 All right. Well, thank you all for coming to the Second Climate Change and National Security Forum. I'm Caitlin Weirall. I'm the co-founder and president of the Center for Climate and Security. And I'd like to start by thanking all of those who made this event possible. Representative Dawn Bacon, Carol Werner and her team at EESI, Lori Glitsen of the H.M. Jackson Foundation, Lucas Haynes, Heather Messera with our team, and our distinguished panels from the Center for Climate and Security. The theme for today's forum is a responsibility to prepare. Our responsibility to prepare is predicated on the fact that we are facing unprecedented risks, and we also have an unprecedented ability to anticipate those risks and to act accordingly. So the discussion and the reports being released today explore both those risks and the opportunities. First, we have distinguished military and national security leaders to discuss the unprecedented risks to homeland, national, and international security posed by climate change. Second, we will explore the tools and capabilities for assessing, anticipating, and responding to those risks. Now, a lot of progress has been made on this front across both Republican and Democratic administrations and Congresses, but there remain key gaps to be filled, and that is basically what we're here to talk about today. So without further ado, I'll hand the floor over to Carol Werner, the Executive Director of the Environment and Energy Study Institute. Thank you. I'm Carol Werner, Executive Director of EESI, the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. I, too, want to thank you all for coming this morning. We are delighted to see you, and I want to say how greatly we appreciate the partnership with the Climate and National Security Forum and working with the Center for Climate and Security. And this topic is an area which we believe is extremely important, and in fact, resilience and climate is a major theme for all of the work that we are doing at EESI. It goes through a lot of the work that we started last year as well as work this year. And in terms of looking at what that means, a lot of this also comes from the fact that we were started over 30 years ago by a bipartisan congressional caucus that was concerned about providing more solid, credible, timely information to policymakers and to their staffs about energy and environmental issues and how we could learn more and also seek out common sense solutions that recognized how important a healthy economy and a healthy environment are to our security. So I want to add my thanks because this briefing and this whole series of briefings and this partnership would not be possible without the support of the Henry M. Jackson Foundation and the David Rockefeller Fund. And so thank you very, very much to our funders so that we can help move this important work forward. Heather? Thank you, Carol, and I'll make this short since I'm the third person welcoming you here today. Thank you guys for coming. What we're going to do is we'll have a first panel that asks kind of frames the big question, what are the effects of climate on national security? And then the second panel will help you guys think through a report that we've put out with recommendations on what various US government agencies and even how Congress can be engaged in providing for better policy in these areas. And I will forego long bios for everyone. I think our moderator can touch on the experience of the group if he would like. We have an extremely diverse panel in terms of backgrounds, in terms of perspectives and disciplines, in the ways that they look at the effects of climate on national security. If you look at the bios in your agenda, you'll see they come with probably potentially two centuries worth of experience in this area altogether, of course. Not any one of you, I promise. But we have folks from almost from every service and we have folks who've dealt with readiness and ranges. We have people who've been ship drivers and we are very lucky to have these distinguished folks on our board to advise us in finding practical policy solutions for these challenges. So without further ado, I will give you the panel. Good morning, everybody. I'm John Conger. I'm going to moderate the panel this morning. I'm a funny story. I did that the first time I testified at a hearing and the members of Congress are all very helpful to say you have to push the button. So, okay. Yes, the learning curve, that's right. Sonya Case, my name is John Conger. I'm going to be moderating the panel today. I'm a senior policy advisor at the Center for Climate Insecurity. And I have, I spent the better part of the last, well, in the last administration in the Pentagon working these issues in a variety of roles. Most recently, the Acting Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy Insulations and Environment. We put out the climate change strategy and such where that had a bunch of time on the hill. I'm going to frame the issue here a little bit and ask some of the questions. And I want to do a brief introduction so you know who's up here. So as Heather said, the framing question for today is how does climate change affect national security? This is a fairly broad topic. I think of it in DOD terms more specifically, sort of how does it affect your mission today? How is it going to affect the set of missions you're going to have to deal with tomorrow? And then how does it affect the geopolitical situation? There are DOD strategies that talk about it being a threat multiplier and that's very real and present and stuff that DOD works to understand. Each of our panelists are going to be able to tell stories from their own experience that fills in each of those areas and talks to each specific. But today, I wanted to use props. So I have here our second edition C-level rise report from the Center of Climate Security. We're issuing this today. You're going to be able to find it on our website. And the folks up here each contributed to this report. So that's why we chose who we chose. We have folks from each service represented and they each have their own expertise that they're bringing to the table. In brief, because I'm not going to read their bios, otherwise I'd filibuster the whole time. But in brief we've got, and I'm going to do all the intros up front and then I'm going to hand it to the panelists to talk. General Jerry Galloway, Army retired. Most recent position was Dean at West Point. He had a long career in the Corps of Engineers and is basically like the water expert if you have water questions. We have Admiral Jonathan White. He was most recently oceanographer of the Navy. General Ron Keyes finished up his career as commander of air combat command. Vice Admiral Robert Parker from the Coast Guard. He was commander of the Coast Guards Atlantic region. And then at the end we have Joan VanderVort. She was an OSD and I worked with Joan frequently when I was in the Pentagon. She was most recently deputy director for Ranges C in airspace and is going to talk a bit about readiness. So with that introduction, you don't need to hear me speak much longer. I'm going to turn it over to General Galloway to start. There we go. A few weeks ago I was at a civilian community, asked to come in and talk about climate change and national security. And the question was, we don't understand. What's the relationship between the two? And I say you may not understand, but soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines all understand because they live with weather and terrain every day. It's the heart of the military profession. You have to know what it is and it affects national strategy and the way you operate. It can influence where we fight, who we fight, it can dictate on what terrain we fight and what that terrain is going to look like and how we're going to fight in that kind of terrain. It defines the type of equipment that we will need and as that changes over time, we have to keep up with it. And it impacts the readiness of hundreds of our military installations here in the United States and abroad. We've got to stay on top of what those installations are doing and ensure that they're ready for the future. Let me give you a few examples. Where will conflicts originate? We can look at the map and we can see lots of things, but one thing we can see whether is stress caused by climate change. The lack of water, the lack of food driven by climate change, the millions of the poorest who are subject to these sorts of stresses. They put these poorest into motion into things like migration and instability. We see uprisings in countries. It's the fertile ground for people like Al Qaeda and ISIS to work. It just leaves people worrying about their future and the future of these countries. Those are the places where we would expect to see catalysts for conflict. This climate change is creating the pressures that may bring us into warfare. It may bring us into needs to support our allies and partners. It may change the way we do things as time progresses. Look at what has happened in Syria and in other places in the world as a result of droughts. Syria, people moved in off the farms. The droughts and the unavailability of wheat moved people into the cities and they didn't have jobs. It created the instabilities that we've already seen there. What's going to happen in Cape Town if they run out of water? That's an amazing thing. What will that do in a tender box? Read the paper Sunday and you can see the challenges that exist there. Significant increase is in major storms. We see that. I'm a flood guy. I'm working in Houston in Texas right now. Let me tell you, 64 inches of rain is a lot of rain. In the context of if you put that on a battlefield, what it would mean. Major storms and rainfall events would turn a normally passable battlefield into mud pits and would stop everything. You can look at history and see the number of times that warfare has stopped with the equipment they had then. And even with our modern equipment, nature takes a lead in many things. You can't cross a river when it's at flood stage. You can't move through areas that are literally impassable because of mud. Increased temperature has already influenced the ability of our aircraft to fly. I think you all recall from the surveillance standpoint that they had to shut down aircraft at Sky Harbor in Phoenix because of hot temperatures. What's going to happen as these temperatures increase and we know they are? What's going to happen on the battlefield when we can't carry the loads that we used to carry? Well, the answer is we need to think about what that's going to mean for us in terms of equipment development. It says that the same temperatures are going to be debilitating to our forces. And how do we operate there? You can say, well, we'll get through it, but you can't. We know what happens. You go back and look at the heat waves in Europe over the past decade, and you see that we're not talking about tens of people. We're talking about thousands of people dying from heat. And when you put soldiers carrying large packs or Marines carrying large packs, people on ships moving across areas where the weather has gotten to be so terrible, it's very difficult for them to operate. We've got to think about those things, and that's going to influence our national security. Daily temperatures, rainfall, drought driven by climate change, fires. We'll place the demands on the military equipment that we haven't seen before. So what are we going to do about it? That means it takes five, 20, maybe 40 years to get to a new weapons system. Look at how long it's taken us to get to several of the systems that we're still developing today. We need to think about what is that temperature requirement? What are the other requirements that are environmental that are going to be there for that equipment? Are we going to be able to supply our logistics? Will we get our water there under conditions of climate change? Those things affect our ability to be on the battlefield and to be effective. These new weapons systems will need to be carefully evaluated. Our supply chains, we've gone to this just in time logistics, which is wonderful. I get everything there just in time. But if the road is cut, the Mississippi River shut down transcontinental traffic in 1993 with that flood. There were lots of places in the Midwest and in the Texas that were shut down during the big floods that you saw last fall. Those things happen overseas. The Indus River, when it rises out of its banks, it moves. The same thing can be said for other areas where we have potential battlefield challenges. So we need to be ready for that. The other thing is the issue of our installations. We have installations all around the world that belong to us, belong to our allies, and those that we share. And they are subject to such things as sea level rise, increased storms. We can see that the hurricanes that have come through recently have made major impacts on these installations. The fires have been very important. You can see pictures, if you picked up the newspaper, of fires just outside Camp Pendleton in California. Those fires shut down the ranges. They endanger our troops that are out there. But they can also occur on the battlefield. If you want to go back in history, go to the wilderness and see the challenges it took place during that battle just north of Richmond when the woods caught fire and the soldiers were there. So we've got to know and understand that and be ready to deal with these things. This requires risk identification at each and every one of our bases here and overseas. It may be an island in the Pacific we use to store goods. It might be the coagulant and complex where we use and work on missiles and use that as a training ground and a testing ground. We've got to be ready to see what's going to happen over time and have addressed that and started the process that in this particular building begins of getting money ready. You can't just go in and ask for a million dollars for next year. It goes through a long process and you have to rack and stack these over time to ensure that you're ready and you are properly dealing with this particular issue. We know that we have these challenges in our installations. I compliment the Department of Defense for setting out to find out what they really are and they've made the initial sweep through to identify what they have out there. What's interesting is a survey that was completed recently by the DOD. About 50% of the people out there said, yep, we can see it already and you'll hear from my colleagues some of the challenges that exist at the bases that are on the east coast and in our report we talk about that. What is there out there? I was at Hilton Head and talking to them about Parris Island. They're worried about that. Those are their neighbors and when they can't get to the ranges, when they can't move the troops around, that's a problem for us. And when you can't get to the ports to send the troops overseas, that's a problem for us. We expect, you expect the military to be ready for anything. We think that it's important to understand that climate change is going to cause big bumps and as this report says, the military has a responsibility to prepare and they have to be ready for climate change and I'll stop there. Great. Thank you. Thanks, Jerry. Next we're going to hear from Admiral White and get a little bit of a Navy perspective. Thanks, John. So if I seem a little stressed up here, it's because I'm sitting next to one guy he used to sign my fitness report or that's a performance evaluation. The other guy he used to sign it is in the back of the room and he'll be on the next panel. So one thing I think we all know is that it doesn't matter how senior you get, your former bosses are always happy to provide you with feedback on how you did things wrong. So I am an oceanographer. I'm currently the president and CEO of the Consortium for Ocean Leadership. It's an ocean science organization, a consortium of about 100 institutions, industry, academic ocean science and it's all around ocean. So sea level rise is sort of what we deal with and everything that happens to the ocean and how the ocean impacts climate overall. The first thing I just want to say and did this a lot in the Pentagon working with several folks is understanding that the climate change impacts on a maritime nation and we are a maritime nation arguably the largest maritime nation with the largest amount of EEZ. France doesn't think so but it's just an argument about a few thousand square miles. So as a maritime nation we need to understand that the geostrategic landscape is changing and that's one of the up front things you'll find in this report. Well, okay that's really profound. The geostrategic landscape is always changing. Politics are changing, leaders are changing, nations are changing borders, things come and things go. We spend a lot of, we invest a lot of resources in understanding how the geostrategic landscape is changing. My question is have we focused enough resources and are we really getting understanding how the geostrategic landscape is changing in terms of the impacts of climate change on that and that will come to my end market as well. So think about that, how has climate change really impacted and what are we doing to understand it? We talk about coastal geography, sea level rise, changing coastlines, the infrastructure. I was just down in Miami a couple of weeks ago visiting the University of Miami, one of our members. You sort of forget about Irma and what happened to the middle keys. It went right over to the category 4 hurricane. Oh there's a little naval air station down there in Boca Chica known as NAS Key West and if you go to the Commander Navy Insulation's website it says I quote, it's got perfect flying weather year round. Well except for maybe in the middle of that cut for hurricane, that's just one day, right? No. So we think about the future of Key West as talked about in there and you start to look at the impact. The impact on some of our coastal bases, but that one and there's a picture of it I think on the front of the report. As well think of 2050, 2070, 2070 likely high tide every day is going to result in about at least half of the land that we know it in NAS Key West now being flooded. Very likely given all the uncertainties that are in there. We'll see but we have to plan for that. So think about that's one base and you look at the keys and the hazardous weather and the events and everything. It's certainly those type of bases are to be looked at. So there's the infrastructure. Then there's the Arctic. Oh by the way, China just put a paper out as part of their maritime belt strategy and they basically talk about the polar silk road. Do we have a silk road? That's part of our road to get up there. We think about what's happening in the Arctic and the Arctic as we know is changing the impact on the Arctic. It's not just that it's going to be water and things like that. What's going to happen to commerce, to traffic, to industry and to our competitors? Are we looking at an Arctic that is as controversial as the South China Sea? I don't know in 30 years something to think about. We think about the basic needs and the impacts on leadership and geostrategical issues that my cohorts have and we'll talk about but I get back to the ocean pieces and the importance of climate change on the ocean and looking at food security, water security, as was mentioned by General Galloway and these issues, how is that going to change the risk of conflict as he talked about? I want to really emphasize that because we see food sources and compound climate change changing in ocean chemistry, ocean biology, sea level rise with overfishing. What's happening there? Growing populations and coastal areas that are highly privatized. What's going to happen? How does that lead? Does that lead to a conflict type of scenarios around the world that we don't even understand today? We need to understand that. That gets back to the how question. In the really impact that we're starting to see, what you understand is the impact on the resources. Everybody is great. We've got a budget pass. DoD is getting a lot of money. They're going to build ships in the Navy probably. By the way, from a Navy Coast Guard perspective, we like that maritime piece. We talk about planet Earth and I focus on ocean because apparently the Army guys named the planet. If it had been the Coast Guard Navy, the planet ocean, if it had been the Air Force, it would have been the planet air and space. But it really is planet ocean with 71%. What resources are we in the Navy? What resources are we on DoD really applying to understanding the how and the resource impacts of getting after this? We certainly need to invest in more research on what's happening to our climate, what is happening to our ocean, what is going to happen to our coastlines and taking that and assessing the risk based on the understanding of the science. We have to invest in science. We have a military that has always been invested and founded on scientific principles. It's key to our future and we need to understand that but the military can't do it alone. But I ask, is our military, is our Department of Defense, is their voice loud enough to influence our federal investment in the science that will help us understand the impacts going forward? And that gets to the how question of understanding that geostrategic landscape of the future and then what do we do about it, which is what the next panel is going to talk about. Thank you. Thanks, John. So, so far we've heard a lot about geopolitical implications. We've heard a lot about how climate is affecting operations on the battlefield today, how it can affect our installations. And then Admiral White talked a little bit about the Arctic as well. Next, we're going to hear from General Keyes, who also, you know, as he was commander of ACC, the Air Combat Command, he also commanded one of the bases that's going to be most impacted or is being impacted even today by climate change. I suspect he's going to talk a little bit about Langley. General. You hope. Well, I just like to go back. I mean, I could easily say me too and then pass the microphone. I mean, we've covered a lot. Basically, it's a matter of planning. It's kind of two-part science and then one part what's practical, affordable and doable in time. That's what we really have to get to. The first part of the science is in the report is the effects of sea level rise. I mean, that's a fairly understood science. If you tell me, if I were a hydrology engineer, if you tell me the sea level is going to rise six inches, I can roll that out on a coastal base and I can tell you to a technical term, to a gnats ass, where that water is going to rise to. I mean, that is all math. On the other hand, if you tell me the sea level is going to rise six inches, then people might argue, is it going to rise six inches? Is it going to rise a foot? Is it going to rise three feet? I think we pretty much agree that it's going to rise some level. So what we have to work through now is, well, how soon and how high and then what can you do? And there are really two issues. One is the direct effect on bases. It's any port base, it's just like a little village or city or town. And what I have to be able to do is I have to be able to live there, I have to be able to train there, I have to be able to test there, I have to mobilize, I have to deploy. And in many cases, particularly for the Air Force, I've got to reach back. If I'm flying my RPVs, I'm flying them remotely. If I'm doing my intelligence analysis, I'm doing it remotely, back here. And so we tend to think sometimes about climate changes, the global aspects. And there are global aspects, but there are direct effects on where we're based. We've got something 95,000 miles of coastline and something south of 2,000 bases that could be affected. So we need to look at it and say, what will it look like? And then the other part of it is the indirect effect. It's more business. If I'm going to have to go out and do firefighting, if I have to do swift water rescue, if I am doing recon on disasters, humanitarian relief, that means I'm going to have to have more training. You can't put people out on the fire line that you haven't trained to be on the fire line. You can't do swift water rescue unless you learn to do swift water rescue or we're going to have everybody swept away. And that may mean that I need different gear. And so I've got to make a plan for, do I need different gear? Can I adapt the gear I have? How much money is that going to cost? How much training time is that going to take? Because that takes away from the original job that you all hired us to do, which is go and fight and win America's wars when we're called upon to do so. Whether that's global vigilance, humanitarian rescue or actual combat. So we've got to make those trades that forces us to make those trades. And that's sort of a part of what I call the fragile, the failing and the feckless states over there that this is going to get real bad real quick. When they run out of water, they run out of food, we get ungoverned spaces and the crazies start filtering in there to build their own spaces. So I think that's important. So the approach has got to be, well, how bad could it be? And could we stand that? Because we in the military have a term that's called survive to operate. That means we know we're going to be attacked, but we have got to be able to fight through the attack and continue to operate. So you look at how bad could it be? In some cases, I'm not going to put a lot of money in it because I'll stand on one leg and grip my teeth until it's over and then I'll go on with my life. In other cases, I find out I couldn't stand that. So then the next question I got asked is what could we do? Can I put up a berm? Can I put pumps? Can I change where I've cited some of my business? Because this is not about a tidal wave 30 feet high sweeping across a base. This is about water coming in every day. You have two high tides in a 24-hour period and we call that nuisance flooding. But the nuisance flooding, when it gets to a certain area, you go, it's not nuisance flooding because my people can't park in a parking lot anymore because when high tide comes, it seeps in the doors of their car. They can't get to work in some cases. So what can we do to change that? And then how long will that take? And how much will it cost? And then what if we're wrong? And how will we know we're wrong? Are we not building enough? Or are we building more than we really need to? Because once again, money doesn't grow on trees. We've got a limited amount of money and you're going to have to balance against all the threats, the threats that we call adversaries. And now as it turns out, mother nature may in fact be one of our adversaries. So you have to balance that sort of risk. I was stationed at Langley Air Force Base twice, once in the early 80s and applying F-15s. And we had, during that time, we had a number of hurricanes moved through there. And so long about September when you're finishing your flying hours out, we'd have to fly to Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio because the hurricane's coming through and you don't want your birds sitting on the ramp when that happened. But we didn't get a lot of damage. We got a little bit of wind damage, but not much because the base was built of withstand what? Hurricanes. We're smart enough to figure that out. The other problem that we have is we had a little bit of flooding because as you, when you set your altimeter to take off, you set it at seven feet. So you're not that high off the water to begin with. Then I came back to 2005 as Commander Bear Combat Command, same base. We didn't have any big hurricanes go rolling through there, but we had several Nor'easters come through. And wouldn't you know it? The Nor'easter hits at the absolute wrong time. It hits at high tide. It hits at the proper angle so the winds could come sweeping in that bay. And we had about three feet of water in the road outside of my quarters there. We had not had that sort of problem before. Then we had another one. And we had another huge push of water. And we have, you know, we have done things that we thought were prudent, but it turns out we need to do more. So those are the kinds of threats that you face and that I have seen the change from way back when the hurricane would hit and it was an irritant, but it wasn't that bad to the point that now you're just getting a plain old vanilla Nor'easter and it gets pretty painful because it's not just a matter of, again, a tidal wave coming across your base and knocking things down. It's getting into electrical conduits that we buried because why? Because we didn't want the hurricanes knocking the poles down. You get water backing up into some of your backup generator areas, because why? There are nice big concrete blockhouses built fairly low to withstand winds, but now we've got water seeping into them. So it's all of that. Then you start looking at your wells around the base and you're starting to see salt water and training into your freshwater wells. So those are the kinds of things that we just have got to look at and make investments based not on historically what happened, but in the future what may happen. And that's hard. It's hard for all of us to look at what's the future worth of a present investment. If we could get our heads around that, we'd all be millionaires on the stock market if we could figure that out. And now we've got to spend money against a risk that we're pretty sure it's coming, but it's not 100%. But we in the military look at it, if you wait till it's 100%, then you're in a situation where one of my favorite lines, if you wait till you're as deep to a tall shrimper in water before you start worrying about sea level rise, you're way behind the curve at that point. We can't allow that to happen. We have got to start making it. So it's a matter of how bad could it be? Could we stand it? If we can't, what can we do? How long will it take? How much will it cost? And then what if we're wrong? I think all of us in here lived through the mortgage meltdown in 2008. And a great part of that problem was what? The default rates were based on historical default rates. It didn't take into account what the situation was today and what the situation was going to be in about three to five years when all the teaser rates came due and jacked up. We can't afford to do that in this situation here with climate and sea level rise. That's my story and I'm sticking to it. Thanks, Ron. And I think I want to sort of pull one thread that the general mentioned. DoD self-insures. So when something goes wrong, we can't rely on somebody else to come and bail us out. We have to prepare for that contingency. You know, as well as I do, that DoD is a contingency operation. We don't want to have to fight a war. We prepare for it. And so with climate change coming and the sea level rising, we have to basically take that into account as we make our investments going forward. You don't want to build your new building where it's going to be flooded out in 10 years. You don't want to do that. It doesn't make sense. And so it's about prudently investing your resources in the future, not just mitigating the ones that you've already spent, but you got to do some of that too. Okay. So next, we have Vice Admiral Robert Parker from the Coast Guard retired. And I suspect that you had jurisdiction over a whole host of sea level impacted installations. We do. Thank you. Good morning and thanks for all of you for your attention and your interest in this topic. None of my bosses are in the room. My stress involves whether or not the dog has been out recently enough that we don't have to worry about that. But I do worry about how we're going about addressing, you know, a changing climate. And it's been a passionate topic for me for a while. I can also say me too, because whenever the services mobilized to fight, the Coast Guard's somewhere in the mix there been involved in every armed conflict since the forming of our nation. So we depend on the DOD side to do that. So what's different about us for those of us who wore the Coast Guard uniform? Well, a couple of things. One is we have both national security and homeland security issues to deal with. And when your work involves first responder type activities, both in the impacted zone and also where you happen to be based to support that effort, it creates a slightly different mix. It doesn't seem like as big a deal until you realize that time is life. In a lot of the missions that we have, in addition to the one that we have to support DOD, we have 10 other statutory missions in the Coast Guard that are all impacted by that event. Moving commerce, safety of lives, key among those. And when you have work that is a time sensitivity to it that's on the water, the planet ocean, as John said, it's important that you're close enough to get to it because that proximity matters. It's a speed time distance problem for us. So we find that almost all of our facilities are in areas that are at some level of risk. So we're constantly balancing that risk as we go through. The Arctic challenges, as John mentioned, are very much there. We're happy to partner with the Navy in trying to sort out how we do that, who does that, how you resource that, what it means. Infrastructure is extremely problematic in the Arctic to begin with. And then with warming and the erosion, you know when the natives who have lived there for thousands of years pick up and move their entire village, you've got to do something different than the way we think about things in the lower 48. So those challenges are real for us in the Coast Guard and how we go about doing that. The other challenge that we have, and I'm happy to say the Coast Guard, if you look at the report and you look at the recommendations in there, is addressing all of those possible exception of the data issue at the bottom, which I think everybody's still struggling with. But it's less of a focus area at the DHS departmental level. You might notice they've got some other distractions between immigration and cyber and some other issues that are going on that are taking up the limited bandwidth that they do have. And they don't have the history as an organization to have the planning factors built in that would automatically include climate change. These are just things that are part of the mix as they go on. They're not as big of an issue in the strategic documents. So why do I care about this? How did I come to be passionate about this? As a ship driver, you get interested in weather. It affects everything you do. And when the weather goes bad more frequently and more severely, you begin to wonder if you're just in the wrong place or the wrong line of work. I remember fairly vividly after about midway through my career when I was driving ships and I was on a ship based out of New Bedford in Massachusetts, and we were up off of New England. We're out on the egg line between U.S. and Canada doing fisheries enforcement. And the only news we could get at that time was via AM radio or via the teletype. And we knew there was a storm coming. We were planning for it. We're trying to dodge it. And I remember hearing very vividly a newscaster say, and this storm has passed safely out to sea. That didn't make me feel any better at all. So it matters where you are as to what impact you're going to get from these things. And then as I got to grow into my chops as I got more senior in the service, I was down at U.S. Southern Command. And I found that we were spending a lot more time doing humanitarian assistance work down in the Caribbean, specifically in Haiti. We did four relief efforts in Haiti in two years before we did the earthquake relief down there. I was the J3 for that event. And then I left there and came up to the Atlantic area, and I noticed that it seemed like we were doing hurricane relief all the time. And then I also noticed that we were, our headquarters bordered a street called Water Street, which was a very aptly named because every time a storm rolled through or an or Easter rolled through, it was underwater. And a mini Cooper really doesn't do well, by the way, for those of you who drive that when the water is three feet deep on the street. So I got more and more interested in this as I went along. And then Superstorm Sandy hit. Our first encounter with Sandy was down in Guantanamo Bay where we have forward operating base for our helicopters that base on and off our ships. It's our four logistics area down there. It's a wildly useful space for DHS. Direct hit right into the hangar. It had never had a category two hit before. Wiped out the facility. Rebasing over on a place that had previously been wiped out and then rebuilt over in Turks and Caicos in order to do all the support work we needed to do there. It did not have the logistics footprint we needed. We did not have everything else we needed to do that. That was complicated enough, but the storm also bent then straight up through the Bahamas and ripped through the Bahamas as a category four before it came all the way up back to just a category one and then impacted the major news zone of the United States, which is kind of an interesting way to get attention on this. One of the things we learned during Sandy was some of your planning is based on the last big event you had. Just like the story about the mortgage, after 9-11 our folks in New York at the sector there moved all their strategic or their tactical communications off the towers because they were on tower one at the World Trade Center when the attack hit in 9-11. So where did they move it? They put it in a nice safe place which was underground at the South Battery. Yeah, it didn't do very well during Hurricane Sandy. So one net for the city was completely out. It was a very interesting place to visit when the lights were out below 72nd in all of Lower Manhattan. It looked like something out of a science fiction movie and working in that environment, trying to provide relief, trying to get gasoline to move again and stave off the people that wanted you to just park a barge and pump it over the side. Static electricity, by the way, very bad with gasoline. So there's a lot of different challenges that you have when you have that much of our populace that lives, works, eats, sleeps, breathes in these impacted zones. So one of the things that happened in Sandy and it's in the report, and it doesn't seem like a huge base, but it's a key point. It's Sandy Hook, New Jersey. It's right at the entrance where Ambrose Channel comes in. We had a fairly good tactical base there. Pretty much wiped off the map. I wanted to put the fuel pier on a milk cart to see if anybody could go find it because it was just gone from the facility. But when we went there and visited, there was great angst to get back in and get operating again. And the timeline that was involved and the planning at that time that existed really told us to go ahead and rebuild where we were because all of the bases and things we have are so precious, you know, both from a operating standpoint and from a constituency standpoint, that it's just too hard to move off that marker to something else. It's easier to rebuild and move on because the press of the day wants you to do that. In hindsight, I don't think I'd make that decision. And the folks that I've talked to recently in the Coast Guard leadership are trying to get a more strategic look at this so that we don't strengthen something that sits in an increasingly vulnerable spot. They're throwing good money after bad. And when you look at it, the very example of the mortgage piece, if you look at how the Coast Guard has had to invest, and it's a very small amount. You've got a $20 billion infrastructure capital there. So you're looking at about a billion dollars recently that you put on top of that. That's a lot of money. And it's about twice the money that we've invested through direct planning. And it's putting it back into areas that, frankly, if we had to do it from scratch, we wouldn't invest in. So I think we need a better strategic look at how we do that, have strategic options available to us. I'm happy to say the service is trying to do that. We need to do more of that across the way. The last thing, a point I'll make here is when you look at how this is done, it's not just the services that are impacted. There's families associated with that. All the things that support that, the logistics to get, the care and feeding for the people that are based there and all of the community are very important and they're equally impacted. So if you can't get a coordinating mechanism to get all those people thinking together, and it's state, local, tribal governments, tribal, especially where I live out in Washington state, and then you get the federal government involved and you get the services involved, it's nice to have everybody in the room. You'll probably hear this from me and Phillips later, but somebody has to be in charge. Right now there's not a good overlay on top of that that's a planning document that says who's in charge of what, who needs to do what, and be careful where we put that because if it's flooding, the natural place to put that is the Corps of Engineers and I can tell you that their kit is already completely full and then some. So maybe there's some other way that we need to scratch at it, but there's a piece there missing as we're looking at the oversight and authorization that we really need to look at and that's how do we do this, what is the forcing mechanism to get these people to talk together and how do we do it in a way that it's common enough between the different areas that the people that touch all those different areas don't have to learn a hundred different ways of doing business. Thanks again for your attention. I look forward to your questions. Great, thank you very much, Adam. Last, but not least, we have Joan Vanderbord. Joan is a readiness expert and I think she's going to talk a little bit about how sea level rise and other climate change effects are affecting how the military trains and tests on our ranges and Joan, I'll turn it over to you. Thank you very much, John. My passion for the last 15 years, both when I was with the Army as well as with the Office of the Secretary of Defense has been in training readiness. From the perspective of how can I protect that training readiness? Most of my focus has been on encroachment, encroachment from urban sprawl, from compliance with environmental regulations and looking at lessening the restrictions and the challenges on the services when they train. See, our ability to be a ready force really depends upon our ability to train. Therefore, that requires us to have access to land, sea, and airspace assets and particularly for land that has a carrying capacity to support that training because we have large weapons platforms, we have a large force that we have to train. So that's where our ability, we really depend on that land, sea, and airspace. You know, the services have been challenged over the years with encroachment and they've been doing very well in meeting those challenges but we still have restrictions on training and actually our testing missions as well but you know what the game-changer is? The game-changer is climate change and not just sea level rise but all the different other climate change factors like drought, wildfire, higher temperatures. And so one of the words that I'm going to use is or a phrase is happening now. We don't have to wait 10 or 15 years or predict what's going to happen in the future because we are seeing the direct impact of climate change on our training right now. Let me give you a couple of examples and these, mostly these are from the Army. Over the last five years, they've been seeing some unprecedented frequency of catastrophic events. Impacts from climate change that are really happening to their training areas. Let's take for example 2015. Very serious and devastating rainfall events that impacted Fort Benning, Fort Jackson and Fort Polk. At Fort Benning over a three month time period they had two back-to-back severe weather weather events. Lots of rainfall. This caused over $14 million in damages and extensive damage to their multi-million dollar digital multi-purpose range their good hope maneuver training area and drop zones with significant impacts to their training. Now, let's look at encroachment what else was happening at that time. Because they had such significant damage and such massive erosion in the training area we have a Clean Water Act compliance issues because down at Fort Benning they already have impaired waters. So we've compounded the problem there. At Fort Jackson more than 15 inches of rain fell within a 24 hour period washing out targets, roads, bridges, disrupting the unit training and you have to remember that at Fort Jackson it is one of our larger basic training installations. They had sustained training delays related as they were waiting for those repairs to take place but also lots and lots of erosion. Clean Water Act Clean Water Act violations and just compliance issues running into both cost and delays. And so we had approximately $4.8 million in damages at Fort Jackson with $4.7 million at Fort Polk. So if you could see that we have to dig into our pockets to really take care of those expenses and it's not just an expense they're damages. And those repairs can't easily be made overnight. And the impact to the training land was tremendous was tremendous. I was a training area program manager with the Army for quite a number of years and I can tell you sustainment of our maneuver training lands is key to training because you cannot train ground troops without a sustainable training land base and the repairs needed to keep the capability up is tremendous there. Fort Irwin, another really good example, 2014 after a three-year drought they had a monsoon. It took out a brigade-side live-fire training complex. That is a tremendous impact for that installation over $50 million in damages. In Alaska let's look at something other than rainfall events. We had some rising temperatures that had caused extensive flooding in a maneuver training area and with the battle area complex adonally training area. Now what happened there? We had an unusable maneuver training area and an inoperable battle area complex facility that we couldn't use for months. Think about the impact of training. You have lost training events lost training days soldiers that are not getting trained. For Wainwright we had loss of the permafrost because of higher temperatures which resulted in the maneuver training land with sinkholes safety hazard which affected airborne and mounted and dismounted training as well. So we not only lost training time but we also had very high extensive damage and it cost a lot to repair that damage and not to say it won't happen again. So those are kind of my examples but we even have something like a camp in the middle of the north of the city of Hamilton. The Marine Corps premier amphibious base out west they are already challenged by escalating restrictions and limitations to training due to encroachment from urban development. 50% of their restrictions are due to threaten and endangered species as well as fire risk. After series of wildfires there, damages to the training area even when you have a risk of wildfire it can limit your training. So limits on or you know precluding training live fire pyrotechnics explosives and in just between 2013 and 2015 nearly 53,000 acres burned at Camp Pendleton. Now from a land management aspect from training land when you have high intensity fires that are burning that land you're also going to hurt that soil and that soil is going to be less receptive to rainfall and it won't be able to take it in as quickly so you're compounding the problems there. Now just think about this at Camp Pendleton they can support up to 51,000 training events a year and so when you're restricting and you're limiting training and you have risk of wildfire and of course they are on the coast and they are at risk to sea level rise you're really hurting your training capability there. So the bottom line is that climate change is impacting training right now we're not saying in 5 years or 10 years but it is impacting training right now and that access to our air and sea and land assets is so very important to our training capability and our national security. Thanks Jim. So I'm just going to recap a little bit and then I'm going to maybe ask a couple questions. I framed the discussion earlier as we're talking about how climate change affects national security is things that affect operations today so you've got operational impacts, you have impacts to our installations and to our infrastructure and you have impacts as you just heard to readiness and our training capability. We're going to have impacts tomorrow to the next generation of missions. We talked a little bit about the Arctic and how as the ice melts up there there is going to be more activity, how China has plans to expand trade routes through the Arctic how inevitably there will be more resource extraction and as we think about resource extraction inevitably we're going to be talking about conflicts and we talked a little bit about frankly, fishing is a resource extraction issue too which is not immune from conflicts by any stretch of the imagination new storm patterns and so on. We talked a little bit about geopolitics as sort of a third category of impact how climate change can be a threat multiplier and how water shortages and food shortages can really light a tinder box that is a weak state or a fragile state. This is fertile ground for terrorist organizations who are trying to recruit because when you have economic displacement you have folks who don't have anything else to turn to and they are more easily and more susceptible to those kinds of lures. So in that context, again I'm repeating myself so you take it away this is clear, it is clear that climate change has an impact on national security we've heard a bunch of those pieces through the conversation today I am going to remind you all that we have this report that we're releasing today on sea level rise and national security that each of these experts contributed to. I want to invite, I know we talked about several installations already but as this report talks about many more than we've touched on, if anybody wanted to bring up other examples that they have personal stories about where they have seen the impacts of sea level rise on bases please jump in. Yes? Okay. Alright, so one is very close to here the naval academy at Annapolis which if you look on the front of the other report that's out from the advisory group there's a picture of the Air Force Chapel the midshipment don't want to be worshiped at the Air Force Chapel, I hear I don't know, but you look at that and we've seen the impacts of sea level rise already at the naval academy they actually have been working, they're putting plans in place what would it take to change the infrastructure to ensure that the flooding that we've seen with Hurricane Isabel and other events at the US Naval Academy that we actually do something to adapt to the change and we're able to keep our base there or if not, at what point do you make a decision on moving it somewhere else? These are things that are going on right now so I think that's one that is a really good example we've also seen with our naval station in Norfolk which was a pilot project actually in Tarahat and Rhodes area including Langley including Army installations and looked at all of it and Coast Guard of looking at what is in the future but I think when you look at the situation in Annapolis right there the river and the impacts and the Chesapeake the winds and the storms the right way as General Keyes talked about that's one key example I think we in D.C. can focus because it's only an hour away and you have a chance to see what's really going on there as a case study for how to get something right in the future so that's one that really gets my attention Anybody else want to touch another example? If not I wanted to highlight a couple other points that got made Admiral Parker talked about how the Coast Guard has $20 billion in infrastructure and obviously that's largely on the coasts and while I couldn't tell you exactly how much of the DoD infrastructure is on the coasts just so we're clear because I used to sort of have oversight over it all the DoD currently values its infrastructure at $1 trillion so there is a lot there to be impacted and a lot of reinvestment that would be forced if you have to move missions or at least mitigate against them and frankly that's a key point too we are unlikely to want to move bases when it costs billions and billions and billions of dollars to relocate critical assets frankly we have to figure out a way to adapt to those problems in place because we're not going to want to move those bases if we can help it let's talk a little bit about the geopolitics too because frankly this is it's an inescapable truth that the climate change is a threat multiplier that these issues cause conflicts overseas I know General Galloway just participated in a CNA panel I happen to be in the audience for so I'm going to ask him to talk a little bit about this I didn't prep him for this but since I've seen him talk about it already can you talk a little bit about how water causes conflict geopolitically well water is water is certainly something that we can't live without and the challenges that we face overseas is that it's in short supply in the areas where the people are the poorest and where we are most likely to have the major stresses it is not just in the places we think about in deserts but you go to places like Cape Town you go to places like Rio you go to places like Manila where there are hundreds of thousands of people who have been in poverty and don't have access to water supplies so as water stress grows as temperature grows as drought increases what are they going to do about that how do you provide that sort of resource to people who will then need jobs have families to raise and will look to the government to deal with that many of you may think back to Bolivia many years ago decade when the Bolivian government decided that they would water water so they would contract out water to an American firm and let them run it the riots of Cochabamba were our legend because they really nearly brought the government down and caused the new constitution of that state to say that water is a right and we've got to ensure that people have access to it and that same thing appears in southeast Asia where we're struggling over dams on the Mekong River we see the Irawati and the Salween developed we see the conflict between water stress for hydro power we want to have hydro power at the same time what do you want to do you want to preserve fisheries that are feeding millions of people so you have to balance all of those things and in the middle of this the military sits and watches and what I think what we're doing and is very useful our military forces with their one-on-one with their counterparts are helping them understand the challenges how you identify the risk what you can do about it and what sorts of things we could help them do in moving forward people like USAID and the State Department have with their programs to help overseas but it is clearly a factor on every continent it is something we have to worry about and if we don't worry about it it will be the catalyst for these conflicts even if it does not create the conflicts it brings poverty to its lowest level when you don't have water we have to worry about this our congress we have the Paul Simon Act that came through that said we're going to help people overseas we really have to be moving in this direction and it's both a military and a social political issue that we have to address thanks Jerry one of the issues in this context that concerns me an awful lot is how it conflates with nuclear security issues and the center has done some work on this and you think to yourself what does nuclear security and climate security have to do with each other and it turns out an awful lot and the reason is is that when climate instabilities like water shortages or water conflicts occur in nuclear states and you're basically feeding instability in a state with nuclear weapons or nuclear power that creates a whole other dynamic of instability and crisis and Pakistan is the one that worries me and sort of keeps me up at night when you think about internal stresses and conflicts inside Pakistan and there are over water and it's also a state with nuclear weapons what happens if first somehow the tinderbox gets lit over a climate issue when you have other dynamics at play so that's just one of those pieces that concerns me an awful lot and I just add to that the industry for a treaty has been wonderful it's been an example of how those two countries have worked together for some period of time but it's under stress right now the Indians have a dam that's under construction the Pakistanis don't like it they're not talking to each other as well as they could everybody is worried that this sort of thing that could bring them not necessarily immediately into head combat but it could make things worse in places like Kashmir which is in part of the fringes of the Indus we have to look at this across boundaries the issue of trans boundary water sharing is going to be interesting and it does affect nuclear powers closer to home we tend to say it's all over there but Georgia and Florida are in a suit at this very moment because the folks and those of you who have visited Florida and had the Apalachicola oysters that industry is up in arms because of the decreased flow coming down from Georgia is making the bay to saline for the for the oysters so there's a I mean this suit is probably going to be all the way to the Supreme Court on this is water rights in our country we think we're fairly erudite and we can cooperate in everything but here is an example of right here in the United States as you go further west particularly in the northwest the fight between hydro power and the fisheries and the wild rivers and everything like that I mean that is a real issue and it's going to be a bigger issue as we start facing climate change clearly that now you got to make a choice are you going to use a renewable green clean fuel for your electrical grid or are you going to or are you going to worry about the pristine nature of being able to kayak down river X those are going to be real and there's pluses and minuses what I think is the issue one of the big issues is we got to be able to sit down at the table and throw these issues on the table because the inspeakable will happen even if you don't speak about it and we can't continue down the road where you can't say something because someone gets mad or someone says no that's not correct military what we look at this is not a big government little government problem this is not a liberal or conservative problem this is not a democratic or republican problem this is a problem that I've got a lily pad that I've got to operate from and I need to keep it the whole the same issue that we all have in our individual homes if we're in a flood plain if we're in a hurricane zone if we're in an area that's becoming drier and drier we start to think about what can I do how can I maintain myself so I can live where I live how I live and continue to prosper that's a simple issue that the military is looking at DOD broadly so I think those are it's not just over there we don't want to lull ourselves into a a complaisancy because yeah I find it's a catalyst for conflict but that's kind of what we're organized to do is conflict we'd like to minimize the amount of conflicts we don't have too much business but let's think about home because of the floods our ability to transport things because of the lack of water the ability to grow food etc etc etc I mean it is all works here we don't see that quite as badly because we do tend to cooperate we do tend to have institutions that work together but at some point we get to the point where there's going to be a rub again down at Langley there's a great effort around Langley and Norfolk that when you're looking at maintaining the bases you can't just maintain the bases because we got to get our food in we got to get our fuel in got to get our electricity in got to get our people in and there are places there today where people can't get out of their area where they're living as we say on the economy they can't get their car through the water you know that should start to concern a lot of people because that workforce not only goes to the bases and the ports but I mean commercially all around so those are the that's the leading indicator we in the Air Force have this approach we have leading and lagging indicators we know for example of unscheduled maintenance that means we're missing stuff on our periodic inspections or something's breaking new and a wonderful new and novel way and if we don't get on to that the lagging indicator is the fully mission capable that's going to be in the toilet at some point down the road if we don't get our hand on this so now we have these leading indicators where we're seeing flood plains change some of you may have gotten you know notes from your insurance company said oh by the way you may need flood insurance we see that as those are the those are the leading edge indicators that if you don't do something now it's going to be really bad down the road you know that's a there's a really good point that the general just made that I don't want to get lost communities are indispensable to our bases okay that the power comes from off base generally there's some backup capability but the fact the matter is is that the grid goes from off base a lot of the time water and wastewater is an off base thing what happens when it out in the community the wastewater plant goes down because of flood and you can't flush not a small problem trust me and and so and as the general pointed out people live off base families live off base transportation matters utilities matter all of those pieces are relevant to the installation and so we can do some work to make the installation resilient but it's also incumbent on those base commanders to work with local communities to make sure the entire place is resilient because frankly climate is not going to respect the border and the fence line of the community all right so I have been told that I'm running out of time I tell you what why don't I just wrap up just a little bit and I'm going to give everybody opportunities to sort of make closing comment because I know when we give everybody a lot of information you only going to remember one or two things from the day I know that's a practical reality so I want to give our panelists the opportunity to give you your takeaway point that you're going to need to remember my thing that you're going to need to have a responsibility to prepare we know so much and we see so much about what's happening and it is basically our responsibility whether it's DOD or DHS or state we see these dynamics and if we don't do anything about it then frankly part of the burden and part of the responsibilities on us for having not prepared for the inevitable climate impacts we look at the eight inches of sea level rise that we've seen over the last hundred years and some of these projections talk about 80 inches over the next hundred years that is not a small deal and we see it coming and yes there's some questions about that but frankly it's going to be more and we know it and we have a responsibility to get ready for it so I'm going to go down the line here just short comments what do you want the folks here who are watching on TV who are here in the room what do you want them to have as their takeaway Jerry I just jumped to the installation we're dealing with an uncertain future and every base has a neighbor and the combination of the base and the neighbor have to plan for what could happen in the future and we can't ignore that so we have to keep our vision extended we have to start working now on what we're doing so that we're ready to stay there be able to carry out our mission at the same time recognize the needs of the people that are overseas with us or here in the conus with us that we're working together to solve this problem of the climate change future great emerald white so I talked about the geo strategic impact of climate change think about the geo part the geo or the geoid that we live on that's the earth the earth system is changing that's the ocean it's the weather it's the climate it's the ice it's the land it's all these things that we've talked about two of the recommendations in our report is one to invest in improvements to improve the data and analysis of what's happening to that geo the other piece in doing so we reduce the uncertainty to allow us to plan act and react in line with the changes that are happening great general keys I just say I'd go back to the planning part how bad can it be can we stand that what can we do how much does it cost how long does it take and I always ask the question what if we're wrong and make it base your plan on that Admiral Parker we all want to invest without regret whether it's personally or at the government level what we've discovered in the Coast Guard is it's five to ten times better financially to invest upfront in resilience than it is to do it after the fact through supplementals I feel like we're backing into a crisis in that regard to highlight the other point about community it's not just community there's a book out called 90% of everything 90% of everything that you use in your daily lives comes to you via the marine transportation system that has nodes that are all in sea level rise impacted areas and whether that's to manage your daily life or to support the readiness of our services that's a key point and it'll be a bell weather for us as we look at that and what the commercial side of that is doing because they have a quicker turn rate generally in the government so I think there's a lot of lessons we can learn from what they're doing how they're making their facilities more resilient how it changes their concept of operations much like we're having to change ours I think we've got an example we can pull from John well my final remark would be in my takeaway for you today would be that you know our readiness depends upon our ability to train and so we have to have capable lands we have to have access to airspace to sea space to do that training the planning the ability to look at how many training days we're losing how many training events we're losing the research that we need to do in terms of our systems our natural infrastructure is going to be critical to actually sustain our training land base and to make sure that we have access to our airspace and our sea space in the future thank you everybody thanks very much I think we're going to have a 10 minute coffee I'm going to do the admin stuff so you don't have to come up here we're going to have about a 10 minute coffee break and then we're going to get together for our second panel thanks very much welcome back to who are not with us for the first panel welcome the second panel is going to focus on what the national security community broadly defined not just DOD but across the government and even internationally can do and what it should be doing to prepare for some of the effects of climate that you heard about in the first panel or hopefully will read about in the reports if you are unable to join us for the first panel we have another very distinguished group of panelists we're going to begin with Mr. Frank Febija who is one of the co-founders and presidents of the Center for Climate and Security he's been focusing on the effects of climate on international security and national security for more than a decade he's written widely on the effects on the Syrian conflict and other areas around the world where the effects of climate have caused instability and thus required military action Rear Admiral Phillips is a retired surface warfare officer and those of you who do military policy know that that makes her a rank number one I won't use the term I will yes and it's kind of a big deal but she has experienced commanding ships and commanding sailors and has been engaged in the past several years in programs that focus on integrating the understanding of the effects of climate from a local and municipal level all the way up to a federal level in the Tidewater region Vice Admiral Dave Tiltley was the former oceanographer of the Navy he is this is like every event planner's nightmare happening right now someone burning the midnight oil that would be me typed in the incorrect title Admiral let's Admiral Tiltley is an expert on the effects of climate on our ocean on our naval service and he is actually one of the most trusted groups in the United States when people talk about scientists that they trust you know if you go back to your constituencies and you talk to the general public about the scientists they trust most it will be your local meteorologist and Dave is a meteorologist he is an oceanographer, a meteorologist and he is going to talk to you a bit about the science and how our understanding of the science of how climate is affecting the globe sphere I believe was the term is changing John Conger who moderated the first panel has vast experience in understanding all of our military installations and is going to speak a bit about that but also more broadly how DOD can prepare these issues and Ms. Jerry Goodman is I like to say the fairy godmother of climate security she has been focusing on climate security and environmental security for decades and has really led the way in thinking about these issues in both a very you know a strategic way but an interdisciplinary way so in a way where these issues fit into our understanding of how nations relate to one another and can interact with one another on the global stage so hopefully she will be able to touch on some of those points but without further ado Frank if you could maybe talk about a little bit about the report that we've put out Great, thanks so much Heather I'm going to be pretty brief as Heather mentioned earlier before the first panel a lot of the other panelists here are each over 200 years old so they have a lot more wisdom they have a lot more wisdom than I have so I'm just going to frame this discussion a bit which is based on this report you know first of all this climate and security advisory group is it's a security group that's looking at climate change it's not a climate or an environmental group that's looking at security and I think that's very important it includes 45 senior experts in the field I'm sorry, 54 senior experts in the field that come from military and national security backgrounds and you're going to hear from some of them today the inspiration for this version of the report it's basically an update from a 2016 report we put out before the election it's actually in a lot of ways I think came from Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis' comments in the questions for the record that he received when he was talking about climate change and what he would do as Secretary of Defense to deal with this issue and he essentially said well this impacts us in a lot of different ways it impacts our troops it impacts our readiness, our operations it impacts strategy but this is going to require a whole of government approach I think he understands quite well that this is a non-traditional problem that's going to require that a number of different agencies across the US government address and address together given the intersection of risks and we heard a little bit about that in the last panel about the intersection of climate and nuclear security for example which is not something many of us think about very often and then John Conger earlier mentioned which is the theme of this report so he just happened to mention it thanks John the responsibility to prepare and really it's simple I think based on the amount of knowledge we have the degree to which we've reduced uncertainty on this risk we know a lot and when you compare what we know about what the climate is doing and the projections we have for what the climate is going to do to our projections for other social, economic and political and security dynamics and what we know is going to happen in that space for example will there be a weapon of mass destruction detonated in the next 30 years there's so much uncertainty around an issue like that we actually have quite a bit of uncertainty of certainty on this issue and as risk managers in the security community I think generally thinks of itself as a community that manages risk and reduces unacceptable risk we need to we need to take that information and and deal with it and so the responsibility prepares about dealing with an unprecedented risk but also recognizing that we have unprecedented foresight to see these risks coming and to deal with them so it reminds me of the I think it's the first Austin Powers movie has his hand up and there's a steamroller coming very slowly towards them and he doesn't get out of the way he just screams for a while until he's run over and I think we see this coming and we can deal with it and so I think that is really maybe that I'm dating myself Austin Powers is one but there you go it comes to my mind and specifically within this report there's a series of actions that we think can be taken by the US government and supported by the Congress in this area and that is assess, prepare and support I'll be very quick on assess basically what we're talking about is recommendations for how we can improve our assessments of climate risk to security and for this, for many in this audience that's going to take support from the Congress to help the DOD the State Department the intelligence community and other agencies that deal with this issue from a security perspective continue to do that, that's very important prepares the second bit and that's really about authorities and investments related to adapting to climate change and that's incredibly important as you've heard in the previous panel and as you'll hear more about today the Department of Defense understands these risks in a lot of ways and a lot of that understanding comes from on the ground dealing with this issue in the various combatant commands for example dealing with countries in their area of responsibility and seeing these risks on the ground so we need as policymakers and as civil society to support to follow that lead our government prepare for climate change risks to security the last bit is support and sounds really general but what we're talking about in this report is how can we also look at climate risk to our partner and allied nations and think of supporting those partner and allied nations not just to deal with climate change and the humanitarian consequences that's incredibly important in our military State Department, USAID, other agencies have a role to play in doing that strategically. How do investments and climate adaptation investments in our partner nations and allies and prospective partner nations and allies in certain geostrategically important areas like the Asia Pacific region how do those investments actually help generate influence for the United States in these competing spaces what are we doing around these issues in the South China Sea and how does that affect our relationship with China and so there are a set of recommendations along those lines we have a number of countries leading on this issue now within the UN Security Council how can the U.S. support dealing with this issue at that level of international security as well so that's kind of the broad framework of this and I'll shut up now and hand it over to Ann. Did you want to introduce Ann? No you already did Thank you Frank. Good morning everyone. I'm honored to be here today as a distinguished panel and also wish to thank the first panel for their tremendous efforts not only on behalf of their full careers in national security but for their continued work in this area and for their gems of wisdom which I hope everyone wrote down that you can carry forward that they put forth this morning so as Heather mentioned I am a surface warfare officer the particular descriptor used has not been used before to my knowledge but I did drive ships for 31 years I'm an operator in that context and so that means I focus on how to assess prepare, train and execute a mission or a task. My initial experience with climate and national security comes from my time working as chair of the surface force working group for the Navy's Task Force Climate Change where I was working for Admiral Titley and while I was still on active duty and then from chairing the infrastructure working group for the Hampton Roads Intergovernmental Pilot Planning Project which was Admiral White brought up briefly in his comments this morning and now as a member of the advisory board for the Center for Climate and Security so Frank teed up beautifully without notes I might add the context of the responsibility to prepare strengthening national and homeland security in a face of changing climate as a roadmap and recommendations that the government can use to move forward on this really existential threat to our national security I can't overstate that I'd like to talk about three kind of basic points today the first is that this problem this challenge that we have in dealing with climate impact on our national security is a risk management issue first and foremost we speak about the Department of Defense as having a history of taking climate impact seriously because it creates and intensifies real risk and global instability but to fully understand and prepare for what lies ahead to for us there we've got to continue to incorporate the evolving dynamics and impacts of climate change in our risk assessment processes for both military and civilian infrastructure and that came up right at the end of the last panel but it's absolutely critical that we not only focus internally to federal facilities but that we look externally as well we must have a process to include projecting future risk and this is a real challenge particularly when you look at UC level rise as an example because that's what I focus on particularly since I live in Hampton Roads flood mapping is based on historical data we know that we will not have historical conditions in our future there is no point to planning based on historical data when you're looking at what you're going to do to operate and maintain bases that are in a flood plain we have got to look at projected future data we have to understand what's happening and we have to develop our planning processes based on what we know is coming or our best estimate of what we know is coming not based on what's happened in the past that is a quantum shift in the way we think as a federal agency as within the Department of Defense we just aren't used to looking that far down the road so to be able to do that we've absolutely got to keep collecting the best science the best engineering data available expanding our modeling capacity and focusing it on understanding dependencies and interdependencies both inside and outside defense line previous panel mentioned that bases predominantly get their utilities and their support systems from outside the base well if those systems are interrupted the base is at risk there are ways to minimize that risk and reduce that risk but at the end of the day you're still very dependent on the surrounding community if you use Hampton Rose as an example 1.7 million people 29 federal facilities all surrounded by 17 cities and municipalities an anecdote I've heard this commanding officer of the weapon station in Yorktown lived in Suffolk he went through four cities and over two bridges to get to work every morning so that's the way life is in Hampton Rhodes there's water everywhere it's our largest military presence really outside of this area of the Washington DC area there are very unique facilities there and it's all vulnerable if we don't plan with the cities incorporated in the planning process with the federal agencies there is no way we're going to come up with a solution for our future that's just an anecdote because that's where where you stand as a function of where you sit or maybe where you live so anticipatory projections continual revision and reassessment of how we collect data and what data we collect and how we're processing it to best be available for federal state and local to help make decisions for our future 2nd point climate change adaptation as discussed whole of government and community approach is absolutely critical both inside and outside the fence line and the whole basis of this product a responsibility to prepare that preparation drives the need to share this information across the full range not only within federal agencies but with state and local authorities as well so we can understand climate and security risks and focus on what is most needed to help us prepare for the future actionable and accessible I think is would be my 2 keywords there we talked earlier frank mentioned unprecedented foresight because of the data and the processes we already have we know what's coming we don't need to have the conversation about well maybe this will happen maybe it won't let's set standards let's pick scenarios at the federal level that we're going to plan to and then update them over time but without we have the foresight to know what's coming we have to take action and get started this is an area where the federal government can really help some state and local agencies move forward we also I think are faced in this context with an unprecedented risk and so what we do now to strengthen and standardize assessment processes we have to be able to look down range more than 20 years which we do now for installation master plans to understand what's happening and then to quantify what our options are we don't do a very good job of understanding costs or impact at the local level and even within the federal facilities at the individual base level there has been some recent activity in this area General Galloway referred to the climate related risk to DOD infrastructure of CELVAS it's an initial vulnerability assessment report came out January 29th of this year based on 3500 facilities globally were asked to assess climate impact across flooding storm and non-storm surge extreme temperatures wind drought and wildfire this is qualitative assessment does not include costs but nearly 50% of the reporting sites reported damage from one or more of those six categories of risk and this is just an assessment that was done individually base by base so one person's analysis is maybe not the same as someone on a different facility in a different part of the world over 25% of the site surveys reported flooding impact of some variety hmm so in this purely qualitative survey with 50% of the sites reporting some kind of impact we know we have a need to continue to move forward to understand what's happening here and how we're going to prepare for it in a related document actually released earlier November 2017 GAO climate change adaptation concluded that the department of defense still needs to better incorporate adaptation and planning into overseas operations what they were looking for was a consistent and this is a need a consistent method to understand risk to be able to project to determine fiscal planning needs for the future and to develop consistent processes that understand track and assess that risk so a cycle of feedback maybe anticipatory governance to quote Lee on fourth work where you are projecting for the future you see how things are changing you update your projections as your as you notice changes and as you pick up on the data that you're going to collect that's going to determine how climate impact is impacting your facilities I should note that when this in the the top two areas that were critically impacted were aviation operations and transportation the area that was called out as being the least impacted was logistics and supply now if you think about that those two things don't go together it's not possible for logistics and supply not to be interrupted at all if aviation and transportation infrastructure is at the top of the list so somehow we got to improve our understanding here so that we can actually document what the heck is going on here and understand how we're going to move forward and this is a real challenge for us we don't within DOD have a great process right now to understand what's actually happening and document impact to our on base facilities based on things that are happening off the base we don't have a great way of doing that on February 14th of this year congressional testimony before the Senate Armed Services Committee the four vice chiefs were asked by Senator Cain to talk about their services related the imperative nature of comprehensive assessment and preparation on infrastructure and activities to ensure operational readiness in some cases they called out specific facilities and we talked about the Naval Academy at the last panel so while all of these are significant starts there is a great deal more to be done and this responsibility to prepare road map and recommendations is intended as a guidance to help focus that work assess climate risk across the full range of federal and homeland security facilities and to ensure a whole of government approach to meeting national security needs in response to climate and the changes that we know are coming and to be able to leverage the full capacity and capability of our national security enterprise the data we already have the processes and models we already have to evaluate and share actionable information so we are a nation of action it's up to us to prepare and face the challenges of our changing climate and we really have no time to lose thank you thanks so much and thanks very much to Admiral Phillips there he actually covered a lot of points I may talk about them because sometimes at least I find this when teaching my students that sometimes when something is said maybe two slightly different ways one of them will resonate and will stay with you because there were some exceptionally important points that Admiral Phillips made there first I was actually going to say that I think I may need to make general keys and honor every oceanographer it was actually pretty impressive listening to him talk about the science there and I understand sir that the air weather service needs some help and I think I'll get you in contact with them so I'm supposed to talk about the science so here's my bottom line which you may or may not like this is actually not about the science to have a science discussion or a science debate or whatever come talk to me afterwards I'm happy to do that usually when you find people who want to debate or sort of pick on the science it's usually because they don't want to address the policy implications and the longer you can talk about something that you don't actually have anything to do you kind of ignore what you really should be talking about but as I said in my Ted talk the ice actually doesn't care who's either in the White House or who's in the Congress it just melts so we're going to deal with this one way or the other it's a whole lot better if to the degree we can we can deal with it in a managed and planned process with branches and sequels and all the things that we're really good at doing in the Department of Defense rather than a pure reaction and crisis mode in which case we just fly the C-17s over dump money out the back end and usually waste half of it in that case we don't want to do that it's being brought up several times that we have really unprecedented knowledge about this so what the science has given us is while we don't know everything we know a lot and we know a lot in comparison to many of the issues that the Department of Defense deals with every day I mean I'll tell you if DNI coats could tell me as much about Russia and China 50 years from now as I could tell them about the climate we would find wherever he is stop his schedule fly him to the White House and give him a medal of freedom this afternoon it would be amazing intelligence and I'm not picking on the Intel guys they're dealing with people all I'm dealing with is non-linear fluid dynamics it's a lot easier it is people are hard physics is relatively simple there so here's the way I kind of think about this three words because it's this stuff gets really really complex and people can get drown in the details people it's water it's change I'm not going to talk too much about the people in the water you'll notice there are no polar bears in there this is people water and change we just talk about the change and Admiral Phillips mentioned it but I think it's very very important we have for really for pretty much our entire country's history and certainly our military's history when we built be it a weapon system be it a base a training range we have traditionally looked back somewhere between 30 and 100 years you add 10% or 5% for safety and you go build it or you design it and you acquire it that's pretty much how we've done stuff we can no longer get away with that we are in an era where the climate regardless of our policy on green house gases will change I can guarantee you it will change for all of your lifetimes it will change for your children's lifetimes and it will almost certainly change for your grandchildren's lifetimes at least probably a lot longer than that the sea level rise we're not talking 8 inches we're probably already already locked into a long term sea level rise of 5, 6, 7, 8 feet and we will probably lock ourselves into a sea level rise of somewhere between 15 and 30 feet depending on ultimately where we stabilize green house gases so Stephen coven covey famously said begin with the end in mind now does this mean we're going to build 30 foot levees no we're not we can't afford it and we probably wouldn't do it but we can think about reasonably where do we go out to for let's say 50 to 100 years and there is a range of projections so what you do is think of that first phase it's a levee and I don't know general galloway is still here he'll probably cringe with me talking about levees and stuff but if you think you're going to need to build a really big one then buy the property now that will support that put the foundation in that will support it but maybe you don't need to build to three or four meters now maybe you need to build to one you know three feet four feet do that and then as is being mentioned already on this panel and on the previous panel you kind of row out to your tide gauge every day and kind of see where it is it's like yeah we're on track so maybe 20 years later I need to put another meter or meter and a half maybe for whatever reason we're all wrong in the science and it stabilizes don't spend the money spend it on something else maybe we're wrong and it's coming up faster so it's not 20 years it's five years you have to put it on and that's kind of how you can do this preparation think smartly at the beginning and then continue to build and that's what our report here talks we talk about there so that's I think I think it's important what came up in the previous panel was sort of the nuisance flooding and the extremes and they're kind of related the nuisance flooding when you have water around your ankles every day or sort of every high tide yes that gets to be a pain and eventually if it crosses a threshold it can be quite disruptive because it goes down into the basements and floods of generators or where all the IT stuff is but then the extremes and really without even making any suppositions if hurricanes or typhoons will get stronger let's just say that's somewhat uncertain they probably will get stronger but I'll give to people maybe they won't possible just the fact that they're coming in on an ever higher sea level means they're going to do more and more damage and that damage doesn't just go up a little bit it again comes over these thresholds think of sandy you know what did it flood out it flooded out part of the subway system why because it got to that threshold and you can pretty well say that if you had the exact same storm a century ago coming in on lower sea level I mean again assuming you had a New York City subway system like we do today a century ago you would not have flooded so that wasn't just a little bit of money that was billions of dollars of money because it comes up and that's going to keep getting expensive so the cost curve really comes up we just mentioned the Arctic it is in our responsibility it sometimes gets lost I'm not quite sure very honestly how much the Pentagon as a whole is focusing on the Arctic I can tell you a little bit of history because we're distinguished and what does distinguished mean old at least for me at least in academia whenever somebody says you're distinguished that means they're saying you're old so when we talk about the Arctic the Arctic is really why the Navy got into climate change this is what CNO Chief of Naval Operations Admiral Gary Ruffed started that's why we have Task Force Climate Change started nine years ago this spring just in case you hadn't seen there was a Russian liquid natural gas tanker an LNG tanker that went from Norway to South Korea across the top of Russia we call it the northern sea route it did it in February last I checked that was winter in the Arctic and it did it without an ice breaker no ice breaker just an ice hardened commercial ship and it did it 19 days faster than going through the Suez Canal is that a game changer you guys tell me so are we paying attention I think I know the answer to that one but we're going to so we're either going to react or we can anticipate and that's kind of kind of our choice there so I think I'm going to let me make one last point then I'm going to pass it on to John and I think actually John might have kind of touched on some of this in the first poll it's really easy when we read whether it's our seasag recommendations panel like this we're all kind of technocrats at some level senior military senior former civilians in the primarily in the Pentagon here but we tend not to always think of the human dimension there are tremendous human dimensions to these to these issues and if we ignore them or minimize them we will probably get the policies wrong because those human dimensions tend to be constituents and they tend to talk to their elected representatives and they tend to vote so we have to make sure that we are listening to them if anybody didn't see the article in Sundays New York Times I haven't read them all but there's a wonderful one on a little tiny town south of New Orleans Lafitte Louisiana and you really get a feel of the human dimension I had a house that was five miles away of landfall in Hurricane Katrina I can tell you all about how the Mississippi coast to this day is still trying to recover from that hurricane 13 years ago and if we if we just sort of not do not account for that we may come up with wonderful technical policies that make a lot of sense but if we haven't done the groundwork to help really our entire citizens and our population understand why these unprecedented changes are going to be needed and we've talked about how these bases do not exist in a vacuum the communities have to come along if we don't do that I think we're going to make a hard problem even harder but we know about this and we can work that so please stop there and let me pass this on to John, thank you very much okay, hello again everybody I think I'm going to try and stay focused and narrow in my remarks in this panel we talked about this framework of responsibility to prepare and how it had three pieces there's this assess piece where you have to understand what's going on then there's a prepare piece and then there's a support piece as we get to my part of the story we're going to talk about preparing I when I was in the Pentagon I had responsibility for all of DoD's installations and that meant that I got to see warts and all how they're managed a lot of the time the fact of the matter is is that DoD installations are underfunded so the idea that somebody is going to come in and say I want to spend a couple billion dollars shoring up this base is well ludicrous so let's not pretend that everybody is going to fix all of these problems but it is about a trillion dollars worth of real property and we do want to preserve it as best we can fortunately there's a lot that you can do to mitigate some of the worst problems general keys talked a bit about Langley earlier and I had data when I was in the Pentagon that talked about how early storms that Langley encountered caused 100 million plus dollars of damage because of the flooding and then they went and developed a sandbag plant and lo and behold the damage costs went down by an order of magnitude still did damage they still had to go out and get sandbags they still had floods but they had less damage and now they're building door dams and actually saying well we flood often enough that rather than going out and doing sandbags every time we're just going to put door dams in front which is the structures that basically stop the water from getting in the door the point being that preparation happens and is happening today I have another anecdote and I'll sort of come back thematically in a second but for everyone there was a study in 2011 it's the middle of Mojave desert it's dry there and so they have water issues and so there was a study that came out said they only have 20 years of water what do you do when a base runs out of water? well there are some things but the base decided to mitigate the base decided to adapt the base found another reservoir the base put water efficiency in place and now they're projecting about 50 years worth of water and they'll do something else as they get closer to that point in time the point being that once you recognize a problem you have to prepare for that problem not every problem are you going to be able to deal with if you have 15 to 30 foot sea level rises there's only so much you can do other than move but the fact of the matter is in a lot of these locations they have location specific problems that they can begin to address so what do you think they should do? well the first thing is they all have to figure out what their location specific problems are there is a report that's been required by congress to the department of defense to identify which bases are most at risk from climate change and some of these problems are going to be wildfire problems some of these problems are going to be droughts some of them are going to be sea level rise and each of these locations that they identify they probably need to not on the back of an envelope and not on a single sheet of paper but develop a real plan to say okay I know what my problems are what is it going to take for me to mitigate the impact on my operations and on my people in order to continue to do my job that's going to be a process that's going to take a little bit of time now we all talk like these sea level rises that we're talking about are going to be immediate and they're not it's going to take some time for the water to come the water is here in a lot of places but if you imagined over a 30 year period you're talking about a foot or two of sea level rises and I'm speaking a little bit Dave is going to be the one who's going to be able to tell you whether that's a real estate prediction but the projections that I've seen fall in that range for the next few decades in the Pentagon the cocoms think in two year spans most people think in five year spans because that's what your budget plan is and so getting people to think about decades that's a challenge but most buildings are around for 30 or 50 years and so you want it to actually be useful for the 30 or 50 years and so you have to start thinking in terms of master plans and on your basis and how am I going to do things differently when I expect this to be the situation in 30 or 50 years and 100 years it will be worse but nobody's spending money on problems that are a century away when some of these bases weren't there 100 years ago so you'll probably get to address those problems when you get closer to that point in time today we're starting to think about the problems that are in the approximate when do you start when you get off the train tracks when you hear the whistle blow when you hear the engine when you see it in front of you when you can feel the wind on you when do you jump off the train tracks well your heart gets to race a little bit different speeds depending on when you pick and frankly when we start to mitigate our problem it's going to cost a different amount of money far ahead of time frankly we're not far ahead of time anymore but some of them we are some of the problems we are are we going to do it today or are we going to wait until it's a crisis a different amount of money so let's think about that in that context have we got assessments of all our bases where the bases are which are going to have water shortages do we have maps of all the locations for the projected sea level rise and are we prepared to avoid new construction and flood plains are we prepared not to have a backup power or IT systems in the basement where they're going to get flooded how much have we had conversations with local communities about regional resilience I made the point earlier and it's still true that those communities are indispensable to our military installations and so if you isolate make the base resilient when the community isn't you haven't really made the base resilient the the fact of the matter is a quick story when I first got to the Pentagon in 09 we were all talking about six month power outages oh there are these events that can occur where you lose power in a large region in the United States for many months at a time well let me tell you once you're through about a week your mission on your base changes to civilian support okay you're not trying to make the base continue to do operate as usual for six months that's ridiculous you can't hold all the other variables constant and the same thing is true here you can't just focus on the resilience of the individual installation you have to start preparing with the community and partnering with the community in order to deal with things there are a whole host of other recommendations in here again I go back to the installation piece of the puzzle because it's what I know best but let me touch one other quick thing on the Arctic another quick story so when I was in the Pentagon and I was doing climate change stuff for the infrastructure you know I was doing the practical realistic stuff and these policy people in the other part of the Pentagon dealt with international affairs and it was all fluffy and what I would always you know criticize them for is you know they wrote these documents for internal consumption that were like German philosophy they took a page to say what they could say in the sentence and and so I would be moderately critical and so then they come out with this DOD Arctic strategy I read it it didn't say anything and I told them as much and I was cynical and I was uninformed and I thought about it alright so if they're thinking out if they're the only people in the department thinking out decades and they're trying to figure out how to act today to deal with setting the stage for problem sets 30 years out well what would you do well you'd start to build relationships and you'd start thinking about how you would do search and rescue and you'd start talking about rules of engagement different folks about trade routes and lo and behold I went back to the document and that's really what they all said alright I don't know everything and I wouldn't pretend to know everything although I have occasionally pretended to know everything and so that kind of thinking ahead of time thinking what am I going to do today to head off a 30 year problem maybe you're not actually taking that big event action today but you are setting the stage because doing things far enough ahead of time is an easier thing that's what we're saying and so we have to think those things through and take those actions today so that we don't reach crisis point so with that I'm going to stop and I'm going to hand things over to Sherry who's going to close out thanks okay thank you John and it's terrific to be with you all this morning first I would like to thank the people who helped bring this event together today because it takes a lot of work Heather you've done a very nice job I know you've been working very hard on this along with the team from the Center for Climate Security Frank and Caitlin I want to thank our partners Laura Glutzen at Jackson and Carol Werner with EESI we've all been swimming in this sea for a number of years now and it's really a team and collective effort and glad to see a number of new faces here this morning and also thank you to my fellow members of the CNA Military Advisory Board the current Chairman General Keyes Dave Titley I think I see Jerry Galloway and other affiliates here as well so thank you all for the service you've continued to provide so the framework for this part of the discussion is the responsibility to prepare and that is a very fundamental important concept you know we think about the nuclear threat that we face and we think about the years we've been had for the last 50 plus years during the Cold War where we were living in an era of strategic stability or nuclear stability and now we find ourselves in an era with less nuclear stability than we faced arguably over the last several decades and so there's more tension we're investing more as a nation to prepare because we understand the responsible actions are to prepare to assess that risk to prepare for it and for a threat that is a we hope is still a low probability but one that could of course be a high consequence during the Cold War we prepared for the canonical bolt out of the blue nuclear attack by the Soviet Union and we were successful now we're in a new post Cold War era but we're also in the climate era and in the climate era we have also a responsibility to prepare for those climate risks because we live actually in a time of climate instability and that's been now well articulated both by our panelists this morning and for any of you who've read any of the literature the climate has become unstable so how do we prepare for to act in so we have this unprecedented risk and so the piece I'm going to talk about you know we've talked about the assessing and preparing and now supporting our allies and partner nations and I want to I'll introduce three mentioned three types of cases one of which has already been discussed extensively this morning the Arctic where of course we know the climate has become highly unstable and that's what's led to the opening of the Arctic and a whole new geographic region where we have a responsibility to prepare to be able to operate there and we're arguably the US has still a long way to go to be prepared to operate safely and securely in that region also the Asia Pacific region which also many would say and I've characterized it as sort of disaster alley for extreme weather events from cyclones to tsunamis that are putting and also the region of the world where you have many of the mega cities so you've got a combination of demographics political instability and climate instability all leading to very high risks and you have former Pacific commander Admiral Locklear who said it's one of the most serious threats he faces in that that we face in the region is the climate risk and then finally you know Africa which is subject to increasingly severe droughts northern Africa across the Sahel and into the Middle East some of that climate driven and we've seen the instability I won't go through some of those cases right now but that part contributed to the massive wave of migration the greatest wave of migration that we've seen since World War II now at the same time we have this unprecedented foresight in this era a combination of advanced technologies big data analytics artificial intelligence and we also have the ability to begin to close the gap between reliable weather forecasting and longer term climate models what some call seasonal to sub-seasonal forecasting and prediction and as we close that gap between weather and climate the two weeks to two months of sub-seasonal forecasting and the two months to 12 months of seasonal forecasting we will begin and adapt that along with the advanced technology big data tools we really get to a place where we can begin to climate proof our institutions and our infrastructure and that is vitally important that enables this to be a business case not just not just a nice to have and that's important for all of our institutions so we need to work and we've said in this report working with our allies and partner nations becomes essential first of all we don't go to war by ourselves when we conduct a military operation it's always with allied and partner nations and they are obviously infrastructure forces ability to operate and threats are all at risk as well and we already know now that other nations are using potential adversaries as well as partners are using the ability to begin climate proofing in their actions as a way to advance their own leadership and you have to look nowhere other than China recent Arctic policy which I've characterized as sort of the spiders web in the Belt and Road initiative now extending China's Belt and Road initiative beyond just the road and rail to Asia and down into South Asia but now extending think of the map up into the Arctic and across the northern sea route and that polar silk road fully acknowledges the climate risk that is faced in the region and also the opportunities that come from it so we ignore that risk and that opportunity at our peril but we do have the opportunity with this unprecedented foresight that we have today to work closely with our allies and partner nations across a range of key institutions from the UN Security Council where now there is a lot of beginning to be more leadership and attention to the responsibility to prepare I don't know if that was did you already talk about that earlier today in December in the ARIA Dialogues that the Dutch Foreign Ministry led along with our own Caitlin Wurl discussion on responsibility to prepare that is going to be brought forward further in this coming year and so I see this as an emerging and important recognition of the climate risk and the opportunity in that form also NATO has begun to look at climate risk the European Union and the European Action Service as well as their armed forces and then in ASEAN and many of the nations key nations Japan in particular in Australia have begun to take this up very deliberately even now in South Asia even the Pakistani military has begun to look at how to do climate training and so we know that our military you know becomes the 9-1-1 force for disaster relief they need to be trained they need to be prepared and be able to work with partner nations with the tools that are now available through advanced technologies through digital visualization and other tools to be able to assess the risk prepare for it and then work responsibly with other nations to support adequate preparations I think I'll stop there and we'll turn it back to Heather for moderate Q&A Thank you guys that was pretty comprehensive but I think we have a little time for some Q&A with the audience and I would just like to take the privilege of the chair to ask a couple of questions I think you know in my mind as you guys are framing this you know thinking through how Congress looks at policy issues and how it gets stove piped sometimes unfortunately this is a real opportunity to try to break down some of those stove pipes and talk across committees across issues to really look for more comprehensive solutions but just to put it back in the box a little bit I think what we really hit on that you know a lot of the defense committees might look at this or if you're a national security analyst you might look at this is you know you've got three legs of this stool and the first one is the intel the understanding the analysis you know the second one is readiness planning and budgeting resourcing and training you care about both your personnel and your stuff and the place that your stuff lives so your installations not just domestically but also our installations overseas that may be impacted by these issues and then I think Sherry really hit on you know what is the more sort of overarching issue and this is you always want to integrate your grand strategic goals your interests your national interests economic and security you know down through your operations your process your planning your training and and your people like Dave said you know people are are hard and even harder than people is culture and you know integrating climate into you know our risk analysis is really a shift in culture in the national security community and it's not one that is unprecedented every time we have new technology that evolves on the battlefield airpower the use of airplanes the use of AI you know anytime we have you know a new a new global paradigm you know the rise of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons we have to shift how we how we view the risk that these issues might present both at a tactical and operational level but also at a geostrategic level so I think Sherry really hit on how you know not just as a nation but as a global community you know we need to really look at these existential risks that climate presents in a comprehensive way not just looking at our militaries but also our other instruments of you know international engagement so through USAID and through the State Department through our diplomacy and even as you know folks on the hill would often raise to folks in the bureaucracy and through industry and so you know I would just sort of point out that the role of the private sector in helping provide some solutions to these issues may be something that we all want to think about you know as we're looking at the intel the analysis the data but also the on the ground operations and changes that may take place so but back to when I was at Brookings I used to say if you have a question please end it with a question mark so I will end that quick summary with a question and that is for the panelists the how can Congress in your view actually engage on some of these specific recommendations that were made by the report so I think maybe we can start with Sherry and move back sure and I also say I see some hands going up so I know Heather will want to get to the questions next I think importantly Congress in its oversight role can engage during the hearing process by asking the important questions about what our institutions whether it's the Department of Defense as we heard in the posture hearings last week all the Vice Chiefs and the Vice Commandants were asked questions about how they're assessing and preparing for climate risks to their military installations and institutions we heard about Parris Island and the Arctic as well as wildfire risk sea level rise risk so there's very clear awareness within the services Congress I think can also act obviously by legislating as it did on the defense authorization bill it can also act in the foreign relations committees looking at how we conduct our overseas operations what important issues we're looking at by holding hearings and also looking at authorization processes there and then finally most important and I know John will love to talk about appropriations because at the end of the day it's all what funds you are appropriate as you know a strategy without money is hallucination all right I'll talk about appropriations a little bit so I spent a long time as an appropriation staffer or a staffer for an appropriator here on the Hill and I still like him even though I was an authorizer and I also got to be the deputy comptroller of DoD and sort of have my hands on the $600 billion budget so I think of most problems in terms of money so I'm going to splash a little bit of water here no pun intended and say Congress is probably not going to spend a lot of money on the 100 year problem, the 30 year problem or even the 10 year problem that we're facing but they might very well spend money on the one year problem or the two year problem most staffers are going to and they can tell me if I'm wrong but most staffers are thinking about what bill they have to write this year and what am I going to put into the defense what is my boss going to ask for in the defense authorization bill this year or what is my boss going to ask for in the appropriations process this year and those things usually have to have some sort of a requirement already in place you're not going to get your money so thinking about things in the immediate term and the fact that last year in the defense authorization bill Congress directed the department to identify the 10 installations per service that are at the most risk for climate change I think a practical follow on would be for Congress to require mitigation plans individual to each of the bases that DOD self identifies that they actually have to think through alright now what are you going to do about it to include it in the encroachment planning process that's already underway so this this is a process which I think is immediate there are other things you have $10 billion of military construction you've requested I think it is not unreasonable to require the department to think about whether they're putting those in floodplains or not because frankly your floodplains that you've already established and identified are not 100 year floodplains anymore even if you call them 100 year floodplains and so you should expect those buildings to flood at some point during the time that they are there so you should be thinking about that there are a whole host of things but they are sort of near term immediate things that Congress is going to be looking at right now I think it's probably a bridge too far to ask Congress to start spending money on the 100 year problem this year because they'll say well I've got 100 years somebody will think about that after I'm out of Congress and they're right and I'm not saying that as a criticism I'm saying that as a practical reality but the study and the assessment will help us we have this responsibility of repair so the smarter we get the better Congress can justify some of those expenditures and so it won't necessarily be the one or two year problem anymore if you know that inexorably you're going to have a problem in 10 years and now is the time to build the new pier or build the new building or fix the transportation line what do you do when you can't drive into Norfolk anymore because it's flooded out 3 hours a day and that just happens to happen during rush hour well you probably need a new road and you probably needed to have built it already so think about that those are the problems that Congress needs to be thinking about right now I think John's comments are actually very illuminating that we're not going to think about these long term issues and he's probably right and when we had climate stability you could get away with that we can't so the submariners God love them have a saying that the stupid shall be punished let's not be too stupid here the other thing John said which I thought was really interesting is he said well you know it's one to two feet of sea level rise in 30 years think about that on a basis of 8 inches of sea level rise in the past 100 years and one to two feet is probably a mainline somewhat conservative prediction so that is three times the rate of change in one third of the time we're already on this acceleration and trust me 2018 pretty soon will seem like the good old days so that's coming in here what can Congress do well first let me just say I think Congress is the key not the administrations whomever it is it's not the administration it is the Congress that will either ensure we're prepared or not I don't think the Pentagon will figure this out and look at the Pentagon I mean big things when we've changed the DOD did they come from inside the building or did they come from the Congress how do we fight joint how did we integrate our force even nuclear power it basically was the Congress that directed the executive branch and the Pentagon to do these things I think the Congress does have that longer view they can think longer than the COCOMs the combatant commanders specific things can do it was already mentioned I think by Sherry in public hearings ask the hard questions we had a saying that when we did things either the various war plans we would do exercises and of course we would always win commanders would say well what did we ferry dust here oh we pretended that nobody was going to shoot at our logistics ships well the adversary might so ask those questions for example in the Arctic if we're not thinking about building surface ships understand it takes about 10 years from the time that Lieutenant Commander has a brilliant idea in the Pentagon to the time you actually start building it takes another 10 years roughly to build out the class just on average about 30 years so although my major is not mathematics 10 plus 10 plus 30 is 50 that takes us to the 2060s and I'll tell you the year 2060s we are going to have ice free conditions in the Arctic probably starting actually in about 10 to 20 years from now so are we thinking about that and the answer is not really we're going to wait and then we're behind and China is not waiting Russia is not waiting so where are we going to be so ask the hard questions we've talked about I'll talk about the science piece one place congress can be very very helpful is taking a look at the National Academy of Science Decadal report on space on remote sensing and taking a very serious look at those requests this is not in the defense budget on how science is on NASA it's on NOAA but that monitoring of our weather of our climate is absolutely critical so we make smart decisions and taking a look at those programs would be most useful and there is an academy report out that just came out a couple months ago I think would be good John's absolutely right I can't think of anyone who made four stars indicating for basis and more money so again somebody's going to need to think about that trillion dollar investment holistically so between our senior civilians and between congress and the senior staffs in congress we can help ourselves here but don't necessarily rely on the active duty military to really be able to think about it because it's not in our culture we want shiny toys we want ships and aircraft and tanks we don't really want to spend money on bases unless it's general keys and the air force and golf courses but apart from that we don't do that I know that's not fair because it's not fair but the air force frankly quality of life on the air force basis is better it just is alright so that's we need help there monitoring in how we monitor the weather and climate ask the hard questions and and help the Pentagon put the money where they're going to need to do it even though there may not be strong advocacy within the building thanks very much okay I think to follow up on Dave's points asking hard questions means you're going to congress will have to be educated so they're going to have to inform themselves and that's going to take a lot of work because as it turns out not a lot of people know a lot about this particularly as in regard to how this impacts military facilities that's just the fact as an operator I didn't know anything about this I knew that the base flooded and I knew that in Hampton Roads it's sort of interesting every time it rains the whole place floods but that's all I knew I didn't understand why I was too busy worried about my day job and my day job was very busy so there was a short-term focus on a two-year tour that might turn into eight months and that's the way it is so you're not going to get the deep understanding in many cases not all but in many cases within the military and to the point about infrastructure the Navy we wish we had the Air Force's attention to infrastructure in general so we really wish that because we don't we like stuff and that's where we put our focus I think congress can help it's very short-sighted certainly by asking the hard questions also by encouraging and really directing the Department of Defense to make federal agencies in general to make decisions one of the things I pound on a lot is setting standards Congress shouldn't set the standards it'll take forever when they have to be changed and updated but they should direct that the services set standards to which they will plan standards must include projected flood mapping as an example and projected groundwater levels and projected aquifer levels and whatever the challenge is for the region of the base that you are dealing with that will help in turn the states and the local communities make decisions for themselves about what standards they need to apply they'll understand what the federal entities are working towards and then they can I suspect strongly since as I was talking earlier leadership tends to be a challenge in this area that when the federal standards or the Defense Department in particular standards are set that the states and the local communities will fall in on that and use that as theirs at least as a minimum and that would be of value because if you're in Naval Station Norfolk and you're surrounded by the city of Norfolk you in the city of Norfolk's futures are inextricably linked and really if you're in Hampton Roads all of the cities and Naval Station Norfolk's futures are inextricably linked but they all want to argue about what should be the right thing if a federal standard were in place they'll follow that second there needs to be more ways that federal, state and local can partner particularly in a fiscal capacity so there must be some way you know Sykes Act is one way, Repti is another Defense Road Access Program how do we give more ways for cities and federal entities to collaborate and work out funding strategies that they can both share and plan towards and execute to get to this my favorite example is Hampton Roads Boulevard but to get federal accesses or things that impact the federal facilities that aren't in their fence line support to be upgraded and maintained and to prepare for this challenge so that the federal facilities can continue to operate and the communities will benefit from that as well how can we inform and maybe improve that process of direct collaboration and then I talked about projected processes earlier in flood plane mapping but when you talk to the average military base commander and I'll use the Navy as an example and you say you know you need to look at long range flood planes because that's not only going to tell you flood doesn't just get higher it also gets wider so more of your facilities will be impacted most of them don't understand that and that's because they've never had to deal with it so first understand what it is and then insist that projected flood planes be used for facilities that are in a flood plane or parts of it are and how they're going to plan for their future because right now that's not being directed and FEMA doesn't do it unless they're asked to so those kind of three things and then I think the last piece I'd like to explain quickly Hampton Roads Boulevard is a major artery that accesses Naval Station Norfolk Hampton Roads Boulevard is floods routinely but it does not flood near the fence line of Naval Station Norfolk so it's an access road but it's down the road where the challenges are it also impedes the ability of vehicles to get into the port of Virginia we have no capacity to understand how that road flooding and being closed impacts the base or the port we don't have any way to get data to say do we what happens to the traffic pattern when Hampton Roads Boulevard is closed what happens to working hours to people's ability to do their jobs when Hampton Roads Boulevard close the port may have some ability to track that because they're in such lock step with all the containers that they're moving fifth largest container port in the United States right now, the four ports of Norfolk but we don't know what the impact is to the base when Hampton Roads Boulevard floods twice a day like it did in November of this past year for three or four days at a time and is shut down you can't go that way you have to go around we have no way of tracking that people ask me this on panels all the time well how does the Navy know what's happening we don't have a good way to keep to understand that we don't have a good way to assess that impact on our ability to do our job so the selective vulnerability study is a start but there's a whole lot more that needs to be done there and I think as we start to understand that we'll be able to prioritize what's critical vulnerable and then start to work together to understand what actions need to be taken forward so thank you well first of all do what they said I think that's the most that's really important secondly there are a lot of recommendations in this report a lot of very specific recommendations for the administration but a lot of those recommendations and a lot of what we're trying to get at with these could use a lot of congressional support in different ways and so I would say take a look at those I'm biased but there's good stuff in there the third thing is I think build on what has been said and done during this administration and this congress that sounds like it for some might sound like a strange thing to say but we've had 12 senior defense leaders that I've counted since the inauguration in 2017 who've been pretty clear about climate change impacts on their mission and have been pretty clear about some of the things that they're doing so listen to what they're saying we've heard Sherry and Anne and others talk about the recent hearing with the vice chiefs and the vice commandant listen to what they said listen to the kinds of vulnerabilities they mentioned and try to figure out how to build on that and also during this congress we have a 2018 NDAA that as others have mentioned calls on the DOD to identify the top 10 vulnerable military bases calls on the DOD to conduct a study on risks to its mission build on that and gather that information and then go from there and that's just the DOD but there's stuff happening right now the intelligence community the worldwide threat assessment identifies climate change risks go to the intelligence community and ask them more questions about that and then build on that intelligence to figure out what you can do legislatively the last thing is really not covered so much here but I think elements in this report touch on it if there's an infrastructure bill think really hard about what was said here this morning and during this panel think really hard about what senior leaders are saying from DOD from the intelligence community about climate and infrastructure and from DHS in the Coast Guard so if you're going to do a real infrastructure bill if you're going to do good investments in infrastructure for this country going forward then if this issue isn't a part of that discussion then that's not good for homeland or national security and so I think if there's going to be something like that this year or later think pretty hard about some of the issues raised today thank you let's see I think I saw some hands back here we have a roving mic and we probably have time for about one or two one or two quick questions thank you really really insightful comments if in fact this is an existential threat unprecedented threat most of the discussion has been focused on adaptation very critical to mitigate the kind of traditional national security missions that we've thought of but if it is in fact existential they're not sufficient to protect the American people from the threat itself so I think I'd like the views of the panel on DOD's untapped potential and when I say DOD I also mean Congress which authorizes an appropriate DOD as the nation's third largest landholder second largest of the county and all the rugby areas the biggest budget of any entity in the world the biggest R&D budget of any entity entity in the world the biggest energy user the biggest owner of buildings is there more that DOD can do on the reversing the trajectory of climate change side of things is there responsibility to repair also responsibility to protect the American people by doing what we can to lessen the threat I mean most importantly DOD has the trust of the American people year after year the most trusted institution so not only can we do concrete things on all the assets we own but we can be a leader not only in the U.S. but also with all of our partners around the world who often happen to be the biggest landholders in their countries also and I'm talking about vegetation, soils, waters all the things that we could do as far as reducing greenhouse gas emissions and let's bundle two questions together I think there was one I'm cheating because I work with and admire all these people we've talked a lot about DOD and I recognize that's your background but I'm wondering where there's a sieve mill connection or what the militaries can do in terms of diplomacy and kind of bridging those gaps okay thank you great questions well Steve you know if I agree with the facts you laid out there and we've seen the department defense go from being an environmental laggard in the 60's and 70's and earlier to being seen as an environmental and clean energy leader today and we've also seen that the defense department, the United States military has been at the forefront of many waves of different types of change from racial integration to others to adapting new technologies and so I think the US military is already beginning to lead here but there's a lot more that of course we could do and I'm glad you're there helping push that leadership and I think modeling what we can do in working with partner nations around the world I think is increasingly important for the COCOMS to be seized with this and for this to be integrated across our foreign policy and national security engagement strategies globally and that really goes to Kailin's question about the SIF MIL integration because we don't operate around the world in stovepipes we do integrate the civilian capacity not only across combatant commands like AFRICOM we should always do this in our foreign policy when we're engaging with other nations and we've seen now increasingly as we work with our European allies for example that they have their balance integrates well the diplomacy and the development with the defense and we need to think of these as sort of combined assets of national power instead of separate ones and we need to think of our climate and energy assets as elements of our national power too it's very clear that China gets it and has integrated even its green energy opportunities as an element of its own national power as it puts forward its foreign policy strategies and Russia in its own inimical way but we need the America can do it and we should be integrating both for the homeland security and national security okay so I'm going to be careful I'm going to jump in here I was on the other panel but I have significant scar tissue over this issue the first one thing is when we talk about DOD you've got to look at the throw weight the market throw weight that DOD has particularly in the energy area people will say well they use the most energy the single largest user of energy in the United States but they only use 1.7% of the energy budget in the United States so it's one of those play on words you don't have to use that much if you just say DOD so 1.7% that means if DOD goes out of business tomorrow it doesn't improve our green standing it's going to be a blip on the big graph of where we are on Stopping Global Warming now having said that it's important because if you're only pulling the amount of oil of about two medium sized oil wells down in a gulf per day that pales in comparison to what we're burning here in the United States so we need to be careful about that second thing is when I send America's sons and daughters down range I expect him to be the best trained the best led and the best equipped force that I can so when I'm doing things when I send the Marines down and they're humping a hundred and eighty pound pack I'm going to be real caught up with renewable energy that they can put a solar device on their backpack and they can recharge the batteries so they are not throwing away a thousand AA batteries as they're out there on patrol if it's a problem with a small outpost out there I'm going to do everything I can to bring power and wind and trash to energy those technologies because that prevents me from having to take liquid fuel across Indian country five hundred miles and gets people killed and seriously wounded so the focus on the DOD is looking at is one, how do I make my bases resilient which means if the grid goes down or even a short period of time how do I operate my bases so I can mobilize and deploy and reach back technology for that I'm going to be in there and I'm going to be putting money in but those things that don't have a direct application to mission effectiveness keeping my people safe then I think it's a matter of we have a department of energy lamentably more focused on the department of nuclear energy we have a DOE we got a lot of departments that when we talk a whole of government when we say the whole of government then we start talking about DOD a lot more people out there besides DOD so I think in this discussion I would just like everyone to let's make sure we know exactly what we're talking about what we want DOD to do and what we want the rest of our government to do and then another comment I can't help but make but when we talk about congress congress can help but what we don't need are rules that say we can't talk about it let's say we can't prepare for climate change that is not helpful you need DOD to be good stewards of the people and the equipment they have and we don't want to write into law that you cannot assess or you cannot spend money to make your base resilient that would be on my Christmas wish list when I talk about the NDAA and things like that we've changed that a little bit but there were not so many years ago there was money being cut from the budget because it had climate change in the budget request that's not the way to run a railroad through high water I apologize for jumping in but I feel like I've lived this through the last part of my activity career and I just think we need to keep focused on what we need to keep focused on I think it's said the main thing is keeping the main thing the main thing I think that's what we need to keep focused on so I could probably talk for 10 minutes but we're running out of time and I can talk to you afterwards but general keys basically said all the cynical things that I was going to say and we can talk more about all this stuff later Heather do we need to go to wrap up soon? Yeah kind of what the general said where I think the DOD can be very helpful is in the interagency process it is the 800 pound gorilla it can help advocate for the right agencies there is always this temptation to make every problem a DOD problem the DOD isn't looking to be the every problem solver so have the department of energy have NASA have everybody else do their job and fund them for it fund them adequately to do that so I think that can be really helpful on the civ mill Katelyn's question Admiral Greenert when he was chief of naval operations there's a every other year seapower symposium we run up at Newport we invite basically every head of navy that will talk to the US to come and there's only about three days of actual work in there Admiral Greenert devoted one half of one day and asked me to lead a maritime risk of climate change symposium and we engage basically every navy that would talk to us and I think that's an effective thing to do thanks there's a civ mill dimension just here within the United States as well and there hasn't been a lot of cooperation between say political military affairs at state and DOD on how to deal with this with climate change not even under the last administration so I just suggest looking at ways that you can drive more collaboration between state and DOD through those mechanisms to figure out which gets to I think general keys' point about whole of government there are things that can be done collaboratively with other agencies that we've been missing thank you and thank you for all of your remarks I just want to invite Laura Iglitsen from the HM Jackson foundation who helped sponsor the event up quickly to make some closing remarks and to thank them for their efforts thanks well does this work first thanks to the panel let's give them a round of applause so it's always nice to be thanked as a supporter people abbreviate HM Jackson foundation it's the Henry M Jackson foundation named after former senator scoop Jackson so for those of us old enough to know who he was the reason that we are here today with our partners EESI for climate security and the David Rockefeller fund to hear these two important panels is really because senator Jackson was a long-term thinker he was someone who thought ahead and he was also deeply committed to issues on the environment on environmental security on national security and also of our military and our military bases so as one of our members of our board likes to say this is squarely within senator Jackson's wheelhouse so I think we heard today specifically the kind of long-term thinking and big picture strategic thinking that is really critical and something that senator Jackson and certainly we appreciate and I just pull out a few you know final quotes I mean the unspeakable will happen even if you don't speak about it and it's not just over there it's here it's happening now we are a nation of action it's up to us to prepare while we don't know everything we know a lot we're either going to react or we're going to anticipate and finally we are in a climate era so I think there were so many pithy comments said today and really important strategic thoughts that I really appreciated hearing from both panels and thank you all very much for coming