 For those of you who don't know, I see a lot of familiar faces in the audience, but I'm Sarah Ladislaw. I'm a senior fellow here at CSIS's Energy and National Security Program. It is my great pleasure to host today's event along with our good colleagues over at E3G. On bridging the climate divide, can risk management reveal a prudent path forward? We're really pleased to have the opportunity to be hosting this discussion today. For those of you who come to our events relatively often, you know that CSIS's Energy Program has spent a good deal of time dedicated to the question of climate change in terms of the impact on the energy sector and the impact the energy sector has on climate change. We've done some work on the security impacts of climate change and on some of the science and adaptation questions, but the bulk of our work has really been looking at the different sort of factors leading to a low-carbon development pathway. Today we're going to sort of shift focus and it's sort of in line with what has happened at a number of our recent events. Not too long ago we had the World Energy Outlook presented here by the International Energy Agency, where we really explored and questioned some of their critical pathway assumptions about whether or not the world was in fact going to reach a two-degree target in terms of limiting the temperature rise and the associated impacts that would happen from climate change. In addition, not too long ago we had Dr. Jonathan Pershing, deputy climate envoy from the United States talk about the impact and what happened in Cancun in terms of the climate negotiations and asked sort of similar critical questions about whether or not we were on track to meet that goal. Our focus in those discussions was really on what happens to the energy sector because that's sort of what we focus on the most, but there's also a flip side of that question and it's about what the overarching strategic framework is for us dealing with climate change. When ATHUG came to us and said that they have this report coming out, we know that there's a lot of other really interesting groups around town who are working on these types of issues. We thought that it would be our place in the interest of having a balanced discussion to bring this issue to light and to invite some people to talk about just that issue. What we're going to do today is we're going to invite some of the authors, two of the authors of this report, to present the risk and the management aspects, as Nick had just said, of this issue and then invite some very informative colleagues to open up a discussion and then open up a discussion with all of you. It's my great pleasure to introduce our first two speakers, Dr. Jay Gullage, Senior Scientist and Director for Science and Impacts from the Pew Center on Global Climate Change, and Nick Mayby, the CEO and Founding Director of E3G, to sort of set the scene about what we're going to be talking about today. Thanks very much. Jay? No, not mine. There we go. One that says Gullage. I get it now. Sarah, thanks a lot. Thanks for organizing this. It's a fabulous event and CSIS is such a terrific host and has such a great draw, so very pleased to be here. So as Nick just said, the science is what describes the risk. So I'm the risk and he's the management, and so I'm going to try to explain very, very quickly some very just core principles about uncertainty and risk as a way of providing a basis for which to talk about managing those risks. The first thing to just get off the table here is the question of whether or not climate change is actually a national security issue. Now, I'm not a national security expert, so I'm not going to try to authoritatively make that case, but I'll just leave it up to some very serious hard security experts who have now confirmed again and again and again from within DOD, the national intelligence community, CNA, the UK Ministry of Defense. They have all written this into their doctrines, their strategic analyses, and they all conclude that it is a security risk. Climate change entails security risk, and some of the things that they point to as elevating risk, as the way climate change elevates risk, is things like the opening of the Arctic and the fact that we don't know how to govern that space yet internationally. Potential for, we know that natural resources competition can spark interstate conflicts and climate change could amplify those types of problems. We know that we provide a lot of aid and disaster response for extreme weather disasters, and one of the things that the climate science is quite clear on is that we should expect more of those. So these are the types of things that interact with the security space according to the defense and security community. So these are risks that need to be managed, and there is not much of a risk management discussion involved in the national and international policy debates about how to deal with climate change, which are being handled primarily through a traditional environmental policy frame, which doesn't really have that long culture of risk management like the national security community does. And so we think that it makes sense to borrow from the expertise and the way that the national security community analyzes risk in dealing with climate change. And in fact, it took about 20 years, but the IPCC, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change finally came to this conclusion on their own, and they do not come from a national security perspective traditionally. But in their last report, they said that responding to climate change involves an iterative risk management process that includes both adaptation and mitigation. Now, the definition of risk from an analytical standpoint is the probability that something will happen multiplied by the severity of its consequences. So the intensity of a rain or flood event multiplied by the probability that it might happen, for example. And so in risk management, there's two things you want to do. You want to try to reduce the probability that something bad will happen, and if it does happen, you want to reduce the impact that it'll have. So these are the kind of two basic elements of reducing risk. So how does risk relate to uncertainty? Because with climate change, one of the big reasons and the reason the security community deals with risk management is because most of the decisions they make are uncertain, or the things they're making decisions about are uncertain. That's the key thing about climate change. Not uncertain that it's happening or that it's going to have consequences, but the specifics of those consequences are very uncertain, especially in the future, we don't have a crystal ball. And uncertainty tempts people, i.e. decision makers, to disregard risk. And that's not a smart way to manage risk. And again, risk is probability times severity. So if you look at this probability distribution, any point along that distribution you can multiply the probability on the left axis by the severity of the outcome on the horizontal axis and come up with a risk calculation. And one of the things that I want to point out is that as uncertainty increases, risk can actually increase. So for example, here's another probability distribution. There is greater uncertainty built into this distribution. It's a wider uncertainty range. But if you look at the best estimates on both of these distributions, the risk is equal. Because you've got a lower probability but a higher severity. And so the risk is equal for the best estimate. But if you look out at the worst that can happen, the 95 percentile on both of these distributions, you now have more risk at the upper end for this more uncertain curve than you can have in the other one. So greater uncertainty can equate to greater risk, just from a purely analytical perspective. So the point, if you don't get anything else out of what I say I want you to get this. Scientific uncertainty. I'm not talking about the way my mom thinks what uncertainty means. Who knows? I'm talking about scientific uncertainty is quantified. It is information. And it is information that informs risk decisions. That's what uncertainty is when you're dealing with analytical considerations of climate change. So let's get it a little very briefly into the uncertainty that we have, information that we have about climate change. The key physical climate uncertainty is the climate sensitivity. That is how much the climate would warm or the earth surface would warm if you doubled the amount of CO2 in the atmosphere. That's how climatologists define climate sensitivity. Each of these curves is an independent estimate of that quantity. It's a probability distribution. They're kind of squiggly and a little bit different, but they all have a similar shape to them, right? They all have best estimates kind of in this range. They all have a long tail on them saying, you know, there's some chance it could be very, very high. Not much chance that it could be very, very low. So they all have this in common. If you put them all together, the IPCC came up with a best estimate for climate sensitivity of about three degrees. That's about a 40% give or take probability. 20% of your probability space is somewhere else. So there's even a 10% chance, one in 10 chance that it might be 5 degrees or higher. And there's some small but non-negligible chance that it's out here at 10 degrees or higher. 2, 3%, I don't know, something like that. I don't get on an airplane that has a 2% or 3% chance of falling out of the sky, and we actually have those calculations very well. We know the risk of getting on an airplane, and it's very low. So let's just look very quickly, conceptualizing what that uncertainty distribution means from a risk perspective, okay? This is, if we just look at how much impacts we would incur from a doubling of CO2, there's uncertainty about that. Our best estimate is that we'd be, if we just kind of look at this cartoon as the range of assessed, or assessed range of risks for warming. Our best estimate is we'd be right in the middle of that range. But there's a 10% chance that we're going to be out near the top end of that range. And then there's a non-negligible chance that we're off the chart, that we don't have the ability to assess what the climate looks like or what the world looks like in a climate that's warmer than 6 degrees that warms by more than 6 degrees. This, from a risk management perspective, has a lot of information in it. One piece of information is that it says we want to take this off the table. We do not want to go there, okay? We want to take that off the table. That's that long tail on the probability distribution. That's one piece of information that gives us. This is my last slide. This is a probability distribution for how much the earth would warm for a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions. And I don't remember off the top of my head which greenhouse gas emissions scenario this is. Not really relevant for the points I want to make. But this is business's usual projection for warming. It's uncertain. Something like a 30% chance is our best estimate that it would be between 3 and 4 degrees, okay? This may even be a doubling scenario. I'm not sure. Now, with a mitigation scenario where we reduced emissions by 1% per year, starting, you know, now, let's say, we would get a probability distribution that looks something like this, okay? So we clearly, whatever the right answer is from this curve, we clearly know, we know that we will reduce the warming. That will take some impacts off the table. But there's some key features I want to point out. Yes, we reduce the expected warming and we increase our confidence a little bit that it will be something below 3 degrees, okay? We reduce our best estimate of warming by about .8 degrees Celsius. But there's something more important about this. If we look at, this is the 5% line, okay? So this is the 95% tile in this distribution. We've moved it down, okay? That's the sort of the tail on that curve that I showed you. And what I want to point out is that while we move the best estimate down by less than a degree, we've moved the 95% tile tail down by well more than a degree. The point is mitigating greenhouse gas emissions gives you extra leverage at the high risk end of the curve. It's added value in terms of taking the worst off the table. It gives you extra leverage at that level. Moreover, okay, this is a warming estimation for a given amount of greenhouse gas emissions. The climate sensitivity, if we've underestimated the climate sensitivity, that's a risk, right? And so we have, so the point is these curves are for the best estimate of climate sensitivity, okay? But if we've underestimated that, there's going to be more warming. What this table shows is how much this thing shifts to the left if we've underestimated the climate sensitivity. If the climate sensitivity is higher, let's say six degrees, what I want to show you is that you shift it to the left even more. So even though it's uncertain, what we're not uncertain, what we are certain about is that we get extra leverage from mitigation of greenhouse gas emissions as the more we've underestimated it. So the value of the emissions reductions is very much amplified by the fact, from a risk management perspective, by the fact that you've reduced your worst risks. And the more you're on the bad side of the underestimating, the more benefit you're getting from the mitigation. That's it. Okay, so you can see from Jay's presentation that explaining probabilities, deviations to senior decision-makers is not the easiest thing in the world, even though Jay is probably the best person I know at doing it. And therefore, one of the points of risk management is how do we turn some of the information in a very simplified version of which you've just seen into decisions. And that's really what this report is about and how decisions many levels. And as always, where do we get to? Why do we do this report in the first place? Well, we've been doing climate security work in East Regis since 2005 and before that in our jobs in government, many of us. And as we took this report forward, we did a lot of work with bringing climate security analysts together to talk about the areas that Jay is discussing. And then with Jay and Bernard Finnell, who helped us, we could draft this report and put it forward. And we've tested these ideas along with a lot of people in the security community or so in the climate community. And so what we're trying to do is open a debate because one thing we found during the process of the report is where we think it's given us quite a robust way of thinking the overall framework of the problem. The more we dug into some of the areas we didn't know about, the more we saw incredible need for further work and further research. As with many times, when you put a new lens on a problem, it really opens up and shows huge area of ignorance which you haven't really pushed into before. So we're not claiming it's the last word, we're hoping it's one of the first words on this debate. And why did we do it? So firstly, our work on climate security showed really, especially from a security point of view, from a senior decision-makers point of view, we were really interested in the kind of extreme impacts which Jay's talked about. That was the bit that worried us most was kind of going into these places where there were extreme impacts on security and stability at home and overseas. But most of the analysis we were seeing done by people was looking at kind of the middle of the curve, really, and it didn't actually include a lot of the latest science on extreme impacts and stability. But we also didn't see a lot of discussion of these worst cases in the debate on climate change because this uncertainty, equating uncertainty with action, seemed to make people afraid of talking about the full range of uncertainty. They wanted to kind of talk about this, we've had a 50% chance of meeting two degrees. And the contrast between the two communities which we span between the security community and the climate community really came home because obviously in security, lots of extremely expensive decisions are made under much more uncertainty than climate data and one which is really out there at the moment which is a huge difference across the Atlantic is actually what is the threat that China will pose in 2050? So you're trying to predict the political leadership of China, as well as its economics and demographics and internal politics in 2050, because that's really important to know what weapon systems you need to build and how you construct alliances and that's a real question of now. That is a lot more uncertain than some of the climate data. So we composed ourselves a question which said, okay, how would our climate strategy look if we treated it as seriously as nuclear perforation and applied the same type of framework of thinking as we do on nuclear perforation? And so we took risk management and to go through what risk management is and perhaps isn't, it's broader than some of the economic techniques people use, optimization, cost benefit, real options, though it can include all of those techniques. It's a very pragmatic approach about making policy decisions under uncertainty. It's not about a theoretical answer, it's about making decisions. It's got a long history of success and certainly a large one of failure in the security field and as we found out recently in the finance field and resource management and infrastructure management, but there's been a lot of learning. We know a lot about how people make good and bad decisions under uncertainty and it's really important the risk management is about who. It's often about who's making the decision as much as what and how much. It's not as abstract as things like economics and science, because it takes into account the human part of the equation, which is incredibly important. And if you've got humans, you've got politics, so it's a way of framing political debates, it's not replacing them and we'll come to that at the end. And it's something we do all the time. We have big debates about big existential issues like deterrence versus disarmament on nuclear, civil liberties versus terrorism, intervention and conflict versus isolationism. The public has those debates, policymakers have those debates, they have huge uncertainty around them, but we make decisions while holding a debate and then we do it again and again and again. And at the heart of all those debates is a simple question, how much risk should we take? And that is what a risk management system is trying to get you to, to defining that in the best way possible. And to do the report, we went through a methodology similar to most security people understand this one. We did a bit of intelligence gathering, we looked at the science, we looked at what we knew and didn't know across science, climate science, impacts and mitigation. So it's how certain are we going to achieve all these reductions if we wanted to do them and adaptation. Then we did assessment, we tried to look at what we knew and didn't know what our biases were, we looked at the assessment phase and then we analyzed what our responses were, how effective were our responses in these areas? Did we have responses? Were they being implemented properly? Were they sufficient to mitigate the risks within the right place? And the short answer is we're not managing any of the risks particularly well and we don't have a clear framework for dealing with it. And there's a lot in the report which goes through that in quite a lot of detail. So pulling from that analysis we went into how would we explain the risk management framework at the highest level and taking away all the complexity of the science and trying to put it together. And one way, and this is just one example is to use scenarios. Two axes we use for scenarios here are climate sensitivity on the y-axis, high to low, which is as Jay talked about and on the x-axis, successful mitigation policies and failed mitigation policies. So simple, control sensitivity. And really I'm not going to go through the details of this but this is saying if we want to aim to keep global temperatures below 2 degrees which is the global target which is being agreed by all countries in the UN well the best outcome is we do the mitigation we say we want to do and it's reasonably low climate sensitivity estimate in the median range and we may get a 2-3 degree outcome a nice green outcome in the bottom but even if we're successful on mitigation could be we hire up the curve and that means we might have 3-5 degrees of warming and then we'd have to do some kind of crash response in return but it's also possible that we fail to meet our mitigation targets then we move over to the left-hand side and we could get anywhere up to 6-8 degrees especially if we move beyond tipping points. So even if we make the decision to move to 2 degrees we have because of the uncertainty of delivery and the uncertainty in the climate system a wide range of possible scenarios to move forward and we haven't even realistically aimed to deliver this with a set of policies behind it. So a risk management system has to respond to all those probable scenarios in a way forward. So the way we've done that is by saying you need a simple framework at one level which is called the ABC risk management framework just to stick in people's heads. So firstly, aim to mitigate to stay below 2 degrees and the numbers here are less important than the framework but this is just taking the kind of consent median view at the moment. But even if we're doing that we need to build and budget for our infrastructure for our security forces to 3-4 degrees. Because we have to make decisions now for many of these things we can't just assume we're going to hit this 2 degrees it's a very poor risk management I sit on the UK government's infrastructure committee and we're currently looking at what our planning assumptions are for infrastructure out for the next 20-30 years and we can't take the government's objective of 2 degrees as our planning assumption. But also we need to and that's real money, real money spending now but we also need to contingency plan to respond to the really bad worst case scenarios that might be 2, 3, 5, 10% but that's a big risk for a huge impact. What would we do in that situation? And the point is these elements are the same for every country. An Indian farmer would look at this very differently to the Indian steel industry like Russia will look at this very differently to the Maldives. There's no universal risk management approach because it is about who you are what you would populate the numbers with but that framework remains the same and the differences between the numbers and the framework are very much the essence of climate politics in the right way. They're about real choices, about real resilience and how much you invest in resilience, contingencies and in mitigation. And so taking that framework and looking across what we're doing and I'm not going to go through these in detail we set out 10 in the report 10 proposals for kind of first steps towards a risk management approach which we think are pretty critical. Firstly I'm on the idea of the area of aiming to stay below 2 degrees. Let's look at the mitigation goals and I'll go in some detail in that later. Investment in transformational RD&D get clean technologies out there faster make the global regime work and independent national risk assessments as all elements and again I'll go into some of them later which we think are critical for actually delivering that type of goal. You can't just hope at the moment we have a let's hope we get there rather than a actual robust strategy for delivering it. On building and budgeting for 3 or 4 degrees we think we need adaptation strategies for perfect storms and interdependent impacts. We tend to look at things in silos. One of the big lessons we got out of the discussion was we need to look at how things interact as they have in Tunisia and areas. We haven't looked at 2008, 2011 real lessons. We need increased cooperation to react to preventive humanitarian intervention. Look at how our resource management frameworks fisheries agreements, water agreements, trade agreements, how resilient are they to these stresses they're going to see because that architecture of agreement is one of the most critical things preserving the community globally. We need to have better tools and data to actually invest in these areas. We found a huge gap and I think the US Navy has also pointed this out between the data scientists provide and the data decision makers need actually make investment decisions. Lastly on contingency planning we need to look at the propensity for crash programs as we move as we think about high impacts. Just touching on a few of these to give you a flavour of some of the issues. Fundamentally lies on the basis of national climate risk assessments. However, most countries do not have clear goals. Looking back to Jay's recommendation is the goal of the US or the EU, if they say two degrees, what does that mean? What percentage for two degrees? Was it more meaningful to say we don't want to get four degrees because that's where some really bad impacts are happening or if you're India, is it about the likelihood of the monsoon shifting? Actually, you look around, you don't see a lot of evidence that countries have really gone for a core process of understanding their core interests and what that turns into in terms of focus outcome. And one of the reasons is the actors who are really affected who run the national infrastructure, who run national security, who deal with food security are not in the debate about what the country's overall goals are. So we don't have around the table setting strategies for delivering mitigation or global strategies on all the actors who are affected for real, not just on paper but the real actors. So our point is, that a whole of government risk assessment is critical for defining national interests and it's critical that that is not done by the policy lead department. At the moment, you have climate change responsible department saying how likely this is to achieve an outcome. We all know that you should never have policy assessment mixed. It's a basic tenet of security policy. We need the assessment done by an independent branch of government so that we can review and update our risk management process we go along. Secondly, on the adaptation on the kind of budgeting for three to four. Again, we think we need to identify clear planning scenarios at national level. Again, US is looking at investing about a trillion dollars in infrastructure soon. What's the planning assumption going to be for that infrastructure investment? That could be the difference between building a liability and an asset. We know that we have to look at some beyond the technical issues in lots of these areas. Post-Pakistan, the flood reconstruction, if we don't understand how that affects social conditions, power values, climate change, we won't achieve our security objectives of stability in parts of Pakistan. It's mixed up. Again, but we know we don't have the data and tools to address this and do it properly. There's a huge potential for cooperative action, particularly across the Atlantic, to build those tools and decision support systems because we all have very similar jobs and we're often doing this in the same place. Places like Pakistan or the Sahel, so there's a huge potential there for cooperation to improve our risk management systems. To produce things like this is a map of vulnerability in West Africa and highly detailed, and this is a piece of work done looking at the really close link between conflict and rainfall in Uganda. These are exceptions. We do not have much data of this resolution, but without it, it's very difficult to actually work on the ground. And finally, on this crash programs. We have a really big policy failure, which isn't that unlikely, given where we are at the moment, or very high climate sensitivity. There will be enormous political pressure or panic for a crash response. Let's do something. Geoengineering, massive roll out of nuclear power stations. They can have huge side effects on the security side, like proliferation. And some of them are just non-feasible, but we know panic does not make good decision making. So we need, and it's prudent to develop contingency planning and regulation of things like geoengineering and some of the core technological options. So they're available, but they're going to be managed in a good way at the same time. So we're not going to have any kind of emergency at all that we're going to avoid these scenarios. And one thing is we're not even monitoring many of the most extreme areas, like the dieback of the Amazon or methane emitted from some of the multipliers of climate change very well. So one of our biggest things we found was this could lack reluctance to plan for the worst-case scenarios despite everybody agreeing how terrible they would be. That's a lot of high policy and it's great for people to do security planning and lots of recommendations from national planners and militaries and infrastructure people who love probability distributions. But what about the public? The public of the egg. This is the egg. They can understand this because in the end this comes down to a very simple idea. How tense does it make you feel watching an egg sitting on the end of a table? This is the situation we're in. Stable. Doesn't look like it's moving, perhaps it's moving imperceptibly, and we know it's fragile. That contains a lot of emotional assumptions about the world as a system which often people don't have. They think the world is very robust, a rubber ball, not an egg, but it isn't. All the evidence shows it's fragile, the system is very dislocated. We are near the edge. We're not in the middle of the table. We're very near tipping points in the global climate system. And I think this is one of the things we've lacked is an ability to communicate, to start a conversation which can communicate some of the rich science, which we've talked about, into the public debate. And so our final point, as well as all the technical and policy and other issues, is, and this came through the process of this report, but in many ways for me is one of the most powerful takeaways, is that risk management really gives us an opportunity to reframe the public debate in an incredibly positive way. Because the current debate, and this is particularly US, but it's also in many other countries across Europe, China, India, so I don't think this is splitting the climate skeptics and believers is really unhelpful, and it really leads to an under-emphasis of both the climate uncertainties and these extreme scenarios. It also alienates the majority of people who, from all the polling in every country, essentially believe climate change is an issue, but are very confused about what to do with it, but do not want to be identified with either camp, which they seem as extremes. And that alienation of the centrist middle really undermines effective policymaking because you don't make decisions with an unstable centre or a politician's centre. And so what we like about risk management is it allows a debate where all the information can be used and assessed and it's pragmatic and not belief-based approach, but you can have different views. People can have different views legitimately without being stigmatised as being one thing or another, and it's not just that they have views, they can have a conversation. They can have a conversation, people can have a conversation about how much climate risk are you prepared to take the coffee shop or the pub or in the house, just like we had conversations about deterrence in the Cold War, just like we have conversations about civil liberties versus terrorist risk. We do this on many other issues of similar import in a place, but we have to have a conversation, not a broadcasting at people, and we have to allow them to look at risk and understand risk themselves. So that's what we feel, and this is, as I said, the beginning at the end, what we'd like to do taking forward the report is to explore how we can change these conversations, promote the conversations, do the policy work, but also think how this might change the way we talk and think about climate change to allow us to actually make some decisions, because the one thing we also know, if we're not making decisions, the risk is only going up, because inaction means more greenhouse gas than the atmosphere and higher risks. Thank you very much. Great. Thank you so much, Nick and Jay, for a wonderful presentation of the risks and a great view of a way to start the conversation about a new strategic framework going forward whether it's the risk management framework you put forward or another one. I've actually been at conferences that lasted three or four days and covered the material that you all discovered in about 20 minutes, so you should be congratulated. You take our friends at E3G at their word about this being the beginning of a conversation. What we'd like to do is help them foster that discussion and wanted to do so today by turning it over to a good friend, Ed McBride, and the economist who has covered issues like this for a while and can help us facilitate a discussion by asking us all the really difficult questions, but starting off with the next part of the learning curve, which is what is security officials, with some examples of what security officials here in the United States are doing about some of these issues and how they feel about some of the things that Jay and Nick just talked about. So, Ed. Thank you very much, Sarah. Hello, everyone. I'm going to basically do myself down. I'm afraid I'm not the environment correspondent of the Economist, which it says in your handouts. I used to be, so I'm horribly out of date, and please forgive me if I say anything that sounds like it's about a year old. Thankfully, I'm not doing most of the talking. We've got two respondents now who are both going to make a brief initial remarks and then join a panel discussion here, and then we're going to also take questions and have a discussion with the audience. So, I will just introduce our two respondents. The first to speak is Courtney St. John. She has the words climate change twice in her title, so that gives you a hint. She's the Climate Change Affairs Officer at the United States Navy's Task Force on Climate Change. She, like our second respondent, is part of the American Armed Forces planning and long-term strategic thinking in response to climate change, and so she is very familiar with the kind of approach that we've heard Nick and Jay talk about, and I'll hand it over to you to make your initial remarks. Thank you. We have to extend a special thanks to Courtney because she has gotten the duty that we've all experienced here in Washington of being a last-minute friend for somebody who wasn't able to make it rear-obnultedly, so we're very pleased that you're able to be here in this place. Thank you. I appreciate it. And I'm just going to talk briefly here about the Navy's approach to dealing with climate change and managing the national security risks associated with them and sort of our approach to how we've dealt with it over the past couple of years since the establishment of Task Force Climate Change. And as you can see here, as we like to call it, was established in May 2009 by the Chief of Naval Operations with a charter that really focuses on the global implications of climate change with a near-term focus on the Arctic. So the Navy recognizes that contrary to what many of us learned in middle school, the geography of the planet is changing, and we understand that these changes will help us gaining a good understanding of them will help us to ensure readiness for the Navy in the inter-century, which is really our primary goal. So specifically, I'll talk a little bit about what we're doing. We have two roadmaps. One focused solely on the Arctic and one on global climate change writ large that identify specific action items to guide decision-making and investments. And our prediction for the Arctic specifically is that there will be roughly four weeks of ice-free conditions in the 2035 to 2040 timeframe. But the risk for conflict even in that timeframe remains relatively low. Thus, we have to complete the studies and assessments now that will ensure that we're not buying ahead of need and that we understand the risk that we face in that changing environment. We also work very closely with our sister task force, Task Force Energy, which is also listed up here. And their goal is to increase energy security and tactical flexibility of the Navy. And we really recognize that these are two sides of the same coin. They're inextricably linked between adapting to changing conditions and making the changes that are necessary in the way that the Navy does business. So as part of our efforts, we've developed an adaptation framework which I'm sure doesn't look dissimilar to many other adaptation frameworks that are out there. And it forms the basis for all of our decision-making, specifically starting with the climate change observation and prediction. We recognize that geography is changing because the observation, not even the models of predictions, are telling us that. We've worked closely with scientists in the federal government and academia and other research institutes to ensure that we have the best access to these observations that we can then utilize to quantify uncertainty and recognize that, you know, the distribution of the impacts may not be uniform. So specifically for impact and risk assessment, we're engaging with subject matter experts, the good work being done within the federal labs and within federal agencies and other institutions. I think the slide that you... the distribution that you see on the right there, water resources was taken from Sandia National Labs and their very thorough assessment of water resource risks in the U.S. We're partnering with NOAA and the Air Force, among other federal agencies, in an effort to recapitalize the nation's modeling capabilities that will develop a coupled system that predicts changes on a regional scale with the timeframes that the Navy operates, sort of the zero to 30 years out. And as I've discussed, our near-term focus is ARTIC because as the QDR states, which I'm sure Dr. Chu will touch on and other defense guidance, that is the environment in which we're seeing the most rapid changes with implications for maritime forces. So we've released the Navy's ARTIC strategic objectives, which were signed by the Vice Chief of Naval Operations in May 2010 and we're also currently conducting assessments of gaps and capabilities over specific timeframes to determine the risk to adaptation and mission in that region. We're also analyzing and monitoring longer-term impacts of climate change for the Navy, such as the effects of sea-level rise on our installations worldwide and implications for our basing around the world, and changing resource distribution and the related effects of ocean acidification. Together, we'll ensure that we're ready and capable in the 21st century. Thank you. Thanks, Courtney. We'll move straight on to our second respondent, who's Dr. Daniel Chu. Like Courtney, but with a slightly broader lens, he's looking at some of the risks facing the United States and its armed forces in the future as principal director of strategy in the Office of the Secretary of Defense. So climate change is just one of those risks and so he'll now give us a slightly broader view of the threats facing the United States. It might be easier if I just jump off the edge of the stage. I don't actually have any slides because everybody else is speaking up here, so I'm going to... But I still want credit for being from the Department of Defense and not having slides. Good afternoon, everyone. Thanks very much. Thanks in particular to CSIS for inviting me here to speak on climate change and risk. Climate change is obviously a very important issue to the Department of Defense as I'll discuss with you here this afternoon and risk management for national security is our job, so obviously climate change and risk is of particular interest to us. Let me also give thanks and credit to the authors of this particular report for I think highlighting some very, very important climate change issues and laying out some great risk management principles that I think are not only applicable here but quite frankly are applicable across a range of issues, including the ones we deal with. So as you've heard, I'm the principal director of an office called Strategy. Let me tell you a little bit what that is because otherwise it sounds pretty vague. We are inside the office of the Secretary of Defense, in particular inside the office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Policy, and we do a lot of long-term planning and analysis for the overall Department of Defense, so we really do have a much broader understanding of what's going on here in the U.S. We also do near-term, near- and mid-term issues. I call them kind of strategy development and policy development pieces often were thought of as kind of the Secretary's think tank, so we develop a lot of different products and issues for his and for our leadership's consideration. And climate change is one of the keys along with energy and some other issues including the Arctic as Courtney mentioned. What we're most familiar with that our office is pivotal in producing is the Quadrennial Defense Review, and you saw Jay refer to it in one of his slides and others have as well. Quadrennial Defense Review as its name suggests is something we put out every four years, but more importantly is intended to provide our broad outlook on the future security environment, near-mid and long-term issues for the Department of Defense and a strategy for approaching challenges as we go forward. So let me start with that and talk a little bit about how we see climate change in the Quadrennial Defense Review. We view it very much as integral as we look at strategy going forward. The strategy that you see in the Quadrennial Defense Review we like to call the four P's and if any of you have read it you probably know them. The first of course is to prevail in today's conflicts. The second is prevention and deterrence of future conflicts. The third is preparing for a wide range of challenges and contingencies in the future security environment and finally we need to do all of this while we observe and enhance the all volunteer force. There's a couple of things in saying those four P's out loud that I just want to highlight to you that I think are important as you consider the QDR. First is you can hear from prevailing in today's conflicts to preparing to prevail essentially in any future conflicts or contingencies. You're hearing both from a near and a long term perspective in there. We think that's critical for a couple of reasons. First of all this is the first QDR that specifically acknowledges and looks at current operations as part of our risk management framework. Secondly as I say that it also implies that as we think about risk management we are not just thinking about managing risk across ranges of challenges but across time as well. We think it's absolutely critical in thinking about these issues and I would suggest it's critical in thinking about climate change issues as well. Another key item to note in this particular QDR is if you look at the section where we talk about the mid and longer term challenges in the future security environment piece, some of the features that we note quite explicitly here are the complexity, the uncertainty and the change inherent in future security environment. As such you cannot take anything but a risk management approach to these types of challenges. We frankly reject the notion that we have the predictive power to plan for specifics and frankly take a strategic planning approach that aims to create flexible, adaptable and robust planning across ranges of challenges. Again very much consistent with the risk management approach so I think you'll see a lot of commonalities there between how we look at future security problems in general and the climate change issue in particular. Finally I've already said it many times but just to add it to the list we also include in the QDR an explicit intent to look at risk management not only as an approach to strategic planning and analysis but also for the department as well. The department defense as you all well know is very large and diverse and has to deal with everything from installations and healthcare for its personnel to dealing with future adversaries of state and non-state actors and climate change issues as well. As a result we have quite a mix of apples and oranges and watermelons and washing machines and all these sorts of different things that we need to try and deal with in our risk management portfolio. It makes it a particularly challenging one to do but we still believe even with that diversity that it's absolutely critical to do risk management in the department and I'll talk to you briefly about how we do that as well. But finally let me just say that one of the most important features probably for this audience is that this is the first QDR that has explicitly has explicitly and specifically identified climate change as an important issue for national security and that should not go unnoticed. We believe that very strongly that's why we're here today and I'll talk to you a little bit about all the different ways we think about that. In general if you look at the QDR you'll see we talk about climate change as something of a threat multiplier or an accelerant to instability because we recognize that while climate change alone doesn't cause conflict per se it can certainly contribute to the conditions that make conflict either more likely more problematic, broader, wider these sorts of things. At least for our terminology we consider that a threat multiplier of sorts. As a result we really think that climate change has to be taken into consideration when we think about everything from our installations both in the United States and overseas as well as DOD's roles, missions and the operating environment in which we will be undertaking those roles and missions again both in the near term and out into the longer term as well. In the QDR you will see that when we talk about risk management and remember again when DOD talks about risk management we're talking about what we're calling enterprise-wide risk management and the enterprise for DOD is the government of defense. We're not talking about from a whole of government USG perspective although we obviously play a critical or a key role there. When we think about risk management in the department we think about it in particular in four key categories. One is operational risk that is the ability of our forces to conduct operations both the current operations that you see now but any other types of near term operations and execute our operations successfully with the right capabilities, the right capacity, the right training, etc. The second is force management risk. We can't do that first those operational duties. If we don't have the ability to recruit, retain, train and maintain the all volunteer force that provides the manpower for those and the capabilities for those operations. The next is institutional risk. The Department of Defense is a company that has many processes it has many systems that support it some better than others and our intent is to consider those explicitly as we think about how they support both operations, force management and the last category future challenges risk because we need to think not just about what we're doing today and what we intend to be doing in the next couple of years but we need to look out more broadly at the future. So that's how we look at risk in general in the department and I want to just quickly talk to you about how we think about climate change frankly in all of those categories because it is appropriate in each of them. I'm going to start by talking about future challenges risk but I will make a quick disclaimer here. I am not a climate scientist, I'm a strategic planner so as a result what you're going to hear me talk about are the types of scenarios, the types of things but they're not intended to be either predictive, prescriptive or proscriptive in any way but as the Department of Defense our job again is to look out into the future and identify the range of things we need to be prepared for. So from a climate change perspective we've looked at projections and we've extrapolated from that some specifics that we need to be prepared for. Those include for example changes in weather patterns that might result in more severe weather for example and as a result greater incidents of crises that might require humanitarian assistance or disaster relief. As a result if those incidences rise the need for DOD to respond. DOD is not always the respondent and is often in the supporting role but the overall need for us to respond may be greater. The specifics may be different, the capabilities may be different and we need to look at all of those and we do. Issues like sea level rise leading to mass migrations and how DOD may have to respond to that either because the mass migrations could cause instability or conflict or because again they could cause some sort of humanitarian relief situation that DOD needs to be involved in as well as something we look at as well. Climate change leading to issues of resource scarcity, water for example, likewise could lead to instability, could lead to conflict, could lead to humanitarian situations all of which we're looking at from a scenario based planning perspective for future challenges risk. The Arctic is another one that Courtney has already mentioned and we are looking at very specifically the idea that there could be increased activity in the Arctic raises a number of issues from everything from the potential for there to be conflict should nation states or others choose to exercise or seek some elbow room in the Arctic to search and rescue ISR type issues in the Arctic as well all of which we need to at least consider if there's going to be greater activity in the Arctic. You can already see me overlapping now with some of the other categories like operational risk obviously operational risk can include some of the scenarios that I've just discussed with you including some of the Arctic issues which are already issues for us including some of the humanitarian operations. I'd also highlight that likewise we've got some issues with regard to installations that can affect our operational capabilities. That leads us into as well the force management risk category where if our installations are unable to maintain training and readiness for example for our forces that can actually create challenges for our maintaining those ready forces to do everything from responding to these types of operations that I've already talked to doing everything up to crisis response and combat operations as well. We also have a particular challenge with regard to force management in as much as we rely to a pretty significant extent on the reserves for conducting many humanitarian assistance and disaster relief type operations particularly in the United States and the stress that places on them with regard to their training availability Finally on the institutional level and you heard a little bit of this already from Courtney in terms of how the Navy is thinking about it DOD is likewise thinking about how we can manage overall institutional risks in terms of not only our budget processes but also in terms of installations, energy use, operational energy use and so forth. We do that in conjunction with basically sister offices in AT&L who look at these on a day to day basis and ensure that we are looking at how climate change can affect those as well. So I've probably already spoken too long. I just want to close with a couple of key points for you to remember. That's how DOD is looking at not only risk management but also climate change across that kind of those multiple lenses of risk management for the DOD enterprise but DOD is DOD we're not the U.S. government clearly we want to play an important role we believe we can demonstrate leadership and we hope that we have in many initiatives that we've taken not only on environmental issues and energy issues but in the way that we are planning and doing risk management with regard to climate change but we're not the lead in this case so we look forward to collaborating with the broader interagency on this I think the advice that you're hearing here in terms of putting this in a risk management framework for that kind of discussion is good advice and I think it will be important particularly and we've all seen the newspapers and heard the television and radio on the budgetary pressures that we're all facing now this is a different kind of risk but I just wanted to mention it it's absolutely critical that we think of it in those terms risk cannot be viewed in a resource unconstrained manner we need to consider this in a resource informed manner so that we apply resources in the best possible way so when we think about the kinds of things that Jay was talking about in terms of mitigation through probability and consequence that we remember to do that and consider as well the kind of cost benefit over time so that we are applying our investments in the best possible area whether that's in terms of an issue area whether that's in terms of near term versus longer term issues or whether that's in term of which agency within the whole of government solution set we're applying to I think that's particularly important because quite frankly and very explicitly DOD thinks we have some important things to do but we would not expect from the many important things that the other agencies in the US government need to do as well and we think that that's why we need to have exactly this type of discussion in a structured framework so we can look at those in more detail thanks very much thank you very much Dan now we get to the discussion part we'll join our two original speakers as well but I might like to start with you Courtney and Dan I just inspired by about the probability curves the neglect of the extreme outcomes that we heard from Jay and Nick could I ask you to indulge in a bit of sort of Maoist self criticism I mean do you feel that in your job looking at these things you and your colleagues give enough attention to extreme outcomes you know low probability but you know high risk scenarios is that something you're actively thinking about from the Navy perspective I think it is I think we've identified sort of our near term and longer term impacts but we also give a lot of consideration to what the tipping points may be in the climate system and how that requires the Navy to act maybe sooner than it would if scenarios consider continue as normal so that's definitely something that we think about from my perspective I might actually dispute the premise of the question in this way here I actually think the Department of Defense is not only good at but probably too good at looking at low probability high consequence events that's partially because that's our job that's what we're supposed to do so that's okay but I think if I were to go back to Jay's presentation the issue here is the uncertainty piece that's where it gets more complicated so when you have great uncertainty with regard to either the probability of the consequences which based on the level of information I think is what we're talking about here not just on one of those that's where it gets really problematic we have some some things we're doing I don't know how to put it but some processes we're trying to implement that are trying to deal with those kinds of broader more uncertain types of potential challenges in the future and I think we've got to continue trying to do that because in the past quite frankly we have taken low probability high consequence events and we're quite good at planning for those it's these ones that are more uncertain to have a range of possible outcomes that we need to get better at planning well exactly I mean this isn't quite like preventing a terrorist attack or planning for a possible future conflict with China but you know those are singular events I mean maybe of long duration or great consequence but but when you're dealing with a sort of a spectrum of horrors like climate change is it as simple to apply the kind of approach that we've been discussing it's simple first of all the approach isn't simple I think it's pretty complicated but appropriately so but you're raising a good point which is so in the past we tended to think about discrete events or discrete kinds of challenges to plan for and we do need to think more broadly than that and that is something we are trying to do I talked about how we do scenarios planning in the department in the past we looked at single scenarios you know conflict with adversary X conflict with adversary Y we really are broadening that set now to look at future security environment strategic context which include things like you know the impacts of climate change and different assumptions with regard to trends in those areas it is complicated it is difficult we're instituting a lot of those processes now but I think they're headed in the right direction and frankly they're very consistent with the broad risk management principles you saw laid out here which intend to bring all of those together rather than again focusing on one element of it and then just taking that and essentially making everything else kind of a lesser included contingent ok well so if I could sort of throw that back to you two in a way I mean it strikes me that there was a slight tension not necessarily a contradiction but as you were presenting the risk management approach for climate change you seem to suggest it was useful both for persuading people who were skeptical of the need to do anything very much about climate change to sort of think of it in a different way and for those people who are trying to respond in some way to climate change to make their response more rational does it work for both or is it better for one or the other or is it good for both purposes I think it does work for both in a sense I came organically out of the discussions we started off thinking about it very much as how do we get this kind of whole of government approach and it was very much an elite focused project but as we went through it and discussed it and actually it came out as being and started thinking about the parallels to other issues the issue about how to frame the public debate became more and more so it grew organically out of the discussions it wasn't something we were aiming for or imposed on the project and I think it's quite the comparison with terrorism actually I can dispute with you on this so I actually think it's a very interesting one when we're planning to look strategically at terrorism over time we're looking at what's the incidence of terrorism likely to be the consequences of terrorism and have a model of understanding radicalisation and therefore we have quite well funded but badly implemented programmes which are meant to be looking at that which I used to work on at one time in our own countries in the UK and Europe in the US but also particularly abroad in North Africa, Middle East but we have to take a view on that and the interesting thing there of course is that if we get it wrong or there are hard security consequences for getting it wrong and not managing that risk down but there's no hard security ways of reducing that risk that has to be done to things like governance and dialogue and spread of democracy various other soft power things so unless you have a whole of government approach where the people have to pick up the hard security consequences can take a view on how effective the civilian side are at reducing the risks and say look we've looked at your we don't think it's working and we can't manage the risks of your failure you can't actually produce a feedback loop devote the political financial and institutional focus on lowering the risk and that's one of the things that comes down is without that feedback from the people who pick up the problem in reactive terms back to the preventive side you can just have people saying well we're going to meet two degrees it's the target the fact that none of our programs have any chance of doing it and it's not that so back to the most useful thing about this is this whole of government approach to the security issues is we need to get the people who are affected by policy failure and the people running the policy together around the table having an honest conversation about what's going on because at the moment it's all a bit about hope and not about honesty let me push on that a little bit I mentioned I'm no longer an environmental correspondent I'm now writing about American politics and so I had the privilege yesterday of watching one of the committees the curator of the EPA and they were very unhappy with the idea that she might do anything about climate change and this morning I was at the big Conservative Jamboree, CPAC and I saw a series of people who want to become president in 2012 explaining how one of the reasons why they should become president was they didn't want to do a damn thing about climate change so just I mean I'm you know it's a little bit unfair but I mean will those people who are certain you know the problem isn't uncertainty the problem there is certainty that climate change isn't a problem does this frame well help to engage them in any way? I mean just to hear the audience's viewpoint my viewpoint is if you know if people have an ideological position about something then no framework of rational discussion affects them we know that from running but I think if you look at the majority of people ideologically convinced either way on climate change most of them think it is a real issue and it's a real problem but they find the debate that has been set up completely alienating and they're unable to involve but they don't want to be involved in it I'm not surprised it's not a nice it's not a nice debate to be in in this country and in several other countries so if we could create a space where it was a more normal place to talk about things where you didn't get vilified as being some kind of unpatriotic for taking a view on any other issues again as a precursor to bad policy then I think it would make a difference it's not an overnight panacea but I can't see how the current process actually is in America's interest or the world's interest in dealing with the security of the country so you gotta have a go it's very much a veneer this political dynamic can change on a dime and will, I don't know how but I'm just saying that it's very volatile and and then and so the notion that that represents some kind of very dense obstacle I don't buy for one thing right now on the conservative side of the political debate we have a very shrill voice that is not actually representative of a large segment of our population according to the polling and so for example the new Gingrich's proposal last month that we abolished the EPA was resoundingly rejected by Republicans in a public poll I'm missing his talk right now to be here so I just wanted to make the point that that is what you describe as a real phenomenon but the notion that it's an obstacle that will stand there and be in the way permanently I don't think so whereas we have very solid analytical work and a serious community of risk managers within the government and within business community who will just keep doing their thing and will actually provide a base for when the politics kind of get out of the way if they do hopefully soon then I think we can make product. Okay well let me sort of ask a variant on that question in a slightly sort of less extreme version which is it do you see that this method leading sort of inexorably to your ABC or your 10 points Nick that you mentioned in your presentation or can you separate the methodology from the conclusions I mean could you apply the same methodology have a different bunch of people using it and come up with very different conclusions about the best way forward I think you in some of the 10 points in some ways are more because we chose things which were kind of such glaring problems in the way we did risk management about how we did things as opposed to the specific kind of like level or rate but sure if you ask the Maldives to run this you'll end up with AIM at 1.5 and below and a totally different set of building and budgeting because they're looking at much higher risks if you ran it in India you'd focus much more on the risk of them on soon failing because that's by far and you would actually not have temperatures in there for me I would have very different pieces in there one of the as I said it's opened up lots of questions it really opened up for me and Joe about how awful this use of global average temperature is as a goal for public policy it's just so it's non-resonant it's non-meaningful and it obscures more than it gives and so actually one of the things I mean interesting follow-ups is we use it because it's a short hand which people understand but one of the things I want to follow up is how do we make meaningful goals which actually would give us something to aim at which would actually be related to our interests as opposed to some output of a model which is not related to our interests and that's so you know there's a long way to go this is a start of a ten but those are different people yes and also they would lead to different ways of framing in the end though you still have to aim to reduce the risk adapt to something contingency plan those things the categories stay the same but the politics between people with different takes that's the politics I'd like to see as well let's come if you come up with a solid basis then have an argument about who does what that is the real politics of climate change that's not easy but it's at least arguing about real things as opposed to arguing about perceptions and ideology just trying to decide if it would be more interesting on dollar for journalists if we did it that way we're horribly behind schedule I blame myself but we obviously want to get everybody here involved in the discussion so we are going to take questions rather than have big cues forming at the microphone you will have to ask your question at the microphone but if you could stay in your seats and just put your hands up and we'll invite you and when you do ask questions if you wouldn't mind identifying yourself and your affiliation and endeavoring to the best of your ability to actually ask a question and not just pontificate that would be fantastic so let's go right ahead the gentleman here right in front Pablo Reyes with the first question for Latin America and strategic studies based in Bogota, Colombia a year ago the real Latin American South America experienced probably one of the worst droughts in over 50 years over the past few months you saw I've seen the rain cause 800 deaths in Brazil and in Colombia or close to 2 million people were displaced by the floods clinics government offices legal cases everything comes to a standstill and I use this to ask two brief questions one is to what is the in your framework what do you suggest you have something for interagency cooperation and coordination both at the national level there are many suggestions on that and also what do you do are there any suggestions in the report on how to bring the climate debate closer and people understand how to deal with a flood how to deal with a drought but it's hard for them to understand okay why should we care while all the debate is taking place in Copenhagen or in Cancun how do you bring that closer to where I actually on the ground can use that risk management and plan accordingly two really good questions and thank God we have recommendations approach to both of them one of them which is particularly how do you do better analysis as you say these combined effects we call perfect storms and some of these interactions we ask people scientists have produced impacts of climate change in the silos but actually it doesn't help people understand how they interact with social economic systems to produce landslides, droughts ripple through society and that's one of the recommendations of really investing you can't get scientists to do this you have to put money into new places new skills and disciplines to bring skills together to do that work which is actually what the Navy is doing in terms of informing its decision process as far as I understand it decision maker driven scientific approach as opposed to a science driven approach which is a real shift in the debate towards providing information to the first responders to the people in charge that's one piece the other one is precisely this issue of getting the people who run the infrastructure and the contingency planning nationally and the security area into this debate about mitigation and what's going on in the world at the moment they are distanced from it they deal with the consequence and that's why this national risk management approach we suggest that's actually the place to do it and again in a very real way I'm currently talking by role in the UK on the national infrastructure committee about how do we characterize climate change risk for making the next 300 billion dollars worth of infrastructure investment in the UK for the next five years we have to give advice to all the people doing the planning on that about what they should plan for at the moment we're giving them a probability distribution by a bunch of scientists that is of zero use to someone who's planning a new road or a flood defense or electricity system but they want to know am I building an asset or a liability because if you build it the wrong way this becomes a liability so that's precisely the whole process we can do there to give them useful information which we're not doing at the moment and it's not that the probability distribution isn't relevant to the solutions it's just that there are about three or four fields in between that probability of expertise between that distribution and the decision maker on building the road or the dam or whatever you know just about a year ago my colleague from Center for New American Security Will Rogers and I put out a report called Lost in Translation that is totally about this concept that there is this space where it's nobody's job between climate science and science writ large climate economics and all that too and decision makers who actually have to make decisions about either mitigating or mainly about adapting to climate change I would say because there's so many more people involved in that function and in that in that report we actually talk in the context of the US government we make recommendations of ways to sort of put some policies and incentives in place to help bridge that gap that both provide a strong demand signal for the information from that analytical community but also the mandates within the government to have strong interagency processes and to send those demand signals Courtney, you just played a compliment there, is it merited? I mean how do you manage to cross those three or four fields and get information from the scientists to the naval engineers? Well I think that we're in a unique position in that the upper echelons of Navy leadership recognize the challenges that are being faced and we also have the expertise both within the Navy and Department of Defense but the federal government as a whole to reach out to the scientific organizations and dictate what we need to them and that's a relationship that I think is a little bit unique but is maybe a model for others we're able to inform and say to them this is the kind of information that we need to make decisions, we don't need 100 year predictions necessarily for everything that we're doing right now but we need to make sure that we can actually go into Columbia and other countries and utilize the information that we have right now. Alright so maybe I'll take another question the gentleman here at the Thank you very much, good afternoon dear colleagues my name is Sun Guoshen from the Chinese Embassy in DC I would like to ask Nick a question before I ask the question maybe I'll answer his question because he raised a question in his presentation what threat will China oppose in 2050 I will assure you that China have never posed a threat to the peoples of other countries we will never invade and we will not kill and we will not enslave the peoples of other countries and I can assure you China will never pose a threat to the people of other countries and I hope that you will be able to get an answer by not being the governments of the countries especially the developed countries to take a need in reducing emissions and addressing the threat of climate change having said that I would like to ask the question you know climate change was mainly regarded as an environmental issue and it seems it's not very effective to address this issue from the non period of time of international negotiation we haven't moved very quickly on this issue in negotiations or in the actions of the different countries we do think that it is easier to sell this issue as an issue of security issue to the governments or to the different governments especially to the governments of the United States to the politicians of the United States thank you there's two answers to the question as opposed to the statement one is actually factual and one is institutional the first one is in a sense climate change moved from being environmental to security issue because it's one of the things that we're going to do at the climate conference the predictions on climate change were much more mild and much more long term and the actual trajectories we're going to have to do were much more gradual than we are looking at now because the science has moved on I'd love Jay to talk a bit about this which is the unknown one of the things people don't realise is it's not that we kind of woke up to climate change the impacts of climate change based on the science at the time but the science moved that tells me a lot but also it means that it is more of a security problem now because it's hitting more vital limits and it's combining with the rise of resource scarcity which was predicted in the 70s and is a byproduct of poverty reduction in China and other countries which is a good thing but we knew that was going to create problems with resources and water with land and other areas and in my discussions with Chinese security planners they're very aware of this and they know that China is extremely vulnerable and I think balancing China's development and security needs around climate and resource is one of the most difficult things the leadership has to do and they're very probably of all countries one of the few places where you know the leadership has taken scenario planning and scenario assessments on some of these issues certainly the UK government hasn't to the extent the Chinese government has in my understanding so it's interesting the main reason for moving to a security frame is more that it's actually that frame where the decisions we made the problem with environment in most governments is it's way out on a limb in CEPA in China for example or most environment ministries are not in the middle of discussions about infrastructure about economics, about energy systems and energy security which is actually all the things we're talking about so the concept of national security is broadened in the last 10, 15, 20 years and I think climate change therefore is a huge part of that space because of its broad range of implications and what you need to do to manage it it doesn't fit comfortably in environmental silo nor can environmental silo move the levers of power needed to address the issues both on adaptation and mitigation so in many ways it's been a natural institutional evolution to that space rather than a sales technique which I think would fail if it was just a kind of sales technique What about your experience within government Dan do you find that that you're thinking about this or indeed that you're thinking about it from a security point of view does that sort of turn heads the way just more nebulous pre-hugging doesn't DOD is paying attention to this has definitely turned heads and I understand that but from DOD's perspective we view it as a national security issue because we are DOD and that's the lane that we look in we frankly believe quite strongly and this is why I think there's to engaging kind of a broader whole of government framework for discussing this is actually quite important is that even if how should I say this it's good that we've gotten attention to this but it's insufficient and until we get this broader approach which I think this kind of a framework can help instruct that's going to be the critical element here Sim take another question that's right Andrew Anderson with EBI those were important words from China I hope you don't let that pass without taking it more seriously I want to put forward a proposition because I think we're almost there and that is that you're going to have to engage the bond market and central banks and insurance companies with your analysis take that over to DOD to properly engage Ed's question to the emerging commerce committee that's the audience that has to be convinced in the current political landscape so to do that you're going to have to engage the financial community because you're going to have to come to congress with financing mechanisms solved we know this I spent 10 years doing this with Sarah at DOE when we were framing the energy policy act and so you have to give DOD financing mechanisms third party leasing in order to do things like the DOD assured fuels initiative and other things because when we went to DOD and we said how are you going to buy synthetic fuels they said well we just cut a purchase order it doesn't work that way you need to build a 4 billion dollar plant to produce the synthetic fuels that DOD needs for its operational missions you can't do that unless you guys talk to the bond market and insurance companies which represent the way to bring the future stakeholders to the current dialogue through those financing mechanisms in order to build in the energy security that we need so I would submit that everybody will fail unless you engage the financial community back into the debate with the house energy and commerce committee you can't do it without them let's turn that into a question are you not talking enough what do you think of the proposition there you go honey well I'll just say briefly I am a science geek but I do work in a very interdisciplinary environment and what I do know is that while the finance sector and the insurance industry are not where they need to be per se in terms of putting solutions on the table the insurance industry at the reinsurance level is quite engaged and some players in the finance and banking industry are within their institutions taking climate change very seriously I know Bank of America for example has a $20 billion investment framework that it's going to apply over the next decade to investing in climate in all financing all sectors building technology etc that will work toward clean energy and more efficient buildings so there are signs of those sectors being interested now actually getting these broader solutions that you're talking about I completely agree I know nothing about that so I'm going to stop talking now I totally agree today and I haven't had the outcome yet there was a cabinet committee in the UK which was meant to decide hopefully the positive fate of setting up a UK green investment bank which could precisely do that and leverage hundreds of billions of pounds into UK's clean infrastructure and innovation in the world because unlike everybody else including the developed world except for the US we don't have a development bank that does this so we'll see and as well as the insurance we're talking to Swiss Rea and some of the big insurance companies a number to hold lots of people talk about China's foreign exchange reserves of $2.5 trillion as if this owning US Treasury bonds is so important European insurance industry $22 trillion much slightly larger holding of international bills and bonds including dollar bonds so we could mobilize that money into this space and it understands the risk then we really do have a chance of solving the problem because that's actually more than it takes to solve the climate problem just according to the IA gentlemen here David Bardeen I'm retired I used to be in the Federal Energy Establishment most recently in President Carter's Administration Dr. Chu mentioned humanitarian response and institutional arrangements now humanitarian response is something most people overwhelming numbers of people understand a lot better than some of these other issues we're discussing many people relate it to climate issues what I'm curious about is it's nice to hear that these issues have penetrated the think tank I congratulate the think tank and the secretary etc. on that but how far more does the question of humanitarian response institutional arrangements penetrate say in the Defense Department's relations with Congress in your planning your training you alluded to it but how much real training whether it's hours of percentages or dollars how about multilateral relations between our defense establishment and those of other countries we see other nations expect their defense establishment to come into crises and that's true in Eurasia the America is everywhere and we even had Mexican Marines as I recall helping us out during Katrina so could you where are we now in penetrating into the consciousness of our defense establishment in and out between it and its partners and communications buddies these issues of humanitarian response to big issues that might be related to our climate change problems it's a great question and I appreciate in fact the opportunity to talk about some of this because I think it's some very important work that we're doing in the department right now and quite frankly this is building on a lot of previous work but I think you're going to see some significant areas including the ones you just mentioned here's where we are so I did say that we are the think tank and yes it is certainly permeated our think tank but it is also permeating the department in fact we think this is the best way to ensure that this is not essentially kind of the issue du jour to things but really is considered as part of our planning requirements particularly for the long term but as I mentioned before in the near term issues as well I'll go back to the QDR for a second just as a touchstone document to give you some examples if you look in the QDR you'll look I think I mentioned before we had a section on force sizing and shaping remember again from a DOD perspective one of our primary focuses on making sure we have the right military capabilities down the road and we tend to look at that for structure terms although it is much broader in terms of skill sets and training as well when we look at that you'll see two things I think in particular that are worth noting and that I think will address some of what you're talking about one is we are no longer focused simply on kind of what we would call major combat operations you know what in the past has been called kind of a war-centric planning approach for force sizing and shaping we are looking at a very broad range of activities from what we call foundational non-conflict type activities which are exactly these types of activities we're talking about including humanitarian assistance, disaster relief type operations I will add to that I may not have mentioned it earlier but including things like building partner capabilities so that they can we can help enhance the ability of our partners and allies around the world to be better prepared for these types of events as well so all of those sorts of things are now explicitly in the kind of force sizing and shaping construct work that we do this is intricately now a part of how the department looks forward and plans for the future I think that's quite significant I think it's quite important and I think it will be enduring so I think that that's one area the other is on the point you also raised with regard to multilateralism we also explicitly look at this from an alliances and partnership perspective our intent here is to work collaboratively as much as possible with allies and partners and as such again we have worked that into our planning construct so we are thinking of things in that way you asked about Congress I will just tell you we have been in active communications with Congress about this approach so that they understand all of these components that are in there and I anticipate continuing that particularly as we head into the next round of budget talks Sorry my slap touch management approach has led us up to time but Sarah likes to keep the trains running on time so we are only going to take one more question how about right here at the front Yes, hi Carl Husker with ICF Incorporated Sarah and Jay I have talked with a lot over the years so they will know that this is I am putting this forth in a bit of a devil's advocate mode but first it strikes me that the risk management framework that you are putting forward would shake things up the most on the mitigation front as opposed to the adaptation front in a sense entities like the department a town, a city, a nation can choose adaptation steps to take and they capture most of the benefits and they are sort of making their judgments about what to do it seems the tougher not to crack is the collective global decision on how much mitigation to take and this is where I really admire the thinking you are putting forward but here is my devil's advocate question who is really your audience for changing their framework and moving it in your direction it is certainly not the people on the house committee who first need to accept the science they are sort of not the audience right now but I would think that it seems that global leaders have already adopted a risk management framework they have chosen a target of two degrees but is the problem just that they are not walking the talk even the previous administration had a target it was a greenhouse gas intensity target and you could argue whether it was the right target but are they your audience or is the people at the recent cops the target for changing the framework when it seems that they have embraced a two degree target or is there another stocking here perhaps which is a framework that is not really articulated much by leaders but is articulated by sort of the mainstream of the economics profession which is like any problem we sort of put it through the paradigm of benefit cost analysis so we should only take steps on climate mitigation that are justified by benefit cost analysis is that sort of the stocking of course here who is your audience who should change their framework and in what way and also is it decision makers or the public at large or both so that is a lot of balls I have thrown in the air catch any of them you want a very simple answer the report is actually primarily written for national decision makers to have a framework for deciding their national interests which as an observer has seen for 20 years I would say to a major country I know none including my own of the UK has done a serious discussion on what are their national interests and what mitigation target they should set how much adaptation what do they see is the limits of adaptation in terms of their security based on the global networks and internal positions so yes they have signed bits of paper it is also very clear that the things they have agreed to do do not add up to the goal they have set the reason for that gap is that they are doing what is painless what they have not done is really commit to delivering the goal they have set as a core piece of national interest so the two pieces is that we want to get that national interest conversation going in India, China, Europe, US and make sure the right people are in it and it comes down to it if the conversation is scientists and environmentalists talking to leaders which is what we have had for the last 20, 30 years it will not work because it is about models and PowerPoint presentations to people who are dealing with real concrete decisions about national interest groups what we need is the people who represent the interest groups of national security national infrastructure agriculture, global food security to have a view on how much certainty they want on the limits of climate change relative to their interests and the things they are responsible for managing in the conversation which defines national interest one of which will be ran everybody's cabinet table but it's got a broader obviously a broader span it's in the Beltway or in the Brussels Beltway that's the conversation we want to influence and we also think there's huge potential for the public conversation as well though it's not what the report was primarily written to do it's something that's emerged out of the thinking and when you get to the House Committee I don't know but those are the people we want to do it and that's what the conversation we'd like them to have because I don't see how you build a global regime on the basis of people who don't know their national interest and I would submit none of them seriously know their national interest at this point and I would just add from the risk management perspective choosing a target is not constituted risk management framework it's one thing to say let's say we did consider our national interest it is in our national interest to meet a target of two degrees but then you have to ask the question given that the modeling behind the mitigation scenarios equates to a 50% chance of failing what do we do in that very high likelihood that it fails how do we manage the consequences of that so I would say that in fact it's highly relevant to adaptation and in fact the B in the ABCs is plan and build for three to four even though you shoot for two so risk management is much more rich than just saying well we agreed to a target even if you achieve everything you set out to achieve to meet that target you might fail the climate sensitivity might be underestimated and there are unknown unknowns how are you preparing for those things that's risk management well I think this has been a really valuable discussion and one of the things that I've enjoyed most about it is the conventional wisdom around town for the last several months has been aside from relitigating the science of climate change it's not a topic we want to talk about I actually think that's completely the opposite of what reality is now is the time for refreshed thinking and bringing more people involved in the dialogue about what we do about climate change given where we stand at a global and national level and so we really appreciate the opportunity to have the chance to have this discussion today and also the point that it's an iterative discussion I think that the last couple of years folks have been operating under this guided premise that we could make a decision at a global level about what we're going to do about climate change and not revisit it and that isn't the case but it helps us because we have to constantly be re-evaluating those things and the perspective that we got from the Defense Department today shows that some people are thinking along those lines and it would be great if we did it on a more coordinated basis across government so in addition to thanking a wonderful, wonderful panel for all their terrific contributions we'd be completely remiss if we didn't thank Katherine Silverthorn from E3G and Molly Walton and our team here at CSIS for putting together all this event today and all of you for being here please join me in a round of applause for everybody.