 Greetings, everybody. My name is Christy Ebay. I'm a professor in the Center for Health and the Global Environment at the University of Washington. On behalf of the National Academies Committee to advise the US Global Change Research Program, the USGCRP, I welcome you to this listening session on global change issues with a special focus on transportation and infrastructure related challenges and opportunities. Through USGCRP, federal agencies coordinate climate and global change research and use the results to create tools and assessments to help people make decisions in the context of ongoing global change. Throughout this session and others in the five part series, we are connecting more directly with users and researchers who are building on and applying global change information and tools in their work and gathering insights and information that the USGCRP can consider as it plans the implementation of its work over the coming decade. In these sessions, we're welcoming staff from USGCRP and agencies that comprise USGCRP, in particular, thanks to Mike Cooperberg, the director of USGCRP for attending the session, members of the National Academies Committee to advise the USGCRP, of which I'm a member, and all of you, users and researchers who are engaging in building and applying the types of knowledge and tools that USGCRP is charged with developing and supporting. We recognize this is a National Academies event on topics that are of critical importance to all of us. And we're trying this different approach for providing input and engagement to support USGCRP in its work. We're looking forward to your insights and your enthusiasm. Next slide, please. In today's session, we have a series of speakers who will provide remarks, all of whom expressed interest in contributing when registering for this session. After the registered speakers have completed their contributions, we will, time permitting, provide the option for others to make additional comments. Representatives from the USGCRP and the committee to advise the USGCRP are attending in listening mode only. Thank you for joining us and we look forward to hearing from you over the next 90 minutes. Next slide, please. To start, I'd like to acknowledge that while we today are gathered virtually, the National Academies is physically housed on a traditional land of Nacogtec or Anacostan and Piscataway peoples, past and present. We honor with gratitude the land itself and the people who have stewarded it through the generations. We honor and respect the enduring relationship that exists between these peoples and the nations and this land. We thank them for the resilience in protecting this land and aspire to uphold our responsibilities to their example. We also acknowledge that our understanding of transportation infrastructure and global change issues are closely related to and informed by indigenous and local knowledge and experience and that many native communities are on the front line of impacts from changes. I personally am enjoying joining you from Seattle, Washington, which is on the traditional lands of the coastal Salish peoples. Next slide, please. I and other members of the committee to advise the USGCRP are looking forward to these sessions to connect directly with users and users, researchers and users, who are using and applying global change information in their work. As part of our regular meetings throughout the year, we provide this and other opportunities to engage with and hear from broad audiences to inform this important work. You can see the goals of the listening session. They are to gather useful, actionable information for USGCRP for implementation of its work, make connections and expand group of researchers and users who are directly engaging with the USGCRP in its work, recognize connections across researchers, users and themes of USGCRP work and products, inform potential future engagement mechanisms and opportunities, including forms, approaches and participants for such engagement. Next slide, please. We are seeking input today on how USGCRP may implement its work to better understand and address global change issues. You do not need to be familiar with USGCRP to provide input. We're specifically seeking to connect with a broader audience in these sessions. If you're unfamiliar with USGCRP, we hope you had a chance to view the introduction video on our events pages before the session or encourage you to view it afterwards. In preparing for these listening sessions, USGCRP requested input and insight on the following themes to inform the implementation of its strategic priorities and activities. First, diversity, equity and inclusion. What actions should be prioritized to fully incorporate these values in research, community engagement and workplace development? How do we implement them? Second, advancing science. What are the priority gaps in foundational science and methods that require enhanced long-term investments? Three, use inspired research. How do we ensure that USGCRP science and products are driven by and connected to users? Including for example, improve use of consultation, collaboration, translation, dissemination, informing climate services, socioeconomic science integration. Finally, socioeconomic science integration. What are the priorities for integrating social science into our programs and to inform critical decisions? Particularly helpful would be feedback on ideas for emerging large-scale scientific questions related to global change and or responses, including those where interagency collaboration will be critical. Specific knowledge on how science is or is not being used to inform societal response to global change and why. And knowledge gaps and obstacles to implementing scientific tools or knowledge. To ensure that all have time to speak, we'll be holding all the speakers to a five-minute limit. Next slide, please. The USGCRP is seeking public comment for the perspective for its National Global Change Research Plan 2022 to 2031. You can see the link here on the slide. The opportunity to provide comments runs through January 11th, 2022. You can find this link by going to the USGCRP review and comment system. This is an open call. All comments must be input via the USGCRP review and comment system by midnight Eastern time on January 11th, 2022 for consideration. For more information on this call for comment, please see the federal register notice or visit the USGCRP website. While these listening sessions may help inform the development or implementation of the strategic plan, individual feedback on the perspective should be submitted through the public comment mechanism. In support of the Fifth National Climate Assessment, USGCRP and National Climate Change Assessment authors will host a series of workshops in January and February to solicit feedback on climate change related issues that are important to the public. The information gathered in these workshops will help the authors determine which topics to cover in their chapters of the Fifth National Climate Assessment. And once again, see the USGCRP website for details on these workshops. Next slide, please. We're committed to fostering a professional, respectful, inclusive environment where all participants can participate fully in an atmosphere that is free of harassment and discrimination based on any identity-based factors. Please report misconduct immediately to Steven. You can see his email address there. And you can take a look at the National Academy's policy on preventing discrimination, harassment and bullying on the event page. With that, Steven, over to you. Thank you, Chris. Appreciate that overview and welcome. So next slide, please. So today we are in a regular Zoom meeting which at this point is likely familiar to all of you who are participating. We ask that you keep your video and audio off during this session until the end when we are going to be asking for and inviting contributions from anyone who is participating today. For these listening sessions, we have a couple of modes to hear from you and for you to interact with each other. For the rest of this session, we will hear from participants who indicated during registration and interest in providing oral remarks on global change-related issues. The first set of speakers were the first ones to indicate during registration and interest in providing oral remarks. Time remaining, we will draw additional speakers from the audience and those interested today to provide additional remarks. One of the aims of these listening sessions is to better understand the landscape of people and organizations engaged with issues that are affected by or connected to global change. Time permitting, we will also invite you at the end of the session, all of you, the option to provide us with brief descriptions verbally or in the chat of how your work intersects with global change issues to inform that understanding. In the Zoom platform, you have the option of renaming yourself. Please provide us with your full name so that we can better understand who is here in this Zoom room. In parallel to the oral remarks, we have the Zoom chat available and we are inviting the speakers to provide key points from their contributions in the chat and we welcome similar contributions from anyone in the audience. We're looking for your thoughts, recommendations and guidance to USGCRP rather than questions. As Chris noted, the USGCRP and the Committee to Advise the USGCRP are in listening mode today. So please add your thoughts and contributions to the chat window. We will also have closed captioning available throughout the session. That live transcript is available through the button named live transcript in the Zoom menu bar at the bottom of your screen. If you have any issues with this platform, please send a chat to the host or an email to Rob Greenaway whose email is listed here. Next slide please. Do wanna note that this session is recorded for a future reference. We are trying to gather information and insights and we are using those recordings for reference as we compile those inputs. Recordings and other outputs will be available through the public access file for this event and may be posted publicly on the event page. With that, I would like to invite Mike Hooperberg to come on and give his welcome from on behalf of USGCRP. Steven, thank you. And my thanks and welcome to the group gathered here. This is our fifth and final listening session. They have been amazing. We have heard from a number of unique and different perspectives which is exactly what we were looking for through these listening sessions. We very much appreciate it and we very much look forward to tonight's session as well. My name is Mike Hooperberg. I'm the executive director of the US Global Change Research Program or USGCRP or GCRP as it's sometimes called. USGCRP is managed by the subcommittee on global change research which consists of representatives from 13 federal agencies that make up the program. You can think of the subcommittee as the board of directors for USGCRP. I'm here today representing those 13 agencies and we collectively want you to know that we're serious about our legislative mandate. That tells us to assist the nation and the world to understand, assess, predict and respond to human induced and natural processes of global change. On behalf of the USGCRP, thank you for your interest, for your time and for sharing your expertise. It's important for you to know that your input will be heard and considered as we draft and implement a new 10-year strategic plan for the US Global Change Research Program. In addition to staff from the National Academies, there are a number of federal agency representatives as well as staff from the USGCRP National Coordination Office here with us today. They'll be listening carefully and taking notes that will inform our discussions and writing of the new plan. The new plan will be completed late next year. Between now and then, you can comment on a prospectus that is a high level annotated outline of the plan. That prospectus was released for public comment through a federal registry notice on Monday. So timely timing here. The full draft of the plan will be replaced for public comment and for review by this National Academies Committee in the middle of 2022. So please take advantage of these opportunities to comment on both the prospectus and the full draft plan. So finally, and again, on behalf of the US Global Change Research Program, our sincere thanks to you for taking the time to speak to us today. Our thanks to the committee to advise USGCRP and the staff from the National Academies for organizing these listening sessions. I explicitly want to call out Chrissie by Steven Stitcher, Amanda Stout, April Melvin and Amanda Purcell from the National Academies. And my sincere thanks to Katie Reeves and to Julie Morris from the USGCRP for their roles in making all this possible. We look forward to your comments and suggestions. We'll be listening carefully. Thank you. Thank you very much, Mike. I really appreciate the introduction. And now we would like to hear from you. In the chat, we have a list of the order of speakers. You each are gonna have five minutes and look forward to your insights and your comments. We're gonna start with James Lee from the Metropolitan Washington COG. And there'll be a meeting time we're coming up in a moment to let you know how much time you have. There you go. There you go. Very good. Thank you for having me. This is James Lee. I'm a transportation professional holding doctorate degrees in management and engineering, working in the field for over 20 years and having some experience with the National Academies of Science via Transportation Research Board. As such, I would put my two cents to the following two high-level sins including use-inspired research and social economic science integration. If I may, transparency would be the one word to summarize my comments to the sin of social economic science integrations and accountability would be the word to summarize my comments to the sin of use-inspired research. According to ASCE, America's infrastructure scores a C minus in 2021. Growing wear and tear on our nation's row have left 43% of our public rowways in poor or mediocre condition. A number that has remained stagnant over the past several years. On the other hand, transportation sector was accountable for 29% of GHG emission in 2019 over 84% of those emissions came from surface transportation. With those background to my knowledge, they are research addressing a lot of those issues. However, it seems amazingly difficult to implement those recommendations for addressing the real world challenges. Transportation automation and electrification could serve us to the lattice examples. We need a quantitative and meaningful way on holding public agencies accountable to ensure that USGCRP science and products are better driven by and connected to users. One of the goal of holding public agencies accountable could be eliminating unnecessary or slash unaccountable middle management to ensure that projects and their products are better driven by and connected to users. Therefore accountability is my word to the sin of use-inspired research. To the sin of a social economic sciences integration. I'm also curious on what the answers could be to the two suggested questions they are. What are the priorities for integrating social economic sciences into our program? How should USGCRP better incorporate this science into our program to improve our ability to inform decisions? Transparency immediately came to my mind after reviewing the website regarding this section and even explored a little bit more on the committee to advise the USGCRP. If I may, transparency on how this committee was formed and how the priorities were determined would be helpful in addressing the two suggested questions. In terms of transportation slash infrastructure, someone who could understand the needs as well as someone who could implement the products in the committee would be helpful to the integration. So transparency to the social economic science integration and accountability to the sin of use-inspired research would be my humble inputs. And that would conclude my comments. Thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, James. We very much appreciate that. We now go to Jay Drake Hamilton from Fresh Energy. Thank you very much. My remarks pertain to the listening session on energy. Minnesota has required all investor-owned utilities to achieve certain outcomes in energy savings for both electricity and natural gas customers for the past 40 years. Fresh Energy became aware that many under-resourced households today, 40 years later, are paying a much higher percentage of their income on energy than our higher income households. We filed information requests with utilities to see what energy savings programs they run that focus on under-resourced households. The information demonstrated that utilities had under-invested in energy efficiency for under-resourced or low-income households. Utilities agreed with Fresh Energy and 100% of utilities supported the passage of a Minnesota policy that requires utilities to invest up to 300% more in helping under-resourced households save energy. Other states should do the same investigation to ensure that their low-income households have effective energy savings programs available from their utilities. And I'll put my bullet points in the chat. Thank you so much. Thank you, we really appreciate that. And thank you for giving us back some time. We'll use that at the end for questions. We move on to Ryan Kalker at the International Code Council. Ryan, you're up. Great. Hi, I'm Ryan Kalker, Vice President of Innovation at the International Code Council. Code Council develops building codes and standards that serve as the basis for building design, construction and operations and maintenance requirements in all 50 states, most federal agencies and even internationally. Buildings are an essential part of communities and the economy, providing shelter for residents and supporting the function of businesses, the provision of healthcare, education and government, including many of the sectors examined in the national climate assessment and other US DCRP and federal agency activities. Building codes provide criteria to assure that occupants are protected from hazards, reasonably expected over the lifetime of the structure. The Congressional established National Institute of Building Sciences found that the regular adoption and enforcement of building codes provides an $11 benefit for every $1 spent. While today's codes play a valuable role in public safety and resilience, it is becoming increasingly obvious that the hazards buildings will face into the future are different than those anticipated in the past. Currently, building codes use historic data as the basis for design requirements. There are initiatives underway to examine how codes can adapt to address future-focused climate risk, including an effort by ICC in collaboration with Building Code Development and Research Organization in Canada, Australia and New Zealand to identify common approaches and research needs. The Global Resiliency Dialogue has already released reports on how climate data is currently used in codes and standards and some potential paths forward. Our next step is to develop an international resilience guideline providing a framework for incorporation of climate risk into codes and standards. We highly recommend that the Academy and GCRP examine these reports, help inform the NCA and US Climate Science Initiative. One particular finding from our work thus far is the need for authoritative data at a scale and in a format suitable for use in design that architects, engineers, planners, contractors, owners and building managers can rely on. US stakeholders acknowledge that the greatest climate data need is for more localized model that utilize baselines that climate and building scientists can agree upon because adoption and enforcement of building codes in the US is localized. Additionally, the need for more resilient structures is very localized, even based on a anticipated hazard event that utilize forward-looking scientific data. Currently, there's a lack of high-quality data at the local scale, which is necessary to inform local codes. Participated pating stakeholders highlighted expanded collaboration across sector experts and increased regulation and incentives for resiliency standards as essential actions to increase service life of critical infrastructure in response to the change in climate. The survey responses concluded that uncertainties of projecting future risk have empowered a business as usual mindset, limiting the application of available climate data to proactively incorporate future-looking risk into building codes. There's a sense that climate scientists and the developers of building codes and standards need to agree upon a path and just do it with the anticipation that the future-looking science will need to be recalibrated regularly as the codes are updated. To date, the national climate assessments are focused on cities and the built environment broadly with only cursory focus on the specific needs of the building sector. Key agencies like NOAA and NIST are beginning to focus on addressing these needs in collaboration with standards developers like ICC. Organizing NCA content and USGCRP activities around the specific needs of the building sector will help drive discussions between climate science and building science researchers and practitioners and help building practitioners express their needs and climate scientists to help meet those needs. It will also help advance resilience in all sectors of the economy. Our prior comments to USGCRP provide more detailed recommendations on the needs of the building sector, including how they respond to needs of vulnerable populations. We appreciate the opportunity to share our comments and look forward to working further with the climate science community to realize climate resilient buildings and communities. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ryan. Really appreciate your comments. We move on to Husam Mahmoud. Is that about right? Yes, that's about right. Thank you so much. My name is Husam Mahmoud. I'm at Colorado State University. I need to start my video. So my work focuses mainly on predicting damage to the built environment, infrastructure, as well as recovery of communities following natural disasters. So I'm gonna kind of break my comment into two pieces. The first I'll be talking about damage and how we go about doing that and then talk about how do we look at recoveries and what we might need to do. So I focus primarily on advancing the science, although you will see how my comment will link to other categories that you mentioned. In terms of looking at damage of built environment damage, which is a prerequisite to doing any resilience assessment, you'll find that most of the work that has been done mainly or primarily focuses on earthquake as a natural disaster. And there's a reason for this, but there's tremendous lack of information and how the built environment will perform under other disasters, not just earthquakes. We try to develop damage or fragility functions, we call them, but the grossly estimated at best for extreme events other than earthquakes. This is the problem is more complicated because we tend to almost ignore multiple hazards. So we don't look at the impact of sequential events on the built environment. Of course, predicting the damage to the built environment is not actually a problem for engineers, but it's a problem of accessing data that tells us what is the portfolio of the built environment in a community or infrastructure. Can we have knowledge of the code to which these buildings or infrastructure were built? Do we understand how the physical system was looked together or not? And all of these information are needed for us to be able to predict the damage. And once you predicted the damage, you need to assign these damage functions to the built environment. And if you look at across the studies around the country and also outside, you'll see that this is again done in a very gross way. The problem is again, is data-driven. We don't have the sufficient information of the built environment, what it comprises of to assign damage functions to it. And then if you start to look at recovery or resilience analysis, we need to focus on system of systems analysis. And this type of approach is generally lacking as well. Sociophysical models or socio-technical models are key to capture the interaction between the infrastructure and the people who use this infrastructure. And these sociophysical models have gained a little bit of attention in the past, I would say three to four years, but there's tremendous amount of work that needs to be done. It's not just about the structure of being damaged or about me understanding how the structure will recover from a peer perspective. But do people have access to this infrastructure? What about the people that actually operate these systems? Can they go to work? Have they been injured in an event? And for the most part, no models are going there actually. As I mentioned, we need to look in terms of resilience and recovery, we also need to look at other hazards. That's gonna be very important. Accounting for supply chain and resilience model almost non-existent. And this should be a main emphasis, which will require the development of a mega supply chain models, which also don't exist. If you look at the supply chain literature, there's issues with scaling. And so it should be looked upon as how to develop these official models. The role of uncertainty is also very important to consider in confined damage, losses and resilience and the subsequent impact of this uncertainty, propagation and quantification on the decision-making process. And again, this is some of the things you also don't see in the literature. And I'm talking about advancing the science. Models that are used by decision-makers do not even correlate to what has been done in research here. I think one of the most important things that is also overlooked in advancing the science is the role of life cycle or how we integrate life cycle with resilience assessment to not only ensure rabbit recovery, which is a huge buzzword, but also how do you do that while minimizing life cycle costs related to inspection, repair and management of infrastructure? And the last comment I wanna say is that when we talk about smelt cities, which all obviously have their own benefit, we must understand that a smelt city by default is not necessarily a resilient city. And you must also consider how you develop social capital for resilience when you start to automate everything. And this is also an area of research that has not been touched at all. Thank you. Thank you very much for your comments. Really appreciate those. And thank you for being exactly on time. We move on to Steve Miller from the Massachusetts Department of Transportation. Hi. Thank you for having me tonight. I'm kind of freewheeling here. I didn't prepare any comments in advance, but I would urge that people research with the US DOT and the Federal Highway Administration about the activities that they have planned for infrastructure. For background, I'm a TRB member of AMR 10 which is protecting our critical infrastructure. And I've been with the Mass DOT for 25 years, 26, 27 perhaps now. 15 of it has been with climate change mitigation focusing on carbon sequestration. And then the last 10 years are so involved with resiliency. My focus in resiliency has been mainly on the coast. And by going to the Federal Highway Administration, you will learn that they have a very strong program with climate resiliency pilot projects. I've been a member of a couple of those. And what it does for you is it just explains the depth and breadth and width of all the problems throughout the nation. So when it comes to crafting a framework, it really comes down to a local level as to what data they're using. For instance, Arizona has the dust storms related to climate change. So they have our strong program and kind of mitigate that problem. Massachusetts on the coast has the sea level rise and storm surge part of it. There's also a precipitation part of it in the central and western part of the state. So it all comes down to the local level as to how things are addressed. Now, to find local for me, it's Massachusetts, but then when it comes to sea level rise projections, you now can involve Rhode Island and New Hampshire, perhaps even Maine. Now, Massachusetts now has a unified sea level rise projection and storm surge projection for present day, 23, 2050, 2070. And so the state is using one set of data, but be advised that everyone uses that data differently for what their functions are. And when it comes to critical infrastructure on the coast, the mass dot has its own criteria, but when it comes to buildings, they have their own criteria when it comes to criticality. And so when you're talking a national approach you do have to consider what's going on in other parts of the country. And so joining forces with the American Association of State Transportation Officials, AASHTO, is a good thing. They have guidance on what federal highway administration can do. That's my federal funding partner, but USDOT has a broad climate change. I guess you can call it a map for all of its agencies. So the more that this group is aware of, when it comes to infrastructure, aware of USDOT actions, the better, I suspect. And that's all I have for now. Thank you. Thank you very much. Really appreciate your comments. We now move on to Ken Stressfett from MIT. Ken, the floor is yours. It's great to see you. Thanks. So I just want to second all the things that have been said previously before me and talk about the irony that I'm gonna be talking about a little bit about Massachusetts and a little bit about Colorado. So we have a link geographically to our speakers. So I'm speaking today with two hats. One as a climate change impact and adaptation researcher providing information and working in that world, but more recently have been very much involved with as a practitioner on all scales from institutions and how institutions are making decisions on investing in climate resilience. And that including the MIT campus, cities like the city of Cambridge and Boston, states and then national as well as having done work for EPA and others. And so I just want to give a few examples. And to hit some of the themes that just have happened is the issue is scale. As Tip O'Neill said, all politics is local. All climate impacts and adaptation are local. The responses to them and the resilience to them are gonna be local. So one of the things that we've learned and I wanna push for is we have to work on bottom up analysis to make national and regional decisions because when we use top down, we lose a lot and especially we're losing that as we're looking at equity issues and issues on environmental justice. An example of this is if you look at top down and look at flooding in Massachusetts, the Charles River has great risk. But what's not known at the top down is that there's a dam at the mouth of the river which prevents Cambridge and Boston inland from getting climate impacts from storm surges. However, on the other side, which is where in the coastal plains as we learned are where most of the poor live in that section. So you don't see that. So infrastructure is particularly linked to disadvantaged populations where the quality of infrastructure that is being used is generally in the worst conditions where the people are poor. So as we look at these things, we have to take a look at that just not at the highest level but at the detail level if we're trying to look at some of these issues. The other thing is when we look at infrastructure and transportation, it is greatly impacted by extremes, the extreme events that we have. And we are dealing with right now in the climate world a false sense of false precision as we look at that. We're trying to use our climate models to estimate things like the 100 year storm when for the city of Cambridge, the 100 year 24 hour storm is eight inches but the 95 to 90% confidence until is between six and 11 inches and the 500 years is between seven and 16. How do we use limited parts of data from our climate models to try to give estimates of changes in those when we have small observations from the models? So we have to be very humble when we're looking at dealing with extreme events where most of the damage is coming. So we have to do a lot of research it's my sense in the climate science on extremes and then you've mentioned it before how do we bring these extremes into new building codes without going to climate crazy and bringing in a sense of certainty in our climate predictions when we don't even have great certainty in our current estimations of those design storms. Finally, the last thing is when we look at infrastructure and transportation from our work what we've seen that is most of the costs we're finding is not in the rebuilding of these infrastructures directly but it's the disruption that is caused by the failure of this infrastructure and we do not have very good ways yet of estimating that both engineering-wise technically and then more importantly in the economics of doing that. And this is particularly true in the electric sector as we moved alongside. And finally, one of the things we've seen is that most infrastructure systems are linked. So we have to work together to look at how the transport system is connected to the electric system, et cetera. And then finally, we need research on how decisions are made. How is risk and inter-generation and values taken places in the different cultures and the different groups within our nation. So with that, I thank you for your time and look forward to the next generation of this document. Thank you very much, Ken. We move on to Masarraf Mazzaman. I hope I was close enough with your name from the University of Oklahoma. The floor is yours. Yes, indeed, you are very close. Actually, you are exact. Thank you for this opportunity. Transportation infrastructure is a truly global issue. All countries in the world need good transportation. We need transportation to drop our kids to school, to go to school, to go to hospital, to evacuate during or before an extreme events like hurricanes, flooding, fires, tornadoes, and so on and so forth. It is also a very huge investment and need in order to address some of these issues that we have been discussing here. In the US also, we see that the funding and workforce development needs are far greater than our resources. We just recently had that 1.2 trillion dollar infrastructure investment and jobs act in which transportation infrastructure is a part of it. It is a very good beginning, but not nearly enough. I think we need far more in order to actually address our transportation infrastructure needs fully. So there are reasons like in our infrastructure, is in our aging infrastructure. And we're talking about this severe weather, climate extremes, climate change, that really pose a much bigger problem. So for example, a lot of time, actually we designed something for let's say 100 year flood and we're seeing that we need to actually do it for 500 year flood instead of 100. So in order to do that, you know, whether you talk about design, whether you talk about maintenance, whether you talk about rehabilitation, how do we actually, what do we do actually implementable that economical in terms of science, in terms of technology that we can actually use as a community. We need new technology, we need new tools. Now in terms of existing infrastructure, that also is a huge incidental actually, we spend like a nationally, you know, three billion annually, you know, just to fix or address auto related problems. In Oklahoma alone, we need, we spend similar, taxpayers spend similar amount for extra vehicle repair costs. So there is no, so we do have to address this one way or another. So in terms of, let's say as we address resiliency, we talk quite a lot and climate change and weather. So how do we assess? So for example, we design our pavement. So I personally work in the pavement area. So let's say, and we say that, okay, drainage is one of the most important thing in pavement. So how do we, let's say for example, we design a pavement, but we do not consider if a pavement gets flooded, then what do you do? So you cannot prevent flooding because that's a natural event. So it is really, and how do I assess the conditions of our existing infrastructure and what technology and tools do we need in order to actually, not only for our new infrastructure, but also, you know, our existing infrastructure, whether it is retrofit, maintenance, rehabilitation. So the other part of it is actually this shortage of trained workforce, you know, with all advancement of technology and tools, we need a new generation of workforce that is instrumental to actually what we do going forward. We have seen a lot of people living duties and how we replace them. And we talk about diversity, equity and inclusion. Diversity, equity and inclusion cannot be just an add-on thing. It has to be a fundamental element and policy of what we do going forward. And there are a lot of constraints, but I think there's also a lot of opportunity that we need to look at. And globally, then how do we actually make it, how do we share things? You know, what methods do we have? You know, what mechanisms do we have? So we do not reinvent. So that means it has to be at all levels, locally, regionally, nationally and globally. So this is a really interesting topic. I'm very interested in this. And we have a center that we have, you know, a regional UTC center at the University of Oklahoma, where the focus is climate, adaptive, transportation and freight infrastructure. So I'm really excited about the opportunity. Of course it is going to be challenging, but we can do it together. Thank you. Thank you. And Steven, you wanted to jump in for just a moment? I did. I just wanted to give a heads up that we will have opportunity for additional comments after our final speaker who was registered to speak. So we have one more speaker and we will be inviting others. So if people have an interest in making a comment along these lines around global change issues, please raise your hand and we'll use that. And as the next, to guide our next section of this. Thank you, Chris, back to you. Thanks, Steven. And Bruce, you're our last formal speaker. Bruce McCarl, who's apparently now at MIT. Bruce, it's good to see you. I see you still have the Rockies in the background. The floor is yours. I don't think I'm at MIT unless I'm lost. I'm at Texas A&M at the moment. And I'm an ag economist. That's a picture of where my house is where I was up till about a week ago. But anyhow, I've been working on agricultural adaptation to climate change for a number of years. A few years ago, we tried to take a look at transportation adjustments and generally we found three things across this body of work. We see agriculture is already adapting to climate change. So is land use and livestock. It's moving north and up in elevation. That means east of the Rockies, it's moving north and west. And west of the Rockies, it tends to be moving north and east. The distances in a lot of crops have been 150 to 200 miles with we think about half of this due to climate change. In cases, this replaces lower yielding crops with higher yielding corn replacing wheat, which generates about three times the volume to be moved. And that needs more roads, bridges, rail and grain handling facilities. We also see a reliance less on the Mississippi River Barge system as we move into the Dakotas with more of the grain going out on trains to the east and west coast. We also see shifts in a number of other crops like cotton and sorghum and livestock and land use shifts with land moving out of cropping and into livestock in the southwest and other areas like that. And all this has infrastructure implications. So with that, I will stop talking. Thanks, Bruce. And apologies for putting you in MIT. I was given a master sheet that said you're at MIT. It's a surprise, but... Well, I think you're probably everywhere but the University of Washington, so... I sometimes say I'm a visiting professor because I'm not really good at it. We really appreciate your comments. Thank you very much. The floor is now open. We already have Dave Shukla with his hand up. Dave? Okay, I apologize. I don't have video on this machine. My name is Dave Shukla. I'm from Long Beach. I'm 41 years old. Five years ago, I started a graduate program in urban planning at UCLA. And it was pretty clear, being a climate person, it was more useful to go back home and try and do things on the ground than staying westward. I grew up at 6333 East Elliott Street. That is directly across the streets from the Alameda's generating station that Southern California Edison sold off to applied energy systems. That power plant was rebuilt over the past five years. It was repowered, hasn't been entirely rebuilt. But it's a critical piece of infrastructure, no matter who's asking. And where it's co-located with a lot of transportation infrastructure. As well as a lot of interstate transmission lines. It's kind of a problem. It's a problem in terms of what we need in terms of climate stabilization in 10, 20, 30 year timeframes. These are the timeframes for my generation that matter. I have to start thinking now today about things like, should I move to Duluth and just not have Long Beach problems anymore? Should I move to Otago? My cousin has been putting up solar panels all over the North Island of New Zealand. I can have the South Island. The specific thing for this USGCRP listening session that I'd like to impress upon all of you is that where FUTBURC, Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Sighting is going to be occurring up and down the Goods Movement Corridor, which right now here in Long Beach is an issue. We're handling it, that's because we've gone to 24 hours. We have now a lot of attendant 24 hour problems. But where the FUTBURC transmission siding is co-located from here all the way to the Midwest is extremely important for the development of smart grid. And one of the problems that we've had in California the past 10 years, frankly, is the Southern California Edison mainly, but overall just the system, I mean, one westward all of it is kind of centralized and has centralized the grid kind of in the wrong way. It's outgrowth over the past 100 years, specifically from municipal dependence on oil and coal has kind of made it much harder for my generation, frankly, to think about realistic alternatives in situ, in time. So, things like offshore wind or intertidal that are both mitigative and adaptable. We, you know, we're kind of behind the ball on. We have the breakwater, but we're gonna have to do things with the Thumbs Islands. And a lot of these discussions, frankly, take place mostly kind of late at night with few people attending. So it's hard to try and explain to people who are younger than me. I mean, that's why I went to grad school, right? Like why they should even care or how they should even follow. And along with a lot of frankly, a lot of the climate disinformation, I mean, I wish everyone had time to attend things like this just to listen to everyone else. It's really enlightening. I appreciate everyone's participation, but for people of my generation, I mean, you're putting a lot of lifts on us that we frankly aren't prepared for and we shouldn't have had to have been. And that question of intergenerational equity, stripped of all of the other systems of oppression, if you wanna think in those terms, you know, race class, you know, whatever they are. That's the Long Beach City Hall. Our city clerk's office is next door to where we have 10 open windows for utility bill collection. That's a perfect example of what we devote our resources to. Anyway, thank you for listening. Thank you very much for adding your perspective. We really appreciate that. Does anyone else want to add any comments I see in the chat, something from Christopher Chinapu? Your hand is up, the floor is yours. Hello, good afternoon everyone. I'm Christopher Chinapu. I'm like everyone else, I've been working in the space of climate resilience, sustainability and innovation for probably the last 10 years. Working in the areas of interventions. What I wanted to contribute for the purpose of this meeting was we want to really endorse some of what was said before and just emphasize the importance of the need for locally led adaptation and in building the capacity for locally led adaptation requires us to spend a lot of time and effort in also developing the social capital in places. If you want to address some of those issues of systemic racism, traditional inequities and so on, that of course must be a focus. Another thing I'd like to see happen too is that we stop bifurcating the issues of climate adaptation and mitigation. We need to recognize that there are overlapping intersectional issues and as our urban planning focus needs to take into consideration this lens that helps us to not only mitigate but also to adapt and look at these diseases in our integrated sort of way. So that again, I also wanted to see too from a system perspective too, I wanted to also draw on the record the system of systems perspective that is also important and why saying that they need to engage more widely our stakeholders and to continue to engage in listening sessions like these but the on listening sessions to find ways as we talk about inclusion and engagement in the urban planning agenda to find ways to include even as they would say the most vulnerable and you're not privileged in the whole concepts of urban planning and urban development. And also to put in our lens, they need to also be more inclusive in the way that we develop our cities, our spaces and our places to make sure that we could actually build that resilience in. Another perspective that I also wanted to put on the record also is for us to take care in also recognizing the limitations of our climate models. I think that we don't spend enough time also expressing, we tend to place a lot of confidence and confidence sometimes too into these models. Not to say that the models do not have value. They do have value and they do have significance and we have to continue to research and we have to continue to use the models to make us better able to predict. But we also have to be mindful to take care to not over stretch those the limitations of these models and tools and techniques and approaches. So we need to be mindful in respect to how we approach to that. The other thing I wanted to say that smart cities and things like that is not only a matter of technology and rolling out additional technology. It's how the interactions with the technology, the urban spaces, the places and the human-enabled systems for sustainability are also managed. So and how the gaps in these interactions are managed to make sure that people can feel seamless. So I think that even our concepts of smart cities and how these things are defined, there may be smart and resilient cities, adaptive cities, all of these things. There is probably a need for us to probably rationalize in our minds what do we really mean by these things and it may mean also taking into consideration the context in the different communities. The other thing I wanted to also say too is that we need to probably appreciate not looking at development in a vacuum in terms of just the buildings and spaces, but to also acknowledge that human element and that human side and remember that at the end of the day, cities and places and cities and places are really about people and the interaction and the resilience of the place will also be dependent on how we develop that social infrastructure, social capital within. So just for those few thoughts, I just wanted to end there. And also, go ahead. There's one last thing, you need to build frameworks for us to think together, look together and to continue to cooperate as we go. So we need to really move away from these silos focus in terms of how we have developed our places and spaces. So that's it. Thank you, sorry about that. Thank you so much. Those are very good reminders, really appreciate it. Does anyone else want to provide a perspective or a comment? If not, I'll turn it over to Steve. Yes. We had, before we close out, we had, since we have some extra time, as I said at the beginning, one of the things that we're trying to figure out that we better understand with these sessions is what is the landscape of people who are engaged in global change work as users or researchers and also recognizing that researchers are users and producing other information as well. So at any of these levels, we'd be interested in hearing from you just contributions of what your role is and just how you are engaged with global change related work. So if anybody's willing to come on and just give a couple of sentences about your role and where you engage with these issues or provide that information in the chat, we'd welcome that as well. And you're welcome just to turn on your video. All right, so we're not getting much of a response there, but we will have opportunities in surveys that we will follow up with you and hope you have, take those opportunities both to provide us information about these sessions and also our call for input. So with that, Chris, if you would provide a closing remark on behalf of the committee and then I'll invite Virginia from USGCRP to provide their comments as well. Thank you. On behalf of the committee to advise the US Global Change Research Program, we really appreciate all of your input. This was a highly informative session. It will be very useful, I'm sure, as the strategic plan is further developed over the course of 2022. As we stated at the beginning, please do provide comments on the draft prospectus until January 11th and then look forward to the fully articulated strategic plan for comment sort of mid-year. We encourage further engagement both with this and the USGCRP. There's lots of opportunities on the website. We appreciate your time, your expertise, your insights. So thank you very much. And Virginia, over to you. Yes, thank you, Chris. It's been a very interesting session. I am with the US Geological Survey Department of Interior, which is one of the 13 agencies that is a member and has been since 1990 of the Global Change Research Program. And you've got another couple of members of the steering committee on the line listening today for the executive steering group that is preparing this strategic plan. And I also noticed that several of the committee members in addition to Chris, the committee to advise the USGCRP have also been listening to these very thoughtful, cogent comments. It's harder to talk in five minutes than it is to give a full blown presentation of everything you're thinking I'm worried about if you had more time. So the preparation that went into the comments today, I just really appreciate. And if you weren't able to work in in that five minutes points that you want to make, I encourage you to submit written comments through January the 11th at the USGCRP website. But there will be a transcription of everything that was said today and the high level takeaways will be provided to the committee and to the steering committee that is actually drafting the strategic plan. So thank you to Chris and Stephen and Amber, all of the Academy of the Staff for helping arrange this. I appreciate it very much. Great. Thank you, Virginia. And I appreciate your presence here and the presence of all of the other USGCRP agency, staff and members who have joined us today. So today is the last of our five of these pilot engagement sessions. We, these are, this was a new approach that we were trying to provide a different kind of input and connection between USGCRP and those who are engaged with these very important issues. Just a couple of next steps. We will follow up with all registrants with an email, which will include links to two different questionnaires. One provides further input opportunity for USGCRP and input for us on the evaluation of these sessions. After the listening sessions, we will be posting materials. And I see the question in the chat that the inputs that were provided through the chat will also be available on the event page for this session. So that will be up within the next couple of days on this session. We will also be posting a recording, the video, the Zoom recording of this session. Finally, these inputs are all gonna be available for USGCRP and the advisory committee as they consider their work going forward in both the development of the strategic plan but also how this work is implemented going forward. So thank you all for joining us at this and potentially multiple sessions. And we look forward to digging into the comments and the insights that you provided in these sessions. So thank you, have a good night.