 Welcome back to our conference today. We continue with presentations from both Southern Command and Northern Command. And as I mentioned from the outset, each geographic combatant command has its own way of organizing and leading around an issue and establish relationships between each other as well. We saw the extensive collaboration between UCOM and AFRICOM, and you will see similar coordination and enthusiasm between the SouthCOM and NorthCOM teams. As you'll see, this panel took a slightly different approach to presenting collectively. As a reminder, the conference program with the agenda and full 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 it'll be available on the Naval War College YouTube page after the event. Now, I'd like to introduce Dr. Christopher Faulkner, a postdoctoral fellow and professor in the National Security Affairs Department at the Naval War College. Dr. Faulkner, thank you for being our moderator for the SouthCOM and NorthCOM panel today. Hey, thank you, Commander Cameron. As Commander Cameron mentioned, my name's Chris Faulkner, and I'm with the Naval War College in the NSA department here. I'm very happy to be here and thanks for the opportunity to moderate this panel. This panel includes presentations from the J-4, J-5 teams from SouthCOM and NorthCOM to talk about operationalizing climate security. Before we jump into the presentations and I introduced the speakers, we wanted to provide some administrative guidance. I will only introduce our panelists by their name and current titles to provide them the maximum opportunity to present. The biographies for all of our speakers are available in the conference program, the conference events page. And second, just for a logistical purposes, please post all questions and comments using the, excuse me, using the Q and A section of the toolbar at the bottom. You'll also have the ability to upvote questions, which will help us identify those that are most important to ask our panelists. So if you could do that, if that function doesn't work for you, we'll also moderate the chat section. From Southern Command today, we'll switch the order from previous panels. This panel will start with Mr. Jeff Hughes, the deputy director for strategy, policy and plans in South Com's J5, followed by Ms. Linda Wostendijk, the command environmental specialist from the J4. We welcome both of you for your presentations today and the floor is yours. Good morning. Thank you for the opportunity to discuss the South Com area of responsibility and how climate change is being incorporated into our strategy. So where do we currently stand? Neither our current strategy nor campaign plan that were developed in 2019 specifically call out climate change. In December 21, our new commander, General Laura Richardson, issued initial planning guidance and her command appreciation. She identified climate change and environmental degradation as significant contributors to state fragility in our AOR. As we update our strategy, we'll continue to focus on three lines of effort, strengthening partnerships, countering threats and building our team. We utilize all levers and a whole of nation approach to advance security, governance and economic opportunity. Most critically, we seek to help our partners address those defense issues of greatest concern to them. So why should South Com focus on climate and the environment as we develop our strategy? The South Com AOR is a very diverse environmental region. In some cases, it's a region of extremes from the rainforest of the Amazon River basin with the world's largest river to one of the driest places on earth, the desert plateau of Southern Chile from the Caribbean islands to the Andes Mountains. According to the North American Congress on Latin America, Latin America contains four of the world's largest rivers. The area is generally considered to have about 30% of the world's fresh water. At the same time, almost 25% of Latin America is now considered arid or semi-arid. The Caribbean is one of the most biologically diverse regions with coral reefs, rainforest and abundant ocean fish populations. Latin America houses some 25% of the earth's forest. Industries across our AOR range from agriculture to industry to tourism. Since 2010, the population of the Caribbean regions increased by about 3 million people. Central America by 22 million and South America by approximately 42 million. In total, the AOR contains about 10% of the world's population. Between 70 and 80% of that population live in urban areas on the coast. So with this backdrop, what are the natural or environmental threats to our AOR? In the last year, the AOR experienced over 21,000 earthquakes. Almost 200 of those were magnitude five or above. One of the most damaging was the 7.2 magnitude quake that impacted the Southern Claw of Haiti in August of 21. According to UNICEF, the event impacted over 800,000 people leaving 2,200 dead and 12,000 injured. In 2020, Hurricanes Ada and Iota struck Central America a mere two weeks apart. They impacted over 9 million people leaving over 200 dead. The insurance journal estimated economic damages associated with these two storms at approximately $9 billion. The COVID pandemic has had widespread economic, social and political impacts on Latin America and the Caribbean. As of January 22, the region had had almost 1.6 million deaths or about 28% of the deaths reported worldwide. Peru had the highest COVID mortality rate in the region followed by Brazil. Deforestation and illegal mining have had a significant impact on the area. According to the Manangabe news, between 2010 and 2020, South America lost 2.6 million acres of forest or an area about the size of Ecuador. According to Insight Crime, illegal logging has become one of Latin America's most common crimes. Some estimates of the illegal forest industry estimate it at $100 billion annually. This deforestation destroys habitats, reduces the absorption of carbon dioxide and through erosion contaminates fresh water. Illegal mining of gold is a growing problem across the region. The global initiative against transnational organized crime estimates that since 2006, nearly 70 tons of illegally mined gold have been smuggled out of Bolivia. Much of this illegal mining is done by organized crime. All of it significantly damages the environment and are recognized threats by our partners. So how do we get after these threats? We work with allies such as the United Kingdom, Canada and France to synchronize our investments. We work with partner nations to develop capabilities and capacity to prevent and respond to disasters. We support partner nation operations focused on protecting the environment and combating illegal mining, logging and fishing. Through security cooperation and assistance, we help our partners acquire capability and develop the skills to prevent illegal activities or respond to disasters in their own countries and export that capability. So that might mean helping Argentina acquire excess P3s, helping Uruguay procure former US Coast Guard patrol craft or developing a domain awareness capability for the Caribbean. We continue to coordinate with our partners across the region to provide them an opportunity to attend training ranging from outboard motor repair to senior service schools. We conduct engineering projects in conjunction with exercises to improve and protect critical infrastructure. Through our humanitarian assistance program, we help provide critical resources like field hospitals. And through our state partnership program, we develop critical skills in emergency management, community planning and logistics that help our partners help themselves. We also support NGOs and interagency partners as they execute projects to protect resources and build resiliency. Now I'll turn it over to Linda to talk about some very specific details of how we approach this. Linda. Thank you, Mr. Hughes, I appreciate that. Good morning, everyone. As I was introduced, I'm Linda Versten-Deek. I'm with US Southern Commands Environmental Program. I am embedded in the J-4 in the engineers division. Next slide, please. Just very briefly, I wanted to reiterate what Mr. Hughes said in regards to our command when General Anderson came on board last year. She specified that climate change, what she calls climate defense is vital within our AOR. And it is one of her top five concerns. We deal with environmental engineering, solutions and obviously operational energy and are looking at ways and means that we can incorporate this into our activities in our AOR. Next slide, please. Just very briefly, I wanna show you who we have on the environmental team so that at least you can put a face with the name and that way you have someone you can reach directly out to in case you have questions. Certainly you can always send those questions directly to me. As you're aware, Southcom is also a joint military command and we support our US national security objectives in the Americas. So we work with our partner nations and interagency government organizations and we have a network of non-government organizations that we utilize in order to bring specific information to our partner nations to help them combat some of the issues that have arisen over the years that certainly lead to exacerbating the problems with climate change. We consider our partner nations also our neighbors which is not quite the same as most of the other combatant commands but that's what we have. We are a community of the Americas. Next slide, please. You saw this slide previously in one of the opening comments and when we consider climate change impacts we need to look at that on a global scale. So because our AOR is bounded by both the Pacific and the Atlantic we have direct results and impacts from both of those ocean areas. And certainly those go back and forth between the continents that are on either side of those. We've got a lot of various areas just within our AOR as Mr. Hughes says that exhibits some diametrically different climates and the impacts are very significant regardless of what those changing climates are. While once area faces severe drought their neighbors may be experiencing extreme storms and floodings with the oceans becoming more acidic and warmer and the glacial deposits both mountains and sea continue melting. It changes not only the basic composition of the oceans but it impacts anywhere that those oceans touch. We also have the illegal fishing issues that are significant to us because we get the threat networks out of China that for instance that come in with fleets of trawling vessels that then use the drag nets that significantly damage reef systems. Those types of activities also change how the climate is impacted, how the oceans are and the available resources to the people there. Additionally we have the surface waters in both oceans that are being impacted negatively by oil spills, sea dumps of plastic trash and human waste all which contribute to additional problems here. Next slide please. There are a few naturally occurring components for climate change. Those are obvious, volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, changes in the sun's energy, many other things. However, we have multiple manmade causes and those have created the most intensive impacts. These include agricultural practices such as cattle grazing, pesticide and herbicide use and things such as that and deforestation issues. These increases in greenhouse gases from traffic, road construction, cold-fired energy all lead to warming of our atmosphere and the fallout from utilizing oil-based or coal-based resources can impact our soils and our water as well. Next slide. We've had a lot of ways to look at combating climate change and these are the types of things that we are working with our partner nations to be able to provide information to help resolve these. In some cases, these are subject matter expert exchanges. In other instances, we show them or provide someone who can provide them with information on how to use sustainably obtained products, how to silver farm, for instance, or a silver grazing for cattle so that instead of having these huge feedlots that a lot of cattle companies use, they have them sustained within wide-spaced forests so that the grass grows for the cattle but it still sustains the environment because of the trees and the more free-ranging atmosphere that the cattle have. We support them through our operational energy program to try to find and utilize renewable and clean energy sources and where we can, we come in and assist them with the construction of solar farms for wind generation so that they have something other than oil and coal to go about heating their homes and providing energy by sustainably growing forests and teaching the people within the communities how to still have a livelihood without having to cut trees down in order to feed their fires. Then we can also assist our neighbors in obtaining a more sustainable future. Next please. So what specifically are we doing? As I said before, we do subject matter expert exchanges or SMEs. We do other types of engagements. We provide assistance within joint exercise programs. For instance, we have an exercise coming up in a couple of months here and we do these annually where for the first time we have included a portion that deals with climate change as part of the training, the tabletop exercise so that we can consider the impacts of what we do during an exercise and what we would do during a real-world event when it comes about because of a climate change situation. As Mr. Hughes mentioned earlier, we had issues with the tremendous storms that hit Central America a couple of years ago to back-to-back hurricanes that did a lot of devastating damage across multiple nations. We were able to provide assistance both in the engineering capacity as well as to assist them in things such as how do they recover spilled oil from their fuel farms or how do they clean up waste that has been scattered because of the storms come through and the land has been disturbed. We provide training for energy resilience, bring in partners from universities and other organizations that can help our partners to look at other ways of doing business that helps to preserve their own resources because a lot of Central and South America and the Caribbean require the or expect the money that comes in from people visiting and I'm sorry, from people off cruise ships and people on vacation and everything else they have these devastating activities occurring or even if it's something such as illegal mining that causes changes in the forest or the rivers or what have you and it's so detrimental to human health as well as the ecosystem. We bring in respected partners outside either of our agencies to help bring new technologies on how to recover those areas, how to reclaim some of the things that have been damaged so that tourism can continue. Next slide, please. Someone mentioned earlier the DEAC program that is supposed to be coming back to us in this fiscal year. Again, that has not been approved at this time but it is certainly something that appears to be more than just a rumor. We've already had several of the partner nations reach out to my office and ask in regards to the DEAC funding when they can start adding new engagements to bring that money to those countries to help them reorganize or to address those areas of concern for them. Just in this past year alone, we've had two engagements in Honduras where Dr. Gamliel, who is our resident cultural expert as well as our compliance manager has gone out to repatriate historical objects into Honduras and to guide the citizenship there as well as their military departments in the best way to protect those from eco-terrorists and from people who find things that are culturally significant and how to protect them the best way. Certainly the changes in climate, the rising sea level, the storms that came through the area not only damaged some of those areas that are culturally significant but also brought some things to the surface that otherwise had been privately hidden and gave those components who are willing to traffic in these goods an opportunity to go in while there was other things to be considered as far as human safety and health after the storms hit and took advantage of these things. So in Yukon and Africom's presentations and they talked about the potential for more of a terrorism type of activity or other types of damage where Russia or Iraq or China or whoever would come in and disrupt things because of climate change. We see that as something that is already occurring within our AOR. For example, in Brazil alone, we know of multi-billions of dollars of animal parts being shipped out in small individual packages on a daily basis that go back to China for their medicines and just so people say they can have it such as the skins of a certain endangered species and things like this. These things have been growing in the last 10 years and with the ongoing fires that have been going along in the Amazon Basin that has been supported not only by Brazil but also by farmers who are just trying to eke out a new source of income to support his family, by transnational organized crime and what have you, the damage that has been ongoing for so long in the Amazon has brought this to light and certainly the shipment of the animal parts coming out of the Amazon is due in many cases specifically to Chinese influence asking farmers that are having to struggle to make ends meet, go out and do this damage because they have no choice. So we continue to monitor these types of things. We operate with the countries such as I have an upcoming planned engagement in Chile for IUU fishing that I hope will be a regional one for next year but we reach out to our partners in these nations and try to provide them additional resources so that they can combat these types of issues that only further threaten the climate issues around their nations. Next slide please. As I said, we are involved in the exercises and disaster response throughout the AOR not just the hurricanes that hit Central America but the earthquakes in Haiti, flooding in Trinidad and Tobago in the islands we respond to these as part of our crisis action team. We consider the planning for any of our exercises to incorporate the environmental consequences of the environmental issues that are occurring throughout our AOR and how they can be affected by areas outside of our AOR. Next slide please. We've been involved in a lot of different security and compliance organizations and activities over the last couple of years. The resource competition environmental security and stability or research recess program that commander Cameron is also involved with is just one part of that. We look at a lot of the elements of the national security plans in order to be able to formulate how we're going to do our activities whether they're engagements, SMEs or just dialogue inclusion in some of these programs. I was, I gave a presentation by invitation early this year to the Western Hemisphere Institute for Security Cooperation or WINSEC. This organization brings in military members from South America, Central America and the Caribbean to sit in advanced courses in the United States to meet US military officers who deal with several of the same types of things that they do as well to try to provide them information on how are we working these issues within the United States so that perhaps they can translate that to their own countries. Next slide please. As I said, operational energy also contributes with our partner nations. Again, we have engagements with the different partner nations, our operational energy guru Pedro Borges has recently been in some of the AOR in order to provide his expertise to how we can assist in building better infrastructure to help them to reduce the use of coal and oil so that they have cleaner energy to use that's more available to more members of their population. Next slide. So that is all I have. Again, I'm Linda Wilson-Deake. My contact information is here on the slide and back to you, Andrea. Thank you. So thank you so much to Mr. Jeff Hughes and Ms. Linda Wilson-Deake from Southcom. Very interesting presentations. A few questions we'll get to here after the next presentation. Next up, we'll hear from the Northcom team. Dr. Jeff Fogg is the engineer operations and environmental chief and the J-4 at Northcom. And Rear Admiral Daniel Cheever is the director of strategy, policy and plans and the J-5 at Northcom. We look forward to hearing from you your presentations and the floor is yours. Great, could you flip over to the first slide please? Awesome, thank you very much. I'm just going to pop this off real quick here. So many thanks for the opportunity to brief today. I'm Dr. Jeff Fogg, U.S. Northcom J-4 logistics and engineering directorate and today I'll be providing an overview of the climate security issues facing U.S. Northcom. I'll then pass the baton to Rear Admiral Cheever for the J-5 portion of the brief. But first of all, to get started off a little context, next slide please. Many of you are aware of the hockey stick. I know that because of the background of the group here and if not the hockey stick is a geographical representation of multiple temperature models. All models are wrong over the last 2000 years in the Northern Hemisphere. The model is very wildly, as you can see on a specific period of time, which is understandable since these are predictions of the past. But overall, things look fairly flat. We have a dip in the little ice age and then we trend upward, pretty dramatically upward. I'm not going to delve into the validity of the individual models and discuss globally warmer periods and ice ages in the past. I just want to direct your attention to the far right side of the graph and note the current temperature spike underway and the very steep slope of that curve, which indicates how fast temperatures are climbing relative to those past SOSO models. And the steep rate at which temperature is climbing appears faster than ever before. Next slide please. That temperature change is precipitating several climate related hazards that are coming to the forefront in the U.S. Northcom AOR. These include seasonal ice retreat, which is opening up the Northern Sea Route and has emboldened adversary activity for economic gain. On the interior of the United States, we're experiencing increased heat and drought, which is leading to wildfires as the blue graph indicates the number of acres per annually trending upward. Coastal areas are impacted by rising sea levels with effects that are enhanced by shoreline erosion, coastal subsidence caused by following groundwater levels and an uptick in storm intensity, which is increasing coastal flooding hazards. Interestingly, in the United States, coastal regions account for 40% of our population centers and globally, eight of the 10 most populated cities are coastal. A secondary impact of these hazards is food insecurity and climate-driven migration, which will be on a global scale and dwarf what is currently underway in Ukraine as harshly impacted communities are rebalanced or survived. Next slide please. Those hazards have led to the U.S. Northcom AOR facing several significant climate security challenges. The primary U.S. North Commission is Homeland Defense and the United States Homeland is no longer a sanctuary from our adversaries. To exacerbate our Homeland Defense efforts, climate security related events have driven a steady increase in demand for defense support of civil authorities. This can be regularly evidenced in responses to hurricanes, wildfires and climate-related migration. Climate-related events have limited the DOD ability to train for military operations and has resulted in the diversion of funds to reinvest in infrastructure that was damaged by extreme weather and we have several examples of that. As new avenues of approach or opening and exploited by adversaries, we're experiencing new challenges associated with transportation, communications and monitoring these approach avenues to ensure our Homeland Defense capability. Next slide please. As a society, we're currently on a path to climate education but the path to climate change reversal is not well-defined. Humankind is slow to embrace practices now that will impact future generations. Globally, we cannot gain consensus or worldwide commitment to embrace the same standards to affect global climate change reversal. Interestingly, the climate reversal efforts by well-intentioned countries is handled and negated by the economic avarice of other countries seeking peer advantages. While some countries and societies are tired for the long game view, they're short-sighted and uncaring when it comes to climate change and how detrimentally it will impact the citizens in their society as well as the global community. So looking down the road to the next 100 years, climate change impacts are inevitable but to what extent is a big question? What will be the triggers? When will we stop rebuilding and just move on and become climate migrants? How will we adapt? How will we be more resilient? How will we enforce climate reversal and level the global playing field? Will climate change be a global unifying event or will climate change be the catalyst for major conflict and societal collapse in the drive for survival? And with that, I'd like to introduce Dr. Admiral Daniel Chiever, the NORAD and US North Common Director of Strategy, Policy, and Plans. Thanks so much. Thanks so much. Thanks, Jeff. Very much appreciated. Always hard to follow, Jeff. He just won our quarterly award yesterday and he's a doctor. I am none of that. And I'm probably not gonna win the quarterly award. So my background is F-18s. I'm a basic strike fighter guy. I've been thrust into this strategy, policy, and plans world. And so I have about 150 folks who are really smart, who work on all of this and incorporate climate into all of our thinking, plans, strategies, and the rest of it. I'll give you a once-around of NORAD and NORTHCOM to kind of give you a sense of where we are. And then we'll go from there really with SouthCOM. I'd like to thank them because they are truly leading a lot of this effort as a co-com with their much more, many more nations. I think they have about 27 to 29 nations that they deal with. We have three for theater security cooperation. We have Bahamas, Mexico, and Canada. Our AOR goes from Puerto Rico to Mexico, Bahamas up to Canada and the Arctic. So that's where we're focused. Our number one mission, as Jeff said, is homeland defense. And our number two mission is defense support of civil authorities where we get into all kinds of climate change support in Bahamas I was the strike group admiral for the baton training them and we swung around the giant cat five hurricane and got right behind the Bahamas as it departed. And we saw the devastation of that cat five hurricane actually wiped out a five million gallon water tank. So they had no water on the island. One of our primary jobs was to do water and to move the assessor teams around and that kind of stuff. It was a great honor to help them. But you can see how much things are changing and how much is needed with Southcom. I'm going down to trade winds, which is a giant exercise hosted this time by Mexico. So I'm going to Cozumel. You can all feel sorry for me, but heading to Cozumel, which should be great. And it's all the nations coming together for a really good exercise. And in 2023, we're doing exercise with Canada, the United States and Mexico in Guatemala for a disaster related effort of humanitarian assistance, foreign disaster relief, and I'm real excited about that. So next slide, please. I'll just talk real quick to our number one priority, which is defending the homeland and homeland defense. The threat is 360 degrees. The transnational criminal organizations are causing destabilization and that's bad. And then you can see the threats from their next slide. Our strategic principles are to go after information awareness, domain, sorry, domain awareness, information dominance, decision superior and global integration to really get after the global set of problems, share across the co-coms, especially with Southcom and then get after these problems so that we can deter in competition, de-escalate in crisis, and then don't even want to think about the conflict space because it's really bad. We're watching what's happening with Russia and Ukraine right now. Talk about a disaster, right? Mass migration of folks, refugees, three million plus caused by the Putin's war here and really destabilizing behavior and it's gonna be years of issues and problems. So just badness. Next slide. So overall, where the national defense strategy is going, integrated deterrence. And we think of deterrence by denial and deterrence by punishment. We've sort of been heavily weighted on punishment. We want to get more on the side of denial. Both need domain awareness, information dominance and global integration. Okay, next slide. So into the climate discussion, to defend our nation, we must adapt to this, to what's going on. And everybody realizes the risks are growing. I'd be preaching to the choir if I told you anything about climate change. But what I see is the potential for mass migration caused by climate change, the potential for ports, airports and infrastructure that's changed by the climate that we have to be ahead of for infrastructure changes necessary. And then the Arctic, I watch with concern the over militarization of the Arctic by Russia, not just defensive stuff, but offensive stuff. And as everybody knows, when Russia goes with offensive capabilities in the Arctic, then there's a necessary defensive side to that, which is where NORAD comes into it. You can see the Canadian flag behind me. But that is a major mission. And we want to keep the Arctic free and rules-based international order focused, but it is increased activity. So it is going to be met with stabilizing forces and those kinds of things that keep it in check and keep the environment safe up there. Okay, so a couple of other things. Resilience is probably one of the biggest keys. And we are studying resilience. We're going to do a resilience seminar in DC here in April, and then a resilience working group here at NORAD Northcom with all interagency co-coms and other partners in order to really understand the resiliency necessary to defend the homeland, do defend supportive civil authorities and get after this whole problem set. So we're excited about that. And that's one of the ways that we're incorporating climate change actively into what we're doing. We are using the DOD risk analysis tool or risk analysis analysis. That's a, sorry. October 21st, 2021. And if I didn't say it, my call sign's UNDRA. So if you put that with my last name, UNDRA Achiever. So that's what you're getting right now. But that analysis is the strategic level. We're taking that into the operational level to see exactly how the co-com incorporates all that analysis into our operational level here. So that's good. Very concerned about illegal and unregulated fishing, watching China do that around the world, watched it in Africa, moved to South America. It moves around a lot. And there are hundreds of ships involved in this thing. And I'm sure it's coming to the Arctic as well. So we're just very concerned about that. I'm very thankful for our partners in Southcom and Mexico and other places in Bahamas that are doing that. We have radar agreements and sharing domain awareness that gets after this so that we know what's going on and we can stop it before it gets out of hand and they fish out fisheries, which is really, really significantly bad for the environment. And then we get into the risk analysis, strategy planning, modeling, simulation and war games. That's all a piece of this. And we're putting that in as appropriate into our activities. We talked about the Arctic enough. I'm personally excited that the DOD has put a Chief Sustainability Officer, 10 January, in charge with authorities that reports directly to SecDef and DepsecDef. For us in the DOD world, that is a huge advantage because now we have an advocate office to bounce things off of and work with. So really, really some good stuff there and exciting as we move forward and get after this. When you see the national security strategy, defense strategy, military strategy and that stuff, you'll see huge pieces of this in there. You've already seen it in the interim national security strategy that climate change and impact is one of the main focuses of that interim national security strategy. So you're gonna see it throughout the online strategies here that should be coming out in the next few months as they look at what's happening with Russia and what could happen with China. By the way, with China, I'm not sure how bad for the environment it is to actually scoop up all the stuff, the coral reef and stuff and throw it on to a place to make an island. But I can imagine that's really bad for the environment and for the climate. And I don't know what it all does to our ecosystems, but just really bad behavior that we've seen and not good for anybody. In May, I'll be up to the Arctic Security Forces roundtable with all our Arctic nations minus Russia because they've been disinvited since 2014 when they invaded Ukraine the first time. And we'll be going through the permafrost tunnel, which is exciting for me because I'll get to even learn more about what's happening with the permafrost infrastructure impacts. And I'm a very practical person because of the way my parents raised me. And so I'm most interested in timelines and when infrastructure needs investments and things like that to make sure that we're ahead of the power curve, not behind the power curve and that we're on the right timeline based on what we see and what the models are telling us, I tend to err towards the most dangerous or worst case scenarios just to make sure we don't miss the mark. So that's kind of how we're thinking here and how we're tracking it. We'll see how that goes as we do this. In my mind always, it's a rules-based international order. It has to be a global effort. It has to be everybody doing things right, no excessive claims, no overfishing, nobody exploiting the environment to the point that it impacts the entire globe and without penalty and that kind of stuff. So really excited to get after that and cognizant of our taxpayer dollars and to spend things effectively because there's not unlimited money as everybody knows. So spending the money effectively, studying it and making sure we know when and what to do and how to do it and that we do it very smartly. Let's see. There's a lot of other things that I could talk to you about and I'm a lot more interested in your questions and getting after those. Up in the Arctic obviously, icebreakers, lots more activity going on up there. We just did icex and a consolidated strategic opportunity, D5, which is very Arctic focused. We're looking at infrastructure up there to make sure that the threat posed by Russia is contained and that they know we are serious as NORAD has done for the last 63 years of making sure that that threat does not come to a setup in Alaska. You're staring down the barrel of their missiles and potential in what you're seeing in Ukraine. So very serious stuff going on and we're cognizant of the environment and the climate. The entire time we're doing this as we defend the homeland is appropriate but also do our defensive civil authorities and our piece of the climate protection. So with that said, I'll turn it back over so that there's time for some questions and I look forward to those questions and I thank you all for being up and for your advocacy and your assistance especially as we get after the very practical where do we need to do, what do we need to do, when do we need to do it and how do we need to do it and how do we get the money to do it? So I appreciate it. Great, thank you so much to both Dr. Fogg and Rear Admiral Cheever for your presentations on NORTHCOM, very interesting. I know there's a bunch of questions. So I would like at this point to ask all the panelists if you could go camera on for the Q&A and I'm gonna try to walk through this just as a reminder to our audience here. If you have a question, please use the Q&A function and then if there's a question that seems to overlap with something you're interested in, just upvote it. So to be equitable, I'll kick it off with the one that got the most upvotes here. Is there any NORTHCOM Canada mill to mill engagement on climate change, sharing and best practices? So mill to mill, and I'll talk just real quick about this, we are engaged with Canada and we do talk about specific issues and they tend to be Arctic centric when we do have that engagement. I would say that sharing and there's some sharing of concepts and ideas but from my experience is that we haven't gotten into, we're still in that education role of how things are occurring and how we're going to engage in that environment but we haven't really had a deep dive in my area which is much more infrastructure and Arctic engineering focused. So I'll have our chief pop in there for some additional. Okay, I told you my call sign was underachiever, see? I will say that a lot of the conversations I've had specifically with the general officers and the leaders in Canada specifically and the Rovahime Defense Force and Mexico Air Force Army and Navy and Marine Corps include climate discussions and native populations and how we make sure we're not doing greater harm by the things we do. It's very much like Jeff said at the introduction and but everybody's in on the discussion, everybody's interested in it. So there's nobody that shies away from the discussion and when we bring it up it is a very free flowing discussion when we talk about in UVic, CalUIT, Alaskan bases and even bases elsewhere and things that we do even when we do humanitarian assistance and disaster relief foreign disaster relief, it's how do you do that without impact to the environment while you're doing the things necessary to save lives and that kind of stuff. So there's still a lot of work to be done to really incorporate this in strategy policy and plans but the discussions are fruitful and very wholesome and I appreciate our colleagues across the environment and I find the same with the Southcom folks and the nations in South America that we get a chance to engage with over. Great, thank you. For our next question, IUU fishing and illegal trade and wildlife, timber and other natural resources are aspects of the emerging concept of ecological security. Do you have the authorities and resources necessary to assist allies and partners in addressing these ecological security threats? And this is open to both co-cops. So if I could pitch in real quick because I got a chance to go to a maritime course, if you will, out with six fleet and European naval commander with all our African nation partners. And one of the things we were able to identify was satellite coverage that's commercially available that can see illegal and regulated fishing in order to better prioritize where they put their limited assets, if you will, naval unmanned things that can go see who's doing what and then you can actually go after the illegal, unregulated fishing. We've had those same discussions with all our LVM partners. So a lot of that and what information we can share and all that kind of stuff has gone into discussion. So I'm pretty excited about that because if you fish out of fishery, it's just, it's tragic in the first place but it's really taking away a food source from the whole globe that is just almost unrecoverable. So from Southcom, I would say that, so generally when you talk about illegal and unregulated, you're talking about vessels violating the rules in the exclusive economic zone of another country, right? So those individual sovereign countries have the law enforcement authority in their AOR. What we view our role is helping those countries, as under said, making sure number one that they're aware of the vessels that are violating their EEC. And we do that by providing them, we've worked with Florida International University to make available some unclassified systems where they can see fishing vessels, see the AIS. And so what happens sometimes is you'll see the AIS on a fishing vessel, it's on until it gets to the EEZ and then suddenly it goes off for 12 hours, right? So we're making that information available through FIU to our partner nations and then we're trying to help them build the capability to push out and enforce the laws in their own territory. We also work a lot with the Coast Guard, the Coast Guard or the US Coast Guard, they have shipwriter agreements with many nations so they can take representatives from those nations on board and go out and actually help them enforce their laws from one of our ships. So not to take up too much time, that's kind of where we participate on the IUU. Thank you. Yeah, hi, on this subject as well, I'm in the process of setting up an engagement in Chile for this matter. It is something that is of high concern with a lot of the countries in our AOR and we go through not only Florida University but I've been in touch with US Geological Survey as well to provide new technologies that they can do for tracking and having people like that along on some of these engagements helps to provide resources to other nations and gives them examples of what things are being done within the US and what has been done in some of the other countries that the organizations we're working with have also had cooperative agreements with and when they can provide that expertise on how well it's worked someplace else and help to provide training in some cases to the military who often do the border patrols and do the resource conservation in all of these countries that provides them another resource that they can utilize in order to improve their own capabilities and that's what we're striving for. Great, thank you for that. I have one substantive and then one more in fact finding here, I'll mention the second one first. There was mention of a resiliency conference in DC. If that is an open conference, could information on that be provided in some form or fashion? So if someone's willing to share that information that'd be fantastic. And then on the substantive side, Reautomaltreat Cheever mentioned that he is data focused. When and where is the question and where do GCCs get military specific climate change data outside of the US and Europe? For example, the South American watershed or drought changes in 2035, for instance. Type in a thing on migration for transnational criminal organizations which we see as a national security imperative because of the destabilization and the security threat that poses currently. What I'm seeing is most of the migration is caused by insecurity currently. What I worry about and what I wrote in my little statement is that the global average of two to four degree Celsius increase in temperatures, and that's an average, but you'll have places that really exasperate that and will cause climate related migration of concern. I don't know when that occurs. I'm looking at 2050 to 2100 timeframe based on the data I have my hands on. But we use a European data to answer the question we use European data. We use our data and we use the office of, I can't remember the name of it now, the new DOD chief sustainability office in order to gather data and pull data in for best informing. Hey, when are these things worst case coming to fruition? What are the models tell us and are there differences? Just like hurricanes, you see big differences in the US model and the European models of hurricanes. So what we like to do is blend them and kind of look at the both of them and come to a consensus of what we think the worst case and most likely most dangerous scenarios are for hurricanes, same with migration and climate change and that kind of stuff over. Great, I think we might have time for one or two more questions. So this one for Northcom, sorry, there's another one that just popped through. What is the capacity that Northcom can call upon for GSCA and would there be benefit to dedicated disaster response brigades to minimize disruption to other operational units? Yeah, so that's a great question. The national response framework is how the nation and other inter agencies, mostly Department of Homeland Security, Department of State and others will ask for that defense support of civil authorities. Then it goes to OSD, Northcom does not decide these things. Secretary defense team through JCS sends us, here's the approved Southwest border request. Here's the approved hurricane disaster relief requests and that kind of stuff. So it all comes through. There's a big capacity because DOD is very big. We have a lot of planning capacity. We have a lot of response capacity and it just depends on the scenario. Always wait into that. Is the risk to force currently? And we saw that during COVID. Okay, how many medical teams can we get to COVID for states that are in trouble? And what impact to readiness is it? And then within OSD, there's a risk assessment of where is that balance of the force that can go, should go and then the risk associated. There was always risk associated with focusing on a different mission, but always taken for the right reasons and very thought through with the inter agency and the rest of the partners. So I'd say that's how it works. There's no specific answer on how much could be. Obviously there's always a limit. So you can imagine if we had, you know, Wasatch and Cascadia and San Andreas go at the same time. Those are earthquakes and had Mount Ikea and mammoth blow volcanoes at the same time in a big way. And we had two cat five hurricanes on the East coast at the same time. That'd be an overwhelming scenario and almost like a nation state attack against the United States. And it would be just a huge request coming through. And I don't think anybody knows exactly the level of requests that would come through and the level of support, but that's how the process works over. And so picking up on that just a little bit also is that, because I had this question happen occur quite often is that we remember the DOD or our primary mission and North Khan may or is Homeland Defense. This gives a secondary mission. And then the services are the ones that are tasked to train man and equip. So, and then, and they can't build resources that are specifically dedicated towards that disco solution. So when we take all that into, so we're kind of wiggling around the problem here a little bit, but we don't have the resources specifically toward that disco role. It's just, it's an incidental capability that has driven out of that Homeland Defense capability that we have over. So thank you. If I could add one piece to that for Jeff, since we're talking to a Navy crowd, I'm really proud of the fact that the Navy has service related authorities in this space. So within service related authorities, we can take a ship like the baton and the three escorts with me and a striker badmul under Admiral Grady's orders, nothing to do with joint requests and that kind of stuff, can maneuver that ship at our discretion to be in the right place at the right time. We've seen that in Haiti, we've seen that in Bahamas, we've seen that in other places. And then when the order comes through based on the request, national framework through DOS, et cetera, we're prepared to go help. And if the request never comes through, we can maneuver back and do it under our own authority. So a really unique, really cool capability that the Navy has just because it's a naval maritime service, the Coast Guard's kind of with us on that. And the Marine Corps obviously fits into that because when we did it, half of the ship was the Marine expeditionary unit who were all just 20 year old pumped, ready to go to help save lives over. Great, I think we've hit right up against time. So I wanna take this moment to say thank you to all of our presenters from both Southcom and Northcom for the presentations and for the Q&A, for our audience. Sorry if we didn't get to your questions. I believe these will be recorded. And so maybe we can get to those at a later point. And at this point, I would like to hand the panel or the event back over to Commander Cameron. Thank you so much to Dr. Chris Faulkner, Mr. Jeff Hughes and Ms. Linda Wostendee from Southcom and Dr. Jeff Fogg and rare ML Cheever from Northcom. This was a wonderful panel showing both the respect of vulnerabilities within your AORs which are very different and yet how you have worked together so closely. At this point, we will take our final 10 minute break and we'll return at 1210 for our final panel with IndoPay come. Thank you.