 Welcome back to our conference today with our final presentation from Indo-Pacific Command. As you have seen five times now, each geographic combatant command has a different way of addressing climate change. While Indo-PACOM has been the environmental security leader and a key humanitarian assistance disaster relief expert for years, they've taken an alternative approach to incorporate in climate change. The Indo-PACOM commander tasked the already well-established Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance with their new Climate Change Impact Program. The J4 and J5 representatives collaborated with the Climate Change Impact Program and today we hear from the leader of the program himself briefing us on Indo-PACOM and I'll leave the rest to our moderator and speaker. As a reminder, the conference program with the agenda is in the chat and you can download it from the events page. The next I will introduce our final moderator, Dr. Hayat Alvi in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College. Dr. Alvi, thank you for being our moderator for the Indo-PACOM presentation today. Commander Cameron, thank you very much in what an outstanding conference you have organized for us. Welcome and thank you and good afternoon to everyone. My name is Hayat Alvi. I'm in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College. I'm very honored and happy to moderate this panel today and we are going to hear about the Indo-PACOM Climate Change Impact Program. Before we introduce our speaker, we wanted to provide some administrative guidance to you. Please post all questions and comments in the chat for the question and answer period after the presentation. You also have the ability to upvote questions which will help us identify the most important questions to ask our panelists. Representing Indo-PACOM is the director of the Center for Excellence in Disaster Management and Humanitarian Assistance and Indo-PACOM Climate Change Impact Program. Mr. Joe Martin. Mr. Martin, we look forward to your presentation today. The floor is yours. Thank you very much. So I'll leave my camera on for just a second as I do sort of some opening comments and then really want to get into the details. But I'm going to grade myself based on the number of participants. I've seen it as high as 215 today. It's currently at 180. If I stay somewhere around that number, then hopefully this was an effective presentation for everybody. As Andrew mentioned, this is not just a J4J5 tag team presentation, partly because Admiral Aquilino decided that he really wanted to stand up a separate function within the command because climate change impact directly relates to the propensity frequency, et cetera, of natural disasters here in the Pacific. That was the natural alignment to put it within my organization as a new line of effort. That was actually resourced separately from the things that we do normally. Why is this such a big deal and so significant in the Pacific? Well, first, as you'll, if you've ever heard of Indo-PACOM Command Brief, the command covers 52 percent of the Earth's surface. We have every conceivable climate issue here and then climate directly affects all of our plans and operations as well as a significant number of geopolitical challenges. Additionally, on the island of Oahu itself, I'll give you an example. So back in August of 2018, just in the state of Hawaii, we're experiencing an active volcano, small earthquakes, wildfires, hurricane lane, flooding and landslides, all on the exact same day, which makes for an exciting place to live. And sometimes the climate change aspects of this are very serious and personal to the command. So this briefing is going to go just for a heads up a little bit from some simple science to policies and practices. And I apologize for the initial simplicity of it. But if any of the slides or information you find useful to yourself, you are welcome to steal these as you see fit. Go to the next slide, please. So sort of what you're going to see again in the first few slides will be sort of set in the stage, really some of the implications for security cooperation here in the middle with some of our challenges. And then I'm probably going to sit for a little bit on some of the government policies programs as well as what INTOPECOM is doing in sort of the last couple of slides. So next slide, please. So I was able to give a similar presentation to this yesterday at the Asia Pacific Center for security studies and really trying to leverage into what are the impacts to the theater of climate change. So we're just going to run through a few of these quickly acknowledging that most of this is probably fully aware to members of this audience, but it does have an impact on others when they see some of these things for the first time. Next slide. So let's just speak to, there's going to be four of them really. So higher ocean temperatures and what does that lead to scientists out there? And I am not one. I was a logistics officer in the Air Force before I started doing the humanitarian business about seven years ago. Higher ocean temperatures lead to all the things you see there. And one of the studies interesting points out that rising sea levels are not just caused by obviously evaporator, you know, melting waste caps, etc. It's actually the rising of the temperature of the ocean itself through thermal expansion causes much of that. Is this real in the Pacific? Well, certainly the folks at Osaka Airport back in September think it's real as you see a storm go through and the water pretty much has sort of no place to go as you're right at the sea level rise there in the airport. Next slide, please. So what happened down under a few years ago as well? The higher air temperatures etc. It led to really sort of a ridiculous confluence of bad happenstance for them in which about 20% of the nation's forest actually burned. Higher temperatures obviously lead to ice melt, snow runoff and clearly more extreme weather patterns in a range of different areas as air temperature often feeds other storm activities. Next. As I mentioned, we kind of have it all here in the Indo-Pacific. So the picture in the middle there is a sandstorm, a dust storm basically in Mongolia. And then the right hand side is sort of some of the permafrost melt issues of basically explosive methane charges or explosive methane activities in different areas. I'll talk a little bit more about the effect that some of these have on training specifically but clearly higher ground temperatures as well lead to certain challenges. Next slide. And as mentioned, you know, the change in ocean acidification, the change in fisheries, illegal and unregulated fishing etc. Really ocean acidification can drive the movement of fishing grounds etc. From places who are very, very reliant on that to other locations that can lead to and I'll talk more about that and admit some security issues as well. But clearly things like coral reef destruction and some of those fishery stress lead to big issues, especially when you think about the fact that there are about 10 countries in the Indo-Pacific region, I could list them all if you want me to, that it really listed economically as tuna dependent. So the movement of fisheries etc. is a really big deal for their pretty much overall economic livelihood. Next slide. So let's talk real quickly about some of the security impacts then of climate change. Next slide. And I'm going to sit on this slide for a little bit because this really is the way that the Indo-Pacom climate change impact program was started. I started working on this particular project back in July of this year and Admiral Acklino was pretty adamant that says I want you to look at the the warfighting impacts of climate change. He says there's a lot of other people looking at electrification and fuel efficiency and solar panels and the rest of that. He says your mission, he actually said this several times, is not to change the axis of the earth. It is to understand the impact of warfighting. So to do that to be able to frame what we're doing here, I used this chart and start out with sort of scientific measurable information all the way on the left under climate facts. And I really have no interesting getting into an argument with anybody ever about are these things measurable and actual because I was a math and stat major in college and I like numbers and those things are simply measurable activities. But what is the impact? Where do we see those things that sort of display themselves? And you can see a sea level rise changes flooding droughts, riverine desertification, extreme weather temperatures etc are the ways in which those things are expressed. But none of that really matters unless there's humans there. So what are the impact on humans then of all these these changes and these impacts to the climate? And you can see the list that we track in the middle. Most of those humans, as I would argue, sort of live in a state structure environment or a country in some former fashion, and then those states are affected and sometimes their security is significantly affected by the effects of climate change. And it is already mentioned the increasing need for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief support both internally to countries as well as providing external international support in certain places. Literally climate change can provide significant stress to already fragile governments. We'll talk a little bit about that more in the next slide and in certain places in the Pacific specifically. So think about the Maldives and Kiribati and Vanuatu and others is literally the entire nation could go into water. So there is an existential threat to both big cities as well as to nations themselves. The impact then comes to sort of Admiral Acolyno's question is what is the effect on me? What is the effect on the warfighter and the geographic back command because my mission is to provide national security options and resources and capabilities to the Indo-Pacific region to support the national defense strategy and our government. These four here will be expanded a little bit more on the next slide, but really it's the program today and the things that we're working on are trying to find tangible physical things that we can do to try to mitigate or adapt to some of the risks and hazards in order to accommodate the impacts on the warfighter from climate change. Next slide. The slide breaks it into sort of two sides and you can see the little banners off to the left said impact on readiness and the banners to the right so the potential for conflict. Impact on readiness and it was mentioned I think from the North Comp folks is the level of damage caused by the changes in weather patterns. The picture down at the bottom I think is from Tindall Air Force Base that tie in the sheer amount of damage that was caused by Hurricane Michael. Think about that with respect to both main operating locations in the Pacific as well as forward operating places that we want to operate from in foreign countries. Extreme weather also obviously impacts the training opportunities and as well as operations themselves and one of the other options that was just discussed I'm turning over to this North Com or South Com that talked about the amount of times the number of times that you're going to respond to a disaster. Obviously in North Com it's a disco function out here it's a foreign humanitarian assistance function but the fact is every time a military force deploys to provide HADR support to a disaster stricken area every day there is a day that they're not training. Certain cases it does increase specific task level training so for example helicopter is flying humanitarian assistance missions are still learning the same basic flight skills as they would in other technicians but you know if you think about the third marine expeditionary brigade out of Okinawa the more often they're responding to disasters the less ready they're going to be to respond to disaster or to conflict in other areas of the region and then damage to training ranges themselves with respect to really anything. So if you think about the training facilities in San Diego for example there's a significant amount of challenge associated with water damage and etc for the Navy SEAL training location there as well as other topics such as permafrost melting in Alaska and other places reduce the ability of the Army to keep their forces trained due to that. On the right hand side this really is sort of the other piece there was a discussion earlier I think about on the intel community and there is support to this and where can you get information there really are significant areas for conflict possible out there here's just a few listed and I'll talk more about the Mekong River in a second climate induced migration is a significant issue and I'll speak to that in a very specific example from Bangladesh and if you go back and look at what's happened in Afghanistan some of the compounding factors of that have really been a persistent drought and you know food insecurity is there and there are ways to actually weaponize climate change as well so you know cloud seeding etc to steal from others and I think I heard within the african presentation uh that was talking about you know how can you access resources etc using climate change maybe as a cover story for the russians or chinese to get in uh to access or harvest some of those minerals or fossil fuel. Next slide. So what does this look like specifically to military readiness in the pacific I'll give you just a couple of quick pictures here one military one civilian for those of you who've been to hawaii this is a marine quarry station in kanua bay in its current condition if we could build this slide please and this is the same location at two meters this sea level rise so unless they put pontoons onto the f-18s and the you know cv-22s and other weapon systems that will fly in and out of that place this is going to be a significant emotional event going on with respect to military readiness around 2050 if nothing changes here out at the marine quarry solution. Next not to be outdone it's not just a military problem uh on the left hand side of this slide that is one of the power plants that is on on uh oahu here you can see the water level that's basically uh pearl harbor so water level there is not much the far right hand side is one of the other power plants that right along the coast on the leeward side subject to water incursion damage etc and then of course we have the reef runway if you've ever flown into hawaii generally speaking you're either going to take off or land from this one depending on the winds and uh sea level rise there would have a significant impact on uh that particular runway that is a shared runway if you're familiar with it between the u.s uh military forces as well as the the commercial airport itself so take that out you basically reduce the capacity to move stuff in and out of the island pretty significantly next all right so let's go through just a couple of security related case studies and we'll start uh with fiji which is you know one of the multitude of of islands out there we're going to talk to a very specific example so if we could build this just a little bit actually you can click one more because I think there's another one down at the bottom right thank you much so basically um you know it's a little coastal village along uh this particular island here and saltwater inundation tidal and incursion etc basically sort of took out their capacity to live there so they decided well we're just moving a little bit farther inland and that should be okay fact is that didn't work out form really well either and they actually ended up moving it to another island so you know they a small sample here of migration uh climate migration but the challenge in this particular one is it's very situationally based so in fiji for example in many of the island states is there is no such thing as like land that you can buy it's really communal and family land um so if you're not part of that clan or etc you really have no place to go and that can cause significant issues in this case it worked out okay but the fact is people had to move because of changes in weather patterns in some of these island nations next slide I mentioned earlier that I was going to talk about the Mekong River um next slide we'll just build that out a little bit please um so the Mekong is this is compounded by a couple of different problems um the first is obviously damming upstream of it within China allow Cambodia and Thailand as far as restricting the water coming down sea level rise as well as salt water and inundation are moving uh water and risk levels up and you can see the bottom right hand picture at a certain point once salt water gets into farmland it becomes unusable for a very extended period of time so the question from a security perspective is hey that's bad but why does it matter well it matters because within this region you can see in the bottom there about 80 percent of the 17 million people there rely on rice cultivation for their livelihoods um what happens in a country like Vietnam or elsewhere where now you've got about 14 million people who are pissed off uh because they can no longer do what they used to do um the internal strife the potential for conflict within Vietnam itself is a very real hazard um with respect to displaced people or with respect to disgruntled people uh and then it could also have international implications and there really kind of is anyway with respect to the damming upstream particular by lau and then further upstream by china and restricting water access in i'll show you another picture that later that talks a little about the water level itself and those hazards next slide well this is kind of a i mentioned earlier the the climate migration issue in in in fiji with about 150 people from one clan or one family having to move um so if you look on the left hand side at the slide here you can see sort of the delta region in Bangladesh today so Bangladesh has got i want to say total it says 112 on here but there's actually about 165 million people that live uh in Bangladesh and with a 1.5 meter sea level rise you can see on the bottom half of that picture just how far the bay of Bengal moves up into the land uh prediction it says here about 17 million people would be affected by it that's a significant emotional event for any country but for a country that is already one of the most disaster prone prone places in the world it can be significant because that is also where the vast majority of their food is generated so not only do you have now 17 million population or climate migrants you also have food security and water water security issues driven by that how bad has it been oh if you look at the picture on the upper right that's basically a fence that the indians built back in the early 2000s to try and restrict the uncontrolled movement of migrants uh from Bangladesh into india next so i really want to just very quickly touch on some future trends again these are some some slides that are used to really show patterns to folks about how and where and when things to get worse next slide i'm going to sit for this one for just a second because when we look across the end of pacific it really is sort of regional based analysis so you can see sort of the top line there with the southeast Asia south east is in the islands this is from the most recent set of IPCC reports that talks about what is happening climate impact trend wise along those was at eight or nine categories there it's getting worse pretty much everywhere you know and and then the effect that you have and one of the outcomes of that are down the right hand side and that i'd already talked to the number of disaster and hazard based events that are going to occur which lead to in many cases both water and food food security food scarcity and insecurity excuse me which can lead to migration displacement hostilities all kinds of stuff and then really in certain cases where the military where i have sort of the greatest interest from an indio paycon perspective is what would be the damage to those infrastructure and facilities that we would we would rely on it should a conflict break out in the region and then interesting is this can actually in many cases compound pest and disease spreading if you think about places for example that aren't used to getting that much moisture that means they're probably not used to having that many vector born disease outbreaks from from mosquitoes or other things well now all of a sudden what if you bring in a higher frequency of malaria dengue zika any of the other vector born viruses based on now a change of water patterns to a country that's probably already not medically that high level anyway and now you're introducing new challenges and diseases there so what does this look like we'll just blast through a couple of these real quick next slide please on the military side that's one of the military installation or facilities on quadrillion atoll the prediction is that about a meter meter and half sea level rise there is that the vast majority that will become unusable which from the military perspective is obviously a bad thing which is compounded which is on the civilian side look to the right any of the purple areas that you see pretty much if you're on an island in those locations you're in big trouble and you can see the percent or the percentage of the population living in low elevation areas is sort of the pink border around most of the countries in the pacific in the Asia pacific region south Asia south east Asia etc so so within the end of pacific region the sea level rise and the challenges that it brings are pretty much prevalent to almost any country except Nepal, Bhutan and Mongolia so I guess those guys are lucky everybody else is going to have some issues with this in some form or fashion to different levels next slide what does it look like from a food insecurity perspective and just blasting through real quick what happens if you change fishing patterns etc you can see sort of the familial arrangement for fishing down in picture in Indonesia there and then even though this this projection goes out to 2070 if you look at corn yields and production projections it's pretty significant in some very highly populated areas of the world and certainly across the end of pacific region in many cases just that that one commodity alone will be significantly impacted next that was a water you can decide this is the picture I alluded to earlier the bottom right hand side is a picture upstream in the Mekong that and shows certainly the the drop in water level not only does that affect freshwater access for the folks in Thailand and other places it also affects basically the freshwater fishing and the other irrigation purposes that they use that river for so freshwater access there is a is a significant event and then as you look to the left hand side of this and you start seeing the hazards you obviously red is bad red is red is less blue is more interestingly the change in in patterns in both directions can be catastrophic uh based on either generating droughts or generating additional flooding sometimes in a country in which both will occur almost exactly the same time next so we're going to talk a little bit about policies and programs and I would encourage anybody here because we work pretty hard on it to steal the next slide that I'm going to pull up because it really does kind of capture is why does the the department of fence care so much about this what are the things that we're doing and and so much of this has really taken a new life to it since the inauguration in 2021 um you know that first executive order sort of drove the boat back in October this past year many departments and agencies across the government sort of released their their climate and policy products prior to the the COP conference um and you can see sort of the three key ones at the bottom that I think all of us at the GCC levels specifically look at as a source for how and why are we doing these things obviously the risks that we each experience is a little bit different um you know the the things that that we are are talking about and I think it was commander cast from you come was talking about waiting for the NDS and the NMS to come out so that we can see the the directive nature of those products into how we're going to manage our business uh the draft version NDS that I saw had I think climate change was mentioned 17 times the previous version of it obviously under the previous administration it wasn't mentioned at all um in the case of Indo paycom we then translate this so for example the climate change impact portion is already in our theater campaign plan and we are beginning the first and it's in the campaign plan because we put it in as part of this project um and it's being getting sort of its first level of assessment now so that my boss can take that to his first basically assessment of our progress here in the end of pacific to the secretary of defense next slide so it was meant to the beginning that that we were sort of set up as a unique function that is true on the 15th of july this past year Amalakalino appointed me as the director as an additional line of effort within my primary responsibilities or what used to be my exclusive responsibilities on the humanitarian assistance and disaster management side uh he put his money where his mouth is the next day and I was able to hire four dedicated staff members uh that gives me some unique capabilities here because I already had a pretty good pretty robust research and training function within my own organization uh and allows us really to network across the DoD and others so I've heard mention of some of the groups up it was inside the Beltway and then uh Andrea it was truly a pleasure and I appreciate you inviting or allowing sort of the GCC inputs to this program because it should give anybody listening a better view of uh of what all is going on and I I'm gonna think about I think I got one more slide of interest here we go next and and I'm gonna just go sort of run the horn on this one because this is what we're doing within the climate change program at Indo-Pacific Command so the four circles in the middle pulled from the the climate assessment or the climate risk analysis and what the DoD should be doing as well as sort of the climate adaptation plan that says hey these are the areas of interest the only one that we didn't list here uh was the climate impact on I think it was a logistics or supply chain that's what it was um partly because that's not within the design of this particular capacity there are others in the Pacific who are working that and it's certainly very important but going sort of on the upper left hand side we've established within the command several different networks internal one is Anahu itself so there was a mention of the University of Hawaii and some of the great work that they do studies analysis modeling etc they're actually a part of our team as well as no other core of engineers a couple of NGOs here east west center and others we also established a community for Indo-Pacific climate security or CYPSIS that is basically allies and partners we went out to each of the security cooperation offices and said hey we want both a military and a civilian point of contact that care about climate change within your respective governments and we're forming that group up the intent being to to share best practices to maybe bring connect resources to requirements because so much of the work that can be done in this arena does not have to be done by the Department of Defense there's only a certain amount of money to go around and the more research we do the more networking that we do the more we understand just how many people are already in this environment I'm fortunate and that I guess I haven't met anybody yet who cares about the climate change impact on the warfighter and on the numbered plans that are here in the Pacific as much as I do so I'm not trading on anybody else's sort of rice bowl but we have met folks who want to adapt and partner in different projects and I'll give an example I had a conversation the other day with the New Zealand consulate and now they're connecting us in a bilateral fashion to New Zealand to try to see what the US and New Zealand are doing in a shared space in the South Pacific as far as assistance to some of the hazards and challenges there on the information side we have gone out and sort of discovered a lot of data that is out there it's pretty amazing all the stuff that people are already doing and I guess there was a question with respect to some of the data projections etc what I would offer is you know just keep digging because there's either a university or a private organization or somebody out there who's probably already done it I say this because when I started asking about places like Palau and Guam and American Samoa and other islands one of our partners actually said well let me send you the four reports that we've already done on each of those islands that tells you everything you need to know projecting out 15 years there's also an organization if you haven't heard of it it's called the Pacific Disaster Center Global or PDC Global PDC actually has a global mandate and does work internationally they are a DOD funded organization out of Maui and they have a ridiculous amount of data information and analytical capability so again PDC Global on Maui I would recommend that you look up their stuff I know Southcom uses them extensively and I understand they have routes and activities in Africa and Newcom as well on the bottom right hand side I'm blessed in my current assignment and that we already do a significant amount of humanitarian assistance disaster relief training here so it has been a natural segue to add climate change pieces to that and we're already involved in most of the Indo-Pakum exercises and trying to insert climate issues as well as other issues into that on the infrastructure side we're right in the middle right now of looking at a vulnerability analysis for many of the nations many of the countries within the Indo-Pacific working with PDC Global and others to say hey you know where the risks and hazards and what what is this going to look like there was a question on timing I think that how far out are you looking I'm really looking at what are these locations going to look like in about say 2030 which bases installations etc are going to be affected by climate change in the Pacific and what can we do from a construction perspective to try and mitigate or adapt to those things now this includes mission assurance projects if you're associated with any of that and then also trying to work with our allies and partners on some of their own climate change issues all right I will hopefully go the next slide yep and this will wrap it up in one more slide if I remember correctly there you go so this really does in the Indo-Pacific specifically you know the 36 countries in the AOR and the things that we're looking at the major war plans and all the hazards and risks and disaster challenges that have already talked about you know this really is significant to the command and its effectiveness and we are attempting within the function that we're doing here to try and get ahead of a piece of that but also really reaching back and we've tried to get involved as involved as possible in recess and some of the other projects like Captain Likefoot and others are doing between them and Kim Kruse at OSD we're really understanding what others are doing so this has been I'll tell you I only woke up at 3 30 this morning so I didn't see the St. Com briefing but I thought the rest of them were excellent and I appreciate all the hard work from my cohorts in crime in this very important area at that point I think I will stop that seems like long enough to be talking thank you very much Mr. Joe Martin for your presentation on Indo-Pacom and the climate change impact program we will now turn to Q&A and there are several questions so I will read them one by one so the first one is the current strategic plan for the Defense Security Cooperation Agency DSCA does not address climate change at all is Indo-Pacom providing input on needed updates to the DSCA strategic plan so that's a great question I actually had a meeting I think it was day before yesterday with Brigadier Litster who is our our British officer who runs that for the Indo-Pacific Command and and the question I had was a little bit more tactical which is how do we get money to do all this right you know I want to I want to be able to mitigate and adapt to these things so they looked across all the different authorities they're available so looking at 333 and 332 and and all the different opportunities that are out there that may be unique to pay common others and they really boiled it down to is is the best way to link these projects today would probably be through the ODACA process if you want to do something that's probably because ODACA has a has a pretty wide capacity to it but you're correct and and many folks in the environmental security arena know this is that environmental security has never been really resourced through ODACA had DIIC was sort of the only chance that it ever had to get any money and and I guess this year they're going to get a million and a half or so which pay comes taking all of by the way so don't even bother turning any packages in we got it but it really is what authorities and things can be changed so that the effects of climate change can be addressed resource-wise I'm not sure who all of our folks are on from from OST policy and the climate section there but that's specific questions that we're asking to Kim and Annalise and Josh Buzby and you know what authorities are going to be created and what resources will be available so that we can put our money where our mouth is with respect to addressing these climate change hazards so so yes we're engaged both at the OST level and at the paycon policy level thank you next question which militaries in South Asia and Southeast Asia have institutionalized climate security into their doctrines or have expressed interest in engaging on climate security issues so it's sort of two-part answers so across the end of Pacific the US military I'm sorry foreign military forces the forces that country in many cases are the primary responders to disasters so from a disaster response perspective many the militaries are very actively involved but I will tell you when we ask the question to them about climate change and climate security issues it was almost not exclusively but certainly the preponderance of the more developed countries already had an interest in a program in Singapore about you know lost their minds they were so happy to find somebody else who wanted to get engaged with them on this at the ministry defense level it was nuts New Zealand's kind of the same way Australia is pretty much in the same boat when we talked to Papua New Guinea they go hey look we don't have this at all within our ministry defense we're trying to make sure that dudes have boots and guns you know so the answer is like many things in Asia and probably across the globe is it kind of depends on which country you're looking at and in many cases across Oceania for example there's only four countries in Oceania that have militaries at all so you can't so their answer is none hopefully that helps to answer the question thank you the next one says can anyone give a concrete play-by-play example of how the Russian Chinese Russian and Chinese exploit climate change phenomena to gain additional access maybe if the you come guys are on I mean everybody seems to start surround Russia at least be engaged in Russian in some form or fashion even the north come that's probably to an extent yes so I'll chime in a little bit if it's okay I just I'm still on the call here so um so from the Russian side of things they've gained access and they're really accessing their resources on their northern slope and then pulling those resources around to other markets so it's open up the northern sea route which and that's okay because those are their resources that they're that they're engaging in where the challenge is with Russia is that whenever they have a resource they feel this this need to go ahead and to protect that resource and so the first thing they do is that also there's cruise missiles up there on this northern sea route that's defending the northern sea route and there's and and now they want to own the northern sea route and they want to and they want to control all the access across that and there's a there's a bunch of requirements they put in place so that other ships can't use the northern sea route and so it would just be Russian and Chinese ships effectively or ships that are just servicing Russia that would use that route so that's how they control the access and that gives them at the same time because of climate change there's increased access to our northern sea areas also um and interestingly is that what we're seeing with climate change also is that fish stocks are moving further north also so now there's crabs up off the north Atlantic that were never there before so we're seeing protein sources the Chinese are well aware of this on the on the pacific side and they've been in there mapping what's going on as far as those biological growth in that area and you can anticipate that we talk about those those hundred vessels that are out there are thousands of them that are fishing vessels that we're going to see that off the northern coast of Alaska as it goes around the Arctic area when that area does open up because the stocks are going to move into those areas to be very fertile ground it's going to be very ripe for for that type of fishing in the future so we see that there's before the ice and everything it prevented ships from going into those areas for a vast part of the season now that access is open and there's there will be a new avenues or new lanes of approach where we didn't have those lanes of approach before the only things that was really up there were some Marines and now we have surface ships that are up there also so that's been the change that we see that's occurring now and it's going to keep occurring well into the future to and the access will continue to grow where it gets better and that's a relative term is that when the center of that sea ice opens up they will have that direct polar route where it won't be under the control of any specific country as far as engaging the area so hope that answers the question that popped up thank you Dr. Fogg thank you very much and in fact I think you have covered the next question's answer as well had to do with the Arctic Dimension of Indo Paycom's AOR and how it relates to climate risks so I'm going to make the assumption that Dr. Fogg has addressed that unless anyone wants to chime in on that sounds good okay so we'll go to the next one since the physics don't care who is in the White House or Congress what was Indo Paycom able to accomplish regarding climate security between 2017 and 2021 sure so that's a great question and I guess the probably greatest thing that they and many people in the in government in general and I've heard this from multiple sources that was able to accomplish is you just didn't call it climate change you called it something else so for example in talking to the Coast Guard the Coast Guard literally was at conferences and they would get yelled at that you know why aren't we doing stuff with climate change and they go well you know I'm here to talk about you know food insecurity and fish fish changes and sea level rise which are all wrapped up into climate change but the politics at the time said you couldn't say it so the reality was is that the the government writ large continued to work climate change issues well through the previous administration they just oftentimes called it something else if you look and you can go across the government and look at that if you look at the fuel efficiency changes across the Department of Defense and greenhouse gas reductions you know have been going on for the better part of 15 or 20 years within the DoD itself if you look at the work that that Indo Paycom and some of its subordinate commands have done with respect to you know the Corps of Engineers for example I asked them what do you guys do with respect to climate change they go every single project that we do every single project that we do has a climate impact to it right sometimes we call it that sometimes we just design to it so a seawall design for example at port facilities in some you know small country or U.S. location is designed with with climate change in mind so the answer is it never stopped it was largely just called something else in the interests of the political environment at the time so which really surprised me because I didn't start doing this until this past summer I've cared about it for a long time I really started doing it the past summer and I was really pleasantly surprised to see that it didn't stop so thank you next question what sort of support or coordination with Department of Navy HQ would help Indo Paycom implement and publicize their CCI program so I guess the question to that I think I see the name is from Adam I guess the question back to Adam maybe well it depends you know where do you work is that is that your function up there because that'd be awesome to be able to relay because we are a naval you know theater you know most of it's covered with water we're led by a four star naval commander and have been for probably the entire existence of the command you know and the more that we can do with respect to resourcing because that's where Indo Paycom gets its resources is located part of the Navy and what can you do to help resource not just fleet naval forces and their activities but the command headquarters itself and the things that we want to do and I'll give you an example so if if you're the Air Force for example and you want to do a military construction project and one of the places that you want to do work is in Timor-Leste so there's an airfield in Timor-Leste called Bacau right Bacau's could be very important strategically to the United States so let's spend some money to try and make it better well that same headquarters Air Force is also fighting for money to improve the airfield at Charleston Air Force Base in South Carolina well Charleston has lots of congressmen lots of senators and Timor-Leste has none right so how do you fight for the resources through the service components to get the service components and advocate military construction projects at non DOD installations that's it's wicked hard right you know and when you look at Indo Paycom you know we're talking in the in the billions and billions of dollars in construction projects that are on the books in order to support the commander sees the initiative effort in support of OPLANTS I think some of those can be can be compounded upon with climate change dollars and sort of the climate change perspective which is one of the things that we're looking at so you know advocate the hell out of it for us would be my answer and and I'll send you copies of the slides I think it's already gone up to I wish I could remember her name the special assistant for the secret for climate change in the the chief naval operations office but you know we're we're a huge fan I think we have time for one more question does the coe oops I'm sorry okay it just kind of flipped out from my vision here okay does the coe work with the dki apc ss or is dki apc ss involved in the cipcs or more broadly on these climate security matters so the the answer is absolutely as I mentioned I was at apc ss yesterday I actually teach in climate change some of their programs they're involved Dr. Ethan Allen and prior to him Dr. Scott Hogger are very involved in our process and me and everyone we talked to are really good friends I'm going to throw one more question in just for the fun of it there because there was a question asked um trying to remember it had to do with with oh h.a.d. our mission increasing in complexity so I think it was John sales sort of has that one down there um the answer is if as the dod as climate continues to change right and disaster risks go up and the frequency of responses continue you know will this ever become a dedicated mission for us military forces you know I don't know I know that as long as you know when when uh you know certain members of congress are there to say absolutely not this will never fund for it fund resources for this but I think that as it changes can you think about I'm not going to be as famous for saying we need to think act and operate differently right well we need to think act and operate about climate change differently because it is changing the landscape of the way that we prepare and respond and you know it's just important that we adapt as the climate you know changes and trying to accommodate the things that we can do so I'll pause there as I saw Andrea pop back up so Mr. Joe Martin thank you very much and now back to commander Cameron I would like to thank Dr. Hyatt Alvi and Mr. Joe Martin for their presentation on Indo paycom and the climate change impact program especially Joe who woke up early not just to do his own presentation but to watch most of the event today this was a wonderful panel to conclude especially your final question and answer about whether this will be an expanded mission set for the dod today was an exceptional event that asked each geographic combatant command how they assess their climate risks and what they were planning to do about them I am honored to have the support of each region so that we could bring this event to you today when I started conceptualizing the event I came up with a standard formula of a J4 J5 team however as it came together it was fascinating to see the different culture and personality of each geographic combatant command and how they approached today's presentations I also enjoyed watching them work together for climate change does not respect the lines we draw on our maps in addition at the very beginning of the event I offered a holistic view of what climate security might entail I said at the time that some of the things on the list we do well some of the things we're starting to think about and some need more attention but one thing I expected today was the amount of thought put into the presentations by all of the teams but what I probably wasn't expecting was the candor for where we need to start putting more attention I'd like to thank the teams for their preparation and their honesty throughout the entire event many of the presenters today are my friends and colleagues who helped shape the event particularly those in the J4 offices around the world who have been carrying the mantle of climate environmental security issues for years I truly appreciate how they help make this format for today possible and with all that being said this is just a start last year the president of the naval war college called my first conference inaugural which meant I could bring to you another event today but with so much progress in one year I'm already looking forward to what we might be able to pull together for next year I would like to thank all the speakers and moderators for their participation today as well as our special events team PAO media services media services alumni programs and our own climate librarian isabel lops and of course professor michael bush while I was on camera it took a large team to deliver this event today and I couldn't have done it without as a reminder all of these panels have been recorded and we will be available on the naval war college youtube site next week thank you for joining us today stay safe everyone this concludes our virtual conference on the national security significance of a changing climate with the specific theme of operationalizing climate security thank you for joining us