 Good afternoon everyone. Happy hump day. Dan Bressette, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Thanks for joining us today for day two of a three-part online briefing mini-series about coastal resilience and natural disaster recovery in Puerto Rico and the U.S. Virgin Islands. If you missed yesterday's installment titled Federal Support and Local Action, which featured Margarita Varela Rosa who at the U.S. House Committee on Natural Resources and Ernesto Díaz with the Puerto Rico Department of Natural Resources, you can visit www.esa.org, click on briefings and watch an archived webcast. Since yesterday, when I started my introduction with some remarks about the ongoing protests across the country against racism, violence, inequality and injustice, I posted a new web article with some additional thoughts about how those issues are in fact quite linked, quite closely linked to climate change. Some of the same topics could come up today as our panelists discussed how community-based groups have tried to recover, become more resilient and meet the social, economic and environmental challenges of a changing climate. Yesterday, our second panelist Ernesto shared some of his experience of the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, which included losing power to his home for only his words 34 days. For most of us, certainly for myself, a power outage of 34 hours is something to test in our endurance. And for thousands and thousands of his neighbors, days without electricity became weeks, and weeks became months. And the wake of the storm, which by the way was not the only category five hurricane to hit the islands in 2017, and by the way was certainly not the last major storm since then. People across Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands have forged ahead to make their homes and communities more resilient by installing solar energy systems and other distributed generation and repair and build their homes, public facilities and critical infrastructure to better withstand severe weather and continue to provide benefits, even when the power goes out. There is still work to be done, but the progress to date is pretty great. And that's the story of our online briefing today. If you're joining us today for the first time this week's online briefing mini series is the conclusion of an extensive year long effort to tell the stories of regional approaches to coastal resilience. So far we've convened panels of experts, practitioners and community leaders from the Gulf Coast, the Northeast and New England, Louisiana, the West Coast around the Great Lakes, in the Southeast, Hawaii and Alaska, as well as the need for better climate adaptation data. That is a lot. But then again, we have a very big country, miles and miles of coastlines and lots of community based success stories to share. Like I said, today's online briefing is part two of the mini series this week. Yesterday, federal support and local action, and tomorrow we will learn about sustainable democratic energy and public health. If you'd like to catch up on coastal resilience, you can access briefing summaries and video recordings of all of our briefings at www.esi.org. And when you visit us online, please take a moment to sign up for Climate Change Solutions, our newsletter to learn about our other resilience initiatives, clean energy legislation and how to stay informed about all manner of ESI goings on, including of course our briefing schedule. One last thing before we turn to our panelists. Because we're online today, I cannot call on you if you have a question. So if you have a question, the best way to get it to me is to follow ESI on Twitter at EESI online or to send me an email and you can use the email address EESI at EESI.org. When we get to Q&A, we will draw from your question submissions after we hear from the panelists. And now, on to the panelists. Our first panelist is Laurie Schumann. Laurie is the National Director for Resilience and Disaster Recovery for Enterprise Community Partners. There, she oversees Enterprise's efforts to preserve and protect the affordable housing across the nation from the risks and impacts of natural hazards and a changing climate. Her team assists CDCs, cities, states and the federal government in a wide range of communities across the country to develop housing that can sustain impacts of natural hazards and incorporate innovative resilience ideas, technical assistance and advocacy support into post-event reconstruction of communities. She leads the development of guidance and tools such as the Keep Safe Guide to Resilient Housing and Design and Island Communities. Laurie, welcome to our panel today, and I really look forward to hearing your remarks. Thank you so much, Dan, and it's a pleasure to be with you. Thank you, Ellen, for inviting me today to be with you. Arturo, it's a pleasure and an honor to be able to participate with you on this. So I am going to just switch over to my screen and please let me know if you can, how's that coming through, everyone? Looking good. Excellent. So I'm here today. I'm extremely excited to be with you today. We're three days into the start of the Atlantic hurricane season, and there are so many events happening around the United States and in Puerto Rico and the VI and in so many island communities around the world. And so this is a most important critical time for us to think about strengthening our homes and our communities in advance of a very active hurricane season. Enterprise Community Partners is a national affordable housing organization. We've been working for 40 years to promote opportunity for low and moderate income communities throughout the United States. We've been deeply working in Puerto Rico for about 10 years, and we have been working to solve some of the most critical issues of our day facing low and moderate income communities. I lead our efforts to preserve and protect communities facing uncertain and certain climate challenges and natural hazards that threaten to undermine our communities and the livelihood of so many households and millions of households around the nation. We have been working in the space of disaster recovery and resiliency since Hurricane Katrina, which was over 15 years ago. We see that every event since Katrina is very much about housing as anything else. Housing is the first thing to go in a lot of these events, considering a lot of the communities we serve, have very few resources to invest in the maintenance operations and fortification of their homes. Homes are often the first line of failure when a storm event hits, and we've seen how much impact these storms have had over the last 15 years. And as you can see, we've lost a lot of homes throughout the last two decades. Starting with Hurricane Katrina, we're almost 800,000 homes. Most, many of those were affordable, were lost, and then stood with Storm Sandy through Harvey to Maria where almost 370,000 homes were substantially impacted. And bringing us to today, we know that we have an affordable housing crisis in the United States and in Puerto Rico. The majority of our states face a critical housing insecurity issue. This means that a household is paying more than 30% of their income for housing. Many of our households are paying in excess of 50 or 60% of their income for housing, and much of this housing is still unsafe and not able to withstand an event. And we know that with the additional threat that many of our communities are facing as a result of climate change, that more households face housing insecurity, particularly in our island communities and island nations. And so what we want to make sure we do is to preserve and protect the existing affordable housing because we know how difficult it is to build affordable housing, how hard it is to incorporate that into our communities due to excessive nimbyism and other policies that prevent affordable housing from getting constructed. So for us, this is about preserving our communities, preserving affordable housing. Mitigating climate risk is about preserving our communities and keeping them whole. And here we are at a most auspicious time where we're coming out of an incredible, still in, an incredible season where so many households are sheltering in place if they have the advantage of having a shelter to shelter in place. And I want to respect many of the communities that are still homeless and displaced from previous events. And so many of us are looking at COVID and a summer of quarantining in place while at the same time we're dealing with a very active storm season. So our homes have to be healthy. We have to make sure we preserve and protect our homes because if our roofs are blown away or walls falter, we will have a very significant challenge in front of us. There are just not enough shelters that are able to quarantine folks and deal with the ongoing impacts of COVID plus the events that are yet to come. And I want to remark on something that a dear friend and mentor of mine, Lucila Marvell, has conveyed when we think about housing, we must consider the context in which housing is built and operated and maintained, that planning for housing must account for more than the physical and spatial requirements it should always consider the social and economic needs and psychological needs of our communities. We must consider that housing for one family today may also mean housing for multiple generations going forward. So when we think about climate risk and mitigating risk, we must consider our current generations and future generations we're building to as well as the needs of our households. And this season is confronting us with some significant risk. We've already had three named storms to date and we're only on day three of Atlantic hurricane season. We're looking at incredible volatility this year and predictions say hurricanes in excess of cat three that there will be more than eight this season alone. And we know due to warming around the states and around the world, hurricanes are stronger and they are becoming more frequent as well as precipitation that lingers over our communities, much like Harvey did in Houston. And we know that these storm events spread disease and create conditions for vectors which aggravate the health problems of many of our communities. Communities that have already been facing extreme risk from COVID and a vulnerability that has yet to be treated because we don't have a vaccine yet and we do not have a way to treat COVID. So the issues around health and vulnerability need to be addressed and we need to mitigate risk because these could create conditions for more disease. And many of the communities we serve are in harm's way from the very beginning. They are designed to be located in areas that are cheaper to build on and often are in flood plains, are in areas that are at risk from the very beginning. So when we consider mitigation, we must consider how we cite buildings and housing and communities to make sure that they're safe. We know that federal agencies are often not the first to show up when there's an event that it is our community members and our neighbors and leaders like Arturo that are there when there's a storm, particularly for island communities. Where getting supplies to our island communities is very difficult at times and this year will be even more difficult considering the issues and impacts from COVID. So we cannot wait for our good friends at FEMA to show up. We need to figure out how to deal with these events today. And so today is very much a call to action. I call upon all of you to consider when designing mitigation programs, the diversity of community members that need to be informing and defining what resiliency and mitigation is. And we need to build prototypes so that peers can learn from one another and share among each other what is critical for the communities. Secondly, we need to consider regional planning, not just localities. We need to consider regional planning when considering floodplain management and resource development. And so in Puerto Rico, we need to consider the entirety of Puerto Rico, not just Guanica or Ponce or Mayoes or Omacau, that it's a community-wide and an island-wide mitigation strategy that's incredibly important. Third, we need to have jurisdictions continue to identify how to leverage weatherization models that can potentially inform how strategies are deployed. Many community members in our island communities don't have the funding to bring their housing up to code, to fortify their housing, to put solar panels on their housing. It is incumbent on those with resources then to develop programs that can be a one-stop shop, a turnkey solution, so that community members that don't have resources can take advantage of all of the benefits of code and the safety measures that we are trying to promote. And then finally, we must always consider the importance of the nonprofit sector in the implementation of this work, that our Turo's leadership and their leadership of so many nonprofits are critical to support at this time. And models like the Rapido Tempt to Permanent Housing Model at Houston, Texas is a critical model that can be built and prototypes developed with community-informed information that can be able to support what we mean and define as resiliency. And there is an opportunity before us with all of the funding coming in through FEMA and the suite of HUD programs, as well as additional funding coming in through other agencies and localities to ensure that we have the funding to promote this work. And the promotion of this work looks at advancing community objectives, capital improvements, as well as how do you mitigate long-term costs with short-term and immediate investment. And I want to take us through the Keep Safe book which provides us with some examples of what we mean by defining resiliency and mitigation. This book was created with partners in Puerto Rico, including the University of Puerto Rico Planning and Architecture School, as well as the Building Association of Puerto Rico, and over 150 leaders throughout Puerto Rico, technical experts that informed how we define resiliency. And how we define island-based housing mitigation. And I'm so proud we were able to feature our Turo's work in this as well because it really is a textbook for the future, a textbook for the current day to help us define what resiliency means by and for communities, not just coming in from above. And so we are really pleased to say, and I want to take us through some strategies for you today to get clear about what we mean by resiliency and mitigation for housing. How do we protect our housing? So we know that Maria was just a one event and a series of events that has faced Puerto Rico, and that as far back as we've been tracking, that events have impacted communities at a very large level. In times toppling communities, we see that the communities are denser and there's more exposure now to risk than ever before. And the danger is that as these events start to become stronger and increase in strength and sequence, we're going to face very extreme risk. It's also worth noting that there are multiple risks we must consider when thinking about designing housing for the future. We're not just looking at flood risk in Puerto Rico or the VI. We're looking at earthquake risk. We're looking at drought. We're looking at extreme heat. We're looking at extreme precipitation. So when designing housing, we must consider all of the multiple risks when we think about the houses, adaptation, and mitigation to the future. So in our Keep Safe book, we look at three sections or segments of risk. This book is available in Spanish as well as in English. We look at atmospheric risks and we've identified risks and mitigation strategies to deal with high winds and drought, fire, and extreme temperature. We look at land risks, erosion, landslide, and earthquakes, and subsidence. We also look at the water risks, the heavy storm events, the surges, and the tsunamis that impact our communities in the coastline. And the guide is comprised of several chapters and I'll just briefly walk these through. We look at the sequence of housing, development, and reconstruction. So housing has to start, mitigation and resiliency has to start from the identification of your risks that you'll find in the introduction chapter. Moving into your site itself, where are you building? What is the quality of your soil? How do you fortify your site so that your foundation and your building, your walls and your roofs, roof is safe. Then we move into building protection in chapter two, where we look at your foundation, how to fortify against earthquakes and flooding. Then we look at the walls, the anchorage, the roofing systems, and how do we make sure that that building can withstand a structural impact. Then we move into passive habitability, strategies that help us understand how to have habitable housing in the event of a power loss. So we're talking about lighting and ventilation and developing strategies for mold remediation. Then we move into energy strategies and these are your strategies on backup and efficiency and renewable. Then we move into water and our water strategies look at renewable, look at portable water as well as septic safety. Then we move into community strategies, emergency strategies, and then finally how do you put it together? How do you fund the strategies, build a code, contract the right folks, pull your permits, get your insurance and design in accordance with multiple risk and resiliency. And all of these strategies are for a variety of stakeholders, from homeowners to construction professionals, from administrators to tenants, from community leaders to property operators. And we look at the slate of housing that's common in Puerto Rico, from the detached home built, self-built by a community to a multifamily walk up. We ask ourselves what is a resilient home and this is from a student that we've been working with, Antonio Rosado, who's been the chief designer and developer of a lot of our drawings. We look at what are the elements of a resilient home in Puerto Rico, how can we move this forward? What does it mean to have agriculture growing on your site so you can provide food to your housing occupants and your community? And what does it look like, again, to provide a strong foundation? How do you understand what goes into a strong foundation? How do you understand what goes into a solar component? We talk about solar power, we break down the components for you. What's an inverter? What is a solar system? What are panels? We also break down the various elements to how to build a portable rain order system or waste disposal that's safe for your community. I'm so happy to have Arturo with us because we look at Arturo's work and what he's been doing with Paso Abuelo as an example of leadership and the model for so many communities around Puerto Rico. Because it is due to his vision and leadership that we have this incredible strong community that we can site that's important for Puerto Rico but throughout the rest of the states. And we've been working to deploy this guidance in the VI with our partners at the university and the housing finance agency. This was actually the last place I went before we were locked down so I have a very strong connection to our friends and colleagues in the VI building this way. And I'll conclude with just pointing out we also have a complimentary guide on community resiliency centers which is available to everyone in Spanish and English. And my colleagues at resiliency developed as part of our keep safe effort. And this is about how do we promote community resiliency for community hubs and not just looking at housing as a silo. We think about Lucilla Marvell's comment that we have to think about all communities and not just housing. And we're deploying this through the next year. We're going to be having sessions on what does it mean to build resiliency into your housing with lots of different partners. And I'm just so happy to be with you all today. Thank you so much. Thank you, Lori. That was an excellent presentation. And congratulations on making the Virgin Islands the last place you got to go before that. Good planning. You practically introduced Arturo for me. I'm going to take a few moments basically by stressing that he's awesome. I'm going to go into a little bit more detail. The second panelist is Arturo Masaldia, who hails from the mountainous area of Puerto Rico in the municipality of Junta where his parents, Alexis Masal and Tinti Dia founded the community based organization Casa Pueblo. Arturo grew up in this project and is chaired as board of directors since 2007. Arturo is a public school graduate who went on to the University of Puerto Rico. He also earned a doctoral degree from Michigan State University. Since then, he has been a faculty member and now a professor in the Department of Biology at the University of Puerto Rico. May I guess campus. Arturo, it's a pleasure to have you with us today. Thank you so much for joining us and take it away. Thank you for the invitation. Can you see my screen already? So this is Puerto Rico on September 20, 2017 when Hurricane Maria was passing, going through Puerto Rico. We are an island in the Caribbean at risk of climate change, not only because of the storm, but Lauri said it. It's about droughts, it's about heavy rain events, it's about sea level rise, it's about coral reef damage, it's about crops, yields being compromised as well as productivity in the marine ecosystem. So if you think about a storm of this size, I mean, it's not only the heavy winds, it's also about the heavy rain events. After the hurricane, over 100,000, 100,000 mudslides were registered by satellite analysis. So water was a big issue and one of the most damaging components to the Puerto Rican life. And this is a summary of what happened in Puerto Rico. This is the power authority of Puerto Rico that generates all of their energy in centralized units, dependent on transmission and distribution lines to bring that energy into the houses and businesses and critical infrastructure like hospitals and others. And as you can see, this is Puerto Rico on September 2017. This is at Juntas, my community, the week after. This is at Juntas and the central area a month after, two months, six months, up to a year in many areas of Puerto Rico. Power, outage. Still today, a few homes, a lot of homes are still energy left behind. Power never went back to their houses. And that's a reality that the government, they don't want to talk about it. And the consequences of energy failure was people relying on power generators, making long lines to get access to fuel, handling the fuel, the fumes, the noise. The risk of managing that fuel, the cost of that was a big deal. A lot of people died because of the power failure for a long time. People left. So we had a lot of climate refugees. Like 6% of the total population of Puerto Rico left the island because of Hurricane Maria. And we talk about the death of Maria, of Hurricane Maria. And it's not the death of Hurricane Maria. It's the death associated to the government failure to provide basic services to the people. And not only that, think about the people who were pre-diabetic, pre-high blood pressure, eating unhealthy food for one week, one month, several months. Those people that were in this borderline condition. Now, for example, kidney failure had triple after the hurricane. And of course, the damages to the infrastructure is part of that reality. And still today, the government, they don't know how many homes are still, like almost three years after this hurricane, still living under blue tarps from FEMA. In January, we had an earthquake, a 6.5. And again, this is the summary of PREPA and other blackout. This time, not because of the failure of transmission and distribution lines. It was because the power generation, the utility failed, disconnected. If you have a natural gas power plant, then you have to go over and check that there's no damages to the infrastructure. If you find some, you have to fix it. So it takes a while for PREPA to respond. In this case, it was a week without power in Puerto Rico. Now we're facing the pandemic. And this is a short clip from the governor of Puerto Rico at the PREPA facility less than a week ago. As they're talking how well prepared they are and how ready they are to face and confront the hurricane season. And as they're talking, guess what? As they're explaining how well prepared they were, there was a blackout, a power outrage in their own facilities. Very shameful. This is how they tell Puerto Ricans how the government has prepared after confronting Hurricane Maria a few years ago. But this is Casa Pueblo. This is in the central part of the island. We're a community-based organization. We're not FEMA. We're not the government. We're not about responding to emergencies. We're about social transformation, dealing with our conservation of natural resources. We have protected the land from unsustainable proposals like mining or a pipeline going through the forest. And we know, we recognize that the energy agenda is the greatest risk threat to natural resource conservation. So in 1999, we decided to switch our home into solar operation. We have upgraded through the years. And what we live with Hurricane Maria is that we had power before the hurricane and the day after we had power. And people went there and used Casa Pueblo as an energy oasis to plug in the respiratory equipment or to recharge personal equipment. We have a radio station. We have a butterfly garden. We operate with economic self-sustainability. We sell coffee. And our brand is Cafe Madre Isla. And from those cellings, we operate. No money from the local government, not from federal funding. So this is all community-driven. And what I want to show you is our definition of resilience. For us, resilience equals community strength. It's not about making politicians stronger. It's not about building dependency models. It's about actually providing means for self-determination, means for self-sufficiency to make the community stronger. And as a community is more self-reliable as a community, as a unit, the community is stronger and better prepared for extreme conditions. But it's not only about extreme conditions. It's about the day-to-day life to improve quality of life for the daily operation. So that's Casa Pueblo. And what we have done after the hurricane is we have launched what we call the energy insurrection. It's a bottom-up process to challenge the energy setup of the island, which is fossil fuel dependent. And because the government says one thing, but they refuse to actually do that transformation, we are promoting that. And our communication tower is now running with solar power. We have energized the barbershop. We have done the grocery stores in rural communities because those are the first line of access to food, critical infrastructure, like the fire station, the emergency unit, the elderly home, a restaurant, lechonera for prepared meals. If something happens, those guides can actually cook for the community. And this is how we have been transforming our reality. The elementary school, we have done homes that has a special medical needs. And after the earthquake, all of those places, they kept running because they had power. Nothing happened. We were scared because of the earthquake. No physical damage to some of the structures, but power was there. And we were able to deal with the consequence in a better condition. At the bottom, you can see this guy. He's from the University of Michigan. We're working with hybrid systems. It uses biomass, and the idea is, can you use biomass as an alternative input energy source for solar microgrids? And this is carbon negative. This is another story that I'm not going to tell, but we're also working on innovation, working with universities, generating new knowledge. And as we are addressing the needs of the community, and this is the bottom line. Now we have changed the energy landscape in Anjuta. Not only for homes, we have done it for critical infrastructure, for economic activation. We have done it to deal with poverty, for food security, and so on. Now we are dealing with what we are promoting is 50% with sun. That 50% of the total energy demand in Puerto Rico could be met with solar power by 2027. And it is residential consumption, what we have been addressing first, which is a major energy demand for the total pie for Puerto Rico. And this is what we're doing, helping homes to reach energy security and also the commercial sector. As we address and build energy democracy and energy generation at the point of consumption with distributed solar systems, now we can help many homes. And we call it Cucuanos. We have done more than 50 of them. So now Casa Pueblo is not the only energy oases in the community. There's multiple energy oases, energy secure sites that can provide all the energy needs. It can be done. It costs less than a vehicle. And our initiative is not public. Our initiative is not private. It's a social initiative. It's a social engagement to help low income families be also energy secure. We are now building, we're working downtown Anjuntas, all the businesses, the place with the highest energy demand as a model for economic activation. The operational cost for those small businesses is extremely high. It's very difficult for them to compete with the Walmart and the big companies that are coming from outside. And one way to help them is by them producing their own energy. It's a mean to build resilience. We're doing this with the Honol Foundation and Rivian, an electric vehicle company. Welcome back, Arturo. Sorry about the technology hiccup. Please take a few moments to conclude and then we'll get into the Q&A. Don't worry. As you can see, it's not only the public utilities are failing Puerto Rico, also private utilities like communication is also failing us in moments like this. Internet reliability is not that good in Puerto Rico either. So I was addressing that maybe the bottom line is that for us, resilience is community strength. And we have to find the ways to transform our reality and addressing energy, energy self-sufficiency, energy independence for the island is a way to make the island better prepared in a better condition to confront the economical crisis, to confront global warming and to confront other threats. It's a necessity. It's not an opportunity. It's a necessity for the island to move away from fossil fuels and we have to reduce our ecological footprint. Now we're energizing the downtown adjuntas, adjuntas Pueblo Solar, and the idea is to reduce the operational cost of the main business. And they're going to pay for the energy and they're going to pay itself for producing their own energy as we're setting up this infrastructure with the Honol Foundation and that money that we're going to be generating because we're producing our own power will be used to help low income families reach also energy self-sufficiency. So we can drive the transition from within. We have a solar cinema in case you wonder. Mental health to have, you know, the pieces of the community that you need to embrace not only on a regular basis but also in situations of difficulties. This is why we have to build more self-sufficient communities with their own leadership, with their own voices. And if you think about the central part of the island being energy left behind, it was the last 30% that was we power after the hurricane. I think resilience has to go with investment. The investment has to go to those places now first, help them reach energy security because those are the places that the government get last. So in order to be more resilient, it's not the urban areas. You have to work with the remote areas and help those communities be better prepared for the future. I want to just remark on something that Arturo just said. I consider that what I term reparative restoration, giving an investment in communities that have not received the investment that many other communities have received for a variety of reasons and that that should be prioritized as a reparative effort. And also for justice. I mean, if you think about those homes are running with solar power, they're saving like $40 to $50 a month. So if you think about poverty and that we have to address those social issues, as they're producing energy, they're also saving money that they can deal with other, you know, with their own reality. And that's not welfare. It will be they're producing energy as a mean to generate wealth for the family to be reinvested in the community. I mean, those are the type of social transformation efforts that we want to push forward. Energy as a baseline to address other needs of the community. Thanks Arturo for going to kick off the Q&A portion. And just as a reminder, if anyone has questions out there in the audience and some of the questions are starting to come in, go ahead and email them to us at ESI. The email address is ESI at ESI.org. You can also follow us on Twitter at ESI online and send them in that way. Thanks to those who've already done it. And we'll do our best to get to those. But for now, Ellen, take it away. Thanks, Dan. And hi Lori, it's great to see you. Thank you so much for your presentation. Lots of stuff there to unpack lots of important issues. That affect communities everywhere. And obviously in the islands, we do have these layered on challenges of continued recovery. And then like you say, the hurricane season to come. You talked about the need for resources to help people of all income levels upgrade their homes and design resilient structures. I know that these, if you do energy efficiency, you'll save money in the long run, but there's still those upfront costs. We've been excited to about some of the new financing programs that are helping people make these upfront investments on their homes. And we'd love to see this for resilience measures as well. I was wondering, are you seeing more like government agencies and funding for disaster creation on you, Lori? Thank you, Ellen, for raising that really important question. So we all know how hard it is and how expensive it is on many levels to recover housing and deal with reconstruction after an event. For example, some of the funding coming into Puerto Rico, and Arturo, great to have a conversation about this. Some of the funding coming in through HUD has taken years to deploy. The good folks at Vivienda are standing up the reconstruction programs today, but it takes a while to deploy this funding. It also takes a while to repair people's homes for a variety of reasons. And it's very difficult to deal with the aftermath of the trauma that a community faces when there's an event, such as Maria or other similar events. I mean, you hear trauma that occurs in a household when you're facing this kind of risk. And I think about the earthquakes most recently, how many children and youth are traumatized, and that's very difficult to deal with. We need to make sure that we have investments and mitigation in advance of the event because it is much more cost effective and the return on your investment is considerate. So there are programs that exist that have existed for a while that can support mitigation. I mean, the weatherization program of which Puerto Rico gets a much smaller share, I think, than we should look at increasing the share to Puerto Rico for the weatherization program, because this is a program that is effective at providing homes with the support needed to mitigate weather risks. That's one item I would put on the agenda in terms of looking at increasing the investment to weatherization. Also, based on a Turo's experience, PREPA does not offer significant support for incentives or renewable energy for a variety of reasons. We don't have enough time on this call to get into, but there is a dramatic issue around the distribution of energy throughout Puerto Rico based on PREPA's grid. It's not working. Unless all of those lines get undergrounded, which is very expensive, it's never going to work. We need to invest in renewable energy and distributed energy so that communities in the mountains and communities in the coastline all have access to power that's equitable, and there needs to be support to the community organizations like Turo's that are leading the effort, that community organizations can't do it alone. We need resources. We need money. We need cash, liquidity to come in. Now if solar companies and manufacturers can contribute resources and supplies and technical assistance, that is a wonderful step forward. But there needs to be an attention to the role that community organizations play. And that's one thing I would also promote. And the last thing I would say is we have an opportunity with the additional funding coming in through the CDBG mitigation funding to think and vision and look at how to use that money to resolve some of the critical issues facing Puerto Rico and Guam and Hawaii and other communities that have gotten an allocation today. And so groups need to be brought to the table, community groups informing the process and really building a ground-up approach because that's almost $8 billion of funding coming in just for mitigation. Yeah, thanks. So Artura, I'd love to just riff on that for a minute because I really appreciated what you had to say about the social initiatives and all the issues that go with that, the mental health and bringing money back to the community. Have you all thought about or are you doing also like training for young people who might be interested in learning more about energy efficiency or renewable energy technologies so that this is not only things they can do for their community, but it might be work that they could do that helps other communities? Not as much as we want. We have done it as a collateral thing, which is not the right thing because there is a lot of need and opportunity for young kids to get training in technologies like this and be productive. But we are a small community organization. We're managing two state forests, Bosque del Pueblo, Bosque la Olympia. We have a radio station. We have a butterfly garden. We receive hundreds of people every single week. So all of those projects, solar projects, is sort of like a collateral effort of Casa Pueblo reaching out to the community, getting a lot of support from the diaspora, like the people from diaspora Puerto Ricania. There's one group in Washington who is very vocal with Edilse Pulveda and his group. But also people in Philadelphia, Georgia, California, they have been helping us to help others. And I think we have to do more and training young people is part of that dealing with that reality, that unemployment rate is so high in the island. We need means for economic activation and again, energy can be a driving force to address that multiplicity, not a risk of needs for the community in this island. Well said. And, you know, you said at the beginning that you're doing all these other things and it's something you would like to do more of. But, you know, frankly through these activities in and of itself, I imagine these kids are learning. They're learning good examples from you, your parents and others. And they're, well, you know how kids are, they love these technologies, so they're picking up on them. So that's so exciting. Thank you. Lori, I want to have other questions, but I probably should hand it to Dan in case we had some come in from the audience. Thanks. We do actually have questions coming in from the audience. I'm going to ask the first one. This is a question from someone who asked us a question online yesterday and we didn't quite get to his. So I'm going to try to make sure that we get to it. His question is about replicability. He congratulates both of you on your accomplishments and all of your work. And he says the model that you've been talking about, Arturo, your model and Lori, the models that would take place if someone were to follow your guidebook. It takes a lot of energy and resources. And I'm wondering what are the kinds of shifts in policies in states, whether it's Puerto Rico or other places that would allow and support community resilience to have a wider impact more quickly. And for these models to take root in new places to build on the work that you've already done so far. Go ahead. Lori, maybe we'll start with you, Arturo, since you're sort of on the ground and then we'll go to Lori for her thoughts. We don't have the recipe for what we're doing. But what we have seen in Puerto Rico, like for example, in natural resource conservation, is other communities doing the same, protecting highly ecologically important areas. So for the conservation point of view, that's happening. The same thing is going on with the energy thing. It's not about Casa Pueblo where we have been showcased here, but there's a lot of communities everywhere in Puerto Rico that truly understand that we have to build energy self-sufficiency. And they're doing their part, they're training, they're not called Casa Pueblo, but there's multiple of them. And what I will say is that resilience is not about investing, putting money and building something and you solve the problem. No, no, you have to invest in our opinion to build community strength. As you build community strength, communities will be better prepared to deal with whatever happens. And the investment, if the investment helps to be the community in a better position, the community, not the politicians again, not these people, not FEMA goals, no, community goals. If you are strength, community goals from the bottom up, that's a good investment and it's going to pay off at some point. So if it makes the community more dependent, and you're going to build the same thing of the model of dependency, you're not helping the community in the best way. So I will use that as a criteria to value many of these investments and strategies to help communities reach, be in a better position to confront global warming and other threats. I want to build upon what Arturo said. We built the Keepsake book to provide accessible information about what we believe is our strategies for building resiliency in homes and we do have a big section on communities and also on energy. But what we wanted to do was to create a textbook that would help to generate information that could help encourage workforce development locally so that when the funding comes into Puerto Rico or the VI or other communities that local workforce's opportunities are created so that communities have the resources to and know how within the community to operate and maintain the systems to build, to design, often we find in disasters there's a whole set of workforce that gets introduced from outside of communities. We see, you know, especially in Puerto Rico, workforce that comes in from the states and what happens is people earn money and decent money at that and then people leave and go back to their homes in Mississippi and New Orleans and New York, leaving the community with not only not enough financial remuneration but the capacity to deal with these ongoing events because the ongoing events are going to be happening in surges and also many community members understand how to deal with that so tapping local knowledge is really critical. Here's my, I don't have a recipe either but I do have a vision and the vision is, and I've actually constructed facilities that are environmental education centers, the vision is we construct prototypes like Otoros and we use them to model what we mean to the government officials, to the funders, to the investors that want to place their money in the right way. But we need physical models, we need real brick and mortar to show people it works and to also measure how it works and to measure and create metrics so we can get more funding to support this work and without that it's just a dream in a book. It can be done, we have shown that it can be done. But you have shown that it can be done, exactly. It can be done, it can be done. So can we do this in real time in other communities around the states and the world, build this and peers will come and show each other and that's my dream that we will do this in other places. I look forward to meeting you in person. We will. That's great, I love the idea that in lieu of recipe vision, the next time I open up a cookbook, I'm just going to have a vision of something really delicious and hopefully if I work... Just give the ingredients. You just need the ingredients, we just need the ingredients. That's right. We're going to have one quick question to conclude things and I know we're getting close to the end, but whenever someone submits a question on Twitter, I feel like they should get a little bit of extra airtime because that's a great way to communicate with us. This is a question about your work and whether or not you have thoughts on natural solutions that can be employed to improve community resilience and to mitigate climate risk. In your work, whether it's in the guidebooks or in the work in the community, how do you incorporate nature-based solutions or natural solutions into residential and community resilience? I should have said, Arturo, we'll start with you. Actually, one of our projects is Bosque escuela. It's a school in Forest. So it's for education and the curriculum is actually the forest. So when the students go there, they see the plants and the canopy yielding solar power for photosynthesis. They see the cooling effect below that canopy and how the micro-weather over there is better than just being exposed to the sun. And this is what we're telling them. Can we do the same thing in our homes? Can we play solar panels instead of photosynthesis, yield energy power for the residents, reduce the heat that is heating the home? Then you can look at energy efficiency and say, can we reduce the power that is needed to cool down that space? And we have done that heat balance in the forest. We know that for one acre of land, you produce the equivalent of 12,000 BTUs units, cooling effect. So the forest has that. And we can have that the same thing at home. And then you can address the issue of biodiversity and they see the value of biodiversity. Even microbes that are decomposing, they see zero waste being produced in the forest. Can we do that at home and in our communities? If we can tolerate and value all the diversity, can we do the same thing with people? You know, black life matters and every life matters. As you are more aware of biodiversity, then you can extrapolate that into your own community. So that is sort of like the approach that we're using nature actually teaching us how to behave, how to improve ourselves, how to change our culture, and how to improve our infrastructure. Sounds like a cool project. Laurie, does your guidebook touch on nature-based solutions and natural solutions? Well, I want to quote a dear friend and mentor to me that Arturo may know, Dr. Fernanda Brunia, who's one of my heroes in Puerto Rico. He's been leading so much work around green building and adaptation for 30 years before anyone even heard about LEED or any of the green building strategies. He was promoting this work. And he said to me when we started the Keep Safe effort, he was with us from day one. He said he became an architect because he was standing in a park and witnessed how the trees were bending to the wind and how the adaption of the grass to the local soil condition was occurring. And he thought maybe he can build houses that can adapt to the natural world and that that's what we should be thinking about. And that's what has inspired the Keep Safe book to build housing that can adapt to the changing conditions of our world, specifically with Puerto Rico. And so he's informed it, all of the folks that have worked on it informed it. And it's not just about mitigation. Resiliency is an emergent adaptive solution. So if Dr. Brunia is out there, lots of love to you. And thank you for the inspiration. Great. Thanks, Lori. And if he's not, just a reminder, he can visit EESI.org and watch a webcast and read materials and presentations from today, but also the rest of the week. So hopefully he's watching today. We are just two minutes. Oh, go ahead, Lori. One thing I want to believe that I have, I did want to say it. I know we're concluding, but it's important when we consider building things though. And this I'm speaking to the agencies and to electeds. We need to consider not only the upfront cost of building, but the cost to operate and maintain the systems. Because if we don't operate and maintain the systems and have money to do that, those systems will fail. And what that means is you will not be able to show success. And we always have to consider budget for operations and maintenance, as well as upfront costs. Yep. I co-signed that sentiment a hundred percent. The emphasis on upfront costs is important, but it's only the beginning of the, only the beginning, not the whole story. We are at the end. I would like to thank you, Lori. Thank you, Arturo, for two really wonderful presentations. And just can't thank you enough for making time and your busy schedules to join us today to talk about this really interesting and very important topic. Everyone in the audience, thank you so much. Thanks to those who submitted questions. Sorry, we couldn't get to all of them. If you have a moment, please complete our survey. We'd love to know what you thought about today. And if you have any suggestions for us to do a better job, we'd love to hear them. I've said this a few times, but the materials from today slide a web, an archived webcast and also a written summary at some point in the next couple of days will be available. You can visit EESI online at EESI.org. Tomorrow will be day three of our three-part mini series. We will learn about sustainable democratic energy and public health. And once again, I couldn't do this without my colleagues, Ellen, Omri, Dan O, Anna Amber, our full cadre of interns, Sydney. Thanks to everyone who contributed to today's installment. And I look forward to seeing everyone back here tomorrow, 3 p.m. for sustainable democratic energy and public health. Laurie, Arturo, I hope you have a great rest of your day and thanks so much for joining us. Thank you. Thank you.