 Welcome back to our conference today with presentations now from European Command and Africa Command. Again, the conference program with the full agenda and biographies of all of our speakers is available for download at the bottom of the events page and there's a link to that in the chat. The event is being recorded and will be available after the event is done. The raised hand function will not be used today but please enter all of your questions for our panelists into the Q&A function. All are welcome to upvote the questions of the greatest interest. Next I will introduce Dr. Nana Hal Singh, a fellow professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College and director of the Africa Studies Group. Dr. Singh, thank you for being our moderator for the UCOM and AFRICOM panel today. Welcome. My name is Nana Hal Singh from the Naval War College and I'm so happy to be able to moderate this panel today. Thank you so much, Nana Hal, and I see your camera on. There we go. We welcome you and thank you. This panel includes presentations from the J4J5's team from UCOM and AFRICOM to talk about operationalizing climate security. Before we introduce our speakers, we wanted to provide some administrative guidance. I will only introduce our panelists by their name and current titles to provide them with a maximum opportunity to present. The biographies for all our speakers are available in the conference program available on the conference events page. Please post all questions and comments in the chat for the question and answer period after the presentations. You also have the ability to upvote questions which will help us identify the most important questions to ask our panelists. From European Command today we have Mr. Gary Russ, an environmental partnership specialist from the J4 and Commander Jake Kast, U.S. Coast Guard representing the J5. Well, good day to the team from Europe. Dr. Sin and Andrea, I just want you to know that you're interrupting my beer 30 today so we'll try and get done soon so I can turn my camera off and begin my after effects. I work in the UCOM J4 and my partner Commander Jake Kast resides in the J5. The two of us will try and paint the evolution of the current site picture of UCOM's climate change common operating picture along with where we think it is going. Next slide please. These are a couple of long statements here but one is by General Walters, our combat commander and then the NATO Cirque-Deaf or Charged Affair. Basically the combat commander is talking to the Congress last year and applying climate change to our strategic environment as one of his priorities and of course in the second bullet the Charged Affair focuses on theater and the application to our partners. Next slide please. As countries in Europe address climate change and its impacts it's imperative that DOD be aware of the policy responses at every level including policies at the supernational, national and municipal level. Policies may directly influence DOD activity in the near term, example pollution user fees and may also change conditions within European operating environments in the long term. For example, a greater electrification of logistics infrastructure. In UCOM it's anticipated that the European regulations will be more aggressive than the U.S. and UCOM is going to have to demonstrate that respect. One example would be the logistics supply chain if you were having to go through Europe or Paris. Back in about six months ago they reduced their city speed limit by 20 kilometers per hour to a maximum of 30 kilometers per hour for about 19 miles per hour. So whether you're going to pay additional fees or you're going to slow down your normal supply chain activities you're going to be challenged by some of these controls at the various levels. Next slide please. So Europe has been upgrading their transport rail and road network from the east to the west over the last couple of years with completion in about approximately five years. The 3C's initiative is a coherent and integrated infrastructure in the region. This will even out the economic imbalances of the European common market and increase the role of Central and Eastern Europe in international trade along the New Silk Road corridors. The 3C's initiative investment fund was established raising between three and five billion dollars to complement the EU country, to complement dollars or euros spent out of each one of the countries. As you can appreciate there's different weight systems on the actual hard stand roads. There's different grades on the rail and so they're changing to the western standard along the eastern side and they're probably about a third to a half a way through. Next slide Jake. All right it's a good afternoon, good day, good morning. Global warming trends are causing sea ice melt in the Arctic. Decrease sea ice extents, decrease the earth's salbedo and drive sea surface temperature warming. This creates a feedback loop known as arctic amplification which further warms the Arctic. Decrease sea ice increases accessibility for human activity. This can be for resource extraction, petrochemical or other important rare earth minerals for commercial fishing where the central arctic ocean currently has a moratorium on fishing through 2037 but that's all but while it's legally binding it's an agreement that could easily be undermined and increased access opens opportunity for commercial and tourist-based maritime shipping. These activities create an increased need for search and rescue and pollution response coordination and capabilities and looking from the other side of the coin these are likely the similar considerations driving Russia's investments in the Arctic where they're remilitarizing old Cold War facilities and investing in additional infrastructure there. Additionally warming is thawing permafrost which threatens existing infrastructure, buildings, tanks, pipelines, airfields. It complicates the development installation of new infrastructure and is a significant source of methane. Increased access creates an opening frontier for malign actors, Russia, PRC, to erode the foundation of the rules-based order which in the Arctic is primarily founded on the United Nations Convention on the Sea which accounts for the divisions of the ocean including the extended continental shelf and freedom navigation and that's the basis of our global power projection and is fundamental to our globally integrated free market economy. The Arctic Council is the preeminent governing body for the Arctic and it's currently observing a strategic pause due to the Ukrainian crisis and time will tell how other Arctic collaboration for are affected as we progress. The Arctic is in danger of geostrategic spillover from other conflict and competition in the region but rooted in the Arctic strategy and the Yukon's regional annex, goals for Yukon are to preserve the stability of the Arctic, a region where countries work cooperatively, the rules-based order is reinforced and the homeland is defended. Next slide please. This is a graphic we stole from the EU. It depicts aggregate potential impact for climate change which is essentially a combination of potential physical, environmental, social, economic, and cultural impacts. This is a comparison of historical data and modeled data for the latter half of the 2070 to 2100. As you can see areas of stress in the south for heat and water, permafrost issues in the high north and areas of concern are concentrated along the coastline. Unfortunately there's no data for the Balkan Peninsula. This is the area where likely has the most stringed governance in the Yukon AOR and as our evolution of thoughts unfolded, all things being equal and assuming we had resources to initiate events and support climate change, this is where we would have started. Next slide please. This is a snapshot of some of the humanitarian assistance disaster response events that occurred within the last year. Again stepping back to our initial thoughts, we figured using a proactive approach to reduce reactive response requirements i.e. security cooperation versus HADR would provide a solid basis to operationalize climate change. Next slide please. Over to Gary. So as everyone recognizes the international security implications are the point. The implications of heat in the north and the south differ. Arctic areas collapsing infrastructure or northern Mediterranean Sea countries lack of water for crops. This crosses borders and creates different international focus from the same issue. Either way the potential for a country destabilizing is critical. As such we developed a few questions that plague us that may be of value for the conference to consider. Jake and I really don't have the answers to these. We've certainly thought about them and would love to have some further you know discussion. I don't know that I told Andrea that I was going to do this but these these have been pestering us you know for the last year. Next slide please. So these are UCOM's equities but not in any other any particular sequence other than the top two. There are numerous options for UCOM to partner with and each has their own political agenda for all these allies and partners inside of Europe and they have a twofold focus because you know they also do a lot of combined effort with the AFRICOM AOR. Also they're all trying to be create a proactive versus a reactive response and that's you know I think a critical point as you do the education and and try to set conditions so they can respond appropriately. The European the only thing I would talk about on the other ones would be the migrants and that's Europeans are very uh it's a politically sensitive issue. The example is as already talked about you know on 21 May there was about 68,000 migrants that crossed over from Morocco into one of the Italian island or the Spain's island and then 1.3 million migrants crossed from Syria in 2015 and of course notwithstanding today's movement of the Ukraine's which is upwards of a one I want to say it's it's a over it's more than a million I don't know it's exact number at the moment. Next slide please Jake. Alright so our climate change efforts thus far I'd like to characterize that what we've been doing recently it's really grassroots and starting to target with the lowest hanging fruit. We're also working to develop some pilot programs to learn lessons and then integrate more broadly as we use it to integrate climate change considerations more broadly across the staff. So first educating the staff Gary and I have embarked on a campaign of office calls all around the campus and also participated in a variety of conferences to help prime the pump and educate the staff about the task of including climate change into across the enterprise. I would say though that our real money thus far has primarily been made 80 to AO and this has mainly come recently following the establishment of our climate change working group which was finally penned in the last week but we've met twice it's a monthly group with representatives from all directorates as well as installation managers for all the components and components we're still working to ensure we get representation from all of those entities that said the discussions so far have been very fruitful and provided great AO level areas to prime the pump as I suggested. Strategic documents that's that's kind of the easy part really Gary and I and members of our team chop on anything we can get our hands on and ensure climate change is incorporated. This will be a lot easier when the NSS, NDS and MS and MS is released so that as all the other nesting that occurs across our enterprise everyone will be looking at climate change that's been chopped on across all components and the joint staff. Exercises I'd say we have a nascent effort but it's progressing quite well again from our working group. The climate change that will be incorporated into the plan are tools which will then be considered in the development of the UCOM level exercises which highlights kind of a span of control challenge. Components control most of the exercises even if they are considered joint and so we need to make sure we incorporate and coordinate with the components as we develop this effort. We're also looking to develop mission essential tasks which will bake in climate change to future exercise activities moving forward. Plans we're starting with an Arctic plan and we're baking climate change into that we'll take the lessons learned and inject those into the next tranche of plans that's developed as the spring moves forward. Security cooperation we're competing a bit with bandwidth with the Ukraine crisis but we've got several primaries for collaboration that have been identified through the CFR system and a discussion with our colleagues in security cooperation and partnerships. Arctic Security Forces Roundtable which is the only Arctic center, Arctic related fora that discusses hard security which is explicitly left off the Arctic Council Charter. We will feature climate change during the event that will be held and hosted by NORFCOM in May. For NATO, I'd say we've got lots of progress to do here, lots of undone work but one line of thought is leveraging the COEs, Centers of Excellence, and the variety of efforts that they've got ongoing to integrate there and also leverage what's happening already. We're gaming as a coastie, I'm just going to stay away from that one and assessments will keep that similar to the strategic documents because that'll get chopped across the command, the national and COCOM wide assessments and ensure that climate change is incorporated into those. Next slide please. All right moving forward, current underway efforts capitalize on the current funding environment i.e. let's make sure we're taking credit for what's happening and be prepared to answer the mail as queries happen in the future. We'll be prepared for funding next fiscal year as we expect DEEC or anticipate DEEC will be funded and we'll assist in posture to ensure assessments are completed for DCAT. We'll continue to build our network identifying several fruitful engagement points having previously identified several dead ends and the better our network, the better our ability will be to respond to upcoming climate change deadlines and data calls and that concludes my comments. Thank you very much to Mr. Gary Russ from the J4 and Commander Jake Kass for their presentation on UCOM. Next we will hear from the AFRACOM team. Mr. Garth Anderson is the Chief of Environmental Security in the J4 and Ms. Swathi Viravali is representing the J5. We look forward to hearing your presentation today. Right thank you and I'm Garth Anderson with AFRACOM J4. With regarding security implications of climate change in AFRACOM we always take the approach of looking through the lens of our campaign plan. So if you give me the first slide please. The AFRACOM campaign plan really provides the basis of everything we do and I'll run through the four objectives of it very quickly just kind of set the stage of how we we went through the process of determining climate security risks. The first one is access and influence. We look primarily at countering the influence of both Russia and China as global competitors. The second objective is countering violent extremist organizations or VEOs. Here we're looking to reduce the threats and the disruption of organizations such as Boko Haram and Al Shabaab. They're disruptive by undermining good governance and stability on the continent and we seek to to counter that. The third objective is crisis response and this is primarily the the traditional role of responding to both natural and man-made disasters. And finally objective number four is working through our partners to to build up our allies and partners to build up their capabilities rather than have to use just just US capabilities. So we take a different approach especially as we compete with China and Russia. We try to build partnerships rather than take a transactional approach with our allies and partners. By building this capacity they're able to respond to their own crises and it minimizes the resources that the United States has to put against something like that. We tend to use the term to the left of the boom investments that we make now in their capabilities have a great payoff later on. Of course our end state you can read that. Essentially we've identified and countered our adversaries. VEOs are no longer disruptive imposing a threat and above all we maintain access and influence on the continent. Okay next slide please. APRICOM recently held a symposium called the APRICOM security implications of climate change. We thought it was a very successful endeavor that we just did at the end of January. We brought together players from APRICOM from across the interagency from DOD and our components to just look to go through in a more of a methodical process to evaluate the impact of climate change on APRICOM strategy and operations. The first task that that I'm going to talk about that one of the deliverables from the symposium was to identify the climate related security threats. The first one is how geopolitical competitors use climate change as an opportunity to increase their influence. China and Russia exploit climate change impacts to expand their footprints across the continent. For example China has already launched initiatives with the African Union to promote Sino-African cooperation through joint research on climate environmental change. Another threat overstretched U.S. and African partner nation military capacities and capabilities. In other words climate change will drive climate by increasing resource competition, the potential for disease outbreaks and the frequency of natural disasters. These factors will compound African problems with overpopulation and weak governance to further stretch both partner nation and U.S. military response capacity. The third threat is the expanded influence of VEOs and other malign actors. VEOs take advantage of worsening conditions caused by environmental stressors such as drought by offering alternative economic opportunities and providing social services in order to build public legitimacy and to marginalize the actual established government. Most importantly VEOs such as Al Shabaab use governance failures to respond to climate change not only as recruitment incentives within the marginalized populations but also opportunities to increase illicit activities such as arm trafficking, wildlife trafficking, and others. A fourth one climate change can affect the execution of our war plans through decreased accessibility of two ports and airfields. Rising sea levels and water availability could adversely affect the operational capabilities of ports, airfields, and other forward posture locations. The ability to execute war plans as well as other contingency operations could be significantly affected by limited access to this key terrain. And finally this was a new one that came to light that we hadn't thought of in our initial analysis was with a global trend toward electrifying transportation and developing power storage technologies is going to sharply increase the demand for batteries and the critical component materials. A competition for these materials on the African continent could potentially create internal conflict and exploitation opportunities for VEOs and global competitors. So I'll now turn it over to Swafi to discuss the next component of our analysis. Thank you Garth and thank you all for your time here today. I'd like to briefly review how the security implications of climate change affect U.S. AFRACOM's mission. First we recognize that climate security will require a whole of government approach with USAID and state in the lead. We've historically had challenges with these institutional silos within the U.S. government but we strongly believe that climate security offers us an opportunity to both integrate and elevate climate change and address these institutional silos with a net impact to other U.S. government planning paradigms. Second the security implications of climate change are such that the Department of Defense, the geographic combat commands such as all of us here today and and our components will have a role. We can both help elevate and integrate climate security into our strategy plans and engagements. U.S. AFRACOM recognizes that there's a tolerance of risk that we are starting to outpace within the African continent that will fundamentally change the way that we that will change the way that U.S. AFRACOM components and partner allies will function in our AOR. U.S. AFRACOM also recognizes that there are subnational effects and impacts that that along with a complex interplay of local dynamics and governance will require subnational frames of understanding. That being said in order to address the security implications of climate change U.S. AFRACOM must first understand climate change and its implications then plan to address those implications and finally execute the plan to address the security implications of climate change. In light of guidance and directives from the National Command Authority and the DOD the observed and expected implications of climate change in Africa and the threat to U.S. to vital U.S. national security interests U.S. AFRACOM sets forth the following strategic goals to address this complex evolving and enduring challenge. First we seek to lead U.S. AFRACOM leverages its planning ability and convening authority to organize and lead a whole of government with partners and allies effort to address the security implications of climate change shape. U.S. AFRACOM identifies and addresses the most critical security related institutional sorry critical security related climate change challenges and incorporating climate change into our theater strategy campaign planning and orders. Finally respond U.S. AFRACOM working closely with interagency partners and allies and African partners is prepared to respond to climate related crises. That being said there are tasks that are firmly within our lane and outside our lane. Outside our lane we will seek to leverage our OSDP our joint staff U.S. aid state and other partners both within the African continent and throughout globally tasks within our lane. These tasks will require two main sub tasks. The first task is to institutional climate security. A couple of presenters have already talked about how their specific geographic commands have done that. AFRACOM seeks to do this by establishing the expertise and staffing capacity at U.S. AFRACOM to integrate climate security planning, modeling, programming and assessment across the staff. And we've done this by creating a climate security working group that coordinates action officers across the command to provide input into the command strategy plans and engagements. We're also increasing the commands climate literacy to satiate learning demands by having a series of symposium and other events that my colleague Mr. Anderson just referred to. Second task and perhaps this is the most important one and primarily why I'm here to listen to you all is how to operationalize climate security. When I was preparing my presentation I was looking for a doctrinal definition of what it means to operationalize of what it means to operationalize. While no doctrinal definition exists, joint pub 3-0 defines strategy as a prudent set of ideas for employing the instruments of national power in a synchronized and integrated fashion to achieve theater, national or multinational objectives. And defining the operational level of warfare as the level of warfare at which campaigns and major operations are planned, conducted and sustained to achieve strategic objectives within the theaters or other operational areas. So this then tells us that operationalization is a translation of strategy into campaign and or operations and plans to conduct and sustain operations to achieve strategic objectives. Planning should involve linking the capabilities and resources necessary to accomplish objectives and formulating the proper approach for further employment at the tactical level. I'd like to give a shout out to my colleague Lieutenant Colonel Brown who helped provide that definition. What you see in the slide in front of you is our attempt to do both those things, first to institutionalize and second to operationalize. With my remaining time I will hopefully briefly go over those key challenges. First foundational challenges, these are challenges that are internal to the command. Within AFRICOM the overlap between the both biophysical drivers of change coupled with the socioeconomic drivers of change will affect US AFRICOM's mission, which speaks to the criticality of creating a common operating picture. And our internal question is how do we develop this with rigor to both climate and conflict modeling or downscaling that allows us to leverage the investments that our interagency partners have already made? How can we create a common operational picture for climate risk across our C4I allies and partners as well as the rest of the world? How do we integrate predictive climate tools into planning architectures, our integrated priority lists, posture and strategic programming? Second, theater shaping. Theater shaping is what's happening in Africa now and into the strategic horizon. Our main question here is what are those operations activities or investments or OAIs that are climate specific? And finally, what is the key terrain that the OAIs will need to occur upon? Keystone challenges. These challenges are the ones that are the most difficult to answer or should be answered and could be game changers. Some of the driving under arching questions here are where will the demands of humanitarian assistance disaster response create game-changing conditions for national security in Africa that affect U.S. Africa's mission set? We acknowledge that there are several sequencing issues. How do we trade off moving troops to support European allies versus incorporating weather and climate impacts into the near, midterm and far future for Africa, similar to the problem set that our colleague Commander Cass alluded to in his presentation? How do we prioritize identifying risks on the continent as it affects our ability to conduct strategies, plans and engagements? We need to incorporate risk into our intelligence assessments and other AFRICOM assessments. Finally, the character of warfare is inherently changing because of technology, which increases our ability to both be more agile, but how does the Department of Defense Enterprise leverage these technological advancements to become more operational to climate security? I'll pause there to yield more time for discussion and thank you all for your time. Thank you very much to Mr. Garth Anderson and Ms. Swati Viravalli for your presentation on AFRICOM. Now I ask our presenters to please go camera on for the question and answer period. For first question, how is it that the Arctic ice melt and permafrost thought is going to stress and affect Russian defense budgets and Russian defense behavior in each of these AORs? So for UCOM the connection is obvious. How is it going to impact Russian behavior across the Arctic and across Europe? But also for AFRICOM how is it likely to impact what you see as Russian behavior across the African continent? Okay, I think I can start on that one. So permafrost thawing will create significant investment challenges across the northern sea route where there's a already sizable footprint of military bases and other dual use infrastructure. I've read a few articles, I can't remember the numbers off the top of my head, but said that the profits from resource extraction would be several orders of magnitude less than the investment necessary to maintain all the facilities, particularly the petroleum tanks that are highly susceptible to heave and sink issues as permafrost thaw occurs. AFRICOM, do you have a sense of how you expect Russian behavior to change in your AOR as a result of some of the climate change challenges? Yeah, I can take a stab at that. I mean, immediately, and I recognizing that we're on an open forum and an unclassified level, not immediately but indirectly, we also recognize that Russia and Ukraine are both net exporters of wheat, and so we anticipate that there will be a huge food security impact in the future. I don't think we've done any modeling yet to estimate what that impact is, but Africa is a net importer of both Ukrainian and Russian wheat exports, so absolutely, Garth. And it's obvious that a lot of Russian proxies and contractors that are engaged in operations on the continent will probably have their priorities changed, so it may actually work in our favor in some cases in that we're not having to deal with the Russian meddling and their approach to gaining access and influence. There could be two sides to that coin. For your second question, who across your command staffs does the commander empower to operationalize and integrate climate security threats issues across the J1, J2, J3, J4, J6, J7, J8, and all of the embedded interagency and international partners? Is this for Africa? Sorry, this is for both. We'll just go first and hand it over to you, Cum. So I think we are very lucky here at Africa, because we have our deputy J5, Brigadier General Hovatter, is a what we like to call him our climate czar, and so at the flag officer, general officer level, it really helps us to have that, that his personality to help operationalize the climate security across the command. And under his steerage and direction, as I mentioned before, alluded to the climate security working group, and the climate security working group is combined of all our jaders, action officers at the GS13 and Lieutenant Colonel and below type. So really the people who are going to do it and the interagency community, excuse me, thank you. We also have USA participating to help operationalize the impacts across the command. And the climate security working group, obviously a huge category of expertise, also help us unpack what those implications of climate change on the continent will be. Yeah, I would like to add that generally the default organization whenever it comes to climate seems to land with the engineers, it always starts there, but we were successful in identifying the engineers with it with an important but supporting role. And because of the identification of threats and the integration into plans and strategy, the rightful leaders of the program must reside in the J5. Over. All right, I'll follow there. And I would say, obviously, Swati, Garth, Gary and I compare a lot of notes being both here in Germany. So in short, it's a ECJ5 lead with strong support from J44, Gary and his team over there, and also another plug for our climate change working group, where we're using that to really get to the right people to pull these threads and mature this process. Have you included climate change considerations into your supply chain guidance to your co-coms? And be me. I guess I can kick that off since I'm in the J4. There are some considerations, I don't think it's as mature as it is with strategy and plans, but logistics are catching up because some supply chain issues are going to become critical. Well, not just supply chain, but also access and transportation as the effects of climate change are felt. I touched briefly on access to ports and airfields. Well, that function actually resides in our J4. So very concerned about those impacts and if current posture locations can support the mission today, 10 years from now, 20 years from now. And I'll grab it for the UConn side. So we're certainly in the J4 looking at it. We're integrating it into our analysis from the as reaching from the Mediterranean up to the northeast and across. We haven't actually given our service components any specific guidance yet. We just haven't gained that large of engagement yet. We're still trying to get our team together and get them all working on the same working group and accomplish a couple of tasks. But it's certainly, as we briefed in our slides, the EU is put billions of dollars into upgrading the infrastructure, which facilitates that supply chain resiliency with bridging and rail gauges and that kind of stuff. Hopefully that answers it over. What additional input and support from the intelligence community on climate change related matters would be helpful to your planning with regard to your plans and strategies to prepare for and respond to future impacts of climate change? And this is actually related to another question which was about resourcing. Where is it that you, if you were able to ask for more, where is it that you feel you could effectively use more resources in your efforts to look forward to the potential strategic impacts of climate change on your AOR? I think I can kick that off Africa. So I think I alluded to this in our slide deck and with the articulation of the need for a common operating picture. And what we really need is authoritative scientific data that includes both social science and physical science inputs and how the Intel community, we need to be able to leverage Intel estimates, both at the classified and the unclassified level. We're right now working primarily on the unclassified level, but obviously as things move in the future, we'd like to move that over into the classified realm. So I believe we're currently using C2IE, so if we can somehow figure out how to plug in scientific authoritative data into something like that, I think that would be a key area. In terms of resources, I think what right now we just need more human capital and dedicated resources to be able to do this from a sustained level. So right now this is an additional duty as assigned and we don't have sort of a one person being able to do this. So I think that's an issue. And as I covered earlier that one of our campaign objectives is to work with allies and partners and build their capabilities up. Right now any engagements that we do, even in the realm of environment or climate, is done to our own internal security cooperation program, which means it comes out of hide, which is fine. But given the rising importance of considering the effects of climate change, I think new sources of funding need to be made available in order for us to expand our engagements. And I know there is hope on the horizon as the Defense Environmental International Cooperation Fund or program maybe have their funds restored in FY23. And I know Gary probably has, he's jumping up and down on that one too. So right over. So I guess the simple answer is just to say ditto from what my AFRICOM buddies said, you know, basically manpower is obviously a critical function. It's an, climate change is an additional duty for both Jake and I. And, you know, obviously the rest of the working group, it's definitely their additional duty. And that's why we're having to, you know, try and jam it down their throats and make them participate with cognitive engagement, you know, thinking from their perspective. As my buddy Garth said, you know, I'm going to hit the DIC fund and security cooperation, security cooperation, you know, at the combatant command level, I don't, we're not counting carbon emissions. You know, maybe somebody a joint staff or, you know, SD is going to make us count them, but we're just going to ask somebody else to give us those numbers. The only way we can impact our theater is through security cooperation and, you know, strengthening our, you know, the weakest links as you will inside of our country. For us, you know, we would probably say it's along the Balkan side of the house as they continue to grow out of the former Yugoslavia countries or former country of Yugoslavia and, you know, build their own components and capability. Yeah, I think that's it. Thank you. Unless Jake's got something. There were a few different questions on the kinds of models that you've been using. I'm going to pick one of them, but feel free to answer sort of more broadly. So, UCOM talked about the DOD climate assessment tool. And so this was a question for UCOM, but sort of I'm going to throw it out to both COCOMs. Have you been using the DCAT to assess your installation climate exposure? Are you providing information to OSD for further enhancement of the tools? And more generally, sort of, what are the models and technical resources that you're using here? As you try to deal with these challenges. So I'll go ahead and jump on that one. So we did an education program throughout the theater regarding the DCAT so that all the components and installation managers understood what DCAT was. From there, we're waiting for the DCAT team to come to UCOM and they have not provided an actual schedule for when they're going to do the assessments. The other thing that all of the combatant commands that, well, maybe some of them anyway, have various countries identified that they'll share, the Department of State will share the DCAT program with, I think for us, it's Germany, Italy, England, and I'm sure I'm missing somebody, but either way, so we'll see if that helps. Other systems, we're using the online stuff and assessing government stability and other stuff like that coming out of Notre Dame and other organizations that are putting it online. Jake, you got anything to add to that? Yeah, I think I'll just go out on a limb here with a bit of my personal editorial. I do think, as African mentioned, getting it into a centralized usable tool, some sort of data environment would be helpful. However, there are so many tools out there, like Gary mentioned, there's one for Notre Dame, one for University of Hawaii. There's all sorts of modeling out there, and I have a little bit of a modeling background enough to know that different assumptions will give you different answers. So all models are wrong. I think if we just accept that and go with what we got, that would be beneficial in incorporating it into a system that could be used, accepting that it's imperfect data. Yeah, from the Africom side, we use DCAT in a very limited fashion because it really only applies to installations, and we only have one location that could be described as an installation, and that's in Djibouti. The rest of our posture locations are expeditionary or just locations, logistical nodes where we can surge into and only have periodic presence. So I think our analysis of climate impacts on those locations are going to be a little more quantitative and assessing local conditions more so than the broad brush, methodology that DCAT did, and also use it to use some kind of methodology like that to project where we want to be in the future, where we can best impact our own response and our own access and influence, and I understand that they're doing some upgrades to DCAT to be able to do that in a more expeditionary environment. So really good. I'm not answering your question, I'm going to answer your question with another question. We're not currently using any models yet, but obviously there's a huge desire, there's a huge need to leverage those social models or scientific and those physical physical models as well and scientific authoritative data, and I think the problem that we're dealing with here is that it's a really complex planning paradigm problem because of the mishmash of time scales. We're planning for the near, very near future, but unfortunately we don't have the models to sort of force, and we don't have, like Jake mentioned, of all models are wrong. We have some more wrong models of the near-term future, so the scale, which is complicated by the fact that the scale of data availability at the subnational scale, especially in Africa, where we don't have the longitudinal data that we need to drive some of those models. So we really need to leverage scenario planning, horizon scanning, and other creative ways, so I mean this is really a call to the folks on the line on the net from our scientific community to help us with that. Over. Relatedly, there are a number of questions which are about your partnerships within the US government, and one of them is asking are your co-coms working with ODNI's Climate Security Advisory Council because they're apparently looking at some of these issues and how to leverage modeling that's coming out of Department of Energy to support things, but if you could speak broadly about your engagement within the interagency, where you have some productive partnerships, and you had a question earlier on the intelligence community, where you might be looking for a little bit more engagement. Yeah, I can go ahead and start and then leave the harder part to our UConn colleagues. So in terms from a partnerships perspective, I mean AFRICOM, I think really the whole model of AFRICOM and how it originated was from a leveraging the partnerships both within AFRICOM within the US government, so you know resting upon those laurels. We haven't worked specifically with the ODNI, but as we establish this community of interest within the command, then we establish those feedback loops within the national capital region, so hopefully in the future we can anticipate working with those communities, but you know definitely looking at our colleagues in OSTP and joint staff to drive some of those, provide some of those policy demands that can help buttress some of our operational needs. From the UConn side, we've been challenged with trying to figure out who's the belly button, and you know I touched some guys from Germany, I don't know, a couple weeks back, and it was very clear they were policy guys more worried about carbon emissions and that in the political side of the house where as I told you, we're trying to be the operational side with security cooperation, so we're still refining who we should utilize and target, it's just hard to find a specific belly button. Jake? Yeah, I think I'll couple this with another question I see in the chat about USAID and state. It's worth noting that we, both of those agencies are represented in the J9 at UConn, and we speak with them often on these topics. USAID has a footprint and is doing activities in the Balkans, which also kind of led us to believe that's where we should start our efforts, and we recently briefed Ambassador Sterling, the political advisor at UConn, to identify ways that we might be able to leverage state and their diplomatic efforts. One that was suggested, but we haven't fully explored quite yet, is influencing the country plans that the embassies have, because that might help influence how the military folks at post execute their missions. Over. We have a recent question that sort of a response to something that Swathi said, which is about timeframe. What is the timeframe you're looking to prepare, you're looking for to prepare the effect, to prepare for the effects of a changing climate. So are you looking at 20 months, 20 weeks, 20 years, you know, where is it that your time horizon is, and how does that intersect with some of the other time horizons that you are hearing about and dealing with? Yeah, I think that's a great question. So we really have to do, I'm not a planner, so I'm, and unfortunately the planners are not here in the room with us, but if they were here, I imagine them saying something along the lines of anything from right now, so very current to 2050, right? So, which is a big, big, big gap, but I mean, the planners write their plans within the, you know, within five year, three to five year time frames. And so that's when we were getting at the complexity of, you know, the longitudinal climate data, not necessarily matching that three to five year time frames and the climate variability models not being as robust as we wanted them to. I mean, some are good, but we just don't have access to those. So does that answer your question, Dr. Singh? Yeah, and from the, you come side, exactly what she said, three to five years is, you know, your operationalizing, trying to, you know, affect your security cooperation and, you know, line up money and define weaknesses and targets. Obviously, longer term, you know, we might go as far as 10 years, you know, when we start doing some of the distinct campaign plans and what have you, but we're really trying to go short term. Again, remember, we're not counting carbon emissions. So obviously carbon emissions is, you know, a 20 to 50 year plan and we're, you know, that just, we're just not impacting that specific area of requirement over. Jake. All right. Why don't we end here instead of trying to switch, sneak one more question in before 1048. So I would like to thank our presenters again from UCOM and AFRICOM today for your presentations and questions. At this point, we will return to Commander Andrea Cameron. Hello. Thank you so much to Mr. Gary Russ from the J4 and Commander Jake Kass from the UCOM presentation. And we'd also like to thank Garth Anderson and Swati Varavalli from AFRICOM. It has been a wonderful presentation. You can see already from SENTCOM, AFRICOM and UCOM how their different AORs look at the climate security risks and what they're doing about them very differently and reflective of the countries within their AORs. This was a wonderful panel showing both the respective vulnerabilities and their relationships between the two geographic combatant commands. At this point, we'll take another 10 minute break and we will return at 11 o'clock for our next panel with teams from SENTCOM and UCOM. See you in 10 minutes.