Welcome back to JSA TV the newsroom for tech telecom and data center professionals Buffy hierarchy this and we are coming to you live from channel partners 2023 in fabulous Las Vegas and joining me today is Nathan Xerringer He is the CRO of comnet Nathan. Welcome to JSA TV. Thank you. Thanks for having me. Yeah, absolutely How's the show been going for you so far? It's been going pretty well. We've had several meetings where again We're just trying to branch out into the channel partner business. So it's been successful at that front. Yeah, that's great So come that is it's very unique to the industry. Why don't you tell viewers a little bit more about that and what they do? Okay. Yeah, absolutely. So comnet was a company that was formed about 30 years ago We're actually kind of bifurcated as an organization. We really have a C&I or that's what we abbreviate ourselves as comnet incorporated C&I services and a C&I fiber division, which is the independence fiber network division of the organization and We on the C&I services side We provide back office support call center knock network operation center In tech and as well tech support and then on the C&I fiber We manage a regional fiber optic network that spans most of Ohio Eastern Indiana and southern Michigan and then with that we were legacy middle mile network So we actually are connected to over 40 ISPs to where our fiber connects to their fiber So we're able to provide connectivity deep without that region. Okay. Well, thank you for that great explanation Sure, the viewers appreciate that and come that has a renewed focus on the enterprise channel Which is so critical in today's landscape. So why don't you give viewers a little bit more information there? Yeah, absolutely So the C&I fibers side has recently completed a lot of projects. It's where we're branching out more into Metro markets and we're realizing that we can get a lot of value by Becoming channel partners with a lot of these managed service providers that are here We don't cross their space when it comes to what the services that they provide We can more complement their services by providing the connectivity that their clientele needs So there's some synergies between their clientele and our clientele on who we can work with and how we can help them And is it going well for you so far at the show? It is it is going well And like I said, we're kind of expanding what we're doing as an operation And we just hope to keep building those relationships Well, I think you touched a little bit about some of the benefits that the partners would get from working With comnet but is there anything else you wanted to add there? Well, see there's also, you know the partner of another ISP connecting with us and they can use us in a traditional sense That we're a middle-mile network right that could provide connectivity throughout that region But when it comes to channel partners again, some of the their customers expect a higher level of redundancy resiliency With with their connections in order for them to provide their service to be the backbone to be the conduit for them to deliver Their managed service provider services and that's where comnet working with them and able to provide that higher level of connectivity In uptime can really help support augment their business. All right And what developments do you hope to see in the channel? Specifically with your channel partner program over the next few years Well, we'd like to see it become a more massive market stream Like I said, we're targeting more enterprise industry on our own We feel like again the synergies between their clientele and our clientele will work well and as our company keeps expanding into new markets Specifically, we're moving completely to over build the state of Indiana with another middle-mile network Okay, I think that we could compliment Them and they can compliment us well and we could both work together to develop business and expand our revenue market I mean, that's what it's all about. That's right. That's right partnerships and how important they are and the strategy behind them so it sounds like comnet has the right strategy and Partnership program in place to to help reach some of those goals. Is there anything else you want to add? No, it's just we're excited to be here. Like I said, we're kind of new to this show But we feel very welcome and it's been productive for us thus far. Yeah, I mean the channel partner community is wonderful Right. It's like a family. So I'm glad to hear that you feel that way about the show and Is there anything else do you wanted to add? No, I would just look forward to continuously working with everybody and keep developing these relationships And where can viewers go if they want to learn more? If you want to learn more, you can go to cni team comm and if network dot does Well, thank you so much Nathan for joining us today live from channel partners 2023 in fabulous Las Vegas And thank you viewers for tuning in happy networking


Where the first four articles deal with the structure and operation of the government that is created by this agreement. The last three deal with important ancillary matters. Article 5 establishes a process for changing the document. This allows for handling any errors that are discovered in the original document or changes required to keep the agreement effective where the original provisions might end up ineffective or harmful to continuation of a constitutional government. Article 6 addresses the continuation of authority from the existing colonial confederation, the nature of the legal authority, and the orientation of public officers to their authority of office. Article 7 provides the process for the enactment and empowerment of the agreement itself. Article 5 provides a process for additions to this constituting agreement, and it is very much like the process that was used to propose and ratify the original agreement. The additional party to the process is the Congress, which is also able on behalf of the people to call for a convention to propose amendments. As with the original convention, those who gather are not subordinate to nor to be limited by authority of state or central government. They are to represent we the people in their efforts to see to the needs for amendment and then to propose the same where there is agreement and convention that they are to be presented by the states to the states for ratification on behalf of we the people. In a large, neither we the people nor our leadership have been educated in the original document but have been presented with misinformation concerning what was agreed. This has had impact on the quality of amendments that have been accepted under this process. In large, our lack of previous education is the purpose for providing teenage students with opportunity to read and understand our remarkable founding document. For the great American experiment in self-government to continue, we have to have both an understanding of the past experiment and a basis for coming to awareness of what we can agree upon today and in the future. Rest assured, there are those who will not agree to even support education for fear that they may find themselves disadvantaged. Recognize that this is a common fear for all people and that only by our agreement will it be dispelled. It is only where we as a people can have faith in each other saying to our corporate benefit that this experiment will be ready to enter into a new phase. Even coming to that realization that the government has a purpose of the people may be sufficient change but this will be in the hands of our future generations of citizens. We will be separately addressing the numerous amendments as not only additions but as historical events and purposes that have been accepted as the basis for changes. Article 6 covers three important ancillary matters. The first is continuation of the new government from the confederation of colonies which was which it was replacing. The second was the establishing of the Constitution as the legal authority of the states as well as being a basis for central government. The third was assuring the support of public officers for the provisions of this constituting agreement. The first was both financial and political. Continuation of the pre-existing government. It recognized the financial obligations that had been incurred before the new government took office. Assuring everyone that there would be no loss of financial obligation through empowerment under this new constitution. The second was continuation of the political arrangements made on behalf of the colonial governments which were not in discord with the provisions of the new agreement. Treaties and other political agreements with foreign nations were to continue as if they had been signed under the authority of the new constitutional government. This was to assure all affected parties a high level of continuity in the transition to the new structure and operation of American government. This provision was transitional and no further effect after ratification of the constituting agreement. All new financial and political arrangements would be made under the new authority and in accord with its written provisions. The second paragraph arranges legal priorities for the government. It includes a people's recognition that the new constitution will be a greed authority in the United States and that it will represent its sovereign citizens. In that it will also have to be center of legal government for the states as well with recognition that they are also to be representative bodies assuring internal groups of the same sovereign citizens. Of specific note there is nothing here about state rights. States are also representative bodies. People are the ones with rights. The states have authorities attended upon representing the people just as the federal government gains its authority from the people of the United States. There is no agreement to any contest between the authority of the states and the authority of the federal government. They are both to be representing the same people. There is rather a division on the sorts of actions they take in their separate parts of supporting the sovereign people who are their source of authority for both of them. It was also wise, even if not technically necessary, to state in writing that the state level court officers were required to apply the federal law in their decisions. This headed off the potential for state governments to refuse to apply the laws that would not be advantageous to the citizens of the state. It assured uniform applications to citizens of the United States. It is for us to note that this did not set the new government above the state governments but rather recognize that the sovereign people of the United States as a whole could be granted greater representational authority than the regional populations of the states. The use of supreme law was probably more a political statement than a factual one. The sovereign people are the authority behind this supreme law and they own the government that sets the laws into place. Both legislation and the Constitution that authorizes legislation are only empowered by reference to the ability of the sovereign people to come together for that purpose. The third paragraph of this article gives the Constitution immediate jurisdiction of all public officers, both state and federal. It requires an oath or affirmation to support this constitutional agreement. It makes both a crime and a tort for the public officer to act in defiance of the provisions of this agreement. Disparagement of the Constitution is not only a cause for removal from public office. It is a basis on which any sovereign citizen might sue for personal damages that arise from official acts of contravention. The only way to justify such an action in public office is an effective representation of citizens who would support such contravention. The sovereign people are the only recognized higher authority. The inclusion of a ban on religious tests for public office is an important one. This is not some separation of church and state, but recognition that divine authority claimed by religious adherence is not being used to prevent representation of sovereign citizens. The sovereignty of the American citizen is to be inherent in being a citizen, not in adherence to religious beliefs. This is recognition of religious authority as potent, but not as the basis for self-government under this constituting agreement. Religious adherence is not to be a foundation for this agreement. The government derived under this is not a religious institution. It does not come from any divine right to rule, as was claimed for past European governments. Article 7 addresses the process for approval and implementation of this new government. It generally addresses the ability of many prior colonies through their agreements to terminate and replace the existing confederation. There are two ancillary matters that are not addressed directly. The first is the status of the non-ratifying states when the confederation of government is terminated, and their citizens are not yet recognized as part of the newly formed United States. It simply goes unstated. The other is the status of colonial governments that had assumed the role of legal government in a vacuum left by revolution. They had no legal source of sovereignty, and had limited acceptance as separate government entities, especially when their attempted government through confederation had been terminated. Once the new government was authorized, their options seemed limited. They could ratify or not ratify, but they would be hard-pressed to otherwise exercise any authority as to gathered states that was forming a central government for the Americas. This will be noted again in the study of the Bill of Rights, the First Amendments to the Constitution. Having such specific statement of citizen rights was considered by many to be an essential for the new nation that was being formed. This finishes our study of the originally signed agreement with emphasis on the nature of the document as the people's document that authorizes a central government. It ordains and on ratification would establish a new government that received its authority from those who were to be governed. The clarity and thoughtfulness that was demonstrated was simply magnificent and worthy of appreciation by all peoples, especially those who reap its benefits. But even in its ratification, we have the seed of political divisiveness and it was in the form of a need for amendments to specifically include the rights of citizens. One group was technically correct in terms of rights already being inherent in the government, having only been delegated powers and authorities. Another group recognized the practical reality that leaders would ignore the nature of the document, treating it as a recognition of a right to rule in continuation of European traditions. As it turns out, the concerns of both were correct.


What's up everybody Jason here for Jasper's case breaks comm Joe did not do the randomizer box giveaway for mosaic baseball last night for predictions number two So I'm gonna run it for him right here guys. So again, if you bought two or more teams in this break You had a chance to win a free box. So if you bought two teams, you get one entry by four teams You get two entries six teams gets three entries Etc. Etc. If you only buy one team may not be entered a win top name wins a box ship sealed now a lot of you guys Did win a lot of teams from team random fillers So those will count towards the promo. I believe that's what Joe told me So everybody that has two more teams will get an entry whether it's a team random or straight straight up straight up spot so a brand had to Christopher with two Gave with just one. I would two James with two Joe with three. So we're just gonna give you one entry But last Bob mojo car with two Matt with four So Carl gets an entry maggots, too Patrick you get four entries or sorry you get four teams you get two entries Sean Maddock with two that's an entry as well and Then Shane with just one Shiri with two Travis Melberg with two so that's an entry each so out of the possible 15 we only have 13 entries, right? Brand Christopher gave it and get one. I got one James. I won Joe got one Carl had one Matt had two Patrick had two Sean Maddock had one and sheer trust. Yep So there you go now let's Roll a dice snake eyes just two times. Good luck one two Matt There you go after two times Congrats Matt. We'll send you a box ship seal. Appreciate it guys. Jasper's case breaks calm


Aloha, I'm Marcia Joyner and we are navigating the journey today. What a journey this one is. My dear friend, and you know I only talk to dear friends, my dear friend Frank Haas is going to take us on a journey through tourism, which is the bed and butter of Hawaii. And it has been for who knows how long. And this is a dream and people always want to take this dream of a trip of a lifetime and if you watch any of the daytime shows and they give away a trip to Maui, everybody's just, oh I gotta go, I gotta go. And so we are going to talk to my dear friend, Frank Haas, about tourism and when is tourism too much and when and what is going on with tourism, how does that impact the rest of us that are not in the tourism business and there's just so much to tell. Thank you Frank. This is quite a journey. I love the theme, the journey theme. I don't know if I told you that I was one of the authors of a paper called charting a new course. It's a journey charting a new course for Hawaii tourism. So it has been a journey for tourism in Hawaii because the promotion of Hawaii goes back to 1903. There was a committee started by the Chamber of Commerce called the Hawaii Promotion Committee with $10,000. And here we are in 2019 with almost 10 million visitors, so a lot has changed. A lot has changed, yes, yes, so tell us about Frank. Well I've been involved in marketing and especially marketing and tourism for most of my career. I've worked on advertising and marketing programs for Hawaii, for Oahu, for airlines, for hotels, for hospitality companies, for restaurants. So I've seen those changes on a personal level and watched how it affects businesses and watched how those businesses affect communities. So I'm at a point now or in my life and career where I want to see how it should fit together. So we keep talking about this as an economic engine, but it's not just an economic engine. It affects everything that we do in Hawaii. So we have to pay attention to the economics, but we also have to pay attention to the impacts on our communities and what it does to our culture and our way of life. Last year before the election we interviewed 20 different candidates from all over the state, from little places that most of us don't hear about. And without exception, they talked about tourism and the impact on the infrastructure. One person told us on the Big Island it takes an hour for an ambulance to get to her community. Another one at Hanna, three hours on the road to Hanna. And all of this, the way it impacts on the state. So I'm back to you. How do we deal with, A, we need this tourism dollar and how do we survive, I guess is the right word, to keep it the impact on the infrastructure? Well, I have a word for you. How do we manage this? Great. Because I don't think we've done a good job in managing it, and for a long time that didn't matter. It was okay. We were growing. Everybody was happy. But when you get to the point where it's almost 10 million visitors, but it's not just the 10 million visitors, it's where they are. They're on the road to Hanna. They're on the road to Kapa. They're at Laniakea Beach. They're in places where there's not enough facilities for them or capacity for them. And they're not, they're getting in the way. They're intruding into residential areas. They're intruding into private areas. And that's where you have the conflict. I mean, the question that you asked is, how many visitors is too many visitors? And it really depends. Too many visitors at a specific site that isn't built for them is a real nightmare. We have places like the convention center, the hotels, where you can have thousands of visitors and that's fine. They're in Waikiki. They're at a resort. They're having fun. But they're not causing those traffic jams. They're not creating the problems that you described. Well, now many years ago, I guess it was in the 80s. I was at the corner of Calacaua and Lourdes. And this young man said to me, tourist, he said, where's the ocean? And I stopped and I turned around and all of these hotels, all of these, you can't find the ocean. There is no, like, ah, I was stunned, you know, like, where did it go, you know? And that was during that boom when everybody was building and building and everything. Well, Waikiki is what it is. And I think it's an object lesson for us on how not to do tourism. But because it is what it is, we now have to say, what do we do with it? How do we manage that? And tourism is a very complex industry and the solutions are very complex. Part of the solution in Waikiki is to find those people who really enjoy what Waikiki is. It's not my cup of tea when I go to a resort, but you can talk to the young person that you talk to in Calacaua and Lourdes was looking for the ocean. But if you look for somebody that's looking for shopping or nightlife or some of the other things that Waikiki has to offer, that's really fine. Well, now, Guam, Taipan, they kind of look like Hawaii did 50 years ago, except on their main street are all the same businesses that we have on Calacaua and in the same order. And shame on them, that's very bad marketing. Yes. And even the ABC store on every corner, it's like, this is amazing. Right. And they have a culture in Guam, they have a Chamorro culture. It's a perfectly wonderful, valid native culture. Why they felt they had to copy Hawaii is beyond me. And that's usually the sign of lazy marketing. They did that because Hawaii already had a good brand and they said, we'll just do that. It takes a little effort to really understand and position and communicate the culture that you have, the essence of the culture. We are moving in that direction in Hawaii. If you look at Hawaii 20 or 30 years ago, we had the tikis and we had the wiki-waki woos and we had all that stuff that was kind of the fake Hawaii. And I think you're seeing, it's not a transformation yet, but you're seeing more attention paid to authentic experiences, authentic Hawaiian culture, and that can't be copied. Right. Guam can copy the glitz, the cellophane skirts, the other stuff, they can't copy the real thing. Well, but it just surprised me when I saw that, because my thought is exactly what you're saying. These are Chamorros and then on Saipan also. And they have a distinct culture that is different. But the only thing, like I said, I was just surprised when, because they've got beautiful beaches and all of the same things, they have a different culture. And yet here are these swords. And we need to resist that sort of thinking in Hawaii. The issue of gaming always comes up, gambling, and you can gamble anywhere. I don't know why we would want to have that here. We have these shooting ranges in Kalakaua. I mean, why would we do that? It's a wonderful book on how to sustain a visitor industry. And the author of the book said, you know, a destination is headed for trouble when you see the first putt-putt golf. Can you have that anywhere? Oh, my. So we need to find those things that are inherently here, authentically here, and really communicate those values to our guests so that they come here and experience those things and not decide to come here just for the glitz. Yes. And I guess the biggest thing, we can see that when they're made in Hawaii is the festival and how, for that whole weekend, how people come from everywhere to buy the real... Yeah. And it's not just that. And when I said we're seeing the change, I was chairman of the Hawaii Book and Music Festival. That's a wonderful experience and I know you've been involved in it. But you get real people in Hawaii talking about real issues and real books about Hawaii and books about the place. The Ula Palakaua thing on Maui was another festival, a very local, very authentic. So we're seeing more of that because visitors are getting more sophisticated and they're looking for more of that. We just had to make that connection between those people who are looking for an authentic experience and the ability to give it to them. What do... But you keep track of everything. So what is the spending like that we are constantly after the spending and everybody says that's the big thing? What do we do with the spending? What are we looking for in spending? For many, many years, the whole focus was how many bodies are we getting here. And bodies create issues with, you know, congestion and intrusion into residential neighborhoods. So there's been a shift to say we really need to talk about the visitor spending. So I have a chart to take a look at what's been happening. And what you see here is a blue line, which is the number of visitors that have been coming to Hawaii annually. And it goes from 7.8 million, 7.9 million in 2012. Just last year we had almost 10 million visitors. So look at the slope of that line. It's increasing every year since the end of the Great Recession. The other line, the red line, is inflation-adjusted visitor spending. And it went from $15.7 billion in 2012 to about $17.6 billion last year. So that line is much, much flatter. So what's the reason for that? And if you go to the next slide, we can take a look at what people have been spending on an average day basis. The blue line is the same line, going from 7.8 million visitors to $9.7 million. But look what happened to spending and inflation-adjusted terms. It's actually declined. And why is that? Well, one of them is cell phones. People are able to find things that are free. They go off the beaten track. They go to Hayao. They go to beach parks. They go to places that they never could find before. Part of it is vacation rentals. They're staying in places in our neighborhoods, which is creating congestion and deloys and upset. Once again, because of technology. And so we need, we're at a point where we need to figure out how to give visitors an experience in a place that's suited for them, that can accommodate them. You think of some of the problems we had, and you named some of them Hana Highway, but La Niakea Beach on this island is a good example of that. Because there's a traffic jam there because people have used their cell phones to find out that there's turtles there. So how do we solve that problem? Well, it's partly technology, but part of it is steering visitors to other places. Well, now we need to take a break and we'll be back in 60 seconds. And then I want you to tell us about this technology, because everybody has the phones and everybody's tracking and tells you where you're going and all of this new technology. But let's talk about that when we come back. We'll be back in 60 seconds. The National Association of Abarbon Owners. Hawaii Energy. The Hawaii Energy Policy Forum. Hawaiian Electric Company. Integrated Security Technologies. Galen Ho of BAE Systems. Kamehameha Schools. MW Group. The Scheider Family Foundation. The Sydney Stern Memorial Trust. Volo Foundation. Yuriko J. Sugimura. Thanks so much to you all. Aloha. I'm Marcia and we're back. And we are navigating a journey that every one of us in Hawaii lives with. And that is tourism. From the earliest times that I can remember about tourism and watching it grow and grow and grow. And it used to be, you could tell who the tourists were. And if you remember in the 70s, I think, maybe later, there was a push and an ad campaign for everyone to greet the tourists with aloha. Do you remember that? There was a big push because it was saying, this is our bread and butter, and who they are, we need you to greet them with aloha. So here we are, and I still do it, everybody and everything, aloha. So, now we have gotten to that place. But that's old time tourism. What is the new tourism? How do we, what is that about? Well, first of all, I do want to talk about aloha first because people are frustrated with tourism. And if you're frustrated, you're not going to show a lot of aloha. Yes. So we need to fix these problems if we expect people to continue to interact with visitors with aloha. So those things are connected. Before the break we were talking about some of these problems, Hana Hayawe, Laniakea Beach, they're very complicated. And we really need a complex solution for these. Laniakea is a good example. The highway is all backed up because people are stopping to see the turtles. So what's the solution? Well, the solution really is the Department of Transportation somehow fixing the road. Moving the road, by the way, costs millions of dollars. The Department of Land, they could create a park where people could park or the city and county so that they'd have a place to help with a crossing there or control traffic. It could be the neighborhood itself deciding whether they want to promote that. So these are really complex issues. What's happened that has caused some of these problems is technology where people can find places like Laniakea Beach. One year, 30 years ago, you would drive past that beach. They never knew there were turtles there. And now everybody's posted those turtles on Instagram. There are probably more pictures of those turtles than there are for some celebrities. So that's part of the problem, but it's also part of the solution. If we use apps to tell people when there's less traffic there or to control access to some of those sites, we can try to control the crowds. We can use, in some of the museums, this is a different sort of issue, but overtourism isn't just a Hawaii problem. It's in the Louvre. You can't just go to the Louvre now. You have to make an appointment. You have to make a reservation because there's so much demand for it. We need to start looking at that and why. Charging access fees for some of these places and substantial access fees so that people who go there really want to go there and they're willing to pay money. There's all kinds of cool new technology. I was just speaking at a workshop called Smart Tourism in Indonesia, and they were talking about technology that helps inform people about the culture, inform people about safety, inform people about access. Just one example, there's a technology called Near Field Communications, and it senses there's a digital information board and I think it's Amsterdam. As you approach it, the sign is in Dutch. As you approach it, it says, oh, Marcia's approaching that she's got a smartphone, and we know from her smartphone that she speaks English, so it changes the sign from Dutch to English. It's that sort of technology application that I think we can help manage tourism. For example, Diamond Head Trail, mobbed, and it's not a great experience. If we advise people via technology that right now it's really crowded, why don't you go to Cocoa Head instead? There's nobody on Cocoa Head. That's a way of using technology to sort of manage the impact on some of these sites. Yes, especially the stairs that go up. But we also need to invest, and when I said the problems are complex, the solutions are not only complex, they're expensive. Moving the road at La Niaké is expensive. Monteville Falls, there's no parking there, there's no car facilities there, there's no bathrooms there. We either need to say we need to restrict access to that, or if we want to open it up to people, we need to invest the kind of money so that it's an enjoyable experience. It's not the Wild West. The scary thing about the technology, of course, is that it knows where you are at all times. Which can be a good thing, especially if you get hurt or get lost or something. There are two levels to that. One is the individual level. Marsha Joyner, I know her books you read, and I know what storage you go to. But on the general level, it can help us find the kinds of visitors that give us a good economic impact, but less congestion and things like that. Let me just give you a few examples. The honeymoon market. Those people stay in hotels, they stay in full service hotels, which creates a lot of employment. They're here for this very special trip. They're spending money on oceanfront, they're doing fine dining. They're doing expensive shows. Golfers stand resorts. They came here to golf, so they're not wandering around Kailua. They're at a golf resort, and they're buying alcohol. I know this, because I know some golfers, and they're spending money at the resort. We need to be very strategic about the kind of people that we're trying to attract, and big data and data analytics can help us find those people and understand exactly who those higher spenders are. So that you would then advertise to those people. Yes, and you can advertise very specifically to those people.  You ought to, here's a deal, and here's how you can get into it. And so it's micro-targeting. Micro-targeting. Well, I like that.  Let me put it that way. But to answer your first question, we can have 9 million visitors or 10 million visitors if they're managed. So they're not all on Lottie K&P. They're not all in our residential neighborhoods. They're in places that are set up for them and can accommodate them. So that's what we need is another Waikiki then. Not necessarily. The neighbor islands are a good example of sensible development for a different kind of visitor. And even there, if we get more business travelers, they don't get in a car and wander around a lot. They stay in the hotel because it's a conference and they spend a lot of money. Yeah, and there are places that no one goes. I like Molokai, for instance. And I'm just saying that because you would need to be a farmer and be interested in that way of life because they don't have the facilities that cater to, like you said, the tourists that wander around. But even here on Oahu, I can tell you some sites that are underutilized and they're wonderful sites. There's a program here on Overtourism and I took the person that organized it. I took her around. And we went to the State Art Museum. They were the only people there. Hawaiian plantation villages. You can go there. Very few people there. There are these wonderful experiences. We need to promote those to the point where they're not overcrowded, too. But get people to see the things that are not necessarily the A-list, but the real authentic Hawaiian. And I remember, of course, with Turtle Bay that when they first built the hotel out there, and then everybody thought, oh, how wonderful to go out and enjoy being out there. Of course, there were no turtles. But the idea that that...  They've been doing a pretty good job in my estimation of marketing. They're kind of positioning themselves as a neighbor island destination on Oahu. They have a golf resort, so it's pretty self-contained. I don't think the Turtle Bay guests very much get in a car and go to Waikiki or go to Mililani or wherever. They're just happy to be at Turtle Bay. When my children were little, we would get on the bus, the Turtle Island bus, go out to Turtle Bay, have lunch, get on the bus and complete the tour. Yeah, you can still do that. And that's very low impact. It is. It is. You don't have another car on the road, and it's inexpensive. And you have a very nice lunch at Turtle Bay, which is not inexpensive, so there you go. And then Disney, of course, is making a fortune there at Alani. Well, we're going to have to see about the need to charge access fees or restrict access to some of these places. And that's a very big shift for us. We've always been wide open. You go to the polylookout for no charge. Now there's a charge. Go to Hanaua Bay. There's no charge now. There's a charge for parking, and it's restricted. Once that parking lot is full, you can't go up there. Haleakala now. It was so crowded at sunrise that there's now a restricted number of permits that they give to go up there. And once those permits are given, they cut it off. Well, even Cocoa Head, going up there and for sunrise, you can see the people on their way up and Easter and things like that where people want to be there. And that's not one that's advertised, but people that know it. People find it on their smartphone. People that know it, you can see the flashlights. The first time I noticed it was, it scared me.  Even the places that are unsafe or forbidden, people still get on to the Haiku Stairs, to the stairway to heaven. So we need a better job of managing tourism, and part of that is enforcement. Part of that is access control, access fees. It's a new world with 9.7 million visitors. We simply can't operate like we did 20 or 30 years ago. So how do we... I know in your position, of course, but how do we get the tour operators? How do we get them to understand that there's more than just the same old thing? Well, they're not... they're not averse to this. You know, they want to be in a business that's long-term as well. So one thing to do is to have somebody like the Hawaii Tourism Authority use its bully pulpit to sit down with these guys and say, here's the new reality of Hawaii tourism. If you're going to do tours to Kailua, maybe you don't do them on the weekend when it's crowded, and I think tour operators would be receptive to that. Well, we are just about out of time, but you had another graphic. I was just showing the percentages, but there they are. Since 2012, visitor arrivals up 24%, spending is up half as much. So we're accelerating the number of visitors much faster than the total spending, and real visitor spending per day is actually declining. That's what we have to pay attention to. Okay. Well, thank you so much for being here. And you will come back, because this is a big topic, and there's so much more, that we're going to cover. Well, thanks for having me. It's a complex issue, so I'm sure there's lots to talk about. There's lots to talk about, and you will come back. Thank you. And we will see you. Hello.


So this is a work of a lot of people that are all listed here, if I can, all right. So this is, I'm just here basically as kind of one of the authors of a large group of people. We've basically tried to write a kind of a reassessment, revisitation as it were of the Pacific Decadal Oscillation, kind of summarizing a little more understanding that we have of this statistical mode that's been kind of gained over the last 10 or 15 years. The paper is currently in review in Journal of Climate. So I'll just start with kind of the conclusions. It's probably a good place to start on this talk, which is going to go by very fast. The key point here is that the PDO is not a physical mode. It's really a statistical mode. And as such, it really represents the sum of several different physical processes, stochastic forcing, essentially kind of a random fast forcing by weather noise, and also forcing by ENSO via a mechanism called the atmospheric bridge, which also changes pollution, low variability, obviously more. And seasonal timescales, that drives changes in SST in the North Pacific. That's integrated by the ocean. So you actually redden the effect of the forcing, and the reddening is strengthened by the fact that you have a reemergence process that actually brings anomalies back from winner to winner. But then in addition, there are strictly internal North Pacific dynamics, particularly variations in the Oishio Extension region in the western North Pacific. So that combination means that some aspects of the PDO, that SST anomaly, might act to force an atmospheric response. But quite a bit of the PDO is forced by the atmosphere, and therefore we need to distinguish PDO-correlated and PDO-forced signals in the climate system. Models capture some of this, but in particular they have a very definite deficiency in capturing the tropical forcing of the North Pacific. And as such, one needs to kind of keep in mind that you're trying to measure this multivariate system with one number, with one index, and that has inherent limitations, which I'll try to discuss a little. All right, so this is what the PDO looks like. This is the definition of it. It's defined as the leading EOF of SST where the monthly global mean SST is removed. That's important to keep in mind, so it's an attempt to detrend the data in that respect. And you see the very typical pattern of kind of cooling in the central Pacific, which is called the PDO-positive phase. Now that's defined in the North Pacific, but in reality it's got worldwide connections. So this is a regression of SST on the PDO index, and as you can see it's not localized just to the North Pacific. There's a very obvious ENSO component, and there are anomalies in the South Pacific, Indian Ocean, and in the Atlantic. So it's really kind of representing a global pattern. And as Clara noted on Monday, a lot of these patterns tend to look similar. If I do a regression off of ENSO, I'm also going to get a very, very similar looking pattern just with different amplitudes. The time series of the PDO however, as opposed to ENSO, seems to have somewhat more of this decadal characteristic. There's this tendency for it to seem to stay in one sign for some period of time, as you can see here, and then seem to switch sign fairly rapidly and stay in the other sign for some period of time. It's pretty robust. These time series are not too different depending on which data set you use, even as far back as about 1920. And similarly, the patterns from the different data sets are also quite robust.  And so people have tried to correlate various things to the PDO and tried to understand could the PDO be forcing these sorts of things. And again, what we'd like to do is develop more of a process understanding of the PDO so that we could better understand these prediction and application issues. Now you can get essentially a PDO pattern fairly simply here. For example, one can run an AGCM coupled to a slab mix layer model. So the leading EOF of sea level pressure anomalies. The dominant pattern is basically an allusion low variability. And that will, turns out, drive SST anomalies that look something like the PDO. Pretty close to the PDO. So this is a model. In fact, there's no ENSO. There's no currents. This is just only atmospheric coupling. And so just weather noise variations alone will drive a PDO pattern. And that's basically happening because as you're changing the winds at the surface, you're changing surface fluxes. So typically you strengthen the winds. If you strengthen westerly winds, you'll get additional latent heat fluxes, additional sensible heat fluxes, more cooling. Also drive Ekman drift, which also turns out to drive cooling as well. Now, observationally, this is very easy to see. On the right, I'm showing a cross correlation between the NPI, which is basically a measure of the allusion low. And essentially that always leads the PDO. Because something one sees very easily in observations, that atmospheric anomalies will precede the PDO. And that's pretty clear here. Pretty much every month of the year. So this kind of, this is just basically stratifying this cross correlation by season. And similarly, you can see a pattern, a PDO-like pattern, if you look at, say, the allusion low regressed or correlated with SST three months later. But we can also see that just in terms of ENSO. And so again, if we do the same sort of calculation, but with an ENSO index, ENSO also leads the PDO throughout the year. And again, there's this pattern of ENSO correlated, leading the SST in the North Pacific. So basically what's happening here is you have an ENSO anomaly here. And typically a couple months later, you're seeing the PDO response as ENSO drives changes in convection, drives changes into the exotropics, and then hence drives changes in the surface winds in the North Pacific. Think until I skip a slide, I can't. All right, but like I said, in addition, there are ocean processes, which are actually driving enhanced integration. So although the mix layers acting to integrate the forcing, that would only give you a time scale on the order of months. But in reality, the time scale is really more on the order of years, and that's because of this reemergence process, which you can see here computed from aura data in three different locations. So we basically correlated PDO to the ocean temperatures. So we're looking at wintertime PDO and just seeing how the ocean temperatures evolve. So if you look in the central, the center picture, basically what you see is the PDO, the forcing is driving a deep mix layer anomaly in the winter. And then as you go into the summer, you get the shoaling of the mix layer. So the anomaly stays below the surface, but it's basically decoupled from above. And then as a result, the following winter, when the mix layer deepens again, that anomaly comes back up through what's called reemergence, basically a remixing of the water. And so the anomaly comes back after a year. And in fact, you can see here in observations that this process occurs for a second year. So this reemergence is tending to bring back that anomaly for a couple of years. And that obviously means the ocean is doing a substantial amount of integration of forcing on it by the atmosphere either through weather noise or through ENSO. And if you look at the PDO autocorrelation, you actually can kind of see this in observations as well. There's this tendency to have these kind of ridges in the autocorrelation, essentially whenever you are correlating with a succeeding spring. So correlations are typically high from a particular PDO looking forward to springs. So the correlation will be a maximum from spring to spring, but if you go, say, from a particular time into summer or fall, the correlation basically drops to zero. So it's very definitely tied to the seasonal cycle, and that's a result of this reemergence process. In addition, we can also have just an internal variability where base and wide wind systems are acting to drive oceanic Rossby waves that propagate westward. And these take a couple of years to propagate to the western boundary, which can be seen in this figure here. These are essentially sea surface height. So you're seeing this propagation occurring on a couple of year timescales, and it's associated with SST anomalies in the western Pacific. And these patterns are not the same as a PDO pattern, but they project on the PDO pattern. And in fact, that's true for all these processes. They're all producing SST patterns that are similar to but not identical to the PDO EOF. They all project on it. Now, in atmospheric models, it's always been a question of whether the atmosphere might respond to these SST anomalies and basically driving shifts in the Oishio current here in the western Pacific. And it may well be that this is a resolution issue. We've done some runs where when we increase the resolution of the atmospheric model to a quarter degree, we get a much different response to these SST anomalies because the synoptic eddies storm track actually is now resolved well enough that changes in heat fluxes appear to be captured. So it's possible that there is some atmospheric response to this part of the SST anomaly. So again, that's something to keep in mind. The PDO, although it's largely forced by the atmosphere, it's not only a response. It could act as some forcing. But the question is how and how much? All right, so we're going to try to put all of this together. And the way we're using here is a statistical model basically called a linear inverse model. And it's essentially just a multivariate extension of an AR1 model. So rather than thinking of a univariate time series with a single number here, this X now represents an entire map. So the entire SST map and maybe heat content map and wins essentially the state vector of the climate system in some truncated form. Here it's very truncated because I'm only using SST. But when one does this, one can get this operator from the observations, the lag co-variability in just the same way you would do a univariate analysis. But the difference is that this operator now, the eigenmodes of this operator represent different dynamical patterns with different dynamical time scales. So you can kind of see that here. I'm not going to go into all the details of how this is done. But these are, apart from kind of a trend-like pattern, these are the leading, in terms of the least damped, the slowest-evolving patterns. And you can see you get a, you get on the top, you get a pattern which looks somewhat like this North Pacific structure that I was talking about earlier. And you can see that has a very slow evolution. And then there are different components that are essentially like a Central Pacific and so Eastern Pacific and so it's really the combination of these different and so eigenmodes which give kind of the full and so diversity that we observe. And you can see the time scales, the time series associated with each of these in terms of the projection of the PDO on these patterns. So now if you just take these three, in reality there are obviously there are more modes in the system but I'm just going to try to simplify it into just these three. And if you add these together you can get kind of a PDO reconstruction these little vertical green lines by the way are times that people talk about as regime shifts of the PDO. And we can compare that to the observed PDO and the correlation is basically about 0.8. So here what we're getting then is we are taking a number of different patterns where the patterns are similar, they're not orthogonal, they're not orthogonal, but they have very different time evolution. So you can think of each pattern as representing a different univariate red noise process and we're just summing these up to make a multivariate kind of red noise system. But as you add univariate red noises together you can generate processes that will get fairly rapid regime shifts. So in fact this is a fairly well-known result I guess in econometrics that you get 1 over f noise in a system with certain interesting nonlinear processes or if you just add up a very large number of univariate red noises with different decorrelation time scales. And that seems to be at least a plausible explanation for PDO regime shifts here. So we can take a look at the well-known 76 regime shift. So I've got the PDO index down there again and you can see the 76 regime shift we're just going to look at what the pattern looked like. So we take the 20 years before 76, subtracted from the 20 years after 76 and the SST pattern is shown there. It's kind of the classic, it's the well-known PDO regime shift pattern. So was that a coherent North Pacific regime shift? Well, if you remember one of the Eigen modes that evolved very slowly it actually had a transition more around 68, 69 so I'm doing the exact same calculation but just centering on 69 and now I get a very different pattern and in fact in the North Pacific I'm getting a larger amplitude and in fact it seems to be more related to the Atlantic. So it's clear again that it's hard to talk about 76, 77 and it's some sort of global climate regime shift based on looking at one tropically based index changing sign. It's clear that different things are going on at different times, in other words we're adding these different processes which have different evolutions and they can line up for a particular index at a particular time and give a fairly rapid shift but that's partly an artifact of choosing an index and as opposed to say looking at the global pattern. Now obviously if ENSO is a large contributor to the PDO you might expect that what PDO skill you have is going to either come from ENSO or be limited by ENSO and in fact I would argue that it's mostly limited by ENSO so here what I'm showing is the hindcast skill of a number of the different Seaman 5 hindcast models compared in the bottom left to a similar hindcast again from this kind of statistical model now this is a global one and you can see with those yellow circles that the one place where there's low skill whether you're looking at a full GCM or this empirical model is in this tropical northeast Pacific area and of course one of the problems here is you're trying to predict ENSO on a two to five or six to nine year timescale ENSO is not predictable on these timescales to that extent ENSO then acts as noise not just in the tropical Pacific but then again in the northeast Pacific so it'll be difficult then to make PDO kind of forecast alright so I'll try to do this real quickly because I don't have too much time so this is the summary of what I'm going to show basically I'm just going to talk a little bit about how the PDO looks in climate models and paleo reconstructions and the key points here is that while most Seaman 5 models have a recognizable PDO pattern they tend to underestimate the connection to the tropics and they're somewhat overestimating the north Pacific internal variability and paleo reconstructions also have a similar sort of problem so here's a Taylor diagram comparing the PDO pattern in all the Seaman 3 and Seaman 5 20th century runs and also in comparison these little black dots if I can show them here are essentially recomputing the PDO from the data set but just doing 50 year sub-samples kind of a bootstrapping and the little triangles are the PDO from the other 3SST data since I'd shown earlier so they're all kind of within the sampling uncertainty but basically the models are all well outside of it so essentially no model is really reproducing the PDO EOF they have PDO-like patterns I think it's probably a better way to put it and that may be at least in part because of this issue of the connection to the tropics so we can do a kind of a simpler AR-1 model shown on the top here where we're doing a regression on a tropical EOF-1 and then EOF-2 which is more this east-west kind of ENSO pattern and having an autocorrelation R for the time series and the observations are in the red on the right so if you look particularly on this second plot here you can see that almost all the models with one or two exceptions and they have their own interesting behavior and variability but almost all the models the correlation to ENSO is too low so models typically underestimate the tropical relationship to the North Pacific so that can tend to give kind of a false impression sometimes if you use a model to try to investigate the PDO you may think that you've got something which has got more internal dynamics or dynamics that's unrelated to the tropics but in reality that's because the models are not able to recapture this kind of behavior and we can also take a look at the spectra so again we can use this multivariate AR-1 model now for the null hypothesis in just the same way that a univariate red noise is typically used as a null hypothesis so in all three of these I'm putting the observed spectra on it's the black line here there's four black lines they're all obviously very close together right in the center there and then these kind of this gray shaded region with the thinner black line boundary is essentially this multivariate AR-1 null hypothesis and you can see how all the models kind of lie within it the reconstructions typically are too weak and again you see this kind of spectral slope behavior of the PDO you're not seeing so much significant peaks really in the observations as a slope in the spectrum again that's characteristic of this kind of 1 over f this 1 over f noise process which again could be a result of the summation of different processes with different time scales so I think I'll just end on this bottom panel so we can then look at the paleo reconstructions and say well how do they do compared to each other and essentially there's almost no agreement prior to the instrumental records they all agree very well obviously after about 1950 but prior to 1950 there's very little agreement the gray shading is kind of indicating a kind of a percent common variance explained and in the bottom panel I'm showing a 20 year smoother so it's even more obvious that all these reconstructions basically can have opposite signs for potentially big PDO events so you can use these PDO reconstructions to say pretty much whatever you want depending upon the reconstruction you pick so there are a number of possible reasons for why this could be why they could disagree so substantially having to do with various sorts of processes in terms of tree room reconstruction and so forth but I would suggest that there may be a more fundamental problem here because these are all coming these reconstructions are based on sites in different locations and these different locations may be sensitive essentially to different parts of these PDO processes so they're not really seeing the same PDO pattern so they're getting trained on a PDO index but one location may be essentially sensitive to tropical forcing which is simultaneously forcing a response say in the west coast to North America and the North Pacific and another site might be in a place where maybe it's more sensitive primarily to weather noise and another may be sensitive to a place which actually is responding to some forced SSC response coming from the Curacao and that mix may make these reconstructions very difficult to make consistent so long as they're being trained on a single index so I'll just kind of conclude there essentially this is sort of a summary side as it were of these various mechanisms and this just leaves us with a couple of implications in terms of how do you use something like the PDO I would argue that this is probably true for other areas maybe this is true for the Atlantic as well trying to differentiate between the forced response in a location if you're interested not just in predicting the ocean but in predicting ocean effects on land you'd like to differentiate between those effects that are forced by the ocean and those effects that are simultaneously forced by some atmospheric variability also forced in the ocean separating that out I think is a much harder problem than maybe has been people have been willing to deal with so far and a lot of this is coming about because we're used to trying to treat these much more complicated systems with a single index with one number and that has inherent limitations which can also give rise to some behavior such as regime shifts which may be more an artifact of using one index than a true representation of the climate system so I'll stop there


Marines, I'm Rear Admiral Jim Hancock. I'm the Medical Officer of the Marine Corps and I'm here today to try to answer your questions about the COVID-19 vaccine. After careful and thorough testing, the FDA has approved through an emergency use authorization the Pfizer and Moderna vaccines. Drugs and vaccines have to be approved by the FDA to ensure that only safe and effective products are available to the American public. During public health emergencies, like this COVID-19 pandemic, when there's good scientific data showing that a product is both safe and effective at treating or preventing disease, the FDA may authorize its use through an EUA before having a year or more worth of data to fully license the product. They are voluntary because it was licensed under an EUA. In the civilian sector, employers can require these vaccines right now, but in the DOD for now COVID vaccine is voluntary. However, all Marine Corps personnel and beneficiaries are strongly encouraged to receive the vaccine when they become eligible. These vaccines are safe. We expect them to be very effective at protecting Marines, their families, and our communities. Department of the Defense does not independently have the authority to mandate an EUA vaccine to service members. However, the president may make this mandatory. When one or more COVID vaccine is issued FDA licensure, or if the president waives the options for members for the armed forces to decline the vaccine, it will or may become mandatory for military personnel. Similar to an annual influenza vaccine in many others. The DOD and the Marine Corps are confident in the FDA's stringent vaccine evaluation and oversight process, and the assessment of the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, known as the CDC. Manufacturers are required to submit all their trial data for the FDA to review, and then an independent FDA review board must recommend the vaccines for approval. The CDC then conducts a separate evaluation after the FDA before they recommend its use. Vaccine safety, immune response, and effectiveness are all evaluated in tens of thousands of people before the FDA or the CDC will evaluate a vaccine and authorize it for use or distribution. If you have recently had COVID-19, you should not be vaccinated until you have recovered from any symptoms and have been cleared from home isolation. However, once you are cleared, everyone is encouraged to receive the vaccine when it is available to them, because the duration of immunity following COVID-19 infection is unknown at this time. The vaccine may provide longer immunity than the natural COVID-19 infection. The simple answer is yes. The vaccine is only 95% effective, so we still have Marines and families at risk. The vaccine works by building an immunity within your body. This takes one to two weeks, so please continue all precautions even after you've been vaccinated. No, it is not possible to get COVID-19 from our current two vaccinations. These vaccines use the cell's natural coding process to temporarily show the body's immune system a small portion of the COVID-19 virus. This causes the immune system to recognize the full virus and attack it if it enters the body. These vaccines do not contain live COVID virus, cannot cause you to develop COVID-19 disease and do not cause you to test positive for COVID-19 with any of our current diagnostic tests. The COVID-19 vaccines do not change or affect DNA. There is no evidence that the COVID-19 vaccines affect fertility. Additionally, experts believe that these vaccines are unlikely to pose a risk to pregnant persons, developing fetuses, breastfeeding women or children because the vaccines contain no live COVID-19 virus. Current theories show that between 65 and 95% of people being vaccinated, we will achieve herd immunity. Marines, what you need to know is the vaccine is safe and we should do our part to keep America safe.


Good morning everybody I'm Tommy O'Brien coming to you live from TFNN headquarters in St. Petersburg, Florida at 10 a.m. Eastern time on Wednesday 30 minutes into the trading day and we got markets starting off with some volatility pretty close to flat but you'll see as we pull up those charts Dow Jones up seven points currently trading 26,186 we got the S&Ps up seven points are about a quarter percent trading at 28,74 and we have the NASDAQ leading the way up 44 points or more than half a percent trading at 78,92 and as we say if we go to the Russell Russell actually actually leading the way up about 13 points or more than 8 tenths percent trading at 15,66 we start things off this morning let's take a look at the VIX volatility index 12,85 yesterday after the close overnight that's actually this morning about 6 a.m. and from there 1307 currently very little volatility priced into this market start things off let's jump over the futures markets and we'll start it off with the Dow and so there's your acceleration we trade higher for most of the overnight we make highs at around 8 a.m. this morning right at 26,300 on the dot and as you can see even though the Dow in positive territory because let's find that market close a little bit of a sell-off yesterday so there's your market close above that level but we're more than 100 points off of the highs overnight NASDAQ 100 a little bit of a different story NASDAQ trading 75,62 we were higher 75,75 at one point overnight but NASDAQ in positive territory S&Ps much the same as in higher this morning pulling back a bit trading at 28,85 now trading 28,77 crude oil with some volatility almost made it all the way to 63 dollars missed it by two and a half pennies 62,9750 for the price of crude at 4,20 a.m. Eastern time this morning crude currently trading at 6,254 with the EIA inventory numbers this morning 30 minutes from right now gold contract volatility as well up there at 12,99 currently trading at 12,94 and pound US dollar as we get some pound volatility almost made it back to 132 we get the pound trading at 131,47 stay tuned folks come back at 10 o'clock with Tom we'll have those oil numbers coming up live at 1030 we'll see how that market hits live programming all day at TFNN.com stay tuned have a great Wednesday


T.F.N.N. Headline news update. Welcome folks, we're at the Dow Industrial's, finish up 57, NASDAQ up 120, S&Ps up 18, Gold. Gold contract down $15.30, trade at 18.51 an ounce. We had Silver down 24 cents, $24.86 an ounce, Light Sweet Crude down 11 cents, $80.78 a barrel, notes and bonds, the 10-year, down 4.6, trade in 1.30.05, the 30-year off 12 at $159.28 and $Kingdala, $Kingdala 555 ticks at $95.959, Euro 113, Yen 114.83 and the British pound is at $134 to $1.00. We get open, we take a look at the S&P folks, bottom line is that you get a sideways to higher market, this thing wants to go after its highs, you had 44 million shares traded out here today, the closing high is 468.53 and we had 469.25, so we're over the closing high, the all-time high is 470.65 and I expect we're going to get there, why? Because what you're doing out here, you get 44 million which is not bad, you're coming into a Wednesday bottom line, you can get some juice happening in this market tomorrow. The Biden administration, they just came out about 20 minutes ago saying that we are going to know who the new federal, it doesn't have to be from new, it's either going to be Powell or Lyle Brandon, I got to get this name straight, she more than likely would be the new Fed chairman, bottom line and within four days he's going to announce who the Fed chairman is. We're going to take a look at the Q's, the Q's are up $2.81 out here today, they closed at their highs, that wants to also go to highs, that high there that we're talking is 400.99, gold, gold contract, gold contract was doing fine until Bullitt came out this morning folks and says we got to get bearish and meaning we got to start tapering. Now the reason that reacted so quickly is Bullitt is normally a real dove, that's the real bottom line, so what you had out there as soon as he comes out the bottom line you had gold go from 1879 to 1851. My take folks bottom line is that the cat's already out of the bag, it doesn't matter what they do right now, inflation's not slowing down, bottom line you're going to see metals at higher price, volatility's going to stay out here, no doubt about that, what we have at the gold market today, you had a higher high and you had volume, when you get a higher high with volume you're going right back top side. Have a great night folks, have a safe night, come back and visit Tommy tomorrow morning, kicks us off 9 o'clock in the morning, great show, have a great one folks, have a safe one.


Hello, and welcome to TV30, another TV30 production of the Government Information Service. My name is Jessie Layance, Information Assistant at the Department of Sustainable Development. We have some wonderful news. The Cabinet of Ministers has endorsed the Marine Litter Management Action Plan. We call it the MLMAP, the latest national effort to address pollution, more specifically Marine Litter. I am joined by Mrs. Dawn Pierre Nathaniel, Chief Sustainable Development and Environment Officer as well as consultant on the project, Mr. Bishnu Tusi, to speak a little bit about the MLMAP and what it will mean for St. Lucia. Greetings. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you so much for having us. DPN, I want to start with you. Just tell us a little bit about, you know, essentially why an MLMAP? Why this national effort to address pollution? We know for certain that we do have a problem dealing with Marine Litter and what have you, but why this coordinated effort? What hasn't worked before that needs to be efforted in this MLMAP now? Well, Marine Litter, plastic pollution, waste management remains a critical issue that the world is facing, the region is facing, and certainly St. Lucia is facing. And we recognize that it is affecting and has the ability to continue to affect just about every sector in St. Lucia in one way or the other. We're an island, we depend on tourism as one of our mainstays, and the whole looking at litter and waste, the two just do not go in sync and hand in hand, and it's a problem in terms of aesthetics, it's a problem in terms of other aspects like biodiversity, conservation and ecosystem uses, and all of these aspects as well. So it's not just an eyesore in terms of visitors and how it can affect us economically, but it can affect us socially. We use the beaches, et cetera, the environment in terms of recreation, and it affects us as well environmentally as well. Wonderful. Mr. Tulsi, we have seen many a year of efforts to curb, to deal with, address a variety of actions, including cleanups and what have you. Just going through the validation engagements with stakeholders and what have you, speak to us about, you know, what hasn't worked so far, what are some of the challenge areas that MLMAP with its documentation and so on, implementation will address. That's an interesting question. The single biggest problem is that we do not dispose of our waste the way we should. If we can do that, then most of the problem is gone. You mentioned cleanups, yes, a lot of these have been happening, but they are not coordinated, you know, consistent, and therefore the effort is diluted. Using the MLMAP focuses attention on specific areas of interventions, which stakeholders identify as the priority ones, and that way we can get a more structured approach to managing waste. I must say that in the research I've done, Centrucia has a really good waste management collection system. The problem is that too much waste does not enter that system. It is leaked out of the mainstream collection system, and they end up in the environment, the rain to take them into the rainwater, take them into the rivers, and they end up in the sea, and then all the problems don't spoke about. So this is really about creating a structure, having a structure approach to dealing with a problem that, except for the work of the Solid Waste Management Authority, has been done in an uncoordinated way. Just to add to that, Mr. Tulsi, in terms of looking at that structured approach, we recognize that there is more than one way to tackle the issue, and it is not simply using one method. And this is why the MLMAP, or the Marine Leader Management Action Plan that we were speaking of, has a number of pillars. There are five pillars specifically. There are pillars to deal with the policy and regulatory framework, looking at pieces of legislation that we were still trying to push, like our Beverage Containers Bill, or our Marine Pollution Act, et cetera, and noticing that these are important in terms of the policy direction for the country where waste is concerned. But looking at our second pillar, for example, that speaks specifically to waste minimization, aspects to do with just not reuse and recycling, but also segregation and composting. The third pillar, the whole one under which we are looking at the Cleanup Campaign Plan, just as it indicates, it's about cleanup campaigns, something we still have to do because people are not doing what they're supposed to do. The fourth pillar looks at partnerships. And that is an important and fundamental part of the plan, in that we aren't able to do this alone as a government. It has to be the government and civil society and the private sector, the business organizations, the media, the individual persons, the students, everyone, the youth working together on this issue. So, for example, having been able to partner with entities such as Massey in the single use plastic bag. So partnerships, that's a very important component of the plan. And of course, awareness raising and behavioral change. A lot of what we do when we generate infographics or we do campaigns and we have public awareness where we do audiovisuals. We have debates and we have exhibitions and all kinds of mannerisms to try to encourage people to do the right thing and to want to do the right thing. So none of these pillars, as Mr. Tulsi was saying, none of them really work alone. They have to work in tandem with each other in order to be effective. And it requires a real collaborative effort to get somewhere. That's okay. I said DPN earlier. Yes. And there has to be international cooperation as well. Yes. Because marine litter is really a transboundary problem. Yes, for sure. Absolutely. We're going to delve a little bit more into the pillars in just a moment. But I just want to get an understanding of how was the Department of Sustainable Development guided in approaching the situation even before the MLMAP was fully developed. What was the vision, what was the plan going into this and who were some of the persons that were engaged in some of the events that you've had so far, DPN? Well, the Department of Sustainable Development has been involved in the whole drive where single-use plastics is concerned. So we have been pushing towards the phase out of single-use plastics, a process with legislation that started, I would say, in 2019 in terms of legislation and incrementally adding it where first it was the ban on importation and moving towards use and sale, etc. So that in 2022 you have that effective ban that is all encompassing on certain single-use select plastics, food beverage containers, stirrers and stirrers, etc. And now we see an environment where of course we don't see the styrofoam piles that we used to see before. So we were seeing progress in that regard. But all of this was part of the process and part of the package under our National Oceans Policy as well, looking at that overarching guide as to how we want to advance as a country in terms of advancing the blue economy and that includes also having proper waste management actions in place. So this process with the development of the MLMAP, we worked with a number of agencies involved in waste management in some way or the other in the collection of waste. So we had a technical consultation where we brought them in to help us guide the process, to help us with the process in terms of what our waste types were, what are the methods that existed right now, who was collecting waste, what data they had. And that helped us if our National Source Inventory that fed into the marine litter management action plan that was developed. We also had a high level segment that was led by our Minister for Sustainable Development but also in collaboration with at least five other parliamentary representatives. And that was significant in terms of being able to get that buy-in that is needed for an issue that affects every single sector in St. Lucia. And being able to have them be part of the process for coming up with the ideas of what those pillars should be and what those activities should be. And that was fundamental. We also had a broad-based consultation and seminar where we had the private sector civil society also contributing to this process towards the development of the MLMAP. We developed collaboratively a number of audio-visual pieces, a number of debates, we had panel discussions and all of that to bring persons in in terms of understanding the situation before us and looking for ways to be able to solve this problem in a sustainable manner, in a coordinated manner compared to what has happened in the past and what has, looking at what has not worked and seeing how we can improve upon it going forward. Thanks for that. Mr. Tulsi, in the development of the NSI and the National Source Inventory and even the MLMAP preparations as well, what information did you have in the research? What was coming forward? Was there a plethora of information, statistics, data? There's been a lot of cleanups. There have been a lot of efforts throughout the years, not only in St. Lucia, but in all the islands to have, you know, to deal with this pollution problem. What were you coming into and what did you have to source out? Yeah, one of the challenges I faced was that the cleanup campaigns did not generate data. Persons would conduct the cleanup campaigns and dispose of the waste. So there wasn't really any information on the type of waste that was being collected or where it was being collected. And that sort of created a challenge for putting the National Source Inventory together. I was fortunate in the exercise because just prior to starting that, the IUCN had done a study on waste in St. Lucia. And they used scientific methods to try and estimate the amount of waste that is being generated and the types of waste from the tourism, the domestic, commercial and fishery sectors. So that data was available. They were not accurate. The pandemic prevented them from doing the extensive fieldwork that was planned. But they did do some waste, actual waste segregation, collecting waste from different sources, separating it and to see what types of waste was there and extrapolating that to the country level. In addition to that, a lot of work was done, especially by UNEP. But the Florida State University has done work as well, the IUCN has done work, in estimating marine litter and coming up with strategies to address the problem. And in doing those reports, they also did some research into actual waste and used proxy data from other sources, other similar jurisdictions. And the third source I was able to access was two waste segregation studies that were done by the Solid Waste Management Authority, where they did waste segregation studies and were able to come up with actual percentages of different types of waste. So the effort benefited from those studies and the data coming out of those studies were used to generate the information in the national source inventory. In a nutshell, the main findings were that most of the waste comes from the domestic sector. I was about to ask. Yes. And most of the leakage into the environment is from that sector as well, followed by tourism in the commercial sectors. So that in the MLMAP, focus is placed on those areas in an effort to achieve the waste minimization and the strategy sort of builds around those. Okay. Thank you very much. We are speaking to the Deputy Chief Sustainable Development and Environment Officer, as well as the consultant on the Marine Litter Management Action Plan, recently endorsed by the Cabinet of Ministers. We're talking about its impact, what we can look forward to and what is happening on the ground right now. Do stay tuned. You're watching TV 13. The world's climate is changing and that affects all of us. Storms are becoming increasingly intense. Periods of intense drought and heavy rain stress farm animals and destroy our crops. Higher average ocean temperatures kill our coral reefs and change the migratory patterns of fish. St. Lucia contributes only 0.0015% of global greenhouse gas emissions, but is doing its part, along with countries around the world, to reduce the emissions that are warming our world and changing our climate. These efforts are called mitigation. But decades of emissions have already changed the climate and the greenhouse gases in the atmosphere today will increase average global temperatures even more. We need to adapt, that is, do everything we can to prepare for and respond to the actual and expected negative effects of climate change and everyone has a role to play. We need to protect our crops, build homes that withstand storms and keep our drains and waterways free of garbage to help us recover or bounce back from climatic events. Learn more about the Government of St. Lucia's National Adaptation Plan and the steps you can take to protect yourself and your fellow St. Lucia. Thank you so much for staying tuned. We continue with this episode of TV30, speaking on the Marine Litter Management Action Plan. Mrs. Nathaniel, speak to us a little bit about the endorsement by the Cabinet of Ministers. What does it enable in this effort to address marine pollution in St. Lucia? A very happy day for us when it was endorsed. But of course, the process started off in 2022 and I think it was really good that, as I mentioned just now, that the Cabinet, a number of members of the Cabinet were actually part of the process when we were discussing the development, both of the National Source Inventory and the Marine Litter Management Action Plan. So they're already aware of the elements, so it was more of a natural transition towards endorsement. So we were able to submit this through our Minister, to the Cabinet of Ministers at the end of the year and by January 2023, the beginning of the year, we already had that endorsement and that is really significant because the commitment, we actually got the commitment even prior to the actual endorsement through their presence and through the proclamations that they made during the actual sessions. And I think it's important in environmental matters, in any matter really, to have that kind of involvement of your policy makers in terms of the way forward. And it will certainly help us in terms of implementation. So when we get opportunities coming forward, our Ministers already clued in in terms of the pillars that can be supported through the particular funding opportunity that may come along. Wonderful. And now that it's building momentum, what next in terms of implementation? Implementation. Even before the endorsement of this plan, we were already liaising with partners such as IUCN that Mr. Tulsi mentioned earlier on. And they were able to indicate their ability to support us with two of the pillars, that is pillar three in terms of cleanup campaigns and pillar five in terms of educational awareness and behavioral change. So through their support, we were able to develop this coastal cleanup campaign plan to take cleanups to another level, recognizing that we do do cleanups whether it be underwater cleanups like we did in 2020, last year, 2022, in terms of the international coastal cleanup, we participated in that. But to be able to take the cleanups, whether they be on underwater, roadside drain, wherever it is, to be able to do it in a more coordinated manner. And that is important in terms of the data collection aspect that Mr. Tulsi mentioned earlier on. Not just collecting and saying that you have a certain quantity of waste, 10 pounds, 50 pounds, 60 pounds, but being able to segregate, being able to itemize that waste in a manner that you know what types of waste you have, how much, what is in there that's plastic and aluminum or metal and paper and so on and so forth. But they're also helping us with the awareness aspect. We were able to develop so many different audiovisual materials and infographics that we need to be able to make sure that they get out there to the public in one way or the other, utilizing both English and Creole, but also wanting to ensure that we worked with our partners like St. Lucia Solid Waste Management Authority that is now able to revamp and revitalize the mascot Tintin and bring that back in terms of awareness raising with kids. It was so popular with the kids before. So being able to do that and get that support from IUCN to help with the revamping of that process and also helping solid waste with their public awareness and audiovisuals and airing and distribution as well. So that is all, all of this is happening with the partnering with the IUCN in terms of implementation. And we are continuing to liaise with them and others in terms of implementation under the pillars. We're working for example with IUCN in terms of the Plastic Waste Free Islands Project which has concluded, but there are components coming on where we're already continuing to work with one of our recyclers that is looking at converting plastic material to furniture. So trash to treasure. So that is something that's also coming up and we're hoping to see the promulgation of that in St. Lucia over time. So there's a lot happening in just about every aspect of the pillars and of all the five pillars and we are quite excited in terms of taking it forward. Wonderful. Mr. Tulsi, coastal cleaner plans. Speak to us about the development of that and the engagements that you've had with stakeholders so far. Yeah, thanks. Firstly, one may ask why focus on coastal cleanup? And the obvious answer is that the marine space is important. It supports livelihoods at many levels and marine litter especially plastics pose a direct threat and a growing threat to the marine environment and the biodiversity that it supports. But coastal waste, the waste from the coastal areas come from inland mostly. It is from waste that is leaked that, like I said earlier, is taken by floodwaters into the marine space. There are some aspects of marine litter that is from beach activities, that sort of thing and from boating. So that looking at coastal cleanup and addressing coastal pollution really starts with addressing pollution plan. So coastal cleanup is more of a holistic approach to managing waste generally. In terms of the action plan that's being developed, really a lot of organizations conduct these cleanup campaigns. They do from time to time. And I think I mentioned earlier the problem is that you clean up a space and you come back a few months later and you need to clean it again. So part of what we are trying to do is from the cleanup to do an analysis of the waste collected, try to identify the sources, and then using that data and information to address the sources so that future cleanups will be finding less waste. So that is really the central direction in which we are moving, not just cleanup for the obvious benefits, but also to generate that information, to inform policy, identify hotspots, and to fashion interventions that will address the source rather than cleanup, which is addressing the symptoms of the problem. And Mrs. Nathaniel, in addition to stakeholder engagements leading up to the cleanup plan, speak to us about other engagements so far. You touched a little bit on it in our first segment. But in terms of the development of the PSAs, also we've had the debate championships to speak a little bit about that in trying to spread the word about this activity and get everyone on board. Yes, it is a process that's really important in terms of really being able to get the ownership and the buying in the process. So being able to work with agencies like the Caribbean Youth Environment Network, or the National Youth Council, and the ABAGLO Dive Association, and entities such as that, because they are the ones who are able to support us in the work that we do. So they engage, for example, in cleanups, whether those cleanups be underwater cleanups, like ABAGLO Dive Association. But there are also those who do the cleanups on the land or on the beach, et cetera. So being able to partner with them, we also have, and people will be seeing us roll out a number of our documentaries, our public service announcements, our infographics on the various pillars coming up. And we want to ensure that this gets found wide. We do have the NSI, the National Source Inventory, the MLMAP itself, the Marine Liter Management Action Plan, available on public spaces, Government of St. Lucia website, but also United Nations Environment Programme, have it as well on this site to ensure that persons have that information. We want to ensure that that is available. Even in the development of the coastal cleanup plan, we were talking about the fact that while it is focused on coastal and the marine, we do recognize that, and we designed it in a way that it would still be useful to anyone doing a cleanup, whether you're doing the cleanup on the land itself or doing the cleanup in the coastal area, in the water, and so on and so forth. And of course, we know everything we do on the land impacts the water. So it's quite relevant being able to design it in that way and to make it available. So while we can't collect data for every single cleanup in St. Lucia, we would have to have a system where we've itemized or at least identified beaches or areas, coastal nature areas, for example, that are representative around the island and being able to identify those for coordinated, regular, systematic cleanups that will allow us to collect data in a way that it is useful, it is scientific to be able to allow us to see the trends and what is happening with the data, what is happening with our waste. So that is important as well. It is also worth noting and just to throw that out that further to the actual cleanup campaign plan that we're also looking at the data aspect of things in terms of looking at and enabling a framework that will allow us to be able to input our data and pull out information for informed decision-making that Mr. Tulsi referenced earlier. So we're not actually designing the database ourselves in St. Lucia because there are already efforts that are on the way regionally, globally, that we want to ensure that we tag up too in a manner that allows for even greater coordination on that global scale. Recognizing what waste management is about, we've been talking, for example, about the International Treaty that's looking at plastic pollution that is to come into effect in 2024. And that is a global effort, a recognition of a problem that is all over the world. So I'm picking up on a lot of different things in the short space of time that we have. But all of the activities that we have undertaken to date and we will continue to undertake will seek to involve not just the government but the civil society, the private sector. We want to involve the media. We want to involve the business places. And that is a continuous effort to be able to get the impact that we would like to see. Okay, and around for final words, what can we expect coming up next from MLMAP as well as imploring to the general public? Well, I want to go back to what the pillar that deals with information, education, and behavioral change because I believe that of all the pillars, that's the one that will have the greatest impact. And behavioral change is a scientific process. It's not easy to change behavior. And from the research I did to produce this work, there is sort of a conclusion, a theory that the greatest driver of behavioral change is economics. I mean, the Massey reusable bag had attached to it 25 cents charge for each bag that you take from the supermarket. And that is arguably, and it will be interesting to research that, the main driver, the returnable containers act, I think it has a different name now, is probably the way to go so that if our behaviors contain the problem of going, and I think that some effort, a lot of effort needs to be put in that area. Wonderful, DPN. I would just say quickly, really continuing to call on our partners to continue to work with us really, Solid Waste Management Authority has been phenomenal in the work that they do. And we have Senator Bureau of Standards in looking at the standards of the types of containers that are brought in in terms of quality and that's an ongoing process to improve that. Customs and excise in terms of what is brought into the country and what is not allowed in. And Massey and we have entities, we noticed that MNC as well, the single-use plastic bags as well, so that the momentum is growing. So we keep on calling on the various partners out there, those who provide funding in terms of donors like IUCN and UNEP, but those in St. Lucia as well who work with us and partner with us to be able to implement all five of our pillars to really read St. Lucia of this issue of waste and have us disposing of our waste in a manner that is sustainable in keeping with our small island developing state that is very tourism focused. I like how you compacted that. Thank you very much Mrs. Donpia Nathaniel and Mr. Tulsi from the Department of Sustainable Development, this is Nathaniel and Mr. Tulsi Consultant on the MLMAP. This is the latest effort at addressing pollution here in St. Lucia and we hope that everyone as she indicated is partnering, comes on board to support this initiative. Thank you so much for watching, for more information on the MLMAP, you could go on to the govt.lc website as well as the Department of Sustainable Development, St. Lucia Socials, or you can call our office 468-5863 for more information. My name is Jesse Leos from the Department of Sustainable Development, signing off. Do stay tuned for more NTN programming.


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