 Hello and welcome back. I am Andrea Cameron and I am the event chair for this conference, the National Security Significance of a Changing Climate, Risk and Resilience in the 21st Century. Before we proceed, let's review both the poll question from before lunch. We asked the audience, what did you think was the most significant climate-related issue, and I'm showing you the results now. Competition for resources, sea level rise, and state fragility seem to capture the most votes. So while the majority earlier thought diminished security, the homeland was our greatest threat. The low numbers here are for concerns like domestic migration, diminished operational capacity, and Arctic accessibility. So the audience must have a lot of faith in the United States system and our own readiness of our forces. Thank you for letting us know your thoughts again. I'd like to thank all of the amazing speakers this morning. This afternoon promises to be just as riveting as our two final panels are about to be delivered. One is the Department of Defense budget and infrastructure considerations, and the second is blue competition, U.S. and international efforts to develop a blue economy. The conference will conclude by 3.30 Eastern Standard Time. As a reminder, all materials can be downloaded from the bottom of the events page. You will find the conference program, which includes the agenda and full biographies for all our participants. Also available are the events page are the three conference pamphlets. In one, we asked all our experts today to give one policy recommendation and we organized those for you. In another, we asked them to give one piece of advice for their audience in particular. And finally, there is a pamphlet with insights I've gained from the scientists and students who are involved in my climate change and national security class. It is titled What Can You Do? All of these available, all these materials are available to you through the events page. And we also launched the Naval War College library guide on climate change and the link will be available in the chat. This research portal is a repository of countless open source resources organized and available. And the books and journals are available to those with Naval War College credentials. We invite you to check it out and welcome your input. Please contact our dedicated librarian, Isabelle Lobs, if you have input. Thank you again to her for putting this together for us. As a reminder, this event is being recorded and will be available on the Naval War College YouTube channel afterwards. Now after looking at the changing climate and how it affects the strategic and operational considerations that we discussed this morning, the Department of Defense, in fact, the government as a whole, has countless other considerations as well. So we'll go straight into the fourth panel today, the DOD budget and infrastructure considerations. As a reminder, 19% of you voted for that on our recent poll. So it was with great pleasure that I introduce our moderator for this panel, Dr. David Alderson. He is a professor of operations research and director of the Center for Infrastructure Defense at our sister institution in my alma mater, the Naval Postgraduate School. Since 2006, Dr. Alderson has been the principal investigator for sponsored research projects for the Army, Navy, Air Force, Marine Corps and Coast Guard. And he's currently involved with SIRDEP-funded research on installation resilience in the presence of extreme weather and climate change. For those not familiar with SIRDEP or the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, I put their website in the chat along with Dr. Alderson's Center for Infrastructure Defense. Please welcome me or please join me in welcoming Dr. Alderson. Thank you, Commander Cameron. It is an honor to be here with you today and to have the opportunity to moderate this distinguished panel. I want to open this panel with a couple brief ideas for our audience. Throughout today's conference, we have heard the term infrastructure with repeated recognition of the need to protect our military infrastructure from climate threats, as well as to make our infrastructure resilient to sea level rise, extreme weather events, and other hazards resulting from climate change. But what is infrastructure and how should we think about it? Certainly, infrastructure includes physical assets such as buildings, roads, pipes, wires and equipment. And much of their traditional infrastructure protection has focused on prioritized asset lists and concerns about replacement costs for damaged assets. But more important than these assets themselves are the functions that they enable. Putting this in a familiar lexicon, assets work together in systems to create function. Function enables capability and capability supports mission. Importantly, it's not the assets themselves that we care about. It's the missions they ultimately support. In general, a key challenge for installation owners is understanding the relationship between asset and mission. And that's before we start to consider the rise and potential threats caused by climate change. The second point I want to make briefly pertains to the idea of resilience, which features prominently throughout today's discussion. Resilience is a topic that has become incredibly popular, but it is also one whose definition is increasingly muddled as it seems that everyone is recasting their current work through this lens. Understanding resilience and how to create it is a deep topic and one that could be a panel or conference on its own, but I'd like to put one idea in your minds. And that is that resilience is not about what you have, it's about what you do. For example, having backup generators does not make you resilient if you're unable to put them into use when the time comes. In other words, resilience is about the verbs, not the nouns. One resource I would recommend for those who want to learn about this topic is the Resilience Engineering Association, and we will put a link to that organization in the chat. And now I have the privilege of introducing our panelists. The Honorable John Conger is Director of the Center for Climate and Security, Chair of the Climate and Security Advisor Group, and a Senior U.S. Advisor to the International Military Council on Climate and Security. Formerly, Mr. Conger served in senior positions at the Department of Defense, including Acting Secretary of Defense for Energy, Installations, and Environment. The Honorable W. Jordan Gillis is the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment. He serves as the Principal Staff Assistant and Advisor to the Under-Secretary of Defense for Acquisition and Sustainment, Deputy Secretary of Defense, and Secretary of Defense on Sustainment in the Department of Defense, and is the Principal Logistics Official within the senior management. Rear Admiral Retired Ann C. Phillips is the Special Assistant to the Governor for Coastal Adaptation and Protection for the State of Virginia. Prior to joining the administration, she worked to address sea level rise and climate impact on national security at the regional, national, and international level, and previously served nearly 31 years on active duty in the U.S. Navy as a surface warfare officer. Ms. Joan Vanderbord has over 28 years of professional experience working with the Department of Defense across a broad spectrum of issues, from climate change and energy security to environmental requirements impacting military training capabilities. Before retiring from federal government, she served as the Deputy Director for Ranges, Sea, and Airspace within the Office of the Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Readiness. Full bios for each of our panelists is available in the conference program. As you watch each of these presentations, please remember to enter your questions in the Q&A box. I will draw from these posted questions during the interactive Q&A session to follow. And now, our first speaker is the Honorable John Conger. Thank you, sir. Hi. My name is John Conger, and I am the Director of the Center for Climate and Security. I'd like to thank Commander Cameron and the Naval War College for both inviting me to speak here today to be part of this panel and for holding this conference. The impact of climate change on national security is a really important topic and one that we're paying more and more attention to these days. Already, you will have heard a lot of important information, things about how climate change can impact great power competition, how it is impacting stability around the world, and particularly with fragile states, how natural disasters driven by climate change can affect operations both domestically and internationally. And now we're going to talk a little bit about the defense budget and about infrastructure. And I'm going to get into those details that I've been asked to talk about, to give you a big picture, DOD budget overview, and to talk a little bit about how climate change might shape that budget going forward. We've all been asked also to give some advice and to give one program that we think is really important, one policy issue we think is really important. And then try and do all of that inside 10 minutes. And the fact that you're watching this particular version of my taping means that I made it inside 10 minutes on this version. So enjoy. So let's think about this and I'm going to mix up the order a little bit rather than tucking the advice at the end and tucking the policy initiative at the end. I think that it's really important and I'll do the advice up front and I'm going to wrap it at the end too. I think it's really important to remember that climate change impacts national security and in that context, it is a national security issue not just an environmental issue. We're not necessarily going to be focused on DOD emissions and green programs and how to make sure that we have a lower carbon footprint. That's all important and it really is. But climate and security is focused on how DOD responds to the crises that are driven by climate change. It is very much about how you protect yourself from the environment as much as how you protect the environment. And so in that context, and my word of advice for you is to think about this as a national security issue and to think about it in that framing. Don't think about it as an environmental program. Think about it as a national security program, an operational program, a mission program, a threat program. So as we think about the budget, the budget is driven by these things, right? It's driven by missions and it is not necessarily driven by the environmental portfolio. I can say that having led the environmental portfolio at DOD, the environmental portfolio, it does not drive the budget. But missions do. So as we think about the DOD budget going forward, I think one of the things we're going to have to remember is that DOD budget, here's my top level guidance is, I can put it in a nutshell, it's probably going to be flat. We can think about the pressures that are going to be on the DOD budget. The president-elect has said that he doesn't expect that he's going to be cutting the DOD budget. And I think that you're getting pressure in Congress in both directions. You're going to have folks in the Senate who in order to get to 60 votes are not going to want to see DOD budget cuts. And you're going to see folks, you're going to see a sort of an invigorated progressive wing inside the Democrats in the House who are going to have their new found power and think, ah, we can get some defense budget cuts in order to be able to get a majority vote here. And so they'll push in that direction. And where it's going to end up, I'm not sure, but I think it's a good planning projection to expect the flat budget. What does that mean? Well, in a flat budget environment, everybody's going to be fighting for every last dollar. In a flat budget environment, you're going to have growing requirements and a cap that's pushing down on those requirements. And in that context, every time you add money to one program, you're taking it away from somebody else and they're going to fight not to lose it. And so you're going to get pushback. If you create programs that have sort of their value is not necessarily seen as central, you're going to get significant pushback. So you have to tie this back to mission going back to my advice. Make sure that when you talk about climate change and climate impacts, you're talking about it in national security terms. Okay, second, I think that we can start to think about how the how you reshaped the money you were already going to spend, how you were able to take the military construction dollars that you knew you were going to get and put new requirements on them to make sure that when you built a new milk on project, it took climate change into account. You didn't put new projects in flood plains or if you did, because you had to put it in that particular place, you built it a little bit higher. You built it a little bit more secure. And in that context, you want to be thinking about more about how you're spending the dollars you were already planning on spending, what new requirements are being placed on those dollars rather than creating a whole new wing of the department that is focused on or a whole new program in the department is focused exclusively on climate change. I don't think the latter works nearly as well as the former. And so we're going to be thinking about reshaping. We're going to be thinking about resilience. We're going to be thinking about how you change the infrastructure dollars in order to be able to protect them better. And in that context, there's going to be significant money put against planning and vulnerability assessments. Now, I say significant money. I think it's more significant effort than significant money in order to identify what those projects are going to be. I'll give you an example. The Congress required DOD to do an assessment of all its shipyards and to find out what investments it was going to have to do in all those shipyards over the coming 20 years. Well, one of the things that floated to the top, it wasn't a climate request. It was an infrastructure request. And one of the things that floated to the top was that the Navy identified a requirement at its dry dock in Norfolk at the shipyard there that because of sea level rise, its flood walls around that dry dock were too low. And it put these $2 billion submarines at risk when they were in maintenance. And so they funded a project that was over $40 million to make those flood walls higher. I think as we do planning around DOD, you're going to find more of those projects. They're going to be the things that face an incoming climate risk that are actually going to have much more mission benefit than the cost. And so those will float to the top over time. And so I'm going to go to my recommended policy. I'm going to nestle it in here. I think that one of the things that is absolutely important for DOD to do is to take the requirement that Congress gave them to do military installation resilience plans, which were supposed to be part of the installation master planning process, which is a five-year process and every five years those are renewed, to take that and accelerate the ones at the bases that DOD has identified as the most vulnerable to climate impacts. And so there are some, all the services had to end in their top 10 in the Congress of what the most vulnerable bases were and they identified them. And so at the very least, those 10 bases per service should have military installation resilience plans developed within the next year. And that will yield projects likely that will need funding out further. But those won't necessarily affect the budget in the immediate term, this year's budget or anything like that. That's something that will come later. But overall, I think that it's important to link the budget requirements to infrastructure. I think that the nearest term climate impacts that will have the biggest budget impacts are likely extreme weather or wildfire that will impact infrastructure. And so I think that as we wrap this all up, and I'm limited in time, so I'm going to make it really short and really tight and I have hundreds of other points I could make, but I'm not, you want to boil it down to these kinds of extreme weather step function items are going to have the nearest term impacts and the most significant impacts. And there's billions of dollars or requirements from hurricanes and flooding and such that we're going to have to spend in response. So I'm wrapping up right now because I'm almost out of time and this is my 10 minute version. So advice, focus on national security, not necessarily environmental policy when you're talking about climate and focus on your resilience plans as far as a policy issue and the budget is going to be shaped, not necessarily increased as a result of climate change and expect black budgets. All right, I'm looking forward to your questions and I'll talk to you soon. Thank you Mr. Conger for that succinct overview and advice in a short period of time. Our second speaker is the honorable Jordan Gillis. Thank you sir. Good afternoon everyone. I'm Jordan Gillis. I'm the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment. I oversee the Department of Defense's construction, energy, environment, housing, real property, logistics, material readiness and product support portfolios and programs. Before I begin I'd like to thank the Naval War College and in particular rear Admiral Chatfield and Commander Cameron for the invitation to speak to you today. It's great to be here with the other distinguished speakers. As the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Sustainment my focus is ensuring that our energy, installations and environment programs as well as our logistics and material readiness programs support the national defense strategies for lines of effort. Rebuilding readiness and lethality, strengthening alliances and partnerships, improving performance and affordability through reform and taking care of service members and their families. As you know the scale of this enterprise is enormous. It touches every corner of the globe delivering supplies on a daily basis creating new capabilities when needed and adapting existing capabilities to meet emerging needs. DOD has over 600,000 facilities including barracks, hangars, maintenance depots, motor pools, commissaries, office buildings located on 524 installations worldwide with a facility replacement cost of nearly 1.2 trillion dollars. Not to mention the 27 million acres of land that our installations occupy or the trillion dollars in material assets like ships, aircraft, ground vehicles that must be ready and available for our war fighters. To ensure that we are postured to support the national defense strategy our installations and infrastructure must be reliable when faced with a wide range of resilience challenges which may be man made from adversaries or environmentally related. As such the department takes an all hazards type approach to ensure that installations and infrastructure are resilient to all of these threats including climate, natural events, disruptions to energy or water supplies and direct physical or cyber attacks. This includes planning and designing facilities to address local weather and environmental conditions and proactively developing policies, guidance and tools to address climate impacts on built and natural natural infrastructure. We ensure that resilience is a key consideration in the installation planning and basing processes by considering environmental vulnerabilities in installation master planning, management of natural resources, design and construction standards, utility systems and services and emergency management operations. As the variety of and velocity of threats continues to rapidly evolve and pose a challenge we must anticipate potential threats and mitigate our risks to our critical infrastructure. One key focus is addressing the uncertainty of long-term future environmental conditions by increasing predictive capability around hazards including extreme weather and other climate related hazards. There are two significant DOD initiatives that address this issue that I'll point out as examples. The first is a DOD developed long-range projection of sea level change at its coastal locations for various climate change scenarios. This data is now known as the DOD Regional Sea Level or Dersal Database. This data was recently incorporated into DOD's installation master planning standards and civil engineering design standards for coastal locations. And our office just reconstituted the interagency working group to update and refine the Dersal Database over the next two years to reflect current science and modeling. The second example is in September 2020. The department launched the climate assessment tool, the CAT, which provides vetted authoritative projected future climate data for 157 DOD installations via a web enabled dashboard. The CAT enables military departments and their installation personnel to deliver consistent exposure assessments and identify regions or installations for additional climate related studies. My office and the military departments are now evaluating the CAT for application to facilities design standards and DOD unified facilities criteria. Thanks to these and other initiatives, we've seen significant progress throughout the department in our efforts to meet the challenges of unpredictable weather patterns. For example, in Virginia, Joint Base Langley Eustis used a flood visualization tool to understand flooding impacts across the base and installed door dams, a floodgate alternative to sandbags to reduce the number of required sandbags by 70%. At Schofield Barracks in Hawaii, the Army partnered to build a 50 megawatt multi-fuel power generation plant that is cited to minimize potential impacts of storms, tsunamis, and rising sea levels and can maintain power to mission critical operations during an emergency. In San Diego, the Naval Amphibious Base Coronado was able to use sea level rise data to plan, design, and modify five buildings to resist a moderate sea level rise event. And the Air Force is pursuing a more accurate model set for predicting impacts to North Slope Alaska shoreline erosion to include warming water near the shore, increasing air temperatures, longer periods when sea ice is gone, increasing spatial extent of open water, increasing wind speed, storm surges, wave height, and thawing permafrost. In addition, the department has invested in research focused on improving the understanding of climate risks to installations through the Strategic Environmental Research and Development Program, or SIRTIP, and the Environmental Security Technology Certification Program, ESTCP. Some examples of work coming out of SIRTIP and ESTCP include understanding and assessing environmental vulnerabilities on three installations in the desert southwest in response to drought risk, developing a fire science strategy to improve monitoring and mapping of fuels and post-wildfire effects. Regardless of the cause, if there is a wildfire on a training range, that resulting loss of training time is what we want to avoid. The department has also been working to develop more landscape scale initiatives to better capitalize on both our on-installation conservation programs and our off-installation conservation partnerships through the Readiness and Environmental Protection Integration REPI program. The REPI program cost effectively and efficiently improves installation resilience by engaging in long-term cooperative agreements that limit incompatible development near our installations and ranges. These valuable partnership investments preserve and enhance key test training and operational assets prioritized in the national defense strategy and maximize our flexibility to use our land, water, and airspace for military purposes and ensure that our military and civilian personnel have the access they need to conduct mission essential activities. Within our overall installation resilience efforts, we have been especially focused on building energy resilience. Energy is an essential enabler of military capability and it needs to be available at the right place, at the right time, in the right amount, and at the right cost to produce and sustain readiness for the warfighter. In FY 2019, the department spent $3.6 billion on energy to power its facilities and non-tactical vehicles worldwide. That's on top of the 83 million barrels of fuel that we use to power ships, aircraft, combat vehicles, and contingency bases. Therefore, it is critical that the department be able to rapidly recover, adapt, and absorb disruptions to the energy supplied to military installations and ensure their mission readiness. As I mentioned earlier, in order for us to mitigate the risks, our focus has been to identify gaps through policy, planning, requirements, and tools to improve our energy resilience posture. Through initiatives like the installation energy planning or IEP process, the department explores ways to further integrate renewables with other technologies such as micro grids and battery energy storage to create more robust and holistic energy solutions. IEPs are living documents that are continuously updated over time to take advantage of advancements in renewable and storage technologies. As commercial technologies continue to mature, the department is exploring ways to overcome current resilience obstacles related to renewable energy intermittency. We found energy resilience can be enhanced in a variety of ways. These include redundant power supplies, identification and isolation of mission critical power loads in associated circuitry, integrated or distributed fossil alternative or renewable energy technologies, micro grid applications including storage, diversified or alternative fuel supplies, upgrading, replacing, operating, maintaining or testing current energy generation systems, infrastructure and equipment, and mission alternatives such as reconstitution or mission to mission redundancy. Of course, the department can't tackle all this on our own. This is a team effort and the collaboration between the services, public agencies, industry and Congress has been key to maturing the department's broader energy resilience framework and building irreversible momentum in operationalizing the national defense strategy. Example of this is the recently signed Memorandum of Understanding, MOU, between the DOD and the Department of Energy to help establish a framework for collaboration and partnership to strengthen coordination of efforts related to energy resilience and the protection of military installations and defense critical electric infrastructure, DCEI. As the DOE works to define policy and establish processes to protect DCEI, the DOD, DOE, MOU will provide an avenue to identify risks to DCEI on military installations and to help close energy resilience gaps. Looking ahead, our contribution to the department's purpose is clear. We must enable war fighting readiness by continuing to strengthen our resiliency and posture through execution and refinement of our current policies and procedures and remain flexible to adjust and adapt them along the way. Over the next five to ten years, we must continue to feature energy and environmental resilience as prominent aspects of our operational planning strategy. And on that note, I'll conclude by saying thank you once again for inviting me to participate today. Thank you all for your interest in this topic. I look forward to hearing from our other panel members as well as addressing your questions. Thank you, Mr. Gillis. That is quite a portfolio that you manage and the programs and examples you described are extremely relevant to our discussion today. Our third speaker is Rear Admiral retired Ann Phillips. Thank you, ma'am. Good afternoon. My name is Ann Phillips and I'm the Special Assistant to the Governor of Virginia for Coastal Adaptation and Protection. I'm honored to be here with you today and have been asked to speak about the collaboration between military and local governments to adapt to our changing climate. I'd like to thank Commander Andrea Cameron, Rear Admiral Shoshana Chotfield, the Naval War College, our moderator, Dr. David Alderson and my fellow panelists. And I'll share my screen so we can get started. Thank you all for tolerating that. So I'd like to leave you with three key points as we move forward this afternoon. The first is this must be a whole of government and community set of solutions, including federal, state, regional and local partners. Second, there must be a codified process by which DOD persists, participates in these planning processes. Right now, there is none and so it's a very haphazard and not substantial process in many cases, though not all. And I'll give some examples. And finally, the risk management decisions that we make today have a lasting impact. So if we aren't including climate resilience and sustainability as we look to our future, we are wasting dollars. You're looking at the community of Chesterfield Heights in Norfolk, which is the winner of a national disaster response competition grant in 2016. It's undergoing substantial work, as you can see, to make it more resilient to coastal flooding and also increased rainfall. Behind it is a large portion of Virginia's shipbuilding and repair industry, which includes military shipbuilding and repair. Also behind it in this scenery, you can see how flat the deprography is and buried back there. And some of the pictures are Norfolk Naval Shipyard in the city of Portsmouth and the Portsmouth Naval Medical Center, also coastal, also at risk. Our thread, predominantly in coastal Virginia, is flooding. Flooding from storm surge, flooding from increased rainfall intensity, duration and frequency, all exacerbated by sea level rise and land subsidence. We've seen 18 inches of relative sea level rise change over the past 100 years and we have an accelerating rate of change. And land subsidence largely caused by aquifer depletion is also a critical factor, which we can slow, but probably not stop. And it determines the kinds of outcomes and solutions we must consider. We are experiencing more and more nuisance flooding caused by wind driven tide, tide plus rain, lunar tide plus rain, plus wind plus storm surge, any combination of the above. NOAA every year does an update of nuisance flooding predictions. And we know that we will see our flood days double by 2050. And we are already seeing increases. There are 10,000 miles of tidally influenced shoreline to deal with in coastal Virginia. You can see our master planning regions there also on this slide. So we are kind of a crucible for the sorts of challenges that many other states are dealing with. And of course, we have this huge federal presence here. What's at stake? Three quarters of our federal presence is DOD, two thirds of that is Navy. Arguably the nation's largest naval station, Naval Station Norfolk, Huntington Ingalls, Newport News Shipbuilding, the only place we build and repair aircraft carriers. One of only two places we build nuclear submarines. NASA Wallops, DOD facilities at Wallops Island, missile test range, Virginia spaceport, NASA spaceport, the port of Virginia, seven total facilities, five located in the Hampton Roads region, the port of Hampton Roads. And of course, we have a substantial shellfish and fishing industry and a substantial tourism industry, which are also at risk. And of course, also part of our challenge. We have the largest percentage of our gross domestic product derived from our federal presence, 8.9%. And the largest percentage of defense personnel spending. And we're second only to California in defense contract spending and total defense spending. So we are wedded to our federal partners. And it's absolutely essential that we collaborate with them to adapt and protect our coast and this tremendous infrastructure. So what tools do we have in our toolbox? Virginia was fortunate that in 2014, we were able to participate in one of what became four federal and three Department of Defense integrated pilot projects. In our case, looking at whole of government and community solutions to sea level rise impact in the Hampton Roads region. The Honorable Alice Hill, who you heard speak this morning was instrumental in our participation in that and the Honorable John Conger, my fellow panelists was also instrumental in designating DOD is the lead agency Navy is the lead service and can and or Navy region mid Atlantic as the executive agent, which established that codified process by which the Navy, the federal facilities in the region could participate in this project with the authority in the top cover to do so. We learned a lot from that process. And one of the things we learned is that without some kind of direction and forcing function, it's very difficult to sustain partnerships over time. It becomes up to the women personality, the experience of the commander or the facilities public works directors, and suddenly you find yourselves with with gaps over time and you aren't able to sustain a partnership. Actions taken with the National Defense Authorization Act over the past four or five years have made a tremendous difference. And I'm optimistic that as those processes are implemented, and many of them have been slow to be implemented, we will see a change. The first thing that was directed in 2018 was that the services prioritize their facilities that are most at risk to the changing climate to climate change, whatever that might be. There are six facilities in Virginia that are on that list, Marine Corps based Quantico joint based Langley Eustis and four facilities in South Hampton Roads, including Naval Station Norfolk and Naval Air Station Oceana. So we know that we are in the headlights of the challenges that many of the services see as priorities, but what actions to take since then? Well, the other tools that you see listed here, REPI, Joint Land Use Study Projects, Defense Access Roads, Defense Community Infrastructure Program, which was created and then funded through NDAA over time, expansions to the Sentinel Landscape Program, which can now include some of the changes to the REPI program to include not only conservation, but also resilience and resilience, not directly adjacent to a fence line. All of these things are tools that we can use to move forward. One that I find most compelling is the creation of the 2020 NDAA of a military installation resilience plan, which is supposed to look 50 years out instead of the standard 20 years out, that installation master plans currently use, and which is to include resilience more broadly. So not only the facility, but the surrounding infrastructure, whatever might be required to collaborate to ensure the future resilience planning for that facility. I can tell you from talking with installation commanders, they have very little understanding of this program or how it will be implemented. They also say that as operators, there's so much that they're trying to deal with today, near term, that's in their face, that they really don't have the capacity to think long range. And they don't have the experience and the practical knowledge to be able to think long range in dealing with this threat. I'll talk a little bit more about that in my closing comments. So we have opportunities here. We have many different tools that we can use to pull together. But the challenge is in forcing that function down so it's actually being implemented at the unit level, at the locality level, and the ability to coordinate across and between and amongst military facilities and their surrounding communities and regions and even the state. Virginia has embarked on a master planning process to adapt and protect our coast. We released a resilience master planning framework in October of this year. We chose this picture because of the vulnerability of what you are seeing. The NAVSUP fuel depot, which is currently undergoing a resilience study, 2035 resilience study. And of course, Naval Station Norfolk, they are in the background. The fuel depot is very, very vulnerable to flooding, as you might imagine, and has found that with nuisance flooding, they are finding more and more impact to their ability to execute their mission because they have roads closed, they can't get access. And of course, 34% of the Navy's fuel is going through this depot at some point or another. So they're vulnerable and they are certainly a high-level national security asset. I'd be remiss if I said there weren't examples of excellent collaboration between localities and their military infrastructure. The city of Hampton and Joint Base Langley-Ustis is a tremendous example of a very successful and long-standing partnership. The support of San Diego has signed a memorandum of understanding with Commander Navy Regent Southwest expressly for resilience and sea-level rise planning. And back in coastal Virginia, Commander Navy Regent Mid-Atlantic is designated as the executive agent to ensure compliance with Chesapeake Bay program water quality requirements. That includes their ability to sit on the Chesapeake Bay program commission and also to oversee the actions to ensure water quality compliance with across DOD facilities within the entire Chesapeake Bay watershed. So with a strategic process in place, a codified process with the authorities to participate, it's easy to make tremendous progress. Without that, it's very much more difficult. I've been asked in closing to consider several questions. The first is, what policy would I recommend or enact? And it would be a coordinated federal response to building resilience as an essential element of our national security and a coordinated DOD response to build resilience as essential to our national security, led and supported by federal standards, backed by funded federal data and the best possible science, focused on pre-disaster hazard mitigation and pre-disaster resilience, prioritizing critical and vulnerable infrastructure and aligning funding strategies, as discussed at the state, regional and local level, through a whole of government and community approach. I'd also recommend rejoining the Paris Climate Accords. I'm sure that's been said many times today already. My piece of advice to the audience as we move forward is, you have to educate yourself about this challenge. Climate change as an entity that we think about every day has only really been with us for the past 20 years, maybe 30 years. And the science is improving constantly. The research is improving constantly. The kinds of things we should consider as we set standards are changing constantly. Any standard or regulation that is set today will not be constant. We will have to change it in the future. We need to set standards with the knowledge that we will have to make change and we will have to adapt over time. The way to understand that process is through education. Read all you can. Learn all you can. Stay on top of the latest changes and ensure that in every aspect of considering, you know, collaboration to adapt to protect climate change across federal infrastructure and the surrounding localities, regions and states, that building in resilience and building in the best possible climate science is going to be essential and the only way you know to look for that is to educate yourself. So with that, I'll close my remarks. Thank you very much for your time and attention. And I look forward to answering your questions. Thank you, Admiral Phillips. It's really important to understand that the need for installation resilience does not end at the fence line, but requires engagement with the local community. I recall a study more than 10 years ago that looked at Defense Critical Energy Infrastructure in Norfolk that was based on the concept of islanding. The idea being that Naval Station Norfolk would be able to have its own electric power infrastructure operate independently from the surrounding region. However, it quickly became clear that having the base lit up like a Christmas tree with the surrounding area in darkness is not a tenable solution given the base personnel and their families who live in the surrounding air. Your comments about these evolving relationships and planning in Virginia is important and insightful. Our fourth and final speaker is Ms. Joan Vanderbord. Thank you, ma'am. Hello, everyone. It certainly is a pleasure to be part of this forum today. And before I begin, I would like to personally thank Andrea Cameron and the Naval War College for bringing this very important event together. And thank you, Dave, for taking time out of your schedule to moderate this panel for us. Well, I'd like to begin by going back a few years when I was on the Army staff in the G357 working encroachment issues and overseeing the management of the Army's training land program. Well, at the time climate change was not at the top of my priority list because the projections were too far out and the near-term risk appeared low. But I began to see climate change in a different light over the next several years when the services began to experience unprecedented damage to ranges and training land from inland flooding, wildfires, more intense storms, higher temperatures and sea level rise that began to have both direct and indirect impacts on training. And that's what keeps me up at night now because readiness depends on the ability of the services to rapidly deploy and decisively respond to global threats. And the cornerstone to that combat readiness is training. So when we talk about climate change in this context, I think it's important that we also take a step back to look at the current challenges to training. Each of the services currently faces shortfalls and range capability from lack of automated ranges and maneuver space to scoring systems and airspace limitations. These challenges are further compounded by environmental requirements and incompatible land use issues that result in restrictions and limitations on the use of ranges, air, sea space and training land. This year, those challenges were further compounded by COVID-19 and its impact on training. So now let's throw climate change into the equation. Within the last five years, DOD has seen the bruising impact of severe weather events, sea level rise, flooding and wildfires fueled by climate change factors on its installation and training facilities. And the cost has been staggering now in the billions of dollars, but it isn't just the repair and replacement of infrastructure. It's also the cost to training readiness, which is so often overlooked and has resulted in impacts to deployments, loss of training land, beaches, restrictions to live fire training, scaled down multinational exercises, canceled sorties and the list goes on. So let me give you some example of those impacts to training. In 2018, Tyndall Air Force Base was flattened by Hurricane Michael, causing $4.7 billion in damages. Those damages forced the temporary relocation of personnel and their F-22 fighters to Hawaii, Alaska and Eglin Air Force Base. Joint Base Langley Usis on the East Coast, already subject to recurrent flooding, took on much of the aviation training for those F-22s in the aftermath of the hurricane. The recovery effort is still going on and won't be completed for at least another five years. Well, just six months later, the Air Force endured another hit when a third of off at Air Force Base in Nebraska was flooded. These 16 B-20 bombing ranges and target tree were severely damaged. Training capabilities suffered as sorties were canceled and airmen had to be sent as far away as England to train because of the damage to their R-13 simulators. Damages were estimated at $650 million and the recovery is projected to take at least six years. In 2018, Marine Corps Base Camp Lejeune was hit by Hurricane Florence. The Marines already being forced to make difficult funding decisions between near-term raininess and long-term modernization of their installations were packed with a hard punch. The hurricane caused $3.6 billion in damages from massive flooding. Beach erosion created obstacles to certifying the 22nd Marine Expeditionary Unit and deployments were impacted not only by damage to the rail network but because Marine Corps aviation assets were diverted for humanitarian assistance during the hurricane. Six months after Florence hit, Camp Lejeune still had not received Federal aid. Captain Neller, then the commandant of the Marine Corps, wrote to the Secretary of the Navy that readiness at Camp Lejeune home to one-third of the Corps' total combat power had been degraded and he stated that it will continue to degrade given current conditions. In 2017, bold alligator, the Navy and Marine Corps' Premier East Coast Amphibious Training exercises was scaled down due to units being diverted for humanitarian assistance and disaster relief emissions after Hurricane Harvey Irma and Maria hit. In 2016, Hurricane Matthew caused severe damage to the Atlantic Undersea Test and Evaluation Center of the Bahamas which impacted the submarine readiness training and command course, ship qualifications and rotary and fixed wind training. Over a six-month period in 2015 and 2016, intensive rainfall events hit for benning for Jackson and Polk causing severe flooding and washing out targetry, bridges, roads and damaging the multi-million dollar digital rain complex with significant impacts to training land and ranges. For hurricanes and severe weather events aren't the only climate change factors impacting training. Rapid snowmelt caused by rising temperatures in Alaska resulted in the loss of the battle area complex facility at Donnelley Training Center and months of lost training were due to unusable maneuver training land. Loss of permafrost also continues to impact stricter training in Alaska as maneuver land reverts to wetlands reducing the available window for training and access to training areas are lost due to the melting of ice bridges. Wildfires particularly in the West and in Alaska have resulted in the loss of training days impacting qualifications for deployment, damaging training lands and impacting live fire gunnery and aviation exercises. As an example in 2017 alone, Camp Pendleton lost over 15,000 acres of training land and they see an average of approximately 143 wildfires annually and in 2018 wildfires hit Fort Hood burning 8,500 acres and suspending live fire gunnery training. Well the repair of damaged ranges and training lands doesn't happen overnight and training workarounds are often just that they are workarounds that can compromise training readiness. There are also secondary impacts as well expansive loss of sediments in unstable soil on ranges and maneuver areas from flooding severe weather permanent permafrost loss and wildfire can result in increased training safety hazards, higher maintenance and repair costs and increases in environmental compliance associated with both the Clean Air Act as well as the Endangered Species Act as habitat is lost and species migrate due to changing climatic conditions. Well DOD has recognized climate change as a security issue dating all the way back to 2003 and they have also taken steps to respond to climate change from developing the climate change roadmap as well as analytical tools to assess risk and vulnerability but what often gets overlooked are risk to training capturing data that tracks training impacts and developing metrics to assess risk is essential to build resilience that said the policy I would recommend would be one that directs the services to capture the training impact from climate change factors and establish metrics to aid in assessing risk and vulnerabilities on that note I would like to add one piece of advice I believe it's time to take climate change off the back burner it's time to adopt aggressive and decisive action to build resiliency because climate change has the ability to degrade readiness over time giving our adversaries greater opportunities not to take action leaves readiness at risk I thank you all for your time and I'll be happy to answer any of your questions that you may have okay thank you Ms. Vandervoort the wildfires here in California over the past year certainly have had significant impacts on training exercises and readiness and now we turn to our Q&A portion of the panel if I can ask all of our panelists to turn on the cameras and as they do that I think it's worth noting that all the panelists noted the potential of climate change related events to affect operations readiness emissions so we have a number of questions that have come in about integrated planning over different timelines as well as both the cost benefit analysis and the need to tie climate resilience to operations and planning given the often short-term focus on current operations what advice do you have or maybe best practices for engaging partners and planning for events that are going to evolve over longer timelines and I know you can raise your hand or just jump in if you if you have an answer for that I'll start if you want I think that the challenge is that we are not good at that I'll put it very bluntly we're not necessarily good at working with the local community and planning we're not necessarily good at there are places on military bases where there's the operations folks on a base have never talked to the infrastructure folks through all their entire time that they've been there that's not unusual and it's a problem and so when you start to measure the planning for how do you make a mission more resilient and you need the installations people in the infrastructure people in order to be able to accomplish that but they don't know who each other are that that creates real challenges and and so somehow you have to create some access in order to move the ball forward on that. Hey and it's Jordan I'll chime in too as usual I agree with John for sure and you know the other challenge is that the longest lasting dollars we have are military construction dollars and those only last five years and and they typically will get reprioritized during that time anyway so even if someone was to come up with a long-term strategy that we get initial commitment to it's really hard to make that something that's enduring so one of the things that we tried to do with the climate assessment tool is that you can actually run scenarios that are much longer term so if you're at Fort Belvoir for instance you can see what the installation is going to look like geographically in 25 years according to climate models or 30 years according to climate models that allows you at least as an installation planner to lay down the groundwork for for how you need to adapt the installation where that's a little out of sync is with the dollars and so to get the funding you will continue to have to compete every year or every five years for for the dollars to make all those things happen. Any other comments or responses? I'll jump because I talked about it in my remarks but it just there has to be a way to establish a process that is sustainable across the changes in you know rotations and tours of active duty personnel and and the long-term staffs installation staffs which the Ottawa John Conger referred to people who were there full-time but who the active duty and operational folks typically don't know so how do you put a process in place where these people are forced to come together to at least communicate and and how do you then include the larger community so that as not only politicals come and go but mayors and and city council people and and other employees of localities they have a place to go there's a structure where they can enter in and meet with each other and collaborate and build from there so I to me that's a big part of it we're finding with the Virginia Sentinel Landscapes application for example that the we need operators and we need the logistics people and we need the facilities people and and all of those people together are what it's going to take to put together something that actually is the functional outcome and yet getting them together is is a tough call so a structure we need a we needed a fine process by which this can work and if I could put a two finger on that and just to wrap one additional factor into this outside the base there's a lot of stuff that the base depends on the the installation depends on the civilian community for energy for water for wastewater for housing for transportation for civilian out you know civilian employees all that stuff is off base and so there has to be some sort of give and take and some sort of relationship between the civilian community and the installations folks who don't talk to each other either as we alluded to in order to have one sort of holistic process. Okay great so following up on this mention of military construction dollars right so we've got a question about that are there ways that maybe these processes can be reoriented or maybe integrated to try to force some of these conversations either in planning or whatnot that maybe requires input from some of these other stakeholders that maybe aren't traditionally involved in this. I can go first again so that the simple answer to this is that's not exactly how it works right you have chains of command on bases where the commander says these are my top couple projects and I'm going to push this up the chain and then their higher command says all right I've got three projects from all these different bases and I'm going to put those in priority order and so on and so forth and whoever made the best case gets their projects funded in the given year but the challenge is they don't necessarily know about what they need from a resilience perspective or from a climate impact perspective because they haven't done the homework yet and somebody has to do the homework to put those things in front of them and when they're confronted with hey this is why you need this project oftentimes the commanders will look at all of those different things and make the right choice like the Norfolk shipyard example that I talked about earlier so so when all this stuff is blended together you got the the folks in charge are given choices between options but you have to develop the options for them and I think if I if I could one of the other things that we did that we started when I was at the department of the army was we issued a policy that required installation commanders to seek a way to have 14 days of assured access to energy and water for critical missions so not lit up like a Christmas tree but but at least ensuring that critical missions continue in the event of a disruption because as everybody knows we we do get power from off-site in in most cases so then at DOD now that I'm here or at least for another 10 days I'm here we are pursuing a policy that'll make a similar request across all the military departments so that installations are seeking that 14-day resilience and then that will then influence them to build that in not just to individual military construction projects but to look for other ways to drive that across the whole installation whether that's you know micro grids and and smart grids backup power alternative power sources that'll be one of the things that'll help make sure that military construction dollars for a critical facility aren't wasted as as soon as off-site power goes out okay maybe sort of broadening that question just a little bit it is certainly true with all of the activities that happen on an installation at a given time that an installation commander doesn't have situational awareness about all the dependencies that he or she faces are there ways in the planning process either the military construction planning process the mission planning process or other things that you can think of to naturally bring these people together to be talking about this so this this inability to connect assets and missions is something that I've seen over and over again and it's quite prevalent in all kinds of things it's prevalent in the cyber domain it's prevalent in other kinds of things folks simply just don't know the dependencies and therefore the risks that they're taking on on a daily basis are there ideas that you've seen that are maybe promising for trying to think about ways that folks can be coming together to think about these kinds of things I don't want to go out of order because usually John goes first but but I'll take a stab at it the you know I mean that's really the role of the installation professionals who are assigned to an installation so you know that in the army would be the garrison commander navy or air force to be the installation commander and that's usually a rotating military person but underneath them there'll be a deputy commander a department of public works civil servant professional who is really there to be the continuity to have that installation insight and to have the professional certifications that really illuminate those kind of critical components of a decision for the commander now I'll be the first to to point out that over the years one of the places as budgets were reduced we made cuts to those installation staffs and and you know some of the ones that I would argue are critical so energy managers at an installation I think are critical folks who should have positions and those should be staffed and so one of the things that that I would like to see happen going forward is to relook and be sure that we have that core cadre of installation professionals who are able to inform those decisions so that folks who do rotate through whether that's politically appointed leadership or or military folks who rotate do get that professional insight that they need I'll just add one other thought the so in my plug that the tapes version I talked about military installation resilience plans this was a congressional requirement that came in about a year ago and in that plan that it said every base has to do this that there were questions like do you know identify all of your dependencies outside the base identify what missions are vulnerable did there are there were a whole host of analyses were required and if people don't know the answers it still makes it hard but at least it forces them to ask the question and to do the analysis and you might hire a civil engineering firm to come onto your base and take a look at all of this and to figure out where your points of vulnerability or your single point failures are single points of failure are so that so that kind of thing it's it's sort of forced the issue in that context and the question is how fast are you going to get those done and and so that's that's a piece of the answer to your question but it's still I'm going to jump back in it's still there's still not enough information or knowledge on the military installation resilience master plan as an entity unto itself let alone how to do it or who's going to do it and so I go to the base commanders and say do you know about this and they go kind of so how would you do this well you know I can't even get two years on a palm cycle so I mean I'm like right here I can't think 50 years out I know I should but I can't so so back to the you know the question at hand how do we do this and I would submit we do this by some forcing function you know if the commander is interested everybody else is fascinated some forcing function to bring this higher up as Joan said in her remarks higher up into the into the prioritization list we have had installation commanders here in the Hampton Rose region who really cared about this issue and for which it was top of mind and we made progress they leave the new person comes in wonderful people highly skilled professionals never heard of climate change all that work is gone so we can't leave it up to personality we have to develop some sort of process and I would submit the integrated pilot project that was done here from 2014 to 2016 was an initiation of a kind of process that did work but it was a pilot project so so can we take something like that and move it forward as an example that's a suggestion and a possibility okay we've got time maybe for one final question so in the survey that we had just prior to this session the area that we received the least responses in terms of climate risk was sort of operations and mission readiness yet it was perhaps the dominant theme of the session what do we need to do or how do we communicate to get folks thinking about climate in a different way well let me let me start by saying that's a really good question and I think one of the things when we're talking about the integrative process and looking at climate change on installation it's very very important to bring that those operators in to have them right there because it's not just the infrastructure it's the natural infrastructure as well as you know when we train particularly on the land training is inherently damaging to land we put money into maintenance and repair of land there's a lot of things that we have to do to keep that land at a certain carrying capacity to handle that training um if we start to assess climate change impacts from an integrated approach where we look at infrastructure as well as natural infrastructure I think that will be able to generate the right requirements at the right level and that extends at the installation level all the way up up to OSD and it is not something that I believe we can't do we can do because we have in terms of the services have done that before across the board so so I think that the poll was interesting in that it asked what the most significant issue was and so that could be interpreted a bunch of different ways that you know operations and readiness are clearly affected by climate change but we operate all over the world and so we adjust to different climates on a regular basis it's those things that are fixed or those regimes that go outside of the the normal operations uh you know parameters that they're the ones that you got to pay attention to the most when you're thinking about operations but if you're in a fixed location and you're doing training and you've got folks you know running around outside and there's you know black flag days of you know over 90 degrees they can't train that day well what happens when a base uh in a southern state is going is looking at in 20 years going from 30 90 degree days a summer to 120 and those are real projections what do you do then about training on a base so it's not a tomorrow issue it's you know there's hot days they're dealing with today but there are there are issues they're going to get more exacerbated over time that they're just going to have to work through and that's just one example and there are others but people pay attention to issues that are in their face more than anything else and that's why the infrastructure and the hurricanes and the wildfires get the most attention because they're in our faces right now they are today issues okay great um uh mr cocker strategically has gotten the last word in i want to thank all of our panelists uh for their uh recorded comments their live comments their answers to the question i want to thank all the questions that came in this was really stimulating we could go for a lot longer but i know we've still got a lot of really great content here so i want to turn it back to commander cameron thank you all thank you so much to dr dave alderson mr john conger mr jordan gillis rear admiral phillips and miss john van der wort when most people think about climate and the do d they're worried about infrastructure and this panel was a superb job at diving into this primary area overall i'd like to thank the panelists so much for enriching our learning and this topic area before we go to break we have our last poll of the day so i'm going to launch the poll right now and then we will come back from the break at 220 the poll question is what is the least researched frontier the poll will be active for one minute we'll keep it open for 30 more seconds if other people would like to participate in the poll 10 more seconds i close out the poll right now thank you so much again to the fourth panel today and we will come back from the break at 220 with a very exciting topic about the oceans and the blue economy