 Good afternoon, everyone. Thank you for joining us today for this very special briefing to review our just released report, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities. I am Dan Berset, the Executive Director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Welcome once again. We have a lot to cover over the next 90 minutes, so I will keep my part short. But because so many of you are watching today are new to EESI, let me say a few words about what we do. EESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental energy and climate change policies to policy makers. Over the decades, we have covered just about every topic you can imagine, from agriculture, business, buildings and conservation, to aviation, biomass, and especially recently, coastal resilience. And more recently, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. We go about our work in lots of ways, including briefings like this. We also publish a bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. And whether for policy makers or the public, we do our best to provide informative, objective, non-partisan coverage of climate change topics and written materials and on social media. And the best way to keep track of it all is to visit us online at www.esi.org and sign up for climate change solutions or follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Today, we will focus on a first ever nexus of two things we do best, holding sessions like this to share information with policy makers and writing reports. The report we will cover today is the culmination of a 16 part briefing series that kicked off in June 2019 with a look at nature-based resilience for Gulf Coast communities. Then we moved through the coastal, yeah, there we go. Here we moved through the coastal regions of the United States, New England, the Northeast, Louisiana, the West Coast, the Great Lakes, the Southeast, and Hawaii. In April, as we figured out how to make the most of pandemic-required online briefings, we held a week-long mini-series to explore five climate adaptation data topics. And then we went back at it with Alaska and our last briefings on the topic, a three-part series about Puerto Rico and the US Virgin Islands. And specifically how communities can be more resilient while also recovering from devastating hurricanes and severe weather. Along the way, we met a lot of really wonderful people. Over the course of these 16 briefings, 42 coastal resilience experts, practitioners, and community leaders brought their stories, experience, and expertise to our briefing audiences. Pretty early in the series, it became obvious that we had something really special going on and that we needed to get creative and figure out how to get this information as well as all the challenges and success stories of the regions and communities on the literal front lines of climate change to the widest possible audience. Sure, as always, we archive our briefings online and we post-written summaries. But to me, the idea that House and Senate staff would someday be walking around after our briefing series had ended and not realize that these briefings were available and not have easy access to all of this information. It was just too much for me to take. And so we decided to write a report. Now, I accept that when someone says they're decided to write a report, that sounds really boring. But this is not just any way, this is EESI, and this is not just any report. It is a resilient future for coastal communities report with all the insights, findings, and recommendations from a 16-part briefing series. So here we are. We released a report, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities on Monday and it's designed with our policymaker audience in mind. We start with six guiding principles that inform the rest of the report. Policies and programs must be designed for the climate of the future rather than the climate of the present or the past. Climate justice and equity must be fully embedded into new policies and programs as well as ongoing efforts. The federal government should take a leadership role in connecting science with practice. The federal government should also take a leadership role to ensure that intra and interagency coordination helps states, local governments, and tribes access resources. Federal investments in coastal communities must be leveraged to create local jobs and help develop a workforce trained in adaptation and resilience. And climate adaptation and resilience work should complement and contribute as much as it can to a decarbonized clean energy economy. Next in the report, we offer 30 specific policy recommendations for the federal government, organized across six thematic chapters. The first is community at the forefront and land use and development, cultural heritage, climate adaptation and resilience data, disaster preparedness, and financing adaptation and resilience. Each recommendation is brought to life with specific examples currently being implemented by coastal communities. We also describe the federal policy levers most applicable to each recommendation and identify key committees with relevant jurisdiction. And then we sort the recommendations by category, capacity building, nature-based solutions, et cetera, and policy lever, appropriations, technical assistance, et cetera, and two charts to help orient our readers and help them make the most of what is of specific interest to them. And so here we are. And rather than listening to me talk about the recommendations and examples of solutions in practice, we invited four of our original panelists to make up an all-star briefing lineup for us. We are so lucky to have Rob, Liz, Kate, and Anu back with us today. And I am just so eager for the discussion. I really can't wait. And our first panelists, I have the pleasure to introduce Rob Kroll. Rob is a policy analyst in the Division of Intergovernmental Affairs at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission in Wisconsin. His duties include coordination of the climate change program and providing policy analysis and operational experience to the enforcement division. The Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission's climate change program is focused on integrating traditional ecological and experiential knowledge with scientific research and natural resources climate adaptation. Previously, Rob served for 18 years as a waterways conservation officer with the Pennsylvania Fish and Boat Commission, specializing in natural resource criminal investigation. Rob has a master's in environmental law and policy from Vermont Law School, and he did his undergraduate work in environmental studies at Northland College. Rob, welcome to our briefing today. I really can't wait to... I've already seen you present before, and I know what's in store. Can't wait. Thanks so much. I'll let you take it away. We're going to be about to see Rob and Dejna Kaz going into democene, Philadelphia, and Dungeba, Anishinaabe Aki, and Glyphwick Indonoki. Good afternoon, everyone. My name is Rob Kroll. I'm the Climate Change Program coordinator at the Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission. If you speak Ojibwe Mohan, you already know that I am not a tribal member. Here at Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, one of our, part of our mission is to infuse Anishinaabe Ojibwe culture into everything that we do, and there really is nothing more foundational to culture than language. So we are encouraged to learn and use Ojibwe Mohan. What I said was, hello, my fellow humans. My name is Rob. I'm originally from Philadelphia. I don't have a clan. My home is the lands of the Anishinaabe, and I work for Glyphwick. And I have to apologize. My screen is completely frozen. So I can't see slides at this point or anything. So I guess what I'll do is hopefully just start with my first slide and work all the way through, and maybe my screen will come back. So Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission is an inter-tribal natural resources agency. We work for 11 Ojibwe tribes in the Great Lakes area. All of our tribes signed treaties with the United States government in the mid 1800s. In those treaties, they ceded, sold, were forced to sell their lands to the United States. In all of those treaties, they retained their existing rights to hunt, fish, and gather on the lands that they ceded to the United States. Fast forward a few years, and the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota were created. The states took over through the equal footing doctrine, the ability to regulate hunting and fishing. And those rights that the tribal members retained over the years were lost, essentially, until about the mid 20th century, 1970s, 1980s, when tribal people, through activism and through the court system, were able to reaffirm their rights. Our job is to help them implement and use their rights throughout the territories that they ceded to the United States, which are now part of the states of Michigan, Minnesota, and Wisconsin. You can see on the map where we work. The red areas are the reservations that we serve. Tribal members practice their rights on public lands throughout this area and also on Lake Superior. They do commercial fishing, subsistence hunting and fishing, gathering of medicines and plants, perform ceremonies and songs, and access cultural sites in all of these areas. Obviously, each band is a sovereign nation, which means that on reservation, they each have their own natural resources department to work with tribal members in the same way state or federal natural resources agencies do. Off-reservation, they retain that sovereignty, that government-to-government relationship with the states and the federal government. And it's our job to assist them with implementing their rights and assist them with implementing their sovereignty in those relationships. Next slide. So the first recommendation that I wanna talk about is, and unfortunately, this screen is frozen again, but it's co-production of climate adaptation and resilience data. So at Glyphwick, we were lucky because we could access the Bureau of Indian Affairs funding to increase our capacity and hire people to create a climate change program. Many tribes aren't able to do that. They don't have the capacity or the funding. Their natural resources departments occasionally are one or two people and they're stretched very thin and very underfunded. But what tribes do have is a wealth of place-based knowledge about the natural resources and natural processes where they live. And this really extends to tribes that were forcibly relocated unlike the Anishinaabe tribes, the Ojibwe tribes, for whom I work, who are in their homelands, tribes that have been relocated. You know, they've lost access to their traditional lands, but they had no choice but to quickly learn about the new places in which they live. So they carry knowledge, both of their ancestral lands and also the new places where they live. Next slide. The other thing I'll be talking about is land use and development. Again, I'm having trouble seeing the screen here, but we're talking particularly about tribal sovereignty and also recommendation 1.1 community outreach falls into here as well. So federal agencies and states to a certain extent are required to consult on a government to government basis with tribes for projects. In this case, we're talking about adaptation and resilience projects that would affect tribal members. But it really kind of goes beyond that. We need to think about not just that government-to-government relationship with tribal governments that aren't necessarily representative of the culture. The current tribal governments were mandated by the federal government and tribes had to adopt constitutions that were representative of federal constitution. And in many cases, this is really not culturally the way that tribal people, their system evolved over thousands of years. So tribal sovereignty is also a big piece of that, is consulting with the communities to make sure that projects and programs are designed with the community and specifically address that community need. So it's about respect and about creating relationships and learning from the community, how to interact with them in ways that work with their culture and values and their perspectives. Next slide please. So at Glyphwick, our climate change program, as I said, we are a natural resources agency. So what we are always thinking about is how does climate change affect the tribes for whom we work? And by extension, tribes across the United States and indigenous people throughout the world. So we know that our tribes depend on natural resources for subsistence and for the modest living that's guaranteed to them in treaty, for medicines, for ceremony. And we know that in many cases, those natural resources due to climate change are going to decrease. Species ranges are gonna shift, they're gonna move out of the areas in which they're currently found. If we think about Lake Superior, that's fish species that are commonly commercial fish by tribal fishermen. And that's also the areas that they can use to access the lake. So infrastructure. Next slide please. Hopefully it changed. So in 2018, Glifwick published version one of our climate change vulnerability assessment. And we were looking at specifically species that were selected for us by tribal members throughout our 11 communities that were culturally important for all the reasons that I mentioned. And the goal of this vulnerability assessment was to use scientific knowledge, so climate projections and species sensitivity, exposure and adaptive capacity, along with traditional ecological knowledge from interviews, contemporary narratives, historical narratives, traditional stories, songs, and combine those into a single document that would look at the vulnerability of culturally important species to climate change in the Great Lakes region. And here you see some of our results. And all of the beings on this list are important. The Ojibwe, like many tribal cultures, don't restrict things, they don't say one being is more important than another. All beings are important. There is a belief that humans, when they were first created, made treaties with all of the rest of creation. And in return for those other beings providing us with food and places to live and tools, we humans were to care for them and make sure that they were taken care of as well. So all of those beings are important. But many of these beings on this list are species that are subsistence foods or major culturally important to the point where they're indicative of the culture in this area. In the Northwest, we talk about salmon tribes, the Great Lakes tribes, the Anishinaabe and the Minamani are wild rice tribes, Minuman. And Minuman is the most vulnerable being on our vulnerability assessment. It's vulnerable to climate change in any way a plant can be. And it is also central to the Anishinaabe migration story. Hundreds or thousands of years ago, people moved from the East Coast following prophecy to the place where food grows on the water and Minuman or wild rice is that food. The loss of that being quite frankly, to a lot of people is an existential threat. When we think about the way we did this vulnerability assessment using both knowledge systems, this concept can be applied to other issues that are important in tribal communities thinking about things like community health or infrastructure as well. Next slide please. So now that we have a good concept of what's vulnerable and why, the next thing we looked at was how do we address the need to work with tribes in a culturally appropriate way using their values and their language and their history, but also how can non-tribal entities, federal and state agencies, universities, NGOs interact with tribes in a way that's culturally appropriate. So this plays into tribal sovereignty and that government to government relationship that I was talking about, but it also plays into the history of government and NGOs and academia coming into tribal communities and further marginalizing that community by the whole we know best attitude instead of creating those relationships and working with people who had been there and had that experience for since time immemorial. So if you look, you see a list of partners down on kind of the bottom of the screen there. That's Great Lakes Indian Fish and Wildlife Commission, 1854 Treaty Authority, which is one of our fellow inter-tribal agencies that work with tribes in upper Minnesota. Inter-tribal Council of Michigan, super important to this effort were the US Forest Service and the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science. Debugging J-Dig and Shanaab-e-Asiatwad, our Tribal Climate Adaptation Menu, is based on work by the Northern Institute of Applied Climate Science. We use essentially their workbook process and also their workshop procedures when we're assisting folks to do adaptation planning in their communities. Next slide. So the first three strategies in the menu deal with cultural practices and community engagement. It also contains a guiding principles document for working with tribes in a culturally appropriate and culturally sensitive way. The menu is based on Ojibwe and Menominee culture and values, but it's designed to be adapted throughout the country with other tribes being able to use their culture and their history and their language to do climate adaptation as well. So the goal really is to encourage people to reach out and ask tribes, what is the best way for us to work with you? The rest of the menu is a comprehensive list of adaptation options for natural resources that's infused with tribal perspective and culture. And I really just want to reiterate that the goal from the outset was to create a tool that could be adapted by tribal communities throughout the country to include their culture, language and history and perspective when they are doing climate adaptation but also when they are working with partner agencies such as states and federal governments. With that I'll close. I am having difficulty, technical difficulties here, but I'd just like to say Mugwetch, Niawia, thank you for listening to me. Well, thank you for speaking with us Rob. And I can confirm it all looked good to those on the stream. So any issues didn't seem to find its way out of our little online group. Rave reviews on the ESI Slack channel. So you're looking good and sounding great. So thank you so much. And yeah, I remember that briefing, I remember the Great Lakes briefing, I remember thinking about these issues so differently after that briefing than I did before the briefing. And I think we really appreciate everything that you were able to contribute to us, to help us approach these issues in a way that's responsible and sensitive and with the goal of making some progress for coastal resilience in these communities, the ones that you work with. So thank you so much Rob for being with us today. Our next panelist is coming to us from a place that is right now feeling some tragedy right now, coastal Louisiana. It is my, she's done everything she can to be with us today and we really appreciate it. And I'm talking about Liz Russell. Liz directs the investments and activities of the climate justice portfolio at the foundation for Louisiana, which works to build people power, advance just policies, cultivate new narratives in support of economic opportunity, environmental justice, and equitable development statewide. Existing in the tension between the world as it is and the world as it could be, Liz has the capacity to both dream and implement and as a New Orleans native with deep roots in Louisiana Liz is no stranger to disaster. She interrogates the ways that land use, planning and development solidify inequities, allowing tremendous variations in investment, social services, real estate valuation, criminalization and access. She's committed to rooting out injustice and bringing about a more healthy, just and vibrant Louisiana. Liz, hope you're doing well in the midst of the aftermath of Hurricane Zeta. Really happy to have you today and really can't wait to listen to your presentation. Thanks so much. Thanks, Dan. Thanks so much for having me. Good afternoon, everyone. I am Liz Williams-Russell, I'm the climate justice program director at the foundation for Louisiana. Foundation for Louisiana was actually founded in the days immediately following Hurricane Katrina and meant to be a philanthropic intermediary and a community foundation that could pull resources in from all over and get them out on the ground to the communities that were being left out of the traditional philanthropic response or our institutional responses to disaster. We have continued to build that work over the last 15 years and it's especially relevant now and always in Louisiana with just the regularity of ongoing disasters, both acute and chronic. As many of you know, even just this year we've experienced five landfalls of tropical events in Louisiana, the last one as recently as last night, Hurricane Zeta and much of our city is still without power. So I appreciate your grace as I tried to set up camp somewhere where I could get access to power and wifi, but really glad to be here today and to be able to speak about our work. So next slide please. So starting with the history of Louisiana and really examining how we think about climate justice, most of Southern Louisiana was built by the Mississippi River over thousands of years. The Mississippi River's goal is to always find the shortest, fastest route to the Gulf of Mexico and Louisiana drains everything from the Rocky Mountains to Appalachia through that Mississippi Delta system. Indigenous peoples, including the Atacapa, the Homa, the Chirimacha, the Biloxi, the Choctaw, many of our indigenous tribes had no problems navigating the dynamic systems of the Mississippi Delta over centuries. And it's only been since European colonization that the management and mismanagement of the Mississippi River has meant control and loss of land through coastal erosion, subsidence, oil and gas exploration, maritime channelization, et cetera. That means that when hurricanes hit us, the wetland buffer that used to protect our communities has degraded over the last century. And the many hurricanes we've had since 2005, the many storms and disasters, Katrina, Rita, Gustav, Ike, Isaac, plus the BP drilling disaster, two heavy rainfall events in 2016, and then the five storms this year mean that every single parish in the state of Louisiana has been under at least one federal flood declaration in the last 15 years. Many of those parishes or counties in other states have been under many more federal disaster declarations. We wanna be explicit in our work at the foundation for Louisiana that we've recognized that Black communities, Indigenous communities, low income communities, communities of color are more likely to live and work near toxic facilities like petrochemical companies which emit pollutants that shorten and impact the quality of life for our communities. Black and Indigenous and low income and communities of color are more likely to reside in areas where there's more flooding. They're more likely to receive inadequate infrastructure to mitigate risks and prevent disasters. And they also experience delayed and insufficient response and recovery investments during and after other emergencies. So we have to be very explicit that climate justice in Louisiana requires not only an account of the land's history and the systems of oppression, but also the power to dismantle harmful influence of institutional racism and destructive practices that are embedded in our policies and offer policies, practices, recommendations, resources that affirm our collective humanity and that build together a more equitable and just future for Louisiana. We also have to have the influence to promote policies that are beneficial to our people. Next slide please. So as was already mentioned, our vision to really create a more healthy, vibrant and equitable future for Louisiana includes building people power, advancing just policies and cultivating new narratives. And that means that everyday people have power and are civically engaged to understand their own experiences as connected to larger datasets and are ready to take action to support change in their communities. It means that our community-based organizations are well-resourced and actually have the space and energy and funding to collaborate, design and deliver on results that get to justice in our communities. It means that our government leaders actually understand the implications of climate change and genuinely work with impacted communities while centering marginalized and disadvantaged communities that have already experienced decades, centuries, generations of divestment and underinvestment. It also means that businesses are able to thrive and create good, stable jobs for Louisianans and leverage the inclusive, healthy economies that are currently emerging to ensure talent and wealth stay in Louisiana but also to begin working towards a just transition away from that reliance on fossil fuels. So next slide, please. I wanna start with just an underscoring of the federal policy recommendations to always center communities and also center communities most impacted. The legacies of institutionalized and systemic racism and prejudice mean that those areas that have received underinvestment and divestment and experience those realities for generations also experience the exacerbated impacts of climate change. So how do we strengthen and support community organizations and community leaders to make sure that their input and their leadership is really centered in the design and decision-making tables? How can we provide funding and resilience opportunities for local leaders to see themselves as climate and environmental and coastal leaders and in the face of disaster? And how do we support decision-making authority in project implementation? And I'm gonna talk about a couple of examples really briefly of how we've done that work at the Foundation for Louisiana. Next slide, please. So first I wanna talk about our Lead the Coast program. Lead the Coast is a leadership education, advocacy and development program that came out of our Together initiative which was launched in 2008 and really launched as Lead the Coast in 2016 and it has since expanded. This program offers the opportunity for residents as I mentioned to identify as leaders but may not identify as climate or environmental leaders to connect to their personal experience of disaster and environmental change to decision-making pathways and ways for them to take action in their communities. So the main program is a four Saturday program and includes curriculum on sort of coastal and climate 101, environmental justice 101, race, power and privilege and then facilitation training, organizing training and advocacy training. We've already run this program six times in the most recently twice with nine different grantee partners and we've had more than 125 graduates. We are currently actively pursuing ways actually actively pursuing a virtual expansion of this program coast wide to all 26 coastal parishes and beginning to expand our funding for the program statewide as we continue to see some of the impacts of environmental change and ongoing migration caused by climate change in our further inland and upland and perceived to be higher safer ground places. Next slide please. So in 2017, we were able to partner with the Office of Community Development at the State of Louisiana who had just received as part of a National Disaster Resilience Competition Award $40 million for the LA SAFE program, Louisiana's strategic adaptations for future environments. Excuse me and over the course of 10 months we had five rounds of meetings, more than 70 public meetings with thousands of residents across Louisiana to really talk about the level of land loss that we see in our coastal master plan and that has been visualized by our Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority where we have basically international panel on climate change data visualized locally in very explicit ways that account for sea level rise and subsidence and the flood risk that we expect to see 10 years from now, 25 years from now, 50 years from now as well as the restoration structural investments and non-structural investments that are already ongoing in the State of Louisiana. This program actually offered residents the opportunity to be the design and decision-making entities. We worked with community partners, nonprofit, public, private and philanthropic allies to co-host these meetings, lead the Coast graduates that I mentioned before, we have 65 graduates that actually were table hosts or facilitators of those public meetings so that these very difficult conversations about whether or not communities will exist 10 years or 25 years from now or 50 years from now with sea level rise impacts, those people don't wanna have those conversations with folks from outside of their community, people that they don't know and trust. So really having the lead the Coast graduates who are from those places and really embedded in those communities, guiding conversations around flood risk, ongoing migration after disaster and the various impacts to communities and culture, economy and jobs, environment and sustainability, housing, transit, public health was really critical to designing a project portfolio that was really representative of a suite of community needs that maybe would not be as clearly definable within a category of environmental. And so as I mentioned, after Katrina, Rita, all of the storms that I mentioned, what we're seeing in Louisiana is that residents with resources and both financial resources and the social networks to move, in many cases are picking up and moving to what they perceive as higher and safer grounds with vast implications to local tax bases, both on the areas where we're losing population. So we're seeing a decline in funding to pay for social services, maintain existing infrastructure. We're seeing proportional increases in poverty rates and populations that are sort of stuck being directly next to wealthier residents who decide to self-insure and remain. And then on the reverse of that, we're also seeing new strains and stressors in communities that are growing in population to accommodate that movement, where obviously schools and traffic swell, but also we're seeing permits for new development that expands without any regard for where water is going or could go. And some of the areas that have flooded in heavy rainfall events are areas that were newly developed and were impacted by new development and really seeing new effects of environmental change that is both climate-caused and human development decision-based. At the end of this 10-month planning process, residents from Louisiana actually voted on the investments they wanted to see in their communities. We had a suite of 36 different project ideas that came from those 70 public meetings and residents within each individual parish voted on how they wanted to see the state of Louisiana's $40 million spent. And so this effort where our Foundation for Louisiana and OCD were able to co-fund and co-manage this massive public planning process really rendered a suite of investments that varied and then expand across areas that we don't really consider as environmental. So there's obviously buyouts outside of levee systems as well as green infrastructure and stormwater management, but there's also an affordable housing project that would be elevated and resilient in an area that needs to be maintained because it is part of a working post that also remains affordable and then kind of accommodate a certain amount of water. There's a business incubator to leverage the ongoing investment in coastal restoration and other adaptation practices. There's an expansion of mental health services and Plackamine's Pirage where so much population movement and PTSD from storm after storm and the BP drilling disaster have meant that there's a lot of trauma and there's a lot of depression in that community. And then finally a safe harbor for our fishing communities that expand across the coast. So this investment in LA Safe was really critical. So I'm glad that we jump to the next slide. In terms of priority areas, I just wanted to elevate, in addition to building people power, advancing just policies and cultivating new narratives, the foundation for Louisiana has really been asking ourselves, there are so many worthy causes, so many ways that climate change impacts our life. Where is the greatest potential for influence and for change? And so we have primarily put those investments towards three priority areas and our deepening investments in these areas. One being economic opportunity, the next being environmental justice and the third being equitable development. Within those areas, there's a lot of activity happening. Equitable development, we're primarily talking about ongoing population movement. How do we plan for increased flood risk across our state? How do we preserve affordability and inclusivity in communities as they grow? How do we accommodate the needs of low-income communities across the spectrum of areas losing population because of extreme flood risk? In the environmental justice space with Louisiana having the most heavily industrial petrochemical corridor that exists in the country, how do we center wisdom and self-determination of those communities, 80% black communities, 100% low-income communities and make sure that there are policies in place to both reduce greenhouse gas emissions and remediate toxicities in the air and soil. So really envisioning a Louisiana where residents across the state work together to advance that future. Finally, economic opportunity where we have hundreds of millions of dollars being spent in Louisiana on an annual basis to support coastal restoration and water management. How can we make sure that we're creating inclusive economic opportunity and really generating wealth for marginalized communities and equitable economic opportunity? So how do we support black-owned businesses, disadvantaged business enterprises? How can we make sure that we're training a representative workforce in this emerging sector? How does this help to leverage these resources and build the public will for a just transition away from oil and gas? Next slide. So with that, I just wanted to elevate a few of the policy recommendations. There are obviously many. When I'm talking about land use and development and equitable development as defined by our project work, we're talking about cultivating inclusive, vibrant, affordable communities with equitable outcomes that are actually prepared for climate risk. And there are a lot of mechanisms to do that. How do we make sure land use planning is designed and infrastructure is built to actually accommodate and withstand future climate conditions that's critical across Louisiana in terms of flood risk management? How do we make sure affordability of housing is preserved at the same time? I may have forgotten to include that recommendation and maybe 6.1 in here, but it may be coming. How do we account for the environmental and social impacts of benefit cost analysis that where we actually, when we're using data sets that are based off of racist real estate valuation practices, we're actually exacerbating the inequities in our communities because we're not elevating the real needs in those communities. We're basing it based on real estate valuation and the benefits of reducing risk to more expensive properties that are typically wider and wealthier. How can we encourage and really support research in terms of the benefits of staying in place versus adapting through relocation and where do we understand those things? How can we support the movement of people but really make sure that community leadership and informed community decision-making is centered in that work? Next slide, please. So as we are in real time seeing investments and development expand in areas that are perceived as higher and safer, how do we utilize the tool of the National Flood Insurance Program to reduce continued investment and development in risk-prone areas and take steps to reduce our financial risk as a nation over time while also continuing to ensure the affordability of premiums and take steps towards actuarial risk? Finally, obviously, here we go, making sure that resilience is a priority as we preserve and I would also add expand, safe and affordable housing. Next slide, please. So it's interesting to me that these are in the land use and development category as well as financing, adaptation and resilience but for me, I really wanted to elevate here the need to support inclusive economic opportunities through adaptation investment and actually leveraging those resources to generate equitable outcomes and advance the public will towards a just transition. So for me, as we think about the tremendous resources going out the door in Louisiana, how do we make sure that those federal and state contracts actually require local training and qualifications and that that is serving a representative population but also dismantling some of the economic inequities that exist in our community because of institutionalized and systemic racism? How can we ensure that climate justice and equity is built into all adaptation and resilience programs and part of that comes back to local community decision-making but really centering the communities that have faced for decades and generation systemic under-investment? Additionally, financing mechanisms, again, I wanna add the caveat here of supporting black-owned businesses, disadvantaged business enterprises and prioritizing or at least having representative access to resolving revolving loan funds and other financial mechanisms to provide economic access and finally establishing a green bank to deploy capital in support of those resilience projects while making sure it has multiple benefits and is creating inclusive economic opportunity at scale. So next slide, please. So with that, I just wanted to share my contact information. I feel so incredibly privileged to be able to lead and support the work of the Climate Justice Portfolio at the Foundation for Louisiana and we are really five years in and just getting rolling on continuing to build people power, advance just policies and cultivate new narratives in support of a more equitable, just and vibrant Louisiana. So thanks so much. Thank you, Liz, for that great presentation. When you read the report, each of the recommendations is illustrated, like I said in my intro, by examples and there are an awful lot of examples pulled from the coast of, from the Louisiana briefing from LA Safe, you'll see that acronym a lot and it's because they're doing such interesting and impressive work. And I thought that would be a good reminder. Liz just gave a great presentation. Rob gave a great presentation but the original presentations as well as the presentations of their original briefing panelists or co-panelists are all archived online, www.esi.org. So if you wanna learn in Liz's example, if you also wanna listen to what Matthew had to say, what Donald had to say, what Justin had to say, well, we can help you out. Again, everything is archived and the same goes with Rob. It's funny that I remember something about every briefing. I remember when I heard Rob's intro that I was like, I can't understand that. I hope he doesn't ask me to repeat it. And I remember so much about that Louisiana from the LA Safe briefing. I remember Donald in particular talking about sort of community involvement and the thing that really sticks out to me is how the people voted. There were these tubes with like little coins that they would put in, like wooden nickels almost and the weird thing sometimes you remember. But anyway, I encourage everybody to go back to the archive and check it out because it is great stuff. Speaking of great stuff, that leads us to our third panelist, Kate Boykort. Kate is the Waterfront Alliances Director of Resilience overseeing the organization's portfolio of resiliency work, including the convening of a resilience task force and development of a campaign for regional resilience and waterfront edge design guidelines. Previously, Kate served as the restoration program manager for the New York, New Jersey, Harbor and Estuary program where she focused on cross jurisdictional coastal issues related to coastal or, excuse me, habitat restoration, public access and climate change. And prior to her work at the Harbor and Estuary program, Kate led a team of experts to develop a climate change adaptation plan for the state of Maryland and has had multiple roles conducting and synthesizing research for the public and policymaker audiences. Welcome Kate, it's great to see you and I'm looking forward to your presentation. Thank you so much and thank you to ESI for having us and congratulations on this report. It is more important now than ever to really set an agenda for how we adapt and build resilience to climate change. And I just wanna acknowledge today is actually the anniversary of Hurricane Sandy, which I'll touch on briefly. And it was a storm that rocked us eight years ago. It feels like not that long ago, but it has been eight years since our region, which is in New York and New Jersey, was really devastated by this disaster. And so I'm thinking of Liz and many others that are experiencing Zeta and ESIUS and such before that, it's been a rough few years. So I'm going to talk a little bit about who we are, Waterfront Alliance and a campaign and coalition we've built in partnership with 90 other organizations actually since the last time that we met. And then I'll talk a little bit about what we do and focus in on our campaign because I think it aligns a lot with some of the recommendations that come out in the report and then go through a few of the highlights of the report, which again, you should definitely check out if you haven't already. So just briefly, Waterfront Alliance, we are a bi-state organization focused on New York and New Jersey and making sure our waterfronts and the communities that surround them are vital. They are vibrant and they are really lasting for generations to come and accessible to all of the New Yorkers and New Jerseyans that live around them. So just for context, we have more than one million people and rising today in the floodplain. This number is actually higher because a recent report actually showed that there might be at least a million in census blocks in New York City alone that are in coastal areas. So it's critical. I mean, the future of New York, which is a population of 8.4 or so million alone and then New Jersey's metropolitan region, we have, you know, I don't know, 15 Hawaii's or everybody, Louisiana's, we have a really dense region and so there's a lot of similarities to what Liz mentioned, especially, but there's also this density that is just a tremendous challenge. So we do a few things as an organization. We educate, we work with communities, we try to get public access to and from the water. We have a program called the Water from Edge Design Guidelines or WEDGE, which is a tool that we try to educate professionals actually to design better in the same way that LEED certification helps to move the market for how we design our buildings. We're trying to do that for our edges for more resilient ecologically sound and accessible edges. And then of course, as following up on actually where we were last year, where we were consensus building, we have built a coalition that launched this past year. You can check it out at www.rise2number2resilience.org and you can see sort of what we're focused on. This really was a process of consenting with more than 400 stakeholders from grassroots to grass tops and like EESI, we have a set of guiding principles where we call them points of unity that bring us together. Not always do we all agree on every single priority and so we have to remind ourselves why we come together, why we're here and what we're generally fighting for and that really helps us to come together on a lot of policies. And just briefly, I wanna focus on a few highlights of some of the things that we're calling for because it's very relevant to this audience. We have a real priority in getting past the Water Resources Development Act, the version that was passed by the house this past year included a lot of our priorities and there was really no opposition. So we're really hopeful that we can get what is essentially a stimulus for green jobs and also helping us to prevent more disasters before they strike past this year. And we'll see where that goes. I know that's a hot discussion on the Hill right now. Secondly, just really making sure we're funding FEMA and some of the programs that really help us like the Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program, think about disasters and prepare for them before they strike, really taking action now. And more than ever, we need that support at the state and local level. We are going to be really hurting from this pandemic in New York and New Jersey especially. Our budgets are tight. We've had to actually pull back. We've seen real cuts to critical spending including a bond act that was otherwise going to go forward and investing in flood resiliency. So we need that federal support. I'm just going to let you kind of look at this slide and see some of the other things because not all of them are federal but it's really trying to make sure that we have a managed, funded, equitable and just strategy basically take the LA safe approach that Liz mentioned and expand that up a little bit and have enough federal support approach that really in tandem. So just shifting over to a little bit of the report, I wanted to focus on a couple areas and I think we did already touch on them a little bit but this is something that we really critically are thinking about and that we can't keep developing in the way that we were yesterday or before and frankly the tools with which that we have to make decisions are not all the way there yet but there are a number of our states and cities are leading and actually just doing a nod to our Water for Nudge Design Guidelines program as well. The city of New York has developed design guidelines and I think there's a lot of concern that there's a lot of uncertainty around how do you design for a park, a building, a maritime, a port, vessel, infrastructure, how do you design for the future, the design life? So we have as well as the New York City has developed design guidelines for how you really take a lot of this complex scientific information and distill that into a path forward for how you might make decisions about land use and project design. I also want to nod to also in our region, New Jersey has committed to developing and updating of all of its relevant permits and specific guidance and regulations in the flood plain related to both impacts on and impacts to climate and that's called NJPAC. So these are ways that I think we are starting to get towards that goal. And then following that, I think one of the things that we really hear about is how can we make sure that data is accessible in a way that's useful? And I think we need to do a lot better user experience design in general. At the federal level, make sure that the audiences that are the levers of change of land use decision makers, planners and regulators, that they have the best information in the ways that they need it. And I think sometimes we see that a map isn't really necessarily useful if you don't also provide the design flood elevation, for example, for a building and really trying to tailor those data sources to the audience and not just creating another tool that hasn't really asked the audience in the first place sort of how to use it. And I think that comes back to some of the questions also about justice and equity and how we really look at community members as users and the people that live there and all of these other different audiences that use data. Just highlighting a couple of things. I think there's some interesting stuff happening at the congressional level. We've seen there is while before I jumped these examples, we've seen actually just a couple of weeks ago there was a bipartisan bill that was introduced by representative Zeldin and Price called the federal flood resilience and saving taxpayers active 2020 that would modernize and invest in these flood maps and trying to get towards a federal standard that includes future flooding and really thinks more comprehensively. So that's something that we support and are really excited to see. I wanna also nod to another bill that I think has been introduced before but there's a lot of tools that we have right now that could be better and could include future looking data sets like NOAA's Atlas 14 which is used to direct at the local level, it's used as a resource for designing stormwater facilities. If we don't have the basic ways to design them for the future we're essentially sort of already making ourselves obsolete. And so that's something I think there was a bill, Senate bill 4462 floods by senators Wicker and Peters that was introduced previously. And I think there is some effort to expand that. Just nodding again to state's leading we've got some effort from LA SAFE as I said to really translate and engage communities and then being more German part of that picture. So I think that's something where we've seen Louisiana has done a good job of really trying to approach the issue on many different levels. We've also seen in the San Francisco Bay Area they're working on an adaptation Atlas where they actually are dividing the region based on geographic and risk context and giving, there's different options to adapt given those different contexts. And I think that's something that we'd really like to see our states and larger cities kind of working together to develop those kinds of strategies. And then of course the state and federal government really stepping in and supporting communities that don't have the resources to plan like that and help with technical assistance. There is a great example in NOAA's digital coast that I think was mentioned in the report and also New York City actually has a flood hazard mapper that's very useful. But I'll give you one example of how that could be even more useful if it was a regulatory layer sort of more of official layer. If we're trying to make regulations or laws, for example, a flood risk disclosure bill at the state level in New York, which we're supporting, it is hard to tell people about sea level rise and disclose that risk without having an official layer of that risk. And that's something that we would really like to see FEMA start supporting and the federal government to support FEMA in doing so. The last piece, and I think really any of this report, I would love to touch on more, but it's just highlighting quickly the National Flood Insurance Program and FEMA. As I said, we really need to fund FEMA to invest in its mapping. And we have 1980s, sometimes very old maps in some cases. Luckily in New York we have more recent ones. But across the board, we don't include sea level rise in those maps and future flooding. And as we saw in Houston, sometimes they're really grossly out of touch with what's happening with local land use and rain, frankly. So that's something that we would love to see. And also as Liz touched on this, there are a lot of inequities with how we approach disaster response and preparation. And in the sort of the making more real actuarial based risk rates with the National Flood Insurance Program, we often see these conversations as an either or. And we really don't think that they are in that we need to be having a more nuanced conversation about how to fix this and make it work better for people and taxpayers. So one we're gonna highlight here is the RAND study that was conducted on looking at housing burden is actually a means tested way of really adjusting subsidies. So maybe we shouldn't be subsidizing the wealth of landowners in the flood plain, but there are people that live there that may not have known their risk because we have terrible flood insurance, flood risk disclosure laws in many states or maybe they were encouraged to go there or maybe they live in public housing of which one in 10 public housing developments is in the flood plain. So I think we really need to look at this reform of the National Flood Insurance Program with a little bit more nuance. And I think there's a lot of opportunity to begin there and we'd really support real efforts to do so. So just a quick, as I wrap up, I do wanna give a big shout out again to really supporting FEMA's Building Resilient Infrastructure and Communities Program. It's a really good step forward. We need more of it and hope that we can pass our Water Resources Development Act. And with that, I will pass it back over to Dan. Thanks, Kate. That was a great presentation. And I was just thinking the briefing that you presented at back in October, 2019 was actually the first, my first DESI briefing. I had only been on the job for like three weeks. So I remember, again, remember something about every briefing, I was thinking about like beaches and like mangroves. And then I was like, oh yeah, New York is a coast too. And it really, I remember thinking during that briefing that the diversity of US coastlines is part of the challenge for sure, right? It's all different depending on where you go, but it's also a really interesting source of information, innovation and the potential for sharing information from one coastal area to the next. So you were probably the first coastal resilience expert I ever met, or at least while I was at DESI. So that's your distinction, I suppose. But thank you, Kate. That was an excellent presentation. I'm so glad you were able to join us again today. Thank you. Our final, oh, thank you. Our final panelist comes to us from the furthest away and probably with the nicest weather today. She's in Hawaii right now. Anukriti Hiddle staffs the state government of Hawaii's Climate Change, Mitigation and Adaptation Commission. And she is an adjunct fellow at the East West Center. Before Hawaii, she was a climate change researcher in Washington, DC with the World Resources Institute, an activist at Greenpeace, and a professor at Washington University in St. Louis where she co-led the Ringo Observer Delegation for COPS 2021 and 22. Her background is in international relations from Columbia University and Forest Resource Management from Duke University. And she studied, her studies have had a focus on economics, policy and law. Although Leopold said there are some who can live without wild things and some who cannot and Anu is someone who cannot. And so with that, I welcome you to the panel. It's wonderful to see you again and really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you, Dan. And thank you so much for having me and congratulations again to Echo, Kate and the other panelists on your report and Aloha everybody. So this is just a sort of one of the advantages of going last is that I can just say, yeah, what they said which is partly what I'm going to do. So I'm just going to sort of summarize with some examples and some alluding some to the work that we're doing as we've got a whole nother briefing online obviously that goes through some of the details of our work. So if you would just go right into the next slide that would be great. Yeah, the adaptation funding slide. So just one big point that I wanted to make and from looking at all the work that I've been doing both nationally, sub-nationally and globally, just the big point that adaptation funding has always had, it's been sort of the whatever you want to call it is the politically correct term these days, the maybe dark horses and such a good term, maybe step child, foster child, whatever. Anyway, you get the idea, it's just not been balanced with mitigation funding. And I just pulled out one statistic from the EU which basically tells you, just shows you some of that imbalance. And I think at this national level here and at the state level, we need to correct that balance. So that's just a big sort of takeaway that I want to put up there. As part of that takeaway, I also there are some bills that I've been looking at that are in the making in Congress right now. And again, I just wonder, I know there are reasons for this, but I wonder if we couldn't have something that's the adaptation equivalent of a universal basic income concept, which is like could every state get like, every coastal state get something without having to put up some kind of a match. And some of these matches that I'm looking at are things like 50% matches with our pandemic still raging and not sure when the post pandemic period will start. I think this is going to be very, very difficult for states, states such as Hawaii, obviously every state, but Hawaii has now has gone from the lowest unemployment rate to the highest in the nation and with some real reservoir as to whether and when we will be able to get back on track. So as we look to our state funds and our state revenues, I think that's one big thing is how do we correct not only this imbalance, but what do we do about the sort of cost shares and so on that are always out there for state government and for our monies. So if you would go to the next slide, I'll just quickly mention the obvious things that are out there for Hawaii and for, we share this in common with many states with the coastal states, especially as the rising sea levels are rising temperatures. And then we are drier, but when we do get rain, it is very heavy and leads to all kinds of problems. And these are not even, we're not even talking disasters here. So if you would just go to the next slide, here's another stressor now, post pandemic. So they're saying that before, so Alice is the term for asset limited income constrained but employed and these are households that are just one event away from just going over the brink. And before the pandemic hit, Hawaii had 42% of households on the brink and now it has risen to 59%. So that is huge. So, and Hawaii before the pandemic had the highest rate of per capita homelessness in the nation. We also have, not surprisingly, we have the highest cost of living in the nation. So all of those things come together to provide those stressors for Hawaii. So if you would go to the next slide, thank you. So what we've been looking at is obviously when we look at coastal resilience in Hawaii, we're looking at sea level rise, coastal erosion, all of the drainage failures inland, all of those things. But we're also trying to, with our climate ready Hawaii initiative, trying to look at nature-based and community-based solutions, again, echoing what my fellow panelists have said before looking at our house, how community can be at the center of things. And I'll speak to that in a subsequent slide here. But so this is one of the things we're looking at is how do we move our coastal roads, our coastal infrastructure and use. So there again is the funding issue, but then it's also the, what are the projects and the nature-based projects and how do we do that in a way that is evaluated using the right cost-benefit analysis, which also has been talked about. So again, we're sort of looking at our land use, our climate risk, how do we incorporate that into our built infrastructure. And so all of these things are coming together, hopefully in a climate-ready Hawaii, but again, I'll go back to that same old, the adaptation funding. If the next slide, please, that's just to show you the, sorry, there's probably a little lag here on the next slide. So that's just to show you that just looking at risk to our physical infrastructure and assets, where we are trying to climate-proof, if you will, and climate mainstream into the daily operations of state government, these are again looking at the entry points to operationalize how we can do those cost-benefit analyses, how we can look at project selection and criteria and all of those things. So that's part of our climate-ready Hawaii. And then the next slide, which is sort of my last slide here, just spend a minute talking about biocultural resource management in Hawaii. So there was some very interesting and wise, there's a community, many folks in our community who are looking to adaptation resilience grounded in traditional knowledge, traditional practices, and then putting it in a framework that is, if you will, more modern, but looking at how this can be relevant now and not just looking obviously to the, well, looking to the past, as it says here, to conjure moments of past flourishing and a future where we might flourish again. So linking both of those and obviously trying to go through the pandemic in this way. But these are concepts that were borrowed from a social and cultural and resource management that went on in the Hawaiian islands before colonization. So we're looking to the larger district level, the Moku, the Ahupua'a, which is the community level, roughly equates with the watershed, but doesn't always have a watershed, doesn't always have a waterfront. So this is something that we also would like to incorporate is all of our Maoka lands, I'm sorry, all of our mountain lands. Here we've got the sort of reef to ridge concept as well, which is we go from the ocean to the mountains. And so we're trying to look at how we could incorporate our communities that work and do agriculture and forestry and ranching, and how all of that contributes to coastal resilience, especially with the smaller watersheds we have here in Hawaii. So those are sort of our basic tenets. Of course, all of this is threaded through with strategies that are equitable and that will make us resilient. And I think that's really where we would like to be. I'm not sure that we've got a starting point. We work with our county governments who have done a lot of outreach into climate adaptation strategies and plans and our city and county of Honolulu at this, even as we speak, is reaching out to communities to pull together an adaptation resilience plan. And I really like how we all look at this, which is not to bounce back, but to bounce forward. So I think I'll stop there for now and give us time to have some Q&A and conversation. But I thank you again and just want to leave you with the idea of a more of a balance to adaptation funding. Thank you. Thank you, Anu. That was great. And the Hawaii briefing was actually not just about Hawaii's coastal resilience, but how Hawaii is really using financing in the Hawaii Green Bank in innovative ways to marshal and leverage funding. So I'm glad you made those points for me. It was a really excellent briefing. And just littered with those mitigation and adaptation double whammy's or at least the institutions that can bring those to bear. So thanks so much for joining us today. And now we transition to, like Anu said, the discussion portion of our agenda. And that means I get to introduce my colleague, Anna McGinn, as much as I would like to propagate the idea that I personally did everything we've talked about today, I am too honest, I can't tell a lie. And in fact, I only came up with all of this. I came up with the idea, the easy part. All the work was actually done by Anna, who developed our research methodology and generally kept everyone on track task, as well as our colleagues, Amber Todorov and Ellen Bonn. Between the three of them, they did all the substantive work. And now I get to introduce Anna. Anna, thanks for joining us today. And I will turn the discussion portion of the agenda over to you. Great, thanks, Dan. And thanks so much, Rob and Liz and Kate and Anu, it's great to hear your comments kind of framed around this report, but again, learning about all that's happening on all the resilience in your different regions of the country. So we're gonna jump right into the discussion. And I wanna start off by highlighting the fact that you're all from different types of entities. So Anu, the state agency, Liz Foundation, Kate with an NGO and Rob with a tribal commission. And I'd love for you to take a few moments to speak about the unique ways that each of these entities can contribute to enhancing resilience and how that can help to inform adaptation of resilience policy at the federal level. Maybe we can start with you Anu and then we can kind of go around to Kate and Rob and Liz. Yes, I think that this is one of the most interesting things about this panel is that we are from different agencies and different sectors of, I guess, life. And so the role of the state I really feel is to facilitate and catalyze and amplify what our communities are doing. And one of the things I feel that we still haven't mastered is our outreach to the communities. It really shouldn't be an outreach. We are the community. The community is us. We should be part of this. We should not be reaching out and they shouldn't be engaged. We shouldn't have to go engage because if I am part of it, then I should stay already be centered in there. And so this is one of the things that we struggle with. And I think that the role of the state would be very important in sort of ditching that old model and coming up, really listening to the new model and figuring out how we can be part of that solution. Thanks, Anu. How about we go to Kate next? Hi, I guess, as you mentioned, I've worked for an NGO, a non-profit organization. And I cannot speak for every non-profit organization because there's so many different kinds, like ESI. But Waterfront Alliance, I think we're in a sweet spot where we are able to talk to community organizations and representatives. We're able to connect to government staff and essentially be synthesizers. And I think a lot of what we do is actually build consensus and convene and figure out, well, what does good look like? And I think adaptation and resilience is something where it's kind of newer and we're figuring it out. And I think we can be sort of the advocate for what good looks like. And sometimes we're partners, sometimes we're pushing our government colleagues to do different things, which is arguably easier than their job because they actually have to do it and now with limited budgets. But I think that we do play an important role in trying to define what good looks like and pushing us towards that. Rob, maybe we'll jump to you next. Sure. So I guess one thing that's important to point out, there are 578, I believe, federally recognized tribes in the United States and tribal entities. There are a lot of different kinds of inter-tribal organizations. LIFWIC is kind of unique because we are an inter-tribal natural resource agency. There are only a few of us in the country. There are three here in the Great Lakes region and then there are a couple over in the Pacific Northwest. From my perspective, I think where we can help our tribes the most is by helping to facilitate that relationship with the other two sovereigns that we work with. So the federal government and the state government. The constitution requires the government-to-government relationship with tribes and the federal government. States are sometimes a little bit more problematic. It really just depends on the state. Going back to what Anusa, if every state had that kind of mentality when they were working with the tribes that are within their borders, I really think that that would be just a wonderful thing. I am really heartened by the fact that there is a lot of interest right now in working with tribal communities on adaptation and resilience. And I think we just have to be careful and realize that tribal knowledge, traditional knowledge is the intellectual property of the tribe and of the knowledge holder. So seeking that knowledge, whether the person seeking it is from the state, from a federal agency or from a non-governmental, recognizing that tribal knowledge is shared at the behest of the tribe, not necessarily something people need to take for granted. Thanks, Rob. And Liz, let's jump to you to wrap on this question. Yeah, sure. So with full transparency, I just wanna say we're not exactly a traditional philanthropic organization. So I do wanna be clear about that because there are different roles. The different funders play both at the national and local levels. But I do think, especially with our role in an activity or a program like the LA SAFE program, we were able to invest in things that the state couldn't invest in. We were able to provide stipends for local leaders to be the facilitators and pay for things like food and transportation and childcare to public meeting in addition to providing grant support to some of the nonprofit organizations that were a part of that work. Most of our funding generally goes to support black and indigenous community-based organizations. I wouldn't say most, but a large portion of our funding in the climate justice portfolio. And we're working constantly with those partners to make sure that we're working together and standing behind them and beside them and elevating the stressors, challenges, and opportunities that exist in those communities. And that those partners are at the table with us in also supporting different research and policy recommendations and analysis that actually can inform long-term work to creating new narratives or to really shifting the policies and decision-making that allow for climate work and climate justice or activities towards that or not. And so I think our role is really unique and also really critical. And I know that Foundation for Louisiana is a very unique institution, but I continue to hear from other parts of the country. We need more organizations, more foundations that are working in this way with communities who are on the front lines and really centering that leadership. Yeah, thanks so much. So I wanna really emphasize that this new report out from ESI is based on the work that all of you have presented today along with the other panelists that presented throughout our year-long briefing series. And it would not have been possible without all the amazing work that you all are doing on the ground. And that's kind of the second part of the title of this report is that all this is coming from solutions that are in practice now. So building off of that, I'd like to wrap up today by having you all talk about a key lesson, learn or take away from your work that will be central for any policymaker who wants to work on coastal resilience to understand and to be thinking about at any stage of their work on this topic. So let's start with Rob and then we can go from there. So I think from my perspective, working with tribal communities and particularly with the communities here in the Great Lakes region, is that it's important to approach them where they are and from their perspective and not from where you are necessarily. Communication and cooperation requires personal relationships. And those personal relationships are built over time. It's not something as other folks have said during this briefing where you can just walk into a tribal community or a BIPOC community and expect that that relationship is just gonna be there from the get go because you have to earn it. Anu, can we jump to you next? Yeah, and actually that really resonates with Hawaii as well. So I should also say I'm not part of the indigenous community or not even local to Hawaii but from living here it's just become so obvious that you really need to cultivate those personal relationships because that's what people have here and that's what helps them through these times and through the pandemic and through times before that with storms and just that's how people, the island relationships are just so strong here. So I would say that another thing that stands out is just, it's the capacity of state and local governments to, so I know I said we need to increase the funding but at the same time, the corollary to that is that I think we also need to increase the capacity to swallow that funding here because it's just, when a place is small, you can't stuff a big funding down its throat, right? So you really need to, I mean, people have like two or three jobs here so a fourth job would be to figure out how to write a grant proposal for this federal fund, right? So I mean, it's just not going to happen and it's that pre-development pipeline, that project pipeline that we really need some help with and I think that's part of that big funding ask is that how do we bring some of these capacity things? I know that Massachusetts and of course, all of you have also talked about your success stories but also we've been looking to Massachusetts program of municipal vulnerability preparedness program which is really training the communities and the really local entities to prioritize, identify and prioritize their climate vulnerabilities and then apply for funding and then and help them apply for that funding. So I think those are the things we're grappling with and really stand out for Hawaii. Thanks Anu. And that's great that you brought up the Massachusetts MVP program because we had a speaker during this series who spoke on that from Massachusetts and that's incorporated in the report as well. So that's great when the different states and entities are learning from each other and that that's kind of all those examples getting synthesized into this report. And there's also so much on funding throughout the report I think that was a really clear need expressed throughout the entire briefing series and hopefully that we've been able to capture that. Let's go to Liz next on a key takeaway or lesson learned to share with policymakers and then we'll wrap up with Kate's take. Yeah. I just want to elevate something that was already said basically that the speed of trust is slow and trust in relationships are the longterm investments that are necessary for any of this work to happen. I think it's been said a few times but really recognizing that these impacts from coastal and climate change really affect every facet of our communities and to Anu's point, we are a part of those communities. And so really making sure that we're centering folks that are most impacted and most on the front lines of those experiences as we work together and are part of the work and committed to the work that really will be decades and generations of investment of time and energy and resources and a continued sort of addressing of change. During the LA safe process we talked about 10 years from now, 25 years from now, 50 years from now and we talked about people thinking about themselves versus thinking about their kids or their grandkids or the generations to come. And really people thought differently about what the future of their communities might look like when they were thinking about those other generations that were not themselves. And that's really how we fact into kind of some of the most difficult conversations around the future and existential threats that are facing our communities. But none of that is possible without trust and relationships and building and supporting the capacity of local leaders. All right, thanks Liz. Last word over to you Kate and then we'll pass it back to Dan. Great, I will try to be brief. I think just good intentions can sometimes have unintended consequences and that is most pronounced when you do not engage and empower communities in the process. And I think that's something we've really heard. And if you're, that's true with policy, it's true with projects. And if you're in New York, we might kick you out with Amazon HQ and a number of other development projects that have tried to move forward in our region when communities weren't engaged, those projects ended. So I think it's just a lesson for both policy and projects that we really need to be just about our process. Thank you Anna for leading the discussion and thanks to the panelists. And Kate, that was a great note to end on. Community is a really big part of this and I hope that comes through to everyone who's watching this today, everyone who watched the archive briefings, everyone who reads the report. All of the stuff that you've just heard about is due in large part to the willingness of our panelists to help us along the way, to stick with us, to help us to answer our questions, to help us understand their work, to make sure that we've got things right. And so we just really wanted, I just really wanna also take one last moment to say thanks, not just to the four today, but to the other 38 who joined us over the course of a year or more to help us through this and to teach us, help us understand it. So thanks to everyone who was able to do that. The report actually includes a description of the methodology that we used. And so if anyone has any questions about that, the report can answer your questions. Let me now turn to thanking my ESI contributors. And it is a long list. So we're gonna go just a minute over 4.30. Of course, thanks to Anna and Amber and Ellen, they contributed so much, brain power analysis, writing, typing, editing, pretty much you name it. You also may know when you read the report how nice it looks. And that is because it's so nicely formatted. And we have to thank for that, our colleague Sydney O'Shaughnessy on our communications team. And not only did Sid manage to blow us away with the report layout, she also somehow managed to find time to be my co-host on ESI's brand new podcast, The Climate Conversation, that we just launched on Tuesday to help make some noise about coastal resilience. So double thanks to Sid. And then the list goes on, Omri Lapour, our communications director, Dan O'Brien, who does so much behind the scenes to make these briefings happen. And also our interns over the past three semesters, Abby, Bridget, Emma, Joseph, Katie and Maeve. And if you liked our briefing today, how it looked, how it sounded, how it flowed, thanks should be directed to Curtis Allen and Troy Hanford for being our tech gurus. And I think I just named half the organization, but that's because it was a true team effort. So thanks to everyone at ESI who contributed to the project over the last year and a half or so. We will go ahead and end it there. The next slide includes a survey link. Everyone in the audience today, thanks for taking time out of your day to join us. If you have a few more minutes to help us by taking our survey, we would really appreciate it. We read all of the survey responses. We take all of your feedback to heart and we do our best to improve every time we put on a briefing online or in person. And one last plug for our website, www.esi.org, that's where you'll find all of the information, including a way to sign up for our newsletter climate change solutions and a special plug for all of the archived briefings, all 16 slides, written summaries, webcast, everything. So if you liked what you heard today, if you liked what you read in the report, there's a lot more available from all of these briefings. We're a few minutes over, apologies for that. But thanks again to our panelists today. Thank you, Anna, for joining me as well. And I wish everyone a great rest of your Thursday. And for those of you, Liz, especially you impacted by Hurricane Zeta, take care. Hope everything turns out okay and everyone gets your power back or their power back. And until next time, take care and thanks so much for joining us.