 Welcome everybody this afternoon. We have a wonderful event for you and delighted to have a wonderful audience to I'm sure. So my name is Sharon Burke. I'm the director of the resource security program at New America. And this event is looking at the Department of Defense and conservation. We came across this as an event because of the release of a wonderful new report called the conservation of defense opportunities to promote conservation through military readiness. And this was put out by the Environmental Policy Innovation Center epic. And I thought it was a great report just from the title right away, the balance between conservation and nature and readiness is a really interesting emphasis and we'll get right into that in a minute. I'm going to introduce our speakers and then just say a couple of opening comments and we'll dig right in to presentations from each of them. Then we will field questions and you may post them either in the chat or the Q&A function. And I will direct them at speakers and we'll get into a great conversation so the floor will be open to you throughout but I will try to group your questions after we get through the presentation so watch and listen. So our speakers today are first of all Dr. Tim Mail who leads the Environmental Policy Innovation Center. He's the founder of that organization. He is a very well established national leader environmental policy leader and particularly in conservation, drought response, finance for water supplies and agricultural stewardship. Before he founded this new organization that wrote this wonderful report, he was the Associate Director for Conservation at the White House Council on Environmental Quality. So Tim is a national leader and you should also know that he is a local leader. He was a three time city council member in the town that I live in so it's very exciting for me to have a local luminary here to talk to us. Tim will lead off with a presentation about his report, and then we'll turn it over to Rebecca Rubin who is the founder, the president and the CEO of Marcel Day which is an international environmental consultancy that she started back in 2002. This is an amazing organization that has had, you know, deep experience in this field for a long time, and Rebecca herself has prior experience with the Army running their Environmental Policy Institute. She's got awards and she's on boards and she's publishes everywhere. She again is a tremendous leader in this field and we're really lucky to have her here today. She's going to tell us a little bit more about what this looks like from her point of view as someone who's been deeply involved with the Department of Defense and Conservation for a long time. And then we're very lucky to have Kristin Thomas guard with us. She is the program director for the Department of Defense readiness and environmental protection integration program. You see, I have to read everything because I know the acronyms, but like a true former defense official. I'm a former assistant secretary of defense. I know all the acronyms, but I don't always know what they stand for. This one is known more commonly by repi, which is a really important program that links communities land conservation and the Defense Department. And Kristin's been leading that program for some time and she also is the lead for the Sentinel Landscapes Partnership, which is an interagency group that also works in this space. She also has a background working for the Army, including as a member of the Army National Guard. So she's a, you know, an important leader for the same issues inside the Department of Defense and just wonderful to have her here today. And I can tell you, Kristin can't, if she even knows I know through my little ways that repi is is potentially going to get a big plus up in the next defense authorization bill so that's a very exciting possibility. So I just wanted to start by saying a couple of framing comments. First of all, you know, based on some research I'm doing with my colleague Wyatt Scott on climate governance in America. We had a really interesting conversation with a woman named Pollitt Blanchard a couple weeks ago about Native Americans and climate change. And I feel that it's truly important for me to start by saying that I'm speaking to you today from a place that is the ancestral stolen lands of the Piscataway Indians. And it's something that I plan to learn more about and about my obligations there. So today what we are going to talk about is the Department of Defense, which think of it this way this is the nation's largest employer with almost 3 million employees, about a $750 billion annual budget. It has a presence in every state in a more than 160 countries. And part of that is managing a great deal of land something like 4800 sites, 28 million acres under management. So this is a scale and a scope that touches an immense amount of territory and as I said has a presence everywhere in this country. So how the Department of Defense operates itself now it's core mission of course is the defense of the country. There's lots of ancillary missions in that and how the Department of Defense carries that out how it is as a partner as a steward. This has a great deal of heft and consequence. So it's really important to think of it that way and we're lucky to have Tim male to talk to us about this great new report that he wrote and that he led and Tim with that, I would love for you to take it over and give us a presentation. Thanks so much, Sharon and thanks to everybody on the on the webinar today. I'm going to swap over to my slides and jump into the presentation, but just a little bit of background on the environmental policy innovation center or epic. We're a small new organization that focuses on speed so how can you make conservation go faster, whatever the conservation target is, how can you make that happen faster through through policy. And let me just jump to my slide. And there we go. So, here's a quick cover shot of the report. I've actually had a connection to Department of Defense and conservation for a long time, although it was only at the beginning of this report that I really sort of put two and two together oddly enough. And it was because as a, as a young child really when I was eight, I had the chance to go to this former army base. It was it's named Fort Mitchie. It's at the end of Long Island and it was a strategic defense area from the Spanish American War to the end of World War two 500 troops stationed on 17 acres. Immediately abandoned after World War two and given to a museum through a process completely unlike Brack just just abandoning it. And this island is now the most important, the largest breeding colony for an endangered bird in the entire western hemisphere. So for me, the idea that military lands can have conservation value is something that literally was my first conservation experience. I subsequently worked on Fort Hood in Texas for two years as part of their natural resource program and learned a lot more about what goes on on active installations. So, you know, with that sort of personal connection, we had the opportunity to put together this report, because a foundation had asked us to dig into the question of what, what are military lands used for today. What is it, what is the military need in the future. How does all that interact with conservation and are there sort of win-win opportunities, you know between the two. And so that started a roughly a nine month process for myself and my colleague Jake Lee to do a series of interviews and roundtables with current and former military leaders with consultants who work with the military and academics who do research on and around military and conservation issues. And that's the basis for the report we put together and the recommendations we put together. So just a little bit of context, some of you know this quite well, but you know why is the Department of Defense important to conservation. And Sharon said they have 27 or 28 million acres under management in the United States. That's twice the size of all state parks combined. It's roughly half the size of all of America's national parks. The military has through programs like the one that Kristen is going to talk about helps protect a half a million acres in the last roughly decade. That includes conservation and agricultural lands that help buffer military installations but provide many natural resource values. Although the military lands are only, you know, half the size of national parks, they contain four times more endangered species per acre than any other federal land holding. For example, they're three times more endangered species, starting four times more imperiled species. There's four times more endangered species on military reservations than there are national wildlife refuges. 75 species found only on Department of Defense land. It's not just the species, the whole ecosystems are also, you know, an important feature 80% by the by the nature conservancies estimation 80% of America's ecological systems, including some representation on a military base. Many of you or all of you may be familiar with the footprint of a military installation, but their interests go way beyond the footprint. And this is a map that shows the airspace and the installation space beyond the ground space in the sea space that is of interest to the military for training and and and readiness purposes. There's this great quote that we got during the report that the more that non military lands are managed for wilderness or other conservation uses the better it is for the Department of Defense. And that's the connection I want to use to talk about why is conservation important to the military. These are three recent pictures of the kinds of ways that natural resource issues affect the military. A wildfire in California that that on the edge of Camp Pendleton wildfires enforce the evacuation of bases in California, a dust storm and in Arizona that affected an Air Force base and the recent flooding of strategic command in Nebraska, by flooding in the Mississippi River. These kind of impacts are real and increasingly frequent with climate change and have an effect on national security and if there are ways that we can build resilience into our landscapes. There may be military benefits to that resilience. Some assumptions that we made going into the report. We didn't want to make recommendations that were about conservation and not about training and readiness. So we were assuming that the military would need more space for for weapons of the future things like hypersonic missiles that encroachment that subdivision and other kinds of development around installations would continue to play a threat to the military and to training and operations, and that between those two things that we might see something like a 5 million acre change in how much land, either the DOD is managing where the DOD has played a role in protecting over the next 10 to 15 years. So, so these are some of the assumptions around which we built our report and tried to find recommendations that really could represent a win for national security, as well as a win for conservation. And so I'm going to go through a series of topics. Just quickly, we can talk more about them in the Q&A session, but areas where we made recommendations. So the first one is on land withdrawals, a process by which the Department of Defense basically says it might need land that the Bureau of Land Management or the Forest Service currently has and a process through which those lands can be withdrawn for military use. And DOD currently has about 17 million acres of withdrawn lands in its management that the Bureau of Land Management lands are the largest category of those withdrawn lands. And one of the things that sort of came out in the context of our report is that there's often what feels like a sort of a reflexive reaction to Department of Defense, having an interest in these lands. And I think there's a real need for just a more consistent and maybe less reactive framework to evaluate land withdrawals. So, you know, if the military from a conservation perspective, if the military is withdrawing lands, does that mean those lands are no longer at risk for mining or other kinds of natural resource extraction? Can you use a withdrawal to protect wildlife quarters? Can you maintain or at least protect some form of public access, for example hunting? What would a military land withdrawal do to funding levels for conservation? And would the use of those lands before active training with troops on the ground and live ordinance, or would it be passive buffering of a range? So we think there's a real opportunity to look at each withdrawal using a consistent process and that's one of the areas that we made a recommendation again associated with the foundation that helps support our work. The Berry Goldwater Range stands out as a withdrawal about 20 years ago that has a sort of a particularly strong approach to natural resource planning. And another step that we had identified was to look more in depth at how that Berry Goldwater Range withdrawal, natural resource, the natural resource requirements have worked out. On the endangered species side, the military, and this is where my background was, has already done some pretty impressive things for endangered species. Many bases have stable or growing populations of endangered species on them. But what's clear is that the military needs sort of stronger, clearer and more consistent incentives under endangered species policies and regulations, so that when they create a benefit for species, it has some return benefit to them in terms of training flexibility. So we identified a number of areas where those kinds of predictabilities could be provided to the military. For example, around meeting recovery targets or population goals for species on an installation or in the area of an installation. And I think both Rebecca and Kristen are going to talk more about landscape scale conservation. So I'm just going to touch on a sort of a related piece of that, which is, it came up again and again that that people thought that there needs to be a broader authority to pool funds to bring funds together across multiple federal agencies or federal state and non-governmental agencies to be able to use those funds in essentially like a single check, imagine being able to provide a single check. And so some of the ideas that we came up with or that participants came up with around funding were creating a program to the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, congressional creation of a dedicated military conservation foundation, having the White House CEQ manage pooled funds or pooling funds through a private foundation like the U.S. Endowment for Forests and Communities. Another idea related to landscape scale conservation, military training and readiness was the idea to create a White House task force, a standing committee effectively that could look at issues of national defense and natural resource, both conflicts, mitigation and minimization, and then the opportunities for proactive sort of win-win outcomes. And I'm going to stop there and I'll pivot back to, I guess I'll share it directly back to Rebecca, so I'll let go of control of my screen. Great. We can flip right over to Rebecca and Tim, when we come back to you in the Q&A, one thing that would be interesting to hear you talk about is the consultations you went through for that report and how much uptake you saw in the defense folks that you spoke to. So put that one in your, on your list and we'll come back to you. Great. Okay, well, well, thank you and thank you everyone for tuning in today. I'm Rebecca Rue and the president and CEO here at Marcel Day. And just in brief, you know, we're a conservation consulting organization that sort of tries to meet their clients at the nexus of their mission and their environmental stewardship responsibilities. I'm going to be talking today and picking up on some of the points made in Tim's excellent presentation. And I'm going to focus on conservation partnering, kind of, you know, what it is and where it has the potential to go through the lens of encroachment planning. And as we, as we get underway, I just want to kind of make the point that DMD went through a rather epic shift between about 2020 from almost like a federal fortress paradigm where the installation was defined mainly in terms of its physical boundaries to becoming a true conservation community collaborator and a true community partner working across installations across boundaries across landscapes and there's been a real pivot within DoD that started I think with its recognition that it probably could not address major encroachment pressures like urbanization and development without its partners and then grew from there to really enfold other kinds of partnerships as well. So, so gradually DoD and partners developed a suite of like no kidding, pioneering solutions at the nexus of mission readiness and environmental stewardship. And, and to be clear, it has to be both right for DoD the partnerships must address testing training or operational pressures just as for the conservation partners they must enhance ecology, wildlife habitat and so forth. So, as we move towards, you know, envisioning success and what that might look like it, it would be really tempting to start with, you know, all the things that went right, but probably closer to reality to say that, you know, the inspiration for a formal conservation partnering program came about the good old fashioned way through struggle and trial and error and in the words of one study written a ways back, how can a fragile and endangered bird coexist with a 60 ton M1 tank on an army base in the North Carolina sandhills. And it's not that initial partnerships weren't well thought out because they were, and it's not that they weren't well planned because they were, but what they were lacking was a certain amount of let's call it top cover or legal or legislative framework in which DoD and the conservation partners could really operate together. And so a lot of credit goes to the conservation community, especially some of the major national groups like the Nature Conservancy and the Trust for Public Lands and the Conservation Fund and the thousand plus land trusts that are all part of the Land Trust Alliance that worked with DoD to help define the need for and really create the market around conservation partnerships with specificity by naming specific installations and opportunities where they saw the possibilities and also with the help and input of the conservation we eventually got to the passage of the so called encroachment partnering legislation, 10 U.S. Code 2684A. Now I know a number of you are familiar with this. So, as you know it allows conservation partnerships between DoD and non federal entities and basically the articulation of common goals to leverage partners and resources. Some details of that legislation are important because they are the enabling factors and so I'm going to speak very briefly to that including the amendments that have taken place since the legislation was originally passed in 2002. So it specifically addresses the use or development of real property in the vicinity of or ecologically related to a military installation. It's intended to help limit development that would be incompatible with the military mission. It's intended to help preserve habitat in order to avoid mission incompatible environmental restrictions. It's intended to improve military installation resilience and also to to protect clear zones as well. I want to be very careful not to imply that all partnering needs to be done or has been done under the encroachment partnering authority, but rather that this authority kind of spawned an era of partnerships. So a lot of people think of encroachment partnerships as addressing urbanization and development and indeed they do and these are major factors, but the program has also evolved over time to address a broader suite of entities and pressures on installations including airspace, sea level rise, water resources, energy generation and transmission, transmission sighting compatibility, climate change, weather effects and so forth. So we think about it, think of it in the in the broad sense of that. When you contemplate the growth of partnering and look across the complex, big complex, lots of bases, you know, what makes what makes the partnerships work and so at the heart of it I think, you know, I'd identify some common denominators and and I say this is someone whose company has done well over 100 different encroachment planning assessments and probably more than that of community partnering exercises. At the heart of things are one risk based approaches, what are each installations encroachment risks and vulnerabilities and which of those create opportunities to mitigate conflict. Between the military testing and training and sort of operational readiness on the one hand and habitat species and people and the other. And then secondly these partnerships all involve delivery mechanisms right these are leveraged partnerships between DoD and conservation partners, states, local communities who are instrumental planning and execution partners. And so from all of this, you then saw additional partnerships around more than just land use beginning to form so around water resources, energy security, climate change, fire control, vegetation management right a whole host of things. There have been a lot of very special sort of marquee moments in encroachment planning and conservation partnerships and I truly cannot do them all justice, but I will try to highlight a few. Out of the Mojave Desert, there's a major wildlife and habitat quarter that was created under the so called Wildlife Linkages campaign that helped to join Joshua Tree National Park with Marine Corps Air Ground Combat Center 29 Palms. Major partners included Mojave Desert Land Trust and the Trust for Public Lands. So they were able to help protect desert tortoise, pristine lands and also offer public access opportunities. And that same installation undertook a critical night skies initiative, dim the lights right replacing the lighting or making the lighting go downward in order to restore the clear night sky. This is a partnership with the community. Wanted to be able to view you know the celestial bodies with the unaided eye and to restore the day night cycle as an aid to wildlife. Camp Lejeune, North Carolina, often one of the iconic partnerships cited to enhance and preserve red-cockaded woodpecker habitat both on and off of Camp Lejeune. A lot of partners in that one, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, National Fish and Wildlife Foundation, Marine Corps Installations East, the U.S. Navy. Another very interesting one in North Carolina involved the Eastern North Carolina Compatible Land Use Strategy. This involved 25 different Eastern North Carolina counties to enhance working farmlands and forests and to reduce habitat fragmentation. In the resource management, there were various water resource management assistance sustainability plans undertaken at Mountain Home, Beale, Altus, Vandenberg and Shepherd Air Force bases. Partnerships with stakeholders include city and county officials, water management entities, major water users, installation leadership, utility companies and so forth. And even after all that, even after all of the partnerships that I think you'll get a much better sense of when Kristen goes through her presentation, after all that opportunities still remain and they especially still remain, I think, in natural factors and climate. So partnerships around storm surge, flooding, sea level rise, thawing permafrost, coastal erosion, wildland fire, water scarcity, drought impacts, habitat migration and more. All of these are still out there. All of these still need partners. So as we think about what lies ahead, I would just sort of offer the thoughts that, you know, resource competition is only going to become more intense. Species and habitat protections will only become more fragile and more critical. Disease vectors will play, you know, a greater and greater role and also hopefully drive our appreciation more and more for ecosystem services. Climate effects will increasingly be enfolded into risk analyses. And while all this is happening, DoD's need for space for the right kinds of testing and training facilities will continue to grow. And so this leads us, I think, to a kind of conservation mosaic approach that would contemplate the interdependencies among habitats and landscapes across federal partners. There's a greater coordination, not just by DoD and with, you know, between DoD and its partners, but also among federal land managers and climate and energy and water and land and ecosystem services. And so continuing USDA and DOI and others, multi-jurisdictional strategies, definitely a continued need for encouragement planning across, you know, across the complex and ideally, of course, planning always stays several steps ahead, which, you know, you know, is a disaster situation. So this requires continued engagement across landscapes and partners probably for a very long time to come. So with that, let me close it up and turn this over to Kristen for next presentation. Thank you. Kristen, take it. Thank you so much, Rebecca. Kristen, take it away. Let's hear what you have to say as the person who runs this program for the Department of Defense. Okay, well, good afternoon, everyone. It's a pleasure to be here today and I do want to thank Sharon and New America for the opportunity to be part of this discussion. But also a big thank you to Tim and Rebecca for the really great work that they're doing that is supporting our efforts within the Department of Defense. So I'm going to switch over to my slides here and hope that, let me see. Alright, so we've already gotten to hear a fair amount about DoD and conservation and a lot of the efforts that are ongoing from a planning perspective, as well as some of the challenges that we're facing. So I want to start off today by talking a little bit about why DoD established the REPE program and why conservation partnerships are so critical to DoD's mission accomplishment. As Tim mentioned, DoD manages around 27 million acres of land and on that we have a significant management responsibility for threatening endangered species and a lot of very unique lands and unique habitats. But we also have the requirement to use that land to provide training to approximately one million men and women who wear uniform and have volunteered to do a very difficult job. And so what that means is that we need to have realistic and varied training environments. That means different terrains, different climates, resilient landscapes that support those varied activities. But we also need to ensure safe spaces for testing new vehicles, new equipment. And as you know, when we train, test, and operate, we make noise, sometimes a little noise, sometimes a lot of noise. We create dust and smoke. We're operating equipment that can be dangerous. And our neighbors don't always enjoy these activities. As Rebecca mentioned, we need dark skies. We need space and buffers around those installations and ranges so that we can ensure not only the safety of the men and women who are using this equipment but of our neighbors. And our installations are no longer in isolated areas. Therefore, we must work with partners at multiple levels to sustain compatible and resilient landscapes that are around and in the vicinity of our installations. And we do this by working with a wide and diverse set of partners, federal, state, local, academic, private foundations in order to promote compatible land uses and to protect these important habitats and natural resources at a landscape level, primarily so that these imperiled species and wildlife have more space to thrive and aren't forced to see installations due to unchecked development. But we're also part of communities. The cities, counties, states, landscapes that our installations are located within. And so not only do we want to be good neighbors, but we want to ensure a high quality of life for our military members and families. And that means sustainable communities, healthy environments, and opportunities for recreation, which are things that are also critically important for our partners. So the REPE program is supported by an annual line item appropriation from Congress. And so there's a couple things that I'll point out on this particular chart. The black line is actually representing annual requirements for REPE funds. And so as Rebecca mentioned, there's a lot more work out there that needs to be done. And so what you're seeing there that black line is is the amount of work that could be done if we had funding available to do it. And that has been steadily increasing. It does go up and down depending on on what's happening at our installations, but generally has increased over time. The green line that you see kind of in the middle of the chart actually represents the annual appropriations we've received from Congress. And you'll note that we've received a fairly steady and increasing level of funding since FY05. And it's averaged about 75 million over the past five years with somewhat higher funding in the more recent years. So 90 million in FY18, 85 million in FY19 and 100 million in FY20. But this is still only about 50% of our annual requirement for the work that needs to be done. And then the yellow line is actually representing the DOD's presidential budget request, which you'll note is lower than the appropriated funding level in all but two years. And this represents the fact that Congress has consistently provided more funding than DOD has requested in order to do REPE work around the country. Again, it is really important to note that the REPE program and the work that happens through the REPE program is resource not only with DOD funds, but also through non DOD partner funds, 8854 million through FY19 to be exact. These are other federal state, local, private dollars that are being leveraged with DOD dollars to accomplish shared outcomes on the ground around our installations and ranges. And that is preserving and enhancing our military readiness, but also promoting installation and community resilience and conserving important habitat and open space. And none of this would be possible without the conservation partners that help to bring those dollars to the table. So I've touched on why DOD established the REPE program and how some of these conservation partnerships are funded. So I'd like to speak briefly about some of the key components of the REPE program. And so I'll start with partner engagement. Well, this accounts for a relatively small amount of the REPE budget. It is probably the most critical and foundational component of what we do in the REPE program. This is really our day to day business and where all of our sweat equity goes. Not only do we work in close coordination inside DOD with the natural resource program and staff with environmental research programs within the department and the military departments, but we also engage with a significant number of federal agencies, state agencies, local governments, non governmental organizations, foundations and academic partners. This is a continuous two way dialogue that is really the foundation for the partnership projects that take place with our conservation partners at the local level. The next big piece of the REPE program are the landscape partnerships and these partnerships are a way for us to focus partnership engagement activities in specific regions or landscapes and target work with multiple and diverse partners. So you'll see Surpass, which is our southeastern partnership for planning and sustainability and the western regional partnership depicted on this map. And these are partnerships focused on developing collaborative solutions to share challenges within those key regions. And then finally, the installation level partnership projects take up about 90% of the REPE annual funding. Those dollars go directly to on the ground implementation, which is facilitated and supported by these other program components that I mentioned. And by the end of FY 19, the REPE program and our partners have permanently protected over 688,000 acres of land across the country, and that's at 110 locations in 33 states. I'm going to mention Sentinel Landscapes on my next slide, but I do just want to point out how there are seven designated Sentinel Landscapes across the country right now. Joint Base Lewis McCord in Washington, Fort Wichuka in Arizona, Camp Ripley in Minnesota, Avon Park in Florida, the Middle Chesapeake Sentinel Landscape, which is in Maryland, but also includes portions of Virginia and Delaware. The Eastern North Carolina Sentinel Landscape, which includes multiple installations in the eastern half of North Carolina and the Georgia Sentinel Landscape, which also includes multiple installations in the southeastern half of the state of Georgia. So the Sentinel Landscape's partnership is really how we're looking toward the future in DOD. And this is a partnership that is a coalition of federal agencies, state and local governments, non-governmental organizations and conservation partners that works to advance common land use objectives in high-party areas that we refer to as Sentinel Landscapes. This was founded in 2013 between U.S. Department of Agriculture, Department of Defense, and Department of the Interior. And our overarching goals are to strengthen military readiness, bolster agricultural and forest productivity, conserve natural resources, and increase access to recreation. And we carry out this mission by connecting private landowners around military installations and ranges with government assistance programs and other partnering opportunities to help offset the cost of implementing sustainable management practices and conservation projects on their properties. As DOD through the REPI program continues to move the Sentinel Landscape's partnership forward with our federal agency partners, I'm going to mention a few authorities and opportunities that we're really focused on using both within the Sentinel Landscapes but also across the country at all of our project locations. One of those is an exciting change to the 10 U.S. Code 2684A, which Rebecca spoke to earlier. There's a change made permanent in FY18, which provides for a funds as match authority. And what this does is it allows the recipient of REPI funds to use those funds as a match or cost sharing requirement for any conservation program within the Department of Agriculture or the Department of the Interior. And so we've really been promoting the use of this, the Natural Resources Conservation Service in particular has been an incredible partner to DOD and our installations and we've been finding more and more opportunities to do work together with NRCS as well as U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Additionally, in 2019 and Rebecca mentioned this specifically when she talked about the uses of the 10 U.S.C. 2684A authority, but we can specifically address military installation resilience now using that authority. What this does is it further enhances the REPI program's ability to engage in collaborative land protection and natural resource management activities that will allow our installations to avoid, adapt to, recover from extreme weather events and changes in environmental condition. And this is going to include opportunities to maintain and improve natural infrastructure. And so, for example, right now we have several projects that we are pursuing. I'll mention just a couple. Naval Weapon Station Earl in New Jersey really was leaning very far forward on this so they are located within Sandy Hook Bay that was impacted by Hurricane Sandy several years ago and received quite a bit of funding for coastal resilience storm surge projects in that area. The base there has been partnering with Monmouth County for some time and they are actually starting to use not only the 10 U.S.C. 2684A authority, but they are also leveraging a tool referred to as the Intergovernmental Support Agreement where they can get funds directly to the county of Monmouth and Ocean County to do resilience work that is going to protect that installation but also the community. We're also seeing great resilience projects in Georgia around Kings Bay and Naval sub base there working with a number of partners to preserve lands that are protecting the sub base. And we're working on a partnering project to manage removing vegetation and managing fuel loads around Fort Wichuka to minimize wildfire risk and doing that in partnership with Coronado National Forest. And so the last thing that I'll mention is that in addition to acquiring the real estate interests to permanently protect lands, we can also fund management and improvement of natural resources outside installation boundaries. And through both 10 U.S.C. 2684A and the Sykes Act, we can fund long term management or stewardship endowments to permanently manage this land and that land and those sources. This allows for U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to give DOD greater credit for the investments that DOD is making in natural resources on these lands and helping us to increase flexibility for training and testing activities. So those are all opportunities that exist. They have not been utilized to their greatest potential and I think we're seeing more and more emerging opportunities for those authorities as we move into the future. Providing a couple resources here for folks. There's a lot of great information on all of the program components and all of the projects that you've heard mentioned at these websites and would certainly encourage folks to check those out. I'll call quick attention to one tool on the Sentinel Landscapes website, which is a landowner resources tool that was recently developed. This provides partners and landowners helps them find voluntary state and federal land assistance programs and it streamlines a search process by compiling over 300 landowner assistance programs into a single location that is filterable by location, category and benefit type so that folks can identify programs and funding opportunities for efforts in those areas. So I'd like to thank everyone for their attention today and I look forward to questions and discussion that follow. Thank you so much, Kristen. That was great. And we have a number of questions already teed up so I will start posing them but just before we get into the audience questions. Tim, could you tell us, because one of the things I'm really interested in is having visited a number of bases, including a number of Rebecca that you mentioned by name. You know, when you when you talk to base commanders to garrison commanders, they're aware of the benefits of the importance of interacting with the community of stewardship. It's also a very decentralized system. When you talk to the soldiers or the Marines or the airmen on the base. They're not always enthusiastic about having to stop training for a tortoise. So I'm wondering, Tim, as you as you did this report and you did your consultations. What kinds of conversations did you have what was your process for consulting people and and you know what did you hear about the attitudes towards these programs. And you're going to have to answer on a steer. Yeah. Should have me now. Yeah. We mostly talked to natural resource staff at installation. So we really didn't go out and talk to unit commanders or or troops and units. Certainly in my experience and working on Fort Hood for two years and being a, you know, a bunny hugger. Definitely, you know, felt some of that attitude that you you talked about. But I guess I just have found that there's a lot of, you know, common ground on these issues that people see the connections when you really get into the conversation. And certainly, you know, compared to any other federal agency I've worked with. There's no difference in the sort of sense of mission that natural resource staff have or consultants have with the O.D. compared to any other federal agency. So, you know, I wouldn't be able to tell. In terms of their professionalism qualifications or anything else that, you know, they were doing their jobs any differently. And I do think that the national security threats posed by climate change and the effects of encroachment climate change is, you know, it has a really pervasive effect on military in terms of, you know, leading the conflict. That's something that's a little different than most of the federal agencies and encroachment is also pretty different. So a lot of, I think other federal agencies more than the O.D. Think of their boundaries and what's inside of them has has key and are to some extent thinking outside boundaries, but I think it's much more universal within the O.D. That the stuff outside defense is really, really important. And so that's it. You know, those are those are important features of working with the O.D. professionals on conservation. Yeah. Thanks Tim and Rebecca I noticed that also, you know, I know I can tell from the questions that a lot of people who are listening are experts and they have very specific questions but I just, if you could lean in a little bit and talk to us what what you mean by encroachment and why for the military. That's such an important issue. Because we also have general audience members who may not actually know what that what you mean by that. Yeah, is that a question for me. Yes it is. Okay. Yeah, so encroachment has, you know, at least a dozen different kind of factors that influence it the big ones are urbanization and development. These create pressures on the installation that can constrict its training mission its testing mission its operations. You can literally see if you were to map it from a GIS perspective you could literally see encroachment moving towards the boundary of the installation from the pressures of development. So that's a big one. But there are others so people talk about for instance noise is a factor. You might also have encroachment from tall structures or spectrum interference right so any of these things that create a pressure on the installation that can sort of inhibit its operations is a form of encroachment climate change has been recognized now as a form of encroachment because it will affect the base and it's and its operations. There is also the opportunity for encroachment to do to be a two way street right so I mentioned noise from the standpoint of a community partner. The noise emanating from an installation's mission may create a factor I mentioned the case of 29 palms out in California where there was in a sense you know light encroachment from the standpoint that no one could see the dark skies at night so so it's in its original sense it was really taken to mean the set of pressures on installation that can constrict its mission and one of those pressures was a pressure on habitat that it was very difficult for DoD to perform its mission adequately if it was kind of constantly having to work around sensitive habitat and threatened endangered species which as Tim mentioned it has a lot of per acre. And so the whole idea initially of partnering and buffering was to relieve the pressure on installation in ways that were also very positive from the standpoint of habitat and wildlife and the creation of wildlife corridors. Initially, the encroachment kind of partner in paradigm was aimed only at lands immediately in the vicinity of the installation and was later expanded to include ecologically relatable parcels. So parcels of land that could become wildlife corridors or create additional ecology for the for the installation to relieve some of the pressure on the installation habitat so that the installation could continue its its testing and training missions. So encroachment pressures can be very widespread and have more recently been taken to also incorporate climate factors and also have been updated in a sense to acknowledge the fact that encroachment can be a two way street between the installation and surrounding community. Thank you that's very helpful. I'm going to slide into the questions that we're getting because they're very good questions. And I'm going to start with Bill carry over in the chat who I think Kristen this is probably going to be a good question for you to answer. And I think Rebecca you also referred to this. He says you know base security depends not only on base resiliency but also on the resiliency of the supporting community that you know whether it's water systems whether it's housing. Electricity there are all kinds of links between a base in the community that it's in. They're inextricably linked. So he asked about whether he mentions a specifically oh yeah which is a different Defense Office has considered broadening the traditional compatible land use studies to focus on region wide resiliency planning and I think that that when you said Rebecca there's been a striking shift that that's one of the things you're talking about is that there's a broader concept of resiliency. Kristen do you have any comments on that. Sure. I should mention that oh yeah plays a really critical role in helping communities to develop compatible use strategies in working with the military installations that are part of those communities. And as Bill mentioned in his question have now expanded those compatible use studies to develop resilience specific components and they're actually I believe about 20 of those projects underway right now across the country to actually add to and expand their existing compatible use plans to incorporate that resilience component. We work very closely in the REPE program with oh yeah to leverage those compatible use studies as a first step before REPE would come in. REPE partnerships particularly the work that we do for 10264A that is a tool in the toolbox. It is not the the totality of the solution set and what oh yeah is able to do in partnership with communities and using the authorities that they have granted from Congress. They really help to develop that broader strategy to help build relationships between the community and a wide suite of diverse partners as well as the installation to better understand one another's needs. What the requirements of the installation are what the community's growth plan and their strategy is for remaining economically viable. And then finding a set of solutions and recommendations that can be implemented one of which might be to develop a REPE partnership but many of which do not require land acquisition or that type of investment. There are many other types of community partnership tools so I think that's a really really valuable first step and something that we ask for in our proposal development process and rely upon or look to to inform how the REPE project is really contributing to a broader holistic encroachment management strategy that's being pursued at that installation. I think we should also point towards there's a new Defense Community Infrastructure Program and the Association of Defense Communities has a study out on that. That's a brand new opportunity as well that also is linked to a broader conception of community resilience and I've also heard that that's going to fare well in this year's defense authorization. Rebecca or Tim do you have something else you want to add on this question of a broader concept of resilience. I would just like to quickly say something about I think and this may have been part of what Kristen was getting at. But I think we also have a slightly underutilized tool in the toolbox through another there's community partnerships in the general sense and then there's community partnerships that are actually covered under its own legislative authority. And my sense thus far and Kristen I would love your impression of this. The formal community partnering program while it has done many things to create efficiencies between you know DoD and surrounding installations and lots of sharing has not yet fully embraced the kind of concept of installation resiliency between installation and the community itself it's like there's a tool out there. It's beginning to be used for that purpose, whereas I think by contrast, some of the partnerships under the encouragement partnering program, you know sort of expressly have been more regional in nature have brought in some of the surrounding communities and so forth. So, so it's my it is my sense that there is a real opportunity to better utilize the sort of official DoD community partnering program towards, you know, kind of increasing the bandwidth of the resiliency to encompass surrounding communities but I'd also be very interested in Kristen's perspective on that. Sure. I, I agree. I think that one of the things that we have the opportunity to do in the repi program, you know, I often times on your bureaucrat you have a carrot or a stick to get someone to do something and in the repi program it's nice that we have a carrot we have a funding line and have opportunity to provide funding to partnerships to advance efforts that we're trying to pursue to protect our installations. The benefit we have with the ability to assess and distribute those funds to projects based on our evaluation at the OSD level is that we can identify categories or elements that we really want to see developed before that funding is provided and so one of the things we tried to continually do is really press on the importance of developing those community based partnerships and really looking holistically at what's going on and not simply coming to to the repi program I have a piece of property I would like to buy a conservation easement on it and that will protect one issue today that I have rather we want to look at projects and we want to fund projects as we move forward that are really assessing how that particular effort fits into a much larger and broader strategy that has been developed in partnership with the community, or even on a broader state or regional basis, so that we have the recognition of the inner relationship between the community and the installation particularly from a resilience standpoint I think that has become even more critical. There was some legislation in FY19 that directed DoD to look at our installation master plans and to assess variance as a component of that. I think it's also important to understand that within the department there are multiple meanings for resilience and there are multiple factors that are looked at in DoD when we talk about resilience. And there's a lot of emphasis on cyber security, energy security, water security, kind of that critical infrastructure security component which is really, really important. But there's also this natural infrastructure and the need to assess how our installations and the communities that our installations are part of. We can't separate those installations from the communities. How are we able to adapt to become more resilient to continue to I think we got Kristin's frozen there. Can you all hear me? Yeah, yeah. Okay, Tim, let's let's go to you. I have a specific question that's directed to you. The amendments to ESA that you're requesting this. This is from Peter Smallwood. He says, are those needs unique to DoD or are they amendments that many commercial and private interests want? Yeah, so it wasn't necessarily speaking of legislative amendments, changes in policy, which could include certainly legislative amendments. Some of the changes are pretty specific to federal agencies because the law creates a federal agency obligation to help species that's a bit different than exists for private parties. But certainly the Forest Service, Pure Land Management, even National Park Service, DoD, you know, all could benefit from the kind of assurances that I was talking about. And I think the basic concept, the thing that I think most people get in a common sense kind of way is it's a bit of a like a square deal, right? Like if I do something that you say today is good enough. You know, we stand by that commitment today, right? So if you ask the military to spend $5 million doing X, Y and Z to benefit a species, and they do those things, is that good enough? Or when they finish that, you say, well, now we want you to do something else. And there's a way to capture that kind of pretty common sense approach in what's called Section 7, Planning Section 7 of the ESA is where interagency federal consultation goes on. Some of those same tools do exist for the kind of private parties that the questioner asked about safe harbor agreements and candidate conservation agreements are examples of those. But from a federal agency perspective, it's just been harder really since the Clinton administration to offer any kind of assurance or guarantee. An interesting example of that is that in, for a species in the southeast, the red cockaded woodpecker, there's an approach that's been established and not particularly well known. But that once an installation and the surrounding area have met the goals, the conservation goals for the red cockaded woodpecker in that area. That in the future, moving forward, as the installation plans to undertake training and other activities, that they're not going to be asked to do anything more. And that's been established through the sort of the consultation documents. There's a bunch of really interesting work, you know, going on in this space. The other area where it's important is in terms of, and certainly both Kristen and Rebecca talked about this. Can you exchange more conservation for species off of installations? Or frankly, the same thing could be true for water resources. If DOD is helping conserve resources off the installation, can they get a little more flexibility on the installation? And then idea of trading in space, you know, can have a lot of benefits and a lot of secondary, you know, benefits, sort of byproduct benefits in terms of protecting a, you know, bigger landscape. But just, I'm going to go back Sharon, just to the previous part, just really briefly, and say that, you know, I think what Bill points out is there are silos, right? Like there are silos between some parts of base planning and the natural resource planning side. And I think that's true. And one strategy is to try to break down silos. I think another one is to think of silos more as haystacks. You can see what's inside of them. You know, haystack is a big pile of hay, right? You know what it looks like, you know, it's boundaries. You don't know what's in a silo. And so to the extent that we have plans, one of the roles that academics, consultants, nonprofits, and even members of Congress play, is that they can see what's inside the different silos and put, you know, two and two together. And so, I mean, that's, that's where one of the things that stands out to me in the context of DOD is that there are fewer nonprofits. I think I feel comfortable saying with this, somebody feel free to weigh in if you disagree in the comments, but there's fewer nonprofits that pay attention to DOD conservation and probably any other, almost any other big federal agency. That's the problem because you lose people who are looking for commonalities and opportunity across these kinds of silos that exist or haystacks that exist. That's where with your experience Rebecca. Well, so not entirely. I would actually have said I think there's, I think there's a very good awareness on the part of the conservation community that, you know, DOD is a really outstanding land manager has become one that has embraced it almost as a, you know, integral component of its mission because it is that important to the mission and I think there's a widespread understanding that DOD, you know, is the steward of, you know, almost more than any species per acre than the Fish and Wildlife Service has National Wildlife Refuge System. There's also a very, very close and I think well established partnership between DOD and the service, the Fish and Wildlife Service. And as Kristen was saying, with other federal land managers, what I do think might be true though, and this is kind of Tim's point is I think it might be true that there's a little bit of a drop off maybe between the partnerships that and the understanding that has been cultivated between the Defense Department and, you know, some, some very significant large national conservation partners. And some on the one hand, where those relationships are really well developed and they have already gone out and executed lots of partnerships, not just in encouragement partnering but just in lots of, lots of ways. There are also in the conservation community, there are many, like at last, but last time I looked, more than 1200 land acquiring trusts across the United States that are all or many of which are members of the Land Trust Alliance. And it may be that in the smaller land trust, there may be less of an understanding there of sort of DOD's role and one of the ways that we got around that. And this kind of goes back to some work that our company did a number of years ago. And during actually during the base closure process when a number of base closure sites were recognized to have very high value habitat. And we were looking for long term owners for permanent conservation ended up having to actually create a new legislative authority to handle all that but in the course of doing that, looking for these conservation partners. And I think that you really had to go in through kind of the umbrella of the Land Trust Alliance, even beyond that, to get at all of the incredible richness and diversity that's out there in the conservation community and some of the really significant strategic partnerships that in the end the duty executed, you know, after a lot of spade work, and I think, you know, one of my personal favorites was the transfer for conservation purposes of the former Sierra Army Depot, 60,000 plus acres in the Sierra Nevada mountains of California, was actually transferred to a very small local land trust out of Salem, Massachusetts that had learned over time about the incredible diversity of habitat at DOD installations. So, I think part of our experience has been that while the larger national trusts are often sort of first movers. And their awareness is very high. There's also many other areas of interest to be cultivated out there in the. That's great. And I'll take that as a, that you're both right, that there's a lot of activity but as so much more could, could happen that there's a lot of, you know, fruit to be picked there. We've got a number of really fantastic questions and I realized that we're starting to run out of time. I'm going to start with the most specific one from the wonderful Jesse Carabando, who's the executive director for the Hoosier Environmental Council. He has a really specific question for you, Kristen, which is, has your program ever looked at opportunities near Crane Naval Surface Warfare Center in Indiana? And he's a great regional leader. So if you haven't, and you want someone to work with, he's the guy. Excellent. Oh, we actually have a relatively new refugee project there. And in fact, they briefed on a webinar that we had yesterday. The refugee program does a webinar series and our regular refugee webinar was on the use of geospatial tools. So there is an ongoing project at Crane. I'd be happy if you'd like more information specifically on that project. I'd be more than happy to get that to you, but there is some information on the website that talks about who the key partners are and what that project is focused on. I believe that project started, I want to say, maybe submitted in the FY 18 cycle or maybe FY 19. So it is one of our newer repi projects, but there is ongoing work there and definitely be happy to get to you and follow on more partners. That's great. And now we've got a couple of wonderful leaders in this space. I think we've already answered his question, but I'm just going to pose it to you all in case you want to add something. He said, can you discuss how repi agreements are addressing resilience can be incorporated into the military installation resilience plans that Congress required in the 2020 national defense authorization to be part of the installation management plans. Any additional comments on that for general Barnes, who's been a terrific leader in the space. Nothing too much more to add. We are exploring and working with our counterparts within OSD to understand how they're updating guidance on when those plans will be addressed. And then really like most planning processes in in DoD that happen at that local installation level. It's really getting information out through the repi community and our counterparts at the installation level to become part of that local installation model planning process and we're seeing more and more of that within DoD. I know that the Navy and Marine Corps have their community planning liaison offices that are very involved in repi work and encouragement partnering work at Navy Marine Corps installations. The Air Force has just rolled out some new guidance on their mission sustainment. So I think that's where we're going to have to focus a lot of our energy and effort is guidance to those teams to really be thoughtful and holistic in how they're addressing and incorporating both on installation master planning with that broader landscape level resilience to look outside the fence line, which is not always a comfort zone for your traditional installation master planners. They tend to be much more comfortable looking inside the boundary. We need to help them work with their counterparts who are used to working outside the boundary. Great. And Admiral Lee Gunn, first of all, congratulated all of you on your presentations and we did have also a question from Nina Anderson about whether the slide decks will be available. If all three of you are willing to share them with us, we'll post them on our site and we'll also make sure we have links to Tim's report and other things. But so Admiral Gunn, another terrific leader in this space for a long time now complimented you all and then said, he asked, is there an especially difficult set of problems that have yet to be resolved. And he said he was thinking of a type of species or terrain conservation, where it's just hard to reconcile with military bases. I think that's a really good question. Or is there a category of military operations that it's just really tough to reconcile with environmental conservation. Tim, did you did you come across that in your in your report. Yeah, the answer is, of course, is yes, there are there are some really tough cases where we're current military uses of lands or waters just don't match up with what species or habitat, you know, needs exist. And we do have tools right that they're they're not, and I hesitate to like suggest these but you know in the Native Species Act, for example, there's basically a national security exemption that happens through something called the God Squad and there's a process and public hearings. But there's a way to deal with complex that are just too big for the normal process to handle on, you know, on water resource issues on water conflicts you have a Federal Reserve right to water. And ultimately there have been, you know, a number of situations where courts, you know, have been engaged in this issue of water rights federal water rights. And so you certainly have, you know, situations that go beyond the stuff that we can necessarily resolve through, you know, frequently used partnership approach. I think one of the one of the things that, you know, we suffer from and I can as a nonprofit I can speak in this way with with a less maybe bipartisan Congress than we used to have on a lot of environmental natural resource planning issues is that, you know, we have new threats and new challenges and also new solutions. And we don't necessarily have either laws or regulations that fit those things that it's the whole idea of restoring a species one place so that you can use another place. More if you could really do that if you could really literally move move the species somewhere else could that work. There's just, there's no real structure within the law to do that other than this, you know, this exemption I mentioned. So, there are some sort of emergency outlets but yeah there's definitely difficult conflict. And, and Sharon I would just quickly add to that that I think one of the, one of the really kind of untapped opportunities. That's also been a little bit of a problem spot is, if you look at kind of the partnerships and the encroachment plans that underpin a number of them. Not all of them, not all of them, but many of them are done installation by installation by installation by installation. And it's, it's much more rare to find kind of planning process that is a regional process that infolds multiple installations. And so there are two of those. And not as many as we've done in, you know, one at a time right and so the implication of that is that you are both overlooking the opportunity to aggregate across installation issues and you're also losing the opportunity to aggregate across the, you know, potential community solutions and other opportunities conservation partnering opportunities that are more apparent at a regional level so I would probably throw that one out there. We have a great question from Christiana Joe. And hopefully I came close to pronouncing that right. I asked how involved our indigenous communities, Pacific Islands, continental US and how involved are those communities and DoD partnerships. And do you think that those communities are underrepresented in these partnerships. You know this is for anyone but maybe Kristen do you have a sense of that. Sure. So, definitely within our western regional partnership so I don't quote me on this number but I believe within the western regional partnership area, the six state region that makes up that partnership. There's about 172 federally recognized tribes within that partnership and so from the very beginning that regional partnership has been incredibly focused on engaging the tribal community in the dialogue. When the partnership first started there was a specific committee dedicated to tribal issues, and over time, the tribal community that was part of that group was ultimately integrated into the existing committee structure so there are three committees that that focus on issues, and then a very long committee that's basically focused on military readiness aviation disaster preparedness activities and so we have tribal co-chairs for each of those committees working those different issues, but we've also established a tribal working group, which was done at the request of the tribal members within the partnership to increase the awareness and engagement of the tribal community in the partnership so that was actually a tribal engagement group made up of multiple partners from the western regional partnership, but led by the tribal leaders that had been part of that community to do some additional outreach to engage more representation from the tribal community there. So that's an example within the regional partnership because there is such a significant tribal presence within those western states. So within the the construct of kind of our ongoing individual installation repi partnerships, we, I would say that it's appropriate to indicate that the tribal communities are not as represented as they could be we do not have any current partnerships where the primary partner is a tribe. There are certainly tribal groups involved in partnerships. However, traditionally, most of those installation level partnerships are our land trust partners or conservation partners or even state and local governments, and it's really very specific to the land use the location and any tribal entities that may be located there as to whether or not they are part of that dialogue. So I think there is certainly opportunity for increased engagement in those local level partnerships, but I think we've been predominantly focused on engaging tribes in those the regional partnership construct. Thanks, Kristen. I just want to share with you that General Barnes offered another thought about by several guns question which is he said the real challenge is identifying habitat for DoD relevant species that will be needed in the future as climate change impacts current habitat and how do you can get ahead of the problem by identifying and working with others to protect that future needed habitat now to get ahead of future restrictions. That's a really interesting concept and I would love to come back to climate change as a as a final point with Rebecca and Tim, but I just want to also throw out a couple of other questions that people asked that I think we can knock out at the end here. So we were asked about, you know, while understanding this is a DoD report whether there's any engagement with DHS facilities and specifically the Coast Guard, and whether Rebecca and Tim you looked at that and then also Jay Shepherd asked about partnerships and local jurisdictions that share the same aquifers around water demand management and conservation. So Coast Guard and water management, did Rebecca, Tim, do you have comments on those on those issues? I have a quick comment on the water management piece and I think Mountain Home is a good example of that where you had a situation of a shared aquifer and you had an encroachment planning study going on. It was able to identify aquifer depletion and you had a community that was quickly able to appreciate the situation leading to kind of a mutual decision, if you will, to look at alternatives, look at aquifer alternatives and to really jump in on that jointly. That is one of the things that I think we've seen come out of some of the conservation partnerships is more of an emphasis on water lately. Yeah, I'll give the example on the water issue of Fort Wachuka and the, you know, pretty significant development pressure around the installation and effects on the aquifer and the way that's forced or pushed the installation to work with the community on issues like subdivision. So that's an area where I think there's been both a little bit of a carrot and a stick engaged, but definitely a partnership. We did not look in depth at DHS issues or Coast Guard, but I'm sure that there's opportunities there as well. Rebecca, have you done any work with Coast Guard bases? No, not in the encroachment planning. So maybe maybe a ripe opportunity. We're coming up on the end here. So I think to finish out, I'd like to get back to Bob Barnes's point, you know, about how you get ahead of the curve because I know Tim you looked at climate change. Could you talk to us a little bit about about your thoughts on that about climate change and how to incorporate it into the kinds of things you looked at. Yeah, I guess the first thing I'd say is that the planning, planning requirements to address climate change are crucial and of course are now in place in many ways for DOD. The National Wildlife Federation did a fantastic report talking about or guidance document talking about how to build climate change considerations and resilience considerations into the integrated natural resource management plans, the in rooms. So if that kind of work needs to continue on the planning side, I think one of the issues and both the admiral's question and general's question or comment are getting at this is that we're not really looking far enough forward. And so we certainly could end up with situations where there isn't a conflict today. The military installation is not the source of that future conflict. We're not around the installation and climate change. We're going to end up where with more situations where the installation is effectively the last refuge for, for a species or an ecosystem. And that's something I think we need to get a better handle on and where frankly, I think DOD needs to play a stronger role looking at the consequences of, you know, of local land use on, you know, on the future. And I think the tools to be able to make those kinds of predictions are available to us today. It's a matter of putting it into decision making context and integrated planning. We looked a little bit at Florida and California's, the state that governors in those states have created state bodies that look at military issues, including land use issues. And those are an example of a regional kind of forum that could be really helpful in anticipating conflicts that are driven by climate change and trying to get ahead of them, trying to plan ahead of them. And certainly the kinds of resources that, you know, Kristen is helping administer and other resources that exist on the DOD side, as well as those partner agencies could be used, you know, a lot more to a lot greater effect if they were focused in some of these places where conflicts are going to increasingly materialize. That whole idea of pooling authority. I think it's really important because partly when you and some people like this and some people don't but if you pool money. In essence, you have a set of people who are taking more of a macro level, 10,000 foot perspective on which priorities across the country we should run to first and where to put, you know, dollars. And that kind of structure allows you to triage that's rather than putting a little bit of money here and a little there to really focus. And so another benefit of pooling resources could be that we can start really adjusting the places where, you know, climate change and installation operations and and training are, you know, are going to see a real conflict in the future. My personal drum that I want to beat is that I still think we need a lot better data and analysis and modeling on on climate change projections at that local and subnational level that are at a more planning quality, so that that we can actually anticipate better how climate change is likely to affect local areas. To me that's something that has to happen that we're still not where we need to be. Chris and I just wanted to let you know that Bob Barnes throughout one last suggestion that he couched us a question but I think it's a suggestion, which is that 10 us code 2684 a should be maybe it should be amended to add tribes to the list of eligible entities authorized to enter into repi agreements so that sounds like a good suggestion I hope that you might be able to take that on board. Any last words. We have, we have let me first before you give your last words just say thank you what a fantastic panel. You all three of you knew so much and had so much to say and I think it was just a really rich discussion. And I'm grateful to all of you Tim for writing this wonderful report and Rebecca and Kristen for the work that you do. Any parting shots as we as we prepare to let everyone go. It's not, it's not a parting shot it's a comment though I think to Bob's point about the effects of climate on habitat and so forth that she want better answers you need more trade space, and, and we won't get it by doing assessments installation by installation this goes back to the point about doing them on a regional basis I think you're going to find a lot of existing plans are still installation specific so that'd be one comment. Rebecca can I ask you so who needs to do that. So this is a matter of when you know various services undertake their encouragement assessments. There is there with some exceptions that are regional there is a tendency for it to be undertaken by the installation. Yes, it's time for for the look to be more regional in nature, and that could be driven by installations, you know, either making a decision jointly or it can be driven from the top but that gets you more trade space. I think that comment is on the military installation resiliency, you know, comments that Bob was making. I think we're going to find that a lot of the initial work has been done in the encouragement planning process which is basically diagnosed installations in terms of their resiliency capacity, and the surrounding communities as well so there's a lot of information to be mine there. Kristen, any last thoughts. I'd like to thank everyone for this dialogue and I think it's a discussion that's that's starting that needs to continue and very much look forward to continuing to be part of that. I agree with what Rebecca raised relative to looking at things regionally and and and you're starting to see that that has been the big push from the reppy program to really invest very, very heavily in Sentinel landscapes as sort of, that'd be 2.0 or 3.0 and what that's going to look like moving forward we have to look at things on a landscape basis it can't be installation by installation and capacity is a huge huge huge component of that. We're talking about a lot of really incredible work and a lot of opportunity, but the capacity on the ground within the region to get that work done has been probably the single most significant factor that we've had and being able to move forward and get even more outcomes from the Sentinel landscapes it's very difficult to find resources to fund capacity on the ground. So that's an area that we're looking at as we move forward. Well thank you all very much and that did remind me by the way that Kristen that there was a question of asking you about Sentinel landscape program and when the next application cycle is is that two seconds you can answer. We're hoping that that will be late this year November December timeframe. Okay, great. Well thank you all very much. And I really encouraged you to take a look at Tim's report which is awesome. And we've got contact information that's been provided for our panelists and we will try to get that up on our website, including the slides if that if the panelists are willing so thank you all and have a great day.