 Newport Artic Scholars Initiative is the first of its kind program that brings together sailors and scholars from Arctic nations together for one year to study and report on important questions asked by our heads of Navy and the many people who care deeply about the future of the Arctic. This is the opening seminar of the second Newport Artic Scholars Initiative and our focus this year, unlike last year, we ended up creating over 30 principles of Arctic security in the areas of awareness, confidence building measures and capabilities and what we found after hearing from our heads of Navy was there's a need to focus on some of the cooperative security frameworks and so that's our charge this year is to explore current and potentially proposed new frameworks to enhance cooperation, security cooperation to prevent conflict and to maintain open dialogue among Navy's and nations in the Arctic. If you think about it, the last two decades 50% of the ice pack in the Arctic has disappeared, opening up for new communication ways, exploration, exploitation, but also competition. So if you think globally, great power competition with the United States, China and Russia has also moved into the Arctic. So this group is looking into how can we re-establish a dialogue in the Arctic? How can we as neighbors talk about security interest that affects us all? And so that is the purpose of this group to look at confidence building measures for the future of the Arctic. The benefit of having so many Arctic scholars sitting together for three days and having time to discuss in depth these issues gives a lot of perspectives which you can't find yourself and so I think the personal benefit for me has been the ability to exchange ideas and knowledge on issues and also to try to come up with new and innovative solutions to complex problems and that has been very useful here. I think this issue is so important because in many ways the future is now and so for a long time people have been thinking about climate change particularly in the Arctic being a game changer or creating new sets of concerns, challenges, threats, sometimes opportunities too and that future is here. We don't need to talk about that in abstract terms, that's not something that's coming down the road, that's the world we're living in right now and it's only the way in which climate change is playing out in this one region of the world but in many ways the Arctic is the most susceptible region in the world to climate change so it's kind of happening there soonest but this is a global issue obviously so I think that the Arctic becomes a really important test case for how states and non-state actors are going to respond to these kinds of questions, the climate change is pushing front and center.