 All right, we are gonna go ahead and get started. We may have a few more people join us in the room, which is great, and thanks to everyone in our online audience as well today. Dana, are we okay? Great, all right. Welcome to the first ESI Congressional Briefing of 2024. Thank you very much for joining us today. We are going to be unpacking the fifth national climate assessment. I'd like to start by sharing thanks with Representative Paul Tonko's office and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for their help with the room today. Thank you, Sharon and David and everyone for all your help with that. I'm Dan Berset, I'm the President of the Environmental Energy Study Institute. And not just is this the first briefing of 2024, this is the first briefing of the year we are celebrating 40 years of congressional education. That's right. If you believe it, 40 years ago, a bipartisan group of members of Congress decided that what this country needed what policymakers needed was an organization independent, nonpartisan, science-based to pull together informational resources to help inform policymakers and their staff about climate change topics. Originally environmental and energy topics and over time climate change topics. And we've been doing it every day since then and it's a great joy to be back up here on the hill doing these sorts of briefings. We do a lot of briefings. Last year we did a couple dozen. This year we're probably gonna do a couple dozen. We'll be back two weeks from today on February 1st to talk about energy earth shots, which is something you may be hearing coming out of the Department of Energy. We'll be back a couple weeks after that to talk about innovations in weather forecasting. We'll be doing a briefing on the budget and appropriations process, you won't wanna miss that. And there's even more to come. Our briefings are always free, they're always online. Even if you can't be with us in person, there's always an opportunity to check them out. You can also download all of the presentation materials from our speakers, you can watch archived webcasts and after a couple weeks you can even read summary notes of what the panelists said. We want these briefings to be very, very useful resources. You might say, well, that's an awful lot to keep up with. How could I possibly do so? Well, just so happens that every other Tuesday we issue climate change solutions, which is our biweekly newsletter. If you haven't already subscribed to that, I really encourage you to. It's a great way to keep up with all of our resources. Not just briefings, we also do articles, podcasts, fact sheets, issue briefs. Our goal when we do these resources is we understand what it's like to have a boss come to you on, I don't know, like a three o'clock on a Thursday afternoon and say, hey, what's this thing? And if it's a climate change thing, you can count on EESI to help you find an answer to that question. We try to make our resources timely, relevant, accessible, and practical. And a lot of thought goes into that. For example, at some point we're gonna have a farm bill and when we do have a farm bill or when we're debating farm bill text, you can come to EESI.org and you can download side by side by side comparison charts of what the house is proposing, what the Senate's proposing, and eventually what the conferees are talking about as we move through that process. It's much, much better to have the information before you need it, and we try really hard to give you the information before you all even know you need it so that you can help your bosses stay informed and up to date on climate change topics. But today we're here to talk about the fifth national climate assessment, which is a really big deal, because in many ways it's for Congress and it's really important for policy makers to take an opportunity to learn more about what the fifth national climate assessment had to say. It was released last year on November 14th, so a little bit more than two months ago, and this report absolutely demands the attention of Congress. NCA-5, as it's abbreviated, is the most comprehensive, holistic, and inclusive report to date on national climate risk and response. If you read the report, you'll note that there are some signs of progress, but unfortunately nowhere near the scale, scope, or pace necessary to achieve the US goal of reducing greenhouse gas emissions by at least 50% by 2030. And the report also makes it crystal clear, and we'll hear more about this today, that our resolve to adapt to climate impacts and help communities improve their resilience is plainly insufficient. Our next slide up on the screen here is a survey. We usually, we talk about our survey at the end, but maybe you're only able to join us for the first half, and so if you like what you're hearing, if you don't like what you're hearing, if you have comments, feedback, if you're on the livecast, if you have any audio or video problems, you can use this link to tell us what you think. We read every response, and if you're in the room, you can use that QR code to take you to the survey as well. But now, we are going to hear from a very special guest, Representative Scott Peters is joining us today via prerecorded video remarks. Representative Peters was elected in 2012, and today serves California's 50th congressional district. He is a member of the House Energy and Commerce and House Budget Committees, where he's championed and passed historic legislation to protect our environment and promote the energy transition. Representative Peters also works to fix a broken budget process and take our nation's unsustainable debt and tackle our nation's unsustainable debt. And in addition to his committee assignments, he co-chairs the Bipartisan Fiscal Forum, the House Special Operations Forces Caucus. He chairs the New Democrat Coalition's Climate Change and Clean Energy Task Force, and is the vice chair of the LGBTQ Equality Caucus. And so any further ado, my colleague is going to show us Representative Peters' video. Hi everyone, I'm Congressman Scott Peters, and it's great to be with you virtually today to talk about the fifth national climate assessment. A critically important, congresely mandated interagency effort that's been informing policymakers for over 20 years. First, I want to thank the US Global Change Research Program for its work on the report, as well as EESI for shedding light on the key takeaways. I hope these findings will be a critical tool in helping policymakers first understand the causes and impacts of climate change, and two, to encourage us to build enduring national resilience against climate hazards that threaten human health and wellbeing, critical infrastructure, and natural environments. Science is very clear. To avoid the worst consequences of climate change, the entire world, not just the US, needs to commit to bold action to get emissions under control. But the US will only remain a global leader by embracing this challenge and raising our ambition to meet this historic moment, not by abdicating responsibility and pointing fingers elsewhere. We can address climate change, create millions of good-paying jobs, and reduce economic inequality by raising our standards and accepting our responsibility to lead. As we work aggressively to combat the climate crisis, we also have to prepare our communities for the unavoidable destruction of climate change. In my district in San Diego, this means rising sea levels and coastal erosion, more frequent and intense wildfires, drought, heat waves, and extreme weather that endangers the health, safety, and livelihoods of my constituents. I've worked with my colleague, Rep Maria Salazar, and my Senate colleagues on NCARS, the National Coordination on Adaptation and Resilience for Security Act, which mandates the development of a national strategy to streamline this work and the creation of a permanent position at the White House to coordinate our climate resiliency efforts. I appreciate the thoughtful work you all do on this topic, and I look forward to continuing to work with my colleagues and all of you on solutions to this great, great challenge. Thank you again for having me and please enjoy the briefing. And thank you to Representative Peters and his great staff for helping enable his participation in the event today. They are a really great group to work with, and we really, really appreciate his leadership. We're gonna go ahead and get underway with our panelists, and this is a pretty good panel, but I have one more thing I need to say, and that is, this panel is so good, we will absolutely have time for questions and answers, and you will definitely have questions, and they will probably have answers. For folks in the room, my colleague Allison will have a microphone, and she'll be very, very happy to find you in the audience, and you can ask your question in person. If you're in our online audience, you have a couple different options. The first is you can send us an email with your question, and that email address to use is ask, that's ASK at EESI.org. You can also tweet us at EESI online, EESI online. And speaking of EESI online, be sure to follow us on social media. In addition to ex the website, formerly known as Twitter and Facebook and LinkedIn, we're also doing real-time coverage of our briefing today on our Instagram story. But without any further ado, that brings us to the first of our panelists today. Rosina Birbaum is the Roy F. Weston Chair of Natural Economics at the University of Maryland School of Public Policy, and a professor at the University of Michigan School for Environment and Sustainability. She served for two decades in the US, legislative and executive branches, and has also served on the President Obama's Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, and as an adaptation fellow at the World Bank, co-authoring the World Development Report on Climate Change. Rosina chairs the Scientific and Technical Advisory Panel of the Global Environment Facility. She's also a member of the National Academy of Sciences, and perhaps most prestigious of all, Rosina is a member of EESI's Board of Directors. So Rosina, it is always a thrill to welcome you to one of our briefings today. I'll turn it over to you. Thank you. Thank you so much, Dan. I'm very, very proud to be a member of the Board of EESI, which kept me well informed during those 20 years in the legislative and executive branches. I thought I would use my 10 minutes and not PowerPoint to make five points and one, talk about the evolution of the assessment. Second, to talk about the review process. Third, about its usefulness. Fourth, about some new information. And then fifth, as we think about the future, what might we hope for in the sixth one? So yes, I was working for the Congress when the Global Change Act of 1990 was passed, and the text of that is still quite formidable. It requires a report to the Congress and to the President that integrates, evaluates, and interprets the findings of the multi-agency program, the U.S. Global Change Research Program, discusses scientific uncertainties, analyzes the effects of global change on the natural environment, on agriculture, on energy and land, water, transportation, human health and welfare social systems, and biological diversity. And that's not enough. You will also project out 20 to 100 years. So Congress, you asked for a lot. But this is, as Dan said, your report. And I think really the idea was, to hold the administration's feet to the fire, to show what the then $1 billion program was producing and how it was giving information that was usable. So I then, within minutes of that act being passed, ended up going to the White House Science Office and was told, do the first national climate assessment. So there is a lesson here, which is be careful what you ask for, you may have to do it. But now we have the fifth one and fortunately the U.S. Global Change Program has grown to $4 billion or more. It includes a coordination across 15 of the federal agencies and the assessments been produced for both Republican and Democratic administrations. And unlike many of the inscrutable things, scientists like me tend to write, this one has great graphics. It's very accessible, it's clickable, it's searchable. And you can find chapters written by sector of the economy, such as agriculture or energy or water. Or you can find it by response actions, mitigation or reducing emissions or adaptation or coping with climate change and by region of the United States. And as you know, none of us lives in the average global climate and how climate feels to you in your place in the Midwest is very different than it'll feel in the Southeast U.S., which Dr. Rivers will discuss. And then the regional chapters pull together what is at risk in those regions based on a suite of pre-existing conditions, the kind of crops that are grown there, the availability of clean water, the industry of that region, the infrastructure of that region and the economy and how all of that might change in the future. We know climate change affects all sectors at the same time, but the composite impact of climate change, whether from the slow onset or the changing extreme events will play out differently in Maryland or in Florida or in Alaska. And that then requires us to plan for, manage, and have policies that are different in those different places. So I think one lesson is that climate change overlays on top of existing stresses, such as ongoing biodiversity loss or spreading invasive species like the emerald ash borer or water shortages that we already have in the Southwest. So yes, it's true. I helped design the first national climate assessment and I wrote the adaptation chapter for the third one, but I had no role in this. So I think I am completely unbiased in my remarks. And I thought one thing that I should mention, peer review has been much in the press of late, but I'd like to say that this report has gone through several rounds of reviews. First by government scientists, then by expert scientists, then the lay public. And additionally, there was something like 34 public engagement sessions, three tribal sessions, and participation in both youth and environmental justice dialogues. And then the National Academy of Sciences reviewed it and produced a 346-page report. And then it was re-reviewed and revised based on all of the above. And each chapter actually has a wonderful traceable accounts if you want to look and find the original data. So this is quite amazingly reviewed. Who should be using this? Well, as you look through it, you'll see there's information that can help hospital managers think about how at-risk they are from storm surge. And so for example, lots of thought going into relocating equipment from the basement so that you can continue to operate when there's floods. Many of you know that historically water managers have planned for the old 100-year extreme event, but past is no longer prologue. There were three 500-year floods in Houston in three years. And this assessment is helping explain the new normal and the new 500-year event. And so for example, Chicago, which has experienced the worst precipitation in 30 years, is thinking about how can it now prevent the city from flooding. And we're seeing farmers who are experiencing earlier springs and later fall and more droughts and more floods thinking about cropping dates and which crops can persist and be most productive. And for example, now Michigan is growing many more cherry cultivars than it used to because we're getting earlier and later frost dates. And so we need to adapt to remarkable changeable conditions. Certainly also health officers can evaluate the likely frequency and duration of heat events which we've seen all around the world and the increased movement of disease vectors like ticks and mold and pathogens. And so really this assessment is meant for managers, for planners, for farmers. It's useful no matter what walk of life you're in. I must say I assigned the regional chapters to my graduate student class and I thought it would be important to also get the youth review which Allison can talk about her own youth review. But the students I have to say love the graphics. They love the interactive nature. They love the clarification of the levels of uncertainty. They love the Atlas where you can look at the climate maps and the climate data but they were also really moved by the youth art and by the poem by our poet laureate. And you know, climate change is very real to youth and pervades their thoughts of their future quality of life. This fifth assessment has a much stronger look at distributional impacts with a new chapter on economics and also a new chapter on social systems and social science and social systems and justice and looks at who's going to bear the impacts more clearly. And it's often really the poorest in any part of the country. And the communities that will be affected or are already affected are better called out in this report as our issues related to tribes. You know, we've learned now that vulnerability to climate change is often reflective of the past too. So for example, historic redlining in cities like Richmond where it's impossible to have enough green space or parks. The ability to protect people and infrastructure depends on characterizing what's vulnerable and then how that can be ameliorated. And I guess I would say as you've already intimated Dan that thinking about climate adaptation and resilience has been under attended to in general, really for most of the last 20 years. And so researchers, planners and managers are all scrambling to catch up with the changes we're already seeing and more to be in place. Caitlin will tell us more about the adaptation chapter. And indeed, while hundreds of cities and dozens of states have adaptation plans on the books, very few have gotten to the point of implementation of the measures they've identified as helpful and even fewer have gotten to the point of evaluating what measures have been implemented to determine what more can be done and what best practices are. So I congratulate the progress this report has made on many of these issues. And also Senator Coons, Murkowski and representatives Peter and Salazar for their focus on a national coordination on adaptation and resilience for security act. And indeed in several briefings that EESI has held before, we've heard that not just human security but national security issues are at risk and readiness as was reported by several of the armed services. So whether you look at our domestic ports flooding, extreme events affecting infrastructure or migration, et cetera. So the frequency and intensity of extreme events as I've said requires new thinking. We're gonna have more intense fires, floods, droughts, heat waves. And as the report notes in 2023, the US experienced $28 billion impacts. Some of those are not yet added up because we haven't done the East Coast floods which went from Maine down to Florida, but it'll be well over $100 billion. And my last point is as the climate, as NCA5 shows, adaptation actions are increasing but they're still well behind. Mitigation or emissions reduction. And Adrienne will talk about the mitigation chapter. We know, as Dan said, the current emission reductions aren't enough either but energy research does have a few decades on adaptation research. And so an area that could help with both mitigation and adaptation and deserving more attention, I would argue, is nature-based solutions or also called natural climate solutions. Storing carbon in forests and soils in mangroves, protecting wildlife and habitat and restoring habitat. And those can help buffer sea level rise, absorb floodwaters, green spaces can cool cities. And so a new survey, which I think was just summarized by EESI on Tuesday, said that 92% of US citizens support those kind of nature-based solutions actions across the political spectrum. So those are some win-wins that I think we need to focus on more going forward. So by NCA6, I hope we have ramped up mitigation and adaptation. Learned from ongoing mitigation and adaptation, have pursued nature-based solutions, have increased our resilience to natural disaster. And I hope we'll be showing dramatic progress on all of these, not incremental but truly transformational as we need to. So thank you very much. Thank you, Rosina. I'll return that to its owner. Thank you very much. That was great. You mentioned the artwork and Allison and Izzy brought the artwork. So it's actually out on the front table. If you wanna check it out, it's really, really cool. And it is graphically, it's aesthetically pleasing to look at. It's a really impressive report. I don't know if the Google Doc that you used to do all of the peer review was nearly as aesthetically pleasing as the artwork or whatever editing software you used. Rosina, you mentioned nature-based solutions, natural climate solutions. We just did an article about the US Nature for Climate Survey that came out, I think, on Tuesday. It was in our newsletter. We also did a side event at COP28 on carbon management, carbon markets, and that's something that's available like every one of our past events on our website if you'd like to learn more a little bit about that. So our next panelist is, perhaps the panelist that helped make it all possible. Allison Crimmins is a climate scientist and the director of the Fish National Climate Assessment. Allison is detailed to the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy from the EPA's Office of Air and Radiation. Her expertise lies in assessing domestic and international climate impacts and mitigation benefits, particularly from health and economic perspectives. Allison has a record of convening diverse teams devoted to scientifically sound risk assessment and policy implementation, notably as the lead of the 2016 US Climate and Health Assessment. Allison, welcome to the briefing and congratulations again on a really, really impressive product. Thank you so much. All right, let me guess. All right, thank you for having me. As Dan noted, the fifth National Climate Assessment, or NCA5, I'm gonna use that acronym a lot, is the most up-to-date and comprehensive report on how climate change is affecting us right here in the United States. It was released on November 14th of last year, so I'm very excited to be here to actually share some of the findings with you. I didn't wanna spend too much time giving you sort of the 101 about the National Climate Assessment since I knew Rosina was gonna just set me up perfectly for that. So I won't go over all of these points here, but I did wanna call out just a couple of them that I think might be particularly of interest here. And the first is that while the National Climate Assessments are policy relevant, they are not policy prescriptive. So we do not include any recommendations. We don't tell you what you should do. We avoid the word should. We don't advocate for anything. Instead, what we're doing is providing you with the information you need to make decisions. And that is what the National Climate Assessment is in a nutshell. It is the public's guide, it is your guide to climate change in the United States. So when you're writing policy, when you're making decisions about when or how to build something or where to move something or how to manage infrastructure, this is your go-to source for climate data to inform those decisions. And I hope by the end of this I will have convinced you that this is not just a giant dusty tome to sit on a shelf somewhere. This is actually a larger project that is designed to be useful and usable to the American public. So this is our table of contents. You heard some of these topics mentioned when Rosina was talking about the requirements of the Global Change Research Act of 1990. I hope you see this list and you think, oh, there's a little something for everyone here. We do have physical climate chapters on trends, both observed and projected trends of climate factors like precipitation, temperature. We also have a number of national topics that look across the entire U.S. for a specific sector or a group of people. We have 10 regional chapters. You'll hear from one of those today. And we have a chapter on adaptation and mitigation. It is a very, very large report. It is written by 500 authors and 250 technical contributors from every single state in the nation, as well as Guam, Palau, Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands. And it is because of its very robust review process, a report that also takes a really long time to develop. So I'm gonna walk you through each of these five messages. I think five was the number that we were, you know, in our brain as we were coming up with our talking points here for NCA5. I'm gonna give you one slide for each of these five key messages. And the first big key message of the assessment is that we are seeing communities across the country taking climate actions, particularly at the state and city level to reduce emissions and build resiliency. And I wanna point out that this is a little bit different from previous assessments and thankfully so, that we didn't have to start the first key message with climate change is real. We are well, well past that point now. And I think it's really demonstrative of how the conversation in the U.S. has advanced since previous assessments that the very first thing we're starting with is the climate actions. We have observed U.S. emissions falling since they peaked in 2007. All wall GDP and population have continued to increase. And that observed fall in U.S. emissions since 2007 is primarily due to the decrease in electricity generation from coal. However, we've also seen a lot of growth in renewable capacities. So that growth that you're seeing in this chart here has been supported by very rapidly dropping costs of zero and low carbon energy technologies. So when the cost of wind energy has dropped 70%, the cost of solar energy has dropped 90% over just the last decade. And we do expect that recent legislation will further increase deployment of that clean energy technology. At the same time, more and more people across the United States are experiencing climate change right now. And we, many of us experience climate change through extreme weather events. In the 1980s, the country experienced, on average, $1 billion disaster every four months. And now there's one on average every three weeks. That was definitely a statistic that when I read it in the report, I had to step back. That is a really dire statistic. And as Rosina noted, just last year we had $28 billion events. NCA's new chapter on economics finds that climate change impacts and damages will impose substantial new costs to the U.S. economy and limit economic opportunities for many Americans as the cost of things like groceries, healthcare, insurance, repair, and building costs all increase. And we know that climate change also threatens critical infrastructure and public services, our ecosystems, and our culture. The things we love to do are pastimes and our traditions. The third key message here is on equity and justice. And as Rosina noted, we do have a new chapter on social systems and justice. But I want to note that these themes, environmental justice, but really run throughout the entire assessment. So it's not just in that one chapter, it is really throughout every chapter of NCA5. The assessment notes that some overburdened and underrepresented communities are at higher risk of climate impacts due to the cumulative effects of social and economic inequities caused by ongoing systemic discrimination, exclusion, and underinvestment. I'm showing here on the slide an image from our water chapter. The assessment found that neighborhoods that are home to racial minorities and low income families have the highest inland flood exposures in the south. And across the entire nation, black communities are expected to experience a disproportionate share of future flood damages. Our fourth takeaway is about what mitigation and adaptation actions are within reach right now and where we really need to be going in the future. And I hope you'll hear a bit more on these topics from Caitlin and Adrienne Leder. We know that we can get a long way towards our goal of net zero greenhouse gas emissions by 2050 with widespread implementation of currently available and cost effective technologies. And I want to emphasize that widespread implementation because we really need to be moving a lot faster and we need to go a lot further. To reach the net zero target, we would need to expand our annual growth in wind and solar capacity faster than we have ever done before. And we need to be researching and looking into additional options for both reducing our emissions and increasing carbon uptake, for instance, through nature-based solutions. Limiting severe climate risk in the US requires not just deeper cuts in global emissions, but also accelerated adaptation actions. And I think you'll hear from Caitlin. I'm guessing that to date, many of our adaptations have been really incremental in nature. We need to be thinking more about transformative adaptation actions to really keep a pace with climate change. So not just treating the symptoms, but actually preparing our country for the climate risk that we're facing. The fifth and last takeaway I'll talk about here is about the benefits of mitigation and proactive adaptation investments. So we know that some of the climate benefits, even from very aggressive emission reductions, may not be detectable until the middle of the century or later. However, there are many other immediate or near-term benefits that come from taking mitigation and adaptation actions. Things that are not just helping our children or our grandchildren that are helping us right now, like immediate improvements in air quality and other benefits to human health. I'm showing an example here of a near-term benefit, which is the increase in clean energy jobs. These are expected to completely offset the number of fossil fuel-related jobs. And we know that as our country is shifting to low-carbon energy industries, we need to be thinking about a just transition. We need to be thinking about how to train displaced fossil fuel workers and address existing racial and gender disparities in the energy workforces. So as I mentioned in the beginning, the National Climate Assessment is your guide to climate change in the US. And to that end, we developed some new paths of entry into the report. As mentioned, we had our first ever call for art, which was really fantastic. We had 800 submissions and 92 of those pieces are included in the assessment. We have a poem written by the US poet laureate Ada Lamone. We've developed some podcasts and recorded an audio book of the executive summary. We're also translating the entire report into Spanish for the first time, which should be available, I'm guessing, probably April timeframe as we work through all of those. And we really have a lot of downloadable and shareable figures. So I wanna end with one of those resources that I hope will be particularly useful to you. This is our NCA Atlas, which is an online digital tool that allows you to choose the climate variable of your interest, choose the future scenario of your interest, and then really zoom into your county. So if the exact figure that you want is not in the report, you can use the exact same data that was approved in the National Climate Assessment to develop that figure. And I will end with this slide to show you some of our resources and where those can be found. Thank you. For Allison, I'll return your placard. Who read the audio book of the first chapter? Yeah, who's like the reader? Okay, that's pretty cool. Yeah, okay, I haven't heard it, but I was wondering like maybe, maybe for NCA 6. We could figure out who the celebrity, celebrity author should be. You mentioned the jobs impact, and we'll actually have a, thank you Allison, we'll actually have our jobs fact sheet coming out in the next little while, and we also track adaptation jobs as well, not just renewable energy and energy sector and energy efficiency as well. Allison had great slides, our other panelists will as well, and those slides are available out on the front table. If you'd like to get a copy if you haven't yet, they're also available online. If you'd like to download them, and if you'd like to go back to anything in Allison's presentation or anything at the briefing today, we will be posting an archived webcast, so you can go back and re-watch it, and like I said, we'll have some some re-notes coming up. If you are in the audience in person or online, and you're getting questions that are bubbling up, you'll have an opportunity to ask them. If you're in the room, we'll have a microphone go around, if you're in our online audience, you can send us an email, an email address to use is ask, that's ASK at EESI.org. Our next panelist is Adrian Hollis. Adrian leads efforts to advance climate justice policy and programs at the National Wildlife Federation with almost 30 years of experience across non-profit government and academic sectors, both as an environmental toxicologist and attorney. Adrian focuses her work on the intersection of public health, environmental justice, and climate change, and on methods for assessing and documenting health impacts of climate change on communities of color and other traditionally disenfranchised groups. She also serves as co-director of the Environmental Protection Agency's Region 3 Thriving Communities Technical Assistance Center grant, and she is an author of the mitigation chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, and a little bird said, you just had a birthday, so happy birthday as well. Welcome to the lectern, I'll turn it over to you. I always do, so let's see. Good afternoon, and thank you for the invitation, EESI. I have to, now that I'm old, I have to use my glasses as of two days ago, so some of this information I'm just going to, thanks to Allison, I only have to touch on briefly, I won't beat you over the head with that. I'll beat you over the head with some other stuff. So the clicker is here, so because I'm also a professor, I threw in some definitions, so bear with me. It doesn't mean I don't think that you know this. So mitigation is emissions reduction or removing carbon from the atmosphere when the goal is to avoid or reduce the effects of climate change, and it's also the most cost-effective response to climate change. Everybody might not agree, but it's in the assessment, so it must be true, so. So in sticking with our theme of five, I'm going to discuss the five key messages from the mitigation chapter, and the first one is successful mitigation means reaching net zero emissions, and by emissions we're talking about green house gas emissions, and people always ask, what are green house gases, right? And that includes carbon dioxide, which enters the atmosphere through burning, fossil fuels are a number of other methodologies, and in 2021 actually 79% of the emissions were from CO2. Also methane is another one, as is nitrous oxide, and the fluorinated gases like hydrofluorocarbons, perfluorocarbons, and others are also considered to be important green house gases. So when we talk about net zero, what does that mean? This was a question that came up last year at COP 27. So net zero means that the amount of green house gases that are being emitted into the atmosphere should equal the amount of green house gases that are being removed from the atmosphere, right? Of course, everybody wants absolute zero where nothing is being emitted, but in the meantime and in between time, net zero is the way to go. There's also hard net zero, which means that the activities of removal is sustained permanently or for a longer period of time. So this is just an example of the, from the chapter that shows you how we have to, it shows the green house gas emissions, first of all, from different sectors. I'm not gonna go into that in detail, but what I wanted you to see is that by 2030, we have to reduce high levels by 50 to 52%. 2030, this is 2024, we only have six years to do this. Well, you know, to continue doing this or to increase what we're doing, right? And that's important. And I think when you put it in terms that people understand it's a little scary. So I like things that are scary. So our key message, our second key message is that we already know how to drastically reduce emissions. And that's the good news, right? Allison talked a lot about that. And I think that it's important, which some of the methodology that you talked about is important that we know that, increasing nature-based solutions, energy efficiency improvements are ways that we need to focus on reducing emissions as well as widespread electrification of the transportation sector is another way. We still may need low-carbon fuels for things, you know, think airplanes and a few other, I guess, applications industry. Land-related emissions in the US can be reduced, which increases, like by increasing the efficiency of food systems, for example, which is important. And of course, there's always the ever-growing problem of agricultural practices and the protection of and restoring natural lands is a big issue. And I think that there are a lot of groups that are working on that, including our work with a nature-based center that we're standing up at the National Wildlife Federation, I threw that in as a commercial. So the third key message is that to reach net zero emissions, we need to do more. There need to be additional actions. And the problem is that there are a lot of uncertainties that exist with some of the processes that have been identified. Not the ones that we're already using that have been caused to effective new ones, or ones that are just coming up or that are currently undergoing research. There are differences in the scale and mix of energy sources as well as carbon management. And in my work, one of the issues, of course, is around carbon management, specifically carbon capture and sequestration with communities. There are a lot of concerns. And I think that this chapter, this assessment, does a lot in the way of hearing and reporting those community concerns. The fourth key message, which I think is also very important, is the fact that mitigation can be sustainable, healthy and fair. Why is that important? Uh-oh, that's important. That, let me go back. All right, here we are. So, I get too many spec. When we talk about mitigation being sustainable, healthy and fair, Allison talked about people who are hit worse than first and worse, right? And those are our communities that because of historic racist practices and like redlining and other things, they're not in a position to be protected from climate change. They live in low-lying areas. They live in areas where flooding is more likely to occur. They don't have access to heat at the same level, because maybe the infrastructure is at risk. And there's just so many other factors that we need to address. And I think that this key message really gets at that, really gets to the heart of that. And some rarely represented but important issues in mitigation scenarios include air pollution, which we've heard about, and we know about who's most at risk. And we also have seen the relationship between air pollution and things like COVID in that with particulate matter, there's this whole thought about particulate matter sort of hitching a ride on COVID particles and then being embedded deep in the long. Sighting and land use, and not just sighting of like wind and solar, but also sighting of, and this sighting of this is the concern that I've heard from communities, sighting of facilities when you're testing certain strategies in the communities. Water use, solar and wind is not as water intensive as some other mechanisms. Labor, supply chain, and of course, energy, equity and environmental justice, which I touched on a minute ago. And this is just a diagram, just showing you that in A, this is the red line maps from the 1930s. And B shows you the pollution in 2010. And if you look, it's the same areas that have the highest pollution, right? And this is just one of many diagrams that really drive home the issue. And then the fifth message is that governments, organizations and industry can act to reduce emissions. The good thing about that is that a lot of them are already doing it. There are a wide range of actors that have been involved in efforts to accelerate clean energy transition and mitigate greenhouse gas emissions, right? Including new legislation. We've seen that, new rules, regulations and executive orders and voluntary actions that both individuals and organizations and other groups are engaged in. The, I don't wanna lose my, I have my important message here. The next slide shows you what some of the people are doing. 25 states, 675 cities, 300 universities and hundreds of companies have announced net zero emission targets. I think that's fantastic. And bottom-up coalitions like the America Is All In Initiative have support from subnational leaders that represent a constituency of more than half of the US population. And since 2018, the total number of state-level mitigation activities has increased by 85%. And 169 more cities have introduced emissions reductions targets since then. I think that that is awesome. And it just shows that everybody is focused on actions to address issues that we are dealing with right now. As Allison said, it's not the future, it's the present, right? So summarize. So greenhouse gas emissions have declined, but we have a long, we have to go faster, right? And do more. Reaching that zero will involve improving our energy efficiency, reliance on greater reliance on solar and energy. And we've seen the cost go down. We saw that in that great slide earlier and reliance on emerging technologies. Large reductions in emissions could improve human health. I think it's very important, not just in air pollution, in terms of air pollution, but in other ways too that I won't get into. That's a whole other webinar. Wide spray electrification is another issue. And the bottom line is reductions in emissions could improve human health and reduce, excuse me, redress legacies of inequity. And that's important. And my final slide is these are all the authors who worked on the mitigation chapter. And no, you can't see them because they're too small, but it's outside on the table for you. And all by our great leader, Stephen Davis, I have to admit, Steve, because I love him. He was very patient with, can you imagine this number of people, right? All who have ideas, their own ideas. And then here's where you can get the information. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. That is an impressive list of authors, a ton of work and a really, really important document. Thank you very much for that. Our next panelist, you've heard her mentioned a couple times, Caitlin Simpson. Caitlin's actually not with us today in person. She's not feeling well, but she was nice enough to take a few minutes out of her morning to actually record her presentation for us via Zoom. And so we'll still be hearing from Caitlin remotely and we'll still be seeing her slides, which are also on the table and on the website. So Caitlin, if you're watching us online, I hope you're feeling better and we really miss not having you today, but we really appreciate that you were willing to help us with a presentation earlier today. So my colleague is gonna put that up and we'll all enjoy Caitlin's presentation. Caitlin is an, I forgot to introduce her. I was too busy explaining why she wasn't here. Sorry about that, Caitlin, assuming you're watching. Caitlin is an economist and program manager of the Climate Adaptation Partnerships Program within the Climate Program Office and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Caitlin manages a network of 13 large research engagement teams focused on climate preparedness and adaptation issues across the country. She co-authored the adaptation chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment and has a wealth of experience assessing and communicating findings around adaptation research. She's been working for decades in the science policy sphere as a federal funder of climate adaptation work that's conducted in collaboration with state and local organizations and communities. So Caitlin, thanks again for making your presentation available to us. I'm really looking forward to it. Take it away, Dana. Hello, I'm Caitlin Simpson, a program manager with NOAA's Climate Adaptation Partnerships Program and the agency chapter lead for the adaptation chapter, the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Thank you for the opportunity to talk about the chapter findings with you. Next slide. I thought I'd start with the adaptation definition that we use in this chapter. It is the process of adjusting to an actual or expected environmental change and its effects in a way that seeks to moderate harm or exploit beneficial opportunities. With this in mind, the overall findings of our chapter are the following. Adaptation activities are occurring across the US but have been small in scale, incremental in approach and lacking in sufficient investment. Transformative approaches will be necessary to adequately address current and future risks to improve capacity and promote an equitable future. Adaptation activities must address the uneven distribution of climate harms and incorporate collaboration with local communities. Next slide, please. Our first main key message is that adaptation efforts are underway in every US region but are insufficient in relation to the case of climate change. Although adaptation is occurring across the US, barriers remain. These barriers can mostly be overcome with financial, cultural, technological, legislative or institutional changes. The figure on the right here illustrates the number of public and private sector adaptation strategies and activity publicly documented and or up since 2018. Since that time, city and state level adaptation plans and actions have increased by 32%. However, there is growing divergence in the ways government, private industry and civil society are planning for climate adaptation with each focusing on a subset of climate vulnerability such as disaster resilience, risk and liability and equity and justice respectively and focusing on individual hazards such as sea level rise, flooding, heat instead of compounding and complex events. Next slide, please. Our second key message is that effective adaptation requires centering equity. Effective adaptations must be just and equitable. For example, housing discrimination played a big role in putting people in hazardous areas. To adapt equitably, we have to ask questions like who can afford flood insurance or elevate their home above flotters? Who can pay more for air conditioning during a heat wave and who is working outside? The path from potential adaptation options to outcomes is filtered through culture and decision making criteria, processes and resources. Individual traits, circumstances and preferences mean that adaptation outcomes are not identical for all members of a community. These social factors may create, perpetuate or exacerbate existing social inequities in a systemic fashion, such that even passive actions can produce inequitable outcomes. Intentionally integrating equity into adaptation can lead to more inclusive and sustainable outcomes. Next slide, please. Third, transformative adaptation will be needed to adequately address climate related risks. It involves persistent novel and significant changes to institutions, behaviors, values and or technology. In anticipation of climate change and its impacts, current adaptation practices in the US are predominantly incremental and do not clearly add up to system wide transformation which is needed to keep pace with extreme weather and climate impacts. For example, expanding access to cooling centers and air conditioning during a heat wave is an important incremental adaptation action, meaning small changes in business as usual. However, we also need ways to build and design infrastructure differently or deploy city-scale district cooling systems so that indoor air temperatures don't reach dangerous levels, meaning more transformational change is needed. The diagram here illustrates various approaches. In some cases, incremental changes may add up to a transformation of the overall system. In other cases, they may not or they may cause maladaptation. Transformative adaptation can also take different forms, including a series of small-scale transformations or one-time large shifts. Panel B illustrates these conceptual approaches to incremental and transformative change. Each could be equitable if it follows the principles of equitable adaptation. Next slide, please. Fourth, effective adaptation governance empowers multiple voices to navigate competing goals. Numerous government, private and civil society organizations support adaptation through funding, guidance and other activities. However, adaptation governance has tended to occur in a bottom-up fashion with minimal coordination. Activities implemented in a coordinated fashion and with technical assistance, funding and monitoring across sectors and scales have the potential to be more effective and transformative. Next slide, please. Fifth, adaptation requires more than scientific information and understanding. Climate services are needed for effective adaptation. However, they need to be coupled with intentional collaboration with communities. There are several federal programs that provide effective decision support for climate adaptation with this intentional community collaboration. NOAA's Climate Adaptation Partnerships Program, USDA's Climate Hubs, USGS's Climate Adaptation Science Centers and others at EPA and DOE all provide climate services in a collaborative manner for a range of sectors and regions. As depicted in the table at the right, climate services can be designed to avoid engagement fatigue and advanced transformative adaptation. They can also be improved by ensuring broad access for historically disinvested communities. Next slide, please. The sixth key message of the chapter is that adaptation investments and financing are difficult to track and may be inadequate. More and different funding is needed for adaptation. We are confident that investing in adaptation now will reduce the cost later. However, we need better financial and evaluation data to determine what adaptation is occurring, how well it is distributed and the effectiveness of the adaptation solutions. In some sectors, proactive adaptation can help reduce projected damages from climate change. For instance, as shown in the graphic on the right, cost estimates are shown for two sectors, roads and rail, for 2050 and for 2090, under two different emissions paths and for three different adaptation scenarios, which reflect whether there is no adaptation, reactive adaptation or proactive adaptation. The costs are significantly higher for the no adaptation scenarios and lowest for the proactive adaptation scenarios. Next slide, please. Finally, I would like to take just a moment to show the roles that NOAA's had in the assessment. As you can see in this slide, contributions are significant in terms of authorship, leadership, production, resources and administrative support. NCA5 provides updates on our state of knowledge for a range of key NOAA science mission areas, including levels of greenhouse gases in our atmosphere, temperature, precipitation, sea level rise trends, the changing nature of extreme events, effects on hurricanes and effects on fisheries. NOAA's work on regionally based climate resiliency and adaptation, community engagement and environmental justice is also reflected in the chapter contributions, including leadership roles in the newer chapters such as the social systems and justice chapter. In addition to federal employees roles in the NCA, NOAA funded university researchers were authors on many of the chapters. NCA5 is a climate service for the nation. We can use it to further inform decisions to protect lives and property in a changing climate and take actions to reduce further impacts. Next slide, please. Thank you very much for the opportunity to speak about the findings of the adaptation chapter. You can, of course, find more information in the chapter itself on the NCA website shown here. Thank you. Thank you, Caitlin, for sharing your presentation with us today. And I hope, like I said, you're feeling a little bit better this afternoon. We will now turn to our fifth panelist of the day and learn a little bit more about the regional focus of the NCA5, which is very, very cool. Louis Rivers works to further the integration of social science at the Environmental Protection Agency. His research projects explore cumulative climate impacts and coastal resilience. Before joining EPA, he served as an assistant professor at North Carolina State University's Department of Forestry and Environmental Resources and at Michigan State University's Environmental Science and Policy Program. Louis was a co-author of the Southeast Regional Chapter of the Fifth National Climate Assessment. Welcome to the briefing today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. All right, I will try to stay on time because y'all have been listening to a lot of people talk for a minute. All right, thank y'all for inviting me to talk briefly. And when I think about the report, I really think about my kids. Also, people love pictures of kids, especially kids in costumes and kids that are incredibly filthy and kids who are hiking. I have all of it in one picture. But these are my two kids, August and Louis. I promise you Louis is not named after me. It's a family name. I'm not that arrogant. But in 2100, my kids will be in their 80s, which is like a mind-blowing thing. So a lot of the things that we're talking about in this report are kind of the future for us. And like, a lot of us won't be around to see it, but for my kids, this is gonna be their reality and the world that they grew up in. So I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Southeast Chapter and like everyone else, I'm gonna kind of go through four takeaway points. We're very organized that way. I think Allison for that, she was amazing and there's a lot of uniformity across the report. But before I get started, I wanna read the first chapter and I wanna read the first paragraph in our chapter. So I apologize for reading, but I think it's important to hear what we have in the actual report. Hatterns of climate risk, social vulnerability and climate adaptation in the Southeast echo centuries of human history. The region consists of highly diverse communities and landscapes, including one of the most biodiverse areas in the continental United States. The Southeast ecosystem stewarded for generations by indigenous people are now in a precarious state. Centuries of political and land use decisions have threatened the landscape and the people with a few prospering at the expense of many. These decisions shaped by a long history of systemic and structural racial discrimination and aggression, continue to have lasting harmful effects on the preparedness of the Southeast communities for mounting climate change threats. The institutions of slavery and intergenerational ownership of individuals as property, Jim Crow segregation and housing discrimination have resulted in many black indigenous and people of color communities living in neighborhoods that are disproportionately exposed to environmental risk and with fewer resources to address them when compared to majority white communities. I think that's important that we say that and we're super clear about that. And when I talked about this as a professor, I would tell my students, I'm not doing this to blame you or to shame anyone. None of us are architects of these systems, but these systems hurt all of us. It's important that we talk about our past accurately because if we wanna come up with solutions that will keep us going forward and serve all communities, we need to be honest about how we got here. And part of that is our social history, especially in the Southeast United States. So considering that history and that background, let's go through our four takeaway points. And what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna put up a takeaway point, regional growth increases climate risk. And then I'm gonna show one of these really dope figures. Like we spent a lot of time working on these figures and they're really well done. I'm not a figures person, I love figures. So it's great to be in a room with people who understood figures and like see the magic happen. So in this first figure, we talk about population change in the Southeast. I was gonna start the talk by saying I live in the best part of America, the Southeast. I live in the best town in America, but everyone thinks that about their town. I hope you do. But there's some data to back up my assertion. A lot of people are moving to the Southeast. So between 2010 and 2020, we had a lot of people come into the Southeast, a lot of migration. We're gonna see that trend continue between 2020 and 2050. But it's also gonna slightly intensify. But the other trend that's really important to think about is that our rural areas are losing population. And this is where a lot of our most vulnerable communities are in these rural areas. So what we're seeing is like a lot of people moving into the coastal and urban areas of the Southeast, stretching the capacity and resources of those parts of our communities. And then a lot of people leaving our rural areas where we already have vulnerable populations and we're living in the capacity of those areas to respond to climate change. Our second key message, climate change worsens human health and why does health inequities? And I just hope you see there's a theme here in what I'm talking about and it connects very much to the previous speakers. So again, another figure. So on the left, you see life expectancy, which is kind of a broad way of thinking about people's public health, or how effective our public health systems are. And then on the right, well, B, I should have picked up from the previous speakers, say A or B, left or right doesn't really work. So in B, we see social vulnerability. So this is a measure of how vulnerable community is to different factors. So this is, it measures poverty, substandard housing, access to transportation, access to healthcare and other factors. So what you see here, if you look at the light green areas and A, those are placed with kind of low life expectancy. The Southeast has the lowest life expectancy of any of the regions discussed in the report. If you look in B, those dark red areas are places or communities with high social vulnerability. And you notice there's an overlap between that life expectancy and social vulnerability. So like we said in the introduction, we're already in a precarious state. Our lands aren't so of our people. So we already have people who are really living tough lives. Climate change doesn't exacerbate their experiences. So again, it goes to this first and worse. They're going to experience climate change first and it's going to be much worse for them and the impacts are going to go on much longer. Our third key message is climate change disproportionately damages Southeastern jobs, households and economic security. And I should say that I'm just picking one figure from our chapter to illustrate these key take home messages. I really do encourage you to get into the chapter. There's multiple figures, a lot of very easy to read texts that talks about each one of these key messages. So here we have another great figure. I really like these kind of color figures. A, they look cool, like I can see pulling on my wall, but I'm a science nerd. So maybe my outlier there, but I just think they're very elegant. So counties where low income households overlap with limited community capacity showing light gray, highlight rule climate risk challenges. And again, I'm going to focus on the rule communities because I think we don't think about rule America enough when we think about climate change. Or when we think about environmental justice. There's a lot of environmental justice issues in rule America. So essentially what I want you to take away here is that let's look at those light gray areas. And if you can kind of remember back to our previous figures, there's an overlap in like these areas of concern across all these different figures. So when these light gray areas, these are places where you have incredibly low incomes. And more than likely, if you're a child born to a family with low income in one of these areas, there's a good chance that you're going to end up also having a low income and having the same issues that your parents face. So it's really this question of intergenerational poverty that we're seeing here which is going to be interacting with climate change. So like essentially we're creating traps for people. Their parents were stuck in one situation and there's a good chance that they're going to be stuck in the same situation. But the trap is getting worse because people who do have the capacity to move away from these rural areas are leaving, reducing the capacity of an overall community to respond to climate change. And let me take a step back and we've been talking about capacity a lot. And I think we throw that term around all the time, but like what does capacity mean in reality? Capacity is like if your town is hit by a hurricane and your school is damaged, your kids may miss a month of school as opposed to a community like Chapel Hill, there's no way you're gonna miss a month of school in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. But some communities you will. If your road is damaged, you may have a damaged road much longer than other communities. There's a lot of places in the Southeast United States that when they are impacted by a natural disaster which will be increasingly more frequent during under conditions of climate change, they don't have the ability to bounce back which is really detrimental to the younger people and older people in those communities. Those vulnerable populations that we care a lot about. And finally, I'll go to our fourth key message. Agriculture faces growing threats, but innovations offer help. I won't be talking about the innovations, but I'll talk about one more figure. The Southeast black farmers face disproportionate weather and climate risk. So then again here, if you look at the darkest parts of this map, a lot of our black farmers have lost land over the last 150 years in the United States but those who are left are in the Southeast United States and they are in a very precarious position. These are the counties that experience the most drought. So they're already expecting, experiencing disproportionate risk from the climate and this will just increase over climate change. So this is a very small special population that's in incredible danger as we experience climate change. So to wrap things up, more cute pictures. But I think we talk about the youth a lot and these are pictures that my mom and my dad, who's Louie, junior, so my son's named after him or my grandfather and his brothers and sisters, my mom. And but, you know, we talk about the youth a lot but I think we should also think about the people who've been here and our responsibility to people who've worked very hard to give us the life that we have and what type of legacy do we want to leave for them and what type of actions can we do to make sure that the last years of their life, they can see that we're doing things to make things better for their children and grandchildren. In conclusion, I want to thank our great authors team and especially our coordinated authors, Steve McGlulty and Jeremy Hoffman. Jeremy would have been here today, Jeremy's awesome but he gave a talk this morning. So I just want to thank our author team and thank y'all for giving me a chance to talk to you. Thank you, Louie, that was great. I'm going to pass your placard down so we can, as we get into the Q and A, where was that last photo where there was like a rocket? The last? There is a Northland line that does a dorm life and finds a community. Okay. It was a school field trip in my hope. Very nice, very cool. They feel like a little hand full. Sounds nice, thank you. Well, that was a fantastic presentation and thanks to our other panelists that leaves us plenty of time for questions and answers. I have a whole bunch, teed up, as I always do. For folks in the audience, my colleague Allison will bring a random microphone and I'll keep an eye out for hands. And if you're in our online audience, there's still a chance to ask us questions if you send us an email at askask.esi.org. But while people in the room are working up their courage, I'm going to start with a question. And that way, and this kind of gets back to the idea that we hit on a little bit before, which is the idea that this is not a prescriptive report, but it is designed for policymakers and to bring them up to speed about where things stand. We're in one of the House Congressional Office, or House Office buildings. There's a congressional agenda underway. I'm curious, Rosina, perhaps we'll start with you and then we can walk through the rest of the panel. How does what, how do the findings in NCA 5 potentially relate to items that are either currently on the congressional agenda or sometimes soon could be added to the congressional agenda? Things like IRA oversight, things like Farm Bill. I'm curious what you think and then we'll hear from Allison and we'll go down the line. Thanks very much. Since I'm not in the federal government, it's easier for me to try to answer this one. I think one thing we realized long ago when I was in the federal government is that the Farm Bill has great potential to advance conservation of all sorts through the conservation stewardship programs or the environmental quality program. And so I think the Farm Bill coming up, thinking about the needs of farmers, of communities, adaptation, preservation, the nature-based solutions, the natural climate solutions that we were talking about before are really important. I think there've been fabulous influxes of money through the IRA and the IIJA. However, if you look at the ecosystem side, much, much less, you'll see hundreds of millions maybe, but not tens of billions. So I think that's one area that's underattended to two bills, well, 41 bills. And I think this is actually an analysis that your team did, Dan. There were 41 bills in the last Congress that do slices of adaptation needs. And so I'm coming back to saying, I think adaptation really needs a lot more work and a lot more action, but there's not an overall one. And so that's why I was ending my talk with saying, I think this idea of a national coordination on adaptation and resilience for security act is a really good idea. The White House has put out a resilience framework, which I think is kind of moving in that direction. But I think we heard from all the speakers, adaptation is not yet well-coordinated. And so if we really need to learn, accelerate, do things fast, I think having a national strategy which this act would call for would be very important. I think it's one last thing that I might say. I think the bipartisan bills, the Coastal Disaster Resilience Act and the elements we saw in the National Defense Authorization Acts recently were really also very powerful pushes towards adaptation. So coming up the Farm Bill, but I think we should be thinking about adaptation and mitigation really in just about any piece of legislation. Yeah. Allison, curious to hear your thoughts about sort of how this report really relates back to the congressional agenda. Yeah, I feel like you covered a lot there, so I won't have too much more to add and hopefully I'm not stealing from your answer, but the thing that comes to my mind is that need for rapid deployment. So having the funding is one thing, but actually getting the clean energy technologies implemented on a widespread and very rapid rate is gonna be the tough thing, I think. Maybe beyond the scope of the question per se, but one of the things that's really useful about this report is that it includes a lot of case studies, particularly in the regional chapters that are highlighting the actions that these communities are taking, whether mitigation or adaptation. And I think it's a really important element because it helps to see what other communities are doing and helps one community be able to learn from what worked or what didn't work in another community. So I think as we are rapidly deploying and implementing all of these clean energy technologies, I hope we're also telling the stories of what has worked and what hasn't worked so that we can very rapidly be learning as we go. Thanks. Adrienne? Thank you. You did steal. No, I agree totally with what was already said. I think that it can be helpful when we talk about prioritizing or in this instance, maybe some reprioritizing. When we look at activities, for example, that we're engaged in, that I guess that Congress is sort of putting forth on mitigation, for example. I don't know why I chose that maybe because that's the chapter I worked on. I don't know. But when it comes to a common theme was communities that are most affected or that are affected first and worse. I think that the NCA-5 can help with focusing efforts and focusing attention in areas that have been lacking that. Thank you. Louis, we'll close out this round of questions with you. If you have anything you'd like to add? What's that? Fair enough. Are you responding to the beeps, to the buzzes? Okay, that's just the house clocks telling people what to do. It wasn't you. You checked your phone, I felt a little bad. We should have warned you first. All right, I'm gonna scan the audience and we have a question, Allison, in the, I guess it's the third row here right in the middle. Thank you so much. Hi, thank you, first of all. I noticed that most of you were talking about prioritizing greenhouse gas emissions, but my question is for districts that can't prioritize that issue, what would you suggest is the next priority? We'll open this one up to everyone if you have anything you'd like to jump in with. I would say it probably depends on the region. I think if you can't reduce greenhouse gas emissions, your only two other options are adaptation or suffering. So we don't want that suffering part. So I would say the transformative adaptation actions that we're talking about. And I would personally also make a push for focusing on health. It is a theme that came up in every single regional chapter. There is a key message on health in every chapter. And it is what of course people care about. That's why we have the pictures of the kids up there. You care about people's health and climate and health is so intricately linked that I think that's a place that every district would be able to focus on. Adrian, please go ahead. So I'm from Alabama and I really appreciated your presentation. And when you said people who can't, where emissions don't occur, I don't want to put words in your mouth, but I think I got the message there. I immediately thought about where I'm mobile. And some of it is of course, because of that particular state administration or whatever it is. And to me, when you said that, my first thought was then you've got to engage in mitigation, which is the same, which you're still doing. Because now I'm thinking of, for example, fossil fuel facilities or something in communities. And once you shut those down or make the guidelines more stringent, then in reality, you are reducing greenhouse gas emissions. You're just doing it differently. So for me, the process would be think about it differently. Like come at it from a different way. And I don't know if that makes sense. Louie or Rosina, do you have any thoughts you'd like to share? I agree with everything that was said already. I mean, one thing that might help is, you don't need to talk about energy, but you certainly want to improve kind of the livability of a community. And when you start thinking about that, that can mean making it more walkable. And then that can lead to health improvements too, or increasing green spaces, which can help with urban heat island effect. And then I think all communities are and need to think about reducing their vulnerability to extreme events, the floods and droughts. And so money will come from FEMA to states and to communities that have plans for how to deal with these extreme events. And so I think that extreme events and livability of communities are two angles that might end up getting the mitigation without starting with mitigation, but they certainly will also help with adaptation and resilience. It's hard, Louie, I think it was your presentation, you talked about capacity, right? And what that looks like, it's hard to do in some places, right, that don't have the capacity to apply for FEMA or something like that. That's something that's an enormous challenge for a lot of communities. And using Louie's presentation as an example, I think a lot of those, where you were pointing out that overlap, I expect that there's also a lot of severe capacity constraints that would also overlap with that. Yeah, and just briefly, you wanna think ahead. So like you're gonna need, you're gonna need grant writers. So a lot of rural communities, we say we're gonna put out these funds for them, but they came and have the people, they only have the staff to actually write the grants to access those funds. So thinking about preparing communities before something happens is really important. And just to focus on the most vulnerable communities, because they will be hurt by any type of disaster that happens. Thanks. Thanks for your question. Allison, we have a question over here against the wall in the second row. Thanks. Hi. So I work for a congressman who represents a district in the South. I'm wondering, I heard a quote or a fact quoted that 92% of people support natural solutions, but I also know that a lot of times it comes, considerations for the environment tend to be polarized along like the economy versus the environment. And so I'm wondering what you all would say makes for good bipartisan solutions to climate problems that can avoid the kind of classic clash of people needing to use their car to get to work and in a place where there's not necessarily infrastructure to have an electric car, right? Versus the natural want for people to participate in reducing greenhouse gas emissions. How do you avoid that dynamic in policy? Thanks. Please, panelists, feel free to chime in if you have anything you'd like to share. Oh, I'm, I was gonna say I'm not paid to be here, but actually I am, you aren't. But I'll let you go anyway. We're here to hear from you. Well, I'll have to at least, again, stealing from Adrian's chapter, point out that the report notes just how expensive climate change is and how actions to reduce our emissions and adapt to climate change far, far, far, far, far cheaper than experiencing climate change. So taking action will save us a lot of money. So I had to start from that baseline. And then I was really glad that Rosina brought up the nature based solutions in response to the last question as well, because I feel like if Caitlin were here, she would have been talking about those win-wins that come from that kind of adaptation. And our ecosystems chapter talks a lot about that too. So thinking about how you're creating parks or green space and all of the different win-wins that come from that. So you might be creating a recreational place that improves health and mental health. You're creating a social space for communities to come together. You might be improving your water quality if you're designing the park correctly. You might be buffering against extreme weather events like flooding. You are also pulling greenhouse gases out of the atmosphere as a carbon sink. So those sorts of solutions that just make sense across a huge swath of different sectors are also the ones that are really definitely economically viable. Thanks. Go ahead, Rosina, please. But to your point, I think, and building on what Allison said, the way our economic systems currently account for things, the cost of the damages are very hard to add up. The cost of the clean energy infrastructures is very easy to add up. And so I think one of the things that's really important and valuable is that every federal agency has been told to figure out ways to value what I guess we would call the ecosystem services, the clean water, the clean air, the co-benefits that you can get from a park or from cleaning up air pollution. And so you're right that there are all these embedded subsidies and things that we can add up and not account it for benefits in some of the benefits you can get from reducing greenhouse gases and improving adaptive capacity. So I think that field of economics is getting better, but it's been really hard to add those up, the benefits. If you find us, either me or my colleague Molly or my colleague Nicole after the briefing, we can make sure you get a copy of that poll. I actually just published an article about it. And we have a couple other resources too that you might find useful if you'd like to catch up with us after the briefing. I think we have to, oh, I see two hands and they went up at the same time. Allison, there's right in front of you. We have a question and then we'll end with you. We'll go a couple minutes over, but I think it's only fair to give you a chance to ask a question. Hi everyone, my name's Elora. I work for the National Wildlife Federation. I admittedly have not had the chance to dive into the report as I should, but I'm just curious, are you all, is this report address the issue of waste or is that something you're thinking about? I know we talk about renewable energy, especially with batteries and things, but we know to make that it has to be mined in Africa unfairly and it causes more waste in other places. So I'm wondering as we transition towards a clean economy or a just transition, what are we gonna do with the things people don't want and don't work anymore and how do we make sure those things don't end up in black and brown communities for them to deal with now as you transition to clean energy somewhere else? Thank you. Hey, I will try my best to take that one. Yeah, and again, I think if Caitlin were here, she would talk about a term weas in the report called maladaptation, which is where you might be trying to fix one problem, but you're, you know, swallowing the spider to catch the fly or something like that. We talk a little bit about waste, I wouldn't say we go into a lot of depth there, but we talk about the different ways that both mitigation and adaptation could result in consequences that we don't want and particularly the capacity to exacerbate or create new social injustices. So the report goes into those sorts of trade-offs and things that we need to consider when we're developing these policies so that we're not exacerbating or creating new inequities. And I think particularly in the mitigation and adaptation chapters, there's a lot of examples where bringing the community into the conversation is really key to figuring that out, to figuring out how we don't create more waste that goes into black and brown communities. And so making sure that those people have a voice at the table from the beginning is the way that we avoid maladaptation. Thanks. Adrian, please go ahead. I can't even add anything to that because that, when you said, no, no, I mean, I agree with you totally, having everybody at the table is the way to address all of that. And I always, I mean, that is, I'm so happy you said that. That is like the, that is the truth. You said it, I'm just quoting. I just think, you know, I mean, the chapter talks about food waste, for example, and a lot, but the only way to address the issue and to make sure that it doesn't happen, well, not the only way, but the main way is to make sure that all voices are heard, right? All the stakeholders and everybody who has some, as they say in Mobile, a dog in this fight, because, you know, we're Greyhound racing, has the voice at the table and provides input is the only way that fair decisions, equitable decisions are going to be made. So when you said that, that really struck a nerve for me. So I don't know if I did say what you're saying, because when I talk to my students, they still say, oh, you know, we used to ship things to China and things, but they no longer accepted. And I'm like, and they shouldn't. We need to figure out, and that's just me. So they need to figure, we need to figure out a way to deal with our own issues, you know? And the same for other countries, because things that are bad here are probably bad there too, you know? If we, like if it's a pesticide, we need to get rid of it here because we don't use them anymore. Sending them away to another country is not necessarily a good thing because it's bad over there too. So I totally agree with you. I almost want to hug you. This is so good. Thank you. We will go to you for our last question of the day. Thanks for being patient. I'm from the House Agriculture Committee, Majority Staff, and I wanted to ask because Dr. Hollis, I know you mentioned issues with agriculture and pollution and climate change. And I wanted to ask for some more detail on that, specifically from you, but from the others as well and how you'd like to see agriculture change to meet the demand for a better climate. Thank you. Well, I can talk about that in two ways. Thank you very much for the question. The mitigation chapter talks about it in terms of the way we plant crops and the way we use the land and how much of the land we use and whether we're using it in a, I don't know, the best way, in an optimal way, right? That's a big issue. Now the other agriculture that is probably talked more in detail in another chapter, so I would suggest reading the entire report, talks about things like confined feeding operations and how that pollutes the environment, the water and the soil and creates, I'm not sure that it mentions, creates a form of air pollution, right? Because people can't breathe in the neighborhoods, I'm thinking specifically of South Carolina because I work with some of the communities there. So it's not just agriculture in terms of using the land. Well, I guess it is just, I think of it in two different ways, using the land in a reasonable manner, but also when we talk about placement of farmland or animal feeding operations, maybe putting them close to water sources isn't the best way to do it. So things like that are just some of the general land uses and I'm sure that there are others that because you caught me off guard, I don't have right now. Thanks. Rosina? Yeah, to build on that, I mean, there's also reemerging regenerative agriculture, there's thoughts increasing about no-till, about multi-cropping, there's interesting new attention to agrivoltaics which is having crop liens that can also have solar panels so you can do both energy and shade crops in case it's getting too hot and grow your crops. So I think thinking across the fields of mitigation and adaptation hasn't happened that much, but there is some potential there for mutually reinforcing things. And then again, the conservation programs of the Farm Bill, if you look at the history of that over time, have increasingly added additional items like we really don't just want you to put it aside, we wanna think about water, we wanna think about biodiversity and those have a lot of money in it and I think those could be very powerful incentives if structured to push things forward on both mitigation and adaptation in the ag sector. We have a bunch more on that too and we did a whole briefing series that a lot of those topics were covered and Molly and Nicole and I'd be happy to talk with you a little bit after the briefing if you have a spare minute but I didn't wanna cut you off, Louie, I saw you just out of the corner of my eye. Yeah, there's also a lot of social capital strong social networks amongst American farmers I don't think it's specifically about the extension services. So we have a strong extension service that supports a lot of farmers and that's another opportunity for us to talk about climate change and think about redundancy in communities and mitigation and adaptation. My dad, he was in the army in his second career, he was an extension agent in the black extension service. So like we had the traditional extension service which was, you know, has issues and we had the 1890 extension service which was largely served black farmers and the extension agents are really trusted in communities. So like of course you go to them from farming but also like applying to my kids' college, you know, other things. So I think that's another opportunity for us to talk to communities about climate change through already trusted sources. Thanks, thanks for the question. All right, well, we're a couple of minutes over and I think that means we probably have to wrap up. I'm gonna pop this slide back up. This is the survey link. If you are in our online audience or in-person audience, you can use this link to take a survey. Let us know how things went today if you have ideas for future topics. Like I said before, we actually read every response and we do our best to find ways to improve. Huge, huge thanks to a tremendous panel today, Rosina, Alice and Adrienne and Louie and Caitlin. Thank you for taking time today while you're not feeling well to record your presentation. I think they all deserve an extra round of applause and Caitlin as well, thank you so much. We also wouldn't be in this room today if not for Representative Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environmental Coalition. So thanks to him and his great staff. We were joined earlier via video remarks by Representative Peters. So thanks to you Representative Peters for being with us today and for your staff who's always a real delight to work with. I'm joined by a bunch of my ESI colleagues today, Dan O, who is helping us with the videos, Omri, Allison, Aaron, Anna, Molly and Nicole and Tim, which Tim doesn't always come to our briefings but he pitched in today because this briefing is actually happening so early we don't have interns yet. So all hands on deck. And Jeff is here as well, one of our fellows, the author of our Sustainable Aviation Feel Fact Sheet or Issue Brief, excuse me. Tremendous resource if you wanna learn a little bit more about that topic. And I have to say thanks to Scott for helping us with all of the webcast and all the technology today. We're gonna wrap up. We will be back on February 1st for our next briefing about DOE's earth shots. That is going to be incredible and it should nicely compliment the briefing today because we're gonna be talking about big things that we need to be doing at scale, at pace to reduce emissions and also deliver additional multiple benefits. And there's some really, really exciting stuff happening at DOE. So with that, thank you so much to our panel. Thank you for joining us today in person in our online audience and we'll see you back in a couple of weeks. And I hope everyone stays warm and enjoys this little taste of winter that we seem to be getting this week. Thank you so much.