 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to this morning's briefing on a Climate Security Plan for America. My name is Carol Werner. I am the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute, EESI. And we are an independent nonprofit started by bipartisan congressional caucus 35 years ago to inform policymakers and to search for sustainable common sense solutions to key energy and environmental problems of our day. I think that today's briefing is especially timely given all of the attention that is focused to our north at the U.N. Climate Week in New York City. We also saw huge numbers of people in terms of climate strikes around the world raising attention to this very, very important issue around which we are going to have important discussions this morning. I want to say that I am delighted that we are partnering once again with the Center for Climate and Security. This has been a wonderful, strong partnership. We believe so strongly in so many of the same issues, values, and the importance of what we can learn through a better understanding of how climate, its impacts, how that affects our national security in so many different ways. So at this time I'd like to turn to my colleague, John Conger, who is the Director of the Center for Climate and Security. How are we doing this morning? Good. Everybody do well on the Metro this morning. I understand that we had some accidents and some problems. But in the end, you're all here. And for those watching online, hopefully you weren't impacted either. I thank you, Carol, for your kind introduction. I'm John Conger. I'm the Director of the Center for Climate and Security. We also really value our partnership with Carol and EESI. Carol, you may or may not know, is leaving as the Executive Director of EESI but will stay with the organization, she tells me. But I just wanted to take the opportunity at the outset of this particular forum to say thank you to Carol and to all of the great partnership we've had from you. So thank you so very much. Keeping with the theme of thank yous, I also wanted to thank our funders, the Henry M. Jackson Foundation and the David Rockefeller Fund for their support for the efforts that we have gone for and for this report. I also have to say thank you to Congressman Adam Smith for sponsoring the room for us today. Now, I mentioned that not just because I want to say thank you for the room, which we really appreciate, but also because I wanted to point out. He's Chairman of the Armed Services Committee. This is a national security topic. This is not an environmental group that works on a security topic as a side issue. This is a security group that works on an environmental issue. So think about that and that's your framing for today, for all the things you're going to hear about today. We're looking at this from a national security perspective and dealing with a very difficult issue. So as you look at the agenda for today and as we think about what we're going to hear, you're going to have, we're going to lead off today with a keynote address from General Ron Keyes. I'm going to introduce him in a moment, but he is a warfighter's warfighter who's going to be able to give you a perspective on this issue in the intersection of climate and national security. We're going to have a panel of distinguished security experts who are going to talk about the impact of climate change on our military just to sort of give you the baseline from which we're operating, setting up the problem. Panel one is setting up the problem. Panel two is going to be talking about our solution. We have a climate security plan for America that we are publishing today. There are copies of it outside. You can also get it online, but we killed a tree in order to get you copies, hard copies here, because sometimes you just have to hold it in your hands while there's plenty to hold in your hands out there. So our climate security plan is talking about now that we have recognized the problem, what do we need to do about it? And we're going to get into that in more detail. I'm not going to do too much talking about that now, but the crux of it is that we need leadership. We need, now that we've acknowledged the problem, we need leadership to move the ball forward. And we have offered dozens of recommendations in our plan of things that we think that the administration should do. And obviously if folks up here on Capitol Hill want to pursue any of those recommendations through legislation, that would obviously be up to them. Hint, hint. So now, with no further ado, let me turn to introducing our keynote speaker. General Ron Keyes is a retired four star general, Air Force general, and he retired after a career of more than 40 years in the Air Force. You're going to catch a theme here today of decades of military service from the folks that we have speaking. But General Keyes retired as the Air Combat Commander, so he was overseeing all of the Air Force's combat power, and he brings that perspective to this discussion. He's a warfighter. He had 4,000 hours piloting combat aircraft and 300 hours in combat. And at ACC, he commanded 1,200 aircraft, 27 wings, 17 bases, and 105,000 personnel. Now, among those bases that he commanded include some of the ones that are impacted and endangered by climate change and extreme weather. So he has not only the combat perspective that he's bringing to bear, but also the managing bases that are impacted by climate change as well. He also is a member of our advisory board at the Center for Climate and Security, and he's chairman of the CNA, the Center for Naval Analysis Military Advisory Board, which has done a lot of great work in this space as well. So with no further ado, because you don't want to hear from me, you want to hear from him, let me welcome up to the stage General Ron Keyes. Good morning everybody. Good morning. How about them cowboys, huh? Somebody wants to read a lesson. Okay, so here we are. Here we are. Just said, I was raised on a farm. I was educated as an entomologist. Trained as a pilot pilot. I like to hunt and put it off. And I raise money to eat. And there's a wildly invalid story that I'd best your ass out there. And I'm here at the CNA as a climate and national security board. And if that doesn't drive your story, how close that gives you is, I don't know what that is. So, what I do know, after 40 years in the Air Force, all around the globe, is how the military frames the process. The prime directive is this. We go and fight to win America's wars. We call them our views of whether that war is a global ambulance, humanitarian rescue, or action combat. So, we owe America's sons and daughters the best equipment, the best plans, the best training and leadership. We can, if they're going to harm Floyd. We hire commanders to win. I'll explain to you. And that's why DOD cares about this. For us, this is not a religion of politics. A bigger, small government. Bigger, small government. Liberal or conservative views. Or being a climate scientist. This is for us about the religion of math. This is about resilient basing. Effective training. More fight. Less fuel. More capability. Less cost. More options. Less risk. We have to be able to base and train and test, mobilize, deploy and reach back effectively without interruption. And have the capacity to be in many places at once, often at very short notice. That for us makes climate change effects a double-edged sword. First, the planning for the direct impacts of climate change that are increasingly not just over there, but here. Sea level rise, flooding, wildfires, droughts, increased extreme heat days. Record precipitation and Arctic ice melt are impacting operations and base readiness. The same could be said about your village, town, city, by the way. So you might look at how we look at the problem for the problems that you face. And we encourage that because we don't just live in the forts and the forts and the bases. We live in all of the communities around our country. And so we are concerned not only with the military capability, but our homes, our cars, our kids, our livelihoods. Now second, climate change, the catalyst for accelerating crises all over the world. Including here at home. Forced migrations, environmental disasters, failing states. All the potential to threaten critical infrastructure, drive instability, embolden competitors and adversaries. And become hotspots with potential for our involvement. Our market is expanding. We would just assume that market not expand. Now being in the military, we accept as a risky business. But we try not to take reckless chances. So our framework is a pragmatic. How bad could it be? Could we stand that? What could we do at what cost and what time frame? And what if we're wrong? And how will we know we're wrong? And how will we know we're wrong in time to go to plan B? And what is plan B? And I commend that sort of approach to looking at the problems that we all face. Along with Covey's quote, the main thing is to keep the main thing as the main thing. And that's one of the big problems we face in this problem. But DoD is hard at work. The recommendations pouring in from ports and ports and bases around the globe. How to be more proactive so we not only evacuate from storms, but more effectively protect assets in place. And we have a term called survive to operate. Better training, equipping and response recovery teams. Addressing specialized response equipment. Hardening emergency and crisis action facilities. Developing the ability to island facilities from commercial support. Changing our process even down to the way we flow our spare parts. So bases that are affected by major hurricanes can be more productive in the off season and better protect assets when the chance of damage is highest. The complete solution is going to take time and money and continued focus. But DoD clearly sees Mother Nature as a peer adversary. But that's resilience. That didn't cure anything. And here's the problem. This is about national security, just military security. It's a Rubik's Cube of technical, social, economic policy and politics. With technical maybe the least of the problem. Economic, energy, agricultural and a host of other securities make up national security. DoD can not fix this problem. We may be, as you hear, the single largest user of energy, but that's only 1.7 of America's energy budget. If DoD goes out of business tomorrow, we're still in deep chemistry. We can be thought leaders. We can prove out mission relevant technology. We can be clear eyed on the threat. But remember the prime directive. We go and win. In our climate and security advisory group report, the climate and security plan for America, we lay out four imperatives. It's for a whole of government approach. One is demonstrate leadership. Because unity of command is essential. The problem with that, of course, is everybody believes in unity of command as long as there are unity. Everybody wants to drive the train. But we've got to have leadership. You can't blow an uncertain trumpet and have everyone follow you. Everything can't be a priority. And somebody's going to have to pay the bill. Assess climate risks. Number two, forewarned is forearmed. Support allies and partners. We think that's important because the nouns of prevention is worth a ton of deployment orders. Prepare for and prevent climate impact. That's hard choices ahead. And I think that fourth one is the hardest and the most important. And we're already late. We say two things mainly in point number four. Build U.S. resilience to climate change risks and reduce their scale and scope. Now who would argue with that? Certainly not Houston, not Omaha, or Paradise California. Second, in the U.S. and globally, reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a scale necessary for both avoiding catastrophic security consequences and bolstering economic development. Here we go. When I say the dreaded phrase greenhouse gas emissions, that means someone's ox is going to get gored. That means somebody's going to lose and somebody's going to win. That means all our lives are going to have to change probably, expensively. But what's the alternative? They're not doing that. That reminds me of the story about the chicken and the pig and breakfast. If you're having ham and eggs, just remember, the chicken was involved, the pig was committed. Are you the chicken or the pig on this issue? Finally, let me leave you with this anonymous quote as you think about this issue today. It was so much easier to blame it on them. It was bleakly depressing to think that they were us. If it was them, then nothing was anybody's fault. If it was us, what does that make me? After all, I'm one of us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of them. It's always one of us. It's them to do the bad things. So thanks for listening to me. And don't forget to pick. I meant not to leave any time. We do have some time. I think we're going to go for 10 minutes or so. We can take some questions. Why don't we aim for about three questions here in the audience? I don't know. Do we have a roving microphone? We've got a roving microphone over here. So please raise your hand. And if you could identify who you're affiliated with, that would be helpful. But let's take some questions for General Keith. Hello. My name is Michael. I'm with Representative Gilles Lozneros. We're talking today about the impacts of climate change on the military, specifically right now, on the Air Force. I was wondering, someone who's unfamiliar with those impacts, what are just brief impacts that we should be looking for and what we should be taking note of? We've got a lot of bases that are down on the coast. We've got Eglin's that's down at Fort Walton Beach. It's a real jewel in the crown of our testing environment. We've got lots of telemetry down there. When storms come through there, we're at danger of losing both our development test outfit and our operational test outfit. I mean, that could be a big impact. A lot of that stuff is hardened. It's out on the beach. We know it's going to get hit. But when some of those breakers come in, they get damaged. If you look at Tyndall, obviously, another base down on the coast got hit squarely with a hurricane, essentially wiped it out. We're building it back now. And it will be an example of how to build for the future as far as you're going to save haven a lot of your stuff that you can get out of there. But some things, if it hits at the wrong time, you're not going to be able to get all your birds out because they're going through periodic maintenance or they may be broken. So you need to build essentially hardened aircraft shelters that are elevated so you have stuff that's safe. Now you look at Langley. Now we've got a bunch of, most of our raptors up at Langley. Langley sets at seven feet above sea level to start. So it doesn't take much to get that place underwater. When I was there, I was there as Lieutenant Colonel as the Squadron Commander of the Eagle Squadron and then came back as the four star in charge of it. And you could see that just in that span of time that we'd get a good strong nor'easter coming through and we're three or four feet deep in water and places on the base. And we could see that at high tide we're starting to get infiltration of seawater on the base. You go across to Norfolk. Norfolk has got some serious problems in some of the housing areas which are off base just from during high tide not be able to get through the water to get to the base to go to work. So those are the kind of impacts. Then you go out west, the wildfires, I mean it's not just civilian structures are getting burned. We're losing power. We're losing some of our training ranges and the other impact that you have is we have people on the fire lines. And so every person you have on the fire line is a person that can't go and do the job that we actually hired them to do in the military. When we were down in Houston we were doing a swift water rescue down in Houston. We're not really set up to do swift water rescue and when you do that you need to have trained people or you're going to lose people getting swept away. In fact during that first, not this last most recent deluge down in Houston but in the first one we ended up rearranging our deployment schedule because we had people either affected and we couldn't get them out of town or we had people deployed in there helping people sitting on their roofs so we couldn't deploy those units out overseas in their normal rotation. So that's the kind of impact that we see and people go well we just head to higher ground. And that's going to be an interesting discussion when you walk into the senator from State X and say you know this has been great being here but we're going to head for higher ground and we're leaving the state. So there's got to be an understanding of you can mitigate and be resilient to a point but at a point you can't be resilient anymore so we need to start on the other we need to slow this climate change down and arrest it. That's the I guess the most important impact. You've got to remember the questions then. Alright I'm Riley. I'm with the office of Senator Jean Chihin. Earlier you mentioned how climate change creates more opportunities for conflict and involvement of the United States abroad. I was wondering if you could speak a little bit more to that and where those conflicts. My name is Bethlehem and I'm with the Center for Development and Strategy. My question is and not to sound alarming but some scholars have argued that it might be too late for small island states to benefit from any measures in mitigating climate change now and I was wondering since we mentioned working with allies if there are any sort of perhaps not preventative but mitigating measures that the U.S. is taking with its allies things like preservation of cultures and societies histories and things like that for smaller island states that might face extinction. My name is Blake and I'm at Senator Cain's office. You mentioned that bases might be moving soon so my question is what is the long-term plan for Navy bases especially places like Norfolk that are pretty well established. Well I take base closure first. I mean as we look at you know ranking our bases and everything that's one of I believe and I'm behind the green door on this so don't everybody run out with their hair on fire that we've got another round of bracket going on but that's going to be one of the analyses that has to be done to say how much money did we pour into these bases until you're throwing good money after bad and is there a way that we can make the curves meet so that we're doing resilience over here while someone is starting to think about mitigation and slowing down the effects. The hope is that you build your levees high enough and you change your operating procedures well enough that you can then live through whatever happens which we call surviving to operate. We know we're going to get attacked but we're going to still operate maybe at a reduced level until somebody fixes this. Now somebody doesn't fix this and I don't know and I don't know what the timeline is but you can look at Norfolk I mean they're no better off than we are so there are a lot of people starting to worry about how do we make this resilient enough to last. What was the next one? Ah well that's pretty easy I mean the patterns of weather change you get desertification you don't have enough water to grow food you have people that pick up and move and they're forced migrations and they go through areas where other people are and they want to settle there. I'm already here I don't want you coming in here and setting up camp because I have barely enough grass for my cattle for example. You see that I'm moving to large mega cities they're looking for a better life they're looking to be able to do something one of the problems that you have is then you have in a lot of these ungoverned spaces and the failing states groups that come together and say well look the government's not taking care of you come with us we can show you a better life and they get radicalized and the next thing they end up on our shores over here our somebody's shores with the intent to do harm to somebody so there's a lot of that impact that we don't have in a lot of places we don't have enough water if you don't have enough water A you really can't live and B you can't grow any crops and your livestock are going to die which means there are going to be a lot of movement and then the other issues are we've been living here all our life and all of a sudden we're now under three or four feet of water and we can't live like that and so now what do we do? and again it's the push and shove between the constituted government taking care of people and other people other groups showing how they if you come with us we can in fact take care of you better than the government so there's a lot I mean a lot of impacts across the world I mean we'll eventually if we go long enough I think we're going to see it here we'll have another grapes arrest story in the United States my mom lived through the dust storms that swept through the country and she's told me those horrible stories we don't want to see that but it's not just going to happen over there it's going to gradually happen all around the world and the last one was the island states you know it's a matter of that's not a military imperative I mean we get swept up into it because we provide humanitarian relief but that's a state department and aid and their venue is back through the U.N. and I think there's a couple of islands out there that are about to become if they haven't already come the first environmental humanitarian situation where they have lost essentially their country due to environmental change, climate change so that's not a direct we're not directly involved in that we're in an ancillary mode when it comes to assisting the other issue is around the world we tend to think of the desert in the Middle East and Africa and places like that because they have some very serious problem but you start to look at some of the other areas which are getting more rain and they're getting flooding and you start to look at the Lakan Straits in the area over in Southeast Asia there's plenty of issue for everybody and our concern as the military is we go and win and part of that winning is humanitarian rescue and support when we're called upon to do so but there's only capacity to be so many places and so many at one time and still do the primary job which is to deploy and carry out our country's business in the military so that's our worry if I could welcome up the first panel and while folks are coming up and taking their seats let me just say a couple things about what you're going to hear from this first group here I appreciate some of the questions because it reflects the fact that what we need to before we start the discussion about how you fix things is a little bit more discussion and description of what the problems actually are how is climate change affecting national security and that's what our first panel is going to discuss in more detail we are going to have a conversation about operational impacts we're going to have a conversation about impacts to installations we're going to have a conversation about what future missions might be assigned to the military in the context of climate change what do you do when there's a whole new ocean in the Arctic that the Russians want to take control over how do you deal with those dynamics and then obviously how do you deal with the climate stresses and how it drives conflict around the world as our panel takes their seats this is the kind of conversation we're going to have for the next hour or so I'm going to introduce each of our panelists at the beginning and then we're just going to go through and have each one give some remarks and then we'll do some more questions afterwards but this part of the conversation think through these are the questions about what the problem said is I will say if you want to talk about base closure later I'm going to be available I used to own the base closure portfolio at DoD when I was the assistant secretary back in the last administration so I can talk at length about BRAC if you really want to hear how it works so today's panelists we have first we have Lieutenant General John Castellaw who served 36 years in the Marine Corps he's a pilot who later oversaw all of Marine Corps aviation and then Marine Corps budget so 36 years of experience there in the Marine Corps we have Rear Admiral Ann Phillips she's currently serving as the special assistant to the Governor of Virginia for coastal adaptation and protection served in Norfolk for a long time during her 31 year Navy career as a surface warfare officer she commanded destroyer squadron and expeditionary strike group 2 which included all of East Coast amphibious forces so 36 years then 31 years of experience we have Breeder General Jerry Galloway he's a professor at the University of Maryland a professor of civil and environmental engineering he served 38 years in the Army including service as the dean of the academic board at West Point so 31, 36, 38 I'm not actually going to try and do public math here I'll move on Joan Vanderbort served as a DoD civilian for 28 years in OSD and in the Army managing environmental and encroachment issues and impacts on military training she served as the deputy director for Ranges C in airspace and OSD's readiness office so we're going to get a lot of perspectives here practical perspectives on how operations have been and are going to be impacted by climate change and so with no further ado let me turn it over to General Castelot thank you John I appreciate the opportunity to be here thank you very much for putting my name on the back of this sometimes I get a bit lost and I get very angry can you hear me all right? as it didn't begin out there can you tell me how to add when we were in that op-ed I was actually always a great board and people saw one of my policies and we put the budget together so it's always good to see them you know we talk about the climate impact on security really for me make the green light come on for me it started growing up like General Keyes I grew up on a farm and the determining factor and just about everything we did was a weather was a climate how we prospered from year to year depended to a great extent on what the weather was and the climate and how well the plants did under our care and then I got in the Marine Corps and became an aviator and man you better be careful about the weather when you're flying and also as I got up into the ranks we started doing operations and being responsible for planning and you better think about what kind of operating environment you're going to be in and then when I transitioned I went back to the farm I'm third generation in a 100 year old farmhouse back in Tennessee not far from the Mississippi River and it is still a determining factor in what we do in farming and so let me I see Esther Batson out in the audience from American security project let me try to steal and I've never had an original thought in my life and then he can confirm that let me try to use what ASP has put out in terms of a framework to think about this and you start with sea level rise and we're talking about the impact on our national security and on the military about a third of my career in the Camp Lejeune Cherry Point complex in eastern North Carolina and of course you know Marines like to be near water they like to have sand in their boots and have a place to land and if you look at Camp Lejeune you know it's a lot like all the other areas in the east coast you got barrier islands down there and one area the first place I ever did an amphibious landing was Oneslow beach which is essentially a barrier island down there but what we're already starting to see down in Camp Lejeune is attack on those barrier islands they're getting more severe if we say 2035 we're going to see some additional overflow over those barrier islands and then Camp Lejeune is wrapped around the new river which is a very shallow inlet broad inlet and you can just see how the surge from the waters during a storm or increase as we're seeing in the sea level is going to impact it because we put you know everybody likes to be right on the water so you can see how all that infrastructure and it's billions of dollars of infrastructure that's going to be at risk down there we go a little bit further south when I commanded the 2nd Marine aircraft wing I had Buford South Carolina which is a fighter base and I tried to steal as much money from the Navy as I could to put into F-35s that we're going to base down there and you look at how threatened that Buford is going to be and you think about how we're doing the right things in terms of where we're doing our investments and what do we need to do to mitigate the risks that are posed to such bases as Buford and Parris Island you know we just had this hurricane and the first thing you have to do down in Parris Island is because you've got one cause way that goes in and out is to get several thousand recruits on buses so along the coast here everybody knows about Norfolk but there are also other areas that are under threat from sea level rise and let's talk about extreme storms again you know I said I was a farmer well you know what we're seeing is an increase I think that's 1880 when we started keeping this the increase in the days of the year where we have more than two inches of rain and what does that mean well when you get this flood this increase in rain flow then it exceeds the capability of being able to handle it and if you look at the Mississippi basin where I'm living now and you look around you see which is on the Missouri river even naval support activity Memphis which was built during World War II and within the last 10 years has had to deal with flooding in their housing area and rebuild that you talk about Fort Campbell Fort Knox Fort Leonard Wood, Missouri inland and far the ocean and sea level rise they're subject to damage from extreme events flooding and rainfall one of the ways that I have confirmed that besides being scientists there's a a very very suspect magazine that comes out every month it has for 110 years it's called a progressive farmer in it every month is an article on how we're going to have to do a better job of conservation in growing crops because erosion is being accelerated by that increase in those rain events of doing that and not only that you know one of the areas that we you know we're dealing with tariffs and we're dealing with a concern in commodity areas one of the areas within the last 20 years in the U.S. that we've increased food production soybeans particular has been in South Dakota and what we're seeing now is with the increase in the growing season you're able to do that but that area also is in the Midwest is one of the areas where that we've had an increase an annual increase in the amount of rain by 8 inches on average you can look at the graph and see that the trend has continued up to do that now the third thing is extreme drought I spent a lot of time I broke the first promise I ever made to my wife when I graduated from University of Tennessee I said honey three years I had a farm and we stayed in for 36 she moved us 25 times around the world but I was in UCOM European Command and Stuttgart and back then we had responsibility for Africa and I had the Africa portfolio and they said hey Castle we may have a a coup down in Chad we're going to send you down to combat an evacuation operation so I go down there and I go out and look at the areas I look at the Chari River and I fly over Lake Chad and I look at that and this is an area of 40 million people in the Lake Chad basin 40 million people and because of instability from a number of things it's always had under the layer some situations but it has increased in the recent years I went back two years ago and I had the opportunity to go over the same area and I was amazed at how much Lake Chad has gone down since I was there and what we're talking about an impact a couple hundred thousand fishermen farmers on herdsmen what's happening as the desert comes south your eyes up you're pushing the herdsmen south into the farming area and crop area and you're getting gunfights between herdsmen and farmers the fishermen are trying to figure out what they're going to do and in this environment you have Boko Haram who's recruiting individuals and undermining those nations down there that their stability and eventually will impact us Esther, what's the fourth thing? Ah, Arctic ice melt thank you Esther Arctic ice melt I was reading the military times here this week you know we've had an interesting situation in the Korean Peninsula and we have suspended exercises on the Korean Peninsula and what's happening is we've got marines and sailors that are, instead of exercising you know on the Korean Peninsula are sailing to Alaska to try to get cold weather operations in and what they're finding there is as the permafrost melts is that you're getting erosion of the coastal areas up there and in inland you're also as the ice becomes water destabilize the foundation for buildings and infrastructure that we've invested in security wise and we also know that hey you know we're going to be in there and we're going to put up more buildings we're going to do more stuff we're going to do more training in that area and we're going to have a significant impact on that something that we have to consider and be aware of I usually have an interpreter I've got a regional dialectical speech impediment otherwise known as a southern draw but I hope I've got through to you appreciate it and I look forward to your questions thanks general next we're going to have Admiral Phillips thank you John good morning everyone let me make sure I have this position so that you can hear me but I'm not going to punch myself in the nose with it that might be less than entertaining more so for you and less so for me so as John said I'm the special assistant to the governor of Virginia for coastal adaptation and protection I come to this position by way of 31 years as a surface warfare officer and after retiring and staying in the Hampton roads region in Norfolk where I live having an opportunity to be a part of an intergovernmental pilot project that took place in that region from 2014 to 2016 I led the infrastructure working group I found the issue compelling I was honored and frankly fortunate to have 25 regional state and federal professionals in my infrastructure working group who are passionate about the issue of rising water sea level rise and flooding impact on the Hampton roads region and they educated me on the need and when we finished not a lot happened that made me angry because there was such a crushing obligation to move forward I found my way to the center for climate insecurity and things have carried on from there so that's my story and I've been asked to talk a little bit today about the pilot project a little bit about what's going on on the ground in the state of Virginia and the challenges that then leads to in the context of national security and the impact of climate on national security so in Virginia we've experienced 18 inches of relative sea level rise as judged by the Sewell's point tide gauge over the last 100 years roughly and we expect that we will see nearly that much again by 2050 so there's a rapid acceleration in place Virginia has one of the highest rates of acceleration on the east coast we also have a subsidence challenge particularly in the Hampton roads region it's not universal across the region it's much more of the problem in some places much less than others but that is an added part of our challenge and that makes our solution set different than it might be in other locations what we are experiencing in Virginia now across coastal Virginia is not just the need to prepare we are already living with water in some cases at least on a weekly or even maybe monthly basis but more recently this fall and we are seeing a trend we are also seeing a trend in coastal Virginia where the incidents of recurrent flooding are more frequent it stays around longer, it's higher and more things can cause it of course all of this is related to the fact that we have 18 extra inches of water already and so tide, wind, rain or any combination of the above creates a scenario where we have water where we don't want it and we don't need it and it impacts our ability to live our daily lives and so what does that mean in the context of what's in coastal Virginia first of all Virginia is the state with the highest percentage of its gross domestic product derived from our federal presence almost 9%, 8.9%, that's 2017 data from Office of Economic Adjustment we are also highest in defense personnel spending and second highest in defense contract spending and defense related contract spending so we are wedded to the federal government and we also have a substantial port the port of Virginia depending on how you're measuring it it's the fourth largest container port by volume or the fifth by this or the sixth by that but the point is it's large it's growing it's located in and around the Hampton Roads region there are four separate facilities in Hampton Roads and three others around the state of Virginia and it is vulnerable it is at risk it takes the issue seriously and has done quite a bit to prepare for the military and logistics supply chain it's one of 17 critical infrastructure ports it's not a critical military infrastructure port but it's a critical infrastructure port in the United States so what comes in and out of that port goes all the way is taken as it comes in past the Mississippi River so that's where our influence is and those things include commodities by and large, export we're the largest coal export point on the east coast of the United States you can love coal or you can hate coal and we export agricultural products and large percentage of agricultural products come in and out through the state of Virginia so we also have a huge tourism industry and economy and aquaculture and fisheries economy and of course the ever present waterfront property which generates tax revenue for our localities and who lives in those localities soldiers, sailors, airmen, marines civilian employees of the federal entities that are there 60% of the people in the Hampton Roads region alone live in one city and work in another so you can't just protect one piece of the region one base, one piece of the port everything is interconnected it's an interconnected system of systems and its future is vitally dependent on the ability of all of those pieces to work together to move forward which drives the larger need for a climate security plan federal strategy and process and particularly in the context of the impact on national security what the pilot project came up with as outcomes across a whole of government and community for Hampton Roads were five key points the first is set standards collective standards that apply to regions that everyone understands the second is ensure the support of a consortium of universities and whatever context that applies so that you have the best possible science and engineering data and updated data over time the third is to be able to collaborate that data, collect it and share it and disseminate it in a way that is usable by any party that might need access to it fourth identify what infrastructure is critical and vulnerable and I don't mean just the department of Homeland Security definition of critical and vulnerable I mean what is the essence of the place what has to be there for it to be what it is and what does not have to be there and then make your decisions about what your priorities are and how you are going to approach them this is a big part of my job now in the state of Virginia and I can tell you it is a significant challenge in a Dillon rule state that has pushed planning to the regional and local level fascinating challenge a little bit out of the realm of national security but it will have an impact because that applies how Virginia views itself and how it wants to use and employ its coast for its future over time critical decision and these are critical factors for us and of course the last piece is how will we pay for this what are the funding structures and strategies and instruments that will be required to support this need huge need for the defense department but really for all federal agencies and entities and for the states and for the localities that will have to deal with this so there has been a PhD paper put out on this issue very recently done by Dr. Hannah teacher she studied the Hampton Roads pilot project and she also studied the San Diego region and the recent memorandum of understanding between the port of San Diego and the command and navy region southwest and looked at those two shared efforts and came up with a couple of key points that I'd like to just bring up here namely that the shared risk between installations and communities bring a great potential for joint planning and drive a need for it and also that one of the two most critical points that Dr. teacher identifies is recognizing independence and constructing credibility as the key to initiating and reinforcing alliances between federal partners and local communities and those partnerships are what's going to be able to give us the opportunity to move forward there are other programs that are of great value in this context the office of economic adjustment joint land use studies are significant positive we've had significant positive outcomes from them in the state of Virginia understanding that what impacts the community and how that impacts the base and federal facilities and also working with the Army Corps on coastal storm risk management studies but the key to remember there is coastal storm risk management studies are focused on coastal storm risk they are not focused on sea level rise they are not focused on recurrent flooding and so the outcomes that they recommend may be of great value in preventing storm surge but they may not do anything for the recurrent flooding that we are starting to see in Hampton roads so recent NOAA data just put out this year 2019 shows that by the mid 2020s in Hampton roads nearly every high tide at least half of them every year nearly half every year will approach the nuisance flood level so that means we're going to see flooding on roads that people used to get to work every day that get into naval station off a Hampton Boulevard one of our key friction points shore drive another key friction point because it acts as joint base Little Creek Fort story areas where we're seeing flooding now we're going to see flooding a whole lot more often and that will negatively impact our ability to execute our mission in the context of environmental readiness degrading environmental challenges degrading readiness over time so this is our challenge in coastal Virginia and it's not just Hampton roads Wallops Island huge NASA facility in Wallops Navy is a tenant command there but Navy does an awful lot of missile testing there it's our only missile test range on the east coast we do an awful lot of radar testing and training it's all out on Wallops Island which is all in a special flood hazard area so a very vulnerable facility critical to national infrastructure and our ability to train and prepare our forces to operate downrange and test our new weapon systems and radars but equally very very vulnerable facility that's Wallops Island Dahlgren AP Hill up here in northern Virginia number of facilities at the federal level absolutely critical and certainly vulnerable so in the context of what's on the ground what we're seeing in coastal Virginia this is a today problem this is impacting and shipping away at our forces and our readiness and our ability to project power downrange now it's not just a Navy problem as you heard earlier from previous speakers it's also an Air Force problem Langley Eustis average elevation eight feet above sea level that means a lot of it's below eight feet of elevation Fort Eustis where our army keeps all of its boats very low area very vulnerable and all of this critical infrastructure is at risk so I attempt to make a compelling case for you for the need to take action now it's very easy to say sun shining winds not blowing don't have a high tide everything's fine spend some time in coastal Virginia and and you will you too will have a water story you will view this differently and if you don't have to spend much time in the Hampton region to understand the essential impact and the criticality of our challenge and its impact on our ability to execute our national security strategy they have no time to waste one of my favorite sayings time and time wait for no man thank you general Galloway let me start with two quotes of paraphrases the first comes from the army failure manual 101-5 which was put out in 1980s and revised weather and terrain have more of an impact on military operations and any other factors weather and terrain the second is from an equally good source and I'll say how many of you know where it came from Toto I don't think we're in Kansas anymore we're in a different world than we were in 1980 we could see some ideas that there might be climate change I've worked in the Mississippi basin for almost half my life and I've seen the challenges with what's going on with floods in that area we've noticed since really the 70s and 80s we were losing Louisiana if those who have been down there the coastal Louisiana is disappearing the second most vulnerable area is coastal Maryland the eastern shore of Maryland I invite you when you go to Virginia a beautiful place I live in Virginia and you go north on the Del Mar Peninsula you'll see the challenges we both face we face with Annapolis for the Navy and the Naval Academy we face with other installations that are in this particular region so we know that weather and terrain have an impact you can think of that in terms of Napoleon trying to get to Moscow Hitler trying to attack Moscow all the things you've seen in pictures or you can think of things you've seen more recently like the pictures of Opid Air Force Base under water but then you can think of things that are changing and they are changing rapidly and we can see that we are on the east coast of the U.S. having sea level rise at a much faster rate than other places in the world and so it's important that we know and understand that well military bases at home and abroad are terribly important I spent 38 years as an army engineer combat and then civil works engineer worrying about things like floods and then 23 years since then I've been engaged in trying to deal with how we deal with these disasters with floods being the principal one and they're all around us and they're hitting us every day now you can say military bases at home that's important but we ought to be able to take care of that there are the military bases there are launch platforms there are how we get troops ready to go overseas you've heard General Keyes mention that we need to deploy you can't deploy unless you have a base from which to deploy there are the logistics centers for the supplies we need the high quality equipment that we use the people that are repairing it and using that there are the places where we do our training and Joan will give you a lot about the training why it is so difficult and the challenges we're facing on bases across the country in trying to keep up with what the weather is doing to us they're also operational many of you have seen movies if not other things where you see somebody sitting in Nevada operating a drone that's flying somewhere else in the world so we have tactical operations being conducted from bases in the United States so we need to have them ready to go and participate in whatever the operations are and they have a defined area in all of these bases and you say well that's okay Fort Benning is here or Fort Bragg but to get to the right airfield or get to the port you have to go as Admiral Phillips has mentioned you have to go cross country you have to go through communities you have to find roads that work and you have to have the support that you need to be able to power the bases themselves and the people there they have to be able to get to the base and the people that live on base have to be able to have the support from the lifelines that we all know it may be water, it may be power we've got to think these things through as a team we need to address them and they're not getting better and that's why we're not in Kansas anymore we did a sea level study the Center for Climate and Security of bases on the east shore east coast and the Gulf Coast and we looked at what was happening and you could see the pictures of what would be happening in 2050, 2070 and these are estimates we really don't know I'm on the Coast Smart Council we just came up with an approximation of where we'd be in the years ahead in sea level rise it isn't a pretty picture if you take the bad situation even with a moderate situation it's very difficult for us and what should you be doing if you're preparing or thinking about this you may recall after 9-11 what we had was a committee that looked at what did we miss and the answer was a failure of imagination and so in this report that the Center put out for the military on these bases they said think the tragedy, think the catastrophe you don't have to bill for it but you better have thought through what you would do, again General Keyes brought out the issue you've got to be prepared for the completely unknown and you've got to think of what you'd do we now say in the United States flood community there's no such thing as absolute protection we cannot guarantee you protection in Houston, or in New Orleans or off at Air Force Base because nature is going to do something different we thought we could run 60,000 models and tell us what could happen where it possibly might have another hurricane come in but nature doesn't read that same model and so it may come up with a different way had Hurricane Harvey come in at a slightly different angle the damage would have been far in excess of what you see we're still trying to cope with so there's a lot of things going on and we've got to be prepared to think about it and we need our best talent on it we need to identify the risk at every military installation in this country and we need to identify what we're going to do about that and start being funded if we're not already and in many places they are to how to deal with them and then be prepared to implement them in these preparations implement them in a phase basis we cannot afford to do everything right up at the start but we can afford to get started and we can see how things change over time and so that becomes terribly important to everybody that we recognize it's a problem but who else are we thinking about as bases overseas where we have our own troops and the bases where our allies and partners work we need to help them understand where we know and where we've got the scientific community behind us what's going to happen under these climate change conditions Diego Garcia sitting in the middle of the Indian Ocean at the edge of the Indian Ocean is a supply base that's where we keep a lot of supplies we need to have that ready to be used we have allies that help us in lots of different places and you mentioned the Straits of Malacca I've been working in Singapore they have a small problem they're an island and its sea level rises where do they go and so they are planning now for 50 years ahead they are building now for 20 years ahead they're doing things that mean we can work with them and we can see a future with them so we've got to be dealing with home and abroad what's happening we mentioned earlier that the problems you have outside of the bases the communities that are there it's what the failure to do deal with those places overseas can cause it can cause turmoil if there is a flood or a natural disaster that causes these communities not to be able to operate the people aren't getting supported and you see unrest in the countries and that can be a flash for so many different things we're dealing with some tough issues sea level rise we know that floods we don't really understand what's happening to floods there's a lot of floods going on there's something that you all have seen in Washington DC cloudburst we've discovered that these things come in like a punch and they dump a tremendous amount of water in a relatively narrow area should we have a category 4 storm in this region and go over Washington DC it's expected you could have as much as 12 feet of water on Constitution Avenue in 2006 from a rainfall event on a Saturday night we had 3 feet of water on Constitution Avenue and we put down the IRS for 6 months now maybe that's a good thing but in any case there was water inside the new National Archives auditorium there were things that were happening here to say this is the hub this is the operational center for the Pentagon for everybody else what would happen under these circumstances we've got to be prepared for that at Fort Hood we had 9 soldiers killed and the blood occurred and we didn't have enough advance warning for them to know how to get out of the way and what to do wildfires have been a real problem and they're growing temperature is causing not only it to be difficult for the soldier or the sailor himself or herself it is a problem for us overall in how we treat the facilities and how our equipment is going to operate you all may recall a couple of years ago at Sky Harbor in Phoenix they let Delta planes take off certain class because it was too hot they couldn't lift off I'm going to war excuse me you can't go well that's what we've got to be prepared for we've got to be able to deal with the new conditions what they mean to us in terms of altitude heat all the factors that need to be taken into account or the choppy Pacific that we went across in World War II and may have to go back to in our Pacific oriented opportunities so all of these things they affect the battlefield they affect how we fight will the battlefield be different you bet it will be will our equipment be able to be useful it's got to be modified we know that so in climate change we recognize that we've got to take care of our bases we've got to take care of our soldiers sailors and airmen we've got to take care of our allies and get them working and equally important our counterparts in our civilian communities and the people who are in technology that are doing so much for us to be ready for the 21st century now stop there thanks general, Joan thank you very much and general when I was coming up from Richmond this morning on the train I was thinking about Toto as well really we are not in Kansas anymore but it's really a pleasure to be here today and in particular to talk about the issue you know sometimes people ask me well what keeps you up at night besides pizza and a beer at 1130 well it really is the risk of climate change and how it impacts training readiness because training impacts it actually runs in my blood because that is what I focused on for the last 20 years of my career so this is an important issue to me even now so from my perspective climate change is no doubt a game changer when it comes to having a fully prepared force because readiness depends on the ability of DOD to rapidly respond to unpredictable global threats of the force is critical to that readiness and the cornerstone to training are the ranges that include the air sea space and training lands that support it well why is that important because to decisively win and survive on the battlefield depends upon realistic training and being able to replicate the operational environment now I'm going to step you through the reasons why the climate change is a game changer to training readiness so when we talk about ranges and the range enterprise as a whole I want to let you know that each of the services currently faces shortfall and challenges with regard to range capability as an example some of the services have shortfalls and automated ranges feeding and score back mechanism spectrum issues air space limitations and deficiencies and maneuver land as well as personnel range personnel as well all of which are needed to support the doctrinal requirements those challenges that they face and range capability are also compounded by compliance with environmental regulations and also challenges dealing with urban straw and energy as well so the bottom line is this the services are challenged by existing shortfalls and range capability that are further compounded by encroachment impacts and this is not something new to congress has been reported to congress multiple years since 2001 now let's throw climate change into the mix and when we do that we just change the risk level to training readiness because climate change factors such as sea level rise frequent and more intense weather events, the droughts the rising temperatures and the wildfires are impacting our range enterprise they're also impacting the carrying capacity of the land to support that training that is the natural infrastructure so I'm going to give you a couple of examples and believe me the list can go on for a long time but we have all heard about off it today air force base in Nebraska with 7 feet of water inundated causing $650 million in damages in 2018 hurricane Michael flatten Tyndall air force base causing $4.7 billion in damages that same year hurricane Florence came rolling up the coast battering Camp Lejeune causing $3.6 billion in damages from massive flooding and beach erosion making it harder to train and certify units for overseas deployments it also hit Bragg causing damages up to $55 million and of course this year hurricane Dorian came up the coast again a lot of the installations were spared but some still had damages in the spring of 2017 snow melt in excess of 200% of annual average resulted in heavy spring flooding at Fallon naval air station in Nevada this significantly impacted the B-16 and B-20 bombing ranges the roads, the target tree and canceled training damages were estimated at $650 million and in a six month period between 2015 and 2016 intensive rainfall events hit Benning, Jackson and Polk causing severe flooding washing out target tree roads and damaging a multi-million dollar digital range complex impacts to training to say the lease were significant total damages at those three installations were estimated at $23.5 million in Alaska rising temperatures have increased snow melt that resulted in heavy flooding it damaged extensively the battle area complex at Donnelly training area and resulted also in maneuver training areas that weren't usable for months thawing permafrost has resulted in loss of access to training areas and also it has reduced the number of months that land can be used maneuver land can be used to support heavy maneuver training so then we have wildfires wildfires in the west and in Alaska as well have resulted in loss of training days restrictions to live fire training as well as aviation sea level rise has also in recent years taken as toll camp Pendleton which has seen a documented progressive loss of the beach impacting their amphibious training exercises you know the repair of ranges and training lands doesn't happen overnight and when exercises and events are delayed or canceled there's a cascading impact to struggle to find acceptable solutions sometimes those solutions are workarounds and not all workarounds are acceptable so these are just a few examples and I could go on and some of them you know haven't reached CNN or ABC news but those impacts are out there and they're impacting training now we don't have to sit here and say what if it is now so business has changed it is not the same and as a former program manager for 7 million acres of maneuver training land for the army I can tell you I have never seen such devastation as I have in the last 7 years it is to me staggering so these are just a few examples it's impacting our ability to train and to support our training requirements the trend line is shifting with an environment that is more conducive to wildfires droughts followed by intensive rain that causes temporary long loss of available training land erosion will get worse let's face it heavy maneuver training is inherently damaging to the land you couple that with intense storms and you're going to get more erosion and loss of land for training that is going to impact readiness so what I can tell you is this climate change is now part of the equation it is part of the equation when we look at the services range capability both in terms of their infrastructure their personnel their training lands their airspace and how we can train the doctrinal standard climate change that comprises the risk of compromising training readiness so what can we do well the plan that we have that they're going to speak about and the next panel lays out some good things but I can tell you we not only need to understand the full risk and vulnerable abilities but also to our range enterprise but also to our natural infrastructure and how the land is going to respond to climate change conditions now and over time so we don't have the luxury to wait so action is required now thank you thanks John so thanks we have time for a couple of questions here I don't know who's got the microphone over there but keep in mind there's a lot of stuff today let me iterate two points one this is a today problem and it's getting worse so tomorrow's problem is going to be worse than today's problem but for today it's a today issue at Tindall it's a today issue at Offit it's a today issue at Lejeune it's a today issue at all those training bases it's a today issue at Hampton Roads things are happening now and they're going to get worse the military is a mission focused organization it's a national security issue here and now but it's happening to all the other communities too it's happening outside our bases too and so there are impacts well beyond what we're talking about today but from the national security perspective to have that square in your mind and we can give other examples if we need to so let's do the questions thank you David Clark Citizens Climate Lobby for any and all of you individual one who deny that climate change is happening what do you say to those individuals who deny that climate change is happening alright I'm going to take that one because I have a concise answer and the fact of the matter is is that a non-scientist talking to a non-scientist about a scientific issue is rarely going to yield some sort of great revelation that counters 98% of the science community so we can just move past that I think is the answer to the question because this isn't a science debate anymore and non-scientist debating it is not particularly helpful we see these issues going on today thank you from Congressman Jared Huffman's office in comparison to other powers like China and Russia is the United States military uniquely vulnerable to the impacts of climate change whether due to its particular geography a basic strategy location or other factors that's a great question I don't think that we're unique I've been to China I've been to other places in Southeast Asia into Europe they're all working on the same issues and in some cases they're working harder the Chinese are trying to come up with ways to deal with climate change they're trying to come up with ways to adapt to the same problems they have of sea level rise and coastal surges they're seeing massive barriers problems with flooding and they're trying to deal with that I think we all are sharing ideas on what can be done and the biggest part of that is to involve the local communities at the local level in trying to deal with it because they're happening so many places so frequently that the central government can't solve it all by themselves I think we're working on that as the Chinese are so nature is being non-discriminatory in how it's applying its force anybody else want to take a whack at or is that good sounds like that's good next I have questions in the back here Mark Kodak I'm a retired army headquartered civilian How can DOD use existing regional partnerships to get the message across that climate and security So the question is how can DOD use regional partnerships to make more progress on the climate issues? I'll jump in on that one since there's quite a bit of that going on in coastal Virginia now, particularly on Hampton Road. So there are a couple of great examples. One is related to Chesapeake Bay and water quality management. So Commander Navy Region in Atlantic is the executive agent for all Chesapeake Bay water quality compliance act issues. They have recently hosted, and this is done every couple of years, not every year, a full commander's conference with every base commander that is in a Chesapeake Bay watershed present and talking about the need to not only comply but to come up with creative and combined kinds of solutions in the context of we're already taking advantage of the funding that they have to make that funding also apply not only with water quality but also now to try to enhance water management and deal with excessive flooding, recurrent flooding and other kinds of challenges. So in the context of thinking about a program that's already in existence we've seen actually a lot of excellent activity in this regard and it's a way to talk about a problem without directly tying it to something that's at conflict with the administration. So in addition to that, I think what we're seeing at least at a regional level is more and more interest in the facilities, in the context of environmental resilience and building environmental resilience of the facilities working with their community partners to try to ensure not only they have base wide resilience but that base wide resilience includes thinking about the challenges that the environment is creating for that circumstance. So in Hampton-Rose is one example, the city of Hampton is working with joint base Langley-Eustis particularly the Langley side which is what's in the confines of their city boundaries to help the base prepare for the circumstance where it might need to move its runway inland some to prevent flooding that now impacts the runway. So the city and the base have been collaborating on this effort for years. They have finished a joint land use study. There are a number of actions in that joint land use study that the city and the base have agreed they think is important and they are starting to take action on some of those particular outcomes planning to relocate gates as one example. And so this is a tremendous example of a community partnership with a federal facility where they're thinking together and they've been working together because they built up this timeline of a long-standing partnership. Similar circumstances with Newport News and Fort Eustis were starting to see more and more of this type of collaboration in the southern south side of Hampton-Rose which is Chesapeake, Norfolk, Virginia Beach. Also I would say another shout out to the joint land use study process caused by and facilitated by joint land use studies because you've got the military and the communities in the room together with stakeholders, with utilities, with other infrastructure providers and stakeholders in the region and they're all talking about what their challenges are and they're getting a much better opportunity for a shared understanding of what the problems are, how to prioritize those problems and to start to seek solutions. So of course the biggest issue is going to be funding, how do we get funding to plan and then how once we have that plan in place, how do we build over time. But the opportunity for a creative outcomes really gets back to some of Dr. Teacher's work is if you have an ability to seek solutions within the context of where you are and you have a common goal then you're able to move forward and make progress and we're starting to see that, I think I'm heartened to see that starting to take place in coastal Virginia. Let me make a quick hit on a follow-up on that. I think another good example is Tendall. Tendall is holding a series of meetings with a local community and what the goal is is not to restore Tendall to its former glory but to build it like it should be considering all of the environmental concerns that we have now and they're bringing in all the community elements, the regional elements to do that. And I want to say one thing about the climate lobby, keep doing what you're doing. You guys are having an impact so keep at it. All right, I think we have time for one more question. So with the microphone back there, you're going to have to pick and pick who your best friend is and who's not going to resent you afterwards. Hi. Could you shed some light on some of the geopolitical concerns with Arctic ice melt? Geopolitical with Arctic ice melt. Anyone want to talk about great power competition in the Arctic? I think some of that's going to get hit in the next panel but let me do a 30-second blip. When you have a national defense strategy put out by this administration that talks about great power competition, I think nowhere is that scene more directly and climate change scene more directly than in the Arctic and where you've got Russia and China looking to compete for resources. So we're going to have some conversation about that but it is more than just the Arctic where you're going to see these dynamics around the world and I think we'll have some of that discussion in the next panel as well. But thanks for putting it all in our minds and bubbling as we go forward. And I think now I've hit my timer so we're going to, you want to do one more question? We're going to do one more question because I've been told to do one more question. You get to make one more friend back there and then we'll wrap up and we'll switch panels. My name is Wayne Edmondson. I'm from Congressman Jerry Connelly's office. The question I have is about global health security. With more flooding that comes along with climate change, there's going to be more freestanding water. Diarrheal disease, malaria are two of the biggest killers in the world. And it also affects our national security. We diverge resources to support those type of missions. Can you set any light on insight? Maybe that looking into how climate change is also going to affect global health security. As an engineer, let me say that that's a problem that we all grasp. Look at New Orleans and what happened when the city was under water. But look at Bangladesh where you're dealing with 50,000 people killed in a big hurricane. And they have, or a cyclone, and you have these challenges. Everyone around the world recognizes that as you have these more intense and longer lasting on the ground, flooding events where you weren't able to contain them, that you're going to have to deal with that. The World Health Organization, every water organization I know is trying to work out a solution. But each one is individual. And that's where the cooperative efforts of our United Nations and others really make a difference. We have a World Water Assessment Program, UN in Perugia, Italy. They are with the people in the World Health Organization. They're working to see how you share ideas and to try and address it. It's not something that's done overnight. All right. Thank you very much. Thank you for your questions. Thank you to the panelists. Can we have one more round of applause? I think that as the second panel comes up, we're going to have Caitlin, you're going to talk about the fellows program. All right. Let's start off on our second panel of the day. So thank you for spending your morning with us to talk about climate change and national security. This panel is going to discuss the release of the latest report by the Climate and Security Advisory Group, a climate security plan for America. But in addition to this report, I'd also like to draw your attention to another report that was released today by the Climate and Security Advisory Group's fellowship program. This is a group of distinguished up-and-coming climate and security professionals that have met once a month for the last year to talk about climate and security. And this report, you can find it at the climateandsecurity.org forward slash CSAG fellowship. The CSAG fellowship program is also currently accepting applications for its second class. It's a very much a community-wide collaborative fellowship program, the Center for Climate Security Works in partnership with the American Security Project, and Woodrow Wilson's Environmental Change and Security program to host this program, and we're very excited about it. And it's managed by Esther Babson, who just does amazing work. So if you or anyone you know is interested in applying to the next year of the fellowship program, please be sure to check out the report and the application online. That's climateandsecurity.org forward slash CSAG fellowship. I see some of the fellows here too by the way. Yeah, if you want to. Yeah. You can't hide. Okay. Great. And now I'd like to turn the panel over to Francesco Femia, who's moderating the second panel, which again is focused on the Climate and Security Plan for America. Francesco Femia is the CEO of the Council on Strategic Risks. He's the co-founder of the Center for Climate and Security. He's the manager and senior advisor of the International Military Council on Climate Security. At CSR, he oversees all the programs, including the Center for Climate Security's work, the Converging Risk Labs, and the Council of the Center on Strategic Risks. He's published extensively on the security implications of climate change and natural disaster and water, resource mismanagement in Syria and North Africa, including the report, the seminal report, 2012, on the Arab Spring and Climate Change. He's a frequent commentator on how the defense and national security intelligence communities are managing the security implications of climate change. So without further ado, I'll let you take the floor away. Thanks very much, Caitlin. I will say full disclosure, Caitlin and I are married, so she's a little bit biased. I don't know, biased positively or negatively, I don't know, but I appreciate that. So first of all, thanks to everyone, and thanks to our distinguished panel. I was just telling Admiral McGinn who is saying this is a well-organized event, that it would really not be any kind of event at all without them. And so we're really honored to have this panel with us and the previous panel with us. They've all been incredibly helpful in really developing a set of recommendations that we have in this Climate Security plan today. The Climate Security Plan for America essentially calls on the U.S. President to recognize climate change as a vital national security threat. And that word wasn't chosen lightly. And to lead by issuing a national strategy to fulfill what we call a responsibility to prepare for and prevent that threat. And that means both preparing for those risks that are already baked into the system based on the climatic changes that we will see no matter what we do at this point, but also preventing some of the more catastrophic consequences that we could see out into the future. And so which really involves reducing the scale and the scope of climate change by reducing emissions. So both of those things are critical to this plan. The top recommendation is that the President issue a national strategy directive, which would be sort of a new type of directive, creating a Climate Security Plan for America and to establish a White House Office on Climate Security led by a senior official reporting directly to the President to implement a major government-wide effort to address the issue in all its security dimensions. Of course, this plan is aimed at the President of the United States. It could be this President. It could be the next President. But I think what we make clear in this report is that this has to happen very soon if we're going to stave off some of the worst security consequences that we might see. The plan is endorsed by an extraordinary group of 64 senior military national security and intelligence leaders, including eight retired four-star generals and admirals, 30 senior military officers retired, a former NASA administrator, a past chair of the National Intelligence Council, the former climate lead at the National Intelligence Council, who's here to my left, and a number of former Assistant Secretaries and Deputy Undersecretaries of Defense, three of whom are on this panel and many others. So I mentioned that essentially to say that there are a lot of recommendations out there for how we deal with the climate crisis. A lot of them have a lot of merit. Here's a plan that is being proposed by a set of very serious clear-eyed national security professionals about what we should do. And the plan is quite ambitious and quite bold, and we think it needs to happen soon. The plan recommends four pillars of action. General Keyes mentioned these pillars earlier today. Those are demonstrate leadership, number one, assess climate risks, number two, support our allies and our partners in dealing with climate risk and also in dealing with a transition to a clean energy economy, and also preparing for and preventing climate impacts, which is, as John mentioned earlier, is a really big part, and as General Keyes mentioned earlier, is a really big part of this. Each of our panelists will be addressing one of these categories in particular, though you should feel free to stray into, you know, other issues if you'd like. And I'm going to introduce them now, you know, part of these sort of sections. Talking about leadership, I think, is someone who has a lot experience as a leader in a number of areas, both in the military and also outside, you know, as former leader of ACOR, the American Council on Renewable Energy, and that's Vice Admiral Dennis McGinn. Danny McGinn is a member of the Center for Climate Security Advisory Board. He's previously served as Assistant Secretary of the Navy for energy installations and environment. In that role, he led the transformation of naval installations towards greater mission resiliency, through energy efficiency, renewable energy, microgrids, and other technologies. So we're going to start with Admiral McGinn, and I'll introduce everybody, and then we'll get started. Talking about assessing climate risks is someone who's been doing a lot of assessing in his career, and that's Rod Schoonover. Rod Schoonover is owner of the Ecological Futures Group from 2009 to 2019. He was a senior analyst in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research at the Department of State. Before that, he served as Director of Health, Environment, and Natural Resources at the National Intelligence Council. Talking about supporting allies and partners, we have Admiral Sherry Goodman. Sherry Goodman is Senior Strategist at the Center for Climate and Security. She's Chair of the Board of the Council on Strategic Risk, so really, honestly, she's our boss. She's Secretary General of the International Military Council on Climate Security, which she co-chairs with General Tom Middendorp, the former Chief of Defense at the Netherlands. She previously was General Counsel and Corporate Secretary of CNA, where she was recognized for her leadership in creating and leading the CNA Military Advisory Board. Sherry also served as the first Deputy Under Secretary of Defense for Environmental Security. Lastly, but certainly not least, we have the Honorable John Conger, who's going to be talking about the broad suite of issues related to preparing for and preventing climate impacts. John is the Director of the Center for Climate Security, the Chair of the Center for the Climate and Security Advisory Group. He previously served as the Principal Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Comptroller at the U.S. Department of Defense, where he oversaw billions of U.S. dollars, and we like to joke that he oversaw a few more dollars there than he is now as Director of the Center for Climate Security, just a few. And he was also the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Energy Installations and Environment, who's basically leading the DOD's approach to climate change. So that's our panel. They're a great group of people. We're going to start with Adam Romm again, who's going to talk about leadership. I'd ask that we elevate our thoughts to 50,000 feet or more and really look at this in the broadest possible context. We're all concerned with all of the aspects of climate change, resilience, mitigation, et cetera. But I want to start by saying this. This is not fake news. Any good journalists asks the journalist questions, who, what, when, where, how, and why. So the who, Frank pointed out, are a group of experts in national security, military and civilian, intelligence and military operations that know the national security structure, know the problems, know the challenges here and abroad, the who is about as credible as you get. What is the plan to talk about climate change? The where? Everywhere. We talked on a previous panel about installations here in the United States, coastal areas, wildfires in the west, but it extends also, as was also pointed out, across the globe. In terms of not just infrastructure threats and threats to fragile governments and societies, but threats to accelerate violence that our United States military, the young men and women in uniform, will be called upon to face now and in the future. When is now? Pointed out by John Conger at the conclusion of the last panel. This is a today problem and it doesn't get better without us doing something about it. Let me talk about the why. If you look at the people who have been in the panels, the people who are on the senior advisory group, others who aren't here, why are they doing it? It's not because they're getting big bucks from oil companies or other entities, they're doing it because they are patriots. They care about this country. They have given their lives dedicated to making this a truly beacon of hope for the whole world. And in order to be a beacon of hope, you have to exercise leadership. That is absolutely critical. I had the opportunity over 35 years in the uniform to be able to exercise some leadership and I had the privilege of commanding many different organizations in the United States Navy. Whenever I took command, I would gather my team around and say, I just wanna let you know something about the way I think. I do a lot better job at solving problems that I know about. And having talked to many plumbers over the years, real plumbers, that leaks don't get better with age on their own. And if we think about climate change in that context, this is a real problem that we need to fix. Tom Friedman, great former columnist for the New York Times and great author about this subject, once said, remember mother nature always bats last and she always bats a thousand. Jerry Galloway pointed that out in his remarks earlier. So we've got to understand that this problem doesn't get better on its own. We have to acknowledge the problem in all of its dimensions and we have to get on with doing something about it, which brings us to the how. If you read this report, it is a detailed approach, a strategy if you will, to getting after leadership by the United States and our allies in every aspect of our government, federal government, and to do specific things that will put us in a much better position to solve this problem, this biggest challenge of the 21st century bar none. Bigger than North Korea, bigger than Iran, bigger than Russia, bigger than China, everywhere, all the time, for a long time. This is the greatest challenge of the 21st century. So a lot of folks, it came up earlier in one of the questions, what do you tell people that don't really believe in climate change? Well you tell them to get out of the way because we've got a problem to solve. We need to understand that we are the ones that are going to be the solution providers and we need to have leadership. We need to get back into the Paris Accord. The United States leadership is essential. A lot of people who are deniers or skeptical about what we could or could not do about the climate change that are fearful that it's gonna hurt our economy or quality life will say, yeah, but we can do everything right and we'll hurt our economy wrong and oh by the way, China and others are gonna continue to pollute greenhouse gases into the atmosphere. They will without leadership, without United States leadership. What's going on up in New York, the United Nations right now requires United States leadership, not a choir of voices from many, many different parts of the world. Important as that may be, they need to have leadership. We can do it now or we can do it in January of 2021. We need to get on with having some very real leadership. And I'll conclude my remarks by saying that climate change is the greatest challenge of the 21st century for our future national security, economic well-being, international order and quality of life across the globe. It is essential that the United States step forward and lead by acting boldly now. We have the opportunity to transform this tremendous challenge into opportunities for technological advancement, sustainable growth and global coordination and cooperation. We are the people that are gonna solve this. There's an old saying that we are the people we have been waiting for, we are. Nobody else is gonna do it for us, we need to do it ourselves and we need to get leadership across the federal government to match the leadership that we see in the private sector, and that leadership at the state level to get on with doing something about this challenge. Thank you. Thanks very much. So I now want to turn to Rod Schoonover and just quickly to set it up. The intelligence community of which Rod was a part for many years has been warning about climate change risks to security for quite some time across both Republican and Democratic administrations. It's been in the worldwide threat assessment for the past 11 years, I believe. Despite that, we've seen recently how sort of political either pressure or lack of interest can obscure such analysis and leave it sitting on the shelf. So how do we avoid that? How do we both ensure that such assessments continue and ensure that the US government is using it and not ignoring it with shaping policy? So that's sort of a framing question. You can answer that or not. I will. But that's just the setup. Thanks. Thanks for having me today. Thanks for all of you for coming on what I think is one of the greatest challenges, if not the greatest challenge of the 21st century. The job of the intelligence community is to provide, to assess risk and provide strategic warning to those risks. And those risks include climate change. And when the intelligence community looks at this issue broadly, it looks at threats to the military and threats to militaries globally. Also threats to other things that the United States depends on. For example, global food supplies or the economic system. A lot of time is spent studying threats to political stability and social cohesion and mass movement of people and surprises. And so that's an overview of really a pretty intense program of study for the intelligence community. The Director of National Intelligence, Worldwide Threat Assessment is essentially drafted without regard to which party is in power. I watched one being drafted in the run up to the election when the outcome of that election was not known and it did not change through that process. And I think it's important to note that the intelligence community is overwhelmingly apolitical. Very similar to the scientific community. It's apolitical, does not have a political agenda. Just in terms of the framework of climate change, I think an evolution needs to happen. Really it needs to continue in viewing climate change less as an environmental add-on to the actual national security issues but more of a foundational issue of national security. The efforts of this group, this forum and the people in the audience help further that kind of changing of the framework but I think it's quite critical. This is actually one of the strengths of this climate security action plan. It illustrates, it shows the wide ranging commitment to a more, that's needed across the entire national security enterprise. To address both the near-term and mid-term challenges that have locked in climate change but also the future trajectory of national security issues. And it probably requires a broadening of what national security enterprise is in the US government. It's probable that we'll have to bring on people from the Department of Agriculture more increasingly. The Department of the NOAA, NASA into the national security framework as we bring particularly the scientific components of those institutions. So before I became a national security officer I was a scientist for many years and what is required within the intelligence community is a more robust marrying of the national security analysis with bleeding edge science from what I consider to be the finest scientists in the world in our own US federal science agencies. And I mean more than just the climate scientists in NASA and NOAA and elsewhere but I also mean the hydrologists, the ecologists, people who study marine geochemistry because I think most people are well aware that climate change affects and the way it affects people will not only be through sea level rise and hot days but through many if not most of the ways that societies and people act. And so I think it's really important to if you're really looking at threats to regional and global stability to bring in that more cohesive piece of the US science enterprise. The president, so like a lot of other issues leadership and the agenda is set from the very top. And so the intelligence community because of its role to assess risk and strategic warning continues to work at threats to national security. It is helped greatly by attention from leadership. And so that means president who I think should establish a center inside the office of the director of national intelligence that brings together the expertise that I mentioned from the scientific community, the intelligence community, larger security community. Also need to populate the federal government with people who more fully endorse climate change as an issue, a threat. So much of how the government works is driven by personnel and the prioritization of personnel as policy. And so along with that, and there are a number of other smaller recommendations I think are really important in this document, but we start with the prioritization of climate change as something beyond an environmental issue, but rather a foundational national security issue to be looked at by many different elements within the US government. So thank you. Thanks a lot, Rod. Turning from analysis to supporting allies and partners, Sherry, I wanted to start just with a framing question as well for you, and you spoke about these issues at length before including congressional testimony. Doing something big on climate change is often discussed as an altruistic thing. It's a moral question. It's a moral imperative, and I think it certainly is that, especially on the international level, and it can certainly be that, but there are also many potential strategic benefits for the US to acting on climate change vis-a-vis both our allies and our competitors. So why are we not taking advantage of those strategic, potential strategic benefits, and what can be done to more fully realize those benefits? And there we go. You and Caitlin and John and the CCS team for putting this effort together. I know a lot of work goes into it. Let me thank Carol and the EESI team for your work and leadership here, and the many military leaders, General Keyes, Guy Zabel McGinn, I know Ann Phillips and Jerry Galloway were here earlier, but there are scores and scores of them, active duty and retired across the nation, actually internationally now, who recognize climate change as one of, if not the most fundamental threat of our era. And I say that with deep seriousness as a cold warrior who came of age worrying about the next bolt out of the blue nuclear attack by the Soviet Union and spent years of my life figuring out how we could deter and defend against that threat. Indeed, when I was a young congressional staffer, how many of you here are congressional staffers, by the way? Okay, good number, and how many of you work on a sort of defense or foreign policy portfolio? Okay, a few. Well, I started out my professional career on the Senate Armed Services Committee working for Sam Dunn in the nuclear era when we were ratifying the now defund Intermediate Range Forces INF Treaty. And we were figuring out how to manage nuclear weapons and what kind of nuclear arsenal we needed to deter the Soviet Union and others. And fortunately, we won the Cold War. Nuclear weapons are still a threat indeed as are other weapons of mass destruction, but climate change is equal in nature to that great global challenge. And so let me just tell you a couple of stories about in answer to Frank's question from my recent experiences. I just came back from New York. I had dinner last night with the Dutch Prime Minister and the Chilean President of the Global Citizens Awards. They both devoted their entire remarks to climate change as the most important urgent challenge that we face. And they both and many other leaders in New York are urging American action and American support, which as you, I don't have to tell you, is sorely lacking at this moment at the federal level. Although there are a lot of good things happening at state and local levels and in the private sector and elsewhere. But they all see the need for American action. And what are the risks of America not leading right now? It is emboldening our adversaries and our competitors to fill the vacuum that we have created. So let me tell you a tale from the Arctic. Last week I was in Oslo at the first ever NATO Arctic workshop, a strategic foresight analysis gathering of NATO member countries, all 29 NATO member countries invited to address the opening of the Arctic and sort of a new theater of operation in which NATO has to be prepared to operate. Why is that? Well, with sea ice retreating at an enormously rapid rate, temperatures have already risen several degrees in the Arctic and are on a path to rise twice as fast as the rest of the planet. Permafrost collapsing and extreme weather events beginning to happen in the Arctic as well. Russia, for example, sees an opportunity to convert its northern sea route which hugs the longest Arctic coastline of any nation into a toll road for transport that will eventually be a major shipping route. Putin has called for increasing dramatically the tundish ship across the northern sea route. It's already doubled significantly in the last few years. China has declared itself to be a near Arctic stakeholder, whatever that means. There's no legal standing for that term and they're investing heavily with the Russians at the Yamal energy plant and elsewhere across the Arctic, not only with Russia but in Iceland, Greenland, in Finland, they're helping build out a data silk road. Communications are sorely lacking in the Arctic in terms of the domain awareness one needs to have. You can't go up there and hope to have the same type of cell phone and internet connections that you would have elsewhere in the world and as that communications is being built out, China is right there at the center of it today. So the world is changing. Greenland, for example, which our president said he wanted to buy, as you may remember, which is increasingly independent from Denmark, although still a very small one to realize, it's a small population of vast territory but changing very, very, very rapidly and when you look at a map, you'll see that it's really part of the North American continent. So a vital strategic interest to Canada and the United States and has been for many years. One of my colleagues at the Wilson Center was up on the USS Healy in the Arctic this summer and they were prepared as an example to face temperatures of 20 below and it never dropped below 32 degrees. It never dropped below 32 degrees. For the three weeks, she was up on the USS Healy. In the Arctic Circle. And just two weeks ago at a, I wanna get back to this very important point that Rod made here about coupling science and research with national security and intelligence analysis. That is fundamental and for those of you who are in the early phases of your career, I'd say this is the next great frontier in research and analysis because the coupling that's needed to make more robust the national security and intelligence analysis depends heavily on the science and translating that science into practical application for national security planners, analysts and programmers. And just a several weeks ago, we at a conference called Arctic Futures 2050 to sort of get at this coupling, we looked at a scenario of a nuclear shipping accident in the Bering Strait in 2050. Imagine Russia has primarily nuclear powered ice breakers and ice capable vessels. It already has quite a number of them and it will have even more by 2050. China will be applying the Arctic to bring energy resources back to provide for its own quest for resources. So we looked at a scenario of a Russian nuclear ice breaker, powered ice breaker colliding with the Chinese liquid natural gas vessel that it was escorting. And one of the consequences, how would we manage it? And what do we need to understand about the science if you were to recognize today that this is possible 20 years in the future? What kind of research should we be doing today to prepare for that future and hopefully prevent it? Now, at the NATO Arctic Summit, I will report to you that our allies and partners across the board want the US back in the climate game at every level, whether it's engaged in the Paris Agreement, whether it's working with them, as we already do on NATO planning, where I'd say these types of issues are front and center, but it's at every level, particularly in diplomacy. And so let me turn to another region where I think this is also very, very fundamental and it's among the small allied states, both in the island states, in the Pacific. We have the same situation in the Caribbean, areas becoming increasingly fragile with climate-fueled risks from drought, then combined with extreme weather events. In the Pacific in particular, we now see China offering more humanitarian assistance and natural disaster relief when the US isn't always there. And that's important to these nations. Some of them may not exist within a quarter of a century because the seas will rise or they will lack and or they will lack the fresh water to support themselves. So we have a global migration challenge across the board that is being fueled by climate risks, one that we will need to work very closely with our allies and partners to manage. So to sum up this part of it, I would say my hopeful news is that militaries around the world, military leaders recognize these risks and have come together in an international military council on climate and security. Over 20 of them now, I think we have, Frank, is that right? 28 countries. Yeah, 28 countries from every region of the world, military leaders coming together who want to address the climate risks were constructively both to assess the risks, provide the leadership, integrate climate security considerations into national security planning and raise the attention of it among global policy makers. Thank you. Thanks so much, Sherry. And now turning to John Conger to talk about preparing for and preventing climate impacts. Now, there's sort of framing question for you, John, and you've probably heard this from us before, but on the same theme of sort of, you know, Sherry was talking about our strategic health interests vis-a-vis our allies and our adversaries, the US is clearly not immune to the security risks of climate change, more devastating extreme weather events exacerbated by climate change have in recent years cost American lives, disrupted many of our nation's critical infrastructure, including major military infrastructure as we heard from many of our panelists earlier. The military recognizes this, but it doesn't seem like the US is fully prepared for these potential cascading disasters that we may see going forward from flooding to wildfires, et cetera. So what needs to happen both on the adaptation side and the mitigation side to adequately prepare for locked-in security risks and to prevent the avoidable worst-case scenarios? Okay. So I'll answer that a little bit, but given the fact that I'm batting clean up and I get to say whatever I want, I'm gonna speak a little bit more broadly. First, I'd like to put it all in the context we've heard today. We've heard General Key's speak from a warfighter's perspective. We've heard a panel that you had up here with over 130 years, yeah, I did the math, of national security experience, talking about how the military is directly affected by climate change and how it affects their job today and how it's not getting better. I think I would hazard to say, and I'm gonna cite General Middendorp, who's the head of our International Military Council on Climate and Security, who did an op-ed in Politico, I wanna say about a month ago, where he said climate change is too important to leave to the environmental ministers, echoing the old quote about war is too important to be left to the generals. The fact of the matter is, is this is not an environmental issue at this point. It is past that. This is not only a national security issue, it is an agriculture issue, it is an energy issue, it is a whole host of other pieces of the puzzle, but here we're talking about national security. And this issue is affecting our national security today. And so we have a responsibility to prepare in the US military for what's coming. Nobody wants to be willfully blind to a problem. Nobody wants to be willfully ignorant and stick your head in the sand. Well, maybe some people do, but the point is, is that they oughtn't be, and the military doesn't want to be. They don't always have the resources to do everything they need to do. But that looking at it, knowing full well, clear-eyed, the problem is coming. You have to start taking actions. Now let me give a compliment, or two, to the current administration. You know, President Trump signed a bill passed by a Republican Congress in 2017 that said that climate change is a direct threat to the national security of the United States. Hey, good job. I mean, that was important to do. This, the Republicans, when the Republicans were the majority here in 2018, they passed a whole host of sensible, pragmatic climate resilience legislation. It was important to do. They're set in the groundwork. This Congress, frankly, both in the House and the Senate, has continued to pass important legislation, moving the ball forward. But there's only so much you can do without White House active support. I think it was an important decision by the White House not to support an adversarial panel in the National Security Council to look and extricate climate from national security documents. That was under active consideration. They decided not to do it. There's pushback from the DOD and from the intelligence community. So that's good. But active support is different from not doing harm, right? First, do no harm. First, don't be stupid, okay? Now let's move forward and get some things done. So this report literally has dozens of recommendations about how to move forward, okay? The progress that we've made is important. The progress to come is also important. You have to start, you have to recognize these changes are coming and then be bold. So in this report, then we talk about climate security infrastructure initiative to actually spend money on resilience efforts within DOD, within the national security community. We have a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure at DOD, a trillion dollars worth of infrastructure and a lot of it's vulnerable. A lot of it's old. The old, what we found in some of these extreme weather scenarios was that older infrastructure is more vulnerable to the changes that are coming. So recapitalizing that infrastructure, building to modern standards is important. When you build something in a smart way, it can be protected from the changes that are coming. So for example, the Department of Defense built a new strategic command headquarters at off of an Air Force base in Nebraska, okay? Billion dollar building. It's a big building, it has a very important job, a lot of important command and control functions there and they built it at a higher elevation than the rest of the base. So when the floods came and the Missouri River swept over the levees, that building wasn't impacted. That building wasn't damaged. Somebody thought ahead of time that it might be smart to put your most expensive building on a higher elevation and make it less vulnerable. On the other hand, when you spend a billion dollars on a radar facility in the middle of the Pacific Ocean in the Marshall Islands and then you find out that within 10 years because of sea level rise, that island is not gonna be able to support human habitation. Not because the island's gonna be underwater but because the aquifer is gonna be too intruded with saltwater to be able to give drinking water to anybody on the island. So you don't spend your billion dollars in a place that you're not gonna be able to use it anymore. Now, we could build a diesel plant there but that's gonna be expensive and it's gonna be expensive to fuel that diesel plant. But the fact of the matter is is that having that foresight and doing things that are smart in advance is gonna save us a lot of money in the long run. It's gonna be able to protect our interests a lot in the long run. So when in the last Congress, they passed a law that reformed how we did emergency disaster spending and they said, when FEMA spends this money and then in the last year, there's been about 19 billion dollars in emergency spending to deal with relief from hurricanes. That 6% of that money was gonna be withheld for pre-disaster mitigation. In other words, preventative efforts. Well, that's a billion dollars. So can DOD, which spends $10 billion a year in military construction, set aside a certain percentage of its funding for resilience efforts? Well, that might make some sense, especially if you're anticipating more and more of these scenarios to occur. When in the last year, you're racking up close to, well, in excess of $10 billion in costs from damage, extreme weather, and earthquakes happen to our facilities and our military installations that has direct readiness impact. So how do you start to set aside some of that money for preventative measures? So that's one of the recommendations we talk about in here. We talk about using resilient building standards. You know, California's done an excellent job of integrating seismic standards due to the risk of earthquakes into its building codes. Well, given the fact that climate change is coming and it's not getting better, we should be thinking about every dollar that we spend in the future to be built in a more resilient way. I mean, when you build buildings in a floodplain, you don't put the backup power in the basement anymore. You have to assume that building's gonna flood. You don't put your servers in the basement anymore. There are smart things that one can do. I could go at length, you know, as was said, I used to have responsibility for DOD installations and I can talk in more detail than you wanna hear. But let me spend a moment and talk about the prevention stuff that Frank mentioned. Because one of the key things in this report, and one of the key things that you need to hear from this group of military leaders, from four-star generals, from senior military leaders, you have to understand that they are also calling for the United States to avoid catastrophic security futures. So what does that mean? That means as we look forward in the coming decades, there are gonna be security problems that we're not even dealing with a fraction of today. You're gonna have displacement of millions of people from coastal regions. You're gonna have displacement of, you're gonna have wire security issues, food security issues that are going to drive massive migration. You're gonna have people's lives at risk and you're gonna have significant human misery expanded around the world because of these changes. In order to avoid the conflicts that will be coming as a result of those issues, the human misery and humanitarian disasters that will come as a result of those issues, you have to start taking action to reduce emissions or to reduce the amount of carbon in the atmosphere. And we're technology agnostic or policy agnostic in this because we're security people. We see into the future and recognize the security futures that are a problem and saying you have to do something about this because it could get, we were looking at catastrophe in the future. And so if you'd rather do it through innovation than regulation or you'd rather do it through regulation than innovation or you'd rather do all of the above, we're not taking an opinion. This is not the group of science experts. This is a group of security experts and saying you have to do something to prevent and you have to start now. And then I wanna close, I wanna quote Denny because he's always very quotable. Denny said earlier today, it doesn't get any better without us doing something about it. I'm gonna be way more jaded, cynical and pessimistic than that. I don't think it gets better. Seriously, it doesn't get better where it's getting worse. And if we did everything we were supposed to do, it'd still get worse, just less worse, okay? And the fact of the matter is that we are on a really bad pathway to security futures that are untenable. And we have to do what we can to avoid them. We have to mitigate the changes that we know are inevitable. And we have to do something to avoid the changes that are catastrophic. And on that really high note, I think I'll finish. Thanks so much, John. And as I was looking through the bios of all today's speakers earlier, I noticed that across the two panels, there were two and a quarter centuries worth of experience in the security community. That's not a commentary on anyone's age, by the way. So it's collectively all together. But I emphasize that just underline John's point, that here is a group and there are 64 senior military, national security, also intelligence leaders that have signed on to this report. So it goes beyond the military space. And I haven't totaled up the years of experience in that group of 64. But here's a group of people with a deep, deep well of experience in the security space who's warning us as John has just warned us of potentially catastrophic climate futures for our security and that we need to do something bold about it. So I think that means something and that means something important. And I just, I wanna go to the floor now for questions. We have about 25 minutes, half an hour. At the moment, again, I know you have to go a little bit early. If you see Admiral McGinn leaving, it's not because he's bored or doesn't wanna take your questions. He has to go to a very important meeting after this. But why don't we start with questions? Okay, so let's see. In the back, all the way in the back. Hi, I'm Stephanie Ooze from NASA Goddard Space Flight Center. And I think this sounds great. A lot of what you're suggesting about creating a panel of scientists to inform security experts. And I'm wondering how likely you think it is that this recommendation to create these new office on climate security and to bring scientists in. How likely do you think that is? Rod? Thank you for your comment. I actually think it's quite likely irrespective of the party that would come in in the next election. I say that because we have had some of those conversations already. Or we did when I was a sitting member of government. And so I'll just mention, some of those relationships already exist, but they're ad hoc and almost personality based. Oh, I know a person at NASA Goddard. I know a person in Boulder, Colorado. So really this is a way to more formalize it and add the convening power of the national security enterprise. One of the side effects of something like this is to also, and this comes from years of talking to scientists in our federal agencies, is for the national security community to better inform research, original research by the science agency. And so they seem to value contributing original knowledge to what is important to the national security community. I would just add as an example, I know that the Air Force today is hiring in Air Force Weather, their meteorologist department, they're hiring their first climate scientist. Because they recognize that this is important. And I'm sure there are more examples out there as well. All right, I'll be, I'll try not to be too cynical. So some of these are more likely than others. If you look through the dozens of recommendations, some are easier than others, right? I think the challenge that we have here is that we are looking for leadership from the White House in order to galvanize action across the entire federal enterprise. And that can happen, we've seen it happen. But you have to have, the president has to be interested enough in the particular issue to make that happen. And so will this president do that? Well, we've heard the cynicism and so it might be a harder sell, right? But he's signed legislation saying that this is a threat. So maybe there's a chance. I'm reminded of the line from, I forget the movie where Jim Carrey was told he had a one in a million shot and he says, well, you're saying there's a chance. I think there's a chance. But I think, and it's been written, this document has been written to be something that any administration could adopt. It is not a partisan document in any way. And this administration could easily find this totally consistent with what they wanted to do. It's just a question of whether it's high enough on their priority list to make it happen. In the Tea House of the August Moon, there's a line that says, pain makes one think. Thought makes one wise. Wisdom makes life bearable. Mother nature is going to get more and more painful. So we can decide what we can do to prevent that to the extent that we can and to be more resilient in the face of that pain caused, not just in the United States, but around the world. I will disagree a little bit with John in saying that there are so many things that we can get better in the face of this challenge. Think about the challenge of climate change as a wonderful, wonderfully riveting bunch of packages, wrapping paper. And inside that challenge are tremendous opportunities. Opportunities to completely transform not just the United States, but the global energy portfolio to have benefits at the local, regional, and of course, global level by that transformation, creating jobs, creating a higher quality of life, creating better water, better oceans. There's a lot of goodness here that we can in fact make better. And if we say, hey, let's focus on climate change but every dimension of it. And as Rod said, bringing in all kinds of different scientific disciplines to this in addition to meteorologists and climate scientists, of course, and Intel specialists, but we can in fact make things better in so many areas. And just very quickly, when we started this process with the group, the mission was actually quite clear. The mission was from a clear-eyed security perspective, what kinds of policies are necessary to deal with those security consequences of climate change. We explicitly didn't put a political lens on it, which might be a little bit unusual for a Washington policy document, but we really wanted to lay out what we thought needed to happen, the scale of ambition that needed to happen, irregardless of who's in the White House. And so that's really what the document is. More questions, right here. And I'm again with EESI, sorry to steal the floor since we're one of the sponsors, you've alluded to this a little bit, but I want to draw it out a little bit more. There's been a lot of talk about decarbonizing the economy, different sectors, and increasingly conversation about sectors that are really tough to decarbonize, and I'm well aware that the military is one of those, but I'm wondering to what extent the report addresses decarbonization or mitigation, decreasing greenhouse gas emissions, and whether or not it does address it, any opinions you all have on that would be great. We address it in very, very general terms, and we don't try to say, hey, we're energy experts or technology experts, we just simply say that there are experts and expertise in things that are being done that can be accelerated and done even better. But we are, as has been said many times, where our expertise for this report is on national security, but clearly there are so many opportunities out there that lie in the energy portfolio area, let's say energy efficiency, et cetera, that are in fact underway to an extent, but with creating the kind of national federal government infrastructure that this report recommends, it's going to automatically go to solution sets. When you start talking about problems, we're gonna say, well, what can we do? What can we encourage if we have a representative a senior representative from DOE that is addressing climate change, clearly that's gonna manifest itself through the national labs and universities, et cetera. And as Admiral McGinn mentioned, it is general, but we do have, I think it's page 31, we essentially call for something we call a climate security prevention policy. So we say, embrace an economy-wide climate security prevention policy to reduce greenhouse gas emissions at a scale necessary for avoiding catastrophic security consequences. So that speaks to the Admiral's point. We, and John's point earlier, which is a group of security experts, we recognize based on the analysis we've seen, both the scientific analysis, a lot of the foresight analysis and scenario exercises that have happened on this issue, both publicly and privately, that we may have some significant security consequences with even a 1.5 degree world. And so the recommendation here is, do something big to reduce those emissions, but we're agnostic on how you get there and hopefully that's the job of more experience than people than we are. From a DOD perspective, something that General Keyes and I have been wishing for our whole careers. And that is, the nation needs to build a solar-powered airplane so we only fly in the daytime in good weather. So, Frank, can I just add one more thought? I think it's important to recognize as you think about energy efficiency or renewable energy at DOD that lowers the emissions profile, you're gonna decide what you're gonna do in the national security enterprise based on national security concerns. And sometimes that means you're gonna have more emissions. It does. I think that a lot of the stories that characterize DOD's emissions are make DOD look worse because it's big. DOD is a large organization with two million people and it's got, it's a huge industrial enterprise. And if you unpack it, you find, okay, so most of the emissions that we have are based on fuel and most of the fuel emissions are based on aircraft and those are the wide-body aircraft, not the fighter airplanes that do most of the emissions. And then you say, okay, what else has wide-body aircraft that fly all over the world? Well, it's the airline industry. So you look at American Airlines and it's almost as much as DOD alone. And if you look at the American airline industry, it dwarfs DOD. And if you look at the world airline industry, it even dwarfs that. So as one decides where you're gonna put your control volume and you look around and you say, here's where I'm gonna analyze, just be careful that you're not distorting the picture that you're looking at. There's a lot to be done, but when you're dealing with 1% to 2% of American emissions and then America is 15% of the world, you're only gonna have so much impact if you focus on DOD emissions. You should look everywhere. By all means, individual action is important. But be aware what your effect is for what you're pushing for. Okay, where's the microphone? Oh, here we are. Right over here on the corner, Michael. Thank you. My name is Michael Clare. I have a question for you, Sherry. Repeating what was asked earlier about the Arctic and geopolitics. You know, last month or so, Mike Pompeo spoke at the Arctic Council. And historically, the Arctic Council and US officials in general have spoken of the Arctic as a zone of peace and cooperation. And I know you've advocated that. But he and his speech at the Arctic Council didn't mention climate change, but said the sea ice is melting and this was gonna increase competition in the area. And he called for a stiffening of American military capacity in the region. So how do you see this playing out? Will the Arctic remain a zone of peace? Or do you see it becoming an area of military, of geopolitical competition and military competition? Right, well, Michael, you know, the Arctic is still a vast and remote place and the risks in the near term are one more likely of an accident or an oil spill. And the hope is that miscalculation or lack of transparency about the situation will enable forces, first responders to work together. But there is no doubt that the competition among adversaries, China, Russia, and the United States in the region is growing. In the first order, in the first instance, it's economic competition. Both China and Russia see opportunities to monetize the resources of the Arctic. But that's really true for every Arctic nation and for many of the Arctic Council observers. They want access to the resources, whether it's fishing grounds that are moving northward or energy resources, there's thought to be the greatest store of fossil fuels on the planet in the Arctic. Now, that's at odds with trying to decarbonize. And if we move in the right direction, the value of those won't be as great and it's still very complicated and expensive to work in the Arctic. Russia is militarizing its portion of the Arctic, rebuilding military bases it had, reinstating Arctic capability that it had let lag after the Cold War. Sometimes Russia boasts more of a game than it actually delivers on. And one of my personal greatest concerns is that historically lacks Russian environment and safety practices. Think of not only Chernobyl, but think of just in the last few years, there's been nuclear submarines lost, there have been explosions, there have been accidents. I mean, this is a repeating pattern in Russian management of both its nuclear forces and other hazardous situations. I'm deeply concerned about those type of situations where in the vast Arctic, where the communications are already not very good and there's lack of transparency about what could happen. Anyone who's seen the Chernobyl series knows or remembers Chernobyl like I do remembers that they weren't forthcoming about what was really happening. So there's a lot we may not know when an incident occurs. We may not have the facts right away, so we won't know what lives or what part of the planet are being put at risk. And an oil spill in Arctic waters could be very, very complicated. It could make Exxon Valdez or even Deepwater Horizon look easy and it won't be confined to one country's waters because of the way the circulation patterns work in the Arctic's almost certainly going to be a cross-border spill with global implications. So those are some of the things I worry about. I also am concerned about increasing Chinese foreign direct investment and other types of investment and influence across the region that will give it a foothold, not only for economic resources, but for global influence in the future. I have to run. I would ask that and we would ask that you take this conversation with you into your personal and professional lives, families, coworkers, other forms. It's our problem to solve and we can solve it. We can mitigate it if you will, but keep the conversation going, especially if you happen to be on a congressional staff, committee staff, personal staff or whatever, getting the right kind of political will to unleash the good forces of America and American leadership is what we have to do. Thank you very much. Thanks, Admiral. Also I want to say, because Michael won't say it, he just published a book, All Hell Breaking Loose, The Pentagon's Perspective on Climate Change, so if you have a chance, take a look at that. We can take more questions. Over here. Thank you very much for being here. My name is Jessie, I work for Abigail Spanberger and this is a top priority for her and I really appreciate the report that outlines recommendations, but it all is directed at the executive branch and some of it aligns with legislation that's being discussed here, particularly around more information that DNI can put together on the security risks associated with climate, but I'm wondering either if you can directly send to me or circulate more broadly congressional recommendations that people here today can act on and if you have legislation that's already being discussed, endorsements or positions of those that would also be very useful. Thank you. In line with bringing it into my day job, that would be perfect. Great, thanks for the question. There are no congressional recommendations in here because of our tax status as a nonprofit organization, but certainly we do a lot of congressional education. As you know, John, I don't know if you wanna take this question yourself, given John does a lot of our congressional work, so. You can come up and talk to us after we get there. Jessie, let me just say I know Congressman Spanberger well, testified before her at Foreign Affairs, I think what she and the other leading freshmen national security congressmen and women, particularly the women are doing are great. I love the women of the five women in the Service First Women's Victory Fund. They're killing it in really good ways. That's changing leadership in our country. And all of these types of recommendations can be converted into congressional direction. And that's, so there's an opportunity to follow up and make things happen. Yeah, I'll say anything that the administration can do, Congress can tell them to do. And also just for informational purposes. I mean, there is a piece of legislation, I think, in progress right now related to climate and intelligence assessments that I believe has some pretty strong bipartisan support. I think it was introduced by Congressman Heck, and so there's stuff like that, that's happening at the moment. But as Sherry said, there could be a lot more and these can be converted. Why don't we take a couple questions at a time? We still have about 10, 15 minutes, so we have a lot of time for everybody. We have here, Mark, and then the hand to the left there. Why don't we take two questions and then go from there. I'm Mark Kodak, a retired Army Headquarters civilian. My question is mostly to John. Well, Sherry might be along. While the plan talks about the supply chain in the context of critical infrastructure support, what about the defense industrial base and equipment? So there are tens or not hundreds of thousands of suppliers who make equipment for the Department of Defense. And particularly within a defense industrial base, presumably that's the most important piece. Climate change can affect them and they're all over the place. They're not just in the United States, they're also outside the United States. How do we sort of bring, how do we get DOD to sort of bring them into the conversation about vulnerabilities? Because even if you can get it from a transportation standpoint to you, they can't make it because of energy or water disruptions locally, that's gonna affect the ability of DOD not necessarily immediately because they may have supplies elsewhere, but over the longer term, there may be some critical holes in what we can produce in order to be able to give soldiers, men, and Marines sort of the equipment and make sure that it works on the use of them. Thanks, Mark. Well, I love training and training around hands-office. So we've talked about doing a lot of things and you do all those things, we need people to do them. Do we have people with the education and the skills to do them? Or at a minimum, do we have the types of institutions that train those people out of the group? And if we don't, how does DOD fit into that solution? Thanks. John, do you want to take? Yeah, I mean, you can take the other one. There's a recommendation in on training on here, on training installation folks and other folks on climate change. So we didn't lose that. We are cognizant of the fact that those programs need to occur. On the supply chain stuff, yes, it's a big problem. The question is, how wide do we draw this? Do we talk about the defense industry? Not especially in here, but obviously the defense industry has an impact on the military. I think that as you look at the international supply chain in particular, it's not just water shortfalls and such, but the possible instability in certain parts of the world where we potentially get critical parts. Even if they're not adversaries, adversaries that they might be allies, but that instability in certain parts of the world due to climate stresses might undermine our ability to continue to get those critical materials or critical supply chain elements. So yeah, we have to look at that more broadly. Thank you for the research and work that you've been doing not only in your career in federal service, but since then it's terrific. And thank you for highlighting the supply chain vulnerabilities from climate change of the defense industrial base. I think it's an under-examined area. I think there's room for congressional direction to DOD to examine those supply chain risks because to me it's a bit like the concern a few years ago about vulnerabilities to rare earth minerals that we would face a supply chain risk because we only had one or two sources and maybe some of them were in China. Well, we have some of the same problems here. We're sourcing materials from China or from parts of India that are consistently flooded or parts of the Philippines or Vietnam and multiple conflict and environmental stressors. And it should be, it's worthy of deeper examination. Thanks. And on the question of are there people with experience that can help do these things that we ask for in the report? Well, first of all, I can think of a 64 off the top of my head that might be good who signed this report that could have some experience moving some of this. But honestly, I think over the past, I mean, for example, I mean, the Department of Defense started thinking about environmental security with Sherry's leadership in the 90s very seriously back then. I'm starting in, I think, 1993 when you joined the department. And then also it started looking really, started looking seriously at climate changes in the latter half of the George W. Bush administration. And so I think there's quite a bit of knowledge within the Department of Defense, certainly within also some of the other departments and agencies and the science agencies. They just need to be channeled. And I think there are people that could easily rise to the level of some of the positions in institutions that we're talking about in this report. Honestly, I don't think it would be that hard to find people. If the structures were in place, I think something like this could happen very quickly and with the expertise that was necessary. Caitlin here and then, yeah, right there. I am Joseph Cabaretta. I'm on the EESI board. My question is something that Sherry referred to, the arms race. If you look at this from a perspective of an arms race, how do our climate security initiatives stack up against what China and Russia are doing? And am I going to speak as non-panelists? I'm also not gonna ask a question. I just wanna make a comment that we've talked a lot about the role of the military. And I think we have a tendency to think that when we talk about climate security or climate and national security, that it's a Department of Defense issue. But this report, it looks at a number of departments and agencies. And if we really are going to prepare and prevent for these risks, we do need as former Secretary of Defense, Jim Mattis said, a whole government response. So you have to have your diplomacy, development, and defense departments working together, working with your intelligence agencies, working with your scientists. So I just wanna underscore the way in which we're defining security and the importance of that for truly being prepared. Thanks, Caitlin. And who wants to take the first question and any responses to Caitlin? Okay, on China, what concerns me deeply is the technological leads that China is advancing in key areas where it's necessary for us to be globally competitive. And that's in quantum computing and AI and 5G and other types of technologies. They all have application in climate security, but they have much broader application. I think that's a fundamental risk in our society right now and it's becoming particularly acute because we are actually decoupling our economy from China right now under President Trump and President Xi. We are, the trade war and other actions are decoupling our economies which had been moving closer together. We had been, I mean, just in the area we're talking about energy and climate change, we had been collaborating heavily with China. We pull back from that because of the real risks of their cyber and other attacks and their stealing our intellectual property. And so, I mean, those are real concerns, but at the same time, we have to really be clear headed about who's gonna be winning and losing in each of these fields as our economies historically decouples. And so I think that the technologies to decarbonize, China's leading in a lot of the technologies to decarbonize society. It doesn't mean that they've decarbonized yet, but they have a lot more, let's say, electric buses like nationally than we do just as a small example. They've done a lot more with solar. They're still very heavy on coal so they're kind of doing all of the above at a very heavy rate they're populating. So as to their climate leadership in the military in particular, I don't have any particular insight on their programs. I think the U.S. is probably ahead in many ways on thinking about the analytics of it, but I think there's a lot of technology advances and innovations that are occurring across China in many sectors now that is deeply troubling for the American way of life. Thanks, Sherry. And on Caitlin's point, you know, if you look at the plan, particularly in the section on preparing and preventing for climate impacts actually and also on support for allies and partners, we call for regional major diplomatic effort called regional climate security initiatives that would mostly be driven by say, in this case, the State Department and USAID making investments and also, you know, in partnerships with others outside the government. And so, and we also even, I think, quite boldly call for a new structure within the State Department to deal specifically with climate security issues. So there's a lot in there. There's a lot of pages, so if you can get through them, they're worth reading through. I think we have time for a couple more questions and then we'll wrap up. One more question actually and then we'll wrap up. I'm being told to wrap up. Way in the back. Hi, so my name is Blake Hite. I'm at Senator Cain's office and a Navy veteran that's experienced the flooding in the Hampton Roads area and down in Camp Lejeune, so it's all very relevant to me. But I'm wondering what the effects on migration in the Southern Americas are and what specific role United States might play in providing security solutions and stability operations there. Sherry. Well, the migration in the Western Hemisphere is fueled by many factors. Some of it is political instability. I mean, think about Venezuela. Some of it is the historic narco-trafficking and other corruption in other countries and exacerbating all of that as a threat multiplier is the increasing environmental fragility of the region from climate stressors. You know, the glaciers, the Indian glaciers are melting. Other areas are becoming more dry. Other areas are more wracked by extreme weather events and hotter temperatures. The coffee crop, which is the fundamental part of the economy in many of the countries, is shifting and no longer as robust. And many of these areas are historically, you know, are primarily agriculture and agricultural and food insecurity is becoming a major issue as well as sort of livelihoods as the ability to farm fish and herd in traditional ways is changing as the climate changes. I mean, you could just read the studies now. For example, you know, within another couple decades, London's going to have the same climate that Barcelona has today. So there are all these global shifts going on and countries that are less able to be resilient and adapt are going to have more people who are, and so the migration we're seeing into the U.S. is fueled in part by that, not only by that. And sometimes it's completely, it's hard to disentangle. What should we do about it? Well, if we're clear-eyed and we recognize it, we should direct our foreign assistance and our aid and our diplomatic efforts to help find solutions in place. For example, if these historic agricultural shifts are going on in temperature, how do you climate-proof your agriculture sector for that particular region? And there's a lot of research going on to enable those shifts to occur and those transitions, but many of these countries will need help and we haven't even talked about the destruction of the Amazon rainforest. But also at the same time, many of the carbon removal technologies that we need to actually meet, to avoid catastrophe require, for example, reforestation and other areas that could make some of these countries much more robust and resilient. So, and a lot of that's being discussed in New York today this week and there's a lot more information coming out now about more robust carbon removal technologies that will be needed across the board to help us, not only as we decarbonize the current energy system, but we're going to need a much more set of robust technologies that are both natural and man-made to help address carbon removal. Thanks, Sherry. And just to add 20 seconds to that, just like in other parts of this story, look to what the science says. And there's a growing body of academic evidence that's drought in the Northern Triangle, Central America, is affecting food security, as Sherry said, but also labor. And those are the underpinnings of stability in particularly those countries, but broadly countries worldwide. And so it is increasingly clear that in our own backyard climate change is having a national security effect. Thanks, Rod. That is all the time we have. I want to thank the panelists here today. So everybody, please, if you'll join me and give them a round of applause. I want to thank the previous panelists, General Keyes. I want to thank John Conger, who really, along with Carol and the team at ESI and Omri, they really did all the work I just showed up. So I want to thank them for putting this on. I want to thank the Henry M. Jackson Foundation for supporting this and the David Rockefeller Fund and the Congressman for sponsoring the office. If you don't have a report in hand, as John said, we did have to sacrifice at least a tree, but it was an old growth, I hope, to print them out. So we printed out many. So if you want to take some back to your organizations and back to your congressional office or wherever, please take some additional ones that are out there on the table. And also, I don't want to carry them back to the office, but please take those and thanks very much for coming and hope to see you again soon.