agriculture. That's what the frond is there at the bottom. And the second one on the right was on natural systems, which was wetlands, forests, and parks. And it was requested by three committees, the House then Science, Space, and Technology, the Senate Environment, and Public Works, and Commerce, Science, and Transportation. So interesting that, what, 27 years ago, Congress was already thinking adaptation might be important. The UN Commission on Sustainable Development commissioned a report in 2007 there on the left. And the World Bank commissioned a flagship world development report focusing for the first time on climate change in 2010. And both concluded then that we knew enough to say, as we did in 1992 and as EESI did in 88, that past is not prologue, that climate change is altering the baselines, that planning and management, as we have done for the past 50 to 100 years, will no longer work, that most of the impacts from climate change will be negative, that all systems, coastal infrastructure, water, health, agriculture, and ecosystems will be challenged in every region of the globe in developing and developed countries. And that enhanced preparedness and response strategy should be a global priority. We argued then, and these reports argued that both mitigation and adaptation are needed because climate change is underway, adaptation becomes less effective, the faster the pace and total change of climate change. So I think it was fitting that two of the three commissioners of the Global Commission on Adaptation that asked for these reports are now serving on the Global Commission on Adaptation. And so Kristalina Georgieva from the World Bank that had done the World Development Report and Ban Ki-moon, who had been at the UN and asked for that 2007 report, joined forces with Bill Gates this year. And so depending on how you count this, it took some nine, 12, 27, or 31 years to get a real call for an action year on adaptation. And as you all know, the Paris agreements that were made to date by 195 countries if they are fully implemented would put us on that blue line, well past the two degree C level that is called for in the Paris Accord, well above the pre-industrial levels of one and a half to two. So we'd be at least at 3.3. And it's gonna be hard to cope with that. And so if you took all the science that's in the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports and digested it into one graph, here it is. And what you can see by the length of the orange bar is that already present and near term risk is not insignificant. But the two bottom lines, if we move to two degrees C above pre-industrial or four degrees C above pre-industrial, things get much more risky. Now proactive adaptation can lop off some of that risk and that's the gray part that just popped up, especially in the two degree case. But adaptation you see at the four degree becomes less effective and of course it becomes much more costly as you head towards faster and greater change. Essentially we can't adapt our way out of a four degree world. And I said that today's risk at the temperatures we've already reached one degrees C or about two degrees F Fahrenheit are not insignificant. We're seeing crops and forests and pest ranges shifting north, things like kudzu, more potent poison ivy, West Nile virus moving north, cranberries and maples moving up into Canada. And we're seeing a spate of extreme events, floods and droughts and fires, disrupting supply chains, energy services and causing great human pain. And this was reiterated by the four national climate assessments that Congress in their wisdom mandated by the Global Change Act of 1990. And I think we are all very pleased that legislation on resilience is now emerging in the Congress. Globally, natural catastrophes have been increasing. And this is data from Munich Ray and it's showing the number of weather related disasters and how they've increased since 1980 on the left. The storms are yellow, the floods are blue and droughts, heat and fire are red. And you can see at the beginning of the chart in the mid 80s, the number of catastrophes hovered around 200 events globally. Well, they're now at 600. And as you know, last year alone, the fires in California cost $24 billion. And in 2017, all of the extreme events in the United States cost $312 billion. That's real money, real money that we're losing today. We are also seeing more powerful tropical storms. And these are just the record setters. So the record is largest and strongest. And you see Irma, Maria and Harvey didn't even make it on this. They didn't set records for being largest and strongest. But Harvey's rainfall was a record at 50 inches. Irma had set a record as the longest category five and Dorian just added to this hall of pain. And as you see, all of these happened since 2012. I think one of the most important changes in our science space is this. You are all used to hearing scientists like me say, we can't attribute any single event to climate change. The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unequivocal blanket statement, the sentence in yellow there. And that is from our own very distinguished National Academy of Sciences. The ability to attribute the role of climate change in extreme events is a big breakthrough in science. And just to give you one example, the attribution of climate change is the two feet of rain that we had in Louisiana in 2016. And you see at the bottom there, climate change increased the odds of getting two feet of rain by 40%. That's quite a powerful statement. So at the temperature increase of one degree C or about two degrees Fahrenheit already, we are seeing increased pain and suffering and cost. And in fact, in the analysis of extreme events of last year, 21 of the 27 were seen to have a clearly increased probability from climate change. In other words, climate change made those events more likely. As you know, every sector is being affected by these ongoing changes in temperature, precip and sea level rise. And so just the energy sector, very much in our minds. Lower water levels reduces hydro power, wildfires affect electricity supply. I don't need to say much more. Inland power plants in a Midwest are sometimes flooded. Water limits are reducing oil and gas productivity. There's reduced ability to barge coal down drier rivers. Intense storms are disrupting transmission and distribution system. And cooling water intake or discharge may be too hot depending on the weather. These headlines all recent bring home the frequency and intensity of extreme events of heat waves, of flooding, of hurricanes. I remember Houston had three 500 year events in three years. We're gonna have to change the definition of a 500 year event. Clearly past is not prologue. We can't plan the way we did before. And fires, the area has doubled since 1984 of fires in the US and the area burned total. And again, the combined fires in 2017 and 2018 were about 40 billion. And from our own military, two thirds of military installations threatened by climate change in the next 20 years, not 2100, well, in our lifetime, I hope. So what else will the coming decades bring? We know there's a lot of infrastructure in the path of storm surges and rising sea level. And this risky business report brought it home after Superstorm Sandy's wake up call. Higher sea levels and storm surge will increase the annual cost of coastal storms along the US Eastern seaboard and the Gulf by two to three and a half billion in the next decade. By 2100, that number just in those regions could be as high as 507 billion. So investors are sounding the alarm, increasingly calling for risk disclosure. And this was amplified at the UN Climate Summit last month. The World Economic Forum at Davos asserted that climate change is the biggest risk to business and the world. And we've seen, of course, PG&E declared the first S&P 500 climate casualty. So the time to act is clearly now. The Global Commission on Adaptation and the Year of Action Tracks are desperately needed. We can delay and pay or plan and prosper. So with that, let me introduce the first of our three distinguished speakers to tell us about the Global Commission on Adaptation and its findings and the Year of Action. So first, I guess we will hear from Manish Bhapna, who is the Executive Vice President and the Managing Director of World Resources Institute. Before that, he was the Director of the Nonprofit Bank Information Center. But he also served as a senior economist at the World Bank, working mainly on watershed and rural development projects in Asia and Latin America. And Manish is the report team overall lead for the Global Commission on Adaptation. So Manish, please come up. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Rosina. That was, you know, I've been looking at this issue for the past couple of years very carefully. And even still, I have so much more to learn from Rosina. So thank you for that lovely opening. I want to start with two things. One is, I suspect on the minds of most people here, the issue that we're here for, climate adaptation, and baseball, Washington Nationals. Want to bring these two issues together for just one moment. I don't know if any of you saw in the Washington Post just a couple of days ago a really interesting article about climate change and baseball stadiums and how we will need to reimagine how we build stadiums for sports in light of climate change. So just, again, something that I thought was particularly interesting in light of where we are today. I wanted to start with a short video that says a word or two about adaptation. My name is Janie Bavishi, and I'm the director of the New York City Mayor's Office of Resiliency. I'm responsible for helping to prepare the city for the unprecedented challenge of climate change. 2100, we expect 50% of lower Manhattan to be at risk to coastal storms. Also by 2100, we expect 20% of the streets of lower Manhattan to be subject to daily tidal inundation. Adapting to the risk of sea level rise, storm surge, extreme heat, and intense precipitation. We've rebuilt the Rockaway boardwalk. It's now 5.5 miles of steel reinforced concrete. We're preparing the city to bounce back from extreme weather events as quickly as possible. So just a little bit, many people ask, what is adaptation? And so we actually spent a little bit of time preparing these videos from all around the world in the voices of those that are on the front lines actually talking about what it means to adapt. What I'm going to do today is to take a few minutes to tell you a little bit about the Global Commission on Adaptation and the main report findings that we released a couple of months ago. And then my colleagues are going to go a lot deeper in terms of explaining what this may mean for the United States on a couple of issues related to both mainstreaming and climate risk disclosure. So let me start with the commission. You saw the co-chairs. Kind of two main objectives for setting up this commission. One, as Rosina alluded to, to elevate the political visibility of adaptation. Adaptation is one of those things that people have been talking about for quite some time, but not nearly as much leadership attention and resources has yet been put on this, even despite the fact that quite recently, as she mentioned, this was the top risk scene by major CEOs in an annual survey that the World Economic Forum conducts each year. But the second point was not just to elevate the political visibility. It was also to mobilize action. That we wanted this to be more than just a report. We wanted this to lead to real world change on the ground. So we set up this commission of people from all around the world, sitting ministers, CEOs, mayors, civil society leaders. We had the Republican mayor of Miami, Francis Suarez from the United States, and a wide range of about several hundred NGO and research partners that were part of this overall effort. The commission was launched about a year ago in the Netherlands. As I mentioned, the last year was largely around trying to set the intellectual or analytical agenda for what we felt needed to happen on adaptation. But this next year is about translating that report into a set of very, very specific recommendations. And the point here was that we have seen a lot of reports that talk about what the cost of the impacts might be, what the problems of climate change may create. But there's not been as systematic an approach to talking about how does the world respond and how does the world respond in terms of building resilience. And that's what this report aimed to do. There were five messages that this report put forward, and I'm going to go through each of them quite quickly. The first is about the human imperative that adaptation is about. The second is to rethink how we look at the economics of investing in adaptation. The third is to say that even with good economics, we're not getting the attention that we want to see because a number of barriers get in the way. We need to see revolutions in understanding, in planning, and in finance in order to scale up, to create the level of action we need to see on adaptation. The fourth is then how we apply that to key economic systems and what that means. And the fifth is how do we stimulate that? How do we promote that in the coming year? How do we actually jumpstart this new bold agenda on resilience? So the first point, adaptation is a human imperative. We know that the people, the communities, the countries that often did the least to generate this problem will suffer the most, but we also know climate impacts will spare no one. Climate impacts are happening here and now. Just to give you a couple of numbers, we anticipate that over 100 million people around the world will fall back into poverty by 2030 if no action on climate change is taken. We anticipate that yields for major crops could fall by up to 30% by the year 2050 with massive implications for livelihoods and lives. We anticipate that over a trillion dollars per year of damages would take place in coastal cities around the world by 2050. But the real tragedy here is that those that have the least, that those that are poor women, future generations will suffer the most. So this is an issue that we know that gets out very much at exacerbating inequality in a much, much more devastating way. That said, the second message is actually quite a fresh message. We make the argument that adaptation, investing in building resilience makes good economic sense. And so we looked at a wide range of different types of actions. We looked at how the returns on developing early warning systems, in making new infrastructure resilient, in improving dry land agricultural crop production, in protecting mangroves or other nature-based solutions, making water resources more efficient. And what we found is that for every dollar that we invest in these types of adaptation interventions, could generate four to five dollars in terms of net economic benefits in return. So this is a really significant finding, right? It suggests that actually countries, communities, companies makes good, good economic sense to invest in building resilience. And this has been further substantiated by a number of US studies that have found very similar conclusions. So why is that? And I'm gonna use another baseball example here. This is a picture you may recall, is something less than a mile away out Washington Nationals Park, which is the only major sports stadium in this country that is LEED certified. And one of the things that they did is they actually put nature to work in the stadium. And so I'm gonna explain why the economics of this makes so much sense. So you have green roofs, you have trees in the stadium, right? So that helps you avoid losses. When you have a lot of rain, like we did last night, it absorbs stormwater runoff. It helps you deal with extreme heat. Hot days in the summer watching baseball, this helps cool the temperature down. So that's the avoided loss part of why this makes good sense. But in addition to avoided losses, we see two other major benefits of making these types of investments. By having much a white roof, by having the kind of grass and shrubs on the roof, their electricity bills in the summer are actually less. They don't have to cool the building nearly as much as they would otherwise. So there's some good economic benefits. And then on top of that, the aesthetic pleasure, looks nice, the recreational benefits, there are some benefits that might be difficult to monetize, but that's still matter. And so those three dividends, the avoided losses, the economic benefits, the social environmental benefits, are in part what actually generates these significant economic returns. The third finding, though, is that despite these economic returns, we don't see the uptake of action that we expect. Why? Because there's a number of barriers get in the way. Oftentimes, climate risk remains invisible. We find it very difficult to respond to climate risk because that requires collaborating between different departments within government, between different levels of government, local, state, federal government, requires collaboration between the public and private sector. And so the silos get in the way of more effective efforts. We also see short-term bias. People don't really appreciate the risk for tomorrow. They take decisions today. They also, we also recognize the financial system isn't wired to help support the upfront costs associated with investing in resilience, but perhaps most importantly, there is a power issue here that those that often will feel the greatest impacts have the least political voice. And so again, this gets at the point of inequality that gets at why we're not seeing the scale of response that we would like to see. So in the report, in order to address these barriers, we make an argument that we need to see three big revolutions in how we understand climate risk and respond to it, how we plan or integrate climate risk into both public and private sector decision-making and how we integrate climate risk into the financial sector to help channel both public and private financial flows to building resilience. So when you take that, and what we did in this report is actually then apply that to the food sector. We looked at cities, we looked at infrastructure, we looked at health, we looked at early warning systems, we looked at nature-based solutions, we looked at water, and we talked about if you take those revolutions and apply them in these sectors, where does one start? If you're sitting in an ad ministry or in the ad department here, if you're sitting in the forest ministry or the forest agency, where do you start to build resilience? And so we laid out what we saw as some of the key entry points for how to actually integrate climate risk into these different areas. And I just have a few little slides here of just examples from around the world of how people have done that with some success. This is just an example here in Bangladesh, a country that is ravaged by cyclones, looking at cyclones from 1970 that took 300,000 lives. Absolute tragedy. And cyclones of similar magnitude in 1990, in 2007, and 2019, with a dramatic reduction in the cost of lives. That even in a country like Bangladesh, real commitment to building early warning systems, shelter, transportation, good communications can result in a massive reduction in the loss of life. In infrastructure, we see the need to not only think about how we update codes and standards to create roads that would be more resilient in more heat or more rainfall, but how we need to think about infrastructure as a system. So not to look just at the road itself, but to look at the road as a system of transportation to think about how you actually make the system more resilient. We looked at cities and we looked at all the efforts going around the world in terms of building nature-based solutions as I mentioned just with the Washington National Park example that really build resilience in cities. And so what this report does, it lays out what we see as some of the areas where one needs to invest, and it gives examples from around the world of where people have done this with incredible success. And that takes me to kind of my, the fifth and final point that I wanted to make is that this commission is not just about the report, it is about how you translate that into action. And so here you see the launch in New York about a month ago where we had the commission actually not only launch the report, but launch a year of action. And what we've decided to do is to focus on these eight areas and within the next year, think about what are some of the concrete steps that can be taken over the next 12 months to build resilience in these sectors. So for example, in food security and rural livelihoods, we looked at how to actually increase or double investment in agricultural research, how we could expand access to digital advisory services, how we could expand access to insurance, finance markets, technologies to enable farmers to be able to actually weather these types of shocks. And we're doing this by bringing the World Bank, the Germans, the Gates Foundation, a wide range of players together to move this type of agenda forward. And we're doing this on finance and we're doing this across all of those eight action tracks that I mentioned. So it's an incredibly exciting moment to be talking about this with all of you and I'm going to now turn this back to Rosina, who I think is gonna introduce her next two speakers. Delighted to be here. Thank you. Thank you, Manish. Now you brought up sports. So I remember more than a decade ago when sports illustrated actually did an article about climate change is worrisome. We might lose eight pro stadiums due to sea level rise. And I would look at the map and I'm like, but you'll also lose the Everglades and you're gonna have saltwater intrusion and some of those cities are gonna be underwater. But maybe sports is a key theme that we should pick up on. Thank you for your remarks and we're now gonna turn it over to Christina Chan, who is the director for the Climate Resilience Practice at World Resources Institute. And so she works to integrate climate considerations into all planning and programs that is mainstreaming climate risk. She also was a branch chief at the US State Department in their Climate Change Office. And before that spent eight years with care helping communities reduce their disaster related risks. And she is a lead author of the overall global commission on adaptation reports. So Christina. Thank you so much Rosina and good morning everyone. What I wanted to do is following Manish's overview of the report as a co-director of the global commission on adaptation having been deeply involved in this report, but also having formally been with the US government as part of the federal government. I wanted to take the key messages that Manish laid out and bring it home to what this means in the United States. Oftentimes for those of you who have been working in this adaptation space, I think there's a tendency in the global dialogue that when we think about adaptation, we actually think about the Bangladeshes of the world. We don't necessarily think about it in terms of countries like the United States or China or the United Kingdom or Germany. The report tries to make this global call. It's not just about developing countries needing to adapt to the impacts of climate change, but also richer nations. Nations like the United States are also going to be affected by the impacts of climate change. And so these revolutions that Manish was talking about, the revolutions in understanding and planning and finance, how we need to apply that to our key systems and agriculture and cities, infrastructure are just as relevant in the United States as it is in Bangladesh. So first I just wanted to talk about why should we care? Manish talked about the human imperative, the economic imperative. I just wanna take a moment and talk about what these imperatives mean for the United States. I wanna start actually and flip it around and talk about the economic imperative. For me as an American taxpayer, I think it is absolutely critical that our federal resources are invested wisely. The title of today's talk is Plan and Prosper or Delay and Pay, and that is key for the United States as well. We need to change the way in which we think about benefit-cost ratios. I've been in this adaptation space now for about two decades and I think the trend is we think about adaptation, we think about the images, the images that Rosina showed about devastation and what we need to do. We talk about it in terms of the costs of the impacts and we also talk about it in terms of the costs of what it would take to actually adapt. What we don't necessarily do, what we don't make as visible is the benefits of adaptation. The benefits of spending upfront investments and making sure that we are resilient in our planning and design, in our infrastructure, in investing in nature-based solutions and also in building back after disaster strikes, not building back to where we were and the standards where we were when a disaster hit, but building back stronger and more resilient. And these upfront, front-end investments will help us avoid or reduce the costs at the back end associated with responding to emergencies with disaster relief, disaster reconstruction in the United States as well as with lost economic productivity. If we don't do more to reduce greenhouse gas emissions and adapt the way we operate in the changing environment, for example, expectation is that we will spend tens of billions of dollars each year by 2075 in federal government expenditure on disaster relief as a result of rising sea levels as well as more intense hurricanes caused by climate change. Another example, as droughts become more intense and more frequent, our farmers in the Midwest will face increasing risk to crop production. That impacts their lives and livelihoods, but it also impacts our federal budget in terms of the federal government does subsidize crop insurance premiums. Those premiums will go up as well as the payouts. So actually, the economics in the United States are very clear. Nish presented numbers earlier about $1 investment in preparedness and resilience can save four to 10 in response. That's the economic imperative in the United States. The second is the, for me, which wasn't really covered in the report, but just as important in the US context, our federal government and our federal agencies provide really critical services to people, to constituents, to citizens. And those agencies, functions and services are going to be impacted by climate change. They need to be remain functional in a change in climate. Climate change, for example, is going to impact the ability of the Department of Defense to do its job. In January of last year, the department released a study outlining how over 3,500 military installations face climate-related risks, from drought to strong winds and severe flooding. DoD's training facilities will also be impacted. I've heard stories from colleagues at DoD. We talk about training facilities out in the West that are getting impacted by higher and higher temperatures and quite frankly, they can't train anymore in those places. It's just too hot. The third reason I think we, as Americans, need to care about adaptation and take more accelerated action on adaptation has to do with the human and moral imperative that Manish talked about. Climate change will impact everyone. It will impact everyone in the United States. However, some communities in the United States will be more vulnerable and have less capacity to adapt. Studies in the United States have shown that have looked at the correlation between urban poverty rates and climate vulnerability, and there's a pattern. The poorer the city, the higher its vulnerability to climate change, and the lower its preparedness for those impacts. One of the key messages in the commission's report is that we should not accept a world where only some can adapt and others cannot. I was struck, actually, I participated in one of the, there was a task force on state, local, and tribal leaders that was a few years ago. They were formed to give advice and recommendations to the president on climate preparedness and resilience, and I was struck by something the mayor of Hoboken said following the Hurricane Sandy about how we can't use, we can't rebuild after Sandy in a way that creates islands of protection, whereby only certain people in a community or in Hoboken are then building back in a more resilient way and others are not. So this issue of equity, this moral imperative, this moral imperative is quite important in the United States as well. So what is happening in the United States? If you look at that report that the state, local, and tribal leaders task force on climate preparedness and resilience submitted to the president a few years ago, there were numerous examples, and I'll name a few. For example, Houston has created mobile solar powered community support and disaster relief stations that can operate off grid and conserve communities with basic needs immediately after a disaster. Communities from Vermont to Illinois to Colorado have rebuilt roads and other infrastructure in the aftermath of disasters in a way that's stronger and better than the state of that infrastructure before the disasters hit. Counties in Southeast Florida have established a coordinated planning effort to work together to adapt to sea level rise, and then we have examples like our neighbors, Delaware and Maryland low lying states that are now requiring that state funded construction projects be designed to new standards that recognize the changing risks in climate. Lots and lots of bright spots happening in the United States. The federal government has an essential role to play in supporting these local efforts. It can do so by providing leadership, by providing guidance and information. It can encourage preparedness and incentivize adaptation. It can accelerate the kind of revolutions that Manish was talking about, the revolutions we need in understanding, planning and finance. And Congress can play a role in ensuring and making sure that this happens at the federal level given the important services that agencies provide to state and local. There's an opportunity to codify elements of an executive order. It was 13653 that was revoked in 2017 on the grounds that it made the U.S. less competitive. The EO had several key components. First, it called on federal agencies to modernize their programs that support state and local communities. Second, it emphasized the role of federal agencies in providing information, data and tools, decision-making tools to state and local, to the state and local level for climate change preparedness and resilience. Third, it required all agencies to develop, implement and update comprehensive plans that integrate climate preparedness and resilience into agency operations and overall mission objectives. There was an emphasis in this executive order to not silo adaptation into some side office, but really build it into the way agencies operate day to day. And it also, this EO also required that all agencies report on that progress. There was an accountability mechanism. So what did we achieve with this effort? I would say that having been part of the federal government during this period, you could see over the course of several years an increase in general awareness. There was a lot more fact-finding. There was a lot more looking at a high level, at least, how climate change was going to impact federal agencies' operations and missions. That was great. It was much rare to see agencies actually take on specific actions to go from risk assessment at a high level to actually taking action to address those risks. That said, again, bright spots existed. Some of the examples that struck me at that time, one was HUD. So basically what HUD did as a result was develop toolkits and training materials for its community, its grantees, so that they could incorporate climate resilience and preparedness in their affordable housing and community development plans. HUD's $28 billion community development block grants have become a popular way to foster rebuilding storm-ravaged communities after disasters. HUD and Rockefeller Foundation also partnered to launch a $1 billion competition in 26 awarding funding for resilient housing and infrastructure projects. Another example that I really appreciate is Veterans Affairs. When Veterans Affairs first started in this process, I remember hearing stories about officials showing up to these meetings and just kind of wondering, why is Veterans Affairs here? What does Veterans Affairs have to do with climate change? And what they discovered in going through this process is their facilities are actually at risk of sea level rise and flooding. And so as a result of this process, Veterans Affairs created new standards so that when they were developing new or retrofitting facilities, it was a requirement that they take the best available climate science into account. So there was progress overall in terms of raising awareness and capacity. It's interesting that if you looked at all of the agencies, they struggled with three things. And those three things are very similar to the revolutions we talk about in the report. They struggled with climate data. What data? How do you use that data? How do you apply it to their high level operations and strategies? There was a real challenge, I mean a real desire from agencies to get support in figuring out where the data was and how to use that data on planning. How to plan with uncertainty. I think I remember being in meetings where there was a, people would raise their hands and just say, tell me what the sea level, how much the sea level is going to rise and then I'll take that into account. And then you'd have the scientists basically saying, well, there's uncertainties, you need to plan with uncertainty. And you've got really good civil servants trying to figure out with no expertise in climate science, trying to figure out what to do with that information. So planning with uncertainty was a major challenge. The third is finance. It takes money to actually do these risk assessments, to build the capacity of people to do them and to identify solutions. And agencies I think struggled with that. Some invested in hiring climate scientists and others talked to each other. There was a lot of collaboration and communication between agencies to figure it out because the finances were there. This was something that people had to do in their day-to-day jobs. There was no additional funding. So with a few minutes left, kind of looking at this experience with this particular EO, I would have a couple of recommendations in terms of what the House can do, what Congress can do. And the first is this process of climate preparedness and resilience is a long-term process. It needs to be invested in as a long-term process. And legislation is key to helping ensure that we don't have these fits and stops. Federal agencies, what we learned over the last few years, we need to collaborate in order to provide the best data, the most usable actionable data and information and decision tools to both our states and communities. Second, we need to continue to integrate climate preparedness into our day-to-day business. Third, we need to incentivize these upfront investments and not keep thinking about how climate change is going to increase our disaster relief expenditures, but really identify ways in which we can take action to reduce those costs upfront, even if that means spending upfront. Another is changing the standards so that after disasters, communities and states have an easier time rebuilding in a stronger, more resilient way. And finally, this issue of equity. How can we, at both the federal, state and local level, ensure that marginalized and underserved communities do not continue to be the most vulnerable and continue to not have the capacity to adapt? And there are issues about what we can do to help communities at high risk with relocation, because communities will need to move. And what we can do to support communities that will be on the receiving end, they will need financial support as well. So with that, I'll conclude. Those are some of the key ways in which I see the report that we put out in September translating into the US context. Thank you. Thank you, Christina. I mean, I think you're absolutely right. It's very clear that awareness at the city and state and tribal level has been increasing. Mayors are in the front line of responding to all these extreme events. And I think if you look at the burgeoning of resilience officers, the Urban Resilience Network, there is a hunger for best practices, more data, and to be able to share things with each other quickly. Our last speaker is Leonardo Martinez Diaz, and he directs the Sustainable Finance Center at the World Resources Institute. Previously, Leo worked at the US Department of Treasury as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Energy and Environment, and he also worked on climate finance, of course, in that capacity, but also our international negotiations. He's held many other positions, also at the IMF, at the World Bank, at USAID, and he served on the Board of the Green Climate Fund. Leo is the author of the Financing Adaptation Chapter of the Global Commission on Adaptation. Leo? Thanks very much. It's great to be here with so many old colleagues and folks who have really spent a lot of time contributing to this issue. I want to focus now on the private sector. I think my colleagues have been very clear about showing you the challenges and the opportunities for the public sector, but now let's think about the other part of the economy, which is a huge amount of small and medium-sized enterprises as well as our large corporations. What is climate going to do to them, and how can they begin to prepare and begin to take action? As I think should be pretty clear from the comments you've heard today, companies will be affected by these impacts. Already, it's becoming pretty clear that these impacts are affecting the bottom line. They're affecting business operations. They affect business facilities. Let me give you a couple of examples. Mars, the food giant, is very aware that climate change is beginning to affect how and where it can source the key commodities that go into its products that we all know and love. And so they now have to start thinking about where are we going to begin to source some of these things in the future as crop yields are affected. Think about Bloomberg, the giant global financial data company that during Hurricane Sandy had its servers in a basement that came within inches of getting hit by water, wiping out the entire operations of this company. Think about our airlines, which are now increasingly concerned about the ability of their planes to take off in extremely hot weather, which would mean, of course, delays and losses that way. Think about our port operators and our shipping lines that are concerned about what happens when port facilities, as well as warehouses and railroads and so on, get flooded and become inoperative. So it's clear that business gets it. At least large corporations are now keenly aware of the impacts. They may not call it climate risk. They call it business continuity risk. They call it supply chain risk. But in the end, that's what it is. And they're beginning, in many cases, quietly, but very, very carefully to plan. And it is crucial that the government, the federal level and beyond, begin to help facilitate and encourage the private sector to take action. Now let me move to a very powerful tool that could help us do that, and that is the capital markets. So the US has, we've built this incredible apparatus, the capital markets, the stock market, the bond markets, which are enormously liquid, the biggest in the world, and very importantly, they're trusted. They're trusted by investors all around the world, and that's what makes these capital markets so powerful. And the reason they're trusted is because they are transparent. Thanks to reforms that go back all the way to the immediate period after the Great Depression, the Securities and Exchange Commission requires all public listed companies to tell us, the investors, about anything that could be material. That is to say, that would impact the value of securities, of stocks, in this case, should that information be known. And as a result, that information is something that investors can use to make decisions about buying and selling securities. And so the question then is, is climate change or climate impacts, are they material? Should companies report these to investors? Well, before that, it wasn't clear that that should be the case. I remember having a conversation with the US bank regulator in the hallway at the Treasury, where I said, look, maybe we should start thinking about the materiality of climate risk. And she said, look, if it was material, companies would be reporting it. And because they're not reporting it, it's not material, right? So this kind of circular argument is going to get us into real trouble because I think you could argue this is a new risk. It's sure, companies have been dealing with risk of different types all along. They have experienced hurricanes, they've experienced floods, but I think for the reasons that my colleagues have laid out, this type of risk is now a significantly new, qualitatively new type of risk in the sense that you're dealing with a much higher frequency and severity of events, and in some cases with cascading risks that cannot be as easily predicted. So what's been the approach to try to encourage to use these capital markets to get folks to think about climate risk? Well, some years ago, there was a very famous speech by the governor of the Bank of England who said, look, what we should do is to get companies to disclose this climate risk. Let's get the companies to explain to us, the investors, the regulators, the consumers, how they are taking these risks into account, how are they identifying the risks, and then what do they do with the risks once they find them, once they identify them, and what exactly do they have planned in order to cope with this major challenge? And as that becomes then quantified and disclosed, then that becomes known to the consumers, the investors, it gets incorporated into the buying and selling of securities and it is priced. As Manish said, the risk becomes visible, and then the prices begin to work their magic, if you will. The companies that take climate risk seriously that are really putting in place credible strategies, they'll be rewarded by the market with lower costs of capital, and those that are burying their heads in the sand will find themselves being punished by the market because the market will say, you're taking risks that are reckless and we're not gonna invest in you, right? That's the theory, and the question is, what happens now, how do we put that into play? And there's been, let me tell the story of one major initiative. It goes by the rather wonky name, the Task Force on Climate-Related Financial Disclosures, TCFD, to many of us that's become like the air we breathe, but I think in the real world, this is still a very obscure group. It's a privately led, private sector led, voluntary group that had the blessing of regulators, including from the US, and it put together some recommendations that were pretty common sense. If you look at them, they tried to advise companies about how they should disclose this type of risk and how they should do it, what types of categories they should consider. That, those recommendations went out in 2017. They were endorsed by hundreds of companies, including many US companies. And then the question became, well, how do you actually do this, right? How do you really make it granular? How do you put it into your reports to the SEC or to other investors? And I think the bottom line is it's not going great. Right now, there was a status report in the summer. Basically, of over 1,000 companies that were studied, about 25% are actually reporting, aligned with five of the 11 recommended disclosures, and only 4% of the 1,000 or so companies are disclosing, aligned with at least 10 of the 11 disclosures. In other words, it's going slowly, perhaps too slowly, given that we have a real time constraint. Now, we should not cast too much blame in the sense that this is not easy, and it's been relatively short time. Technically, it's hard to quantify these risks. As Christina said, you have to model things. There's uncertainty involved, getting the right data, making it compelling, making sure you're getting things right is difficult. And there is something called the first mover disadvantage as well. There's a lot of companies that are concerned that if they go out there with their climate risks and they are transparent about them, but their competitors don't do it, then they will be at a disadvantage. They will be perceived to be more risky than somebody else who has stayed quiet about their risk. So as one banker told me once, if I were a company today, I would be secretly preparing for climate risk while denying it in public, right? Not recommending you do that, but that is the perception out there. And that is going to be the problem as long as we have a voluntary system of disclosure. Those that feel they are doing things right may be more biased towards disclosing and those that have actually more risk may not want to disclose anything. And so that's partly what's holding back this project. What can we do now? What can we do next to try to address these things? Well, there's at least three things on the table right now. There's the Climate Risk Disclosure Act of 2019 introduced in the Senate by Senator Warren and there's, of course, a counterpart in the House. It basically would direct the SEC to issue rules within two years that require every public company to disclose a series of things, including its risk management strategies related to physical risks and transition risks posed by the climate crisis, right? It would, of course, the devil will be in the details and the SEC will have to work through that with the private sector and with the community of investors. But it is crucial that that type of authorities come from the Congress, otherwise it's just going to be left to the financial regulators and will still remain in this very difficult voluntary environment of very uneven disclosures. The SEC did issue in 2010 some guidance on disclosing against climate risk, but there was no introduction of new requirements for listing, so we're still in a world where this is encouraged but not required. Meanwhile, in Europe, they're moving forward with something called the European Union Sustainable Finance Taxonomy. This is, it sounds incredibly boring, but I assure you it's actually quite important. It's essentially going to be a list of activities that are determined by experts and scientists to be aligned with the Paris Agreement in terms of mitigation and in terms of adaptation that can help provide a sense of credibility around these types of activities. In other words, if a bank or another financial institution puts out a green bond or a green financial product or a product that is meant to be good for adaptation, how do you know if that's truly green, if that's truly sustainable and truly climate friendly? This is one way to do it. If you apply the taxonomy, the taxonomy will be an approved, fully endorsed definition of what good for mitigation or good for adaptation would be. And so this would be a sort of European standard that would be universally applied at least in Europe and would therefore help those in the market trying to make sense of these activities have that reference point. They are pretty far along, the taxonomy has been released, it's been consulted very extensively, but it has yet to be approved by the Council of Ministers and so that will be crucial if that happens. Then as of around 2023, this would start getting implemented and it would move very quickly in a major economy, major regional economy. And finally, there's the climate resilience principles. They were launched this year by the Climate Bonds Initiative. This is a focus very much on the bonds space. You may have heard about green bonds, they are now everywhere. The city of Washington DC issued its own green bond for water and the problem is a lot of these bonds are focused mostly in the mitigation side. We haven't really done very much on green bonds for adaptation or resilience. And what these standards do, and WRI was part of the process, is to help define exactly what are quote unquote, allowable, high quality, credible activities for adaptation and for resilience. And so there is good material out there, there's building blocks out there, but we have yet to take the big step of actually endorsing and turning these into law. So what should Congress do? I think the first thing is that I would say is to reflect on what we have learned over the last five years, and begin to realize that there are limitations to the voluntary disclosure regime that we are part of now. And that means, in my view, there's an obvious need to move towards a mandatory disclosure regime. That's what the Adaptation Commission's recommendations also contain. And I think importantly, these have to be gradually introduced, right? In order to make sure that the market will be able to absorb them and work through them. These are complicated things, but we have had some practice. The TCFD and other initiatives have already allowed the market to practice with a lot of these in a sandbox type of environment. So they'll have to be gradually introduced, but we're gonna need a set of common standards and metrics. If every company gets to choose how it reports, on what metrics, on what basis, and what scenarios, on what temperature targets, it's going to be such a disorder of information that the market will simply ignore it. It's crucial that this information be presented to the market, to the investors, in a way that is comparable, that is consistent, and that is common to all of the companies. And that's going to take centralized action, and that's why it's so important to have government involvement. It's important that we initially apply this to the publicly listed companies in the first instance. Folks often say, well, smaller, medium-sized enterprises don't have the resources to do this. It would be an enormous burden on them, and that's true. We're not suggesting that this type of disclosure begin with SMEs, that it should begin with those that are publicly listed. That's where we have the authorities and the mechanisms to do that. The process will take time, so it's better to start soon, especially now that the voluntary approach is run for five years. And it's important to ensure that the US and Europe don't end up with separate standards. This has happened before. For example, those of you who follow accounting standards and be familiar with that, it's important here that we begin a conversation, transatlantic conversation, so that the two largest capital markets in the world will be able to have a single standard, not competing ones. And finally, it's going to be important to get China and Japan to eventually join this so that there is a level playing field in terms of disclosure. Let me say at the end that transparency and disclosure are not going to solve everything. The market transparency will be a very powerful tool to move the system across the board, but it will not necessarily help the transition. We're still going to have to provide assistance and support to companies and to communities in order for them to build that resilience. The market will simply be able to discriminate between those that are riskier and less risky and may even move very swiftly to punish those that are not taking action. But unless we also provided at the same time a lot of support and a lot of help to those who want to build resilience, it's going to be very difficult for them to move forward. Thank you very much for this opportunity. We very much look forward to continuing this dialogue. Thank you, Leo. I think your point is very well taken that the international markets are moving very, very quickly and strongly towards climate risk disclosure and the US should be part of defining that. You also, when you started, made me think again of that iconic picture during Hurricane Sandy of Goldman Sachs, the only lit building in Midtown Manhattan, which brought me back to Manisha's opening point of, you know what, it takes a system. It's not any good to have just one building lit if you can't get anybody to or from. And so the infrastructure, the transportation, the finance, the natural resource systems, all very necessary to build a resilient system. So finally, it's your turn to ask questions and I want to invite Dan Bresset back up. I can't believe we sat through all of that without applauding. It was fantastic. I think they deserve a round of applause. I had all I could do not to burst into a pause. Before we get into the Q and A, though, just a couple of quick things. First, I would like to give a special thanks to our friends at the Select Committee. The Select Committee is not a, it's made up of people who are committed to working on the problem and we have two of them today. We have Sam Medlock in the back, Senior Counsel. Melvin Felix, Communications Director. Melvin, I think you'd like to say just a couple of words. Great, thanks. Thank you. On behalf of Chair Kaster, I'd like to thank everyone for being here today. Really quickly wanted to mention, so the Select Committee on the Climate Crisis is developing a set of policy recommendations for climate action, for Congress to take, and those will be made public in March of next year. And we need your ideas and your policy proposals as groups, as organizations, and as individuals. So I wanted to plug our information request, which is climatecrisis.house.gov. Slash info request. It is a big document where you can fill out any parts that you have ideas on, whether it's like resilience, adaptation, carbon pricing, all of that. So again, that's climatecrisis.house.gov slash info request and you can follow our work on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram, Climate Crisis. Thank you so much, Sam, if you wanna say something? Yeah, come here. Yeah, we have a, you can either come up here, we have a roving mic too. Get that down to normal height. So Sam Medlock, senior counsel for the House Select Committee on the Climate Crisis. I also just really wanna recognize some of our other fantastic staff that are here in the audience with Raleigh Martin, who is our AAAS and AGI fellow, and is really helping to lead a lot of our thinking around science, including metrics and data, and how do we deliver on a lot of the tools and decision support tools that are an actionable information that's needed. And then also our incredible clerk Dana and a couple of our interns are also here. So everybody kind of give a wave and catch up with them and talk with these folks after we adjourn. But this is all building toward our report to the Congress in March 2020. Your input is really valuable to that process as noted. So thank you, appreciate it. Thanks, thanks, Sam. And thanks also to the Science, Space, and Technology Committee for hosting us in their nice room. We, so today is November 1st. I've only been with the ESI for a month and we've been very, very, very, very busy. In addition to working on our response to the RFI, Team EESI, who, and there are many of us here, have also been very busy with briefings. We do a lot of briefings and they're all fantastic. So if you're not a regular attendee, that should change and you should start attending. We have webcast options. We have three coming up that I need to plug. November 6th, next week, Community-Centered Resilience Lessons from Louisiana. November 15th, the growing role of renewable energy in the U.S. energy mix in November 22nd, which is also the deadline for the RFI response. That's burned into my memory. Legal pathways to deep decarbonization in the U.S. These are just the ones in November. We'll be making announcements for December and January. And like I said, if you can't be with us in person, we do have webcast. We also record everything and they're all on the website. So if you're not, again, already visiting EESI.org, subscribing to our newsletters, including the Climate Solutions newsletters. We have a lot of information and it's all quite good. And so if you're not currently using us as a resource, we should change that. Also like to thank our friends at C-SPAN for bringing us to a wider audience today. And again, thank our friends at World Resources Institute for all the great work. We're gonna go ahead and get started with questions. We have a roving microphone somewhere. Oh, there she is. It is held by Savannah. I don't know if it, yeah. But I'm gonna get started. I'm gonna kick us off with the first question. And the first question is, when you look at what other developed countries are doing, are there, and to advance human adaptation practices and making investments, what are the best practices and lessons learned that you think US policymakers should look at and emulate? And your microphones will turn on in the same way with the little talk button. Please feel free, Christina. Thanks, Dan. This report actually has several examples from other developed countries, but I will name, I'll develop major economies, I'm going to expand it. I'd name four examples of good practices. One is the Netherlands. As many know, the Dutch have been living with water for quite some time. And there's an example of their effort, Room for the River is what it's called. And basically, instead of building levees higher and higher as the sea level rises, it's actually making room for the river so that it does flood and allowing that space for flooding and not having development on that space, which then increases losses and damages. Second would be an example on infrastructure in the UK. An iconic example in the adaptation community is the Thames Barrier built to protect I think 1.3 million people, more than 265 billion pounds of property and assets from storm surges and high tide. China, often example used in China is sponge cities. So they've got a goal in these sponge cities in China to either absorb or use or capture 80% of stormwater runoff in urban areas by 2030. And I would say the fourth is our neighbors to the north in Canada, investing and financing in nature-based solutions, particularly natural infrastructure, restoring saltwater marshes, for example, on the Bay of Fundy in order to protect against coastal flooding. Any other comments from our panelists? Okay, we'll go ahead and turn to the audience. We have a question right up here in front. Thanks, I'm Karen Florini with Climate Central. And earlier, this is a question I think primarily for Leo. Earlier this week, we published a peer-reviewed study showing that coastal flooding risks are massively greater in most of the world other than the U.S. than had previously been understood because we were able to develop an improvement on the coastal elevation data set because of course sea level rise isn't just how high is the water but also how high is the land. And the data set that have been used today turns out to be wrong by an average error of six feet. We've been able to use machine learning to adjust that down to about three inches. The result being that there are about 300 million people who are at risk of annual flooding three times more than previously understood by 2050. 150 million at risk of daily flooding, also known as high tide line by again 2050 and those numbers basically double at the end of the century. So my question for Leo is how do we ensure that as companies are doing their analysis of climate risks that they are using new data such as this and not just this but also other data as it becomes available much of which indicates that the risks are way worse than had been understood to date. Well, a couple of thoughts. One is first is gonna be crucial to have the type of disclosure regime that I mentioned in my remarks because that will then empower investors including the really big institutional investors who hold large chunks of shares in these companies to engage with those companies and ask what are you doing to deal with this risk? What precisely are you using in terms of your scenarios, your planning? What kinds of baseline scenarios are you considering to be most probable and how are you deploying resources against that? What are the redundancies and other safeguards that you're putting into place so that if this were to happen, you don't suddenly lose production, lose the supply. The other piece of course is the insurance companies. The insurers are gonna be crucial because their conversations with companies will have to be taken quite seriously. Companies rely heavily of course on insurers to deal with a lot of this risk and reinsurers even to deal with the super risks. And so the insurers are gonna want to know that the companies are also taking into account the best science data available. And we need to make sure that there isn't moral hazard. In other words, that there isn't the perception that government will come in and bail you out because that is the perception certainly in the residential market. We all know about the National Flood Insurance Program and its challenges. The Global Commission adaptation mentions this issue of moral hazard. How do we make sure that companies do nothing because they feel that ultimately if there is damage that there is an implicit, what's known as an implicit government guarantee that will essentially pull resources into those companies and communities. Of course, government has to be there to protect communities to help them recover. But there has to be a division of labor and division of financial labor between the public sector and the private sector. And that conversation we haven't truly had yet. And we're going to have to have it. It's going to require both. And it's going to require demarcating where the government's role begins and where it ends and where companies are going to be expected to put some skin in the game. Thanks for the question. We have a question over here. Just a second. Oh, no. While we're, yes, please go. A 20 second addition just to that is one of the things that we also recognize in the report is that given the pace of urbanization taking place globally and the incredible lack of data that city officials have in many places around the world, one of the most strategic investments that can be made is basic topographic maps for cities. The city officials don't even know necessarily the spatial elevation in their area. Just one thing. We mapped everything that we did. It's all online. And how we actually then translate or share that and use that for the uptake with given some of the recent advances to be able to do that is a huge, huge opportunity. Hi, yes. So one of the things that has been emphasized is a need for action on the federal level. And so my question is that haven't seen so much of that recently. And if we don't see that soon, let's say within the next four years, is there a plan B? Is there something that cities or can the private sector step up more? Yes, do we have a backup plan if federal support doesn't come quickly? Thanks for the question. While our panelists are thinking, I'll say a couple of things on that. One is I think that perception is pretty widespread but I'm not sure it's completely accurate. I think we talked about this last week in the Senate Energy Committee. There are a lot of bills and they're not just being introduced. They're being, their committees are taking action. Many of them are finding their way to the Senate floor or the calendar at least. I think the transportation bill, which has a lot of emphasis on infrastructure including nature-based solutions and natural infrastructure is one example. That sitting on the calendar is bipartisan. You know, who knows when it will come up but I think it has a lot of potential. And of course on the House side, the select committee's been very busy but so have the committees of jurisdiction, energy and commerce in particular has been working through a lot of bills. Many of them are limited in scope so maybe there's an energy efficiency bill, a storage bill, a workforce bill, a weatherization bill. But I think when taken together, if they could be enacted, passed and enacted in the 116th Congress, I think that would be a great place to get started. But let me see what the panelists think too. Yeah, I would agree and I would just say I think one of the most amazing things we saw was the coalition that's called We Are Still In and so you're seeing cities and states, the private sector, the philanthropic community, the investment community all saying, we recognize this is a problem and we are still dedicated to confronting climate change both mitigating as much as the US had originally promised and coping with these problems that as I say, the city mayors are feeling on the front line. And I think that was an amazing amassment of groups all around a common theme. And I think there is great strength in those numbers. We know philanthropy can't solve it. We know the public monies can't solve it. You really need the private sector to be in there strongly and they are now. Feel free to go right down the line. Sure, just to add to that on the We Are Still In, the US climate alliance, most of the focus has been on what they're doing on mitigation but they have been doing quite a bit on adaptation. There's a whole set of kind of land use solutions related to agricultural or forest lands that they are working with. And we also need to remember that oftentimes some of the best solutions, both kind of sequester carbon, kind of help on the mitigation side but also build resilience. So there's a lot that can be done both on mitigation and adaptation. And the other piece is also to think a little bit about not only looking at standalone bills that look at adaptation and how you weave building resilience into your kind of bills that are likely to go forward in any case. There was a nice example and I don't know the details but I suspect you do, the Transportation Infrastructure Act. But there's gonna be a wide range of bills and one of the things that we try to make clear in this report is that adaptation is, good adaptation is just about doing kind of growth or development differently. And we need to kind of look at how to actually reframe sometimes the narrative from one that might be polarized around climate action to one that also can be about building resilience and what we do every day. I'd like to hold on to the hope that we, on adaptation and resilience and climate preparedness we can do both and it's not a plan A or plan B. I think frontline communities and cities because they're facing the impacts of climate change today and regularly will continue to take action to prepare. One of our commissioners is the mayor of Miami Francis Suarez and he's doing some great things in Miami. One of the examples that we highlight in the report is the Miami Forever Bond where taxpayers in Miami actually voted for their taxpayer money to go towards climate preparedness. I also think that there are front runner states and front runner cities and communities that will continue to take steps to adapt. I think we need the, at the federal level, it's, I remember there was a mayor from Louisiana so I'm so glad you're doing a session on Louisiana on November 6th who was part of the state local tribal task force. And no, it was Alabama, not Louisiana. It was a mayor from Alabama who was talking about how she just doesn't have the resources that a Miami or New York has. And so it's those communities that are also at the front lines but don't necessarily have the resources and capacity. And that's where I think the federal government and the policies at the federal, national level are needed to support those communities. So I would, I remain hopeful that we can do both. And just one last federal asset that does still exist and is still being amplified on is NOAA's climate resilience toolkit which has examples from all different parts of the country and you can put in your latitude and longitude, your city and it will give you future projections and you can work your way through what is most vulnerable and then give you some case studies of how other smaller big communities have responded. Okay, great. One of the themes of our RFI response as we're putting it together is actually kind of the point that you're raising which is in order to get this done, it can't just be the federal government, it can't just be state government, it can't just be local governments. This requires a huge amount of coordination in order to get this done because we don't have time to waste resources, right? If we're not all pulling in the same direction at the same time or at least in a staged order that makes sense, it's gonna be very difficult. I think we had another question up here in the front. So first off, thanks for such an amazing set of talks. My name's Alex and I'm working with Senator Schatz and I have a question about climate change risk versus transition risk. So for the private sector, it seems that different companies have very different portfolios of risk, whether they're an agricultural company and they have climate change risk versus, for instance, fossil companies where they have a large transition risk. I'm wondering, do the large institutional investors, are they mostly worried right now about climate change risk or transition risk? And then further, with the Disclosure Act, do you think that they'll use the same framework for climate change risks and transition risks or is there gonna need to be a different framework? Leo, that sounded like it was aimed right at you. So yeah, so climate risk is sort of the umbrella term and then within that you have the transition risk that is to say the danger that your business model will be upended by changes in policy or changes in technology so that if your company's based on pumping oil and gas and selling it at a market price, if suddenly that becomes unfeasible because of changes in regulation then what happens to your company's value? And this physical risk, which is all the things we've been talking about here, the hurricanes, the droughts and so on affecting your company. I think initially companies were mostly focused on transition risk. Initially when the TCFD and others were launched, the focus was very much on the large emitters, the cement companies, the energy companies and how are they going to deal with this shift to essentially a higher carbon price? And I think since then, partly because of all of the disasters that have beset the world over the last four years, the private sector has now and the investors are now increasingly concerned about physical risk. We at the finance center, the LRI, talked to a lot of investors, especially the asset managers and the asset owners who are sort of the top of the financial food chain and they tell us that they are most concerned about climate risk and they are increasingly devoting resources to understanding physical risk. The problem is they need data. They need lots of data from the companies in which they invest and oftentimes that data is not forthcoming or it's coming in ways that are hard to compare and that's again where the disclosure, the mandatory disclosure regime could help. But I think the private sector now really gets it and they're really concerned about it. The two kinds of risk, the transition and the physical are very different, right? So one is about regulatory and technological change affecting a very specific set of high emitting companies. The other is about a complex set of physical risk affecting supply chains and the markets more broadly. So the frameworks will have to be different for both and so in order to do this right, you're gonna have to need really two sets of people who are quite different in their skills and their expertise to put together frameworks that make sense for each one of the risks. Just had one small addition to that is that for many of these companies that have complex global supply chains that these risks really need to be better appreciated given that physical risk may manifest itself quite different in different parts of the value chain but in particular the transition risk, the regulatory risk also has implications given that many other countries are actually taking action on this at times considerably faster than in this country. And so in that vein, this reminds me that we did a look at the end of the last administration of adaptation in the private sector and it was really shocking. This sort of answers the previous question too though about how things are accelerating. We, most of the S&P 100 were most worried about contingency, keeping operations going and only 18% were using long-term climate models to think about things now, it's almost 40%. And so that's been just a few years. And so this idea as Manish says, about the supply chains and understanding an event in one part of the world is gonna affect you too is really taking off. So I think that's very important. Thanks, I think we have time for one as long as it's brief up here in the front row. The front row is really showing up today with questions, thank you. John Webber with pedestrians.org. Just like talk a little more about the highway bills that are, or transportation bills that are going through. Where transportation is located often determines where private investment is gonna go and where we're gonna develop. What should we look for or try to get into the transportation bills to keep transportation infrastructure from getting people to build in the wrong places? Well, I'll just say that's a good question and I'll leave that to our panelists. I think two things kind of stick out to me in the transportation bill. Three things actually stick out to me. One is that it's going to move. It's a viable legislative vehicle. There has to be a transportation reauthorization. And so by that means it will attract lots of attention and everyone will have their lots of ideas for what the committees and what the members can do. There are also some block grant programs. We heard about one of the existing block grant programs. I think community development, CDBG. But there are other block grant programs in particular. There's one called the surface transportation block grants and then there's one that is the promoting resilient operations for transformative, efficient and cost-saving transportation, which conveniently reduces to protect. And those are great ways for the federal government to encourage the kinds of adaptation investments that the panelists have talked about. But if you have questions about land use and transportation planning, I'm happy to turn it over to the panel. So I'm not familiar with the bill, but just speaking generally in terms of transportation and what we can be doing, I was struck by actually the last point in your question about how do you prevent or disincentivize maladaptation, building transportation in areas that we know are going to be more at risk, for example, of floods. Where a one in 100 flood is now a one in 25 year. And I think that gets to Dan's point on land use. How can we be better at thinking about how do we change and update our zoning and regulations to disincentivize building of public transportation and infrastructure in areas that we know are at risk? Just to add to that, I think you need a couple of things. One is to make sure that the planning, the design, the siting of the infrastructure is going to be based on the best available data and the most updated flood maps, because you're talking about infrastructure that has a life expectancy of 50 plus years, right? The other thing is what's known as no regret policies or no regret practices, where basically what you do is you incorporate into the infrastructure some flexible features. So you may not know for sure what sea level rise is going to look like in 30 years, but what you might do is make sure that that structure can be at low cost, expanded or raised or elevated or retrofitted in some way in order to cope with a projection that exceeds your baseline, right? And so for example, in California, there is a bridge that has structures that are designed for a certain sea level height, but that can be elevated further should the need arise, and it can be done cheaply. So you have to factor those flexibilities into the structure before you build it, just for a rainy day, if you will, if you want to do that. I looked that way and saw Doug Mason sitting over there, and Doug, I know, was part of an effort, Hoover Institute put out a paper this year, right? Doug on infrastructure and principles for climate resilient infrastructure. One, I mean, I was just reading through it the other day, and I can't remember what the six or so principles were, but I think there are organizations out there like Hoover and experts like Doug Mason in the room, who I think would be a wealth of expertise on advice to that particular bill. Thanks, I think we're gonna have to end it there. We're a couple minutes past 11. Speaking to the bill, we have a wonderful fact sheet, EESI.org, Nature-Based Solutions in the Transportation Bill. Let me thank Anna and Amber and Savannah and George and Omri and Dan Oh and Absentia for all the work pulling off today's briefing. Thank you, panelists, thank you, Rosina, and I hope everyone has a really great rest of your Friday. Thank you. Thank you.