 And welcome to another episode of Likeable Science here on ThinkTech Hawaii. I'm your host Ethan Allen, thanks for joining us. Today on ThinkTech we have some great guests, but before I introduce them, I want to just mention the SACNAS conference that's coming up in late October. This is a society for the advancement of Chicano's Native Americans in Science. They're now expanding to other underrepresented groups including Pacific Islanders. There's going to be a huge conference out here in the convention center in October, early November. Really a great event. I hope you all plan to look it up and join in. So, you ready for that? Anyhow, I have with me today Dr. Sonny Choi. Welcome, Son. Good to see you again. And Greg Nakano. Welcome, Greg. Both affiliated with UH. Sonny's the assistant dean of engineering, and Greg is a group called Pacific Allies. And they're doing amazing stuff in a lot of different fields, but we are specifically going to be talking about sort of STEM education and why that's in our interest as a whole as a country and what we can do to make sure it gets continued to be promoted and advanced. But maybe we can begin a little, maybe you can tell us about the Pacific Allies program, give people a little context. Okay, thank you. Pacific Allies was started as a program to help look at how do we teach next generation leaders the impacts of climate change on national security. And the whole idea is that, you know, it takes you 20 to 30 years before you really become a senior military leader in admiral to general or even just a colonel sometimes. So, if you're not being exposed to kind of the impacts of climate change on national security, when you're a cadet, a midshipman, then how are you even going to understand what you're looking at in some place like Bangladesh or, you know, a small Pacific island if you were never exposed to it, you know, younger? Excellent, excellent. And so, when did you sort of get this bug to get climate change in the engineering and the particulars at work? So, climate change has been an engineering problem for decades and decades. And, you know, my background with the robotics stuff now with the unmanned aerial systems. We're constantly trying to figure out how we can get more data to do this stuff. So, STEM, climate change, places that have not been quite the level of STEM education that we have. We want to try to influence this. Right, because these places face a particular burden, particularly the freely associated states, right? Because we have this sort of ticking clock going now, right? The compact freedom association, right? COFA is known. And the COFA agreements are due to expire in 2023, I believe. And although certain parts of them will continue to exist in perpetuity, other parts sort of disappear then, including a lot of the money that is currently goes out each year at least. And when that happens, there's liable to be some significant social changes, right? Economic changes as well. I mean, you know, it's... I think there's a reason why we have always had an interest in the South Pacific region. It's geographically very desirable. And I think there are many other nations surrounding that region that see the exclusive economic zone benefits. And maybe even things underwater that have a lot of significant benefits. So many, many countries and regions are pretty much eager to get their hands on it. And luckily until 2023, which is snap, snap, is that, we still have some sort of influence on it. And I think we need to figure out how to maintain that. Yeah, and it's real clear from people in the region that, for instance, the Chinese are making significant inroads in trying to cut business deals. They are building infrastructure for them, giving them really very nice deals to entice them, basically entice their governments into aligning more closely with China. Right now, because of our exclusive economic zone, we can essentially, as I understand it, allow or unallow any ships from any nation to enter that, right? Of course. Of course. I mean, exclusive economic zone, EEZ, gives you a huge advantage of what you can do in that region. I mean, simply, even fishing right. You look at the vast number of square footage or square mileage of what you're controlling down there. A lot of fishing zones. And as populations grow, one of the places you're looking to gather more food are the ocean. And a lot of countries have a lot of big populations. Although, all the projections that I've seen basically sort of say we shouldn't be counting on getting more food from the ocean because most major fishing stocks have hit their peak and are declining some fairly rapidly. I mean, I think they said we've reached more than 50% of what the oceans are supposed to produce. So we're now on the downhill and the food process. If we've hit peak fishing, that's a dangerous concept, right? Because some 3 billion people in the world depend on seafood basically as their main protein source, right? Well, I think that's where the climate change and the sea level rise come into play. Climate change has obviously changed the way fish migrate. It has changed how coral reefs develop or get destroyed. As more coral reefs get destroyed, the food we're going to cultivate from the ocean. So, yeah, we're really on a downhill trend here. And I think every effort and all effort that we make to do this conservation, sustainability, resilience type stuff has to come into some sort of a single point agreement or an action. Yeah, it's one of these issues to it. It's global in nature, right? You can't decide country A can't decide. We're going to go one way and country B says we'll go the other way, although it does happen. You don't get anything done, right? You can't. Because the air that we breathe blows elsewhere and we breathe air. It's been in other countries. It has to be a concerted effort. If anybody starts becoming very selfish, I think we're just bound to go downhill. That's what we're trying to see if we can help curtail some of... I mean, we're never going to stop any of this, but maybe we'll get enough people to be on the side that's curtailing their development of the destruction and advancing. Right. I mean, you want to see good, well-educated residents of all these areas who can look at evidence and say, what does this evidence tell me? Where does this lead? How should I decide which way to jump here, right? Shall I go out and keep fishing what I know is an overfished stock and watch it plummet further so my kids won't have anything? Or shall we try to set some limits on it now today and make it sustainable? Yeah. So, you know, one of the areas down there that we have a particular interest is because of our military ties, and that's Kwajaleen Natool, and I want to have Greg talk a little bit about how we're trying to get the cadets and midshipmen and especially our ROTC, University of Hawaii ROTC programs, to hopefully in the near and far futures become much more involved where we do see some engineering students in the ROTC pool. We're hoping that we can get a greater number of engineering students and maybe, as Greg mentioned, at our young early age, they can have an understanding about what these atolls and the South Pacific region is like and the type of problem that they're facing and how it has a direct relationship to how it's supposed to get a bit of Waikiki and make UHD oceanfront property in the future. Why don't you tell us about what you're trying to get happening here? I think the biggest thing goes back to kind of like how long does it take for curriculum, we talked a little bit about this when we were outside, it's like how long does it take for curriculum to catch up with the needs that you're looking at? So I went to school undergrad in the late 1980s and when we were being taught about national security threats, we still had the Soviet Union and national defense where threats were looked at like a Russian or Soviet motorized rifle division coming through the full to gap, right? That was national security. I think the challenge is how do you begin looking at something like sea level rise or loss of a freshwater lands or shifting cultivation zones for wheat or other staple crops as a national security threat? And if your future national security leaders aren't thinking in those terms, then they're only going to see the famine, they're only going to see, you know, the flood, but then they're not going to recognize, hey, all this conflict that is being generated as a result of this really comes from something else that really is a climate-related issue. Right, and we already, there is at least some evidence suggests much of the trouble in Syria is actually caused by several bad years of drought, basically. It drove a lot of the farmers in the cities, too crowded, short on supplies and augmented unrest, basically. Right. You can just see that kind of scenario playing out in other places with even worse results, right? And Syria is bad enough. I mean, you know, technological development has its advantages, but when it becomes very monetized, monetized and monetary, we do things without really thinking 20, 30, 50 years into the future. I think a good example is when we cut down a lot of trees because it's an immediate economic effect for you, and then you realize 5, 10, 20 years down the line that you've created potential landslides when it rains, California, or potential sandstorms in central China because of all the forests that they've cut down. So I think it's the same thing with the ocean. We've overexploited what the ocean can give to us and now it's producing these things where for the South Pacific these sea level rise is really getting people's homes. Very personal. And the combination of the sea level rise, the warming and the acidification is really putting a triple threat onto the coral, also on the added burden of pollution really can impact coral too. And since something like 80% of all the marine species live in or on coral reefs at some point in their life cycle if the reefs collapse that's bound to have huge impacts on the whole food lab, right? That's right. So one of the things that we're trying to do is that we've gotten the Annapolis Naval Academy, the Coast Guard Academy involved, we're hoping West Point some of the other places they're involved and we'll get their cadets and midshipments out here and send them out in the like that we did in the last two years and have them visually realize what's going on. I mean to me it's almost like electrical engineering versus mechanical engineering. When I say electricity flows down wires how are you supposed to visualize that? You don't visualize that but if I put blue water into a clear tube like your water bottle and send it down you know that there's water going down that thing. And I think it's the same thing. As Greg mentioned our threats from Russia Soviet Union back in the 80s that was a very visual threat. You see tanks and missiles. Now we're dealing with something that's relatively invisible it's almost like that old thing when our age when they were telling us be careful about carbon monoxide. I think it's the same thing. We're dealing with something that we don't instantly visualize but it's coming. And the issues I've been thinking about crises recently and the issues of cyber crises are sort of it's a whole new form of crisis that we never really it didn't exist some years ago and now it's very real. There's so much stuff that is controlled by via the internet that if somebody can put a big enough bug in the system many other systems could start collapsing in fairly ugly cascade of events right? Oh yeah. When I was working a lot with the robotics arena a lot of it is still wireless communication and we always talk about the cyber aspects of how you can steal somebody's signal and control that vehicle. I think it's getting a little beyond that now where it's not only the cyber security that the communications that we need to worry about I think there's a lot of these electromagnetic frequency type stuff that we deal with even from many many decades ago in terms of military warfare that maybe they're all related in just one security measure. Okay we're going to dig more deeply into that when we come back right now we have to take a quick break I'm told. So I'm Joy Gregg Nicano or with me here from UH we're talking about STEM education and the COFA agreements. We'll be back in one minute. Hey loha my name is Andrew Lanning I'm the host of Security Matters Hawaii airing every Wednesday here on Think Tech Hawaii live from the studios. I'll bring you guests I'll bring you information about the things in security that matter to keeping you safe, your co-workers safe, your family safe to keep our community safe. We want to teach you about those things in our industry that may be a little outside of your experience so please join me because Security Matters Aloha. Aloha I'm Wendy Lo and I'm coming to you every other Tuesday at two o'clock live from Think Tech Hawaii and on our show we talk about taking your health back and what does that mean? It means mind, body and soul and everything you can do that makes your body healthier and happier is what we're going to be talking about whether it's spiritual health, mental health, fascia health, beautiful smile health whatever it means let's take healthy back. Aloha. Good afternoon and welcome to back to Think Tech Hawaii likeable science. I'm your host Ethan Allen Song Choi and Greg Nakano from UH are here with me. We're talking about the COFA agreements and we were in the first part talking about a specific area, Quagelon at all and even more particular the island of Ebi I suspect some of our viewers probably don't know too much about it and I think we've got a photo that gives some sense of it. Greg tell us a little about Ebi. Honestly I'm still learning a lot myself but Quagelon at all is considered one of the largest if not the largest at all in the world and it consists of over 90 different islets. Ebi is one of those little islets and as you can see from the picture there it's rather crowded. They have somewhere in the range of about 9,000 to 12,000 people they don't have a you know they haven't had a solid count in recent times and about 900 people support or work on the base which is about a 10 or 15 minute ferry ride away which is the U.S. Army base and so when we were looking for how do you teach climate change impacts on national security we obviously wanted to look at a place that was being impacted by climate change today sea level rise and those impacts today but then we also needed to find a place that was of interest from a national security perspective through the United States to the cadets themselves and a lot of people probably don't know this but Quangelo Natol is used as a bullseye or the calibration for the nuclear missile that we shoot from Vandenberg. It's not reassuring. It has that function and the other thing they have is something called a space fence where they're actually tracking satellite and space debris and apparently they're at the point now where they can track softball size debris satellites out there. Sea level rise will impact both communities these are low-lying animals probably no point on them more than 6 to 10 feet above sea level right? Absolutely and so this was the whole thing is the Department of Defense recently did a study and what they did was they said well how long before freshwater lens which allows the plants to grow and things like that disappears and they found out it could be as early as 2035 which is only about 15 years away. Best case scenario is 2065 which is 45 years away and even then that's within the life spans of kids who are going through school right now so that's really what we're trying to do is say okay you said likable science in this case science isn't necessarily your friend but it's like if you really understand what the challenges are and you understand science and you understand science, technology, engineering, math then you know what your options are and then the earlier you're talking about slow onset disaster earlier you can start making decisions based on data rich analysis the more the better your outcomes are going to be. Absolutely, absolutely. It's frightening to watch people acknowledge that and these islands are wonderful canaries in the coal mine where they are being impacted very seriously they're losing parts of their shoreline people complain because they can't get out to visit their ancestors graves because that's all underwater now but when they were a kid that was all above water No, I mean you know as Greg mentioned the whole fact that maybe in this case science is a thinkable side but what has given us is this huge advantage of utilizing the potential of all the data we can gather from there I mean we've seen simulations of how Waikiki is going to disappear in the last 50, 60 years so by now start doing something about it now and we want to see we can send things down there we've done a lot of stuff in our state with robotics and we're trying to get young kids excited and understanding of these new technologies and exposure to even new ones that hasn't come out yet and we're trying to do the same out there we're trying to get them to understand the importance of vehicles like unmanned aerial systems maybe even unmanned underwater vehicles and instead of us going down there and taking random data every three months, six months why can't we just transfer some of that knowledge educate many of the kids there to have a greater understanding about these type of technologies and have them be our contact in gathering those data if we have too much data we're not having enough data at the same time that's then building a STEM literary workforce down there which they really need if they are going to cope effectively with climate change and sea level rise and the various impacts of this they need a citizenry who really understands these issues understands what the impacts are going to be understands there are options how engineering can be used how technology can and cannot do what it might be able to do you raised a really interesting point you're talking about slow onset and then you talked a little bit about the United Nations International Organizational Migration went and did some projections and they said by 2050 they really think there could be as many as a billion climate refugees but when they looked at the range they said okay 200 million climate refugees at 2050 is about what we think is going to be the number that's about right Syria right now is about 6 million people who are either refugees or refugees in this place so you multiply that and that's what potentially we're looking at just from climate refugees so what we're trying to do is say hey you know that the best science is telling us you're going to lose your freshwater lens how do we work together and how do we co-develop a lot of these research projects so that as you are getting new information we're working with you to ensure that one you can stay on your home island longer but two that when you come to Hawaii or you go back to the mainland wherever you need to go to you're going to bring with you knowledge, experience, skills, capabilities that are going to be valuable for the place that you're having to move to this issue is not just confined to these small islands all around the world the aquifers are being depleted faster and they're being refilled there are already simmering tensions in parts of the world any of those easily could fairly quickly erupt it into a much worse situation one crisis breeds another crisis you look at the continental US map the way it's projected in terms of simulations is that the middle of the United States and the sides, the coastal lines of the United States are supposed to disappear I think we need to figure out how to if not stop slow it down enough that we come up with another solution engineering is all of this, coming up with a solution right and we can do things you can now genetically engineer plants to tolerate more heat tolerate more drought, tolerate more salt all of which might be very useful traits right, in the future they already have salt tolerant taro growing in a variety of places now and that's saving a lot of people's lives and livelihoods and I think the other important thing is being able to blend modern technologies, STEM science, technology, engineering and math with the indigenous knowledge and wisdom and begin putting all of these high tech tools and systems into the context of either place based education or project based learning where the Marshallese themselves are defining what they need to collect what they want to know about more and then us on the back side we're working with a development team so the first year the first summer that we did this we really were focused on how are we helping the American Cadets of Midship and understand the situation in the Marshall Islands over the past two years really we flipped that model and what we're doing is the American Cadets of Midship are coming down and they're doing service learning and really what they're trying to do is help the Marshallese have their own summer program we now are going to directly support the E. Bi. Spartan camp and through IHS Infant Item Humanitarian Systems and Office of Naval Research this summer what we're going to be doing is helping them do a map of the city of E. Bi and then also do their first demographic survey so that they'll be able to say how many people they have where do they live which is in their hands now an American coming down it's not someone from the capital coming down it's like they can kind of do their own survey anytime they want the outsiders coming in asking intrusive questions we're just trying to figure this out we want that self-sustaining system to grow and hopefully we'll be able to set up some sort of pathways where if we do see people from that region want to have specific knowledge in something and they'll be able to come over and get that knowledge and hopefully go back and help make whatever situation they have a little bit better who knows we were joking about the fact that we have these drone piloting competitions going on here and maybe one of those kids that have been playing with the drone every day for a couple of years to gather all that data will be one of the champions or something this is great it's wonderful to learn about the interest you have, the efforts, the actual programs that are running, the fact that you're engaging more people in them if some of our viewers want to get in touch with you I assume they could do so and you'd welcome all the help you can get if they're interested in contacting us if you guys have the thing we can send our email addresses or whatever we could always make contact well excellent very interesting to learn about this sounds like there's a lot of aspects perhaps we'll come back and talk about this again some time and tell us updates focusing on specific programs and all that kind of good stuff Greg has a couple of bidship coming in this summer maybe before, during, after we'll be here too tell us what they've done first that'd be excellent thank you so much Greg thank you so much Song Song Choi, Greg Nakano both from UH and I'm your host Ethan Allen thanks for joining us here on likeable science and I look forward to seeing you on future episodes until then