 Hello everyone. My name is Susan Cleary and I'm the Director of Policy and Public Outreach at the State Department's Bureau of Oceans, Environment, and Science. It's my pleasure to welcome you to today's live interactive event here in Washington, DC. We need nature, the importance of biodiversity. This discussion comes at a critical time. We're seeing record levels of warming on this planet, unprecedented melting of glaciers in the Arctic, an increase to the certification of our oceans. So what are the implications for global biodiversity and what needs to happen to address these issues? These are precisely the questions that will be raised next week at the largest conservation event on the planet, the IUCN World Conservation Congress. For the first time ever this event is coming to the United States and it's going to be hosted by the State of Hawaii. Thousands of representatives from governments and GOs in the scientific community will gather to make major decisions about international conservation efforts. To help shed light on the importance of this upcoming event and why we should be concerned about the state of biodiversity on our planet, I have two distinguished experts with me. Dr. Sam Gahn, a senior scientist and cultural advisor at the Nature Conservancy Hawaii and Amanda McCarty, Assistant Director for Partnerships at the National Sea Grant Office, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. They've spent their careers in different areas. Sam has focused on Hawaiian ecology and culture. Amanda has worked on global ocean and climate issues. However, what they do share is the use of scientific research and analysis to make informed decisions on conserving and sustaining our precious ecological systems. Thank you too so much for being here today. We're delighted to have you. Now before we start into the discussion, I just wanted to say hello to everyone joining us online through Facebook. Live as well are our viewing groups in Papua New Guinea and Samoa right now and we're ready to take your questions. If you are on Facebook, please use the comment section to ask your question and we'll get to as many as we can during this some hour. And with that, I wanted to start the conversation with a question for each of you. Dr. Gahn, Hawaii is just about to host the World Conservation Congress and some say, call this the Olympics of conservation. Can you tell us a little bit more about that event and why this gathering is important for the topic of biodiversity? Well, certainly the the idea of the Olympics of conservation comes from the fact that the IUCN's World Conservation Congress occurs once every four years. Four years ago, it was in Jeju, Korea, South Korea. And this time, as you said, the first time that the United States has hosted the IUCN Conservation Congress, it's occurring in Honolulu, Hawaii. And people are gearing up and the preparations are reaching a fevered pace now because in just about a week will be the opening day, September 1st of thousands of delegates from 160 or so countries coming to meet on conservation issues globally. And it's occurring in the Hawaiian Islands, which is one of the hotspots of biodiversity conservation in the United States and indeed in the world. That's wonderful. And I wonder if I could talk to turn it to Amanda for a second. Hawaii obviously is surrounded by oceans, but ocean and climate is one of the big topics as well, not only at the conference in Hawaii, but in a follow-up conference in Washington right after that. Can you just talk to us a little bit? I mean, I think a lot of people don't understand the threat that climate change has on the ocean. I mean, how seriously is the impact of climate on the ocean? Well, it's very serious. I think a lot of people don't realize that climate is climate change is ocean change. 50% of the change that we see in the climate is actually taking place in the oceans. The oceans and our climate are interwoven. And so what we do to the climate we are doing directly to the oceans. It's everything from changing temperatures to changing currents to changing pH. The oceans are acidifying. So it's pretty serious. And you know, the oceans and humans are tightly interwoven too. So what we do to the oceans, we do to ourselves. Thank you very much. Now let's go to our viewing group in Apia Samoa. I wonder if our guests gathered there have a question for the panel. I have a question for Dr. Sam, gone in relation to your background as a cultural advisor. How do you see the role of traditional knowledge in monitoring some of our biodiversity tools? So tracking progress on biodiversity targets? Hawaiian culture is the is the prominent indigenous culture that that would be interplaying with with biodiversity conservation. And I'm the current chair of the Hawaii Conservation Alliance, which is 25 different federal states and private organizations that are all devoted to to conservation of Hawaii's biodiversity and ecosystems land and sea. And that group recently put together a position paper acknowledging the importance of Hawaiian culture and the need to integrate Hawaiian values, knowledge and approaches into conservation efforts in Hawaii. This becomes more and more important as we look to community corroborations in management of land and sea. No government is able to to handle the huge conservation issues. Everyone in all communities living in Hawaii need to be involved in this in an active way, either in the prevention or the mitigation or the repair of environmental damage that has occurred over the last few centuries. And certainly in the years to come with global climate change affecting both land, freshwater and ocean resources. To know that you live in the context of an island people that had sustainably lived in those ecosystems for 1000 years means that there are many lessons to be learned by paying attention to cultural knowledge and to indigenous approaches. Thank you, Dr. Ghan. That was very interesting. Okay, now let's turn to our viewing group in Ports Moresby, Papua New Guinea. Do we have a question from from our group there? I was wondering if you could talk about the experience of Hawaii with eco-tourism and sort of monetizing conservation. I'm the economic officer here, economic ECH officer here at Coast. I hear a lot of people say, you know, definitely want to conserve, but we have to feed our families, we have to fish, we have to do these things. You talk about some successes globally, maybe in, you know, using conservation to drive economic growth. The history of eco, the history of tourism in Hawaii has hardly been ecologically friendly. It's been mostly a matter of building up resorts on the coast so that people have a nice warm place to swim and and lots of shopping to do. But as more and more sophisticated tourists arrive in the islands, they are more interested in what is uniquely available in the islands, whether it's in whether it's endemic species that are found only here and nowhere else, whether it's the cultural components, the aspects of Hawaiian culture that that define the people here and their interactions with the environment. All of those things are gaining prominence. Moreover, a good example is that on the island of Hawaii at upper elevations, there is a movement now to join between both publicly held lands and privately held lands to establish an equestrian and foot trail in the heart of Hawaiian forest bird habitat, so that tourists have an opportunity to move through those habitats and ecosystems, see those birds in place rather than going to a zoological park or or something. And in doing so, helping support the cost of conservation. Thank you, Dr. Gunn. Maybe I might ask Amanda as well to weigh in on this one, because I think a lot of the work that you do with NOAA really does impact on ecotourism as well. Definitely. The program that I work for the National Sea Grant program is a series of 33 university based programs throughout the United States. And so we are working at the local community level throughout the coastal communities of the United States. And a great example that relates to this also comes from Hawaii. The idea of ecotourism of bringing people into appreciate your ecology is great. And at the same time, you want to make sure that you're not destroying the ecology while you do it. And so one of the programs that our Hawaii Sea Grant program implemented is the Hanama Bay Education Program. And this is a program by which visitors when they come in 10,000 people a day are coming into snorkel in this one bay. And that can have massive impacts on the ecosystem. And so Hawaii Sea Grant partnered with schools and other organizations to say, we want you to know a little bit about these ecosystems before you dive in. And so there's a video that you are watching an education center. There are people that you can ask questions about. But the goal is to say, you want to come back five years from now and we want this to be beautiful when you get here too. So it's a great opportunity to bring education into ecotourism as well. It's a great point in that educational video that that greets people that Hanama Bay is the voice of my of my kumu, the person who taught me Hawaiian chant and put me through traditional rites of passage as a as a cultural practitioner. That is his voice. I'm celebrating the biodiversity of Hanama Bay in in the Hawaiian cultural context. A kind of appreciation that we hope to sophisticated tourists at least will be able to appreciate and take back with them. What a great. That's wonderful. Maybe we could go to our Facebook live audience for some online questions. So we have one here right now. The question is if you had one plant or animal species that you think needs more attention brought to it, what would it be and why it's a great question? Maybe do you mind if we go again to you, Dr. Gunn in Hawaii? Do you have an animal species you think needs more attention? Wow. We have hundreds of birds. We have thousands of native invertebrates and it seems that the megafauna worldwide are the ones that get most of the attention. The pandas and the tigers and bright colored tropical birds. But in Hawaii, the invertebrates have long been neglected. And one of my favorite invertebrates, in fact, the one that earned me my PhD, is the Hawaiian happy face spider. And that spider, if you can imagine, a small transparent yellow spider with a clown's face on its back, living quietly under leaves. It is one of those canaries in the coal mine, if you will. If those spiders are doing well, then we know the forest ecosystem that they exist in are doing well. So paying attention to the small denizens of our endemic ecosystems is one way to make sure that the entire ecosystem is functioning. That's wonderful. Amanda, do you have an answer to the one species you think needs more attention? I'm going to go small too. I'm an invertebrate person. And so I'm going to go with the pteropod. It's a very, very small, tiny organism. Usually you look at it under a microscope and it sort of looks like a sea butterfly. And what's great about these pteropods are that they are the base of the food chain. And so many other things eat them, which then are eaten. And so a lot of the ocean depends on things like the pteropod. And the reason that I think it's important to pay more attention to them is because they are being impacted greatly by ocean acidification. So as the climate's changing and the oceans are becoming more acidic, the shells of these pteropods are not forming as firmly. And so they're not surviving as much. And then organisms like this that are the basis of the food chains of the ocean are starting to have a hard time surviving. So I say pay attention to the pteropod. That's wonderful. What do you think we could, we talked a lot about the problems so far, but maybe we can talk a little bit about some of the success stories. Oftentimes when we talk about these problems, you know, we know the threats are out there, but we don't we don't communicate enough about some of the things that are actually working. Do you have would you have any anything to share with us, Dr. Ghan, success stories about restoring or protecting nature? Well, I think what what comes to mind is the fact that lately in ecology, you you recognize that small preserved small preserved areas, say a small sanctuary around a single endangered plant, that's not likely to be successful in the long run. You need landscape scale conservation. And so in Hawaii, and here we are talking about the 100th anniversary of the National Park System in the United States in one of the first national parks established in Hawaii was Hawaii Volcanoes National Park. Hawaii Volcanoes National Park, as it turns out, is part of a large landscape conservation partnership between federal, state and private on landowners and managers that together actually manage nearly half of the island of Hawaii. And the same is true on all of the major islands here. And it's an important success story. The fact that cooperation between public and private landowners and managers allows us to manage ecosystems and species, ignoring land ownership boundaries and focusing on the threats and the ecological processes that need to be maintained. And that breakthrough in partnership in conservation is one of the major success stories in the Hawaiian Islands. That's a great one. I know, Amanda, you know, we're here in Washington. We're preparing for a big international event. It's called the Irish Conference. It's hosted this year in Washington by Secretary John Kerry. And one of the themes of this conference is a commitment driven event. In the two years of its existence, we've already had four billion dollars of new commitments and six million kilometers of new marine protected areas. And so talking about marine protected areas is something that's very much on the agenda in Washington in September and the importance of marine protected areas. Can you talk a little bit about about that strategy as a sort of successful strategy? Do these things, do these marine protected areas really make a difference? We believe they do. A lot of science has demonstrated that they do. What marine protected areas do is they focus on different areas of the ocean where organisms have a habitat that is important for their protection or for different phases of their life cycles. These can be breeding grounds, for example, so it's a space where animals can go to breed and then there's spill over to the local areas. So you don't fish here, but you get a lot more fish outside. So we've looked at them from a lot of different perspectives. Another thing to think about with these place-based protected areas is they can be an area where we can educate the public, where we can bring them out to see the beauty that is the ocean. Sometimes it can be hard to know what the ocean looks like. It seems so far away, but these provide us beautiful places that we can bring communities to show them how the ocean impacts them. So they protect cultural resources. It can be ship wrecks, it can be places that are important to native cultures, or it can be resources like fish that we want to eat or coral reefs. We have protected areas all throughout the United States and they're all over the world and we believe that they allow us to appreciate the oceans and to sustain them for generations to come. Thanks. It looks now like that our viewing group in Samoa has another question for us. Yes, hi. My name is Ahmed. I'm from the Samoa Voyaging Society. My question is a general question to everyone is we've been talking a lot about engaging communities. So do you have some sort of best practices or case studies of showing how to bring communities or how to engage communities into biodiversity programs? And what the context of asking this question is when through our voyaging work we try to engage communities, we often hit the wall of individual and local interests versus environmental interests with the development coming through people want to get into more of like new development things using technology, using, you know, fossil fuel, everything else. But then it's just difficult to engage communities at times. So do you have suggestions, best practices, your experiences around how to go about engaging communities? Thank you. Boy, that's a great question. Dr. Ghan, do you have an answer to that? Do you see that dichotomy between people's desire for more economic activity and preservation? Well, you know, in Hawaii we've had decades now since statehood and rapidly growing of both technologies and conveniences. And it's gotten to the point where at least on the island of Oahu where 85% of the people live. A lot of the marine resources in particular have been depleted heavily. Recognizing that different communities on other islands where the situation has not yet gotten quite so bad have put together community resources, mostly in knowledgeable people who have been fishing these waters for for generations and know the and know the sensitivities, the seasons, the reproductive cycles of the area of the fish of the area and know how to best manage them over the course of the year. And so there is now a movement of collaborative community conservation in which working with the state of Hawaii's office of conservation and the Board of Land and Natural Resources, they are able to create special rules that apply only to the waters that are relevant to those communities and allows them to work in conjunction with the state of Hawaii to establish special rules for the specific resources that are in place there. The model was just created only about a year ago. The very first community collaborative conservation effort is to be found in on the island of Kauai at Haina. And if you wanted to Google that, you could learn a little bit more about that particular effort. It was just followed by a similar effort by the communities on the island of Hawaii on the corner coast where they have established a series of rules for their stretch of marine resources. So that kind of movement is occurring at least on the marine side of things. The terrestrial side of things is a little bit more difficult to to manage in that respect. And I think you must have a lot to say on this one as well. The program that I work for Sea Grant is a locally based program. And so we believe we live here, we work here, we play here. Our problems are your problems. And so one of the things that's great about our program, our Sea Grant Association president is the one who's that's kind of his tagline of how we present ourselves. And so what Sea Grant does is it has 200 academic institutions, 1000 state, local and regional partners and 350 extension agents who are living and working in these communities so that it's not a tension between what the local community wants and what our program does. Our program is that local community, that local connection. And so I think that going to where your community is speaking of best practices, it's knowing your community, it's knowing what that community needs and then showing how biodiversity, how ecosystem resilience, how human resilience are all interconnected. And when you're there and you're part of that community, you can see that and you can make those connections and you're a trusted person to do that. So I think some of the best practices are really knowing what the local community wants and showing how biodiversity can contribute to that. Let's go now to Papua New Guinea and we're going to get a question from their audience there. What kind of solid action items can we expect from next week's conference? I think I might ask Dr. Gant to take a... I think I might ask him a little bit about what you're looking at from the IUCN conference and what you would like to see this huge gathering accomplish. Well, in these conferences, there are always numerous opportunities to propose motions before the entire conservation, international conservation body. Among those motions are ones that deal with marine debris, with adaptation to climate change, with increased biosecurity to prevent the spread of non-native species from one region of the globe to another. There are all kinds of commitments that are that are made on the part on the part of leadership of various countries. In Hawaii, for example, we're putting together a biosecurity plan that will greatly enhance the protection of our borders from unwanted pests, for example, tree snakes from Guam that would if they established in Hawaii completely destroy our bird life. So there are all kinds of commitments and ways to amplify and catalyze important conservation change. Maybe one of the most important aspects of a Congress of this sort is the ability to share stories, successes, lessons learned in different parts of the world, because even though our ecosystems might be different, our cultural backgrounds might be different, the conservation challenges at the heart of it are going to be shared. Yeah, I mean, it's it's it's very much from from a Washington perspective, a very important moment. And it happens, you know, during a very busy important season for conservation efforts. So we'll be going from IUCN to the Oceans Conference in Washington, UNGA and then SIDES, just a very impactful sort of six weeks in which so many leaders can come together and to discuss really before they go into more formal settings, issues like an ivory ban, you know, concentrating on particular species like pangolins or looking on what we can do on wildlife trafficking. So I know that that that that importance of just gathering people together to to trade stories and and research. But Amanda, what about yourself? What do you think a big international gathering like IUCN can produce for the for the issue of conservation in the oceans? I think anytime we can raise attention to these issues and bring people's focus to them and show that there's a need, but also that there are solutions to me. That's that's motivating. If we just go in and focus on the problems, it can deflate people's energy. But I think what we find when we come together as a world is that there are so many solutions to these problems. And I think a focus on that would be fantastic. And I think that will happen. People say it's a very inspiring event because you've got so many people, you know, really taking action and and raising raising the alarms on some in some areas, but also pointing to solutions on the other. It looks like we have some more questions from viewers participating in this program on Facebook. So around the world, we're seeing increased awareness of the tension between economic development and conservation. How can we balance these competing interests and what role do local communities play in protecting sacred or special places? That's that's a great question. Dr. Ghan. Well, I think that that's certainly the idea of the relationship between people and special places is one of those things allow those places to maintain their pristine or their their relatively undisturbed state. And so when you look at those relationships and you capitalize on what it is about the relationship between people and place and are able to articulate that well, then you are able to appreciate something that is the basis for long term sustainability of resources in an area. And that is that is indeed one of the one of the roles that community can play is to voice the importance of the places in which they live in which generations of people have lived and to point out the point of the contrast between the sustainable reciprocal relationships of people to place versus the commodification of land and nature, which is maybe primary growing relationship that occurs on this planet. But the question is, is that a sustainable one? So sustainability is sort of the is sort of this key word. I mean, when you're looking at these issues, how do you have the conversation about about sustainable use of natural resources when you're talking about fragile ecosystems? A lot of times I think it starts with having people's vision of what they want to see five, 10, 15, 50 years down the road and then working back from there, saying, you know, this beach, this place is special to you. This this park is special to you. And and there are some threats on it. And we need to take those into account and work backwards so that we can get from today to where you want to be 50 years from now so that you can be pushing your kid on the swing in this park or you can be walking along the beach with with your child or your grandchild some day. And I think that that emotional hook is is usually what gets people. And then you can go to the details of here are the facts and here's how we we need to work together to make sure that your vision and what we share in common can come through. But I think a lot of times it starts with with a shared vision. And do you think that how do you get to that point in a conversation where where you can get beyond that idea of you know protection of natural places and economic development? How do you have that? Because I think that's the second or third question about that about that balance. It can be hard because sometimes it's different groups, right? It's not one person who's looking at sustainable resource development versus economic development. And so it's bringing people together. It's having difficult conversations. It's facilitating dialogue between people who want to use the same resource on different timescales or or who want to get rid of a resource so they can put another one in place. So a lot of times it starts with bringing different people together who want different things, but then finding commonalities and trying to, you know, collaborate when you can and compromise when you need to and and and, you know, figuring out what that long term vision is and how you can work towards it together. And sometimes it's different paths that you want to take and you have to just decide. And that goes outside of you. So it's better to collaborate and do it together. Yeah. Thank you. That's that's really interesting. Dr. Kahn, what do you think if you were going to say have, you know, one key piece of advice for people who are looking to get more involved in local conservation efforts? What would your piece of advice be? I think my advice would be to learn all you can about the particular place that you're in. It doesn't have to be Hawaii. Of course, my examples are all from Hawaii, but but in anywhere you go in the world, there will be unique biodiversity, unique ecosystems, each of which have their special roles to play in Hawaii. You know, as a as an island archipelago with limited terrestrial fresh water and indeed even marine resources, it becomes really important to view your ecosystems as the basis for the future of human life, as well as all life on that island. And so unless you're looking at your resources in that way, conservation really doesn't have a chance. But the moment the people recognize that the lands and waters that they live on are the basis for their well being and the well being of their children, grandchildren, great grandchildren on into on into thousands of years down the line. Then we have the basis for sustainable futures. Do you have to have advice for people who want to get involved locally in conservation issues and what's the first step people can can can take? I would say don't be intimidated. Just just do something. My my niece called me the other day. She lives in Minnesota, which is about as far from the ocean as you can get. And she said, I heard about the oceans. I want to do something. So so I had a sign up sheet in front of the principal's office and and I raised thirty seven dollars. What can I do with it? You know, if my niece can do that, anybody can do something. So so just start somewhere, do something, find an organization that you can contribute to. But but don't be intimidated. There's such a need and your energy and enthusiasm is needed. It's great. So we're going back to the Facebook page and and we have really an excellent question. And that is when we say biodiversity, I mean, what do we mean? What does that word mean? It's a big word. We use it a lot. And and why is it important that we protect it? I mean, biodiversity is essentially the totality of all of the living things that are in a place. You can talk about the biodiversity of the planet. You can talk about biodiversity of a continent. You can talk about biodiversity of a region of the globe. And Hawaii as as its own biogeographic province is unique in that regard, in which, for example, 90 plus percent of the plants and animals that you find in the Hawaiian islands above sea level are going to be found nowhere else on earth. So that means that the unique aspects of its biological diversity, that is the all of the plants and animals that live there, make it irreplaceable. You cannot go anywhere else on earth and find the same suite of plants and animals that live there. And the same is true of anywhere else on the planet as well, though. When you think about it, Hawaii is an exception in that the thousands of miles of ocean around us means that our biodiversity is highly endemic. But no matter where you go, the biodiversity of your place is going to be different than the continent next to you or the continent on the other side of the globe. And the value of that cannot be understated. When you go traveling, you go to see new things, things that you don't see in your own lands. Not, you don't go to see exactly the same thing that you left. If we don't value the diversity of cultures, the diversity of languages, the diversity of foods, all of that boils down to the underlying ecological diversity of the places in which we live. Amanda, what about you? Do you think that biodiversity is about an appreciation of life's many forms of animals and plants? Is there other value? Is there an economic value to biodiversity? I think there's a lot of value. There's the inherent value that organisms have in and of themselves. And as an ecologist, those interconnections as well as organisms themselves are amazing and fascinating. So there's a lot of inherent value. But if you look at the societal value, the socioeconomic value, we know that resilient ecosystems are generally more diverse. So the more diverse an ecosystem is, the more biodiversity that it has in it, in general, the more able it is to withstand a threat. So if a coral reef bleaches, but it were to be more diverse, have more species on it, there's more likelihood that some of those species could handle the threat. We're finding that some species of coral are more tolerant to temperature increases. Others are more tolerant of pH increases. If we only had one species of coral, we might lose them all. But with many species, we have more of a chance of keeping corals around. And then the fishermen who depend on that, the communities who depend on that for tourism, the more likely we have corals, the more economically sustainable we are as well. So resilience. Just an example. Yeah, absolutely. So it looks like our viewing group in Samoa has another question for us. So back to Samoa. Okay, hi, guys. I have a novel. From your experience, I mean, this is for me over the last 30 years, what I've seen is that we've had increased awareness globally and in the Pacific, specifically from Samoa's standpoint on conservation and biodiversity. There's been more awareness, a lot of environmental policies have been put in place, a lot of best practices from everywhere in the world on how to do it. But my biggest problem is there seems to be continuing degrading of the environment. From your working experience, why is this happening? Well, and what have you done? Because if you do the index now of what compared to 20 years ago, if you look at the money that's been spent and the resources that have been put in place to try and conserve and protect the environment, I don't think we can come up with saying that we've done a great job because I don't think so. Thank you for that. I watch your experience. Amanda, maybe I might turn to you first because you spent a lot of years working on the climate change agreement and you were in Paris last year and I believe you brought a family member with you. But maybe you can talk a little bit about what the Paris agreement meant for this issue of progress because it can get rather difficult to keep sort of optimism on these issues when we see some of the trends. Right, humans are having a huge impact on the planet. There's a lot of us and we're consuming a lot of resources and so that does impact the planet and we're seeing that through climate change, we're seeing that through pollution, we're seeing that through resource use. There's a lot of negatives. There's a lot of scary things. At the same time, there's a growing awareness among the human population that we have an impact on the planet. And so I think when I look at climate change, what we did 100 years ago is impacting us now and it's going to impact us for the next couple hundred years. So there's lags to how we respond and how long it takes for those impacts to sort of roll back or for us to be able to adapt and for ecosystems to be able to adapt. So I think part of it is that our awareness of our impacts wasn't always as fast as our impacts themselves. At the same time too, I think that, we just have to keep trying. We just have to keep trying new approaches. We try things sometimes and it doesn't work and so we're learning as we go. You talked about sharing of best practices within the Pacific Islands and from around the world. This is hard. What we're doing to the planet is difficult to remediate and so it's a little bit of failing but it's also a lot of success and so I think the more that we can share our successes, the more that we can focus on the big accomplishes we made like the agreement in Paris where we said enough with climate change, we need to pay attention more than we have already. We need to mitigate, we need to adapt and we need to make sure that everyone can move in on it. I think it will take a while to sometimes see the changes but those changes are happening. How many years did you work on as a climate negotiator? Since 2010. So did you see changes in that period of time and people's attitudes towards climate there? The climate negotiator family has always sort of been preaching to the choir, right? But I think global attention to the issue has risen. I'm seeing that happen with the oceans as well in part because of the ocean conference and so I think it's been interesting over the period of time that I've been really, really involved in environmental issues. The amount of attention that diverse people are paying to these issues has increased dramatically. Yeah, we certainly see this in Washington, the number of stakeholders who care about these issues is growing every day. Dr. Ghan, how do you react to that question? I've been in conservation for over 30 years now and during that time I've seen a lot of changes. As you point out, there were increasing awareness, greater investment in conservation projects, in protection of lands, in management technologies and the like. And yet in my career in conservation, I've seen Hawaiian species go extinct. I've seen growing stresses on both terrestrial and marine ecosystems, largely as a result, as was pointed out, of our growing populations and our growing demands on the resources of every place on this planet. And yet the successful trends that I see in partnerships to protect larger areas in the recognition that the upland ecosystems of Hawaii, for example, are vital for the future of our water resources and indeed for all of even marine resources as nutrients and water go down into the sea. All of those things are beginning to emerge so that they're second nature to people and they recognize that those relationships exist and need to be protected. So you begin to see both at the community level and the government level projects that specifically deal with the threats to those ecological processes from the tops of the mountains down into the depths of the sea. And that's something that I find promising. It allows us to view global climate change, for example, as a dynamic system. We have forest birds that are susceptible to avian diseases, to bird diseases spread by mosquitoes. Mosquitoes are in the news a lot because of the spread of human diseases but our forest birds have been dealing with that for over a century now and everything below 4,000 feet, you won't find native birds because they've been killed off by mosquitoes and as global climate change raises that mosquito zone. They are essentially doomed unless we find new ways to deal with those things. But now at least we're able to recognize that that is occurring and that the solutions will take those factors into account. So we are playing catch up constantly and as was mentioned, there are lags between the effects of a century ago and what we have to deal with today. But I remain an optimist because as long as people are devoted to conservation of biological diversity, as long as we keep increasing our understanding of the processes that are involved, we can enhance the tools that we have to work on the problems. That's great. Now let's go back to Papua New Guinea for a question from their audience. My name is Jane Moguina. My question is about created biodiversity. So I'm talking about food crops here. We continue to talk about natural biodiversity and linkages between local communities and interdependence between the natural biodiversity and local communities. But there is also created biodiversity. People have created the huge diversity of food crops which they depend on particularly to sustain them. And increasingly we are seeing that a lot of communities are not coping with events such as El Ninos, such as extended droughts. And we've seen this in Papua New Guinea, especially in the more recent years. What is the general conservation effort into protection of created diversity such as protection of cultivars which people really depend on particularly in the life of climate change? Well, certainly in the Hawaiian islands where there were once hundreds of different varieties of taro and dozens, if not more varieties of bananas and various other crops, sweet potato varieties, breadfruit varieties, I hear your concern immediately. And in fact, the loss of those cultivars over the last 150 years has been rather appalling. We've lost over half of them. I presume that you are not in that position where you still have the majority of your cultivars. And it's really important for you to be an advocate for maintaining the existence of those cultivars because cultivar diversity, created crop diversity is going to be important for the future of food sustainability on this planet. I'm a member of the Red Listing Committee. So the IUCN maintains a red list of rare species. And I was talking with the botanical specialists of that effort. And asked them about whether or not the same listing process could be used to document and to track the status of cultivars on this planet. And they said that that's a very important idea and that it's something that needs to be developed. So at this next IUCN World Conservation Congress, if there are voices that are united in expressing the importance of that concept, I think that that can move forward. It's certainly primed to go. Amanda, maybe I could ask you that same question but talk a little bit about food security in the ocean. I know that some of the work that Noah's doing is looking at fisheries and different ways of looking at food security that comes from our fish stocks. Absolutely. So when we think of farming, we often think of the soil but we actually farm fish and we farm seaweed as well. And so the balance of native crops or native fish stocks and the food that we can farm provide us a good diversity of a healthy nutritious diet. Protein is an important part of your diet and fish can be a great source of that. Our wild populations, we're working to rebuild them. We're working to find ways to reduce by-catch to make sure that we're sustainably harvesting fish so that they'll be here for decades and decades. And we realize that at the same time the demand for sea-based protein is not what we can sustain from the sea. And so we're investing in aquaculture programs to look at how we can farm different species, how we can improve the aquaculture practices we already have and provide a safe, sustainable, healthy seafood for people to eat. That's great. So let's get back to our Facebook Live audience for just another question. This one is a personal one. What made you decide to go into this field of work? Tell us how you got hooked into this line of work. Well, I was one of those kids that after school, instead of being on the playing field I would be in the nearest stream turning over rocks, seeing what lived underneath them. I was always curious about the living aspects of the natural world, even from childhood. And I was encouraged in that by my parents. And at a certain stage in high school there was a hiking group that was formed. And it took us up into the mountains on different trails and the like and taught us, and there I learned so many, so many of the names of our native plants and animals and our birds. And I came to appreciate the fact that many of these things could not be found anywhere else on the planet. And whenever you're growing up in that kind of extremely special biological diversity, it kind of primes you for a career in the conservation of those things that are part of who you are. You are an ocean expert, and yet you grew up nowhere near the ocean. How did you get connected with your line of work? So I was originally pre-medicine. I had planned on being a doctor because I wanted to help people. I wanted healthy people. And then I went to college, and I spent sometimes in Ecuador studying ecology and evolution and I realized that that would be a lot of fun for one part, but I also realized how important the health of our natural environment is for the health of people. And so I realized that I could help more people be healthier by going down the path of working in the environmental field and I could by being a doctor where I treated one, two, three people maybe at a time. And I just wanted to really give back and combine my passion with being outdoors, being in the ocean, realizing that there are these amazing places. I mean, the ocean seems so big, yet we're influencing it with our actions. And so the idea that I could raise awareness of that and help people find the solutions to these big problems, that's what shifted me away from the medical route and all the bills that are associated with that and going more towards working in the ecology and environmental policy field. That's great. So we're gonna go back to Samoa for one more question from the audience there. Hi, my name is Serena Heckler, I'm with UNESCO and the question I have is a little bit of a follow on from some of the other discussions that we've been having is we've been talking a lot about sharing best practice and one of the challenges I face working here in the Pacific and I know everyone in the room also is we see a lot of wonderful projects happening in Hawaii particularly and are very interested to learn from those projects and bring them back to the Pacific. But it always seems like there are barriers that you face in Hawaii or that you don't face in Hawaii, resource barriers, infrastructure barriers that we do face in the Pacific. And I was just wondering if you had ideas and thoughts about how your work could come to the Pacific in ways that would be supporting Pacific stakeholders to develop their own projects and ideas and overcoming those barriers. I'm sure you both have a lot of experience with that. Maybe Amanda, do you mind starting off with that one? Sure, so there's many examples of where the United States government and our agency partners really try to help other countries. One example, this actually was in the Pacific Islands, it was in the Indian Ocean, but we went over and we did a three week long series of workshops where we tried to help marine protected area managers understand what climate impacts we're gonna be on their systems and conduct vulnerability assessments so that they would know where their key vulnerabilities are and then integrate that into their existing management plans. In the Pacific Islands, to give an example there, we worked with USAID, NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, worked with USAID to understand what sort of climate services the region needed. So saying we have all this amazing data and information we've produced in the US, it's freely accessible, we want you to use it, here's what it is, it will help you learn how to use it. We've trained meteorologists to do modeling to bring it back to their countries. They can come over and work alongside our meteorologists and then we bring them back and they can apply that in their own countries. There's definitely barriers. It's hard and there's even barriers when you're transforming from community to community within the US and so I think it's being persistent, it's seeking out those opportunities, it's looking for your critical partners and NGOs have played a huge role in the Pacific Islands in helping foster government to government connections even. So it's bringing people together and I think it's sticking with it because it's hard and knowing that if you just persist, we want to partner because we learn from other countries too. So it's everyone's benefit. You know, people will tell me that they have barriers in their particular place that let's say in Hawaii, we don't have but the amazing thing is that no matter where you are but there are obstacles to examples that you see elsewhere in the world that are a result of your unique history and your unique set of laws and the interactions between communities and stakeholders and governments in the place. And in Hawaii, we used to have all kinds of interesting frictions between federal government and state government, between state government and county government, between county government and large private landowners between landowners and NGOs and the like and if you looked at that, you would think, oh my gosh, how does anything get done here? But the answer was persistence, recognition of what was at stake and continually striving to find that common ground, the motivating factors that allow people to work together to build trust with each other and to actually get toward the goal of conservation. For example, in our large watershed partnerships, watershed was the key and the idea that the tops of our islands were the key to the future of our water resources meant that everything that came along with that, the native species, the forest, the birds, all came along with the idea of banding together in order to protect that water resource. So as soon as that common block of motivation was there and people began to work with each other and ignore their boundaries and their independent missions, then we were able to actually make huge strides forward. And the idea of exchanging ideas and methods between countries and between regions of the world is a really important one. Hawaii benefited a great deal from the technologies and from the advancements and the approaches that occurred in Aotearoa, for example, in New Zealand. We looked to them for many of the latest technologies. As we were developing our conservation program, 30 years ago, we did not have a lot of the tools that we enjoy now. And I think that in your situation, you'll be able to do the same kind of thing, but it will require persistence and building upon that common ground and the mutual decision that what's at stake is more important than the obstacles. That's great. I think we're about running out of time, but we're gonna go to Papua New Guinea for our final question and some short answers. My name is Max Sugihara. We've talked a lot about the linkages between the local communities, governments and conservation organizations and sort of achieving these conservation outcomes. Where do you think the biggest opportunities are for industry and commercial interests to help with conserving biodiversity? I think the areas where industry and businesses have direct impacts because of the ecosystem. So fisheries, that's an obvious place to me. Aquaculture, that's an obvious place. But even supply chains and port security, all of this is dependent upon healthy coastal ecosystems that buffer our lands from storms. And so we have to help businesses and industry see how this will impact them to get them on our team. That's great. Dr. Ghan? By the same token, the major industry in Hawaii is tourism. And so the appreciation of Hawaii as a place that's important, not only for its culture, for its nice climate, but for its ecological diversity and its biodiversity in general is one of those things that can help align industry with conservation. Great. I'm so sorry to have to wrap it up, everyone, but it looks like we're out of time. I just wanna thank our panelists for joining us today, Dr. Sam Ghan and Amanda McCarty, as well as our online viewers, and of course, big thanks to our groups in Papua New Guinea and in Samoa. And if you're interested in following up on the very important work that our speakers are doing, I encourage you to check out at TNC Hawaii and at Sea Grant for more information and a plug for the State Department, which will be covering the IUCN World Conservation Congress on the ground in Hawaii next week. So please follow us on Twitter. That's at State Department OES and like us on Facebook. We're at facebook.com slash statedepartment.os. And we hope you'll keep the conversation going. Thanks, everyone.