 It's a great panel. But that means we're gonna have a really great discussion and I'd like to thank everyone for joining us today. Welcome to our briefing, the National Security Climate Adaptation Nexus. I'm Dan Berset. I'm the President of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. And I'd like to start by thanking the Office of Representative Paul Tonko and the Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for helping us with our room once again today. ESI, we're in our 40th year, if you'd believe it, of advancing climate solutions through congressional education. We were founded by a bipartisan group of members of Congress and have since 1984 worked to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change topics to policymakers and the public. What does congressional education look like? Looks a lot like this. Congressional briefings, we do a lot of briefings. We're running about one every two weeks, which is incredible. We are covering all sorts of amazing topics. We did one a few weeks ago on the budget and appropriations process, which is something that's very, very relevant right now. Hello, Sharon. Nice to see you today. We did one on the Sustainable Energy in America Factbook. That's a briefing we pulled together with our friends at the Business Council for Sustainable Energy. That is a great resource if you wanna see a snapshot of the U.S. energy system circa 2022, 2023, and understand all of the trends that are influencing how we use and generate energy. A couple weeks ago, I keep saying a couple weeks ago, but it's true because it's always a couple weeks, it's only April 2nd. But we did a briefing about the Infrastructure, Investment, and Jobs Act and Inflation Reduction Act. We looked specifically at the progress report of how the U.S. Department of Agriculture and the Department of Energy are implementing rural programs. So PACE, New Era, and other programs, REAP, Rural Energy for America program, for example. But that's just the ones in the past. And I'm mentioning those because all of our briefings are available online. We have the archive of the webcast, we have summary notes, we have presentation materials. And so if any of those topics or any other topics that you can think of, basically, sound interesting to you, it's all available for free online at www.esi.org. Coming up, however, we have today's briefing. Next week, we'll be back for an online briefing with our friends at the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy at the Department of Energy. We have one the following week, April 16th, on Ocean Carbon Dioxide Removal, which will be a really great one, one following that on dam safety. That's a lot, you're taking notes, that's nice, but the best way to keep up with all of this is to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Comes out every other Tuesday and it's the best way to keep up with all of our great stuff. We also do amazing writing and fact sheets and articles and it's all designed to be timely, relevant, accessible and practical. We put a lot of thought into ensuring that our resources are ready for you before you even know that you need it. It's no fun to have your boss come to you on a Thursday afternoon or a Wednesday afternoon and say, hey, I need to learn about this topic, write me a memo, I have these difficult questions about climate change. I hope you'll use our resources as a way to help answer your boss's questions and look really good in the process because all of our information is science-based and fact-driven. Climate change impacts like extreme heat, wildfires, drought and flooding affect people's homes and communities every day and that's already. And that's in addition to the effects these impacts have supply chains, the electric grid, military installations and other critical infrastructure. There's a lot happening on the ground at the local and state level around the country to address our vulnerabilities and build resilience and there are many federal programs supporting these efforts and today we've pulled together four tremendous panelists who will highlight some examples of how federal policy can advance national level coordination on adaptation to safeguard critical infrastructure and protect and improve people's lives. Before we get to our panel on the screen here is a survey. If you have a moment, if you're not gonna be able to be with us through the end of the briefing, it's totally fine. You can always come back and finish watching it online later. But this is a survey link. If you have two minutes or less, we really appreciate everyone's responses. We read every response. We're always trying to do this a little bit better and so if you have a moment, we'd really appreciate it. After our esteemed panel, we will have a Q and A. We will absolutely have a Q and A from here in the audience but we also have a robust online audience today so thank you online. And if you're in our online audience and you wanna ask us a question, the best way to do that is to send us an email and the email address to use is ask, that's ASK at EESI.org. We'll also be busy on social media at EESI online doing real-time coverage on our Blue Sky, Instagram Story, Threads and X. We have a special guest who's joining us via video remarks and I'll introduce him in just a second. Adam Smith is the lead scientist for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's billion-dollar weather and climate disasters research at the National Centers for Environmental Information. Over the last decade, he has led research, developed new data partnerships and gained national and international experience merging environmental and social science data into research tools for studying the impacts and costs of natural disasters. He's joining us today at his headquarters in Asheville, North Carolina and my colleague Dan O will come up in just a second and put his video on and then we'll get along with the panel. Thanks, Dan O. Hi, I'm Adam Smith, an applied climatologist at NOAA's National Centers for Environmental Information. Early this year, we released the final update to our 2023 US billion-dollar weather and climate disaster report, confirming a historic year in the number of costly disasters and extremes across much of the country. During 2023, there were 28 separate US billion-dollar weather and climate disasters surpassing the previous annual record of 22 events set in 2020. These billion-dollar weather and climate events of 2023 included four flooding events, 19 severe storm events, two hurricanes, one winter storm, one wildfire event, and one drought heatwave event. The first half of 2023 began with an active year of severe storms. As destructive tornadoes, severe hail and high wind events impacted many central and eastern states. A series of atmospheric rivers also impacted much of California from January to March of 2023, while in April, Florida experienced flooding after two feet of rainfall fell in 24 hours. The second half of 2023 continued with more severe weather events, the tragic wildfire in Hawaii, the Northeast flooding event in July, Hurricane Adelia impacting Florida in August, the southern and central drought throughout much of the year and a powerful east coast storm rounding the year out in December. The damage costs from these events were approximately $93 billion. However, the southern and midwestern drought was the costliest event of the year with losses exceeding $14.5 billion largely to the agriculture sector. In recent years, there were about three weeks on average between billion-dollar disaster events compared to about three months in the 1980s. Shorter time intervals between disasters often mean less time and resources available to respond, to recover and to repair for future events. Since 2017, the frequency, diversity, and cost of US billion-dollar weather and climate disasters have been at historic levels for many different hazard types. This 2017 to 2023 period had a historically high frequency of major landfall in hurricanes striking our coastline in five of the last seven years. The last seven years have also produced many of the costliest US wildfires on record across much of the western states, shattering previous cost records and nearly destroying towns like Paradise, California. This period also caused a dozen billion-dollar flood events from extreme rainfall, more than 80 severe storm events, and persistent damaging drought and heat waves. The total direct costs over the last seven years from these US billion-dollar disasters exceeds $1.1 trillion. In general, we can say that the number and costs of these weather and climate disasters are increasing and due to a combination of our increased exposure, such as more assets at risk, our increased vulnerability, including where and how we build, rebuild, post-disaster as well, and that climate change is supercharging the frequency of some types of extremes that lead to billion-dollar disasters. Climate change is most notably increasing our vulnerability to drought and lengthening wildfire seasons in the western states. It is also enhancing the potential for extremely heavy rainfall that is becoming more common in the eastern states. Sea-level rise is also worsening hurricane storm surge flooding, and hurricanes have shown an increasing potential to rapidly intensify, which makes preparing for oncoming storms all the more challenging. Giving all of these compounding hazard risks, there's an increased need to focus on where we build, how we build, and investing in infrastructure updates that are designed for a 21st century climate. Yeah, I was gonna say, he makes it look so easy, but we have, thanks to Scott, we have our videographer, our videographer, and so we have all of this stuff that we can't let you see because then you'll see how we do the magic, so. Thank you, Dano, for doing that, and hopefully it looks and sounds great on our live cast. That brings us to our first panelist today, Susie Torriente. Susie is a global principal for city resilience at Jacobs. She has three decades of government experience in South Florida as an assistant county and city manager as Miami-Dade County's first sustainability director and as Miami Beach's first chief resilient officer. At Jacobs, she works with cities, military installations, and private developers to identify risks and build resilience into plans, policies, and projects. Susie, thank you so much for joining us in our briefing today. I'll turn it over to you. Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for the opportunity to speak here today on this very important topic. What I wanna do is just tell you a little bit about what I'm gonna be sharing. And the big reason is why are we here, right? It's because climate change is not just a threat to our communities. It's also a threat to national security. And the good news is that we can actually take action. We can do something about it. We can take proactive steps to understand risk and vulnerability and invest in our adaptive capacity. I'll show you some of our South Florida results of a recent vulnerability assessment. Talk a little bit about adaptation approaches. Highlight some important partners, funders, and advocates. I'm gonna highlight one program in particular, the Military Installation Resilience Review. And then I'm gonna end up with some Florida case studies and show you some adaptation tools and leave you with some final thoughts. I'm gonna highlight some of the recent vulnerability assessments data that we got in South Florida doing one of these Military Installation Resilience Reviews. And of course, no secret, aging infrastructure is a common stress that local governments are experiencing across the country. Many installations rely on local governments in order to get what they need from like energy, water, power, utilities, roads. The year 2023 was the warmest year on record ever since these things were actually being written down that back in 1850. And the 10 warmest years have been in the last decade. So are our installations ready? Are our community ready? Are they prepared? And that's something that we need to think about in this climate adaptation. Hurricanes from Florida, so hurricanes, and it was mentioned in the video, they're getting stronger, they're getting more intense, they're getting more frequent. And many local municipalities are adopting stronger planning and building codes in order to address and to reduce risk. Building to these higher standards is obviously makes a lot more sense and is highly recommended for any military new construction or rebuilding versus actually just following national standards and not really understanding your local geography. In several installations in Florida, we also found that encroachment and development very close to the base is causing a security risk right there physically but also a risk to the mission. So land management strategies can address this as well. And then talking a little bit about coastal areas. We heard about compound flooding in the video actually. Coastal areas are exposed to various flooding, right? It could be storm surge, it could be high tides, rainfall, the elevated rivers. The occurrence of any more than one, I need two of these, is what we call compound flooding. And it's already happening and it can be addressed with really robust stormwater management. And of course we're just seeing more intense storms and causing a lot of damage. The last one I'll mention is with storm powers increasing, deadly storms can also creep inland causing a very dangerous storm surge. Now, the reason I'm saying all this is not to be alarmist and not to scare you and not to make you think you can't come to Florida because you can. But I'm saying this today because we can actually do something about it. And if you put yourself on this sort of resilience path and risk reduction path, you can take these steps. You understand your risk today and tomorrow. You start to assess your vulnerabilities and you document them in a plan. Develop adaptation strategies that make sense to that local environment. Develop policies and projects. I'm a big believer that it's not just one project at a time but you need programs and policies to really move the needle. And you then focus on prioritizing and securing funding so you can implement and invest as we were chatting about before we started implementation. And then I have this arrow there just to say repeats because adaptation is as an ongoing process and it's not just a one time issue. It's what I've seen successful in my career in South Florida and now the work that I do with Jacobs and in other communities around the country is that incremental adaptation over time working at these different levels with different partners is the road to success. Think of local governments. You have a yearly budget, maybe a five year capital plan and a few maybe 20 year master plans. So you can't really fix the 20 year problem but you can start investing year one and year two and year three and you build upon that. And you create this comprehensive program. And in order to make comprehensive programs succeed, what you need is partners, a lot of different partners. And that's why I'm a big fan of this Merb program because it brings a lot of different players together. So when you start on this journey, look at your community and start to think who lives there, who works there, who plays there? What are the economic engines? Is there a role for national security and how does the community support that mission of that base? And you really start to work beyond the physical borders, the geographic borders, the political borders when you look at this in a more holistic way. And these are your stakeholders. It could be at the neighborhood level, businesses, local, state, federal players. I wanna highlight two important partners that I've seen work in this space in Florida and one is the Florida Defense Alliance. And they are a group of, it's an organization, it's made up a lot of former military and their mission is to really focus on advocating for these bases, for these communities, and for the servicemen and women and their families. And this group was very valuable in bringing the military installation resilience review to Florida. The other important partner here is the funder. Old CC is what we call it. The US Department of Defense Office of Local Defense Community Cooperation. That is the organization that is giving these funds to local governments, to a state, to a regional planning council, or to a city or a county. And these grants, what they do is they focus on studying the community and then the base within it, what do they need from the outside world? What do they need from the community? Are they getting their water through the county? Are they are getting their roads through the state? And so what are those things that are important to the mission outside of the fence line? And now I'll highlight three Florida case studies that I've been, had the pleasure of working with over the last few years at Jacobs. But first I'll mention the program objectives. And when we were doing our first case study, we focused on creating a very simple message. And the project objectives are simple. Support mission assurance, promote resilient communities, and foster regional cooperations. Here's an example of how we did the vulnerability assessment in South Florida. And this is kind of your typical standard formula to determine vulnerability by an access exposure based on proximity. Then you start to figure out how is it affected, right? Affected, what's the sensitivity? Then you start to ask, how can this asset adapt? For the MERS, the risk to mission became that other layer and driver to prioritize adaptation actions because there may be a lot of vulnerability, but maybe it's not putting an asset at risk. And so the Emerald Coast Regional Planning Council as they were doing their MERS, and we were supporting them, they did a very similar review on exposure and sensitivity. And the East Central Florida, we were just did the kickoff last month. That's in East, that's like Central Florida where I am now in the Orlando, out to the bases in the East. And this regional council and this community wanted to change this formula a little bit to add the layer of population sensitivity and really focus on land and focus on population. And then learning from the previous two MERS that we did, we not only put the vision, sorry, the mission lens at the end, but we did it at the beginning. And so kind of that initial screen focusing on the mission, go through the process, get your data and then prioritize based on risk to the mission. With that, these are the types of tools that we're developing in these projects and very similar to community planning tools that I'm very much accustomed to. The tools include the Unified Resilience Assessment methodology and all the data that goes with that, different planning guidelines, decision making frameworks. And then we package the plan in the form of an implementation plan and also in the form of a grant funding strategy because these things can be important and there's no one single source. So there could be local, there could be state at federal grants supporting implementation back to what we were chatting about of these planning grants. And then of course, I'm always a big fan of throwing in what are those big policy recommendations that are gonna make a difference and really create the process, if you will, for real change. And so that is the Florida example. I do wanna leave you with some final thoughts because I think it's just important to have certain things resonate from this conversation today. We all know that climate change is a national security threat. I think that's very well accepted and understood. Climate vulnerabilities don't stay within geographic or political borders. So working beyond the borders is key. When the hurricane comes to Florida, it doesn't stop at one county and then kind of just hit another. It's widespread. Planning for future conditions and investing in a system's adaptive capacity reduces risk to military installations and the communities they call home. And I do wanna mention again, the old CC Mer program is an excellent vehicle to bring communities together, to bring community and military planners together. One thing we'd learned from that process that it was only for Department of Defense agencies. And so we had US Coast Guard agencies in the general area but they're funded through the DHS so they weren't formerly part of our plan. So we did highlight that as an important recommendation moving forward. And then the final one that I alluded to earlier was DOD should allow military installations to follow their local building and planning codes and land use codes when they are in fact already been made more robust, thinking about future conditions and climate change. That would increase the resilience outside the fence line but also inside the base as well. So with that, thank you again very much. Thank you, Susie. That is a great way to kick off our panel. As a reminder, your presentation materials will be posted at esi.org. So if you wanna go back and check out Susie's slides or re-watch her presentation, that's easy to do and that goes for our other panelists as well. Our second panelist of the day is Mary Carson Stiff. Mary Carson is the executive director of Wetlands Watch, a Virginia based nonprofit where she works on climate change, adaptation planning, local government law, flood risk reduction, wetlands conservation, wetlands mitigation and policy. Mary Carson is a certified floodplain manager, and serves on multiple advisory boards and committees dedicated to climate and conservation issues in Virginia. Mary Carson, welcome to the lectern and I'll turn it over to you. Thanks. Good afternoon, everybody hear me? Thank you for having me today. Including our organization's perspective on this critical issue. As was mentioned, my name is Mary Carson Stiff and I'll be speaking to you today about how climate change affects national security in Virginia. A little bit about our organization. Wetlands Watch is a 501C3 nonprofit that is incorporated in 2001 and we seek to conserve and protect shoreline ecosystems from the impacts of climate change across Virginia and beyond. We are based in Norfolk in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia where we experience climate change daily. We work through the regulatory landscape to ensure that shoreline protection laws, regulations and guidelines are respected and followed. We work through education and outreach to inform the public and community leaders about the impacts of climate change and equip community members with a voice to seek risk reduction strategies implemented on the ground in their communities. Finally, we work through advocacy to advance public policy and programs that ensure wetlands conservation and protection. We believe in collective impact and the strength of partnership to achieve shared goals. So a perspective of sea level rise and climate change in Virginia. There are two major driving forces of climate change that we experience in Virginia. The first is sea level rise and I'm gonna focus on where the rates are highest which is in Norfolk. We have seen sea levels rise about a foot and a half over the last 100 years. So this is historical already happened data. This sea level rise is a consequence of land sinking from glacial melt and groundwater withdrawal and seas rising which is exacerbated by a slowing Gulf stream that is pushing more water to Virginia's coast. We are about to see that historic sea level rise rate double with three feet of sea level rise projected by 2065. The second driving force is rainfall. Virginia has seen a statewide average 18% increase in the amount of rainfall and the intensity of rainfall since 2006. You can see this represented on the graph with the blue outdated Atlas 14 NOAA planning standard in red and the new blue line representing more contemporary conditions today. How are these climate stressors actually changing life in the Commonwealth of Virginia? The following statistics are from our 2021 climate or coastal resilience master plan which was released during the north of administration. For our organization, the most staggering impacts are those to our natural ecosystems. In Virginia, our coastal wetlands can't grow vertically at pace with sea level rise and as a consequence are drowning in place. If we don't create space for our wetlands to migrate landward, Virginia is projected to lose 89% of its tidal wetlands by 2080 and 51% of its non-tidal inland wetlands by 2080. Wetlands are the most productive ecosystems in the world. If you didn't know, more productive than rainforests or coral reefs. Losing them will have disastrous consequences to our health and economy. The master plan also revealed how buildings would be affected. In 2080, 340,000 buildings will be exposed to extreme coastal flooding. Nearly 1 million residents will be exposed to major flooding and our annualized flood damages will increase from $0.4 billion today to $5.1 billion in 2080. 500 miles of roadways are currently exposed to chronic coastal flooding, but in 2080, 2,800 miles will experience chronic coastal flooding. So let's turn to what this means for national security. It should be pretty obvious. In Virginia, the Department of Defense spends more money than any other state in the nation. In 2022, the Department of Defense spent $62.7 billion. This represents a whopping 10% of Virginia's GDP. Where is this investment going and how on earth are we going to protect it? The spending is concentrated in two places mostly, Northern Virginia and Hampton Roads. So this is again where our organization is headquartered. In Hampton Roads, there are more than 16 military bases, installations in our region, and most of these facilities are within three feet of sea level rise, which again is projected to occur by 2065. Despite this risk, the Department of Defense continues to increase spending in our region, investing $27.1 billion just last year. As a result, our economy becomes dependent on these annual resources. 40% of spending in Hampton Roads is military spending. It's really difficult to diversify when the bases are there, need to be there, and people in the region have to support them. What does this support actually look like? As Susie mentioned, installations are not islands by themselves, they rely on utilities and people from off base. Power and water must get to the bases and the roads must be reliable to get people to and from these installations. In Hampton Roads, 150,000 people need to get to these bases on a given day. Where do all these people live? Where do their kids go to school? How can these bases run when our roads look like this? Are our houses safe to live in? Even when you elevate a property, the roads have to be dry to get to it or leave from it. There are over 5,000 repetitive and severe repetitive lost properties in Hampton Roads region, yet we have no mandatory flood risk disclosure requirement in the state despite our failed attempt to pass legislation just this past session. For our military personnel, this means moving to a region without any background or knowledge of our flood risk before purchasing or renting a home. What about our schools? Instead of snow days, we have flood days where school is outright canceled or we have delayed starts or early closures. Local staff estimate in Norfolk that we see roughly 40 days of flooding in our streets annually and this number is climbing. So enough of the sad stuff. The good news is that we're doing a great deal at multiple different levels and I'm gonna talk about state, regional and local. At the state, we are doing a great deal to address these and so many other climate concerns. Our state assessed the risk through our recent coastal resilience master plan. The state established the NOAA Intermediate High Curve as the official sea level rise planning scenario. We set requirements that state-funded buildings must be built well above flood levels and that new roads and bridges must be built under new state climate change engineering design standards. Virginia shoreline regulations must now accommodate for sea level rise and coastal storms. Finally, we joined and recently exited, that's another story, the Regional Greenhouse Gas Initiative and under Reggie, our state required that 45% of each auction be used to local pre-disaster, used to fund local pre-disaster flood mitigation projects and studies and work and capacity building across the state. So far, 150 million has been invested through this important grant source. Regionally, our planning entities are busy ensuring continuity of services across member localities. The Hampton Roads Planning District Commission adopted short, mid and long-term planning scenarios for sea level rise. They are currently developing similar adaptive planning standards for rainfall and stormwater management. The Middle Peninsula Planning District Commission designed a comprehensive program called Fight the Flood that links property owners with private businesses that can help address shoreline erosion control on private properties. Finally, what's happening locally? This is my favorite part. Local governments are doing the most and we could spend hours talking about what they're doing and only begin to scratch the surface. In response to more rain, local governments are upsizing stormwater systems. Our state law requires that all Hampton Roads communities include sea level rise planning and adaptation strategies in their comprehensive planning processes. Many communities are actually in the process of updating their plans right now and military representatives are sitting on advisory committees for these updates. Local governments are using zoning ordinances and land use to restrict development and requiring specific standards in districts that experience unique risks. Localities are regulating against flood risk outside typical high-risk flood zones like the high-risk flood zones as defined on FEMA's flood maps. This step outside of the traditional regulatory spaces reflects an understanding that flood zones are simply lines on a map and only as accurate as the data being used to create them. Water does not flow and follow lines that are drawn on a map. Susie hit on this point really well also. So, where does the military fit in to all of this? Many docks have been raised, beaches have been replenished, large living shorelines are protecting runways from erosion and wave energy and buildings and utilities are being flood-proofed so they work during storm events. My remarks will focus on military actions that engage local communities. We have started the hard work of coordinating the military and local government responses to climate change through joint land use studies programs or J-looses. These studies bring local stakeholders to the table, setting a tone of cooperation and hopeful consistency on and off the base. The J-loose process points out areas of greatest risk where focused efforts for infrastructure improvements should occur in the future. The goal is to ensure alignment on climate change adaptation between J-looses and local comprehensive plans. We are hopeful that the Sentinel Landscapes Program will help prioritize funding these projects identified in the J-loose and local comprehensive planning programs. This work is just getting started, but it's important that these projects utilize natural infrastructure defenses against storm surge, promote green infrastructure solutions, buffer against non-adaptive development patterns and engage communities and neighborhoods in planning and implementation processes. Finally, I'd just like to say that the best way to build national security in Virginia, like every other state, is to support what's happening at the local level. It's local governments, local organizations, local money and local people who are on the hook for developing and implementing solutions. As Susie mentioned, if local standards are higher than federal standards, defer to those local standards no matter what. Finally, we're gonna talk about the money. There's a lot of money coming from the federal government, but it's not easy to get. If you or the people you work for have control over simplifying the grants process, please do it so our communities can continue building an adaptive future in the face of climate change. Thank you. Thank you, Mary Carson. So Mary Carson, you had two photo credits in your presentation, one was that one. The other one was the stop sign on a flooded road. Where was that, do you recall? Oh, wow, okay, yeah, there was a lot of water that day. So I just asked a follow-up question. You all will have opportunities to ask questions as well. We'll have someone with a microphone here in the room if you're in our online audience and you have questions for our panelists. You can send us an email and the email address to use is askask at esi.org. Almost two years ago, we had an amazing presentation from someone named Chauncea Willis who is with the same organization as Antoine and I wanted to give a quick plug to that briefing. Chauncea did a great job, Antoine's gonna do a great job too, but Chauncea did a great job. She was a presenter in a briefing series we did called Living with Climate Change and we covered polar vortex, sea level rise, wildfires, extreme heat and Chauncea's panel was called Integrating Equity into Emergency Management. You've heard a lot about those climate impacts so far and you'll hear about them more. If you wanna learn more about those climate impacts in detail or in greater detail, definitely encourage you to check out those briefings on our website and don't overlook Chauncea's panel. It was a really excellent one. But today is all about Antoine and Antoine Richards serves as the Chief of Staff for the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management. His experience includes nearly a decade of work in the healthcare and emergency management sectors including public health, community outreach, public affairs, diversity, equity, inclusion and research. He is a Doctor of Science candidate in Emergency Management at Jacksonville State University where he studies the intersection of public health and emergency management, social vulnerability and social determinants of health, community resilience, capacity building and sustainability. Antoine, thank you so much for being in our briefing today, I'll turn it over to you. All right, good afternoon, how's everyone doing? Excellent, thank you. So as Daniel mentioned on behalf of the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management and our Co-Founder and Chief Executive Officer Chauncea, Willis, I am happy to be here and share this time with you to discuss this very important topic. As we move forward, I'm gonna give you a brief overview of IDEM. So the Institute for Diversity and Inclusion in Emergency Management is a global 501C nonprofit organization that focuses on equity, how we can instill an operationalized equity in emergency management, how we can take care of the underserved, vulnerable and marginalized communications, not only in the United States, but also globally. Our team has over 200 cumulative years of emergency management experience. It includes certified emergency managers, master exercise practitioners, public health professionals, down the line, a very interdisciplinary team that is dedicated to ensuring that our communities get the services and the things that they need, that they have access to the resources that they have been excluded from and that they're able to live the best versions of their lives that they can, regardless of the impacts of climate change. We are one of the only organizations that is dedicated to diversity, equity and inclusion in emergency management. It is our mission, it is our vision, these are our goals. This is the work we do, this is why we exist. We exist to build resilience. We understand that decreased resilience equals decreased national security. That is for the communities that are impacted by disasters. We exist to promote the integration of social equity. What is social equity? How does culture influence what response, recovery, mitigation and preparedness looks like? How can we instill that in the ways that we approach these things, especially as we look at national security and this nexus between climate adaptation? And most importantly, how can we educate and train not only the communities that we serve in building resilience, but the people that serve those communities? What can we do to make an impact? What can we do to teach them how to navigate those barriers? So as we move forward, I wanna start by just saying that decreased resilience is decreased national security. When we talk about national security and resilience, we have to understand that things such as resource scarcity, increased national disasters and inequitable outcomes, vulnerability of critical infrastructure, geopolitical instability and environmental justice issues all decreased national security. And these are all things that impact many communities around this nation, whether they're rural and communities, communities of color, low income communities, LGBTQIA plus communities, elderly communities, children, they are all impacted by these issues. And if we do not begin to look at how we adapt to climate change, then these are issues that also continue to threaten the security, not only of our nation, but of the communities that we serve. We are often taught to adapt. We are taught from a very young age to adapt. We learn to walk, that's adaptation. If something bad happens in our life, we adapt and we make the necessary changes in that day. We wake up in the morning and say, this is what we're gonna do, we get a flat tire, we adapt, we adjust our schedules, we do things just a little bit differently to make sure that things run smooth. And when we think about climate change and the impact that it has, adaptation seems to be a distant thought. It's not something that we think about, we focus on mitigation. For many communities that can't afford to mitigate, adaptation is not only what they must do every day, it is their lifestyle, it is survival. So resilience, decreased resilience is decreased national security for many of these communities. So when we talk about addressing climate and vulnerability for improved resilience and security, I'm gonna look at some of the work that we've done. And when we talk about resource scarcity, our organization has done a lot within these communities to build resilience. Our programs such as BUILD, which stands for an extremely long name, bridging resources for underserved and indigenous populations and landfall disasters, call it BUILD, right? But programs like that are dedicated to working directly in communities. They work with governments, they work with communities, they work at the community level. They provide workshops, they provide access to internal resource portals where not only do you get access to the things you need, but the people that you need to access. So no longer do I have to just call that number, I know who I can get help from, right? Resource scarcity, access to resources is important. The other thing that we look at are community crafted resilience solutions. What are we doing to build resilience in these communities to increase the security of those that have lost their homes, that have lost everything, that have suffered from complete losses, right? That have had to migrate, that have had to lose their culture. So when we think about community crafted resilience solutions, this is an understanding that from the bottom up, most communities know what they need to be resilient, but we often overlook them or don't seek their input to increase their resilience. So these solutions are focused on working from the bottom up while also leveraging top-down experience from your policy makers, from other private sector organizations, nonprofit organizations, faith-based organizations to come together to find the right solutions that are informed completely by those communities to build resilience. When we think about our next disaster here and when we think about increased national disasters as a national security threat, we do things such as deploy equity response teams, teams that go out and identify those inequities across the nation. We've deployed them following major hurricanes, following major tornadoes. We've identified both short and long-term needs of communities and also found ways to leverage the resources from the private sector, from the public sector and across other nonprofits to increase better response and recovery to make sure that the security that people need to feel, that the resilience that they need to build is at the utmost priority. We've also looked at certain things, sorry, such as climate education, awareness and training. When we think about vulnerability and critical infrastructure, I think about communities such as Falcon, Mississippi. After Hurricane Ida, I believe, we went out and we were doing some work with the program that I was talking about earlier, the Build program. We worked with Equipment County, Mississippi. Equipment County actually was the only community to receive a BRIC grant following one of our workshops in Mississippi. Only community in Mississippi. We provided some grant writing support, some education and awareness on emergency management concepts. They received funding for mitigation, right? And we say, great, what are we gonna do with this? How can we make a difference? Is there anybody else that needs assistance? And they say, well, there's a community right over there called Falcon, Mississippi, and this community has to use buckets to go to the bathroom because their infrastructure lacks running water. 2024, people are still using buckets in the United States to use the restroom because they don't have the infrastructure necessary. Security issue, right? It's a health issue. It's an emergency management issue. And then beginning to think about geopolitical instability, how politics plays into those things. What are the impacts of the policies that are in place? The policies that were intentionally designed to exclude others or that were manipulated in a way that created such segregation or discrimination. How can we navigate those policies? How can we adapt to those policies? Understanding that we may not be able to change the policy in its entirety but make very small changes to it that create a significant difference. So we've worked countlessly with governors, federal policy makers to make a difference on policies such as heirs property, such as the National Disaster Safety Board Act, the Disaster Saving and Life Serving Act, even the FEMA Equity Act. And then at the local level, working with governors, with county commissioners, parish commissioners, local mayors and all of those things to make sure that our policies are now adapting in a way that support and empower the communities that we serve. And we also do those globally as well. And finally, environmental justice issues. Quite frankly, there are a lot of them. When we think about environmental justice, not supporting climate adaptation is a travesty to environmental justice in itself. Not thinking about how we can adapt and do the work is an impact on environmental justice in itself. We have to be that change that we wanna see. I know it's cliche, but what can we do in our roles? Many of us work within the bounds of our jobs but we can make very small changes within to make a difference. So when we think about opportunities for increased coordination and adaptation, I always like to point back to our community crafted resilience solutions. Whether we're using tools such as cedars, your community disaster resilience zones to identify where those communities exist, or we're looking at word of mouth, working directly with communities and hearings, such as we did with Falcon Mississippi, that there are other communities that are in need. It's about creating those solutions that build resilience, those that support the security of others and the safety of others in this process. So I'm always encouraging us to look not only at what we can do from the top down, but ways that we can begin to build from the bottom up to make a significant difference. I also wanna point you to our recent documentary. We launched a documentary on January 25th. It is called Muted Climate Marginalization in America. As you can see on the screen, Congressman Benny Thompson was a part of that along with Congressman Troy Carter. It is for free on our website, but what this documentary does is it takes you through the stories. It amplifies the voices of many of the communities that are marginalized, that are experiencing these troubles, that are experiencing threats to their national security. So I always encourage you to go take a look at the documentary because it's better to hear the stories directly from them than to hear it just from me up here talking today. When we think about what it's gonna take to get to a better future in terms of climate adaptation, in terms of a better future, in terms of national security, we have to begin to look past the barriers that exist to effective climate and national security priorities. Lack of awareness. We have to begin to raise awareness of what the issues are. I am very gratuitous of you, Dan and E.C., today for putting this together because this is raising awareness. And again, you've mentioned that these are resources that can be found on your website. These are great opportunities to raise awareness. We have to start to look at what the competing priorities are. Funding is very minimal in terms of climate adaptation. There's a lot in mitigation, but less for adaptation. And then how that funding is distributed, whether it's to the six agencies and departments that get the majority of that funding, or whether it's the 5% of funding that goes to climate adaptation, how can we find ways to better expand that? Because at the crux of it all, everyone is competing for that funding. There has to be new funding mechanisms, new opportunities, new ways for grants, new things that actually support communities on the ground, that actually support nonprofits that are doing the work. We do not have to reinvent the wheel. We just have to support the efforts that are already on ground to make a difference. Complexity of the issue, it is complex. Thank you. Climate adaptation is not something that will change overnight. It is a long-term strategy. So we have to start to look at our political and economic factors. We have to start to look at the policies that are in place. We have to look at geographical disparities and we have to understand that this is a long-term commitment and not just a short-term gain. We have to look beyond the disinvestment in communities and how the funding has been situated. You have to think that for an organization like our own that is minority-owned and that is woman-led with over 200 years of cumulative experience, funding is difficult for us to do the very necessary work that we do, right? As a nonprofit, it's difficult and it's even more difficult for the communities that have been disinvested in. So how do we get those funding to the people that are doing the good work? And in addition, we have to start to look at how we can do these things beyond our borders, as was mentioned earlier. We do work overseas. We have a global outreach center in Ghana and we're working on expanding to the Caribbean because we understand that these are not just issues of the United States, but issues abroad. And as those climate impacts influence those communities, those people come here to the United States, which again is a security issue, right? How do we accept them? How do we navigate them? What does it mean for us here in the United States? So as we think about a path forward, I want you to just begin to look at some of the things that we are looking to do as we move forward. We wanna focus on community focused funding. We wanna focus on collaboration as a key issue. Who can we collaborate with? We cannot take this together alone. This is a collective impact that we have to have. We wanna increase climate awareness, education and training, work with policy officials on ways to improve. We wanna integrate climate and vulnerability into national security and adaptation strategies, work with our legislators on ways that we can influence policy, increase funding allocation and how it's allocated, who gets it? So diversity and funding and ultimately plan, implement and evaluate climate impacts on vulnerable populations and put that at the forefront. Thank you. Thank you. I won't let you leave without this. Thank you. You'll need that for the Q and A. That was great. Thank you so much for that presentation. Thinking of listening to you, I was reminded of our first briefing of the year was about the fifth national climate assessment. And that might be a good resource if people wanna kinda dig into these impacts a little bit more. And we had one of our presenters talking specifically about disparities. So that would be a good place to learn a little bit more about that. Our final panelist of the day is Rachel Jacobson. Rachel is a longtime friend of EESI. And she's currently the lead researcher of state climate policy at the state fiscal policy team at the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. Rachel builds transformational climate and social justice policy through cross-sector collaboration. She has over a decade of experience, which includes working with the American Society of Adaptation Professionals, our old friends, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, the White House and the Council on Environmental Quality and private sector companies. Rachel, thanks for being here today. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks so much, Dan. Thanks to EESI for inviting me to be here today. Oh, not yet. So as Dan said, I'm Rachel Jacobson. I'm lead researcher for state climate policy at Center on Budget and Policy Priorities. We are a non-partisan research and policy institute that advances federal and state policies to help the nation where everyone has the resources they need to thrive and share in the nation's prosperity. And as a longtime member and former staff person at American Society of Adaptation Professionals, I'm part of a growing community of people, including all of the folks that you just heard from, working together to center adaptation in climate action. So as Antoine highlighted, despite adaptation efforts, we will continue to experience climate disasters and they will disproportionately impact low-income people and people of color. We must center the people who are most impacted in our work. Through Mary Carson's presentation, we saw that for most, if not all of adaptation projects, policy at multiple skills is at play. So we have to address needed policy reforms at multiple skills simultaneously and in coordination with one another. And Susie talked about how the, and Mary Carson talked about this as well, about how climate resilience of the military is inextricably tied to climate resilience of the surrounding community and how benefits expand when more parties work together. So how does coordination and alignment within and across scales of government increase effectiveness of the work at every scale? And what type of federal leadership and governance do we need to activate that coordination and alignment? So my last EESI briefing was exactly three years ago and I talked about three changes that need to happen in federal policy space to create an enabling environment for climate adaptation. So one, funding to implement known actions and strategies. Two, reforms of existing policies to avoid maladaptation and transformation, accepting new realities and envisioning our future. We still need change in all three of these areas, but we have also made a lot of progress since 2021. So IRA and IAJA each provide much needed funding for adaptation of resilience. Just a couple of my favorite examples, I don't know, there are a lot to choose from, but EPA administering the community change grants to fund concrete projects that address climate impacts and improve governance for inclusion of environmental justice communities in the work and for service administering community wildfire defense grants to plan and implement wildfire protection and high-risk communities. I had to choose that from a list of like 20 of my favorite programs. Okay, but in order to center the people who are impacted the most, we need reforms in how the money is spent. Antoine just talked about this. Despite admirable investment in technical assistance to support community access to competitive funding, competitive grants are still likely to go to well-resourced places. Cost estimates for putting together federal funding applications run anywhere from $10,000 to $75,000, and that money often has a little or no return because so many of them are unsuccessful. And I in particular want to highlight the role that states have to play. So to begin with, some funds are contingent on state acceptance. We saw that with the Climate Pollution Reduction grants that were rejected by Florida, Kentucky, Iowa, South Dakota, and Wyoming. States can create enabling policy environments for federally funded projects. A good example is streamlining the permitting process for green infrastructure projects. States can also provide technical assistance to increase local capacity. So the Massachusetts Municipal Vulnerability Preparedness Program is a great example of this. It provides the capacity for every local government to have a climate resilience plan. And then more to the point, states can directly help local governments and community-based organizations meet federal match requirements. New Mexico just passed a law last month for this creating a matching fund for federal infrastructure money. And finally, states need to prioritize equitable distribution of formula and block grant funding. You may have seen reports on an alarming share of the Infrastructure Investment Investment Investment and Jobs Act funding going to highway expansion. That's money that could have been spent on adapting transportation infrastructure to address climate impacts and increasing public transit in low-income communities. It's also worth pointing out that there's no credible comprehensive estimate of the total national costs of climate adaptation, but developing one would allow Congress to make much more informed decisions on how much federal funding to allocate to existing and new programs. And spoiler alert, I think it would be more than it is now. Okay, so in 2021, we called out the need to reform existing policies to avoid maladaptation or actions that may lead to increased climate risk while we're trying to reduce risk. We accidentally increase risk either now or in the future. And we've had some progress here as well. Of course, Justice 40 provides a framework to account for how benefits are distributed. This is a really good start, but what framework is helping us see where burdens are going? Infrastructure projects that increase resilience in one place may heighten risk in a neighboring community. Okay, this is for you, Mary Carson. Atlas 15 precipitation data. Can we get a round of applause? Okay, so we are no longer going to be using precipitation estimates from the 1970s. We'll have current and projected future climate information to inform climate secure engineering projects, but it's gonna take a while. This, the implementation process for this just started with a pilot, I think it's in Montana, and to cover the entire country is gonna take years. Okay, I wanna zoom in on the energy system because it allows us to specifically see how the reforms and coordination needed to make critical infrastructure climate secure cut across all levels of government and many sectors of society. Okay, so this is a picture of Winter Storm Uri. Power outages, contributed to at least 210 deaths, especially for people with chronic medical conditions who relied on electrically powered medical devices. Outage impacts, not surprisingly, affected low income and minority communities most acutely for the longest duration, but the interconnected reforms needed for better future outcomes in a climate secure energy grid are really complex. We have to change the policies, priorities and practices of utility asset owners across the systems for generating, transmitting and distributing electricity. And of course, those are all different in every state. We have to reform state utility regulations, again, different in every state, to enable deployment of new grid technologies and better regional interconnection. We have to influence local land use regulations to enable distributed electric generations. They change state and federal regulations for siting and permitting clean energy. And like we talked about before, we have to make climate preparedness and disaster recovery funding more accessible and more equitable. So although there is now some more federal money available for grid resilience, emergency preparedness, clean energy generation, there's uneven application of reforms at the state and local level to enable their use. But federal policy leadership would enable a lot faster progress. So we're gonna talk about that. Finally, we have to acknowledge that climate impacts are transitioning us to a new reality, one without precedent. And in 2021, we talked about the slow pace of federally assisted community-based relocation for threatened Alaska native villages. New Talk Alaska received a $25 million grant from the voluntary community-driven relocation program in late 2022. And that program is managed by the Denali Commission, Bureau of Indian Affairs and FEMA. It's one of several signs that the country is starting to acknowledge the reality of climate migration and acknowledging that its complexity requires coordination across partners that may not have had reason to work together in the past. But there's still just a really long way to go for Alaska native villages needing to relocate and especially for both federally recognized and non-recognized tribes across the country. And at the center of these relocation actions is a desire for a safe and secure home. And that's something that is out of reach for too many people in the US. But we can choose to address, and this is just an example of a crisis that we're experiencing that we can choose to address together with climate impacts. We can address the housing crisis and climate impacts together. Not just to avoid the danger of climate disasters for those without shelter, but to envision and then create a more secure, prosperous future for everyone. There are programs across several agencies that when combined provide a strong foundation for progress on this task, which is not an easy one, but for this to work, affordable housing developers need to work with federal agencies that are new to them across overlapping issues like building electrification, heat health, flood risk mitigation. This all requires strong inter-agency coordination, coordination across jurisdictions, and most importantly, the willingness to put on-house people at the center of our climate adaptation actions. So one way in which we have made progress on adaptation governance since 2021 is the development of a White House National Climate Resilience Framework. This framework provides guiding principles. It articulates society-wide objectives and opportunities for action that cut across all agency domains, cut across all climate impacts and economic sectors, but it's only a framework. It doesn't prioritize actions, it doesn't direct responsible parties to implement actions, and it doesn't fully acknowledge the root causes of climate change and its inequitable impacts are extractive fossil fuel-based economy. So it misses the opportunity to identify transformative policy reforms and new policies to enact a vision for a just and equitable future. We need strong, comprehensive, nationally coordinated approaches to dealing with climate impacts and that requires leadership and governance at the highest levels to activate alignment and coordination. So currently we have adaptation teams in individual executive branch offices. We need a leader, for example, a federal chief resilience officer perhaps to establish a unified set of priorities to guide the nation's resilience-building efforts. Did you know that the U.S. is one of the only developed countries without a national adaptation plan? We have agency adaptation plans directed from executive orders, but we need a whole of government, national climate adaptation and resilience strategy and implementation plan to form a dependable foundation from which to build our efforts. We have interagency resilience working groups developed either by executive order or as coalitions of the willing. And here I want to call out the important work of the U.S. Global Change Research Program which has been running those groups for a long time as well as other elements of the executive branch. But we, and we also have some like ad hoc, issue-specific cross-sector coordination, but we really need durable mechanisms to sustain these interagency groups and groups across sectors throughout the country. Luckily, there is an existing bipartisan bill that combines all of these things, so I encourage you to check that out. It's the National Coordination for Adaptation and Resilience for Security Act. Okay, so we've made good strides to set a foundation for funding known adaptation actions. We have a much greater awareness of the policy reforms needed to avoid maladaptation and we've started to implement them. And we started to recognize that we'll only be able to transform into a just resilient society through collective efforts across all sectors and scales. The thing that's missing to truly set us on the path of transformation is a national proactive vision for the future. Federal leadership is critical for infusing that vision into national priorities and taking action on them, but to craft that vision, we should look to our local communities, just like Anton said, our local communities who are already doing it. Mary Carson said this too, probably Susie did too. Here on the slide is the vision board from Oakland, California. It was a key input into their transformative climate communities application, which is a California state grant program that puts resources behind community-defined climate priorities. You should check it out if you don't know about it. What is our vision? What is our national vision for a just climate resilience future? And what could we achieve if we pursue it? Thank you, Rachel. That is a great way to lead off into our Q&A. I will scour the audience for hands. Megan in the back of the room has our roving microphone, so catch my attention, and I'll catch her attention if you, you know? Oh, sure, yeah. There's Rachel's contact information. Oh, and there's three pillars of climate action. Oh, and how to adapt. So yeah, if you have any questions, please feel free to raise your hand. But maybe to get us started, I'm gonna come back to Susie, because I wanna build on something that we've heard a little bit about. And I think, you know, when we put this briefing together, it's called, we use the words national security, and I think when people hear national security, their mind probably goes first to national defense, right? And a lot of that takes place on military installations. But, you know, like we said, even the biggest sort of most sophisticated, you know, military installation in the United States is still pretty dependent on the community for pretty much everything. It doesn't like, I think Mary Carson said, live on an island. Love to come back to the idea of sort of ready communities or community readiness as a way to deliver military readiness. And I'm wondering if you could, now that you've heard the rest of the presentations, we'll start with you, but we'll go down through the line. There are other examples of how military installations are working with communities and vice versa to ensure things like the electric grid, the hospitals, schools, transportation systems are there and ready to provide sort of holistic resilience and some security kind of, you know, at that nexus of climate adaptation. I think I'll start with something that's been said a lot here, is that a lot of this work really began at the local level. And that's what I saw in my career as well. And a lot of the work that happened in South Florida and the organization, the planning, the Southeast Florida Climate Compact, that was local governments coming together. And at the time, it was really government to government. And over time, it started growing and expanding and bringing in other players. And I think that we're at a point now where we've been working individually in our circles on these issues, trying to understand the data, what does it mean? It's time to continue to widen that circle and bring in those military installations because for years they did feel like islands and they did get a lot of resources from the outside. But the fact is that, you know, the men and women who are service members and their families do live in the communities and they're impacted. And you're right, they might be coming into a community that they know nothing about. So I just think that it's an issue that it should have no borders. And it should be more maybe place-based and grow from that. Because I think every community has some sort of risk. But maybe it's different in Southeast Florida and, you know, Northwest, you know, part of the country. But, you know, the process is the same in identifying and doing something about it. And so I just think there's incredible value in getting out of your little circle and bringing in the other members that maybe you don't feel quite comfortable with at first and maybe you don't even speak the same language but find the vocabulary. So that's what I would say. That's great. Thank you, Susie. Mary Carson, do you have any thoughts about how sort of where this climate adaptation national security nexus, how are communities and military installations working and how could they be doing even more just for community readiness? I feel like I touched on this in my presentation. So I want to be sure that others can share. I didn't mention that, you know, in our state planning process, the Coast Resilience Master Plan, and we're in phase two of that plan right now and about to launch into a statewide flood risk reduction plan. The military and its many branches have been represented on stakeholder working groups, technical advisory committees, and the like so that the needs and the interests of the military population as well as the installations themselves are represented in those larger coordinated planning efforts. So that's an addition. But I really think that the local planning, the joint land use studies, and the participation in our regional, you know, we have hazard mitigation plans. Everybody's doing this on the regional scale right now. They're a part of that process as well as the local comprehensive planning. Great, thanks. Antoine, do you have any thoughts? Yeah, I'll just say that I think in terms of a lot of this, it is being inclusive about it. So a lot of these plans, planning and things that are done or developed aren't done. I don't want to say with the community in mind. In some cases, I think they are intentionally done without the community in mind, but a lot of times there's not an inclusive component to it. So resilience is never inclusive. Emergency management is never inclusive. How we adapt is never inclusive because we don't have the right people at the table, those that are influenced by the decisions that are being made. So I think ultimately finding better ways to include them in that process is going to be something that's really key to moving forward. Not only including them in the process but making them a part of the process as well. This takes me back to community crafted resilience solutions. The power of that is not only learning from the community but making them a part of the plan to develop what resilience looks like and moving forward, finding ways to implement that things. In the same vein, you're empowering the community while you're informing yourself to make the necessary decisions and informed decision and educated decision on things that can make an impact. Rachel? I would just briefly add that we're talking about community readiness. I would ask us to consider like, what is the mission objective? And I'm a little out of my depth here speaking defense lingo, but we know what we, Susie and Mary Carson talked a lot about vulnerability assessments that have been done. It's pretty clear what impacts we're facing, but what we don't know is when we adapt, what is our goal? What do we want that end state to look like? Is it just to have a business as usual services performing as they have? Or is there something that we, is there a goal beyond that that we can be working towards together? That's a great point. Yeah, I'm not sure. That would be really interesting to figure out what that would be. Cause one thing that you talked about with Atlas 15 and real heads will know that Atlas 14 is coming gone, but we're thinking about climate impacts of the future. Like we should be planning for future impacts, not just a business as usual scenario, which is kind of status quo and reflective of the past. Can I add something? Yeah, please Susie. That's a great point, Rachel, because I think any good planning process starts with community visioning. And every community is different and their risk tolerance is different. And again, a lot of the work that I've done in resilience in the past few years, talking about resilience is about bouncing back, but I would say it was about bouncing forward. And not just going to that normal status quo, but going to a better place, a stronger place. But I still think that's also from the local up, because every community is different. And you should respect that. Every community is different. Thanks. We have a question in the audience who have two questions in the audience. So we'll start with you and then we'll go to you. Okay, thank you so much. I'm Sharon with Seek and working with our members on FY25 and DAA priorities, specifically climate priorities and military resilience priorities. And was hoping you all could highlight some policy recommendations or programs at DOD that really help support military installation resilience, specifically outside of the fence line as you recommended Susie, as well as some that you might think receive more bipartisan support on that end. We'll open this up, it's for anyone who would like to chime in. Rachel, you look like you're chomping at the bit. I'm chomping at the bit for Susie to answer this question. Okay. Alley, you. I will, you know, again, I highlight the military installation resilience review. And that is Department of Defense Dollars coming to local communities. One thing we were chatting about before we started as a panel was that there's this segregation of planning grants and implementation grants. And I'm at the end of several planning grants now, but I know what's coming. I mean, I was in government for 30 years and I can't, you know, not think about that. And so that some of these planning grants should have some money at the end to help implement or bridge to the actual implementation grant. So those are for design or for construction or for permitting, but when the consultants disappear, you know, and the grant dollars dry up, there's a gap. And so I think that's an important thing that could be addressed. And I think this Department of Defense program would be great if it could work across agencies and include other agencies like the Department of Homeland Security. And like I mentioned earlier, the Coast Guard. So you can look at a study area. And in Miami, we did that. In Miami-Dade County, the study area included, you know, Monroe, Miami-Dade and Broward, and four installations, but it didn't include the Coast Guard right on the causeway to going to Miami Beach. And they wanted to be involved because they knew the value. So those are two easy ones, I think. Mary Carson or Antoine or Rachel, any other thoughts? Oh, go ahead, Rachel. Yeah, I'll just say one thing in terms of the process that Susie's describing, where we need, communities need to understand how they can, what funding will help them move from planning to implementation. The National Coastal Resilience Fund has a really good segmented process, four-step process for that. You apply just in one category, but there's also, you know, a lot of kind of community, there's a community around that grant fund and a lot of support for people to move from one phase to another. So that would be a good program to check out, to see kind of what that model can look like. Great, thanks. Thanks for the question. We're gonna come up here and then we'll go back to you. Thanks for your guys remarks. Josh Foster from adaptationleader.org. I've been working with military planners on resilience planning recently. And one of the issues is that the military is a very complex set of planning processes and directives and codes and everything like that, often was considerations of outside the fence and then local planners also have their comprehensive codes and planning. Is anything being done to synchronize these two sort of by mandate beyond just sort of participatory processes and planning and vulnerabilities studies? Feel free, anyone is welcome to jump in on that. I don't think anything is by mandate. Okay. I haven't seen it and I've seen conflicts. And that's why we're recommending if the local entity has a stronger code or design guideline, just let the installation use that and not use a standard. That's the same for Miami and Portland. Installation has been more stricter. That should be discussed, absolutely. Yeah, yeah. Again, take away the borders. What's the vision? Thank you. Oh, Mary Carson. Okay, thanks for the question. We're gonna go back to, and then we'll come back up here in the front, but we'll start, I saw that hand first in the back. Hi there, Alice McIntosh. I'm a national security fellow with Congressman Fluger's office. So for this community of practitioners, when thinking about future-proofing our national security apparatus, particular installations, if we're to look at the most dire predictions in terms of climate change, so I mean you spoke to like the 2080 projections for wetlands in Virginia, some of the projections with Florida and a lot of it may be underwater down that far. Is there a conversation happening with this community of practitioners thinking about something along the lines of the BRAC Commission based realignment and closure as it relates to climate change impacts? So are we thinking about tearing our most vulnerable, highest priority installations and looking at where we would have to move those installations in order to insulate them from future climate impacts? A lot of those conversations are happening behind closed doors and not as out in the open as many of us may wish. However, I think that there are some conversations about smaller bases that could easily move some of their production and some of their assets away from a current risk, but then there are other bases that the thought of moving them seems impossible and I think that we are certainly experiencing that with Naval Station Norfolk, but some of the smaller installations that have experienced risk are no longer taking off at certain runways and moving planes, so similar to how migration is working in our region, which is one street to two streets over or one neighborhood to one neighborhood over or one local government to the adjacent local government, that kind of piecemeal operation may be existing. It's hard to get that data. Thanks for the question. I was thinking about listening to your answer. Many of you spoke about community engagement. I mean, military installations as big as that have a lot of people involved and the decision makers set pretty high up, but I'm wondering if there could be a benefit of having more military civilian engagement around some of these decisions that might eventually trickle up or bubble up as people are making these kinds of decisions about which one-raised runways to keep operable or which port facility maybe to use or maybe which installations to either devote more resources to to increase resilience or maybe to look for another site. I don't know if that would be, that's something you've seen in your experience, but as you were thinking, as you were talking that made me think of that. Yeah, our region has been really fortunate that lines of communication I think are open in ways that other regions we've heard haven't been. So I think that the situation is such that the impacts are so extreme and are felt so chronically daily that it kind of forces the conversation in a way that may not be happening elsewhere. So I think that there are discussions that are occurring with governments and the military about some of those decisions, but I really don't know enough about them. I think it would be very useful to have conversations with community members and community organizations, but I think we're maybe eight years away from that. Okay. Go ahead, Susie. It's a very complex question, obviously. And I'll tell you what sort of the community planners, the folks that I've always worked with, what we learned during these MERS is that these places, these installations are huge economic engines in the community and in the state. And then the other thing, they're there for a reason geographically, strategically. They're quite unique and they're interdependent with each other all over the country and the world, right? And so rather than jumping to retreat or rather than jumping to closing, how do you protect that valuable asset? So I can continue doing what it has been doing. And again, I've witnessed it in the communities that I've worked with. You can get on a path to adaptation and you can do it over time and continue that process as more data and science becomes available, continue to adapt. And hopefully with maybe new technology coming available, continue to adapt. So those conversations about jumping to retreat or jumping to closure that could be happening behind closed doors, the communities want to do something different. Great, thank you. And I think this may give you the last question of the day. Ken, feeling with Storm Center Communications, we're actually a NASA NOAA Homeland Security Geospatial Mapping Technology Company. And as a former local elected official, I'm harking and encouraged to hear that the panel has focused on solutions, I guess being gleaned from the grassroots, the local level, because those solutions generally don't have voices in order to make an impact with the military, with security, enforcement, even with commons. So in order to do that, however, in order to transform their communities into climate change, not just resilient, but prepared communities, they need data, they need information, constantly in real time. So what does that look like in your area or in your community where you are now and what you're suggesting that you're impacting about? Thanks, so data availability needs to make these kinds of decisions. Anyone would like to hop in? We'll give everyone an opportunity if you'd like. Thank you for the question. Yeah, I can try to answer that. Well, I want to lift up the climate services work that is being done throughout the federal agencies. And I think that there is more and more, a lot of capacity being built at the federal level to make sure that that data is getting where it needs to go. But there are geographic gaps in that. We have a lot of US territories, we have a lot of tribal lands in other areas that aren't served by the same climate services that the rest of the country is served by. And then, I think it was Mary Carson who talked a lot about like, we have the data, but then we also have what people are experiencing and they don't always match, right? I think you said that the water doesn't follow the lines on the map. And so, you know, also that integration of lived experience and people's real-time experience which is enabled by social media and other technologies gives us a much more complete picture of what's happening on the ground. I was thinking too, as you're asking your question, like having the data is one thing, but having it in a usable way, especially to lay people who are in communities. I know Antoine, in your CCRS development in communities, is that a barrier that you're seeing in real-time that the data, even if it were there, it's just, you know, sort of too deep or out of reach? No, I mean, I think data looks how it looks at different things. You go to different vulnerability assessments for different things depending on what you're looking for. Some have certain factors that, you know, tie into what you're seeking, others have different factors. What I do think a lot of them ultimately lack is qualitative perspective. So what you miss is the understanding and the stories of the community. You miss what those experiences are. You can easily get, you know, information on the percentage of a Hispanic population, but maybe not the percentage of how many of those are Cuban or Puerto Rican or Dominican or Honduran or Belizean. You know, so, you know, you miss a lot on qualitative perspective and even those unique cultural experiences. So, you know, a lot of times when we look at community-crafted resilience solutions, CSERs, we look not only at that data, but then trying to integrate within that community and identify who those communities are, what their unique experiences are and how we can best tailor those solutions to what best benefits them ultimately, so. Great, thanks. Any final response on the question? Susie, did you have anything you wanted to add? No, that's perfect. We just finished our project in Miami-Dade County on resilience hubs. And we did an incredible data collection and vulnerability assessment and all the different layers. And then what we did was actually go to the community and say, does this make sense? Is this what you're seeing? Is this what you're experiencing, right? And so we, it was a very deliberate process of using the data, but then using the conversations to build the product at the end. So, definitely, I completely agree. Great, thank you. Thank you. I'll just add that there's a lot of data, and especially in areas where things have been studied over and over and over again, like in our region, and particularly because there are so many bases, information about roads and passability, that's available, information about how frequently electrical lines need to be repaired, that's available. It's about taking data and actually making decisions based off of that data that is so difficult. And we're kind of in an implementation phase in this work in our region in particular where we're making hard calls about how to actually move forward and execute big projects and big projects with lots of money behind them. And it's the getting to this next phase where people have to make concessions, people have to compromise, people have to make difficult decisions about how that data is gonna be interpreted and used and actually implemented for future conditions, not just current conditions. And it is not going great. Just say that. Well, we'll have to have another briefing in a couple years, kind of like Rachel's flashback from a couple years ago. I'd like to start by thanking Adam who joined us by video remarks. So thank Adam for coming to us today. Suzy, Mary Carson, Antoine and Rachel, thank you for being tremendous panelists today. I think they deserve one last round of applause. Thank you so much. I'd also like to say thanks to Representative Tonko and Sustainable Energy and Environment Coalition for helping us with the room today. I have great colleagues, Dan O'Brien, Omri, Alison, Erin, Anna, Molly and Nicole for helping pull all these amazing briefings off today. If you wanna hang out a little bit, those of us who are wearing our EESI lapel pins, I'm sure we'd love to chit chat. And if you have any other climate questions or of course our panelists perhaps, if they are able to, if their travel demands don't force them out of the room too quickly, for a moment for networking, but I'm sure we would all enjoy an opportunity to meet you. We also have three really great spring interns, Megan, Emily and Kylie. So thanks for all of your help today as well. We also couldn't do it without you Scott. Thank you very much for being our great videographer today. We will be back next week on April 12th for Funding the Future, the impact of federal clean energy investments. And that's gonna be a briefing that we're pulling off with our friends at the Department of Energy's Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy. You won't wanna miss that. We're doing amazing stuff in buildings and transportation and manufacturing and renewable energy of course as well. And we have other things coming up, other great stuff after that, including ocean carbon dioxide removal, dam safety and even more. To keep up with everything, you haven't already subscribed to Climate Change Solutions. What are you waiting for? It comes out every other Tuesday. It's the best way to keep up with all of our educational resources. We'll go ahead and wrap it there. Thank you again, panel, for joining us today. It really, really learned a lot. It was great. And I hope everyone enjoys the eclipse and enjoys the rest of the basketball tournament because it's super exciting right now. So, thanks everyone. Have a great rest of your Tuesday and we'll wrap it there. Thanks.