 So, our work isn't easy, collectively, but it's vital. And I know that recently there has been a lot of talk about the changing landscape and the rural landscape in particular, not just in Vermont, but throughout the country. And that many of our towns and villages are experiencing challenges, both environmental and social, that can feel a little bit more pronounced right now. VPR earlier this week, as I expect many of you have seen, released their rural life survey, where they asked 800 Vermonters questions like, how would you rate the quality of life in your community? How well do you think Vermont state elected officials understand challenges facing rural Vermonters? Are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future of your community? And to be frank, some of the results aren't very encouraging. Nearly half of those polled said they'd advise 18-year-olds to leave the state to build a successful life and career. And we're also struggling from the vantage, from at least my vantage here at ANR, with things like making investments in critical infrastructure. Roads, bridges, schools, water lines and sewers, all of which play important roles in ensuring thriving downtowns and village centers. And this work is further complicated by a changing climate, with more frequent and intense storms that are likely to be the new normal, testing-aged infrastructure that was not designed for these current conditions, even when it was new. These challenges, both environmental and social, require all of us to come to the table to find solutions, to invest in villages that young people want to live in, to create and sustain towns that have a sense of community cohesion rather than isolation, to understand and abide by environmental regulations that keep our drinking water safe and our favorite holes swimmable. There's no question that every Vermont community has its struggles, but there's also no denying that our villages, towns, forest fields and the people who live, work and play in this state are a unique and resilient and creative group, many of whom are in this room here today. In that same VPR story, there were also some more cheerful findings. Nearly 80% of Vermonters rate their quality of life in their community as good to excellent, and 66% of those surveyed are optimistic about the future of their town. These high percentages are no doubt in part because of the critical work you all do every day to support Vermonters from the overall quality of life in our towns and protecting and restoring Vermont's waters, woods and wildlife habitat. Today is all about continuing this work by identifying ways we can learn from one another, and our staff are here today to share information with you, to get to know you, and to hear firsthand and learn from you about what your towns are experiencing. The goal for these conversations is to increase our collective capacity to continue doing good work across the local, regional and state levels, because we know when we work together we've been able to accomplish great things for our communities. And I wanted to take a moment and just reflect on a few wonderful examples of things I've been able to actually view firsthand over the past year. We're reimagining what our downtowns can look like with exciting projects like the groundbreaking at Putnam Block in the heart of Bennington's downtown. This past August I was able to participate in a ribbon cutting of a $31 million redevelopment project, a partnership with the town, the Bendy Heap County Regional Commission, the state and private interests that will revitalize downtown Bennington with vibrant mixed use spaces, including office, residential, restaurant, retail and open space areas. ANR has also worked in partnership with sister agencies and local officials to improve wildlife travel corridors along and across Route 15 and Wolcott and Morrisville to increase connectivity for wildlife and decrease car accidents for the traveling public. We are working with ACCD, regional planning commissions and local officials to provide technical assistance and financial support in the development of community-scale wastewater projects in some of Vermont's village centers, including Wolcott and Burke. We know that investments in village wastewater systems provide an avenue for many of our communities to participate further in economic growth, and it's necessary to make these investments to reverse the decline in grand list values and population and to expand the state and local tax base. Just earlier this month I was able to tour the Creamery site in Richmond, a former brownfield. This is a site with a complicated industrial past, but really can serve as a cornerstone for larger economic revitalization in the Richmond village. And this first phase was celebrating the completion of the remediation of the site, as well as the first set of apartments being ready for opening. This project represents another incredible partnership between local, regional, and state and federal agencies committed to streamlining these sorts of projects and promoting collaboration and communication. We are teaming with local officials and RPCs through the municipal roads grant and aid program to make investments in our roads as part of the municipal roads general permit that both make them more resilient and less than the impacts of road-related runoff on water quality. And we've quite literally been working with the community to rebuild main streets together. The Winooski Main Street Revitalization Project, which includes streetscaping in the smallest, highest density city in northern New England, and a strong partnership with the city of Winooski and city manager Jesse Baker. Those are the sorts of things that sort of buoy my spirits and keep my heart full. And I want to acknowledge that those opportunities are real and we are thankful for them. But most of all, I want to thank you. I know that public service is both challenging and underappreciated, and I am grateful for all you do and look forward to our continued partnership. So thank you for taking time to be here today. And with that, it is my absolute pleasure to be able to introduce to all of you Dr. Leslie Ann Dupuis-Giraud, who is a professor of geography at the University of Vermont and also serves as Vermont state climatologist. She specializes in climate hazards and severe weather with a special focus on flooding and droughts. And as an applied climatologist, Dr. Dupuis-Giraud's research interests intersect a number of interdisciplinary fields, including hydroclimatic natural hazards, climate literacy, as well as the use of remote sensing and GIS and climate research. As the state climatologist, she engages directly with community groups, federal and state agencies and national climate organizations, facilitating and promoting dialogue among meteorology, climatology, emergency management, agriculture, forestry and GIS interests. Leslie Ann is also the lead author of a historical climate variability and impacts in North America Monograph, which is the first to deal with the use of documentary and other ancillary records for analyzing climate variability and change. She currently serves as the president-elect of the American Association of State Climatologists and was recently named a fellow of the American Meteorological Society. Dr. Dupuis-Giraud earned her BS in physical geography and development studies from the University of Toronto, her master's in climate and hydrology from McGill, and her PhD also from McGill in climatology and geographic information systems. And I'm thrilled that she is here this morning to talk to all of us about some of the impacts of climate change that we're likely to experience here in Vermont, how they may impact municipalities as well as a bigger picture. Please join me in welcoming Leslie Ann. Well, good morning, everybody. And thank you to Secretary Moore for the opportunity to come and chat a little bit about some of the work that took place with the National Climate Assessment. I'm gonna talk a little bit about the Northeast chapter that I was the lead author for, and then sort of segue into some of the things that we are expecting and will probably see and have been seeing in terms of how climate change is affecting here us in Vermont. Have you seen this visualization before? Some people have. Some people haven't. Okay, what is it actually showing you? Well, this comes from the NASA Science Visualization Studio, and what they've done is they've sort of got an average period which runs from 1950 to 1980, and they've taken the snapshot over time going back from 1880 all the way to 2018, and showing you how places have either warmed or cooled relative to that 30-year period. And so the places that are blue are places that have cooled, and the places that are orange are places that have warmed. As you're going through, you're seeing more and more warming versus any places that are cooling on here, and so I kind of like to start with that. Because the other thing that I always like to start with is the way in which we've sort of improved our sophistication of our understanding of how climate changes. And so climate change as a definition, as a term, is not a new one. What's new is our understanding of some of the actual linkages and processes and complexity with which it sort of plays out. And so if I were giving this talk 20, 30, 40, 50 years ago, it would probably have been more of a linear approach in terms of our understanding. So one aspect of that is adding additional greenhouse gases to the atmosphere, and then how that sort of changes the way in which the energy in the atmosphere plays out, and then we see the impacts of that. And now as we've gone through time and learned more about the interconnectedness of our land surface and our ecosystems, we see the way in which that sort of is more complex myriad of things like changes in fluxes, radiation, changes in rainfall patterns, and how all of those sort of come together to give us the impacts that we see across the landscape. So this is one of my favorite slides. It's from Puget Sound. And it helps to sort of encapsulate the ways in which we can look at climate change and work through it. And on the right, the left-hand side, you see all of the ways in which climate change as a process kind of occurs, whether it is the addition of greenhouse gases or there's our land use changes and so forth. And then in the middle, where you have those sort of salmon and reddish places, or places where you're looking at the impacts of climate change on the right-hand side or the strategies that we can employ, whether from an adaptive capacity perspective or from a mitigated capacity perspective. And so it sort of brings that together. And so one thing that I always ask, just to get a sense of, where are you in terms of, where does this resonate for you? Are you on the drivers? Stick your hand up if you are. Impacts, strategies. And that means there are only 10 people in the room. Because very few people put their hand up for any of this. Okay, the way in which it can either be an abrupt process and we can sort of see jumps through time or the way in which we can see trends, which are either an increasing value or a decreasing value. But the one that sort of hits us most at home is the last one on here. And I'm gonna try and do this and walk to one of these slides here. No, because I like to walk around but I hate being something out of podium. One of the things that sort of is important for us as human beings and as a society is this last one on here. Because it shows us the variability of the variation over time. You see how those squiggles are getting larger and larger drops, right? And adaptive within a particular range. And that's what those will function really well in. And when we get outside of those ranges, so when we have excessive equate, like you've seen, that's when we start getting into the challenge of how is this then a seven pound to say that it's essential for having things like increased conflict. So when we put all of this together, looking at and thinking about in the national climate assessment, it's a fourth national climate assessment. It's a regressionally mandated high impact document. This is the fourth one, this has been in place. This last one was the first time that we were actually able to meet that congressional mandate. So we're particularly excited about that for a number of different reasons that we won. So this is the national climate assessment. It came out for the first time in two different volumes. First volume was devoted to the increase in our understanding of the science climate changing. Second one was all about different types of impacts that could occur. So in the second volume, which is where we have all the different chapters across the US, the Hawaii and the Pacific Islands, the Caribbean, that's where we could actually sort of drill down and see how the image changes affecting different parts of the country. And so we're looking at that and looking to see how we can sort of understand what's taking place in the last four years or so. Now, one thing that's critically important is that all of these documents that you signed are informed policy, but not to drive or to say, you must do this, you must do that. So it's a lot of support, a lot of the other groundwork that we've actually been seeing across the board. Now, a couple of things that are important for us, in 2014 and 2018, when we had the third national climate assessment is, we've seen some improvements in a lot of the ways in which we can get the information out. And a lot of the things that are important, so one of them was something called the state summaries. And so each state has a four-page document that talks specifically about what climate change looks like in that state. And so what you're seeing on here on the right-hand side is a little snippet of the state climate summary from what talks about changing your temperature, changing the nighttime conditions, and so on. So if you're interested in sort of delving a little bit deeper, that's one thing that you can actually sort of take a look at. A couple of the things that are new above the fourth national climate assessment, or NCA4, like the abbreviated two, are some of the perspective because a lot of the change and a lot of the action happens locally. And so instead of relying on the local climate models or regional climate models, we wanted to get that down to a more local scale to actually see what we can do with the future of climate projection. So that was one piece of mail. Another piece that was really exciting was for the first time we actually had economic evaluation studies involved. So now we've put a dollar amount on some of the change and some of the impacts that you're seeing across the border. So in creating the data document, we wrote down the US into various regions. And each region was challenged or charged with trying to figure out what was unique to that region in terms of a changing climate, and then sort of speak to that. So when we think about the Northeast, we think about things like the fact that the everywhere we have, a lot of the major cities in our region, like New York, and Boston, and Philadelphia, and so what is that, that dichotomy, what is that tension between rural and urban, and how does that sort of play out for us? The other thing that we have, and that this is critically important for us, is the fact that we have an inland region, a coastal region, and the economies in both of those places are really different. And because this region has been settled for such a long time, but it's the first place that has been settled, and as Julie was mentioning before, a lot of our transportation issues are part of the fact that we have them in place for at least 200 years, right? And so that likely settlement sort of comes into play. And also critically important for us is the importance of our cultural heritage, because it sort of identifies us as folks who live in the Northeast. How do we sort of honor and treasure that, and also see how it affects us from our changing climate perspective? And then the last thing is, of course, we've got that sort of all the way from the mountains to the coastal regions, and that sets up particular challenges from our topographic perspective in looking at how various elements of our climate can affect us, as well as these two of us. One of the fun things about this particular report was that it is framed from our risk-based perspective. So instead of only looking at science, we were tasked with trying to think about what is at risk in our region? Who is at risk in our region? Which aspects of our economy are vulnerable? And then what are the potential tipping points that could sort of drive us into an undesirable state? And so those are some of the questions that we sort of spoke to and wrote about in putting together each of these. And this was not done in a vacuum of which across each region to actually sort of pull in all the great case studies and examples, things like Reggie, all the things that are being set in place across, let's say, the Northeast, for example, and how can we make sure that those are well-represented in terms of the things that are actually taking place? So we had a number of these different workshops and a number of these different calls at least two or three times and moments so this is information and feedback from everybody in the region to actually make sure that we report was better. So I gave one of these talks at the American Rhetological Society meeting in Phoenix in January and I literally read through all the discoveries from each region, their 10 regions, and I thought, we will go to reality in terms of a lot of the things that sort of thread through each of the 10 chapters that spoke to the different regions and you can see these listed up here. With the exception of our in-land state, we talked about the way of sea level, ocean perspective almost. We talked about the ways in which changing climate affects indigenous peoples, their livelihoods, their communities, their identity. We talked about the way in which added to the capacities being challenged very strongly by our changing climate, the impacts of infrastructure, the impacts of transportation, so forth. There are all things that each one of our regions actually sort of addressed in various chapters. So let me walk you through the five, what are called key messages that came out of our report. So thinking about all those things that are unique to us, there are five things that we sort of focus on. First one is the fact that the seasons are changing across the Northeast and with that are coming changes in terms of our rural economies, so the rural life equals our rural ecosystems. And that sets up a very interesting and important point because it has a recreation perspective, it has a tourism perspective, it also has a forestry perspective and other for the flora perspective. So that's the first key message. So it's called seasonality and it talks about us as a rural part of the community. And in looking at that, it tees out a lot of this from a sort of inland versus rural, inland versus coastal perspective and we can sort of pull out all of the places in which that is going to become critically important for us on the interior parts of our landscape and try to figure out what does this look like or what will this look like in the future from an economic perspective, from an agricultural perspective but in particular what this slide is showing you is changes in the growing season either currently or at two different times in the future. So on the left-hand side, all of the panels on the left-hand side are showing you the time when we have the last freeze in the springtime and on the right-hand panel we're seeing the time when you have first freeze in fall. So in between you have three seasons which is when you have the growing season. So the top panel where you see a lot of oranges and yellows is looking at representative concentrations in half-ways or what would happen if we did nothing, what would happen if we scale back on emissions and those sorts of things. So 4.5 is one of the lower scenarios and when we look at that, yellows mean anywhere between six to 10 days of a change in our growing season and the middle panel shows you the same information for R68.5. This is one of the higher end emission scenarios where things, either business as usual or going in the wrong direction. So what you're seeing here are getting into more of the oranges at rest. So anywhere between at least 18 days of a change in your growing season. All right, one of the other pieces in terms of this reality and a change in the seasons that we're observing is changes in your snowmelt, changing in timing that has, well, constrainable patterns. And so this is the work that Len Hodgkin's view as GSD and looking at the way in which pretty much across the board from the North Country perspective we're seeing snowmelt occurred at least 10 days early on, okay? So again, this is sort of playing into a lot of the observations that you probably are making with this as an agency but also in terms of your own personal observations. So the second key message stands for the physical landscape but this time it goes to the coastal and ocean pieces. And in this particular one, we're looking at the fact that a lot of the changes along the coast, a lot of the changes along the ocean right off shore are occurring faster in the Northeast than they are in other regions around the U.S. And so that sets up particular challenges for us from a public perspective, from a tourism perspective, from an economic life perspective, from a vision perspective, for example. And so we sort of tease through how that might actually play out. So Eric Allen is again in the U.S. creating this graphic from scratch to show the way in which sea level rise and coastal changes can actually play out across a region from a built perspective but also from a physical geography perspective or a marine island as being affected by sea level rise and then divide when we have storms like Sandy and Irene sort of making landfall in some of these spaces up here. So the third key message looks at the interconnectedness between the rural parts of our landscape and the rural parts of our landscape and the fact that they're co-dependent and cannot be separated from a cultural perspective, from an economic perspective and what are some of the specific challenges that we have in our urban areas and those include things like flooding issues that are slightly different from the flooding issues that we have in the North Country here because again, of the next seven, the title seven and all that plays out for us in things like use of flooding, game type flooding and so forth. And one of the things that we observed in terms of adaptation or response to some of these flood concerns was the subways in New York that got particularly flooded during Sandy and that could be done sort of being against that. So this is one of the new ways in which a lot of the infrastructure has been rebuilt so that the breaks over at the entry to the subways are now elevated in a tent or tent to prevent a lot of the flood waters. Getting into the subways as quickly as they did and then shutting down one of the most important and highly trafficked subways and stuff to the border. So again, bringing in some of the case studies bringing in some of the local examples of impact and also what could be done to mitigate against some of the impacts of climate change. The fourth key message was a little bit different because the fourth key message actually talked about us as people and the human health implications of a change in climate all the way from tick-sneed disease, more to more diseases, air pollution events, for example, but it also looked at the ways in which some populations are going to be a little bit more vulnerable because they're outside and we're all fun. And we can think of the migrant workers who work in different places across the Northeast. You can think about different crews who are more exposed to different types of conditions and what that means for us in terms of the press, in terms of human health. So these are some studies that we've done in Rhode Island in looking at hospital room visits, which is one of the ways in which you can actually sort of quantify how things are changing in the human health perspective and looking to see how the changes in your temperatures are actually affecting some of those that we're looking at here. Now, the last key message was all about adaptation. And part of that was because there's a lot of awesome work that we are doing across the Northeast and so this is one way to sort of highlight some of those success stories as a way of sort of being an example of other regions across the state, sorry, other regions across the country, but also because we have gone through the entire process and found maybe we need a lighter note that actually allows us to be hopeful because there are so many success stories in case studies have even bring to bear. So that last key message actually sort of takes us through. So all of this wouldn't have been possible without all of the folks that you see on this particular slide. These are the people who did a lot of the head to the right in that we mostly missed. If I didn't end with this slide, as well as a lot of the folks who provided technical assistance, a lot of the maps that you saw in the report itself, a lot of the case studies, we're also ensuring to provide folks that you see on this slide here. So if you haven't had a chance to take a look at the report, it's not on this particular website. If you'd like to go back and sort of go back through and see a little bit of this. All right, so here's a basic question. What does the letter change look like in the mud if I were to ask this? Maybe I should ask it because we've been very, very quiet apart from your question. What do you think the letter change looks like in the mud? Well, I would have loved sea fools, okay, and in the back. Whoa, that's a good idea. Oh, say that again. More bridges taken out and more roads undermined by big storms. Okay, so more bridges taken out and more roads undermined by big storms. Let's fly. Let's fly, let's go back, okay. Line of disease. Line of disease. That's what you were going to say, line of disease, okay. This side of the room. Ten storms. Dwarat has storms, okay, and has a lakeshark thing, sedimentation. Got you the first time this time. All right, how about this side? Yeah, just more extremes that relate to the, more heat, more cold, more sugary grounds in January. Cry. One of them is, of course, lakeshark thing, a change on lakeshark thing, and I like to think of lakeshark thing as an integrator because it has all of this coming from the east side, from the west side, from the New York side, and then changes that are occurring on the landscape are going to end up being affected in the lake itself. And so, one thing that we have a very long record on is the time when the lakeshark is out completely and how less frequent that is, if at all, and the extent to which it's occurring and the date at which it's occurring. So all of a sudden, as you said, in terms of timing of dates and extremes, all kind of get played into here. The other way that we can see this is something that's called a backward spring. And a backward spring means that the temperatures are going in the opposite direction in spring time. So in other words, instead of warming up, it's getting cooler, and you might see things like snow falling in April and May, have you seen that? So one of the things that we're seeing in terms of how Vermont changes in climate include, you know, those nighttime temperatures? So let's say they do know, I'm talking about how low the temperature gets at night. Those are actually not getting as low as they used to be. But what's the problem with that? The problem with that is that a lot of things like overwintering, the things like ticks are not occurring as much, right? So this low time temperature at night, if you look at it across different seasons, you'll see different patterns. So you've got winter on the upper left here, summer here, spring here, and fall here. And the way in which that changes over the 100 plus years looks at how that middle and temperature getting warmer is important for us across different parts of the state. The other thing that you can look at is the precipitation. And again, winter on the left, fall by summer, spring and fall. And the way in which that changes your precipitation over and over time from seasonal perspectives is important. When I show this, I ask, does it matter to you which season is getting wetter? And the answer is invariably yes, because especially from an agricultural perspective, knowing if it's the fall that's getting wetter will affect things like the choices of incisions that are made in terms of planting or harvesting and so forth. Knowing the seasonality of things like these changes from precipitation is important. So if I had to ask, and I won't, what are the sectors of the most vulnerable susceptible to a changing climate? One that you will probably say is agriculture. I know I said it wasn't an ask, but I didn't. Agriculture, what else? See industry, what else? Tourism, okay? Forestry. Forestry? Okay, so let's work with that. Let's talk about human health for a second. And in human health, because of where we are, because we're inland, because we're north, we are activated in different conditions than our relatives or our colleagues who live further south or coastal places. And so one of the things that we observe is a change in terms of the threshold at which we need to actually start up. So think about where do we want quite for changes in temperature? So we now have a new value of 87 degrees that when it hits 87 degrees in the summertime, the national level services for one part of the health will actually put up a warning because we don't have to wait until we get to 90 degrees for heat extremes because we're not acclimated to heat extremes that are that high. And so at 87 degrees we actually see more hospital visits. So that's one thing that's a change, okay? So make sure that you are included to that 87 degree when you hear some of those warnings going on. The other thing that we can look at in terms of human health, our live disease, as we talked about, the fact that we can look at the way in which, like I said, over winter it takes us a lot of hurry at the same rate as before. Ozone conditions and the way in which our topography sets up just the right type of landscape for having stagnation events. And then our folks move it into our region because it's a little bit more desirable. So looking at that point, the refugees is another piece that we can look at with human health. So here is the little chart that one service in the Department of Health looked at to sort of come up with that brand new 87 degree cutoff. And so you can see that the variations across the state are really well. The Northeast Kingdom, which is higher in elevation, Koldar, fewer of those extreme events in terms of heat waves. The Southeast part of the state, actually it looks smaller in New Hampshire than the rest of the state. And then the other belt in Sheldon Valley, which is the borders part of the region. So one of those days is gonna get 87 degrees more frequently. Second thing that we can look at is looking at that vegetation. When I say vegetation, talking about everything that includes forestry, agriculture, anything that is growing essentially. So what can we look at here? Well, one way that we can see the climate is changing and occurring is that the climate party maps have changed. And those of you who use this select the varieties if you go in your garden or plant, know that this has occurred and you know that the zones have shifted a little bit. So on the left-hand side is the older map and on the right-hand side is the Arbade Foundation map. And I absolutely love this one because it's at GIS based maps so you can actually zoom in and out and get down to the individual parts of the landscape that you're interested with a lot more accuracy and precision than you would have been able to do on the left-hand side of the paper map. So we can look and see how that's already factoring into some of these changes. If we think about agriculture, we think about different types of species of the plant and how does changing temperature, precipitation, drought at different times of the year affect us? And what does that mean in terms of our economic life and what does that mean in terms of individual tolerabilities or larger-scale tolerabilities? And when I was giving a version of this talk back, in fact, the wake of it in March, just before that, like two days before, on the front page of the free press, there was this story about a farmer who had a go-fund-me site because of the challenges that he had experienced over the course of the last winter and his inability to actually procure feed. And so, again, more of an economic impact in looking at how changes might have affect us from an economic perspective. Looking at it from a local forestry perspective, what we're going to see across in here, again, from more of a seasonal dynamic, how some of these things are affecting us. So, there's a species that has now been observed for the first time, is it the bollia delgea? Okay, so the bollia delgea, I think this is the second year that it's been observed here in the state with is an invasive pest and not made its way to the state so far. And so, it's one of those things that is being very carefully tracked because it's one of these pieces that is branded for us as now is going to be an additional threat that we're going to be working through. Other threats that we can look at as our climate change is include things like, what are our drugs occurring? What does that mean for things like bollias? What does that mean for our agricultural patterns and so forth? And in looking at some of these species that are critically important to us as a state, sugar labels, one of the economic savings of our livelihood from a bollia delgea perspective, and undergale has a site where forest parks in Iraq have been monitoring the changes in your growing season for the last few decades and looking to see how that length of your growing season is increasing and what does that mean for the sugar label and so forth. So, the other part of that calling is not just the length of the growing season but when does what actually occur because it occurs too soon and then we run into a frost. We have that additional challenge sort of taking into account. And then the last thing I'm here is ground level ozone. Again, so ground level ozone is ozone that's produced at the levels that we walk around in by driving around and other processes, forest fires are a number one. It's important from a human health perspective because it's a very certain for us as human beings but it is also important from a vegetation perspective because it also is a very tough for plants. So, if warming conditions are conducive to ozone and the ground levels, this is going to be of importance to us from those two particular sectors. And then keeping in that sort of sugar vapor ozone and white popular tourism perspective where we can look at the ways in which again, things like drought conditions, things like when we have more snowfall as snowfall is reliant on snowfall, how is that going to affect us from a cold season perspective, from a tourism perspective? And some of those changes in nature of claim are also going to be critically important from a recreational also tourism perspective. And so, a couple of shots from the St. Albans Bay area. You go out to the place where you can get a nice little picnic, pull off, and sit on a hotel bed and you probably go until the picnic van. So, we were there a couple of years back and you can actually see the effect of the drought that had been in place pretty much for that entire year because the water levels should be where this downpour center is. So, the lake was at least 50 or 20 feet up because of how much the lake level had dropped over the entire summer. So, for our conditions, the lake level conditions, where the official Lake Champlain is also going to be critically important for us. Now, the flip side of that, and this is these extremes again, you can go from grounds to clubs, sometimes all in the same year, this is from earlier this year where we had flooding along Lake Champlain. So, this is the King Street Ferry dock and I went to pictures in the same place that I took pictures back in 2011 because things have started to wrap up and look like they were going to be at our repeal of 2011 but fortunately we didn't have that because the entire system wasn't as wet as it was in 2011. So, we fortunately dodged a bullet here but that doesn't mean that the game factor flooding along the lake is still critically important from an economic perspective. And then, when we think about infrastructure, we think about, you know, as Julie's mentioning, the way in which a lot of excessive facilitation affects our roads and so forth. A couple of the pieces that we bring in from an infrastructure perspective include things like our critical infrastructure, which is where your business management comes in, include things like our electrical equipment, include things like our water supplies and the way in which those might be affected. So, looking at the way in which climate change plays out from an extreme perspective, from an infrastructure perspective and how that affects us individually, how that affects us collectively, is one of those pieces that we need to sort of factor in plan for and work through as we continue to move on through in here. For one, has specific challenges, which include the fact that our topography is a very challenging part of who we are and I'm going to have to put the mic down for this. So, do you ever realize how a lot of our roads and rivers are in the same place? And so, that means that in a lot of cases, the roads and the rivers are juxtaposed. They're sometimes like two feet apart because there's no other space to put it. And so, when you think about what that means from a both a real estate perspective, it came to bear in the worst scenario possible that we had Irene in the case of a water burry because here's Irene, this is a misty river and we had that sort of isolation occurring when it got the misty sort of jump to the max, right? So, how does this sort of justice position play out for us? And when we think about the plan for our downtown areas, how are we going to include some of the possibilities that could be in place? So, this map was created by Jonathan Groff in V-Trads and what it shows is an overlay of 1927 flood, which was the flood of red for Wilson State before Irene. So, that's not the sort of brown parchment looking part of the diagram here, all the dark lines of here, 1927 flood lines. And what Jonathan did was to superimpose the places that flooded in Irene and so those are these white colours, the greens, the yellows, the reds, all indicating the extent of damage along various roads and they match like this, okay? Because the roads haven't changed in the last hundred years and so what that means is we actually have a lineup on where all the abilities are because we've seen where a lot of these flood events have occurred in the past. So, we know where the kind of targets and resources because there's been repeat flooding in a lot of those places. So, we have a little blow-up of the middle part of that map, Jonathan, created. Again, just to show that, that's sort of a very nice one to one relationship between the 2011 flooding to the current regions and then the darker lines showing 1927 flood lines. So, a lot of the things we sort of extreme that are critically important for us as a state, including things like tropical cycles, be it hurricanes or when tropical stormed themselves. And the ones that usually can turn those down and the ones that either move directly up the coast and then into the Shankling Valley like we're on Island Express did across the pier. All they give us a lot of glancing blow like a hurricane floided or following a very, very similar track as Floyd was Irene. Now, the difference between what they have on precipitation and flooding that occurs in each of these types of events is due to the fact of what the landscape looked like just before the hurricane moved through. So, Irene, our energy supply produced several amounts of flood. It was preceded by a couple weeks of heavy rain. It was preceded by a few months of rain or we had that springtime flooding occurring. Floyd actually dumped 14 inches of rain on the top of Mansfield but there was not a stitch of flooding. You know why? We were coming out about 18 months drought. And so, knowing what your landscape, it looks like a hand time when we have some of these extreme events kind of moving through is not going to help us to understand whether we need to prepare for our flood or if it's going to be our business as usual. So, just really, really quickly, focusing on the hurricane because they are one of those whose problem most of the quickly moving systems that do affect us, flooding-wise, we can take a look at why this is going to be the case and why the hurricane sort of exacerbate a lot of the climate change signals that we're seeing and part of that has to do with they're occurring in an atmosphere that has more moisture and they're occurring in sea level conditions that are now higher than they have been in the past. They're occurring over more oceans and so the storms themselves are going to be larger because they have more precipitation in them and so when they make landfall they're going to pose particular problems. The other thing is, did you know that the hurricanes are actually moving slower? Okay, hurricanes are slowing down which is problematic because a hurricane that slows down has a chance to actually not form precipitation in place that it will move really quickly. Dorian was a great example, right? Dorian sat, unfortunately, over a harmless, at least survey and produced a tremendous amount of damage, tremendous amount of evacuation that's occurred because of that solid. So looking at how our hurricanes are changing is also important to us. So when we look at this and we try to figure out can we do something, can we work with these changes? One of the answers is yes. And the NOAA Atlas 14 is a product that came up about five, six years ago and they work. Again, the beach land actually works with this because when you have to answer the question, are my culverts being sized correctly? You want to be using most up-to-date information to do that size. And so the Atlas 14 allows you to pinpoint what the extreme values are at different parts of the US at a level that can be worked with. And so when we look at this, the yellow lines were the lines from the TP40, the technical report from the 1940s, which is what we had been working with for all of this time. And you see how few lines there are? There are like five lines up there. And that means you have to interpolate between each of them to figure out what values should I be using for my awkward side, for example. So now that you have a geospatial way of doing your extreme precipitation, that's gonna improve the types of answers that we get before we put them on the landscape itself. So Atlas 14 allows us to do that. Okay, so one of the things we're seeing is as all of these different types of events, whether they're floods, droughts, different types of catastrophes are increasing, the one that always surprises people is mineralogical events, so these green bars here, those are the ones that are increasing in most, okay? Those are the ones that are at the largest in terms of the types of events that there are. So even though flooding is very visible, it's not the type of event that is decreasing in most because it falls on the hydrological types of events here. So knowing what it is you're dealing with is part of the challenge in making the choices and decisions that need to be in place. And so one of the ways I see this is putting a dollar amount on it. So if you ever Google really good dollar disasters, what you will see are all the disasters we're going to be back to on 1980 that produce at least a billion dollars worth of that, which I think is sort of a horrendous precipitation each year so you can actually see that. So the one that causes the most billion dollar disaster is not soft like flooding, it's still things like severe storms, okay? And so where in fact, again, this is like, this is 2019, we're in fact again having severe storms be one of the biggest countries that's a billion dollar disasters across the region. So just a couple examples of what those might require, it could be ice storms, they could be tornadoes, they could be hurricanes, but they vary by region and they vary by year. So 2017 on the left, 2018 on the right. So all of this, and I've thrown along with you, but it seems like it's by the kitchen's sake and the reason behind that is because there's so many moving pieces, so many moving elements, so many moving things kind of keeping in mind to help us understand what we need to look at from a climate change perspective. So pretty much the only way that we're gonna do this is to have a system-based approach with making sure that we're factoring all of us for the human system and the physical system in place. The other thing that we need to do is to make sure that we are looking at things from multiple, if I mentioned multiple scales, open space and time. And as we do that, the best way to make sure that we're not missing anything is to do a multi-hazard perspective because that way you're gonna get all of the different types of elements, whether they're hydrologic or meteorologic and so forth, that are gonna be affecting us at different parts of our landscape. And as we do that, I'm thinking about the fact that it's not just one type of public ability, not one population who's vulnerable, but there are many and multiple, they're co-types of public abilities and they're interconnected in here. And so just to bring it back to where I am, the space of physically standing in here, a lot of one of the things that you can sort of continue to move forward and continue to turn a lot of leadership on, include a lot of things that we are having in place or planning to do zoning and other ways that we can reimagine a lot of flood things, so plan, reimagine the way in which we can do our resilience. So, thank you for your time. Thank you for your attention. And if you have any questions or would like any slides, please contact information from us here. So, we have time for maybe two or three questions. Would anyone like to ask one? I've got a question. One of the things that I think maybe was left out in your residential experience, the mental health impacts of climate change and disasters, and could you speak a little bit about that because I think a lot more has been learned, especially the impacts from the Orlean's flooding, the Orlean's flooding. Katrina, yes, could you speak to the mental health impacts? So, everyone's post-traumatic stress disorder that psychologists have identified with the survival of a lot of events that are either natural physical disaster events or changes in economic environments, changes in life events. And so, I think to the extent that we can use a lot of the work and the understanding and the practice and strategies, the empathy that comes out of something like the knowledge of PTSD to help us with the ways in which we interact and help to support people who are going through vapor war, whether it's living through a particular flood event or something like that, we have somewhere to start as well, try to save. And that is this one piece that I know for sure has been deployed. As far as resources are concerned, they lost their home. All of them couldn't sleep at any time at night, and that's where it began. Thank you, Leslie.