 Good afternoon, and thank you for joining us today for the release of environmental engineering for the 24th century addressing grand challenges a new report from the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. I'm Rhea Anandwala from the news from the news office here at the academies and I would like to welcome our audience here in the room as well as many members of the audience who are joining us. We have a webcast. The report is now available and can be downloaded at www.nationalacademies.org. I wanted to go over a few logistics before we get started with the briefing today. This will be a one hour briefing unless we run out of questions beforehand. We'll start off with opening remarks to introduce the report and then give an overview of the report's findings and recommendations. We'll then open up the floor for questions. For our audience here in the room, please step to one of the microphones in the room. And for those listening online, please email in your questions at any point during the briefing to eechallenges at nas.edu. You can also join the conversation on Twitter using hashtag environmental engineering and this event is also being streamed live on our Facebook page. With that, I would like to introduce Al Romek, Executive Director of National Academy of Engineering, who will offer welcoming remarks. Well, first off, thank you all for coming, either in person or for those of you that are here virtually. And let me first start by saying on behalf of the National Academy of Engineering, our President Dan Moat, who's actually returning from China today, myself and all of our members that we would congratulate you on, I think, a job very well done and a very, very important topic. It's one that actually has a special place in the heart of the NAE for the following reason. About the turn of the century, meaning now 20th to 21st, the National Academy of Engineering was asked to identify the top 20 engineering innovations of the 20th century. And a list came out in priority order. And in fact, if you took out your iPad or your pen and started writing it down, you'd end up with about the same list. Electrification, automobiles, airplanes, advanced materials, nuclear energy, space travel, and so forth. Well, that then beg the question from NSF, what about the greatest innovations we should expect in the 21st century? And I don't know about you, but if I knew the answer to that, I wouldn't be here. I'd be on some warm beach on my private island. That's obviously not really the right question. The right question is, what are the challenges that have to really be solved over the course of the 21st century? And so under sponsorship of the NSF, we pulled together a program called the Grand Challenges for Engineering, which really talks about the 21st century that we're entering today. And what, in fact, this group start came out with a number of luminaries. We're on that list. It was chaired by Bill Perry, who was the former Secretary of Defense, a member of the NAE. And they started out by defining a vision for engineering for the 21st century that says it's continuation of life on the planet, planet worldwide, not just the U.S., not just Virginia or whatever it might be on the planet, making our world more sustainable, safe, healthy, and joyful. And out of that list, we tried to get to 10. We ended up at 14. There were 14 more holistic, broader, I would say, Grand Challenges than the ones that came out of this specific area that cluster into those four areas of sustainability, safety, health, and joy of living. And it's clear that if we look at the ones that, of course, are reported out in this report, they fit very, very neatly into that sphere of so-called sustainability. So there's a strong correlation between these two. In fact, they map in to a number of the ones that are at the larger aggregation level that were done by the NAE. And so I think the whole notion for how the world, the country, et cetera, solves these problems is going to be on being able to identify what they are and find a path to their solution. Not only what is the technology that we need to develop today, but also worrying about developing the workforce to solve these problems over the course of this coming century. With that, I will get ready to turn over to the committee for the report, but I'd also like to introduce Randy Atkins. Randy? Randy is the Director of Communications inside of the NAE, and in fact was the study director for the Grand Challenges that the NAE did back in 2008. There was a booklet that was prepared. If anybody wants one at the reception, you can talk to Randy. He can make sure that you can get one of them, tell you how to find it on the web. But anyway, with that being said and that introduction, let me start by introducing Domenico Grasso from University of Michigan, who was the chair of the study and several of the committee members. It's interesting if you look in this committee, we had NAE members that were part of the committee as well. Well integrated, cut across the entire body of membership within the academies. And with that, I look forward to hearing your report. Thank you. Thank you very much, Al. It's a pleasure to be here and to share with you the outcome of about two years worth of outstanding work that this committee did. I would first like to start by recognizing the National Academy staff that has been so instrumental in helping us achieve this product. I'd like to start by recognizing Stephanie Johnson. Do you want to stand up, Stephanie? Take a bow. Nancy Huddleston. I saw Carol Lainey come in. I don't know if she's, there she is. And Brendan McGovern. We're, Brendan. I'd like to, I'd like to give them a round of applause because they certainly deserve it. This report has been an exciting product to work on because it really allowed us to think very broadly about the future of what we have come to know as environmental engineering and what the challenges that this particular discipline is going to face in the coming century. Actually, our time window was only the next 20 to 30 years. So we were looking at what are the challenges that this field is going to face in the 2050 timeframe. As many of you know, we can trace back what environmental engineers do to ancient times. And if you go back to the Roman time, we had the aqueducts and cloaca maxima and we could go to Machu Picchu and they had sophisticated water systems. And then we moved to a more modern era and we could see that engineers started to look at delivering clean water and taking care of wastewater and sanitation. Then it moved into air pollution and then we started dealing with industrial contaminants and cleanup of soils and hazardous waste sites. And much of the work of the past century was driven by regulations and that's what our field responded to, regulation driven enterprises. The next century is not going to have that luxury. In fact, it is going to be self-motivated by our discipline and we're going to be pressured by the challenges that we are all going to be facing. So some of the challenges that we face are an increasing population on this planet. I know that that figure in the top left looks like a queue for a bathroom at a Big Ten football game, but that is actually what the population is going to look like in the coming decades. We're expecting 2.6 billion people to be added to the planet by 2050. And of those 2.6 billion people, 2 billion of them will be in cities. So in the lower right, we're going to see increased urbanization of the planet. Already more than 50% of the global population lives in urban areas and that's only going to increase. And overarching all of this is a problem that the entire planet is going to be facing and that's climate change and the consequences of climate change. And what the extent of that's going to be and what the consequences are is really going to be in large measure a result of what engineers and society plan to do about it. But we definitely know that we are starting to see rises in sea level and other consequences of climate change already. The study committee comprised very distinguished and accomplished individuals from a variety of different disciplines. And we had members from National Academy of Engineering, Academy of Science, and the National Academy of Medicine. I would just like to go through their names because that is the least gratitude I could give them for all of their effort here. Craig Benson from UVA, Amanda Carrico from UC Boulder, Kartik Chandra from Columbia, Wayne Claw from Georgia Tech, and the Smithsonian. John Crittenden, Georgia Tech, Dan Greenbaum who is going to speak a little later from the Health Effects Institute, Steve Homburg from the Environmental Defense Fund, Tom Harmon from UC Merced, Jim Hughes from Emory, Kim Jones who's also here, from Howard University, Lindsay Maher from Virginia Tech, Bob Purchasepe who's also here, from the Center for Climate and Energy Solutions, Steve Pulaski who is also here, from Minnesota, Maxine Savits, Norm Scott, Maxine is from Honeywell, Norm Scott from Cornell, Rhodes Trussell from Trussell Technologies, and Julie Zimmerman who is also here from Yale. And I'd like to thank them for an outstanding committee with whom I had the privilege and honor of working. The committee had a large task to identify what the challenges the field was going to face in the coming decades. And what we decided on doing as our approach was to identify challenges that society was going to face for which environmental engineers in the field of environmental engineering had a major role to play. That environmental engineers were going to be necessary to address these challenges. They were not going to be able to do it on their own. They were going to have to work in teams, but they had a major role to play in these challenges. And we received input as we developed our thinking on this from a variety of different sources. One of the largest was the Association of Environmental Engineering and Science Professors Grand Challenge Workshops. We had four of them, and we received hundreds of comments and suggestions that ranged in scale and magnitude from a variety of different perspectives. And we also had input from the scientific community, NGOs, and the public. And we tried to, at the end of the report, identify ways in which the field is going to evolve from the perspective of education, research, and practice. And finally, I'd like to thank our sponsors that provided the support and the encouragement for this and the initiative for this effort, the National Science Foundation, the Department of Energy, and the Delta Stewardship Council from California. So I will not keep you in suspense. And in the military there's a term called bluff, which stands for bottom line upfront, and this is it. So these are the five challenges that we had identified for which environmental engineers are going to have to play a major role for us to address them. Sustainably supplying food, water, and energy for our growing population. Curbing climate change and adapting to its impacts. Designing a future without pollution or waste. Creating efficient, healthy, resilient, and interconnected smart cities. And fostering informed decisions and actions, which is critical to the success of our ability to address the prior four of those. And let me just go back for one second and just say that these are challenges that are all interconnected. They are very broad challenges. They will need to be operationalized and contextualized within the work that engineers decide to undertake. But it's going to be up to the engineering community, the environmental engineering community, to decide what aspects they want to undertake, how they want to undertake it, and in what particular order they want to address these. So this is something that is going to need much more thought going into the future. But these are guiding challenges for us to think about how to better view our future as environmental engineers. Now environmental engineers have certain capabilities and skills that distinguish them from a variety of other disciplines, which makes them very appropriate to engage in these particular challenges. They have a broad understanding of earth systems. They have experience working with aligned natural sciences. This has been in their history. They've been doing this for decades, for many years. And in addition to their ability to work with the aligned sciences, in the future, they will need to work more closely with the social sciences as well and other allied disciplines. So they're going to be approaching this from a holistic systems perspective. This is an advantage and a capability that environmental engineers can bring to bear on these issues. And they can use more specifically tools like life cycle analysis to operationalize again with more specificity the concept of holistic systems thinking. So what I'd like to do now is I'd like to turn it over to my colleagues on the committee and have them go through each of the grand challenges for which we've identified particular components in the report. And then I will return and talk about essentially the ultimate grand challenge. And then we will open it up for questions and comments here on site and from the web. So I will now turn it over to Kim Jones from Howard University who will speak about the first grand challenge. Good afternoon. Let me make sure I can. So our first grand challenge was to supply life's essentials as food, energy, and water to a growing global population. The committee recognized that currently we live in a situation where we have a lot of low income countries where we still have significant stressors in food, energy, and water where over 800 million people live and are undernourished. About 844 million live without access to safe drinking water, 2.3 billion without adequate sanitation, and 1 in 7 without electricity. At the same time we know that as our population grows we have shifts into middle class and so we still have a need in higher income countries to provide these services and develop technologies that will allow delivery of those services without adding stressors and without adding more pollution and doing so in ways that are sustainable for upcoming generations. And so in the next few slides you'll see specific examples in food, water, and energy but I want you to remember that these are linked systems. You can't think about food, energy, or water in a vacuum. You have to consider the impact of these on the other system. So first food, as I mentioned undernourishment is an issue, population is growing so we really have to increase agricultural yields. And in light of the fact that 70% of water withdrawals are for agricultural uses we need to be a lot more strategic about developing technologies to allow farmers in the agricultural sector to have better information about how to use water and fertilizer. And so environmental engineers can develop sensor technologies, come up with innovations such as vertical farms that can be located closer to urban centers so that you can reduce issues with the supply chain. Also just educating consumers on things like reducing waste. Coming up with ways to prolong the shelf life of food, developing protective films that will allow food to be stored for longer periods of time. And also thinking about ways to change our dietary needs as more consumers move to middle class you have more need for the demand for dairy and beef increases and we know those are very food and energy intensive processes so just educating consumer on things like a meatless diet or other alternatives would be useful. We live in a situation where water scarcity is an issue. We know that in places like California, also we know Cape Town South Africa came very close to meeting day zero with their water recently. So we have to think a lot more, think a lot more, a lot differently about our water supplies and environmental engineers have to continue to develop solutions to get water from non-traditional supplies so we can do things like make desalination cheaper water reuse should be higher on a priority list for folks and also think about resource recovery and you'll hear a little bit about that later but resource recovery from wastewater treatment. So I have to think about wastewater as waste but rather a way to recover valuable resources to be used in other places. Distribution systems there's a role for environmental engineers to work with others there water leakage can be an issue our country has really aging infrastructure right here in DC is a prime example so we really have to do better about regenerating and reinvigorating our distribution system. And finally energy, energy as we talked about food and water and both of those processes the production and treatment of water and food is very energy intensive we're still very reliant on fossil fuels and we have to shift towards low income, I mean low carbon energy sources but we have to do so in a way where we don't create more pollution and so I have to think very strategically about some of our innovation in terms of clean energy because we know some of those alternatives have negative impacts and we have to minimize those so that we can maximize the use of alternative energy sources. So in closing I'll just say that environmental engineering has environmental engineers have a huge role in these processes but in thinking about or envisioning new technologies we have to do so in concert with social scientists and others so that we can come up with a holistic solution that will work for all. Thanks Kim and I will give a quick overview of the climate change challenges in the report. Here's a little bit of context if you need any more this is the rising temperatures, average temperatures globally since 1850 let me put a few more pieces of information along with that chart 2018 which is not on that chart yet is on track to be the fourth hottest year ever recorded so it'll be up near the top there the Arctic ice shelf continues to melt the CO2 concentrations in the atmosphere give you a little hint when I was born it was around 300 parts per million right last year at this time on December 3rd I just used that date in 2017 it was 407 parts per million this December it's 409 parts per million so it shows you how quickly it's going and just out today from the climate conference in Poland in Katowice we're expecting a record year for emissions of greenhouse gas is probably 37 billion tons into the atmosphere so there's some significant context to this challenge as it continues to go and one of the biggest parts of this is to reduce this rate and the magnitude of climate change and by doing that we have to have a sharp reduction in the greenhouse gas emissions by the middle of the century the earth through the United Nations and the Paris Agreement want to have picked a goal of limiting the global average temperature change to two degrees centigrade and below and you can use 1.5 which the recent international panel on climate change use as a goal this means dramatic reductions in CO2 actual probably removal of CO2 or negative emissions of CO2 and powering things like transportation, buildings and industry with electricity generated by low carbon emissions or some other low carbon fuel the advances that are needed to curb climate change include more efficient energy use and it's not just traditional efficiency that we think about for instance what there's a lot of waste heat and environmental engineers have spent a lot of time figuring out what to do with heat and the idea of being more efficient in just efficient lights and air handling units we also need to figure out for instance as an example what to do with waste heat switch to low carbon energy sources, advances to make renewables more cost effective including how to manage the environmental impacts of renewable development and advanced nuclear and also what to do with nuclear waste that we currently have and how to make the safety and performance work better and then climate intervention strategies such as capturing carbon before it gets into the atmosphere or actually pulling some out there's agricultural emissions there's vegetative and natural sources as a way for resilience as well now all that being said I just told you what the concentrations of greenhouse gases are in the atmosphere and that's probably not going to abate immediately by next Thursday so we're probably going to have to be planning and as most of you know we already have climate change impacts being felt and so adapting to climate change is going to include things like optimizing the 20th century old infrastructure that Kim was talking about to be more resilient to climate change at sea level we expect to rise over the next half a century by at least over a foot particularly more if we don't stem the greenhouse gases we're seeing heavier rain in more regions more droughts in other regions we're in Maryland and DC and Virginia we're having a record year close to a record year of rainfall I think we're going to have probably just a touch over 60 inches of rain this year here it's usually around 40 upper 30s as an average so water management, ecosystems, biodiversity, agriculture all of these things have to be looked at for adaptation and we have to develop those strategies for disaster resilience and we have to adapt to the coastal flooding there's engineering involved in particular engineering that focuses on how we can use ecosystems to help us with resilience so a lot of skills that need to be applied to this in the environmental engineering field and so now I'll turn it over Julie I have a pleasure to talk to you about the third challenge just this idea of what the future could look like if we didn't have pollution or waste as we were doing economic development so the context for this challenge is this historic linear model of the industrial revolution we call it take make waste so the extraction of natural resources using them in manufacturing and then landfilling or throwing away wherever away is whatever we didn't use there's a statistic from Paul Hawkin from several years ago in the ecology of commerce book where he says that 94% of materials extracted from the earth end up as waste versus 6% that end up in product and then many of those products are single use or disposable products you could think about packaging as part of that so it's very clear that our balance of what we're taking out of the earth versus what we're using is off when we think about these wastes and putting them out in the environment in 2015 one in every six deaths was derived from diseases driven by pollution you can think about indoor air quality you could think about water contamination you could also think about cases of cancer from some of the synthetic chemicals that we've put out into the world so while environmental engineering and these challenges are looking to the 21st century we still have legacy pollution challenges we need to deal with these chemicals that are out there are often characterized by three parameters one is their persistence this is the idea that not only do they exist in the environment once they're out there because they are persistent they're distributed globally this is why we find things like fluorinated compounds in polar bear blood these compounds tend to bio accumulate so thinking about up the food chain and the food web so as these chemicals are present at lower levels in fish for example and then humans eat them that they continue to accumulate and then the third characteristic is that they're toxic and this is both an acute toxicity and then more growing awareness understanding of chronic toxicity low dose chronic exposures things like endocrine disruptors that weren't even part of the discussion 20 or 30 years ago so if we think about what the challenge really is for environmental engineering it's working with our aligned sciences as Dominico said to design and to reduce or eliminate pollution or waste this is the idea of the circular economy which has taken off very significantly in Europe and Asia it uses things like life cycle and systems thinking and is really founded on this idea of green chemistry and green engineering it's not enough just to close loops we have to think about the inherent nature of the materials that are cycling in those loops so that they're not persistent bio accumulating and toxic the idea of using systems thinking here is to anticipate potential consequences are we shifting environmental burden from one place to another as we make these changes I really stopped playing this game of whack-a-mole to avoid unintended consequences so when we put forward something like corn-based ethanol as a solution that we actually caused many more problems than were solved by doing that and in fact put more energy into the system than we were able to recover from the fuel when we burned it so I think the idea here is to eliminate the very concept of waste and if we look to natural systems this is how they work waste is a human construct we've created this idea of waste is really a material or energy or heat that is out of place or doesn't have a value there's nothing inherent about that material that is wasteful it's that we haven't found the appropriate use for it the idea here is to design which is intentionally bring products and processes and systems to bring these materials to economic use I think the opportunities to recover come from municipal waste I heard about urban mining of landfills during the committee is one idea of there's greater concentration of some of these rare earth metals in our landfills and in the ores that we're mining now and the idea of not talking about wastewater but recovery water and nutrients that can be recovered nitrogen and phosphorus and land applied for fertilizer there's agricultural waste there's lignin when we use cellulose when we make ethanol we burn all this lignin it's a great source of aromatics chemicals and chemical production and Bob already talked about carbon capture there's lots of advances that need to happen here in terms of science and technology but also in terms of policy and business models thank you Julie in many respects the three challenges that my colleagues just described to you all together food, water, energy climate change, eliminating waste rise to a new level of challenge and opportunity as we turn to this increasingly urban century we expect two billion additional people to be in cities by 2050 that means that two out of three residents of the earth will live in cities most of them in very densely packed mega cities facing aging urban infrastructure and a series of challenges addressing just life as well as all of the things that we've just been talking about but those are also opportunities there are opportunities for environmental engineers with their colleagues to step in to improve the quality of life and to address these other challenges along the way in many respects the urban infrastructure and we describe this in the report is a system of systems through which money, energy information and materials flow for a number of important purposes for life that infrastructure will need to be dramatically transformed to handle this greatly increased number of people and these other challenges that we've identified that are coming very quickly for food and energy supplies for climate and for dealing with waste so environmental engineers will need to think about how and help lead efforts to re-envision urban architecture to transform existing infrastructure and to create alternatives for energy and water efficiency and other benefits importantly there's a host of new technologies emerging that also allows us to move towards smart cities to embed sensors throughout cities to monitor traffic, water, energy use use of trash bins even and this is not limited to cities in the high income countries of the world we have examples of the beginnings of the use of these technologies and even low and middle income countries cities and data can really help inform decision making about how to deliver services in the most efficient and cost effective way in one sense what this pressure and what this challenge in the city means is that the traditional skills of environmental engineers will continue to be needed to be applied albeit in a new and innovative fashion to design equitable access to recreation space to continue to work to improve indoor and outdoor air quality to reduce water pollution to prevent, detect and mitigate the spread of infectious disease which often can start out in dense urban neighborhoods and to ensure reliable provision of both clean water and how best to manage waste at the same time there are a host of new challenges as climate change emerges more and more strongly environmental engineers have a role to play to assess vulnerabilities from things like sea level rise from heat island effects to develop systems that have multiple benefits parks in cities that can also serve as flood control in extreme weather events and to as we're re-envisioning the urban infrastructure rebuild it in the most resilient fashion possible Thanks Dan. I want to talk a bit about this last of the five challenges fostering informed decisions and actions there are many cases where the gap between what we know how to do and what we actually do is large and growing and environmental engineering provides many potential solutions to serious environmental problems but the potential is only actually realized if it's implemented so how do we think about actually getting action to occur and the committee really focused on two important aspects of this one is making sure that society is well informed about how the environment affects human well-being so that they recognize both the problem and that the gain that could be had in well-being with the solution and then the second is dealing in partnership with stakeholders who are affected by these potential problems or could gain from the solutions so talking about each one of these linking environmental and societal impacts in some cases you know if you think Dan mentioned this historical achievement in environmental engineering was sanitation there the link between improved sanitation and health was pretty direct and pretty dramatic in many other cases the links may be more extended and not as maybe as dramatic but they are they can be large and so how do we actually provide those clear links from the proposed solutions to the improvement of well-being of various segments of society and there are a number of tools decision support tools that are out there so life cycle assessment was already mentioned valuing of ecosystem services thinking about risk assessment there are a number of tools for which environmental engineering supplies the essential kind of core analytics but then combining them with other fields to talk about say the costs of risk the other important part of this is integrating the experts the environmental engineers the scientists and other fields with those who are impacted by either the problem currently or could be improved with the solution and we know that there's a lot of research out there that engagement with stakeholders is quite important for a number of solutions first of all to be able to really understand the broader economic social and institutional factors that those emerge with understanding of people who are in the community and living these issues and the other thing that besides just creating an open dialogue it's that fosters trust and that's an incredibly important part of actually getting implementing in society it was at a talk last week about the Flint water crisis and the a number of solutions and other communities where potential water problems were coming up and people were stopping not drinking the public water supply because they didn't trust that it was safe so these are incredibly important issues and to the extent that environmental engineering as a discipline as a field is like the communities that they're dealing with so increasing the diversity in engineering communities is also an important aspect of this and then finally getting to thinking about moving towards getting these solutions implemented and there are a number of tools that or approaches that people have used in other fields so there are four that are listed here so providing information educating the public this can come through things like the toxic release inventory act that government requires that information be released to the general public or thinking about certification of products so there's a number of ways in which to provide information to the general public the second you may have heard of is very large behavioral thinking about how we structure decisions so a very simple example in Belgium versus the Netherlands two communities one had an opt out so of donor organizations versus an opt in and a 95% increase in donor organ ownership with the opt out versus the opt in the incentives thinking about whether it's farm programs for farmers or urban settings thinking about for developers are they adopting solutions that mitigate urban heat island effect or storm water which they can do but maybe there is a cost to them and a wider benefit to society and then finally in certain instances we may need in fact to set rules and regulations but these are all ways in which we can take core ideas from engineering and other related sciences to better society so in closing thinking about you know the environmental engineering is really at the core as a heart of many of the solutions but it's engineers working in a team with natural sciences social sciences and members of the community that will really bring this to fruition Thank you Steve and now I'd like to just sum everything up and bring everything full circle and talk about how we try to realize addressing some of these grand challenges and there are as I mentioned earlier education, there's research and practice so if we try to contextualize the evolution of the field and this is a graphic that I think does an excellent job of really looking at the evolution of the field along multiple dimensions you see that on the left hand side our challenges are now much more complex than they were in ancient times and I know of course you may think ancient times was last century but I'm talking about last week really ancient times when we had to deal with issues of just getting the water to the cities or water born diseases of course we still have those challenges but the challenges have become much more complex and if you look at the geographic scale they've gone from the local to the regional to then global and this is what we call the interwoven community on this planet and the disciplines with whom environmental engineers are working has grown exponentially essentially over this period of time as Steve just mentioned we have to work as parts of teams and we originally started working with public health professionals and then it moved into other forms of brain disciplines other types of scientists and now we're heavily engaged with working with social scientists and humanists and other allied fields that are not necessarily in the STEM disciplines that we have conventionally thought of as supporting environmental engineering so in terms of practice there are multiple aspects in which the committee saw the environmental engineering evolving one that is very very important is that we have to make sure that we have a diversified workforce of practitioners in this field so that we can look at things from multiple perspectives and really develop the best solutions to serve the society that we are all pledged to serve so increasing diversity in the workforce is a very important objective of changing practice additionally involving stakeholders as an informed group of individuals is a major part of what the field the practitioners have to consider as we move forward and as Steve said this is going to be critical to the success of environmental engineering is to engage stakeholders educate stakeholders and educating the public in general because if you educate the public in general you never know when individual subsets are going to become stakeholders so it's very important that we take that as part of our mission of practitioners in terms of education has been mentioned by several of the committee members and was a common theme throughout our discussions is that we have to look at the preparation of our students as future practitioners from a systems perspective and that they are going to be dealing with systems of systems they are going to be dealing with complex systems that involve the social sciences and we have to find ways to introduce these concepts into the curriculum and we also have to build essential skills that involve collaboration critical thinking and contextualized problem solving or experiential learning and of course effective communication so ways in which we could do this include but are not limited to a greater reliance on graduate training of course this is a subject matter that we have to really engage our colleagues in the academy and in industry and practice on as to what the appropriate level of education is what should be done at the undergraduate level what should be done at the graduate level creating more service based learning models and experiential exposure for our students similar to the medical field where they have clinical rotations they have residencies so that our students are not just learning pedantic information and there are other opportunities that involve extracurricular type activities such as the grand challenge scholars program that was first developed as a pilot study between Olin College, Duke University and USC in California and has now moved to a variety of different universities as an opportunity to engage and excite undergraduate students to work on grand challenges and they work throughout their four years on these looking at different aspects of how to engage in these grand challenges the NAE grand challenges and then the academy gives them a certificate at the end as validation of their efforts so that's another example of a strategy to modify education and finally research the committee thought and discussed this in great detail and one of the components that we see as important to the future of environmental engineering is evolving research to include interdisciplinary type of efforts through funding agencies and through teams that are going to be validated in the academy through personnel actions so that although there is always room for basic science and individual type of research there is a major need to address these problems from a team interdisciplinary perspective and these have to be validated at university and academic levels and they also have to be funded through funding agencies so with that I think we're going to open it up to easy questions only Thank you for that excellent overview of the report we'll now begin taking questions for audience members here in the room please step to one of the microphones also state your name and affiliation and for those watching online please submit your questions to eechallenges at nas.edu Can you please step to the microphone Thank you My name is Dave Vonspuk, no affiliation I'm just wondering if they have anything in mind to deal with this flare gasses wasted at petroleum sites keep seeing on all pictures of petroleum the flare flame is going on the air and how that can be and why that can't be used for energy generation just flared in the air, thanks Bob I think there were two two ideas that were put in the report one was capturing carbon instead of flaring it the excess methane that's coming out to capture that and use it in another more productive way I think that would be one of the key items there and the other one over the long haul is having a different mix of fuels as well that are used for transportation and other energy needs so a combination of controlling those emissions and reusing it which I think was mentioned in a number of our summaries and also relying on a more diverse fuel base all of those things are important that environmental engineers start to focus on Rich Hi, thanks very much this is an excellent presentation my name is Rich Blaucine I'm doing a piece for Physics World on the report I'm a journalist and I have a I've talked to Dr. Grosso I have a couple of follow-up questions from the presentation on greens on resilient cities and also on pollution reduction for pollution reduction you mentioned examples in Asia and Europe I was wondering if you could offer specifics there and maybe if there are any sectors in the United States where green chemistry, green engineering is really taken off and then for resilient cities I have a question you mentioned in the paper about Boston being a place of multiple solutions so any amplification of the Boston example or other American cities would be welcome so for the circular economy the name the idea of the circular economy has taken off in Europe even in the five-year plan for China right now so there's a regulatory government drive towards that idea and so industries are responding to that and you see it across sectors from paper to plastics to chemical production to food and how food waste is managed so we see that happening in many places for green chemistry I think it has also affected numerous sectors I think some of the very biggest and earliest wins in the chemical sector so there's this idea of if I'm going to make an anti-cancer drug I want to put carcinogens out in the environment it was a very easy conversation and a good place to start about health and wellness and then trying to use safer chemistry there's also chemistry benefits in terms of using green chemistry for accident prevention and reducing chemical site security risks from terrorism and sabotage and so there was a lot of movement for green chemistry and for Europe in question there are many cities in the US that have begun to put in place building codes and development codes that actually require developers to think about when they're developing how to do that in a resilient fashion the Boston case specifically was we had a river called the Muddy River which was largely a sewer running through the center of Back Bay in Way Park and flooding would occur regularly the entire subway system was stopped because of flooding and it was redesigned to rediscover the wetlands clean them up create parks and also dramatically improve flood management that's the example that we're using in the report perhaps Henry Hedger retired government in the television show on Sinking Cities recently on Wednesday nights and they looked at Miami and Miami is already suffering due to they say king tides where new moon and full moon creates an excessive tide and the flooding is a little more serious at that time at other times it's only 20 days a year but you know this will get worse little by little and I wondered sea level reduction measures should be encouraged so I checked on and the possibilities are for one, Katara depression in Egypt a low lying area 300, 400 feet below sea level I saw an Englishman do a show on it and on the Katara depression and he indicated a lake as large as Lake Ontario would form if the sea could be permitted to enter the Katara depression nobody lives there it's an open uninhabited region which would be improved by letting the sea enter it so sea level reduction mitigation is one measure there another place the Dead Sea bordered between Israel and Jordan that could be greatly increased if you could drill through the answer would be to not cut a canal but to just drill through the land in the way with a pipe if you can drill at the bottom of the sea for oil you can surely drill on the surface and create a way from one area to another the areas that are lower could easily be filled with sea and would flow in and might reduce sea level substantially it's always an unusual question who's behind it whether it's man or just nature itself but at any event man appears to have something to do with it and I think this is something we ought to look into I could go on and on could you please ask the question we are sure on time whether this here in our own country there's the Salton Sea, California artificially created by the failure of the banks of the Colorado River rather substantial area water in the eastern southern part of California should it be let where it is sort of a drying out sea which is polluted or should new measures be introduced to permit the Colorado River to flow into it give it fresh water or organic pipes to permit seawater to enter it any thoughts on these questions well any attempt to lower the level of the oceans would require quite a bit of engineering and our whole thrust here is to demonstrate or indicate in a report how important it is for environmental engineers to be on these challenges and I think using some kind of natural balancing or natural systems is specifically mentioned as something that we think should that this is where environmental engineers can really step up and help analyze it but what you suggest in some of those places would require quite a bit of engineering so I think we can't we don't get to that level of detail on what particular solution should be taken using a natural systems approach and having the environmental engineers focus on it is certainly in line with what we have suggested Dan actually when the committee was meeting one of the things we did is we actually went to the Bay Area and held a public meeting and got input on a variety of possible solutions to these kinds of things and actually there's a very innovative plan that they've been putting together and recapture the marshes that have been paved over and create them as the flood storage that they can be not to mention all the other benefits of having restored marshes of flipping to a different part of the country and we have significant problems south of New Orleans where the channelization of the Mississippi River has meant the silt is not replenishing the marshes the land is sinking we don't have very high sea levels Katrina was just the beginning of the problem and that is a major environmental engineer that's exactly the kind of challenge that environmental engineers could and should be very directly involved in helping the south we'll switch over to a question from the web this is a question from Maya Trotz from University of South Florida she says that environmental engineers work a lot in underrepresented communities and our wastewater treatment plants and landfills are closest to them given the lack of pipelines into our profession from those communities based on our past practices how do we build trust with those communities to accept systems that sense their environments now that we are pushing smart and resilient cities well just speaking to the pipeline issue it's an issue our committee was very in agreement that we as we mentioned today we have to diversify our profession we've done really well with gender diversity we've done really horribly with underrepresented groups so that's something that we recognize we have to turn around and I don't know if there's a magic bullet for how to do that but we do need to start engaging in some serious discussions about how we can what we can do and one thing that I think is the residents of a community understand how they could have an impact on their community if they for example pursued environmental engineering as a profession I think that would be helpful I know that my own story I started off wanting to be a structural engineer and I had an internship at a company and I learned about environmental justice and when I learned about environmental justice I said hey that may be something I need to look at if I actually understood the science behind what's going on I could make a difference and so I think just educating folks in a community so that they understand that they can have an impact and they can have a voice and we value we value them at the table and I think just making sure that we continue to send that message is important in terms of diversifying our field you know once in one respect we think of this as a problem well the waste plant is near a low income community a minority community you could in a way turn this around and say well this is the community that's most affected this is the community where people could get excited perhaps about the solution because it's so close to them but that would take it would take a concerted effort it's not just saying that but actually having I don't know how you heard about environmental justice you know where that came in but you know making these opportunities not just a one off but a continual sort of an on ramp that people can see and you know the environmental engineering is certainly a component of that but again there are other components of that thinking about you know where do we site facilities and that's clearly as much of a political problem once we have something there designing it in a way which you know if Julie's world can be true where we really don't have waste streams and we can basically not have negative effects for surrounding communities that you know so the engineering component is important but there's also some you know politics about where things get cited. From the National Academy of Engineering Scholars Program thank you for this report and I'm very excited to work with the people who get implemented this report in training the engineers for the future and so you open up a lot of opportunities but my question is about a different aspect you have focused on the urban population as one of the five topics and you know I had experiences during Jefferson Fellowship at the State Department to visit Africa and other developing countries where the rural population is also growing at two three percent or so and the urban population may be growing at five percent so the population is growing in both sectors and India as well and the challenges and the solutions are quite different obviously because the sparse population in the rural areas be it water or energy or you know defecation or anything that you take it's different from the urban and the peri-urban so how much did the committee spend time on kind of delineating this challenges and opportunities both in the rural and urban and even in this country there is a big urban rural divide it goes all the way to politics so I think we have to be addressing all of those things I suppose as we mentioned in the report we did recognize that there are different problems that will require different solutions when you think about low income versus high income rural versus urban and so it is important to understand what we have in one place may not necessarily be transferable and that's why we stress this idea of actually thinking more about our solutions as a system and so as we look at some place where example you look at an urban center where the population some places like Detroit the population is actually shrinking so you think about areas that are urban and becoming less so you think about a place like DC which is quickly gentrifying and not just going but also gentrifying at different rates so there are socio-economic and political ramifications to that too so when we think about solutions we have to think about bringing in stakeholders in a community to think about how they would accept the solution and not doing so in a vacuum and I think that's a common theme in the report we specifically don't call out solutions we call out challenges and we really talk about a way to work together to try to get the best solution not necessarily trying to be very specific about what the solution is but I think actually engaging stakeholders from the beginning of our discussion on solutions all the way through implementation is important just might add that one of the things we noted in the health arena is not limited to urban areas that in low and middle income countries there were examples that we cite of making cell phone technology available to families across low and middle income countries having the result of increasing the vaccination rates and doing other things because there was now a notification system in a way of communicating and following up to improve the health of the population and that those technologies are actually leapfrogging into rural areas in many of those countries as well so it's not a problem that's been solved but there's hope that even the new technologies are available in those places I'm just going to add one very quick point and that is we clearly point out in the challenges that there are large populations on earth that do not have adequate water, adequate electricity and energy and much of that is in rural areas and that's a significant challenge that we identify in the report Hi, I'm a little short I as well as the other people that are here also want to say it is my humble honor to be here and involved in this. My name is Christina Gersik, I am an educator scientist, athlete and advocate among many arrays I apologize if I seem nervous I'm shaking in my skin right now but I also have some questions and also everything you guys are working on is very very on point and I believe that education does come first involving young anticipating prospective youth like myself into lack of a better term situations like these challenges that we have I think is what is the best because we are the future and stuff like that and you guys are here to educate us so that we don't make the same mistakes that you guys did no offense no offense, sorry but I was actually I was very blessed to be at the Bernie Sanders climate action what do you call it the conference that they had and I was actually so blessed that I got to be three seat rows away from him a couple days ago and I to the questions portion there was a man named Dale Ross, a Republican from Texas and he actually had he had said that his whole city and his area is super green and friendly that they reuse all their resources more than any city in the United States which is why he wanted to join the conference there I think that if we implemented more stuff like that I don't know if you guys have ever heard of solar panel roadways I always like to educate my friends and stuff like that on this stuff even though sometimes they look at me like I got a tin foil hat on but what do you think about GMOs and I don't know if you've ever heard of this but the Kardashev scale Kardashev scale is if you guys don't know what I'm assuming you do is a civilization model formed by the Russian scientist Nikolai Kardashev excuse me, I'm sorry a little nervous and I think I understand that where research says that we're 0.86 percent of one on the first year of civilization and I think if we look at the civilization model formed by Nikolai Kardashev from 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 we can evolve continue to evolve our civilization and I think that would come a lot from genetically modified organisms even though that has got a lot of bad rap I learned from one of my professors at the college I used to attend that GMOs are very beneficial and I would just like to as you guys think about all of what I just said thank you I'll speak to the GMO point I think that in the report we talk about this a lot that there are right things to do and you can try to do the right thing but sometimes you do the right thing in the wrong way so corn based ethanol that I talked about before was this really noble goal and we didn't go about it in the right way and so thinking about what is we're trying to achieve and then what's the best solution to get there so the report was very careful not to say these are the solutions but instead this is the compass this is where we want to get to and then let's find the best most sustainable way to get there whether it's GMOs or a different technology I just want to follow up on the GMO topic because it was just an article and the economist about GMOs and I don't know if anybody saw it but it pointed out that the United States has one of the largest percentages of food products compared to other countries in the world and that we have definitely gone down a path of GMOs but I don't think that you can throw a blanket over all GMOs and say everything is the same I think you have to evaluate individual products and consequences on their basis on their merits and that you can you have to look at those individually alright and may I add an inspiration for everybody and everybody online I guess too this is on web okay cool so I heard from a civil activist during the civil rights movement I can't remember his name but he said and this goes to everything everything there comes a time when the operation of the machine becomes so obvious it makes you so sick at heart that you can't take part that you can't even pass until we take part and you've got to put your bodies upon the gears upon the wheels upon all the apparatus and you've got to make it stop and you've got to run it to the people who own it that unless you're free the machine won't be prevented from working at all and I think if we held this strong perspective that that man I can't remember his name said I think we'd be able to achieve more so if you could take that inspiration and everybody I'm sorry we'll have to move on to the next question committee members are going to be here so you can probably have one on one with them later thank you sorry go ahead it's nice to see enthusiasm I'm Eagles Milbergs I'm co-founder of Pure Blue which is a non-profit in Seattle dealing with water technology and water innovation our focus is on helping entrepreneurs develop new water solutions I appreciate the report you've done I think it lays out very important challenges very comprehensive very holistic a question I have is how you avoid making it shelfware this is a town that's full of a ton of information tons of analysis tons of challenges but very few things really start going down that road of really developing some powerful solutions so I wanted to ask your opinion about what the national academies might be able to do on three important fronts I think one developing leaders that might be able to take on these challenges and function in various regions states around the country I don't have a lot of confidence in Washington DC these days in terms of problem solving but what role could the national academies play to try to bring the leaders together second kind of area is what can we do with the media and inform the public and I think we need to educate the media to how to report on these kinds of issues to explain these kinds of issues to the public and thirdly what can we do on terms of metrics how do we know if we're succeeding how do we know that we're on the right path I don't think the report handle a lot of the data issues but I think you alluded to the fact that you get what you measure and I'm wondering what we might be able to do on the data front so how do we get beyond shelfware how do we get on the the long putt to a solution I'll take the metrics question while you guys negotiate the other two so this metrics question is really hard if there is a national academies report maybe four or five years ago that looked at the tools and the metrics available to measure progress towards sustainability and the only tool that are fully developed and fully adopted are cost benefit analysis and risk assessment and so they're telling us that what we're doing is the right thing because we keep doing really well on those metrics right that's the status quo and so it's hard to identify metrics because we don't have the tools yet and so there's a lot of investment that we need to develop those tools I will also say that I can get on a long soapbox about efficiency metrics which is often what this gets reduced to and efficiency will help you do something better but it won't help you do a better thing and so we really tried in this report to set out true north what is the solution and that the compass is pointed in that direction but we did not worry so much about this pedometer and how fast we're getting to those solutions I just wanted to comment that more broadly the academy and the staff we've been working with have viewed the publication of this report as the beginning of their job not the end and in fact earlier today we were speaking with the sponsoring agencies about a set a detailed set of activities and metrics to communicate about what this report says to a variety of important audiences and try and get this infiltrated into all of the key audiences whether they be the academic institutions whether they be kids thinking about going into the career and a variety of others so I just and I don't know if Stephanie or one of the staff wants to speak to this but there's I was pleased to see that because I've been on other academy reports where that hasn't we've run out of money and we couldn't go next but that's been planned into this one in a very good way and I just want to follow up on that because Dan said it very nicely but we did talk about what the next steps are in terms of the leadership item that you brought up I think that that's got a longer time frame to deal with I think we're in the process now of inspiring who are going to be the future leaders I think it's going to be harder to change the perspective of individuals that are already in leadership positions in terms of the new perspectives but I think that we're in this report part of it is inspirational aspirational to inspire a new perspective and new leadership in the field. If I'm hearing it correctly you're considering roles for the national academies to try to move forward along these lines so that the report has more impact or is more impactful is that right? Does that make sense? Okay. So I'm Nancy Hattleston I'm the communications director so it's partly my job and we are identifying like different audiences for example the pipeline of students and looking at how we can do products based on this that's distributed to 25,000 teachers that kind of thing making sure that this report goes through maybe AP science classes and then into the undergraduate and people are using it maybe on this section that Domenico talked about on the ultimate challenge doing shorter products to try to set up meetings with university leaders we're thinking of creative things like for example industry I mean they're already we say in our report that the Volvo and Ford everybody is going to be electrifying their cars by 2035 so we're thinking of more how is how is industry viewing this what are they already doing even if they aren't regulation different driven because jobs and markets obviously drive people to this information so we'll be doing a number of things to try to get it not to shelf self where I'm hoping that it'll stay every for a while because it's a nice big broad thing even if the numbers change a little it's a nice big broad view but thanks for asking we'll do our best we're going to get in three more questions quick questions do you want to go with the web question first two questions that I'm going to merge together one from Maruzbe Tarani from Temple University and the other from Kenan Selenro from reimagined science and they're both related to kind of curriculum and how do you build these skills and so they're asking if the committee has any specific suggestions for modernizing the environmental engineering curricula and also kind of how do you resources and collaborations and anything that you have to suggest in terms of building a systems thinking and design thinking how do you teach that more effectively so I'll start that and then I'll turn over to my colleagues as well but I think that one thing is for certain is that the role that environmental engineers have played historically has to be propagated forward we're still going to need people to design water treatment plants wastewater treatment plants air pollution devices we're still going to need environmental engineers to do that so as we think about the new opportunities it may not be a one size fits all I think that there are going to be different institutions that are going to take on different challenges and they're going to have to rethink what they want to do in their curriculum and this is a job I think in large part for the association environmental engineering professors really in their coming deliberations at their various workshops and conferences to think about what if they are going to address new challenges new opportunities that they're going to have to take something out of the curriculum or modify the curriculum or move the curriculum to graduate programs but it's going to have to be a holistic perspective and as I said many of our challenges are going to involve a lot of other disciplines and we don't need to be experts in those disciplines but we have to be conversant with those disciplines and it's very important for us to know how other fields think so we can interact with them engineers think in very powerful ways and scientists do as well but so do economists but they think differently than engineers and so do policy people and lawyers and it's important for us to be exposed to and understand those modes of reasoning I want to add that one thing that our report stresses is the importance of systems thinking and importance of working with others being interdisciplinary in our solutions and when you drill it down to the curriculum level we need to train our students we need to educate our students along those competencies so if you think about systems thinking if you think about holistic solutions and if you think about working in an interdisciplinary field of other people those are really that if you think about that as a competency just like you would think about understanding you know math and science or understanding engineering ethics or something like that then if you think about it as a competency then those are things that you can place in your curriculum and you can have other classes to involve it for example we're relatively constrained in a lot of engineering programs because we're accredited and so we don't have a lot of flexibility but what we can do is rethink the way we deliver the courses that we already have to do so I do think we need to be creative and a little bit more flexible about how we deliver our curriculum so that we can involve systems level thinking and interdisciplinary activities in our current curriculum please go ahead thank you and good afternoon I'm Peter Goodwin I'm formerly of the Delta Stewardship Council and I'd like to just make a comment on the earlier questions first of all the value of these reports of the National Academy's reviews for California on the water issues were truly transformative those reports really allowed the federal agencies, state agencies, NGOs private sector to coalesce around many of the issues that you highlighted so the values of these reports really enable people I think to think in the right way and our immediate reaction I've been getting texts from folks out there in California I think that I'd really like to say thank you to the panel what we'd hope to see in this report was looking ahead so much we're looking proactively back in the past how you deal with these issues and I think this is a sync presentation we've heard obviously is we haven't had an opportunity to go through the report but it just really hits those big issues that we were hoping that we would get that type of vision but the question that I would have and I wonder if you had much discussion on this is that you spoke about a systems approach which of course is really important but these systems are also incredibly dynamic and if we're going to solve some of these problems making the huge steps that truly need to be put in place in these systems which are dynamic where there's a huge amount of uncertainty in the consequences of the decisions made today in the future how do we protect the agency director the leaders who are putting their reputations on the line to stand out and make these very brave decisions and I just wondered just for the experience you had on the panel you've been involved in some of the biggest issues globally and I just wondered if you had thought about how to make this transformative rather than incremental I'm not going to answer that question but I'm going to turn it over to Bob because he ran a very large agency and he was probably in that hot seat and I'm just delaying here to give him some time to think so I think that he probably has a very good answer for that right Bob it's a secret well look we this panel and this report really focuses on building improving the skills and the diversity of the workforce and the techniques aimed at these big issues and so we do have a little bit of that long-term look to it because this is not the kind of report you can have the results on next Thursday again this is something where we want to change the way engineering schools are thinking we want to change the way businesses are thinking about what they do with the graduates as well as the government and so I think you know the decisions for instance and now that I've been called out on this the decisions that you have to make in high level government positions that don't have precise answers you just have to decide with the best information you have and what the hope would be and that's what public service is about if it's a government agency and that's what the stockholders wonder about if that's your if it's a publicly held company and you live and breathe based on how well that works out there's no other way to deal with it you can't guarantee that everybody will love your decision and the information you have available and what we hope is over time if we move in the direction we're talking about in terms of education and how engineers are looking at their roles in society and how both government and business look at the roles of engineers in society particularly in the environmental field that better decisions will be made and there'll be more information available to the decisions makers to make it so I think a simple answer if I had to make a decision this afternoon it would be I would do it with the best information available and I think leaders have to have that attitude they can't they can't shoot from the hip they have to have the best information available and make a decision but you have to make them delaying sometimes is a decision that's not a good one I don't know this is very philosophical and I just want to add the options are dynamical and I think that you have to have multiple scenarios to consider I think it's a mistake if you just go down one path and develop one solution with potentially a sensitivity analysis I think you want to have multiple scenarios that you want to consider and look at the uncertainty around those scenarios and the potential consequences downstream and that's where you get into the issue of complex systems and complexity and emergent behavior pretty complicated pretty quickly that's great thank you and I didn't mean to put you on the spot but it is this concept of adaptiveness and continue reliance on science it's not just a one-time decision and I think actually Steve you were getting to that point the better you can understand the consequences of decisions the better you can manage them and that's a simple yeah actually I just want to very quickly pick up on that point which is that these are not one-off that of course your decision now actually sets the stage for the decision that you have to make next time so if you think in this sort of dynamic systems approach that sets you up for the best you know a systems approach helps you minimize those true surprises out there because now you're really thinking about what are the kind of peripheral or what previously had been unintended consequences but now you're taking those into account there of course always going to be surprises in systems but taking this sort of in a way the adaptive management knowing that you're setting your decision now with setting yourself up for something and so you're trying to build in as much resilience into that system as you can last question for today yes my name is Takeda I'm from Japan and I used to be a professor and the time to time work with the Japanese government and I do appreciate your efforts those are just nice results and I appreciate your efforts on educations environment educations and also I do like a word of holistic solutions but let me couple of questions about through my experience I have done Japan has no energy resources so that's like for my young time I focus on nuclear energy and then work on more efficient way because efficient way is perhaps like other way to and I work with General Draper some of you remember on populations and not only for Japanese case work on Asian and African with UNDP and other things and then my question is even though the holistic solutions and even though I mean those things are happening but at the same time some are the other way of thinking Julian Simon is the other one and what's like happening at the same time is digital transformations everything is much better and save energy more and energy itself is changing data at the coming era could be I mean oil so question is how much like you spend time on the digital those like digital economy is just coming and as like Professor Stahlmann said everything is going to better so perhaps like if you could add some on the digital era how those things could change and the second is I used to or we used to US National Academy of Science and the Japanese side work collaboratively because what you have done is very important to diffuse to the world I'm quite sure that Japan is welcome working on those things environment engineer and environment education and other including digital what's the means of digital for the future those things but I'm hoping like you could take initiative to the world I mean on the educations all in school and Duke and those are doing quite good on the environment education so why not share with the other part of the world thank you Dan could talk a little bit about smart cities but I couldn't agree more with you about the importance of data we talked this morning about funding infrastructure and there are now initiatives where infrastructure as being part of smart cities is being outfitted with sensors and some of the thinking here is that we can sell the data infrastructure so you're using the data as a vehicle to fund the infrastructure so data is playing a role in even more basic infrastructure construction I think that the whole concept of smart cities is very data rich and I could turn it over to Dan and he could talk a little bit more about it but hopefully that's going to be a major part of what environmental engineers are going to do talking with Japan or other countries I think that there's a great deal of interest I can't speak for the United States of America but I will to do this collaboratively because we are dealing with science and engineering which really knows no borders so I'll turn it over to Dan the last thing first the national academies have ongoing relationships with their counterparts in countries all over the world including in Japan I don't know if there's been any discussion about whether there might be interest in this being communicated to those through the foreign secretaries of the academies I would expect that that could happen but should happen and it's a very good point I think one of the things that we discovered as we looked at this and the report has more detail on this is that the potential we are in this new age as you're suggesting for a massive amount of data potentially being collected and it ranges from centers that could be placed to my discovery that I could find out about traffic congestion in Delhi from my phone because all the phones there were Android phones and Google had that data and they could figure that out and that sort of data has enormous power and could be used to better manage cities that's what we talk about in the report so we agree that there are enormous opportunities obviously in this country but well beyond this country so thank you and with that we will conclude our briefing for today I would like to offer a special thanks to our committee members who joined us here today and as a reminder you can download a copy of the report of the materials on www.nationalacademies.org the powerpoint presentation slides will also be available next week on the same page and for our attendees here in the room we are hosting a reception right outside starting right now so please join us and thank you everyone for making this a lively discussion