 Hello, and welcome to a special Earth Day natural capital conversation. My name is and Gary, and I am the chief strategy officer and lead scientist at the natural capital project. And I'm just going to start with a few housekeeping kinds of things before I turn it over to the moderator for today's session, Katie Archima. Let's see. So a couple of housekeeping things today's conversation. We have simultaneous translation in Spanish so the webinar will be presented in English with Spanish interpretation, the interpretation button is on the bottom of your screen there's a little globe circled in red here. And if you click on that you can choose either English or Spanish. And please be sure to mute the original audio so that you don't have to hear two languages at the same time. So make sure you select a channel in order to hear the webinar after you've clicked on interpretation by clicking on that little globe at the bottom of your zoom screen. Just a quick introduction to the natural capital project at NACAP we pioneer science technology and partnerships that enable people and nature to thrive. We use, we aim to use understanding of nature's benefits to target investments in nature that improve the well being of both humans and nature. And today's is called the natural capital conversations that we started this pandemic year to try to keep our network together as much as possible. And the format is designed to spark engaging discussion to learn from others experiences, and to promote new connections with collaborators both old and new. And these events have been featuring everything from climate smart coastal planning like today to cultural ecosystem services, and then coming up next is land use planning in the Amazon. Today's conversation is a special one, because it marks Earth Day. And I can think of no better way to celebrate Earth Day than to showcase the amazing work that you'll hear today. We're going on the Meso American reef that aims to safeguard the life support systems of that system. I took this picture near my house last week just as spring was beginning to spring. And these buds, like the work you'll hear about today give me so much hope. I'd like to turn it over to our moderator for today, one of Nat caps lead scientists and ecologists who's turned her prodigious talents to working with decision makers and communities to shape more sustainable futures. So Katie, I will turn it over to you. Great. Thank you, and I'd like to extend a warm welcome to all of you joining us today for the climate smart coastal planning and sustainable development session. And it's my pleasure to introduce this session and to introduce our panelists. So, these past few years, and that's more than a few now past decade have. We've seen a market increase in the number of climate extremes and climate impacts with wildfires reaching across the United States and Australia. In the news this week, there was an article about how one of the glaciers on Mount Denali in Alaska is moving at 100 times its normal speed at 90 feet a day. And of course we have had numerous hurricanes impact our shores. And this this past summer to hurricanes in the Mesoamerican reef region exemplify the devastation that we're seeing in coastal communities across the world. Iota and at a hit both Guatemala and Honduras. And our sort of typical I think response and coastal systems is often to build walls to protect ourselves from sea level rise and from storms. And certainly there are some places where that is necessary where there aren't any other options. But there's also large stress stretches of coast around the world and especially in the Mesoamerican reef, where there's opportunities to leverage other kinds of approaches. And so the panelists today are all involved in different efforts across Mexico will be Guatemala and Honduras are related to understanding better the impacts of climate in this region in particular, and working to develop a portfolio of ecosystem based adaptation communities that will hopefully help to reduce the risk to coastal communities but also allow these regions to still be able to harness the benefits the coastal protection the fisheries the tourism, the carbon storage and sea frustration that underlying underlie the livelihoods and the well being of so many people in these four countries. And so it's my pleasure to introduce our five speakers are all involved in a project called smart coastal planning and in one way or another and they'll be talking to some extent about their work related to that and then some to some extent about other types of work that they do in their respective country. So we have first menisca down now, who is a senior staff associate at the earth Institute at Columbia University and ministry will be talking about downscaling global climate model information to the Mesoamerican region. And then next we have Fabio Christo Alina, who's a climatologist and is leading several different efforts in Guatemala related to climate impacts on ecosystems and also to the nationally determined nationally determine contributions update for that country. After Fabio will be will have my stress data Rodriguez Gomez, who is the Minister of Secretary of Sustainable Development in the government of Yucatan in Mexico. And she'll be talking about some of the initiatives that her team and her agency is leading related to sustainable development in the region. Next we'll have Arlene young who's director at the police coastal zone management authority and Institute, and she'll be talking about sort of links between science and policy and the way that her agency is leveraging analysis that's coming out related to climate adaptation. And finally, we'll have Luis cheviz, who's with World Wildlife Fund and Honduras, and he'll be talking about some of the approaches that we're taking to identify climate adaptation strategies and to leverage the science to inform decision making. Next slide. We'll have the first three speakers. Before a break and the break will be five minutes. And then we'll come back and we'll review the results of a word map activities and I'm going to share with you in a moment. And after that we'll have our last two speakers, and then we'll be followed by some time for discussion. So for the word map activity, I invite you to grab your pencil and paper and write down www.menti.com and go to the site throughout the session, when you're feeling sort of so moved to do so. And enter the code here 18421756. Type in a word that your hearings here that you're hearing things spoken by the speakers, or that is relevant for you related to these issues in your region, and we'll create a word map that gives us all an opportunity to interact and keep our brains going as we're listening. So for the next hour and a half, and also will be sort of a nice product to showcase the content from this presentation. I wanted to let you know that a recording of this webinar will be available on the National Capital Projects YouTube channel and a PDF copy of the slides presented today will be included in a thank you email following the event. Some speakers will. Sorry, and we go back to last slide for a moment. Some speakers, most speakers I believe will be presenting in English but they're actually maybe some speakers that will be presenting in Spanish. So if you would like to be able to see the slide in Spanish, all the slides on the screen today will be for the most part in English if you would like to be able to see the slides in Spanish, then please go to a link that Mary Jane will be putting in the chat, so that you can download the PDF of the slide deck in the language that you prefer. So keep an eye out in the chat for that link to a public site where you can download the slides in the language that you need. So during the presentations, please submit any questions that you have for the speakers in the question and answer box. And those are content related questions and the speakers will do their best to respond throughout the session. If you need any logistics or technical assistance and please put that in the chat. I can already see there's requests for the mentee information and we'll get that in there shortly. Okay, and I think am I done with my slides here my interest slides. Wonderful. Okay, so with that I'd like to hand it over to Manishka who's going to kick us off. Thanks so much Kelly. And I'm pleased to share an overview of the work we are doing in the Mesoamerican Reef region. We will, we are working on assessing climate risk in the region and have been involved in this project for about two and a half years now. I will be very briefly going over a number of our climate variables we've developed. Just to introduce some methods, talk about how we've integrated climate risk into ecosystem service models and a couple of other related initiatives and some next steps. Just to introduce our center. The center for climate systems research is a collaborative entity between NASA and Columbia University. Within CCSR, we're part of the climate impacts group, we carry out applied research related to agriculture, urban areas and conservation. And then in 2015, we, we started a partnership the advanced partnership with WWF to develop new ways to integrate climate risk into adaptation planning. As Katie mentioned, all of us are involved in the smart coast project in the Mesoamerican Reef region in some form or the other. Our main project activities include providing downscaled climate risk information for ecosystem service analysis and adaptation. We've co-led workshops to co-generate climate risk information so we've got a lot of information from stakeholders and try to tailor our information as much as possible. And we also provide guidance on how to use climate risk information for project planning and activities. We will be not going into any details about our methods. All I want to say is that we use multiple climate model outputs. We provide projections for two emission scenarios. We work in time slices of 30 years and our focus for this presentation is mid-century and we always go for a range. So we provide a low and high estimate and I'll tell you why we do that as well. The main, you know, the obvious climate variable that we always do is, you know, we look to see how temperature changes across the region. And once again, I'm not going to go into details but just provide a very quick overview, you know, this is not surprising, mean temperature is increasing everywhere. It's increasing a little bit more in internal areas in the more mountainous areas than some of the coastal areas. And then under the high estimate, we see as much as three degrees Celsius by mid-century. So that's quite concerning but that's at the high estimate and we're talking about RCP 8.5. When we look at extreme heat, we are looking here at base over 35 degrees. And we see a lot of that even under the low estimate in some parts of Mexico and Guatemala. And then when we look at the high estimate, it can reach up to about 300 days a year in some parts while others see about 150 to about 200, which is still very high. In the case of precipitation under the low estimate, we see drying. And then even under the high estimate, we see quite a bit of drying in the central regions with some coastal areas showing a little bit of an increase. And here I'm just going to mention why we always show a range. And this is because if we take a range, for example, let's just assume it's a range from plus 30 to negative 30% change. This is just an example. It's usually not an equal range. But if you plan for this, then we might realize that yes, rainfall may increase or decrease and therefore we realize that we have to plan for a couple of different possibilities. However, if we just average and show this, we might think that there's no change and that we do not need to plan or adapt to climate change. So this is why we always try to show a range. We also look at the change in the number of rainy days and under the low estimate, there's a decline. Even under the high estimate, we see quite a lot of areas seeing a decline in the number of rainy days. And this means that in areas where there's a decline, that means total rainfall occurs in a smaller number of days in a year. It's not surprising, very similar to temperature, there's only one direction. Unfortunately, the sea level is going in and that's an increase. And we see levels of almost up to a half for me to increase across the region, it varies really slightly. And this is using a range of data sets, including multiple climate models. This is once again just an example to show that even if the intensity of storms do not change. If the storm state surge level is the same as before, just with future sea level alone, you see more water being pushed internally. So this is why even if the intensity of storms don't increase sea level alone will push more water during storm events into coastal areas. We also developed projections for sea surface temperatures and this is for the whole Mesoamerican reef, the ocean region. And we did this across three different time slices. And by the time you get to the end of the century, you can see a range of two to four degrees Celsius. Once again, this is very concerning. And actually, you know, the emission scenario that will actually occur will be not RCP 8.5. So that was just a very quick overview I'm happy to go into details about some of the projections we've done. I just want to spend a moment talking a little bit about how we integrated climate risk into ecosystem service models. In this case study in the latest unit adaptation gap reports in BS chapter. This is once again we engaged with stakeholders, then we worked with Katie and her team to integrate different variables into the sediment retention, coastal risk reduction, tourism and fisheries models. And then it informed me a range of nature based solutions which stakeholders have prioritized and will implement. They won't implement all of these but they will be implementing at least some of these. We are also working on another study where we are using the degree heating week metric which is currently used by Noah and a lot of practitioners in the region. What we're trying to do is we're trying to see how degree heating weeks will change with climate change in the future. So that analysis will be ready in about a month or two. I just also want to mention another initiative that we are a part of and that is the NASA pace program. The NASA pace program is a mission that is going to be launched quite soon into 2022. It's called the plankton aerosol cloud and ocean ecosystem mission and we think that this will be very useful for this region, because it will advance the assessment of ocean health, because it will be measuring a range of parameters that will be useful. It will even be useful for detection of things like harmful algorithms. So there's a team in our group that pace earlier doctors so we'll get a chance to develop methods and start utilizing this data quite soon. Any of you are interested please do contact us and we'll see how we can help get some of this information when it's available. I just wanted to share that with everyone as well. And then I'd just like to conclude by saying what we have lined up. We will be and we're currently developing a synthesis report of the climate risk assessment for the region. In the midst of the degree heating week analysis. And once all that is over we will be presenting our results in an online format. And then what you see on the screen is an online platform which we also hope to launch. And then we want to continue to engage with NASA space program and stakeholders in the region to deliver some of that information across to you all. So thank you very much and I'll be happy to answer any questions at the end. Thank you. Thank you so much. Manishka that was wonderful. And yes, put your questions in that question and answer chat. Sorry in the question and answer box, and we'll get to them in the discussion session. Go ahead Fabio. I'm very happy to talk today about climate change impacts on Guatemala ecosystems. Today, it's Earth Day. And so it's a particular honor for me to be here. The motto today is to restore restore our Earth, because a healthy planet is not only an option. It's a necessity. And today I'm trying to, I'm going to try to talk about the necessity to adapt. I'm going to talk a little bit more about climate change impacts, not only Guatemala, but in general the major American coral reef. So, just to put in context, the climate change in Guatemala, I just took the data from the latest global carbon project, which is, which came out later late last year. And you can see here the emissions of Guatemala of CO2 in comparison to other countries and other regions. And as you can see Guatemala, at least in 2019 was not really one of the greenhouse gases, but if you look at the emissions per person, which is the second, the lowest part of the slide, you see that Guatemala, the average Guatemala person is even emitting less than the average person in Central America. So it seems important to think about that Guatemala is not really one of the nations which are most responsible for climate change, but is one of the nation which is most affected by it. Not only the people, but also the ecosystems. The ecosystems of Guatemala and in general of the world are under threat because of climate change. We know about, as Maniska said, the increasing temperature, the increasing sea level lies. Also the increasing ocean acidification, which is destroying the coral reef. There are also other changes that are effects of climate change, which are maybe less well known or less completely understood. One of these is the change in precipitation patterns study that came out early this year, showed that there are all the climate models predict a general decrease in precipitation in the Central American dry corridor, which is already at arid or semi arid region at the end of the century, both in a moderate emission scenario, the RCP 4.5 and heavy emission scenario, the RCP 8.5. So this kind of change is of course impacting ecosystems which are already under pressure because of low precipitation. Another change, as Maniska and Katie mentioned before, is the increase in extreme events, such as for example hurricanes. Central America was hit by back to back two major hurricanes last November, Eta and Ayota. And this study that came out late last year showed that there is a correlation, a solid correlation between increasing temperature and increasing the intensity of such extreme events. So, thinking about the impact of extreme events on local ecosystems, with two organizations, Picsantia and Healthy Reefs, we started to develop a project to monitor the impact of climate and weather extreme events on a coral reef. Before moving to Guatemala, I didn't even know that new coral reefs were being discovered, but this is the case. In 2014, the Cayman Coral Reef was discovered. It is a really peculiar coral reef in Guatemala, and it is quite deep. It is a 10-meter depth, and it boasts a 60% of coral cover, which is huge in comparison to the rest of the Mesoamerican coral reef. It is a really peculiar ecosystem with a lot of life, and of course, which is under pressure because of climate change. So, with a project which is financed by the Sustainable Ocean Alliance, we plan to monitor the impact of weather extremes on this ecosystem. Sadly, because of the pandemic, we were able to analyze only the time series between May and October 2019, because it was impossible to recollect again the sensors. We plan an expedition later in May to get more data. So far, as you can see in this slide, what we analyze basically is a correlation between the increase in sea temperatures that we measure at the coral reef and the pH. And of course, we need more data to assess also the seasonability and also to really understand the impact of events like the hurricanes that we got in November on the coral reef. Here I linked an article that appeared in the Guatemala Magazine in Trimundo, so if you're interested in the process of the discovery of this new coral reef. ecosystem, which is definitely under pressure because of climate change, are mangrove forests. And they are under pressure because of course of sea level rise, but also because of the massive deforestation, which is happening in this forest in Guatemala. And the National Forestry Institute, the INAP, also monitored that some mangroves are dying because of fungal attacks. And what is interesting is that these fungi are normally found in May's culture. So it's maybe due to the fact that people are not really doing good waste management in our cultural sector. Another effect that can be seen in mangroves in Guatemala is that you can see a change in plant productivity, and that is maybe because of the increasing CO2 in the atmosphere. This path still has to be explored, but you can also see in the graph above that this increasing productivity is kind of being saturated and of course this can impact even more the productivity of mangroves. To conclude, I just wanted to come back to the first slide that I presented, to the necessity of adaptation. Guatemalan ecosystems and Guatemalan people, but in general people all over the center, all over Central America, have to adapt to climate change. But how, in general, what I believe in, what I see in the project in which I'm involved in is the necessity of bottom-up approaching, which are involving the communities which live with the ecosystem and within the ecosystems, not only in the implementation of climate change adaptation measures, but also in the planning of these measures to guarantee really the sustainability of these projects in these measures after the planning of the measures themselves. One of a really striking case to me is, for example, the case of forest concession here in Guatemala in Petén, where in the northern part of Guatemala, in the tropical forests, where the local communities were involved in the planning and in the regulation of the forestry, you can basically see zero impact of wildfires, whereas outside these forest concessions where the local communities were not involved, wildfires are ravaging the tropical forests. So a project like the WWF led smart coasts, about which other people are going to talk about later today, and the fact that science is being taken to the community and the decision making is involved in the community with the power of nature-based solution is one of the sustainable options that I see as a future for the ecosystem managing in Guatemala and Central America. In Guatemala, we have now an opportunity to do so because we are updating the nationally determined contribution, so the commitment of Guatemala to the price agreement. And it is necessary in such a process to involve the local community in a truly participatory process to guarantee really the sustainability of the chosen measure of adaptation. Thank you for the attention and I'm really happy to take any questions afterwards. Thank you so much, Fabio. That was great. Yes, feel free to add your questions into the Q&A. I already see people doing so, and I would like to hand it over to Sayed Ahmed. Good afternoon. Good afternoon. It is a pleasure to be able to share with you a moment and, of course, to talk a little bit about what is happening from the state of Chucatán. If you allow me, I would like to quickly introduce you to Chucatán. It is one of the thirty-two states of the Mexican Republic. We now have more or less, around two million, two hundred thousand inhabitants in a territory of thirty-nine thousand and five hundred and twenty-four square kilometers. There is something very interesting that of one hundred and six municipalities with which we live in the state, twelve of them are located in the coastal area. We have basically twelve coastal municipalities in the state, of which practically all are part of some type of protected natural area, some type of conservation. In Chucatán, we have also learned a little from the mistakes in the situations we have experienced due to the impact of climate change, which is evident, is noticeable from many sectors of the population, is that we need to generate a different vision of the attention of coastal areas. We need to move towards an integrated management of these areas that provide us with a large ecosystem services for the entire population of the state. Our work has persisted from the different sectoral development, in being able to resume many efforts that for many years, due to academic interests, we had previously been introduced to the fact that information exists, that there are many initiatives and that there are many people and scientific compromises to generate information that will allow us in the public sector to participate in a better form of decisions. This is a poster that has been built through the National Autonomous University of Mexico, Launam, which has a portfolio of analysis and coastal resilience in the state of Yucatán, with other instances such as the CICI, which is the Center for Scientific Investigation of Yucatán, and the CINVSTAR, which is the Center for National Investigation. This is a poster of coastal resilience, which has less or less indicated the analysis that has been carried out, cataloging or maximizing the status of the coastal region, according to four environmental factors, which are habitat, biodiversity and water. And we see that obviously there is a region that is located in Rojo, which is a great area of ​​attention, and that precisely through it we can differentiate that it is necessary to generate strategies that are integrated in the sense that the solution is the same for each of the spaces. And this integrated manner of coastal zone, what we visualize is that we need to focus on the great items and the great areas that are not the same in each of the states, that are not the same for each community that lives in the country. For us in Yucatán, the purpose is that this integrated manner is through municipal interaction. Each of the heads of the municipality, the municipal presidents, we can interact with them to introduce a very local public policy. It is the issue of adaptation, of course. The people and the community understand very well that we need to advance towards the adaptation measures between what is happening, what are the effects of climate change, but it is not possible to mention what adaptation is. It is not possible to mention how we can be participants in adaptation measures. We also have to, of course, work with the potential of our coastal zones and, in the case of Yucatán, all of our coastal zone, the rural zone is one of the great tools of our integration. And, of course, very important options in terms of our coastal line and the effects of coastal erosion in terms of the integration of the community. Of course, there are two issues that do not really matter to us. One is monitoring, because it allows us to interact a lot with the people and be able to talk to the people and make this socialization of the importance of coastal zones. And, of course, the conservation of fauna, which, for Yucatán, is very, very important, because we always see migratory species and species as charismatic as the Torto Dome. And, evidently, we, as a state government in Mexico, one of the great issues is that we do not have great competencies of regulation of coastal zones. Every time they are all of them, they are of federal competition. Regulations that must be regulated from the Mediterranean Secretariat, from the Marine Secretariat, from the Funa Pesca, from other instances. And, precisely, the operation and the execution of many of the actions in coastal zones. And, of course, the government of Yucatán is very interested in generating process of alignment and public policy, precisely integrated, which allows us to be more participants of this. Some very important data for monitoring is already working a lot on the identification of the coastal line and the generation of flights, overflights with photos, monitoring dynamically the behavior and the modification of the coastal line and the most affected areas, cataloging the characteristics. There are some works of protection that have been fortified in the state, and these must be monitored to be able to dimensionally function in one of them. And, in that sense, it has already been worked on, over 2,145 meters in line, in which there is already some work of protection and they have been established in the official development of the beach, as well as they have also been removed from the actions that they generate in the coastal zone and already in 30 very important sites. An important issue, because it allows us to interact and be participants of the people, are activations in the evaluation of the beaches. From there, we have worked a lot with certification processes of clean beaches, clean beaches and a beach with the Blue Ocean application, in which we have strengthened the work with six municipalities and in each of them I have already implemented the monitoring and monitoring of clean beaches. In terms of priority species, of course the turtle Mariana is working a lot with this charismatic species, but we also have the flamingo and many migratory birds species that have also been monitored by not only the government of the federal state, but also many civil organizations that work together with us to be able to strengthen the actions in the country. Culture for sustainability is this great issue that we have in dialogue and participation with the population, accompanying the certifications but also spreading the importance of the knowledge of coastal areas, coastal services and the knowledge of what they are, protected natural areas that we should know, value and know about. This is one of the great challenges in which we have found and focused as a federal government and it is precisely because the action of the generation of open ports in these two fishing ports that we have in the state has caused the accumulation of sand in the eastern site and the loss of the sand that does not run, as it should run, to the east side of each of these coastal areas. And here we have coordinated the work so that by placing the systems behind the sand it can pass the volume of sand that has already been studied that should run in a normal way to eventually generate processes of modification of the structure and orientation of the entrances of the open ports. All this with potential to be able to generate a smaller impact of these open ports precisely. This is another focal point that as a federal government and as we have already mentioned in the previous panelist that the social participation of the projects of adaptation and mitigation are also very important. The governor is the believer of this and of trusting the population and this festival is a festival that was created to celebrate that we should not fish in a pond. It is a festival to celebrate the truth of a very important kind of state that is the mayor and during all the two months and a half that lasts the mayor's truth because they generate economic, cultural, sports, capacity and also cleaning beaches in England and many more activities to be able to support a part of the coastal population but also to be able to spread the importance of knowledge of the mayor for the state and also of our own beaches. This festival has been a great success for the state recognizing the importance of our coastal zones. This was already mentioned in the previous form and there you can see in the map how practically all the states are covered by a protected natural area. These are state nature areas and both if you look at the line everything is practically covered by the states and the remnants are federal natural areas in such a way that all the coastal area in the state is a natural area. This is the festival that I had talked a little bit about before. This is our turtle camp one of the things that we are very proud of is that it has served us a lot so that in the same communities there are volunteer groups that generate the inspection of the nest and the turtle monitoring but they have also helped us to monitor the care of the mangrove and to help us to take care of the management issues and even we are already strengthening the representation so that it can help us with the monitoring of the nest empowering the communities in the knowledge of their coastal zones. I would also like to comment on the project with these lists Yucatán is the goal of this project we have two communities that have served us to be able to take the first steps to do all of this that I will comment on as a manager of the coastal area a public policy and in which now precisely as the government of the state we are working to be able to generate this as a document that can be published that can be recognized by the environmental authorities and the incident authorities that are competent so that this can be done permanently for the entire coastal area coastal lists as I mentioned in the base, we have already talked about the internal analysis of this experience but it is very important to note that this leads us to be able to generate with the community solutions based on the ecosystem solutions that allow us to be able to do restoration of the coastal area the integrated management of the fire which for Yucatán is a very important point and that we take care of each year in a very preventive way and of course it is a topic that is not talked about much but it is of great importance for the development of biodiversity and for the conservation of the large that is the conservation of the sea masks and what this leads to in the capture of coal equally because we are aligning this with our tools of public tools which are linked which are territorial for the entire state of Yucatán the strategic program of action starting from the climate and the one that I was talking about which is the state policy of seas and things in the state of Yucatán and something that we would like and that precisely in these fields we like to comment that we have to bet as coastal communities to be able to recognize and be able to generate the value of blue coal with what we have in our wonderful mangrove systems and lava systems and even be able to talk about communities in the process of generation of emissions this is the great work that we are developing through this program already with functional days that day I made for you which is our tourism office to which we are working a lot with these topics but also with ours and the institutional coordination between other state instances that allow us to carry this in a very specific way and all this focused of course so that all the bases adapt them adopt them and promote them in coastal areas and we hope that this will really be something that we will be able to give as a permanent policy so that regardless of the authorities that arrive and the citizens in coastal areas identify the economic value of each of its sites, of each of its ecosystems and really keep it in a suitable way not only the participation in the MDSS but the sustainable development that we all would like to see in this case I hope some questions and questions and above all to be able to invite them to Yucatán because this is nothing to do with the MDSS Thank you so much Saida That was wonderful, thank you for sharing all of those programs Okay, we are going to now take a short five minute break and I'm going to put up a slide here that will cover some of the word map activities so please take a minute or so of your break to fill in some of those some of those words and we're going to give Tais our interpreter a couple minutes here to rest her voice and we'll welcome you all back in just about four or five minutes Hello, I'd like to welcome everybody back Lori can you hear me Yes, I can hear you Katie Okay, great So I just wanted to share it with everybody the word map that we have going on so far Lori can you see my screen with the map It looks beautiful, thank you everybody for filling it out Yeah, so we clearly have a lot of people sharing words related to climate risk and community and biodiversity and resilience I also see nature based solutions ecosystem services and I see some words here in Spanish which I love to see Aracipis which is coral and I see manglades mangroves I also see some policy related some words such as the NDCs coastal management and GHG emissions so keep on adding your words and adding the issues that are important to you in your region I also love to see some other countries in here as well I think I see India somewhere so feel free to add whatever these presentations are making you think of feel free to add your questions to the Q&A and our speakers are responding to them so with that I'd like to hand it over to our next speaker who's going to be Eileen Eileen are you there It says I cannot share while someone else is sharing so can you please stop sharing Let's see if I can stop sharing I don't know why I'm having trouble stopping sharing Good afternoon everyone just to give a quick overview of my presentation today the goal of it is to highlight the importance of how 6MEI the Belize coastal zone management authority and institute has been using natural capital information to inform the updating of Belize's integrated coastal zone management plan and how we are also engaged in other important processes such as the updating of Belize's nationally determined contribution and also to demonstrate how this important information can also serve other purposes as well as you may know for those who have been working in Belize the coastal zone provides significant ecosystem goods and services for Belize as you can see tourism is our main income earner and also important is the fisheries sector which contributes to the economy and is also an important source of food for coastal communities in Belize additionally we see that shoreline protection coastal protection we gain a lot from the services that the mangroves and coral reefs provide in terms of avoided damages from storms and hurricanes so these are all figures from the coastal capital of Belize which is a bit dated but we have recent studies that have more up to date information and as you would imagine in 2021 these ecosystem goods and services are even more important now the Belize integrated coastal zone management plan was endorsed in 2016 we heard previous panelists speak about the importance of integrated coastal zone management and this embodies our framework for ICBM in Belize it was done through a partnership with the World Wildlife Fund for the coastal project and local and national stakeholders through a participatory approach and really the goal of updating or one of the key goal of updating our plan is to incorporate up to date and recent climate smart recommendations and scientific information to guide the policy recommendations in the plan we also heard earlier a bit about some of the models from the smart coast project and the ecosystem service analysis that has been done in the four countries and particularly in Belize this provides baseline results with key information on coastal risk what specific areas of the country are at highest risk and this information will be used to bolster the climate change and coastal zone section in the plan with a focus on vulnerability and resilience this is one of the key areas that we hope to strengthen the plan additionally our key sectors like tourism we use the important tourism data and maps generated by the models particularly to highlight and reinforce the value of the coast we know that tourism is very important to Belize and this information will assist managers to continue to plan for investments where to plan how to make improvements towards improving visitor satisfaction and again highlighting the role of adaptation in this sector is very important in terms of the adaptation strategies that have been that have been a result of the models we hope to use this in several ways as you can see one of the strategies is to protect mangroves and this work has allowed us to realize that some important areas for mangrove do not fall within our protected areas system and so this will be key in terms of identifying additional areas for mangrove habitat protection and also to inform investment as it relates to the implementation of these adaptation strategies additionally the Belize Coastal Zone Management Authority and Institute is one of the key partners in the Blue Carbon Working Group which was established to provide technical guidance and support to the NDC updating process Belize is a small island developing state and we recognize the importance of Blue Carbon and to this end the 2016 NDC is currently being updated to include targets for mangrove protection as well as improving the management of sea grass as well in terms of getting specific priority locations to inform the targets the analysis was able to or the models were able to assist us in looking at different targets to validate with stakeholders and so this has been shared with local stakeholders, national level stakeholders to be able to inform the decision-making process as to what really is a feasible target for us to include in our NDC ranging from looking at 500 hectares to 10,000 hectares and what would that look like and where would be these priority areas for mangrove protection as you can see of course increasing the coverage we will likely get a wider geographic scope of areas where we could prioritize furthermore using these targets or these different range of targets were then used to help us to identify how much carbon these different target areas would store and sequester as this important data that is included in the NDC document. This slide just shows a snippet of the sectoral targets in the NDC for the coastal zone and marine resources and some of the targets that were actually in a validation session earlier today to look at these targets and to see if they are realistic for the country taking into consideration finance, human resources and so forth. So the targets range from protection targets to targets for restoration for management interventions and as well the natural capital information is also being used to inform investment at various levels so we're working with the Inter-American Development Bank on a mangrove initiative particularly geared towards coastal risk reduction and implementing some of the adaptation strategies for mangrove. Additionally, we were recently engaged in a process to update our country program for the Green Climate Fund and this as you all may know is a huge opportunity for us to be able to implement these adaptation strategies towards sustainable use and improving coastal protection. There are other major pipeline initiatives such as the updating of the National Climate Change Policy Strategy and Action Plan as well as the development of specific adaptation plans for the fisheries and coastal zone sector for which a proposal has been recently submitted to the Green Climate Fund. In summary the presentation was aimed at showing a snapshot of how natural capital information can be used to support policy development and planning in Belize. These important strategies will continue to help us to improve habitat protection and make investments through nature-based coastal risk reduction projects and furthermore these climate data datasets will also help us to support the value and cost of mangrove ecosystem as well as helping Belize to improve its ambition and climate change action plan. Thank you. Thank you so much Arlene. That was really excellent. Thank you for sharing all that important work that you're doing. Okay I'd like to hand it off to Luis now for our final presentation before the discussion. Thank you Katie. Arlene, are you just wearing perfect? That's it. Let me share my screen. Thank you very much for being here today. I'm going to talk about the experience that WWF and our partners in the Mesoamerican region as working with governments, communities and private sector on climate smart team protective areas and coastal zones in terms of planning and management and I'm happy to do so in Earth Day which is great. I'm going to speak about three specific teams. What is our approach in the region? A brief introduction to how the consistent service analysis looks like. You have seen some already in past presentation through this series and how we are supporting decision making in the region. Just to give you an idea of where we are working, this is our below mar eco region and you can see at the right the network of coastal and marine protected areas where we are working and our approach is actually a 300 science based approach where we try to analyze climate and ecosystem risk with the support of universities and we try also to model climate influence on the delivery of ecosystem services which is important in terms of planning and after generating this science information we try to strengthen capacities at national level through trainees to undertake ecosystem analysis and identify and evaluate risk reduction strategies and adaptation options and finally we go over the support decision making process and try to integrate strategies or options within policies and plans and also will be piloting adaptation option measures to set an example over the countries we are working on. And this is just possible thanks to a network of partners so as I mentioned at the beginning we go we work closely with governments in each country we have different implemented partners that help us to set up academic information as you can see here Columbia and Stanford University involved in our work in the region but also different projects that collaborate in different levels including local level work at the field and finally local project executors that are key partners in communities and MPAs that work closely with local authorities and business sectors around their MPAs a quick example of the climate variables that we are using for ecosystem service modeling together with our partners we are talking about sea level rise precipitation, mean temperature sea surface temperature and how this affect different ecosystem services model like cost of protection, sedimentation, tourism and features. Regarding ecosystem services analysis as I mentioned we are looking to see how it influence the climate adaptation strategies and also in the benefits that people receive from these ecosystem services with example here of what we are doing with the support of natural capital project it's for example the tourism or recreation service where we use climate variables such as temperature or precipitation and the idea is to see how visitation is influenced by nature and climate and how this can change in the future in terms of climate change. Once we have this scenario we are working again with MATCAD in a restoration opportunities optimization tool and that help the governments the communities and the private sectors to decide where activities should be target so here we have brief examples like transition in agriculture to agroforestry to improve sediment retention models or restoring mangroves as a cost of protection adaptation option or even restoring coral reef as part of cost of protection as well and this is possible to identify this potential climate adaptation strategies is possible thanks to work with local communities local businesses and government agencies in the field so we try to go ecosystem we try to look for ecosystem based adaptation options that are relevant for the focal MPAs that we are working with and the coastal areas in the region and of course this is a stakeholder driven and this is important because it's people who choose what are the key ecosystem services that they like to protect in the future and we have done through we have done this through different workshops in different communities and in different countries sometimes getting together which allows us to have a regional approach and once we have defined this strategy with the support of Stanford we get represented especially and that way people can visualize what it means that adaptation option in terms of restoring and also what will be the influence of this adaptation on the ecosystem services and here you can see a good example of how protecting mangroves might influence tourism and coastal risk of the coastal zones of the region and the MPAs and finally and this is something that we are working at right now it's generating an agreement map where the adaptation strategies generate the greatest return in multiple services now and under future climate conditions and this involve not just science but also consulting people and taking notes from the field and once we have all this ready we go over the decision process and as mentioned it's science based information that are provided to communities and business leaders and the idea is to support decision making at three levels, a local level by providing feedback to management plans on the coastal and marine protected areas providing feedback to municipality and states in terms of land zoning and even providing feedback on climate adaptation strategies based on the ecosystem services that we are developing through this project and at national level as you have seen we are already supporting countries NDC processes in terms of updating also coastal zone management and climate adaptation strategies at national level as well and at eco regional level there is an opportunity to promote regional policies that might improve the eco regional approach of the mesoamerican reef and also learning from each other and this is an important part of the project as we have spaces to share with NPA co-managers different authorities where they get together and learn from each other from their experiences whether this might be mango irrigation or planning with communities at local level so thank you very much for your time and I hope you like my presentation Thank you so much Louise that was a wonderful presentation to wrap us up I would like to invite all of the presenters now to turn your video on and we've had a quite an active chat and Q&A session here already over the last hour so I think all of the attendees for your good questions you're clearly listening and paying attention and I also want to thank all the presenters for your good answers so feel free to keep looking at that Q&A and I thought that I start off with a couple questions that that I had I thought maybe first sort of Louise you shared with us your the kind of process that we've been undergoing as part of this inner country sort of collaboration around ecosystem based adaptation but I also know that you are deeply involved in a lot of work going on in Honduras and so I wanted to just give you an opportunity to share some of your insights from that work with this group and in particular I'm thinking about the devastation that we've seen from Eda and Iota and also the impacts of the COVID pandemic and I'm just wondering if you have thoughts for people from your experience about engaging with communities that have been suffering from these sorts of sort of both natural disasters and sort of health and political issues how do you go about approaching community members that you're engaging in projects like this given that wider context oh thank you for your question Katie so it is very interesting now after Iota and Eda looking at the people reactions in the communities they are aware now and especially because they were probably influenced by our project and learning about ecosystem services or nature based solutions for adaptation and they were reflecting many communities that we have contact with that need to for example restore forests in the mountains and they were recording that the communities were more vulnerable just because they were removing forests nearby and that's an important reflection and I think it's a momentum it was a really sad experience for the country to suffer these two hurricanes in a month people reflections are good and I think taking that momentum and supporting people in getting less vulnerable it's a very important piece for this project and regarding the COVID-19 crisis it just makes it harder because we try to engage with our partners and with our community members but it is just hard and we are trying to do different measures for example in the past December we launched a South Opera by radio station broadcasting and the idea of that South Opera was to actually educate people about climate and how they can adapt it and it was very successful we reached about 20,000 people in our region in our eco region which might sound a minor number but it is large for the type of communities that we work with and that has been a good experience so far trying to reconnect with them of course we are always trying to educate people in terms of adaptation wonderful thank you Luis thank you for that answer so Saida we have a question for you from one of the participants and I'm going to I'm going to try to read it in Spanish and you'll forgive me I'm going to try to say it in English as well congratulations for the presentation Saida some questions who is directing the international group the LME Saida thank you I was just trying to answer that same question what we are going to do I'm going to save the writing currently this initiative that is an initiative it is not a formal group it is now led by the development secretary in conjunction with a group of civil associations where there is also the GEP where there is the web where there are several other instances that have formed an initiative for the coasts and seas of Mexico so this initiative and we are in formulation of this policy with an informal group where we participate in the state secretaries as the municipal coordination is the tourism secretaries the fishing secretaries and the sustainable culture of the state we the research and study of the state secretaries and the health secretaries all of these secretaries and the homologues of the federation as well as the alcoves and we are working with very cultural groups that already have activities for example the Voluntary Group of the COCTOMI which is the conservation program of turtles the group of tourist guides that have a project with that future the fishing cooperatives as well as the groups of social communities that are online or acting are our social groups with which they are developing this work the intention of this policy is that it is generated we can then publish it degrade it or concretize it as an instrument and then if we have a formal group that can access it with a certain period of time wonderful that kind of leads into a question I have for Fabio I know you focused largely on the impacts ecosystems in your presentation which was really interesting but you like many others on this call are involved in a wide range of different projects and I just was wondering if you wanted to share a bit more about the multi-sector process going on related to the NDCs and I was just talking about working across sectors and across organizations and I'm wondering sort of how you see that process playing out in Guatemala and what makes you optimistic about sort of these efforts thank you very much Katie I think it's a really great question and there is not a simple answer so the idea is that at least for the updating or the determining contributions for the commitment of Guatemala to the price agreements I see in the process that the idea is really to try to harmonize the commitments in all the sectors and at least for the adaptations the adaptation measures which is the the sector in which I'm more involved in I see that all the actors are trying to the look for these connections in the other sectors something that has never happened before sometimes even there were conflicts between different sectors and in this case what I see is more of a I don't know an idea for a collaborative discussion towards the same goal and within this discussion and I just wanted to briefly answer on this question that came up also in the question and answer we are trying to involve the Mesa Indigena de Cambio Climatico which is an indigenous association of the organizations of indigenous people also to overcome some of the language barriers that are still there in Guatemala and to involve the local indigenous people in the process not only just saying from both from the government perspective you have to do this but trying to get the idea of what do you think that it is important to do so this kind of new process is something that makes me optimistic and I'm guessing that sort of resonating a bit with Arlene and the work that's going on in the Lees related to the NDCs I thought I would ask give you a chance to respond to this first Arlene but also open this up to the floor we had a question from one of our attendees about what you all see as your number one opportunity to push nature-based approaches and what you see as a barrier to advancing nature-based approaches what are both those opportunities kind of the barrier that you see I'll give Arlene a chance first and then if anyone else wants to jump in I think one of the opportunities that we realize from these national processes for example as Fabio had mentioned we too have noticed that in the updating of NDCs and the targets and particularly in relation to adaptation that the various sectors have comfort to say that we have things that we can do or targets that we can set for example for agriculture energy and so that is one of the key opportunities that we see working on adaptation across sectors and well I guess barriers usually in terms of resources to implement these adaptation strategies we have funding that would allow us to perhaps do a pilot but I think while it's a constraint or a barrier it still can be flipped as an opportunity because then these small funding or seed funding can then be used to demonstrate the case and that it could be replicated in other parts of the country and perhaps the approach could then to be try to get private sector more involved in implementing these for example mangrove restoration one of the question was how do we get the tourism sector on board which is often one of the drivers of removal of mangroves so definitely I think while there are opportunities while there are threats and barriers they definitely can help us to capitalize on the opportunities well I actually want to hear more about people's response but I am looking at the time and sadly we are coming to an end so I am going to have to stop us here I'm also wishing I had a chance to ask Manishka my question so we'll just have to we'll have to follow that up for later that was the latest exciting science on the global scale that we can downscale to our particular region so we'll have to hear, we'll have to get some ideas from Manishka and our newsletter or something so with that I just want to thank all of you for sharing your time and your efforts and your energy and you know there's a huge urgency and need for the kind of work that you're all doing and we're really grateful for your leadership and I'm incredibly grateful to all of the attendees today and for your good questions I also want to remind everyone that this conversation series is continuing and each month or so is a very different and enriching topic but certainly topics that all have a lot in common so even if you're focused on the coast I would encourage you to join our next upcoming conversation on advances in land use planning in the Amazon and that's happening on May 25th and you can get more information on the Natural Capital Project website about that so thank you very much and let me just make sure I'm not forgetting anything Laurie and the other organizers are we okay to wrap up here? It was wonderful thank you everybody thank you okay take care at all have a good rest of your day bye