 The US Naval War College is a Navy's home of thought. Established in 1884, NWC has become the center of Naval seapower, both strategically and intellectually. The following issues in national security lecture is specifically designed to offer scholarly lectures to all participants. We hope you enjoy this upcoming discussion and future lectures. Well good afternoon and welcome to our third issues in national security lecture for this academic year. I'm John Jackson and I will serve as host for today's event. Due to the expected storm, we are not welcoming participants on campus today, but will function only on Zoom. I'd now like to offer the microphone to rare Admiral Chatfield for her welcoming remarks. Admiral, we have you muted, ma'am. Oh, and now I'm unmuted. Okay, thanks everyone. It is really great to be here. I know there's been a change of venue, so we're just logging on from home as well as everyone else. This is going to be a fantastic lecture today. We really appreciate your continued support. We hope that the word is getting out that we are inviting our broader community to participate as well as our staff and spouses. And so I'm looking forward to this event. My husband David is here with me looking forward to our family group after discussion. Yeah. Yeah. So this afternoon we have Melissa Puyamara joining us, military one source. She's a repeat offender. We get her a couple times each semester. Professor Jackson knows her as well and it's going to be terrific. Please, she's going to have a pretty full presentation, but there might be room for some questions. So ask away. I was just in an Alphonse meeting. I was amazed at all of the offerings that military one source provides our families. So please make use of that. Thank you very much. Admiral David, thank you. The goal of this series is to share a portion of the Naval War College's academic experience with the spouses and significant others of our student body. It's been extended to include the entire Naval War College family members of the Naval War College Foundation, international sponsors, civilian employees, colleagues throughout Naval Station Newport, and participants from around the nation. We will be offering 13 additional lectures between now and 31 May of 2022. And as a reminder, we are pleased to offer certificates of participation to all viewers who attend at least 60% of the offered lectures or 10 out of the 16. And whether you attend in person or via Zoom, just keep track of your attendance. Looking ahead on Tuesday 9 November, May on Tuesday 9 November, we will hear from Professor David Burbach, who will discuss the role of space in our national security. And as David has indicated, we will have a family discussion group meeting after the prepared remarks. We'll take a short five minute break between those two events. So without question, climate change affects security around the world. This afternoon, our speaker will explore the basics of climate change and the many ways it interacts with national security. Global changes to climate have significant impacts to local food, water, and other resources, leading to potentially destabilizing effects on fragile state systems and migration. The countries and organizations that best understand and anticipate these changes will be best prepared to fight and win in the unstable climatic environment ahead. Commander Andrea H. Cameron U.S. Navy is a permanent military professor teaching policy analysis in our national security affairs department. And she is the founding director of the Climate and Human Security Studies Group. Her academic interests include climate change and security, climate and energy policy, human security topics, and civil military coordination during humanitarian assistance and disaster relief efforts. She is an internationally known expert who was awarded the 2019 ECO Educator of the Year award by the Renewable Now Network. She has earned a PhD and security studies from the Naval Postgraduate School and an educational doctorate and educational technology from Pepperdine University. It is indeed my pleasure to pass the digital baton on to Commander Cameron. Over to you, Andrea. Thank you for this great opportunity to talk with you all today about climate change and national security. It's a topic that has gained significant momentum within the Department of Defense for the last eight months. I'd like to thank Rear Admiral Chatfield and Professor Jackson for this exceptional lecture series, and I'm truly honored by the large audience as well as my colleagues and students that have joined me today. Today, I'd like to take the chance to share an orientation about the breadth of climate topics. I'll interweave some of the trends, what climate change is, and what the DOD is doing about it. In addition to teaching here at the Naval War College, I'm also part-time assigned as a climate environment policy advisor at the Office of the Secretary of Defense for Policy and Stability and Humanitarian Affairs, and I also serve on the Navy Climate Change Working Group. That being said, I am involved in many of the projects that you're going to hear about, but everything I say here is my own opinion and does not reflect the official position of the U.S. Naval War College, the Department of the Navy, or the U.S. government. I thought I'd start my talk today by answering the most popular question that I get, which is why do I study climate? How is this connected to security? First, we at the Department of Defense have a clear mandate to deter war and protect our country, and if we cannot deter war, how do we fight and win if necessary? We're not only tasked to do this today, but to plan for the future. For decades, we've known that climate is changing. Our scientific agencies like NASA and NOAA have been researching the Earth's systems for decades. Back in the early 90s, our government created the Global Change Research Program, and that's the unit that gives us our national climate assessments. Our intelligence communities have been investigating the climate-related risks to stability around the world. So if we, as the DOD, are going to fulfill our mandate to protect our country and continue to operate globally, then we must increasingly take into account how climate is going to change how we fight and win. I often get asked also, why don't you study something else, like hypersonic missiles or cyber unmanned systems? Thankfully, we have brilliant people, many of them my colleagues at the War College, who study these issues. But we're a very large organization in the DOD, so we can study ABC, XYZ, everything in between and much, much more. So what I am focused on is understanding the strategic operational and tactical environment, what it is, and how it will change, how it will impact our mandate. So let's look at warfighting. In the joint warfighting concept, we anticipate things like contested logistics and distributed operations. Our warfighting apparatus is more supportable if it does not require as much logistics in the first place, particularly water and energy. All domain operations is challenging already, but it gets exceedingly more complicated if we are reacting rather than planning for how the climate will impact each of those individual domains. We are less effective if our ships have to slow down because the water temperature doesn't cool the engines the way it used to, or our sensors don't work. We can't fly our aircraft if extreme heat makes our runways too hot to take off, or our aircraft carrier flight decks deteriorate faster. What happens when air density affects how our aircraft conduct missions or ocean acidification affects our ships' hulls or our undersea warfare capability? We lose countless training and readiness days a year because of black flag heat conditions, and we've built our infrastructure, our platforms, our sensors to all operate under a certain set of conditions, and those conditions are already changing. And if we start thinking long term, our buildings, our piers, our aircraft carriers are supposed to last up to 50 years. So if we protect our country now and in the future, our fundamental mission, I think we do this better and smarter by knowing how the environment is changing and how we can plan future missions and capabilities for these changes. Also, many think that the DoD should not be focused on decarbonization. That we have to choose between being combat effective or being green. I suggest that this is not a binary choice. In fact, I think it's a false dichotomy. Let me tell you up front, I am not going to argue that we should compromise our combat effectiveness for the sake of alternative energy. But we have a lot of critical vulnerabilities that come from our dependence on fossil fuels. And if we can develop effective and sustainable alternatives, we gain a substantial competitive advantage in the future war fighting environment. And finally, we at the DoD are the largest consumer of fossil fuels in the world, which puts us in the cycle of contributing to climate change. In the end, that means we're going to be called upon more and more around the world to respond to some type of climate-related event, whether it's destabilized regions, competing for resources or some type of disaster response. So to diminish the cycle of activities that will draw on our resources, we should be looking for better ways to operate. All of these challenges don't only affect us, but they're also having impacts on our allies and partners, as well as our competitors and adversaries. So in sum, if there's a way to be more combat effective, less vulnerable to our dependence on energy and water resources, gain a competitive advantage, prepare our capabilities accordingly, and help stall the cycle that'll continually draw on our resources, I think that's worth investigating. I also think it's worthwhile that anyone tasked with a mandate of national security should have some understanding of how we protect our country in the era of climate change. So those are some of the reasons I give. When people ask me, why do I study climate change? Dean, can you please bring up my slides? Now that I've told you a little about the climate security connections that I think about, let's start talking about what climate change is. Next slide, please. I'll start with a quick video from NASA. Did you know that the Earth's average temperature has risen over one degree Fahrenheit in the past century? It might not sound like much, but think about it this way. A one degree rise in your body temperature can lead to a fever. Five degrees can land you in the hospital. So guess what? Our Earth has a fever, and scientists believe Earth's temperature could rise by three to ten degrees this century. Why? For one thing, greenhouse gases in the atmosphere raise the temperature by trapping heat. And warmer temperatures means, you guessed it, less snow and ice. As they melt, what's left behind are darker patches of land and water. And guess what dark colors do? Here's a hint. Ever try wearing black clothes to the beach? Not a good idea. Black absorbs more sunlight, thus emits more heat and makes you warmer. Not good for you or the Earth. Here are some other possible symptoms of planetary fever, shrinking glaciers, shifting plant and animal ranges, sea level rise, more intense heat waves, stronger hurricanes. Experiencing any of these symptoms? It's time to seek attention right away. Remember the planet you save may be your own. Next slide. Build off the NASA video with a short science lesson. NASA has studied the Earth more than any other planet, and it's some of the best science in the world. So if you're not familiar with some of the science on climate change, I highly recommend the websites like NASA Global Climate Change, NOAA Climate, or the U.S. Global Change Research Program. They're the ones who put together our national climate assessments. So studying climate change is a science about the Earth as a system. You don't have to be a scientist or an environmentalist to kind of understand the basics and think about what it means to you. There's two big things to understand about this Earth system. First, it's a closed system that stops at our atmosphere. And second, everything that happens within it affects the air, the land, the water, and the ice in this closed system. Kind of like your body. It's a closed system. If you drink a soda, it will have an effect on your digestion, your circulation, your breathing, or your glands. Climate change is also called global warming, as the video mentioned. This is because of the greenhouse effect and the increase in greenhouse gases into parts of the system, the atmosphere, the land, and the water. In this NOAA graph of the greenhouse gases, you'll see that the most common gas is carbon dioxide, and about two-thirds of the portfolio. Methane is about 20%, and the rest is nitrous oxide or chlorofluorocarbons like freon and some other minor gases. As the chart indicates, more of these gases lead to more greenhouse effects and the overall change to the Earth system. Next slide. When NASA and other research organizations study the Earth, they use satellites, aircraft, ships, and submersibles. They've been tracking a few key measurements to understand the state of the planet. One of the biggest key measurements you probably hear talked about the most is temperature. We can also measure the amount of greenhouse gases in parts per million. We can measure sea level in millimeters per year and land ice in gigatons per year. What's happening is the temperature, gases, and sea level are all rising while the land ice is decreasing based on this warming. This science about the closed system of the Earth and how the climate would change has been understood for about 150 years, and we've had really good granularity on understanding the trends for the last several decades. This is something our federal science agencies and economic departments have been researching since the 1960s. President Johnson was the very first president to actually get a brief on climate change. But mostly what we've wanted to know was how this was going to affect American businesses and prosperity. It was a science and economic issue. Slide. Then in the 1990s and 2000s, we started to get our first indications out of the intelligence community that there's some risk here, not to just to our economics, but security risks. We finally got an official definition out of the government on climate security in the fiscal year 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. It called climate security the effects of climate change on U.S. national security and related infrastructure, on political stability at national and subnational levels, on security of allies and partners, and on ongoing or potential political violence and unrest. You will see me come back to these pieces of the definition throughout our talk today. Next slide. In addition to the global Earth changes that we've talked about with climate change, there are also many non-climate related environmental security issues as well. So here's a list of them, some of them you might be familiar with. Going back to the 1990s, Congress created within the DOD an organization called the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, or CERDEP, and they could start researching these environmental issues around our military bases. There were a couple reasons for this. First, the DOD hasn't always been as conscientious about what we do on the basis, and this includes everything from our ordinance to firefighting foam, fuel, storage, and transfer, chemicals in the air, land, and water. Also, if we're going to build our infrastructure that's supposed to last for 50 years, you want to understand what's occurred on the base already, what we're currently doing about it, and what the base is going to look like 50 years from now. Fortunately, our researchers and our engineers have been way out in front on climate and environmental security, and we've developed some other programs along the way that really supports these efforts. Now we're going to take a big step forward because there's been continuity of progress over the last 30 years, but a lot of work has been done just in the last eight months. The DOD really started focusing on climate security based on Executive Order 14008, tackling the climate crisis at home and abroad, which was issued on January 27th, 2021. This gave a lot of tasks to the Department of Defense about climate security issues. Previously, we were working from the DOD Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap from 2014. The two big deliverables out of this Executive Order were just made public in the last couple weeks, so this lecture is very well timed. The first one released was the DOD Climate Adaptation Plan, and the second one released last week was the DOD Climate Risk Analysis. You might see these on the news right now because the Secretary of Defense and Deputy Secretary of Defense and many other are talking about it on the news. Next slide. The DOD Climate Adaptation Plan is very robust. It identified five different lines of effort for enablers, strategic outcomes, and an end state for adaptation. The end state is to ensure the DOD can operate under changing climate conditions, preserving operational capability, and enhancing the natural and man-made systems essential to the Department's success. Next slide. The second major document just released is the DOD Climate Risk Analysis. Now this one focuses on climate hazards, risks, and security implications around the world. Then we incorporate these considerations into our relevant strategy, planning, and processes. This is what I was focusing on at the beginning of my talk. How do we need to adjust our force management, force development, force employment, and especially how do we adjust our requirements in budgeting? How do we determine our future material requirements? Do we just keep buying the same way we always have without considering the changes? Or do we build climate into our future material requirements? Working on these will be the next steps for the Department of Defense. So now I'm going to change up my presentation a little bit. We've explained climate and environmental concerns and the latest guidance that's been issued. Now I'll talk about the strategies for addressing climate change and what the DOD is doing in those different categories. Next slide, please. The first thing that can be done is called mitigation. Within the closed system that is heating up from the greenhouse gases, we can do something about the amount of gas as we put into the system. When you hear about cutting emissions, using renewable energy or electric cars, or fuel or building efficiencies, this is all in the category of mitigation. As I mentioned previously, the DOD is the largest single fossil fuel consumer in the world. It's expensive, inefficient, and creates vulnerabilities based on our dependency. So the DOD is looking at improving this for installation energy, everything we need to run our bases, as well as operational energy. Operational energy is the energy required in the training, moving, and sustaining of our military forces and weapons platforms for military operations. Here's the thing, the dependence on this energy coming from fuel is a critical vulnerability. As important as it is for the cost savings and the emissions reductions, we can find ways to have less demand and provide energy that's more supportable than we minimize risk to our operations. It's also a critical vulnerability for our adversaries, so it's an important significant advantage on the battlefield if we can start to address this vulnerability. So mitigation is about decreasing the amount of gases we put into the atmosphere. Policy solutions are about mandating or incentivizing the behavior we want to change and disincentivizing behaviors we don't want to stop. So less fossil fuel consumption and more promotion of alternatives. The second approach that you hear about might be geoengineering or the interventions meant to counteract the gases we put into the earth's system. There's two big ways to do this. One is to remove the carbon and the other is to increase our ability to reflect the sun's energy back into space. So let's start with the greenhouse gas removal or carbon capture. With all this carbon dioxide in the air, water, and land, what kind of technologies can we develop that make sure it doesn't get into the system or can be removed from the system? Can we capture CO2 from the seawater or scrub it from an energy plant before it's released into the atmosphere or store it elsewhere? You may be familiar with regenerative farming or building more forests like the One Trillion Trees Initiative. These are some of the many efforts to pull carbon out of the atmosphere. Historically, the DOD has not focused on the strategy much and it's been left primarily to private industry, academia, and other government agencies. Now you may notice I keep referring to carbon dioxide specifically because that's two-thirds of the greenhouse gas portfolio. That's also what the DOD mostly generates. There's many big and small energy companies working on the carbon capture, especially if we can find a way to create energy in the process of removing the carbon. This could be an area that will get increased funding within the DOD research and development, and we can partner with companies for really innovative solutions. For this reason, what we've seen this is usually called energy security rather than climate change, but the good news is it does both and it's probably something the DOD will do a lot more of because Congress is applying more and more funding to these types of programs in our National Defense Authorization Ads. Another approach to large-scale geoengineering is to increase our ability to reflect the sun into energy back to space. Sometimes the terms geoengineering and solar radiation management are used synonymously, but the most common approach is spraying into the atmosphere to block the sun's radiation from getting into the whole earth system. It's basically a high-level chemical cloud. This is called stratospheric aerosol injection. The idea is built from the science behind what happens on earth when a volcano erupts. The earth has had colder periods after a large volcanic eruption because all the particulates in the atmosphere reflect back some of the sun's rays. The idea here is that on the planet, if we haven't been able to curb the warming from our own greenhouse gas emissions, we can run a large-scale experiment in engineering by injecting the sulfur particles into our atmosphere and manipulate it to achieve the same cooling. Naturally, this is very controversial because it can cause as many problems as it solves and we actually don't know until we do it. It can further exacerbate the environmental security issues we're trying to address and destabilize some regions of the world. NASA uses a great analogy that, at best, this is a band-aid or a tourniquet, and at worst, it can be a self-inflicted wound. It is not a substitution for mitigation, and it comes with significant ethical issues about whether we should do it. And to do it, it would involve significant multilateral cooperation because to do it on scale would be required of many states working together. So this solar radiation management option is really complicated. The last one is adaptation, and this is probably what you hear the most about. Next slide, please. These are the initiatives that reduce vulnerability. They're the preventative actions or the practices that avoid probable harm. This is where environmental management, planning, and disaster management come in. Because there are so many military installations, there's actually a broad interest in maintaining mission readiness of all of those bases. So this comes back to the research and engineering that started about 30 plus years ago. I already mentioned the brand new DOD climate adaptation plan. That was a significant step forward in setting a strategy for adaptation for the DOD. Another thing we've been developing over the last two years was the Army climate adaptation tool, which has now been adopted by the full DOD as the DOD climate adaptation tool. This gave us a way to standardize metrics to evaluate the hazard and risks to our bases. And we are rapidly trying to categorize all of our bases with these metrics. Another area in adaptation and understanding the issues is with sea level rise. So a big development released last year was the creation of the DOD regional sea level database. This resource looks at a variety of site specific scenarios for how sea level rise and coastal flooding will affect our bases. And finally, I'd like to mention the DOD installation exposure to climate change at home and abroad. This was released just in April. It sets out the most revised set of climate hazards in the DOD that we're concerned about and it assesses the risk by service, which I find very interesting. What was most interesting about the report was that every service, including Navy, listed drought as the number one climate hazard. Over 10 bases have been affected by natural disasters and extreme weather events from 2017 to 2021. Totally more than $13 billion in damages. That's $13 billion that isn't going to modernization, cyber, AI, unmanned systems, or any other priorities we might have. And given the trends, this will be an increasing proportion of our budget. So you will see that both mitigation and adaptation will become priorities because it will cost less to address it on the front end rather than on the back end. I'd also like to mention that you might hear the term resilience. Resilience is something you can get from adaptation. But some people use these terms adaptation and resilience interchangeably. Resilience technically refers to the capacity of an ecosystem to absorb disturbances without significantly altering its structural or functional characteristics. And it can return to its original state after the disturbance has ended. So if your military base is resilient, you can resume operations as soon as the event has passed. Or if your unit is resilient, you can adjust to changes. But resiliency isn't just about structural integrity or mission accomplishment. There's also a big psychology component to resilience. The ability of each of us as individuals to bounce back in a healthy way after a disturbance. A building resiliency has been one of the key buzzwords since the Obama administration, and it will probably continue because our force readiness is dependent on our resilience at all levels. So adaptation is what you do ahead of time, and resilience is tested in the moment. But you can see how adaptation and building resilience can both refer to preparing for climate hazards to come. So we've talked about what climate change is and what the DOD could do about mitigation, adaptation, geoengineering, and carbon capture. I'd like to move into some of the trends we will see. We couple these physical changes that I just talked about in the Earth's climate and environment with these trends. We can use strategic foresight than to take into account all of these trends and develop plausible scenarios about what we can plan for. These trends include population growth, urbanization, poverty, or the inability to earn a livelihood, food, water, etc. While I review these briefly, please keep in mind that none of them directly imply instability or conflict. There is no causal connection between climate change and conflict. For over a decade, some have referred to climate change as a threat multiplier, generally conveying that climate change interacts with other destabilizing factors which can lead to conflict. This is a great way to introduce people to understanding the risk. Today, the literature aims to move beyond this phrase by examining which specific factors, after exposure to climate hazard, can lead to a negative security outcome. However, there are many context-specific things that contribute to either a positive or negative outcome. There are different geographies, political structures, and cultures, and all of those things are important to how countries are going to manage their climate-related risks. Just as important within all these categories, we have a range of policies and practices about what we can do about them. So the most meaningful question to ask is what are the best interventions and policies that countries can adopt to reduce those risks to these trends over time? So what are some of these trends? Next slide, please. I'll start with a talk on population. Current growth trends have us at about 7.8 billion people on the planet at the moment. That's three times as many people that were on the earth just 70 years ago after World War II. By 2023, in two years, we go over 9 billion. By 2056, 10 billion. And almost 11 billion by the end of the century. And in looking at the chart, most of the projected growth is in Africa and Asia. By 2026, just a couple years from now, India will overtake China as the most populated country. In 2007, for the first time in human history, the urban population overtook the rural population and it continues to rise. By 2050, mid-century, more than two-thirds of the population in the world will live in urban areas. That's almost 7 billion people. Remember, we're only at 7.8 billion right at the moment. On top of that, there's significant poverty and extreme poverty affecting about one to two billion people. The most recent global estimates suggest that about one in three people in urban areas live in slum households. We can also talk about food security and the trends there. Food and climate interact in two big ways. First, food systems account for over one-third of the global greenhouse gas emissions. You have to take in food generation like agriculture, forestry, fisheries, and livestock production. And also the greenhouse gas emissions just from the storage and distribution of food. On the flip side of food security, we have spent years examining it, coming up with early warning systems and monitoring systems and tools and practices for what we can do about food security situations. This is something that has gained a lot of attention globally and we've made a progress in food. Another resource we're often concerned about is fresh water. We're approaching about two and a half billion people in the world that live with water scarcity. With water, it's not just about quantity but about quality. It affects so many things like sanitation and hygiene, production, pollution, food, energy. All of these things are connected. So even with a variety of good water management practices, we won't be able to prevent drought. And as I said, even within the DOD, the Navy, Army, and Air Force all listed drought as the dominant climate hazard to our own bases. And finally, Al briefly mentioned global public health, which has been our focus for about two years. The pillars of securing our health were the same before as they are now. How can we prevent, detect, and respond to a health emergency? And as climate changes, we have to be more cognizant about how our human health, animal health, and the environment work holistically together. So what does all of this mean? It really means that we could be called upon to act in parts of the world where we haven't had a very large footprint before. It means that the military with so much capability and capacity might be called upon to provide humanitarian assistance more often. Now I've had this whole long talk and not really talked about humanitarian assistance disaster relief yet. This is for a couple reasons. One, climate change and environmental security are broader topics and I wanted to get you a sense of that. Also, living through extreme weather events is probably how most of you have already experienced the change in climate. Most climate policies are about getting ahead of the problems with solutions and development and capacity building. And humanitarian response, where the body of my research actually is, is by definition response. Something's gone wrong, whether a natural disaster or in a conflict. And what we at the DOD do supporting USAID in humanitarian response doesn't change whether the event is climate related or not. There's an evening lecture dedicated to humanitarian response later in this lecture series and I'm sure you will thoroughly enjoy it. So the biggest thing it means is that if we're called to both fight and provide assistance both at home and abroad, when do we start making tough decisions about what we can and cannot support? When are we in the position that we undermine our own security by being spread too thin? And that's why understanding the science and the trends and what it means is so important. And now I'll wrap up my talk with a few of the strategic implications. I'll talk about China, Russia, and the standard question we ask every leader what keeps you up at night? Let's start with some thoughts on China. I hear from a lot of people that China doesn't care about climate change. Most of because China and their urgency to develop has become the largest emitter of carbon dioxide since 2006. They are the world's largest coal producer and consumer. But saying that climate change isn't important to China is simply not true. They are dependent on energy resources for their continued prosperity and development just like every other country on earth. China wrote their first white paper on climate change in 2008. They looked hard at their vulnerabilities, controlling their own emissions, adaptation, and intensifying their research and development. You know they have looked at renewable energy and optimizing their energy mix ever since then. Why? Because China actually considers themselves one of the most vulnerable countries in the world to climate change. They're still the largest developing country with a large population, insufficient energy resources, and they already have a very fragile environment. So while they're still dependent on coal, they also lead in photovoltaic technology and they're the top producer of solar energy. So when they're talking about climate change, the conversation is usually about energy and how they mitigate climate change with some emissions reductions. But they are looking at the same climate science and future trends that we are, and they're going to make decisions in their own interests. They need resources, energy, food, water, and the means to move those resources. So what might a strategic climate adaptation foreign policy look like for China? They might be buying large swaths of agriculture around the world. They might be developing fishing infrastructure to fish globally. They might be doing science research to exploit the opportunities in the Arctic and Antarctic. They might be securitizing the resources and routes in the South China Sea. They're developing alternative energy through hydropower or solar. Most importantly, they're probably building infrastructure throughout the world to bring them the supplies they need. So while we may look at these different things through a separate lens, like an economic lens or a research lens, or even a means to political legitimacy, China is executing big components of their strategic approach to address climate vulnerabilities. And they're probably about 10 years ahead of us in thinking about this aspect of the security dynamic. Briefly, I've also heard that Russia doesn't care about climate change, which is also not completely true. There's more nuance to that. Russia is concerned because they have vulnerabilities, permafrost melting, increased wildfires, and a myriad of historic and environmental problems. But from their perspective, the changing climate may also mean net gains. Their petrol state where most of their economy is built on maintaining those interests. Arctic waters opening up for exploitation and commercial traffic means they can monetize the Northern Sea route. And there are opportunities as agriculture may shift upwards or northward. So we really have to examine whether the net interests that drive them to address climate change is something they're going to take seriously as they weigh their vulnerabilities and what becomes available to them as a country. And finally, what keeps me up at night? To me, one thing I look at more and more when I study climate change is the issue of migration, whether it's internal and there's more and more urbanization or whether it's across state lines or even continents. This really pushes some of the premises of our fundamental liberal values. These values believe in human rights. All people are equal. And if you believe in democracy, that people can determine their leaders. What happens when your city is just tripled in population based on migration? Do you welcome in these people? Do they learn your language? Do you learn theirs? Do they have to assimilate into your culture? Do they take your jobs? Do you have the social safety net to support them? Do you make them citizens, treat them as equals, let them participate in your government? I'm not defending protectionism, but I am identifying tensions around the world that are going to continue to push these liberal values of human rights and democracy to the limits. So as I keep studying the subject of what will we have to adapt to in the future, migration challenges on the liberal values and its potential for destabilization is a huge question yet to be thoroughly explored. Next slide. I would like to point out that the White House just released the first ever report on the impact of climate change on migration, which is a major step forward in thinking about the impacts of migration around the world. I will close out my talk today by returning back to the Navy. Next slide. I want to mention the one Navy Marine Corps team strategic guidance from the Secretary of the Navy. In it, combating climate change is part of maintaining maritime dominance in defense of our nation. Next slide. And to quote Secretary del Toro from that document, climate change increases risk and exposes vulnerabilities to our people, installations, platforms and operations and its impacts and expands the mission set for our naval forces, which we must support. As I wrap this up, I leave you with the notion that the countries and organizations that best understand and anticipate these climate changes will be the best prepared to fight and win in the unstable climatic environment of the next century. Thank you so much for listening to my talk today. I am standing by to answer your questions. Andrea, thank you very much for an outstanding presentation, not a cheerful presentation, but an important presentation. One question I'd like to have you address is to what degree is the denying of the science a problem that needs to be addressed. There does not seem to be a universal belief that global warming is a real thing. And to what degree do you think the world needs to come to a grips with the science? I think in general, there has been scientific consensus. You might hear the statistic 97% of the consensus is a global consensus. When you speak about climate denialism, that's primarily an American problem. It's been politicized. The science has been politicized. And then there's debates around that. Some people don't believe it exists. Some people think climate activities at the expense of our economic development is not a worthwhile tradeoff. And those narratives tend to get mixed. Increasingly, you see less and less about the denialism part of it and more about the economic tradeoffs. And it just shouldn't be a priority. We should prioritize other things like American prosperity and opportunity. I do think, though, mostly because of the with the DOD lens, the infrastructure in our military bases, every member of Congress wants the safety and security of their military bases and understands that they are vulnerable to extreme weather events. So more and more, it has been Congress driving the DOD climate responses for the last four years because they've been putting more and more reporting requirements in the National Defense Authorization Acts. One of our participants today asks if we are partnering with commercial entities to address some of these issues, is DOD reaching out to industry to see what they can help us with? Yes, absolutely. In a variety of ways, one in adaptation and resilience. That's not just working with private industry, but also working with state and local communities. Our bases don't exist in a vacuum. They have towns and cities outside them. That's where almost everyone works and lives. So we have to be in a partnership relationship for that. The way I see a lot of this and the talk about decarbonization and moving towards more electric vehicles, perhaps, is that's the direction of our future transportation industry and a lot of our industry. And we don't want our militaries to get left behind in that transition. So the energy transition is something we see as a strategic advantage. We want to partner with industry so that we can stay on pace with that kind of development around the world. What kind of alternative fuels are we looking at? There's a lot of talk of biofuels and others. Is that a viable approach to addressing some of these concerns? I have not heard a lot of biofuels talk recently. A lot of it is about electrification and battery technology. And some of it on our installations is about solar and wind, sometimes geothermal. Do you want to talk a little bit more about sea level rise, particularly since we have a naval focus? How big a threat is that? And do we actually see evidence that the next set of piers that are going to be built somewhere are actually going to be built in a location or to a size and configuration that will address sea level rise? That's a really important feature for the Navy, which is why I'm always surprised that the Navy listed drought as the number one consideration over sea level rise. We can build our piers higher, as you've seen at Naval Station Norfolk. The piers have gotten higher and higher, but the parking lots, the airfield, the roads driving into the base have not. So it is increasingly a concern. We also have naval air stations that are right on the water line. And when you combine sea level rise in general with extreme weather events, which push a lot of more water ashore, it is increasingly a concern about the long term sustainability of those bases. Now the problem with piers and you can move an airfield more inland, but you cannot move your ships inland. Somehow we will have to find a way with sea level rise to still have the piers accessible to people who are working on the ships every day, but also in a way that safely accommodates the sea level rise. We have a question here about several books written by Steve Kuhnen, Unsettled or Michael Schellenberger's Apocalypse Never. Are those books that you're familiar with in this area? They are not. I apologize. I am not familiar with the themes of those books. Well, there are some very interesting science fiction kind of stories, popular issues that indicate when they decided to launch these rockets into the atmosphere resulted in freezing the world completely and whatnot. So I think your issues with be careful of what you wish because you may wind up with unintended consequences. And for anyone interested in water security, the Dune books and latest movies is all the hottest rage for those in the community. That's right. It's hard to watch a Dune when it's raining like crazy outside. Much of the fossil fuels the naval aviation community expends as dumped at sea to achieve aircraft recovery weight on board the carrier. Are there efforts to consider these types of sustainability concerns when designing future war fighting platforms? I think that's that's one of my students. Great question. And I think we are really far ahead on thinking about the installation energy part of our portfolio and less advanced on the operational energy part. And that's really where a lot of our future focus is going to be. We're going to work on a couple things. One, are there alternative sources that we can use? Can we use the ones that we use more efficiently, which is I think what the student is alluding to? Or can we just drive down the demand for it somehow so that when we operate and we're dispersed in our operations, we don't need to resupply so that those kind of logistical questions are are less of an issue for operating in the future? Well, I think that's the last question we had. Andre, any closing comments that you'd like to leave us with? No, I you said it was a sad talk. I actually think it's an optimistic talk because I've been doing this for a couple years. And I will note that there has been significant progress of bipartisan support in Congress, major leadership within the Department of Defense and all all aspects, whether you're talking warfighting or engineers and installation management or planners, a lot of people are getting on board and trying to really think through what the climate change is going to mean for the Department of Defense and how we can do our mission best in the 21st century. So I think very optimistically about climate security talks in the future. That's great. Thank you very much for sharing that optimism. All right, that concludes our formal presentation. We'll take about a five minute break here, and at 5.30 we will come back and do our family discussion group meeting.