 I'm Mary Anna Grisman. I'm the founder and managing partner of Minerva Ventures. We're a consultancy that works on solutions for climate change, for resilience and adaptation, and for mitigation, any of those kinds of things. And I am really excited you're here. I take it personally that you're here because there's a whole area of tools for climate adaptation that are being innovated. And our panel is going to be talking about that today. It's an area that I think a lot of people haven't been thinking about yet because we're thinking about things like reducing greenhouse gas emissions, which is important. But the planet has these big geophysical systems that are already in process. And we tend to not really think about these things happening. So this is a Google campus. Anybody from Google or work and have ever been by there in Mountain View? And this is what it would look like at 2 degrees centigrade, which we're rushing towards right now. And this is what it would look like at 4 degrees centigrade of sea level rise. So that's pretty wet. Right now, Google's counting on the City of Mountain View to implement their sea level rise plan. They have a sea level rise plan. Their expectation, according to the plan, is that sea level will rise around 8 inches or so, which is a little optimistic. They voted on their plan in 2012. And they haven't implemented any of the capital improvement measures yet defined in the plan, although they do have some money to do that. And they haven't really worked with Sunnyvale and Palo Alto to see if they put containment strategies up, like seawalls, what happens to the water that goes to their neighbors, or even across the bay to Fremont that toward the South Bay, the dynamics of waves and water are amplified when people do containment. So you can't really just have one city at a time figure this stuff out. And most of the cities aren't even there yet. So sea level rise predictions, the warmer it gets, the worse they are. I just read an article about three times melting rate in Antarctic compared to what it was predicted to be. So we're in a tough situation, some more data. So there are some efforts in the Bay Area to do design and resilient by design as an example. Right now it's sort of designed by committee. There are groups of people who have come up with really cool ideas. There's no real governance or funding structure to do the engineering and to implement these designs and to figure out the tradeoffs in the whole system. I was at a meeting last week with adapting to rising tides, which is a project run by the Bay Development and Conservation Commission, which has responsibility for 100 feet away from the edge of the bay, which of course is going to be an increasingly large area. And again, they are not, they actually, Palo Alto Mountain View aren't even in the areas that they're looking at initially. So they have some different areas. But again, it's sort of a committee based. There's interesting science and design, but there's no real plan for making change happen. So the questions that we're going to be looking at in our panel today are what actions are being taken to anticipate and address climate impacts for infrastructure, things like energy systems, transportation, water, buildings, and to prepare for the acute shocks and the chronic change over time. What design and management changes need to be driven? What information is needed? How do these new tools that some of our presenters are offering? How do those come into play? I was at another conference last week that was quite interesting about insurance and risk and climate change. And one of the speakers, Lundin Patton, who's a real expert in this area, said civil engineers and architects and others are going to be held accountable if their buildings and infrastructure fail under storm conditions or flood and sea level rise conditions if they fail to anticipate. So that gives these guys who are selling tools a real good market to push for, because they'll be this real liability for the designers to be accountable to. So what are some of those challenges? That's what we're going to delve into. And I'm going to allow the speakers to introduce themselves so that I don't use up their airtime. We have excellent representation from PG&E, from Arab engineers, from Jupiter intelligence. And the empty seat is for Dan McElhaney, who's a deputy director for the Bay Area region for the California Department of Transportation, Caltrans. He's on his way here, and will be joining us when he's able to arrive. So I'm going to turn it over to Nathan. I'm just going to do one of these. All right, y'all. I'm Nathan Benson. I'm a principal on PG&E's climate resilience team. I am really excited that you're all here to learn a little bit more about what we're doing to become a more climate resilient utility. So here we go. So what you're seeing on this slide is an orientation to the many things that PG&E's climate resilience team is undertaking. Today, we're going to focus on the development and implementation of climate resilience tools. But we're really trying to take a comprehensive approach. And the goal, which is actually enshrined in our 2018 to 2023 executive guidance now, so very high level senior leadership level priority, is to integrate climate resilience into all of our lines of business. So all of our electric and gas planners, it's something they're thinking about and everything that they already do. Because this is such a priority for an infrastructure focused company like we are providing essential services. Could the lights be turned off so we can see the slides, but? Sure. OK. I see. The one other thing that I'll say before diving into the tools is that my team was formally formed in 2017, not that long ago. However, that's sort of the formalization of over a decade of work on both the mitigation and adaptation sides of the coin. And our looking at our own climate vulnerability, the vulnerability of our assets to physical infrastructure risk goes back to CDP disclosures as far as 2005. But it's something that we're even pushing forward more strongly on now. Great. So let's talk about the tools. We're developing two tools internally that feed into one another with help from our colleagues at ICF. So the first tool is what we're calling the visualization tool. And you can get a sense for what it looks like up there from now with the red and yellow, not very many green splotches, unfortunately. And essentially what it is, is it's our assets. And on top of that, our assets are data layers that come from Caladapt. And that information speaks to the six climate risks that we identified for ourselves in a 2016 climate vulnerability assessment. And they're listed there on the slide for you to read. So what an asset planner or manager would do is they would go in, they would look at this visualization tool, they would find their asset, and they would get a readout of what level of risk that the climate risks pose for that asset. That then feeds into the screening tool, which is essentially a decision tree, where that expert is going to talk themselves through how sensitive that asset is to the particular climate risks, and then what additional mitigations might need to happen. And again, really all of this work is with the goal of taking the deep expertise that our experts already have. I mean, they know the system with their hands, with their eyes. They know how hot it was last year. They know how hot it was the year before that. And they're already taking a lot of the actions that are needed to make our system resilient. They're just not calling it climate resilience yet. This is just a great question, a line of business. So that's our gas and our electric folks, that people are out there actually managing the system. So let's go ahead and walk through the tool real fast. So let's take an imaginary asset. Let's say it's a transmission tower on a bluff in Pacifica. So the first thing that an asset planner or manager would do is they would locate that in the actual tool, which unfortunately I'm not allowed to show you yet, but it's a big map. They would find it. And then the information that's recorded there would have an output that looks a little bit like this. So you can see that for our imaginary transmission tower, it's got low exposure to most of the climate risks. It's got medium exposure to heatwaves. It's a conductor. That makes sense. It's affected by high heat. And it's got a high sensitivity to storms, maybe because it's on a bluff and it's wind exposed. So you get that information. And then you feed it into the screening tool. And I know that that's tiny. It's not really important that you're able to see the details there. What is important is that you understand that it's essentially a decision tree. So for high and medium risks to an asset, you're going to the expert, the asset manager, will then talk themselves through a series of questions that determine whether or not they really need to take additional action to make that particular piece of equipment more resilient, or if they need to move it, or whatever the mitigation may be. Yes. Asimid is a subject matter expert, the experts that I keep referring to. I'm committing the cardinal PG&E sin of acronymization. I apologize. So I will say one other thing about this. This is really exciting. When we rolled this tool out to our leadership in early 2017, or yeah, early 2018, they immediately had projects that they wanted us to do. We've jumped in with a transformer replacement project in the Sierra that's led to discussion of additional mitigations. And then we've applied it to a project for transmission towers in the Bay Area. And I think that one's particularly exciting, because those guys already knew that they wanted to raise those towers. They understood that it was likely necessary. But they didn't have all the data they needed to justify that internally or to the CPUC. And so we came in with our tool. We did the analysis. And it was very clear that based on the state of California's endorsed data for a sea level rise over the next 30 or 40 years, this was going to be a necessity. And that's something, obviously, we think about a lot as we have to apply to the CPUC to get funded for these projects. So that's at a high level the tool. I'll be happy to answer any questions that you have. Once again, I just want to place this work in a broader, comprehensive climate resilience framework that we're taking on. So we're doing some of our own research. We're diving into each of those climate risks and seeing how they impact sensitive parts of our system. We're developing our own benefit cost framework to get a little bit more sophisticated about how we decide which mitigations are worthwhile or how worthwhile one mitigation is to another. And we're also investing in communities. I help manage a grant program that will invest $400,000 this year in four communities that are trying to enhance their local climate resilience. And we have also just begun engaging the CPUC in their first formal climate resilience OIR, which is an order instituting a rulemaking. So we have set out for the first time publicly our framework for how this might work for California utilities. And you can see the formula on the bottom. It's a very simple way of describing a very complicated issue. But at the bottom line is if the CPUC can tell us which impacts they think that we all need to plan for, we can analyze our system, understand our own vulnerabilities, and put together a plan that will allow us to continue to manage, hopefully affordably and cost effectively, provide safe and sustainable energy services into the future, even though we know that this is going to get harder and harder to do. So with that, I'll turn it over. I got it here. Thank you. OK, my name is Cole Roberts. I'm an associate principal here in San Francisco Bay Area. I lead the Energy and Sustainability Practice for Arup. Arup essentially designs the built environment. We're a large engineering design consulting firm, about 15,000 people globally, about 500 here in the state of California. I've been invited today to specifically talk about an initiative that we launched about four years ago or three, four years ago called Weathershift. And the question of why in the world would we design our infrastructure and our buildings with old data. Every day in the US, about a quarter million to a half million individuals make decisions. These are small decisions made in small rooms. It desks everywhere. And it's used in inaccurate old information, sometimes decades outdated. And yet we know better. We know that global circulation models can inform us and that the resolution of those models has just been improving and improving over time. And we can morph. We can shift and stretch that historic data for future conditions so that we can effectively design our built environment for a future climate. We can do that anywhere in the world where there's historic weather data present. And we can use downscale data or GCM data. We can look across multiple emissions scenarios, multiple paths into the future, and multiple plausible futures across all of the different data sets that are available. And we're using that data in a format that we already know. Those thousands and thousands of individual decisions make use of TMY data, IDF data. If you don't know what that is, that's because you're not a designer designing the built environment. But that's what they use every single day, and that's what they need. They do not need GCM data. They need TMY files. They need IDF curves. And we can make that easily accessible online. So this is a portal into weathershift.com. Couple quick use cases. This is a civic center about half a million square feet. You can see a parking garage in green, a residential skirt around that parking garage in blue, office tower in red, and then a variety of energy infrastructure systems on that design. We looked at the energy use intensity stretching out into 2035 for this project. And the energy use intensity doesn't actually shift that much. It's fairly consistent as we push out across the 10th, 50th, and 90th percentiles of that future climate. But the cooling and heating shift significantly. And that did change the design for this project. Another quick example is the Gerald Desmond bridge replacement, a huge amount of our imported goods come across Long Beach. This is where that bridge is being replaced. I-710 down Southern California. Quick visualization of what that crossing or bridging across water across the roadway is going to look like. And this is using the weathershift data set. Looking at the 25 year and 50 year return periods for the current design, you're basically looking down on top of the roadway here. And even though there's a little bit of blue, which signifies the water, it is not encroaching on the drive aisle. It's not encroaching on where the cars are going to be going. However, with that future data, you see that there is some transference of water across from one side of the roadway to the other, called a bypass. So you're bypassing water across the lane of traffic. You're also seeing exceedances of shoulder conditions. So water is now coming on to the roadway on the shoulder. And those are the red areas on the screen. And then we can also look at what the solutions are for this. So we're identifying multiple new inlets on the bridge in order to accommodate that increased future intensity of rainfall. And then we can cost those changes. And we can inform the clients, do they or do they not want to actually design for the future climate? So effectively, this is a stress test of a key piece of critical infrastructure using future climate data. Another example, pushing out across the world into China is looking at future climate data. For this is a city of about a half a million people. And we've got 10 different energy nodes around that city. I know you can't see this. I apologize for the light levels. But effectively, what you see in the green box, yellow box, and red box are different scenarios in which the energy infrastructure, the energy loops in those cities in that city across those 10 nodes may or may not be upsized or downsized based on future climate conditions. So it's basically percentages, 10% increase in size, 15% increase in size, 15% reduction in size, that kind of thing. So from our standpoint, with the right data, we already have the knowledge and the practice out there with the right data, and with improvements in standards and processes, we can, all of us, can stress test impacts on energy systems, the grid, transportation infrastructure, individual buildings, or portfolios of buildings, renewable energy systems for things like weather risk to PV systems and wind energy systems, and a broad selection of city services. And then we can choose how we want to design for the future climate. It's pretty interesting the order of presentation that we've had today. We've had, obviously, a power user, power company, which has a lot of assets, assets that are at risk. We've had a design consultancy firm and a design engineering firm, which has seen a gap in tools that are available to help them make more informed decisions. So you start to see the shift from power users all the way through to engineering consultancies, which have to develop their own tools, and you end up at me. My name's Dinesh Sharma. I'm head of products at Jupiter Intelligence, where a Silicon Valley startup in the data analytics space. And what's interesting about that is because the topic that's a hand here, climate change and climate resilience, is now a topic which is top of mind for the venture capital industry. And everybody in this particular area knows that as soon as things are starting to smell being able to make money, the venture capital industry is going to jump upon that. And Jupiter Intelligence is a company that hopes to be able to capitalize on a confluence of many different things. What Jupiter does is we provide probabilistic prediction of physical risks. What we mean by that is essentially perils, things like floods and heat, which are the announced products that Jupiter has today. We do this in a probabilistic scenario-based manner, and we deliver those from six months out to 50-plus years in the future. We don't mean by predictions that in 2037 on June 21st, there's gonna be a cap four hurricane on this time. We don't do that. We talk in a vernacular of the risk analytics world, which is percentages of events that are gonna happen. The reason that time is now for something like Jupiter is that it really brings together three major trends which have matured to a level where they can play off one another. The scientific modeling, which has previously been the provider of essentially just supercomputing facilities that are out there in the world, we've been able to look at means of being able to bring scalable cloud computing, scalable platforms to essentially deliver massive scale out there in the cloud to mimic a lot of the functions that you see as far as the HPC environments that are out there today. We can do not everything, but we can do more than enough. Then there's also the scientific modeling has been developed sufficiently so that we can actually take some of those codes, which were previously very optimized for those environments and move them over. Couple that with the advances in machine learning and the amount of data companies like Jupiter is collecting over time. And you can probably imagine that climate and weather data is incredibly verbose is there's opportunities to really play on that. In fact, 13 months after the existence of the founding of the company, our first product, flood score planning is live in Charleston. Charleston was an important area for us to bring together because Charleston unfortunately is subject to the great trifecta. Tropical cyclones, hurricanes, non-tropical cyclones, nor'easters form off there. They have some of the worst king tides. Plus they also have a lot of precipitation and everybody knows the storms are getting wetter. So it was very important for us to find a location which was at risk. And it's actually a very important port for ingress and egress for this country as well. We'll have global coverage in terms of our hyper-local approach to bringing this to big commercial and urban areas. And we'll be bringing that to market over the next few years to have global coverage. We have tremendous leadership as far as our scientific community. Our scientific presence is concerned. Allen Blumberg, the creator of the Princeton Ocean model used by over 5,000 organizations is part of our team. Josh Hacker, who led the first cloud-based stuff at NCAR. Pat Haar, world-renowned expert in tropical cyclones, Betsy Weatherhead, who ran on the Nobel-winning IPCC committee. We attack across broad markets here, but the ones that we're really focusing on are essentially enterprise we mean by just general business, finance, the financial services space, together with public service in the government area. In the enterprise space, we have done a considerable amount of work in the asset owners space so that they can start to assess what their climate exposure is. Anybody who has a long-term commitment to an asset, like PG&E, is going to be concerned about that. There's interesting, some of the things that Nathan talked about is his people on the ground having a view of what the weather is, how hot it's been this year and last year. What we're saying is that kind of tacit knowledge is important, but in the future, you have to essentially model. You have to model the weather of future because it's a non-stationary climate. Understanding what happened over the last 20, 30 years doesn't give you all the full picture. In the finance space, you can probably understand it. There's a lot of finance products out there, risk transfer products, which would have a better understanding of what's going to happen. Hydroelectric companies want to understand and hedge their risk over the next 20, 30 years so we can help them in terms of producing products there. And of course, in the government and the public surface and public sector, understanding all the things that are needed to build in this resilience. Again, non-stationarity of climate is very, very important. It's understanding, building out infrastructure that you thought had a return period of 50 years, probably 20. And so, as Cole was pointing out, people are gonna be held responsible for those decisions. I've already kind of talked a little bit about our flood score planning product. We're gonna be out there in the marketplace in New York City and in South Florida, obviously much broader markets than Charleston but subject to the same kind of things. The level of resolution that we can bring here, obviously with the kind of massive data processing capabilities that we have in our cloud, we can bring it to city block resolution. We run this currently today at 10 meter resolution, which is almost 10 times the resolution what other people have. By having a scalable architecture, that can drop down to even if there's lower resolutions, the digital elevation maps that are available in some areas with the USGS program are down to three meters. It's just more compute time, but it's a finer grained result. Quick vision, I don't wanna scare you. This is a view of Charleston, South Carolina, with flooding at different levels based on one of the visual deliveries of our application. As I mentioned before, everything is built upon the climate score intelligence platform. It underpins everything. So we have a number of different capabilities in data source, accumulation, data assimilation, weather and climate models, together with obviously a deep seated knowledge of how to build massively scalable systems in the cloud. Bring those all together was essentially the marrying of Silicon Valley with the best of earth and ocean system science that is out there is really what Jupiter's all about. There's a few places you can follow us on, thanks. Let me come and get in here. Okay, well, I was hoping Dan would be here by now, but he's not here yet, so we'll get his slides queued up, just to get to that first one, and we'll let him present when he gets here. So, oh, he's here, all right. Yay. You're came with the kind of knowledge. Right, and Susan, do you have any questions? Yes. You're up? Do you have a moment, as well? I'm just, your slides are here. I have a lot of people to introduce themselves, just want to catch your breath, and really how Dan is here, he's with Caltrans in the San Francisco Bay Area, and Caltrans, I should say, and I'll let you take it away. I can put your portfolio. Just use the arrow. Actually, there is a remote. I haven't been using it. It's okay. It's perfect. Good afternoon. I'm Dan McLean, the Chief Deputy District Director for Caltrans here in the Bay Area. Caltrans in the Bay Area has about 3,000 employees across the nine counties, and we cover everything from environmental science to transportation planning to maintenance and capital delivery, which is engineering as well as construction management and traffic operations as well. So, very proud to be in customer service-oriented mode. And so I just came from a public meeting on the Bay Bridge in San Francisco. So thanks for your patience and perfect timing. I have great news. As part of our tools moving forward as a state of California, we've got to have laws and we've got to have policy that give us the opportunity to do the right thing. And California is a leader for the nation on many of these because of our leadership, whether it's Governor Schwarzenegger in the top photo or Governor Brown. There's been a lot of opportunity by the legislature and the governors to sign new bills, such as Assembly Bill 32, Global Warming Solutions Act in 2006 all the way to recently in 2017, Assembly Bill 398, Governor Brown extending the cap and trade program and a number of executive orders in between. They really give direction to all the state departments which provide leadership at the county and state level on greenhouse gas reductions. So tools in policy, tools in law are extremely helpful for us as we put things into practice. And at the district level for Caltrans, we have 12 districts statewide. These give us really excellent guidance in implementing climate change policy and practices into projects. Whether it's new bridge projects, new roadway projects, working with our local assistance in funding local projects. And we want to be able to implement the law and put it into practice. And we have many policies at the department level that guide us as well. So from our planning documents, such as a project initiation document for roadway or bridge projects, we look at climate change elements, particularly initially sea level rise or storm surge related. And I've got some examples of that. They get implemented into the project initiation documents. They look to funding for that through our design and construction. We look forward to incorporating climate change related issues. At the state level also, another great tool is the Ocean Protection Council, which gives us an update on a regular basis on where they see sea level rise along our coastal elements, not just in the Bay. Here in the Bay area, I'm a member of the Bay Conservation and Development Commission. As an alternate commissioner, I've sat and made a number of decisions with the commission on policy related to sea level rise for the Bay. And BCDC, as we're called, gives us an opportunity to provide guidance for the region on where we move ahead. BCDC also looks to the Ocean Protection Council at the state level for information on rising seas in California. And this was just updated in 2018 by the Ocean Protection Council. So I want to give a heads up on that to you. And it gives guidance on planning and design and permitting and construction, but also re-emphasizes at the state level, we want to be sure that we're incorporating good look ahead, whether it's to 2050 or 2100 or 2150 for sea level rise, storm surges, and as like I call them super king tides here in the Bay area. At the district level, we just finished a climate change vulnerability assessment summary report. This is also available online. And it gives us an assessment working with our partners here in the region, what the vulnerabilities are for highways in the Bay area. Right now about 75 miles out of 1400 miles of the highways in the Bay area are vulnerable to flooding. As we look ahead over the next century, we see that almost multiplying by four, almost 200 miles of essential highways in the Bay area. Most of them, you know very well, whether it's route 37 or 237 or the 101 are very vulnerable to higher sea level rise as predicted by the Ocean Protection Council and the Bay area assessment for rising Bay. So we've got to incorporate that into our design. This climate change summary report gives us the first step. It doesn't say what we're gonna do on all the highways, but it gives us really succinct guidance moving ahead. And the next step is what are we gonna do on all those highways? Another great tool is funding. It's nice to have statewide support for the recent Senate Bill one that Governor Brown signed this time last year. It added $5 billion in funding to the Bay area over the next 10 years at the state level and $5 billion at the local level. It will receive a challenge on the November ballot to allow us all to vote to continue to support SB one. That's a gas tax of just 12 cents a gallon, but it is providing us the funding that we need to incorporate climate change resiliency in our projects and to get projects moving for bridges and culverts and pavement. And it's been a big plus over the last year. I mentioned all the highways. So these are all the highways in the Bay and everything in red is vulnerable over the next 50 to 100 years. And so we have mapped those out and we know the hot spots. So we have tools at the regional level and we have projects that are lined up for those and some in planning and some actually heading out to construction over the next few years. So very difficult areas to deal with, particularly the approaches to the seven toll bridges, which we also manage the toll bridges. So the bridges are fine, but the approaches are a little bit of a challenge. They will likely be underwater by the end of the century, if not by mid-century. But we, engineering-wise, there's solutions, but overall there'll be a funding challenge. And this is just a different look at it, 2050, 2070, 2100. So we've looked at this with BCDC and our other partners as to what is vulnerable. How do we adapt? We've got to either defend the shoreline and this is the Bay or along the coast or adapt or retreat or we'll be forced to retreat. And I have a couple more slides. This is an example of retreating. And it's a terrific project that's waiting for Coastal Commission Permit. And you can see that we're retreating to the 2100 limit line. It's soon to be out in construction by next year. And the new bridge actually gets us up above the beach at Gleason Beach in quite a few hundred yards inland. And the bridge is built to the 2100 level. So of course, even the Coastal Commission is questioning, well, this is quite a visual impact along the coast. So we're learning as we go through some of these new projects that everyone has to really get up to speed on climate change and what it means in projects. So this is a real-time project that hopes to be out in construction by next year. We go for the final Coastal Commission Permit this fall. And a number of the partners are questioning the scope but I think as we get, and we've been really emphasizing this is so we're more resilient along the coast. But there'll be many more locations along the California coast where we'll need to do this on Route 1. So that's a great example. So bottom line, I want to thank you for having me here. Look forward to questions. Scoop down a little bit. The last one? Yeah. Yeah, that should be on. Okay, so we are going to be at the Q&A section and I know you guys are probably bursting with questions but I have a couple of kind of summary comments. One thing I noticed thinking about climate change is that the climate science is very well-developed. The tools are getting well-developed. The vulnerability assessment is happening but there is often a gap between mobilizing the will to take action, especially preventive action like for example, that example of moving section of Highway 1, maybe all of Highway 1 is going to have to move because there are many places up and down the coast that are already impacted. So how do we make these decisions? And when we have 101 cities and nine counties in the Bay Area that are doing land use planning plus private property owners, it starts to get to be a very complex challenge. So I think that's one of the, when you've got these great resources, how do you get them connected? How do you get the decision makers to use the tools? How do you get the tools to actually help people? How do you bring in the funding? So the state tax, which I think one of the candidates for governor is running on the platform that we should tax ourselves to prepare for the future, that 12 cents a gallon is somehow a burden on us and we should be against that. And then on the other side, we're saying, hey, this is how we collectively work together to deal with these things that we know are coming faster than our decision processes. So I would like to give the panel one quick response about kind of how do you bridge these gaps between the science, the tools and the decision makers? And then we'll open it up for questions. And we have a mic which will run and I'm gonna ask you when you ask a question to Stan and say your name and maybe where you're from if you want before you ask the question. So we start to get to know each other a little bit. So- Could we get a sense for who is in the room? Like from a standpoint of where they're kind of the room as a whole. Sure. So how many people are from the university or students, professors? How many people are engineers, architects, designers? How many people are in that area of property management or utility infrastructure management? And then I'm missing investment people. Government. Yes, okay, great. All right, thank you. I think that's more or less the scientists. Okay, great. Does that help? Okay, so the question is when we have these silos of knowledge, we have the climate science, the tools and the people who are trying to make decisions to protect assets. How do we make bridges between them? And Nathan, I'm gonna let that start with you and then we'll kind of just really quick answers. Sure. Obviously our, my organization's incentive to do this right is huge. For us, I think it's just about learning fast enough. So we know we must do this. We are gathering as many resources as we can. I had conversations with Cole earlier that will continue and hopefully help me and PG&E. And we're also part of a number of collaborative groups and just where we're all trying to learn from each other. So we're part of something called BC3. Of course San Francisco businesses come together to talk about this because there is an awareness gap and a knowledge gap and we just need to keep going because it's happening now. My input is that we've done this to some extent before. It's a process of standardization. And when you see a process of standardization, you see early adopters, people who are taking early action. At some point, it becomes something that everybody has to do. You start moving into mandatory guidelines. Those mandatory guidelines need to be a little bit loose at the beginning because we're still developing what the processes are. So there needs to be kind of a maturation of those guidelines and then you move into codification. So my only concern is it's not happening fast enough. It's done, we know how to do it. And for those that are in government, I think you have a unique role where you can start to move that either into guideline standardization and maybe maturation, depending on the quality that's out there. For those of you that are practitioners, whether it's science or practice, I think that you guys should be, and if you're not already, you should be early adopters and you should be doing this on projects right now and developing the best practices that then become the guidelines and standards and eventually code. Well, a couple of real world examples ongoing is we have a Bay Area Regional Collaborative of elected officials from the nine counties that meet on a regular basis and look at climate change issues, as well as projects going on around the state, not just transportation related. So at least our government officials are getting together, our counties are getting together and they're trying to develop policy that really makes sense for us here in the Bay Area. Also, I mentioned BCDC, there's an adapting rising tides effort that's been going on for quite a few years that they've been leading working with the nine counties. Another great example that we've got to pull together on policy but actually get out and advance the assessment, there's been quite a bit of investment by Caltrans and others in those assessments. And lastly, remember last winter was really, really surprising on how much storm damage there was across the nine counties, particularly in the North counties for Caltrans and those cities and counties really had a lot of work. We had over 75 emergency projects, $350 million worth of damage repair. That is new for us in the Bay Area. 100 years of Caltrans, that's the biggest storm surge, super king tide all came together with a lot of damage. So things are changing quickly and I think that helps all of us as citizens realize that we've got to adapt quickly and we've got to move forward with some of these solutions and plan for these types of events. I would echo what Cole actually said and add a couple of points and one fairly serious point of concern is that I agree with the standardization as it starts to become codified, becomes what people need to do. One of the other aspects that we're seeing here is we're driving towards businesses who are actually requesting climate disclosures. If you are exposed financially to a company where it owns $70 billion worth of assets and they're all at risk, that has a material impact on you and it has a material impact across the economic spectrum. Rather than the life and loss of life and those kinds of things are very, very important but the money talks at the end of the day and when you start to see companies like BlackRock asking for climate related disclosures in terms of any investment, you're starting to see the needle start to move and when you see things like TCFD and potentially regulations that are gonna happen around every financial company, financial company have to create some kind of quantitative disclosure suddenly becomes more real. One of the points of concern I have is that in a politically charged environment where people are term limited and you're thinking of things in an eight year timeframe or a 10 year timeframe, those are not typically climactic scales and at some point it's politically expedient not to have to worry about something that's going to potentially hit in 30 years, right? But what we're seeing with the data, with some of the pathway scenarios, with some of the new information around melt is you're gonna see material changes especially in sea level rise which is gonna impact places within a 10 year timeframe. So suddenly people who thought it was out of my term limit are now gonna have to start to think about it because instead of people remembering a king tide that happened 30 years ago being particularly bad these are just commonplace occurrences. Charleston is gonna go towards 80 days of nuisance flooding a year by the end of the century on the optimistic kind of scenarios that's one in every four days. They're gonna have water on the streets down Charleston. It's probably gonna happen sooner than that and I think this acceleration is gonna have an impact but I am concerned about term limits and political expediency making it to not of their interest to act in that timeframe. And two additional points we're gonna need amphibious vehicles not just autonomous vehicles. And then the second thing is that I think the time scale, if you think about the Bay Bridge being damaged in 1989 in the Loma Prieta earthquake it took about 30 years for that complete redesign, rebuilding, removal of the old bridge. So and that's a known infrastructure with funding and design and management all kind of integrated between Caltrans and MTC. So if you're trying to think about other infrastructure projects that will take at least 30 years to do and we're saying we aren't gonna really see the impact today what 30 years will be. Once you try to build the sea wall 30 years from now it's a lot different than doing it now or an accommodation strategy or managed retreat. So I think this is a big challenge of getting people to change the time scale from the slow kind of gentlemanly process that city councils take to actually, all right let's consider that we're in an emergency state even though it doesn't feel like an emergency. Questions from the audience. John right here in front. John Massey. So sort of related question. I attended a workshop about 10 years run by BCDC on preparing for sea level rise in the Bay Area which was really a great conference lots of local government folks. They made us do an exercise of doing a 50 year plan which for a fake city around the Bay. One of the clear issues that came up on sea level rise was of course there's uncertainty. And there's lots of issues like should we move back now? Should we do something now? Can we delay investment? What I'm curious about is in your own domains how do you have examples of the trade-offs that people make when having to make long-term infrastructure investments under that kind of uncertainty. What kind of guidelines do people have? Most are related and I go to the alumnus. Great question. I think frankly we're still figuring that out. So we're right now engaged in the exercise of trying to figure out how to draw the circle around what you include in those cost-benefit analyses. And that will obviously determine what path you take but we're fairly early on. I can give an example and also guide you to a resource. So we just finished up a consulting activity with the New York City Office of Recovery and Resilience and they just published their second iteration of their Climate Resilience Design Guidelines which I highly recommend. It's a very good document. They incorporate a discussion of adaptation pathways and that essentially starts to talk to some of those challenges. When do you invest in adapting to an uncertain future and how can you kind of stage that over time so that your investments are phased? They went through 10 different projects in looking at how that would actually happen and it differs from project to project and technology to technology. We did a stress test of the San Francisco Airport, the new terminal one renovation that's happening at the San Francisco Airport. The hydraulic infrastructure there, looking at five-year storms out to end of century, different percentiles and seeing the surcharging, the back flooding that happens as a result of rainfall events in the future. It was a really interesting conversation with them because they effectively said there were about five or six points that backed up in the network. Most of those points, the airplanes can drive through water, it turns out. That's so they were kind of passed through the water. It's a temporary condition. The planes aren't sitting in water over time and it's not sitting in the backflow locations, surcharge locations aren't right up against the building for the most of them. There was a couple areas which were a concern and one pipe was upsized as part of that redesign effort. It was a $5,000 upgrade. I mean, that level of on a $700 million project, it doesn't even register, right? So like that is something that an individual design member can just do and nobody's even gonna bat an eye at it. And that was to end of century. So that's interesting to me because I think that a lot of projects are going to be inherently resilient. A lot of engineered projects, there's already some safety factor in them. Nine out of 10 might be fine. One out of 10, we should know pretty soon whether or not that project's gonna have a failure because it's better to fix it in design or when you're retrofitting it anyhow, then do it later. In regards to where we're at now, we've certainly completed an assessment as I was talking about of the highway system and what's vulnerable at mid-century and end-century. We require that every new project considers the sea level rise and the bay level rise and storm surge requirement throughout the state. So any new project is considering that. I showed you Gleason Beach, that's a great example where it sort of surprises the community as well as the Coastal Commission and others, but everyone's very supportive and understanding. So things really have changed over the last 20 years in that regard. So I think the education of all of us moving forward, but so real projects are getting that implemented. We're still a few years away of an entire solutions plan that develops into say a scale of dollars needed over the next 10 to 20 years. When I showed the Bay Area map and all those red numbers, that's easily in today's dollars and probably shoot low. It's probably a 10 to 20 billion dollar improvement plan that's currently unfunded and certainly not all the solutions have been developed. There's always alternatives. So as we move forward, at some point as a state we're just gonna have to make a complete decision probably in the first quarter of the century on what we're gonna do new to really get the projects moving on a large scale. John, it's a great question. It's something that we see as the outgrowth of the kind of data that we're collecting. Designing for resiliency with a 500 year event this year doesn't mean that in 2035 it's the same 500 year event. That's probably a 100 year event at that time. That's the thing that we have to kind of really, our goals are to provide data to these guys. They understand the cost structures, they understand the long-term built infrastructure for the state and whoever for many, many years, they understand the cost ramifications and the impact on their business. We can just provide better data because better data is starting to become available. So that's where I think companies like Jupiter can kind of contribute to this but there is a ingrained knowledge, is a domain knowledge which I think as we work together this is kind of a hopefully an opening of eyes to say, something you thought had a 100 year return period for a building is actually 20, right? And that's gonna have a problem because we all end up paying for it than if it's civic infrastructure. So I wish you wouldn't call it nuisance flooding. We really need a different term. If it floods every couple of days, it's not a nuisance. It's a term that the DOD likes. Thank you, panel. Perfect segue. My question, my name is Eileen Ambray and I'm with the Center for Resource Solutions and the Presidio. And I think the main thing that nobody's really identified is the, well, the funding in terms of who's gonna really pick up the tab because as Dinesh pointed out, which is really terrifying is we have elected officials who can kick the can down the road and we voters make that easy for them to do too because the media 24 hour cycle and not thinking 30 years ahead in all the drama. We don't necessarily have the courage to take the decisions that will prevail and pointing out what Cole said earlier about standardization. We know that getting to standardization is the way to go. So are there any areas of funding that we can think about now to ward off to get the work done because it's the money. It's being able to pay for it so that we avoid some of these catastrophic things. When you think about it, we had Houston, we had Florida and we had Puerto Rico all in one go and that was before the fires hit. And one of the things that I find distressing about our reaction in California to the fires and then I'll stop is just the blame game. The blame game kicked in, every lawyer's out there trying to sue somebody instead of we're all in this together. This was bigger than anybody could imagine and what are we doing to prepare and fund and not get upset about a 13 cent gasoline tax? Well, first let me just say that personally I appreciate your perspective on what really was. I mean, what was first and foremost a terrible tragedy but second of all, something way bigger than really anyone could have imagined. I mean, it is a new climate environment and the impacts are greater. So for us, it's gonna be really challenging. Affordability is one of our key tenants and that's why we're looking for flexibility from our regulators as we design a framework in which to do this work where we have the space to try and manage things as affordably as we can. We know the impacts are coming. We've already done a vulnerability assessment and we have an understanding of the investments we need to make but we need to be able to do that sort of over time in a phased way if we're gonna be able to continue to provide this essential service at a reasonable cost because there just will be costs. It's a new environment. So it's something we're working on and thinking about and it gets back to my previous answer which is we understand many of the things we need to do but it's about parsing out how to do it most effectively and affordably. So that's the utility perspective. And I'll let Dan hit this one and then we'll go on to the next question. Yeah. Well, I was mentioning before at least on the state highway projects with the policies and laws in place. There's, you know, we're looking for the state and some transportation local funding that meets those needs for sea level rise for instance. So at least that's in place. When BCDC approves a permit within the 100 foot band around the bay developers are stepping up and meeting the requirements that BCDC sees for sea level rise. But like I mentioned, there is a large shortfall in funding at the private level, at the local level and at the state level. At some point we'll have to develop 10 year, 20 year program that has a funding source that addresses it. Of course we talked about the 12 cent gas tax. That's really to get us back up to PAR in addressing bridges and pavement and culverts but that can also bring our old infrastructure up to PAR. But we're gonna need a solid plan that moves ahead over the next 20 years. And that's in the works, but it hasn't been completed. That's gonna take us a few more years. And it's gotta be more than just at the state level. Of course it's gotta be county level, city level. And there's a lot of good things going on at the city and county level. Funding source. And I think one of the challenges is if we just spent $350 million, how many people knew that Caltran spent $350 million to ask you're dealing with emergencies related to flooding? So one out of this group. And this is a pretty informed group. Thank you. So people who care are showing up. So I think part of the point is we come up with the money to handle the repairs because we have to or to fight the fires or to clean up the mess after the fires. But it's these preventative spending that's really a hard sell. And again, I'm concerned about this tax issue coming up in the next election because maybe we need to be talking to our friends and family and our networks to explain why taxing ourselves for prevention is way cheaper than waiting for things to break and trying to fix it later. Suparna. Thanks, Maria. Hi, I'm Suparna with this area. We run a small early stage startup called Climb Formatics, formed of all ex-scientists and climate modelers, computer scientists of XIPCC Group and Lawrence Livermore National Lab. So my question, okay, a bit of background. We are actually building a tool that can give climate and weather prediction at a daily to monthly to yearly and decades ahead at a zip code level or finer. And we are currently testing that out for California running a few pilots. And we also do customized climate modeling for geoengineering space. We are currently trying to save Arctic ice from melting with that project. My question to you is, what would you or your institution have done differently if you knew that the recent drought that hit California, if you had the former information, well ahead of time that starting this year, this month you're going to enter into a multi-year route and how would you have planned? Did you envisage it? Whether it's PG&E, like, did you plan for it? Did you have a prediction scheme for it? Or you were taken by surprise? Or is there any tool that any of you are building or using on that? Okay, go for it. I will, I think the best way I can answer the question is that we have climate data projected. We have our own meteorology department that's super sophisticated. And we have plans and we sort of adjust as we can. Did you see it coming? The drought? Yes, or the fire. Or the fire. Or do you still say flat last year? I can't speak to whether or not we predicted those. I would have to talk to our meteorology team and I'm sure that we did not predict anything having to do with the fires. I mean, that was a complex set of combined effects. Anything for ARIF or calisthenics? Oh, okay. I can add something if you understand you want to jump in, okay, go ahead. Okay, well maybe I'll do something here which is to say that what I mentioned in that maturation curve in this change that we're going through that there's a need for us to stay both kind of rigorous in requiring that people design for the future climate and yet also a bit flexible in how they do it because it's emerging. So you're developing a tool. We have data, Jupiter has data, there's data over here. There's a lot of data out there, right? In different formats and different use profiles. So yes, I think there is, I don't know if it's competing data with what you're doing and the tool set that you're creating but you're not alone. I don't think, and I think Jupiter and ARIF and I think these data sets aren't alone. There's a lot of stuff that's emerging. The bit that I have a challenge with and it goes to some extent back to the question about money because from my standpoint there's two different kind of sides of the money equation. There's the money that we need to fix a problem that we didn't adequately see coming and that's a big ticket. That costs a lot of money and it's to some extent what was brought up earlier. And then there's the money that we spend every day on forming and creating our built environment and we spent a ton of money in that in building this building and building the road that got us here. There's money, there's a lot of money and we waste a tremendous amount of money in how we design our built environment. And I don't think that for the vast majority of the investment out there, I don't think it's a huge margin to prepare better for different potential futures. So I don't think that there's a money problem so much on that front. I think there's a will and kind of enforcement problem. That's one big issue. It's one thing to say to all your designers, you need to consider future climate, how well they do that and whether they do it or not at all is a big question mark. And I think that's for large entities like PG&E and Caltrans as well as for smaller, smaller cities and whether or not you say it and whether you do it is a big enforcement gap. I'll call it enforcement gap. That's probably, I don't know if that's the right term but gap in reality and implementation. And then the other is the business community tends to do a fairly good job of moving fast, right? So you could see Arup released our data set four years ago. Jupiter is at least a year old. Some of the larger constructs, so when you talk about AB2800 and the working group, that's a process and that process takes a long time and to some extent that data has been available for years and yet people aren't using it. And that's a huge frustration but it's also an opportunity. So I would love it to see a little bit more collaboration between private sector and public sector in capitalizing on that fast moving entrepreneurial activity without necessarily kind of fixing it down as an assault, like buying just that one product, right? Because there's gonna be many different products out there and there's many different things but if you don't move, it's gonna be another 10 years before we see infrastructure designed like it should be. We have time for a quick final question. I'd love to hear from someone in the government sector who are the decision makers but okay. I'm perfect, does that count? We'll count you, go ahead. It's paid for. Well, yeah, I meant the, like you just put it. So this feels a little aggressive. I'm gonna move it back. I'm Alan Sands at Berkley Lab. My question has to do with uncertainty. I wanna begin by making a remark about the previous question. The fact that all these projections, model and downscales are now becoming extremely high resolution does not mean they have any more predictive skill than the lower resolution. It's a different thing. So it's not gonna make it any easier to predict fires, for example. But, or any other specific event. But my question's for Nathan. I'm wondering if you could quickly summarize the benefit cost methodology you use to assess the potential resilience investments that you identify with the tools you described. I'm particularly interested in the distinction if any, you do what you do for these things and what you sort of traditional reliability investments which you have more data and which not nearly as uncertain and long-lived. That is a great question and I know the people who can answer it for you. I cannot. I'm afraid we're nearly out of time and I thought, so I'm gonna give each of you like 30 seconds for wrap up thoughts. I do think that one of the biggest gaps is how do you get decision makers who are operating in a different kind of timescale to take this information seriously and to take action on it. So I just wanna express my appreciation for the work that all of you and your organizations are doing, especially the things that go on in the background that we take for granted. And so thank you for bringing it into the foreground and if you wanna just do a very quick sum up, Keith thought you wanna leave the audience with. I'll go first and I'll just boil it down to one word. It's collaboration, don't roll your eyes. We need to keep learning from each other. I think Cole needs to be in the first seat because his last answer was like the best. So yeah, I'll leave it there. Wow, that's nice, thank you. From my standpoint, every one of these conversations is an opportunity for the individuals in the room to walk away with at least one action. And I'll take an action away, which is to share the information that I learned today, especially the Caltrans because I hadn't seen the vulnerability reports. I'm gonna take that one action away and I'm gonna do something with that action to share it with my colleagues. I would ask you guys to all think about one action that you can take away from this one meeting that's tangible because our problem isn't talking, it's doing and we're not doing it fast enough. I don't know about all the other states of the United States, but I know California is really providing leadership. I've been impressed over the last 10 years with the elected officials I've done for us regionally and statewide, how they're leaning on the scientific community, they're leaning on the data and they're adapting as well. And then the education of the communities as we come in with our projects, whether it's infrastructure or otherwise, the education level has come up extremely well over the last 10 years. And so that helps as we're implementing new projects as we're asking for funding to invest in the future. And yeah, definitely together we've gotta move forward at the private industry level, the local city, county and state level. And even the federal highway administration, my counterparts federal highway did allow us to do a resiliency project on route 37 last year and solve a frequent flooding near Nevada on 37 and that's because they saw the need for us to invest. And I was convincing of that in an emergency contract that gave us more resiliency. So at the federal level too, we've all gotta come together to make this happen and be ready over the next 10 years. And again, following from what Cole said, this is not a deterministic problem, it's gonna be a continuum of different solutions. It's gonna be the collaboration, it's the use cases, it's gonna be the desire and drive of people who build billion dollar projects to want to think about where this project is what's gonna look like in the year 2050 and 2060. And so what is happening though is there's a level of innovation that's coming around at this time, you hear from people in the audience that that is I think is very, very encouraging in this space. And I think attracting the attention of the business community, which moves at a different pace and especially they can engage with the private sector who are starting to be much more aware around this, the point I made about somebody like a black rock. Once that happens, when this starts to become a practice in a portfolio from a company like black rock, people are gonna look at it and say, well, why don't we know this about our civic infrastructure? And so it's a yin and yang, things have to work together. I'm not saying they're gonna completely lead, but I think it's gonna have to be a collaboration and again, a continuum of solutions and people, it's an ecosystem that's gonna end up delivering this over time. Great. Before we clap for the panel, I just wanna say the next section on the agenda includes conversations, which will be held in the main ballroom. And I'm hoping that our panelists will join. So if you wanna continue this in more in-depth conversation, we'll be having different conversations at different tables and that will be happening after the brief break. I wanna thank you all for the amazing work you're doing and how thought-provoking the session was. Thank you so much. Thank you, man. Thank you.