Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to our briefing today about protecting vulnerable communities from climate impacts. I'm Dan Brasat, the executive director of the Environmental and Energy Study Institute. Next slide, please. ESI was founded in 1984 on a bipartisan basis by members of Congress to provide science-based information about environmental, energy, and climate change policies to policymakers. Over time, we've also developed a program to provide technical assistance to rural utilities interested in on-bill financing programs for their customers. Next slide, please. Our session today is the second in a new series produced in collaboration between ESI and the Energy Efficiency for All Coalition. EFA unites people from diverse sectors and backgrounds to collectively make affordable multi-family homes energy and water efficient. The four national partners that comprise the coalition, Elevate Energy, the Energy Foundation, National Housing Trust, and the Natural Resources Defense Council, support sustainability efforts across 12 states and bring together advocates and stakeholders to develop innovative and collective solutions to increase access to healthy and affordable homes. EFA is doing great work in many locations, and I encourage you to visit the coalition online at www.energyefficiencyforall.org to learn more. ESI is very proud of our partnership with EFA. It is a genuine privilege to work with EFA to share the good news of energy efficiency, multi-family housing, and affordability, healthy homes, and strong, resilient, and equitable communities. So thanks very much to our friends at EFA for helping us bring this briefing to you today. Back in February, we partnered with EFA to assemble a panel to discuss relief and housing assistance for communities impacted by the COVID-19 pandemic. As a reminder at the outset, if you miss anything today or if you would like to go back to the briefing from February to revisit the presentations, everything we produce is available online at www.eesi.org. And while you're there, I hope you'll take a moment to sign up for our bi-weekly newsletter, Climate Change Solutions. Today, we will consider the stresses and strains that climate impacts, like sea-level rise, extreme precipitation, and dangerous heat waves and cold snaps, put on already vulnerable, affordable housing developments, and our neighbors in low-income areas and communities of color, from Los Angeles to Miami and places in between. In our major report released last year, A Resilient Future for Coastal Communities, we highlighted mitigation and adaptation benefits in our recommendation to prioritize resilience when developing and preserving safe and affordable housing and pre-disaster preparations and post-disaster recovery. Policymakers, we said, could make investments in safe and affordable housing to improve community resilience, deploy cost-effective energy efficiency, renewable energy, and promote equity, three worthy goals of a comprehensive and sustainable approach to how we develop our surroundings. Many of our recommendations also focused on the need to develop new and refined existing climate risk assessment tools, make data accessible to non-experts to facilitate inclusive community-based preparations and planning, and learn from successes from cities and states achieving their goals and delivering benefits to residents. These topics will also be addressed over the course of the next 90 minutes or so. And for policymakers online with us today, I hope you're taking notes, because a great deal of this information will be informative as you start to assemble and consider proposals that address the nexus of climate and infrastructure. And in these parts, during ESI online briefings, we definitely consider buildings and our working definition of infrastructure, and buildings definitely include affordable housing. Before I introduce our panelists, let me mention that we would be glad to take your questions today as we go through our session to inform our discussion. If you have a question, you have two options to ask it. First, you can send us a message on Twitter at EESI online, or you can send us an email to EESI at EESI.org. We'll do our best to incorporate your questions during our Q&A after our fourth panelist. And now I get to introduce our first panelist, Dr. Benjamin Strauss serves as president, CEO, and chief scientist at Climate Central. He is an expert on sea level rise and the architect of the surging sea suite of maps, tools, and visualizations. Benjamin has testified before the United States Senate, and his research has been cited by the White House and two secretaries general of the United Nations. His work has won extensive coverage in U.S. and international media, including The New York Times, Washington Post, Associated Press, Reuters, Bloomberg, and other outlets in at least 110 countries and 29 languages. Benjamin, thank you so much for joining us today. I'll turn it over to you. Dan, thanks so much for having me. It's a real pleasure and honor to be here and talk about this important subject. Just first a very brief bit of background about Climate Central. We are an independent non-profit organization, non-advocacy and non-partisan that researches, reports, and visualizes compelling local information on climate change and what we can do about it everywhere.  Today I'm going to talk about a recent study, a recent peer-reviewed research paper that I co-authored with colleagues from University of California, the National Housing Trust, and some colleagues at Climate Central, and a related online tool and information resources that I hope will be interesting to this group. So I'll start with a brief explanation of the methods and findings of the research, but then really dwell some more on a very quick tour of the tool and how you can use it and what you can get from it because it dives down into the local information. So I think we might have skipped a slide there. Why do research on affordable housing per se and coastal flood risk? First, well really because there's a triple threat. So affordable housing tends to be in substandard condition, so there's a question of the physical vulnerability of the physical structures themselves. Second is the socioeconomic vulnerability of their inhabitants, and third of course is that the environment is changing, sea level is rising, and that's increasing the frequency of coastal floods. Now if we could move along to the next, that would be great. So in this study, we used two large national databases of affordable housing. First, we included federally subsidized housing compiled in a database maintained by the National Housing Trust. That housing includes public housing, housing and HUD sections 8202 and 236, USDA sections, 515 and 538, the IRS low income housing tax credit program, some state programs and a little bit more. We also included natural occurring affordable housing, in other words unsubsidized housing, and that we define as housing with rents below local market rates, or at least 30% below local median household income, and that comes from the co-star database of housing nationally. So moving to the next slide. The considerations that we factored into our research included, we looked at different climate pollution levels, high emission scenarios versus lower emission scenarios. We considered a range of possible sea level outcomes depending on each pollution level because there's a range of possible outcomes. We analyzed a full spectrum of flood heights and likelihoods across decades, so the higher the flood, the less likely, and we integrated across annual type floods all the way up through 100 year floods and more severe. We focused the analysis on several different years, in particular 2050, although you'll see in the tool, we enable exploration of every decade from here to the end of the century, in terms of likely impacts. And finally, a special feature of the research that was a nice advance from some of the past literature is that this is analysis grounded in individual building footprints. You can see at the right and green, the kind of machine learning detected housing footprints from a project that Microsoft did and made public. So we matched affordable housing in the database to individual building footprints, and we were able to do our assessment where there was exposure of any corner or part of a building to flooding in our analysis. Okay. Moving to the next slide. So moving to key findings. The basic headline is the amount of exposure to the amount of affordable housing units expected to be exposed to flooding each year, triples by the middle of the century, as compared to we were actually in the year 2000 but we're much closer to 2000 today than we are to 2050. So that, and, and secondarily, that threat is quite concentrated the largest numbers of units are in New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts, although there are effects in every coastal state. And even within states is concentration. When we look at the 20 most threatened cities account for about 75% of the national exposure so that to me is a silver lining of the study it suggests that a targeted efforts to mitigate and reduce this threat. Could address a large amount of the problem. Moving to the next slide. Just a quick visual look at the state level risk. It may be a little hard to see the details aren't so important except you see the blue lines represent number of units that threat in the year 2000 versus the orange lines in 2050. The first three are New York, New Jersey, New York and Massachusetts, but especially with sea level rise is very appreciable threats in Virginia, Florida, California, Connecticut and moving on. If we could go to the next slide. Now going down to the city level again you see most of the threat is concentrated in terms of the broad numbers of structures and individual housing units within them that are threatened is concentrated New York. And then moving on to the next slide. Actually Atlantic City, New Jersey, a much smaller city, Boston, and several other municipalities. But if you look at the orange line. Some communities have a much higher percentage of their existing affordable housing stock that's threatened, and that's something quite important to bear in mind, and in considering the impact. The resources available to explore these findings and much more detail. If that's of interest to you. And all of these resources are available online to our website, our sea level rise website at climate central coastal dot climate central dot org. And in addition, once you're there, you need to click on choose map and go to affordable housing. And so the resources include the scientific paper we published itself. A lay person's report, a recorded webinar that will go into more depth than I'm able to today here. A map tool and dynamic fact sheets or PDFs that can be generated for each state or county or and scenario. Next slide please. So here's a look at one view of the tool. We're looking here at imagery at the different threat level to counties in New Jersey in the year 2050. Next slide. And if you were to mouse over one of those counties. You can see the quantitative result for that scenario. Next slide please. Now there are a lot of parameters you can adjust, including what years forecast. Next slide. And next slide, and then moving to the next slide. You can also change where we're looking next slide. Choose any state in the country. Next. Once you're in the state, you can next choose to look at a lot of different geographic units. So we've been viewing impacts organized by county in New Jersey, but we could look by congressional district or state legislative districts or for individual cities or even zip codes. Next, there's a range of other settings that you can use next. You can change the pollution scenario, for instance, or look at all affordable housing above it versus subsidized housing only. And then choose how lucky we get or don't get in terms of how sensitive sea level is. Temperatures and sea level are with respect to the pollution scenario. Next, and next. Here's a look at a map from Massachusetts by congressional district. And next, here's a look at exposure within zip codes inside Atlantic County, New Jersey. And next, here's a look at counties in Florida. But next, it's very important to notice this download button on the upper right. And that is a pathway to a lot of additional resources, including a fact sheet, which is dynamically tailored and customized to the particular view you've established, right? What state you're looking at, or it could be a county or a congressional district. Also, what year you've chosen and even what pollution scenario you've chosen, all of that gets customized in the fact sheet. If you download the fact sheet, I'll also point out you can take a snapshot at the map. You can download, you know, if you don't want to click on each county or location to get the number behind it, you can download tables of data below the CSV data button. If you're looking for the walks out there, that's the efficient way to get lots of data here. But moving to the next slide, this is an example of the fact sheet that you can generate in around 10 seconds. And then this is for Florida, 2050 counties. But moving to the next slide, here's Florida in 2070, looking at congressional districts. And moving to the next slide, that's the same fact sheet, except in Spanish, the entire tool is available in Spanish as well as in English and all of the associated documentation and resources. Next. Finally, to wrap up, I just want to note that you can come back here to the base location and move over to choose map. Next. And you can get access to a wide range of other maps outside of the affordable housing sphere that are available on the site. And I want to highlight in particular the year map moving next, because that allows you to pull up. Those of you who think of sea level rise maps probably imagine something like this where areas are shaded if they're literally going to be below water, as opposed to color coding a zip code or a county relative to, you know, how many people or buildings might be exposed. This is these maps are the underlying maps that show the geography of what areas specifically are at risk of flooding in the different scenarios that we've analyzed and you can match up those scenarios the same settings, or most of the same settings are in this map as you could find in the affordable housing module that I just showed you. So next, here again is the URL. I thank you for your attention and look forward to the Q&A which will be at the end of the session. That's great Benjamin thank you so much and the Q&A will in fact, like you said be at the end but I have a clarification from our online audience. Does the tool include all 50 states in US territories. It includes all 25 coastal states and Washington DC. It does not. Well, the affordable housing part of it does not include territories, the sea level rise layers and maps are in fact global. Great thanks and in that number of coastal states Hawaii would be one of those Hawaii would be one of those yes. Okay yeah we had a question wanting to make sure that Hawaii was covered so thank you so much. It was a great presentation and an excellent way to kick off our panel today. Just wanted to remind our audience that if you missed anything or if you want to go back and you want to dig into Benjamin's presentation everything is going to be posted a little later at www.esa.org, or you can go right to the source www.climatecentral.org and check it out there. That was a really interesting overview of a really impressive tool. Thank you very much. We're going to move through our program and I get to introduce our second speaker today at the very beginning of the program I mentioned our coastal resilience report. And our next panelist was actually one of our panelists during our coastal resilience briefing series and so we got to welcome her back today to talk about this topic. Laurie Schumann is the national senior program director for resilience and disaster recovery initiatives with enterprise community partners. She oversees enterprises internal and external efforts to preserve and protect affordable housing across the nation from the risks and impacts of natural hazards and changing climate. She has launched programs and initiatives to support and help reduce the risk to housing and communities in Puerto Rico, U.S. Virgin Islands, Texas, New York, California and Florida. And she was one of our speakers during our Puerto Rico and Virgin Islands series last June. So Laurie, it is great to see you again. Thanks so much for joining us on today's panel. I'll turn it over to you. Thanks Dan and it's great to be a regular on the EESI community webinar. I couldn't be that bad. You invited me back. Thank you so much. It's a pleasure to be with everyone today and we've got a very timely topic that we're discussing given all of the discussion as of late around infrastructure resiliency around equity around the need for supporting communities on the frontline. There's no more important and critical intersection, I believe, than the intersection between housing affordability, housing resilience and climate change. So I'd like to walk you through a little bit about what Enterprise does and some of the solutions we put forward to support affordable housing from a changing climate. We are very much in the first generation of thinkers, all of you in the audience around this topic. So, you know, we're in many cases building the plane as we're flying it. But we do know what the best practices are and we can find the solutions to the challenges of our day if we keep collaborating and keep taking risks and thinking about solutions. So, next slide please. Enterprise Community Partners has been and is a nonprofit. We've been working to create opportunity for communities low and moderate communities around the nation for 40 plus years. We have 11 markets across the country. Each of our markets responds to local challenges that are facing communities at the local level and also drives forward our mission to create opportunity for households across the nation. And one of the important and critical features we've found over the years is in our efforts to preserve affordable housing, we also know that there is a significant risk that's facing our communities and that risk is the risk of climate change, of rising sea levels of extreme heat that compounds and aggravates the shortage of affordable housing that compounds and advocates the risks that communities are facing and compounds and aggravates the inequities and systemic and structural inequities that our communities face. Our partners, next slide please, include every sector from the federal, state, local, public sector partners to communities on the ground working day and night to build solutions and to deal with problems and critical challenges. We work with cities, we work with rural communities, we work with tribes to collectively solve the problems of our day. And so this is important that we have these various sectors of partners because we can't do it alone. We know what, not one sector can solve the problem alone. We have to have multiple sector solutions and cross a jurisdictional implementation efforts. Next slide please. And so as we all know from this year, the COVID pandemic has laid bare the many inequities that so many communities face. Many of us are on the internet today on Wi-Fi connection, engaging each other on this platform. There are so many communities that don't have internet access. There are communities that have really been struggling and will continue to struggle through the pandemic. The conditions that many communities that we serve face, particularly communities of color, frontline communities, communities that experience first and worst consequences of climate change. These are communities that we are putting at the forefront of needing to serve. We know that structural inequities, policies such as redlining have created deficiencies in infrastructure that create incredible vulnerability. And we also know that decades of disinvestment have led to extreme exposure and risk for so many communities. So whether it's a fire or an earthquake or a flood or a pandemic, not every community shows up to face this reality in the same way. Not every community is impacted in the same way. Next slide please. Here's the biggest, one of the biggest issues that we're facing at Enterprise and many of you in the audience that run cities and states face on a regular basis is the extreme shortage of affordable housing that our nation faces. Nearly 11 million of the nation's 44 million renters have extremely low incomes. The U.S. has a national shortage, according to the National Low Income Housing Coalition, who produced this map. The U.S. has a national shortage of close to 8 million affordable housing units, rental units, at least the most severe shortages, however, are in our cities, leading with Las Vegas, then Houston and Los Angeles. And these are the cities that face incredible, incredible affordable housing shortage where more than 40, 50 percent of a person's household income is going towards rent or mortgage. You'll also notice an interesting trend. If you look at the darker areas of the map, these are the areas with the most housing shortage, affordable housing shortage. These are also areas that are extremely vulnerable to coastal flooding, hurricanes, extreme heat, earthquakes, and fire. And so we see a very strong connection between affordable housing shortage and extreme climate risk, which puts these communities at extremely dangerous conditions. Because if we get a housing unit displaced from one of these natural hazards, it's very difficult to build it back. More than 30 fourths of the nation's housing stock, whether it's affordable or not affordable, is at risk from fires, earthquakes, and floods. All you have to do is look at the risk maps of the United States, fire zones, earthquake zones, flood zones. All told, climate change has become one of the signifying challenges of our day and our administration recognizes it. And there's a reason for it because Americans are vulnerable to climate change. It's impacting everyone. We also know just one of many stats that 400,000 federally subsidized homes are in the flood plain. So, you know, this isn't the challenge for us, and it's just an important issue that we're taking forward in the infrastructure bill and the administration and policies that we're trying to develop. Next slide. And so what are the impacts to communities when we lose affordable housing? We lose affordable housing, at least displacement of households, impact to workforce and economy, lowered property values. It impacts the entire community and the legacy is long lived. Next slide, please. So after an event, we enterprise has worked tirelessly to create tools and programs to support communities in need. The majority of our work, we hope, will really help communities before the event takes place because we know how expensive it is once an event happens and affordable housing is lost. Next slide. Tools that we've created deal with multi-family housing risk and what kind of resilience and strategies can we put forward to mitigate and adapt housing to changing conditions? Tools that have been created with community, with the folks that are going to be moving these tools forward. We believe that it's important to have participatory planning effort on every tool that's deployed. Next slide. And that these tools can go into shape in real housing in real ways. And this is the slide of a newly constructed public housing facility in three port Long Island called Moxby Rigby. We took the tools we developed and worked closely with the New York state governor's office of storm recovery and put forward ideas to create a new public housing facility that is resilient, state-of-the-art, and will be able to survive for generations. This is a flood plain community. And so we took an old facility and turned it into a resilient one, which again will house the most vulnerable folks in three port Long Island. This is the best practice. Next slide. And other ways we've adapted our tools is we took some of our work to Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and worked in concert with the University of Puerto Rico and hundreds of leaders across Puerto Rico and the states to develop a guide for what single-family housing could be if it's resilient and informed from the ground. We believe in tools that are informed from the baseline, from the ground, so that they're viable and feasible. Next slide. And this tool is really wonderful because it actually takes us through the entire sequence of how you build a home to be resilient. Starting with the identification of risk in moving to your site, in moving through to your bones in the fabric of your building and the layering of the energy in the water systems and trying then to look at operating the building, then how do we pay for it and how do we get it built to code. So this particular book has also been digitized and this is a really great way for us to support you and the audience, jurisdictions, states and cities to build a thoughtful, resilient housing program that will help deal with your issues of the day. Next slide. And we've taken the interest in Keepsake Housing further and we've now got a program that we stood up with the city of Miami, Miami-Dade, Miami Beach called Keepsake Miami. And we're working in concert with the city and over 70 community groups across Miami, Miami-Dade to help multi-family housing in Miami, Miami-Dade, Miami Beach identify risk climate and create solutions. We have set up funding sources with the city to help pay for the retrofitting of the multi-family housing sector. This is the kind of model program that we can put forward in many cities across the country to build and design and operate and deploy affordable housing that's resilient. Because we know in Miami and in many other areas that depend on tourism that if we don't have affordable housing ready to, in the community that needs workforce housing, then we won't have any economy. We won't have a tourist industry. We need to make sure that folks don't have to travel two hours to get to their home to get to work. Next slide. And other tools we're developing with Fannie Mae to provide free support for business continuity development for affordable housing operators. Next slide. So after all the lessons have been learned after all of the work we've done in this field for over 15 years, we've got some best practices and some lessons learned I want to share with you as I close. We believe that there are actions we need to take to ensure that housing is built in a resilient way. We need funding, funding to support pre-disaster mitigation and adaptation. We can't continue to rebuild and rebuild and rebuild after every event. We need to build forward and ensure that our housing has the funding to build resilient and adaptive funding. Number two, we need to have technical assistance to help housing owners identify their risks, find solutions and build the capacity to respond. We need stronger infrastructure, infrastructure that includes housing, infrastructure that's stable, that's secure, a grid that is going to be consistently delivering wastewater treatment, water, potable water and energy, most of all. And then finally we need to have support for planning that's participatory, that puts equity at the forefront and that shares models of best practice from around the nation and in fact around the world because we are a global community with global solutions. Thank you so much for today and I look forward to a robust discussion. Thanks Lori, that was a great presentation and I look forward to that discussion a little bit later today too. As a reminder, before I introduce our next panelist, if you have questions for us and I've already asked one from the audience, when we get to that Q&A, if you have questions you can follow us on Twitter at EESI online. Alternatively, you can send us an email, an email address to use is EESI at EESI.org. You can ask questions about any of the topics we're covering today, we'll do our best to get there. And now I get to introduce Anna Weber. Anna is a senior policy analyst at the Natural Resources Defense Council on their water and climate team. Anna researches and advocates for policies that advance equitable adaptation to climate change. Her team works to incorporate the current and future effects of flooding, sea level rise and other climate driven hazards into local, state and national decision making and ensure that adaptation policies benefit those on the front lines of climate change. Prior to joining NRDC, Anna spent 10 years at the Cadmus Group where she supported the Environmental Protection Agency with respect to water quality. Welcome to our panel today. I'm really looking forward to your presentation. Thank you. I'm so glad to be here today. Great, thanks. So, as you may know, the Natural Resources Defense Council is an international environmental nonprofit that works to safeguard the earth, including its people, its plants and animals and the natural systems on which all life depends. Before I dive into my presentation. I just want to take a moment to acknowledge the pain that I know so many communities are feeling right now and that in the face of such ongoing heartbreak that talking about things like building codes and flood insurance just doesn't necessarily seem all that urgent. So I think we should take a moment just to acknowledge that if we're talking about protecting vulnerable communities that the stuff that we're talking about here today is is only one component of that protection and that safety and I do very much support and appreciate everyone who took the time today to tune in despite everything that's going on. All right, if you want to go to the first slide. So we've heard a little bit about how there's this enormous risk that climate change poses to affordable housing and the need to invest in protections for communities that are both disproportionately exposed to physical risk from climate hazards. And also in the context of investments and in the systems and policies that are designed to keep people safe. So, today I'm going to talk a little bit about some of the ways that we can ensure that when we make these investments, and we make them in ways that will last, despite the threat of climate change so to start. I want to talk a little bit about this Washington Post article from a few days ago it's about something called Atlas 14, which is one of these sort of extremely niche technical policy areas that most of us have never heard of. But it guides countless decisions across levels of government that have actually a huge effect on people's safety and quality of life. If we go to the next slide. Here's a quote from the article, Alice 14 is basically guidelines on how much rain to expect in different places so that if you're designing something, you can do it appropriately for the conditions that you will experience. You know whether you're in Philadelphia or Phoenix. Next slide please. The problem though is the same problem that flows through so many of our policies, it's that these guidelines are based only on past conditions. It has made sense historically but climate change means that using backward looking standards that sets up for failure before we've ever even put a shovel in the ground. Next slide please. Basically, it's like we're driving down the road, but we're only looking in the rear view mirror and that can be okay as long as the road ahead is clear, and it's the same as the road behind us, but climate change means that that is not the case. Next slide please. There are flood zones, for example. So you probably know that FEMA's flood maps, which underlie the national flood insurance program and the floodplain management requirements that come along with it are based on, you know, site specific data, but they're historical data. So climate change means that in many areas more and more homes are flooding in areas that according to these maps are supposed to be at lower risk and therefore aren't as high on the list for flood risk reduction projects. And in this article here it describes how in Houston, as in many cities, these neighborhoods that are outside the designated flood zone but experiencing more and more flooding are mostly black and Hispanic neighborhoods. They're getting hit with the impacts of climate change and the policies that are supposed to protect people aren't keeping up. Next slide please. So I'm going to be mentioning a lot of different types of policy opportunities today. I don't want to dwell too much on the details of any of them, although I'm happy to answer any specific questions either today in the discussion or offline or you can go to our website at nrdc.org to find a lot of information on all of these. So there's a variety of things that we can do to incorporate climate based decision making forward looking data and projections into the decisions that are made across all of our agencies and level of government. There are these just there are relatively straightforward tangible changes that we can be making to ensure that decisions that we make today account for changing conditions and correctly identify and protect those that are most at risk. So for example, creating flood maps that not only represent past risk, but also show future conditions or incorporating additional protections into codes and standards for buildings that we're going to be constructing at the code. Next slide please. Now of course, having good data only goes so far, you have to know what it is and it has to be communicated effectively. People I'm sure you agree have should have the right to know their own homes flood history and flood risk, but that is rarely the case and it is especially rare with tenants. In most states there are simply no requirements or very poor requirements for anyone to tell you that a home that you're thinking of moving into has flooded before or is at risk of flooding in the future. And the requirements that do exist mostly apply to real estate transactions. So if you are deciding whether or not to rent a home in a particular neighborhood, you're pretty much out of luck. Even worse, this leads to situations where there are families who get turned down for disaster aid because a previous flood that they had no idea ever even happened meant that the property that they live in is required to hold flood insurance going forward, and they had no idea. Next slide please. So we end up in situations like Scott Harris and his family did in Baltimore. Scott told NPR last year that quote we had no idea at all that there was even a concern about a floodplain until that is his home was hit by a flash flood. So the NPR story linked here goes on to say that in fact, Scott's block had flooded at least six times since the 1970s, but that was before he moved in. And there was no way for him to know about that previous flooding. His home isn't in the FEMA designated floodplain, and it's mostly at risk from urban flooding, basically stormwater runoff. So it's not like there's even a nearby body of water that provides any clues to his risk. Next slide please. So again, in this case too, there are straightforward tangible things that we can do to make sure nobody else is in this position. And some states are taking action on this Texas, for example, just adopted a pretty comprehensive set of flood disclosure requirements in the past couple of years. But that's not the case in much of the country where people are covered by a sort of patchwork of laws and regulations. However, there are changes that can be made at the state level as well as at the federal level, for example, in the National Flood Insurance Program to guarantee homeowners, renters and the general public a right to know about flood risks in their homes and community. Next slide please. So the last policy area I want to mention is pre-disaster hazard mitigation. And Laurie talked about this a little bit. It just means taking action to address risk before something bad happens, which, you know, when you put it like that is a no-brainer, right? In terms of saving lives and money and preventing suffering. But it's tough because the way our financial system works, you can't pay for things with avoided costs. They're not, it's not real money yet, right? So communities, especially those who aren't in a position to take on debt, often rely on government grants to do this work, which is fine, except those grants aren't nearly enough and they are not set up to meet the needs of the communities that need them the most. Next slide. Basically, these grants are just hard to get. And as a result, assistance often goes to places that have the pre-existing resources and capacity to get the money. These are local jurisdictions that have dedicated staff and grant writers and lawyers and engineers and experienced managing federally funded projects. So unsurprisingly, hazard mitigation dollars tend to flow to wider, wealthier and more populous communities, which sets them up to fare better when they're ultimately faced with hazards. And then contributes toward the fact that disasters when they hit actually widen existing wealth gaps, making white families on balance wealthier after a disaster while leaving black families even farther behind. Next slide, please. So these here are just a selection of the many changes that would help make hazard mitigation more accessible, more individually tailored to the needs of particular places, and basically allow communities to have more agency over how they want to address climate risks. We need to grow the pool of money that's available for hazard mitigation, make it specifically available to the communities that are most in need, and accompany it with technical assistance and capacity building support so that communities have the ability not just to get the grants, but also to implement them and to plan well when they're using the money. And I should note with all of the policy opportunities that I'm talking about here today, none of them are meant to exclude any of the others and of course this isn't an exhaustive list. So we need to be doing all of these things and more, and we need to be doing them in a way that's responsive to the needs and desires of the communities that are already every day dealing with the threat multiplier of climate change on top of the structural inequalities and other harms to health security and well being. Next slide. So to wrap up, I just want to leave you with this line from the recently announced infrastructure package. This was the most exciting line to me in the announcement it says every dollar spent on rebuilding our infrastructure will be used to prevent, reduce and withstand the impacts of the climate crisis. Now the way I see it, this doesn't have to mean that every single dollar literally goes toward a clean energy project or toward hardening infrastructure against hurricane, for example. It means that when we as a nation spend money, we should be doing it in a way that considers the predicted conditions over the life of whatever it is we're building. It means making development and land use decisions that we're not going to regret in a couple of decades because the bridge is too low, or because the train tracks are underwater or because the housing is inaccessible when it rains. It means protecting the most vulnerable communities today and also addressing those vulnerabilities going forward so that risks are lower in the future. So in closing, I hope this presentation provides them food for thought in how we can start to achieve some of those goals. Thank you. Thanks for an excellent presentation. And I feel like we should probably start recognizing panelists who are able to work in obscure federal programs or federal initiatives that have disproportionately impactful. That are disproportionately impactful on our ability to withstand climate change and Atlas 14 so far I think is the, the front runner so maybe Heather, our next panelists can top that but I'm glad that you were able to work that in because it's one of those things that's kind of behind the scenes but it's critically important and also fundamentally flawed, like you pointed out so thank you so much for an excellent presentation. And now I get to introduce our fourth panelist, and this is Heather Rosenberg Heather is an associate principal at Arab, and is their city resilience skills leader in the Americas. She's an ecologist by training. Heather is a US GBC Ginsburg fellow with 20 years of experience and sustainability and resilience in the built environment. Her approach combines organizational and community resilience with effective asset management. Previously, Heather was the founder and president of our own successful resilience strategy firm building resilience network. She created the building resilience LA program worked with Gresbe to develop its resilience module and serves as resilience advisor to enterprise community partners. It's almost afternoon for you so I'll still say good morning to you Heather. Thank you so much for joining our panel today and I'm really looking forward to presentation. Thank you so much. And thank you for for including me today. It's really great to be here with all of you and we having this really critical discussion. You know, sometimes we see a lot of discussion around climate solutions that are disconnected from what people are experiencing on the ground and all of the speakers today I think are pointing to where we need to focus efforts on the most vulnerable populations and make every strategy that we implement solve as many problems as we can we have your problems are too big to solve them one at a time we need to bring these things together. So that's what I'm going to share with you today a little bit about some work I've been doing actually in partnership with NRDC and enterprise and really trying to to bring together some of these very challenging issues in to more of an ecosystem approach. And we're really looking in in these cases, particularly at making essentially a business case for investment in resilience retrofits of existing affordable housing is sort of the larger theme of the body of research that we're moving forward. If you think of money, like water, it likes to flow downhill it likes to find well worn paths and and keep going in the same grooves and get downhill as fast as possible. And in that context, existing affordable housing where there's no point of sale or other thing going on. That's like the top of the mountain. And it's been traditionally very hard to get resources where they are needed most and that is why we need new approaches new ways of framing the problems, new ways of quantifying the impacts and the benefits, and new ways of deploying really comprehensive and systemic solutions. So next slide please for for vulnerable communities, even the solutions that we implement can be the problem. Part of that is related to, you know, the the challenge that the Anna mentioned of communities that have more capacity or a more likely to a more able to to gather those resources. But some of it just comes from the fact that when we think about solutions, we might think we're going to develop a policy for the city of in this case Los Angeles, it's where I live. We have all kinds of hazards here we've got them all, you know, fire, flood, brimstone, you name it. And we think a lot at the city level or at the regional level of how to address that but if we don't bring it down to the household level to, and not even to the building level but to the unit level to the household to the renters. To the owners of the rental property, as well as the residents. We will miss the mark and in particular, we find that multifamily housing is really left out of a lot of policy multifamily rental and particularly affordable. This is really the tippy top of the mountain for a lot of funding programs, because you have a split incentive between renters and landlords because you have, you know, people who who don't have operational control of their units and so there's there's a lot of challenges here. And, of course, the consequence of of tipping the scales of the cost, particularly towards low income renters is displacement and we already have a homelessness crisis and these other things and so we have to design our policies to support low income multifamily housing and really low income housing in general, with displacement as the thing we're trying to stay aware of and really focus on. Next slide. So, looking at just one example and we've done similar exercises I'm going to talk about electrification today which and decarbonization and electrification are actually we think of those as climate adaptation or climate mitigation strategies right that's not adaptation that's the reduction so why am I talking about it here. And I would argue that that can actually be seen electrification and and decarbonization are really critical goals California has very aggressive targets and we're moving on this path in an aggressive and comprehensive way to decarbonize the grid to electrify buildings. And, and that means and will eventually mean a massive retrofits of a lot of existing buildings. And, and we typically think about that in terms of well what is the first cost what are the operational costs or savings in terms of energy savings and how many gg's are we reducing, which is great and we need to keep thinking about all of that but next slide. For low income communities and multifamily housing and renters that's happening in this much broader ecosystem of many different challenges. So in the resilience world we often talk about shocks and stressors, we need to understand the stressors, not just when we're understanding what are the shocks that can happen, but what are the implications of different interventions and improvements that we can make. We think about something like electrifying existing buildings, for example, in the city of Los Angeles is considering and NRDC is looking and supporting what would an ordinance or a measure look like to to decarbonize existing buildings. We have to understand that the real situation on the ground for households where many, many households are extremely rent burdened. They're also energy burdened and utility burdened. And all of this is increasing as a result of COVID. These are communities that have been disproportionately impacted by COVID, and from an employment perspective from a healthcare perspective from an economic perspective. And so communities are in crisis. When we start talking about electrification of affordable housing right now, the first thing we need to think about is we have communities in crisis the number of people who are extremely rent burdened the amount of rent arrears that we are looking at for just from COVID is is profound. We also know that we're shifting labor force as we move from from electricity to natural gas. We have all kinds of changes and also we have changes that are happening at the grid level. California is experiencing annual fires that disrupt either because of damage directly to grid infrastructure or the potential. Disruption to infrastructure from fires. We are seeing massive power outages and we have to understand that those power outages can also have severe impacts on on low income communities and particularly on medically vulnerable populations who depend on energy for life supporting equipment and all sorts of things like that. So these things are all deeply interrelated. And when we start to say, well, how are we going to transition our energy infrastructure our energy system to support or to reduce greenhouse gases, we need to make sure that we're not creating unintended consequences and exacerbating these underlying stressors. But instead, can we design our policies in a way that picks those things up brings them together and puts them into a comprehensive package. And so that's that's what we're looking at here is understanding the underlying stressors that the community is addressing and trying to build policy that that solves all our problems at once. Next slide. So what does that look like that's probably kind of small there but but this is an exercise we're doing not just with electrification but we're looking at it with seismic retrofits we're looking at with other sorts of potential retrofits that might need to be done. So we have competing goals here right we need to number one protect existing affordable housing, keep people in their homes and avoid displacement, protect the energy grid and energy reliability for everybody and move away from carbon emissions. So if we start with pretend preventing displacement as our goal we can look at, well, what are the things that are going to trigger displacement, we have both economic drivers of displacement in terms of, you know, COVID related rent burdens and just general rent burdens in a place where we already have a housing shortage and a housing crisis. So those things are happening on their own at the same time we have potential impacts of climate change and other challenges and here we have earthquakes to things that will potentially make those housing units unfit for purpose. So we need to do both we can't just say well we're going to preserve existing housing and not touch it, we have to touch it to keep it fit for purpose, because there is no alternative. So if we look at electrification actually as a potential disruption. It is both a mitigation strategy and a potential source of disruption. We can build better policies so first of all we have to understand how much does it actually cost what are the first costs of retrofitting a building for electrification how it cannot be mitigated. In different ways what are the operating costs does this increase energy costs or decrease it and actually the answer here is it depends and depends a lot on how old that building is. And then what are the benefits and we're not necessarily always calculating all of the benefits. There are benefits in terms of improved air quality there are benefits that are health benefits up this up this chain and as well as benefits of avoiding displacement and keeping people in their homes. All of which has a societal benefit and long term across savings, although as Anna was saying it's really hard to get people to pay for avoided costs because there's no real money there. So thinking about what is the societal benefit. What is what what are the agencies even that can be benefiting from these things that can be health departments that can be even the prison system keeping people out of jail because we keep them in a home and not getting into other kinds of cycles. Can we quantify those things. And at the same time quantify really understanding the first costs and design appropriate incentive programs and packages of subsidies that that are more targeted at the populations that we're talking about here. Which are quite and I would say populations as if it's one thing that's an extremely diverse group of people and group of buildings and typologies and all sorts of other things but there's there there are some commonalities that we need to design for next slide. So ultimately when we think about energy resilience electrification and decarbonization are one piece of a much broader in ecosystem that involves changes that need to happen at the grid changes that need to happen at the building and that interface in between. And as we understand these different dimensions can we design programs that meet all of these different goals at once that. Will prevent displacement. Which I would say for a lot of people that is the worst case scenario whether we're talking about climate or economic or other drivers. Displacement is is you know and homelessness ultimately is is what we're trying to avoid keep people in But can we do it in a way that builds energy resilience that protects power reliability and including power reliability for vulnerable populations that doesn't leave low income communities behind as stranded assets because they're still dependent on on natural gas infrastructure that may be transitioning or in general aging infrastructure. Can we do it in a way that brings the labor force and supports labor at the same time. So we need to really be able to walk into gum here part of that is just understanding the context and starting even when we talk about interventions and programs for making improvements with understanding the underlying stressors. So I'm going to cruise through these things really quickly. But I'll just keep them in the slides I think I'm about out of time. But it's really important that we understand these things are systemic. And we have to balance that with paralysis versus that you know you don't want paralysis by analysis. Right. We know there are good things that need to be done right now but we also are in real need of innovation. Understanding co benefits understanding how these things can be designed to protect residents in multifamily homes. Next slide. And this can be extrapolated across different kinds of mitigation or adaptation measures. So electrification is is just one and decarbonization that's a major piece of this. But really we need to be thinking about how do we bring comprehensive whether we're talking about flood or seismic or other interventions. Bring them in context develop programs that are relevant and actually meaningful to low income housing to rental housing to multifamily housing. So that we can can transition towards a resilient infrastructure resilient housing stock and resilient energy and an infrastructure system. So thank you. Last slide. That's just me and feel free to reach out. This is these projects are an honor to work on and I would love to talk about them more with anyone who wants to geek out. Geeking out about resilience is something that this panel is especially well equipped for and I'm looking forward to the Q&A but first I have to thank you Heather for a wonderful presentation and really just for back to back awesome presentations. I'm looking forward to the discussion that we're about to kick off. Let me before we get into the Q&A though just remind people that if you have any questions it's not too late they are coming in I appreciate that. You can follow us on Twitter at ESI online you can also send us an email ESI at ESI.org and without further ado let us transition to our moderated discussion. The first question I have for the group and Benjamin will go back and we'll start with you and we'll go through your the presentation order. What are the other data needs that are out there that we really need in order to advance our understanding of climate impacts and I'm curious if those data need to vary by perhaps region or proximity to certain features. One of someone asked us a question on Twitter, you know what does all of this mean for people who might live near rivers versus coastal areas. So Benjamin I'll turn it over to you for your thoughts on that. Thanks so much Dan and I really enjoyed everyone's presentations. My sound cut out for a couple of seconds for the first time in the hour plus, just as you were asking that question, but I think I got the important part the second half. So data needs I'll actually start with the location and extent of affordable housing and our research. We use this great compilation from the National Housing Trust on subsidized housing, but I know that that was already quite incomplete. So I think, as a starting place, more and better resolved housing data, affordable housing data will be quite important and when it comes to floods you really need to know it at the down to the address level. We are very early in our ability to be able to predict track and map inland floods with great skill. So I'll just, you know, I could go into lots of different things and I want to leave it mostly for my co panelists. We call the First Street Foundation just published really it was a coalition of scientists, a model looking at current and future inland flooding, which was very impressive but it's just a start. There's a lot of skill to begin there. A lot of information to learn about flooding history at different locations. So I would say inland flooding data and analysis is a really big one there too. Great. Thanks. And sorry, I know I cut out for a second. It's too bad because I have never been more eloquent than I was in that two and a half seconds or whatever it was. I'll never be able to recreate that which is a bummer for the online audience. Lori, turn it over to you. What are the existing data? What are some existing data gaps that still remain when it comes to evaluating coastal resilience and resilience impacts on communities? And how does that change from your perspective across regions? That's a great question. I think that the existing data that we need is looking at, you know, easy to use future risk scenario that can be used with existing planning efforts. I'm not looking at just current flood plains, for example, but future flood plain mapping. I mean, the flood plain maps are critical because that's what determines the NFIP insurance rates. So New York City is looking at a future flood risk flood plain mapping scenario and they've actually, that's underway right now, and Miami has been looking at that. But I think we need some, you know, investment grade, future flood risk mapping tools. We also need some tools on rates of extreme precipitation. And that has not been, I have not seen that yet because, you know, Harvey was a precipitation event. And the precipitation events, Baton Rouge, Baton Rouge's recent flooding was precipitation related. So that's a critical need. I have not yet seen a good tool. Maybe my colleagues Anna and Heather have. Anna? Yeah, unfortunately, Lori, I don't have a good answer for you. I also think that that's a huge data need. I want to second everything that you said. Another thing that I'll bring up is the fact that a lot of our understanding in this country of how floods affect people in terms of say damages to their homes comes from the National Flood Insurance Program. However, the vast majority of people in the US don't have flood insurance under the National Flood Insurance Program. They don't have flood insurance at all. And so when we're basing decision on information that is from a program that not everyone is captured by, it means we're leaving out a huge amount of information that should be relevant to decision makers. Unsurprisingly, it's lower income people, people of color, people who live in disinvested communities who are less likely have flood insurance in the first place. So if we're making policy decisions based on the past of the flood insurance program, we're not only not incorporating climate risk for the future. We are also basing our decisions on a subset of the population who doesn't represent the people who may be most at risk in the future. There are, of course, like lots of commercial data sources where people can go and pay a whole bunch of money. If you're a corporation, you know, you can go and look for an insurance company. You can go and look up granular flood risk information that's, you know, modeled and predicted for certain circumstances.  So I think this comes back to the point I made in my presentation about better data transparency and accessibility just to the public at large. That's a great point. I also like to add what Anna just said makes me think also we have to map the stability of our infrastructure as well. It's the grid that also determines the habitability of housing. So that has to play. Heather, love to give you the last word on this question about data, data needs gaps and sort of variability across regions or proximity to features. Absolutely. I think there's, I mean, I just echo what all of my colleagues here have said really all kinds of data gaps. We don't even understand some basic things about affordable housing. So really echoing Benjamin's statement, we've been trying to do a market characterization of affordable housing in Los Angeles and you'd think that'd be a straightforward exercise and it's actually very difficult to correlate. We have all kinds of demographic data. We have some building data. It's very hard to correlate them in any kind of way, especially talking about naturally occurring affordable housing. The other kind of data that I think we need to be thinking about and getting our arms around or how do you calculate co benefits and social benefits and how do you go upstream. What are the methodologies and the data sources for doing that to inform policy. That's not necessarily data that everybody wants to have their hands on all the time. You know, it's pretty, you know, pretty dense kind of data sets and calculations, you know, enterprise came to us and said what is the business case for preservation of existing affordable housing and for funding retrofits and we have been working on that for for some time and and figuring out which, how far upstream do you go what are the right methodologies what are all the data sources. There's a lot of benefits, but they come from a lot of diffuse places. And so it's really the methodology of linking these things. So we hope to have a report out on that coming up. But that's, that's a really critical piece too. Thank you so much for that. Next question I wanted to ask about was we actually covered a lot of really good examples of work being done in different parts of the country to begin to address some of these impacts. But Benjamin, I'd like to go back to you and maybe explore in a little bit more variety, other case studies, other good models that are out there, examples of communities that are leading in these areas, small communities, large communities, perhaps communities with more or less communities than others to give our audience maybe a better understanding of sort of the range of the work that's going on. You have any thoughts on that. Yeah, I very briefly. I also just want to respond to one thing I think Laurie said in the past round, which was about missing rainfall data. That's true. There are only a handful of stations that are taking six minute scale rainfall data. And that's something that if it were expanded widely across the country would help us to learn a lot more about that urban kind of precipitation driven flood risk. I don't have a lot of examples of local communities doing things one way or the other but I want to just draw one contrast, which has come into focus for me through my sea level research, which is the contrast between Miami Beach and Atlantic City. Both of those, they're similar sized barrier islands facing similar threats. They're both in quite bad shape in terms of sea level rise and one of them, Miami Beach is wealthy and investing, you know, already investing more than half a billion dollars of, you know, in self assessed costs to bonds and businesses to raise their streets and put in pumps and do a whole range of mitigation measures. And it's, you know, sister city of Atlantic City is essentially bankrupt. And the only tiny investment that's happening is from the Army Corps of Engineers and it's protecting, you know, wealthier neighborhoods on the beach side because that process, as I understand it at the time it was implemented the decision as to, you know, where the Corps would invest is based on a benefit cost analysis and a near analysis therefore, you know, wealth, you know, high value property and wealthy neighborhoods like yielded a greater benefit per mile of levy or sand dune reinforcement. So, meanwhile, on the other side and the base side of this, I began with a photograph of this working class poor neighborhood. Those homes have lost all their value. If they weren't affordable housing before they are now because they flood multiple times a year. So, and the community just doesn't have the resources to invest. I think with problem like climate change and sea level rise that are striking so many communities at the same time. It's not going to be possible for state or federal governments to support each and every community financially with its resilience and adaptation efforts and squeaky wheels and early movers, maybe more likely to get more resources. And those often tend to be, you know, wealthier and more powerful communities so they're really is a great impetus to, you know, do the work we're talking about here. Kind of shine a spotlight on the particular problem that affordable housing and low income communities are facing because those are the communities that really are least likely to get but can stand to benefit the most from federal and state resources. Thank you. All right, I'd love to hear from you on this too. The affordable house and there's been a conversation as a play about the issues around and it's not going conversation like the issues around retreating from coastline communities being forced out of the floodplain and that is true. There are a lot of reasons why communities are at great risk in the floodplain and in the coastal communities. The problem is, though, there's very little alternative and folks to move to. I was meeting with the New York City mayor's office of resilience today and, you know, it's one thing to ask, tell folks that they need to think about moving somewhere else, because of the floodplain risks. The problem is, there's not a lot of places to move to we have an affordable housing shortage in the country. So one of the things we should be considering in our planning efforts is looking at where are the receiving communities. What are we going to do to support the communities that do have safe ground to make sure we plus up the affordable housing to make sure we improve infrastructure that when we're looking at investing in communities that we're looking at receiving communities as well because, you know, I'll always remember the terrible pictures and videos and I was down in New Orleans after Katrina that we saw of households moving from New Orleans to Houston and where did a lot of communities end up going they went to shelter in a stadium and then from there, you know, doubling up with with family and friends. I mean, it was really hard. So while we know this is a risk coming forward, let's start planning the 1020 years out we're going to need to for the receiving communities. Thanks. And Anna, I'd love to hear from you to and then from Heather about case studies or successful efforts that you see that, you know, perhaps they're in progress but are on the right track that are doing their best to improve community resilience. Yeah, so instead of a particular case in a in a particular location I want to point to a sort of a policy method or an approach. And this is something that my colleagues at NRDC and enterprise are working on through the spark initiative which is the strong prosperous and resilience communities challenge. And folks on that team and their partners have been looking into models of community ownership for land. There are things like land banks, community land trust, and other methods of land ownership and maintenance and decision making that involves the community as opposed to just the government or private land owners. And so this is a strategy that has been used successfully to preserve affordable housing in different places, and also has been used to preserve land for conservation and open space. So there's really great opportunities here to sort of bring those things together with climate change adaptation, looking at the intersection of affordable housing, open space, affordable access to green space, and making communities relative to climate change and so that's something that I'm really excited to be seeing reports and research on and and I'm looking forward to hearing more about that as these methods get used more widely. Thanks for that. Heather. I'm just going to actually use a similar example of of land trust, but I'll, I just want to give a quick shout out to a city, a little city I think is doing some interesting things with a different process, which is Olympia, where they have really looked at how they allocate funds and how they do projects and bringing departments together on site to collaborate at the beginning of any kind of project they're going to do and really get all of these goals out there on the open so that they have the engineering and the housing and the planning and the, and all the groups, understanding these, these different pieces together before they go out and deploy a project and so I think part of it is, you know, there's, there's a need for leadership. There's a need for new policy tools, and there's also a need for collaborative teams and different processes working together. So, I think they're doing a really interesting job it's a nice model that that other cities, particularly cities of similar size and not the big, you know, sometimes it's actually harder for for the larger cities to to really be as collaborative and you know sometimes there's for smaller cities and communities you can you can bring a team together to take a more collaborative approach. Great. Thank you so much for that. I think we may have lost Lori. So we're going to do our best to get her back with us. While we're doing that I'd love to hear from the panel about. I guess I'll let you take the question in one of two directions either emerging policy tools that you're aware of that are coming online that you're especially eager about that may be able to make a near term positive difference in terms of how we address these issues. Or in lieu of that if there is something that is not emerging yet but you would like to see emerge that you think would make maybe the most impact in the in the near to medium term. Love to hear sort of what you see coming down the line or what you would like to see coming down the line. Benjamin we can we can go back and start with you. Sure I'll just be very quick and do an advertisement that with collaboration is we're working on an analysis trying to intersect toxic sites with flood risk and socio economic vulnerability right because there's always the possibility of contaminants being in the flood waters so that that's an area of need that we see increasing a sea levels rise. But just one of so many areas and made and I'll pass it to the next panelist. And I think we'll skip over to you while we're getting Lori back online. So one of the things that our team at NRDC does a fair amount of work on is something that Laurie just brought up in her comments before which is this idea of relocation and dare I say managed retreat from climate hazards that can't be addressed And we have done some research looking at existing programs for relocation assistance home buyouts basically in areas where residents are fed up with flooding in particular and just want to leave. And this is, you know, perhaps the best and by best I mean worse example of how hazard mitigation funding doesn't serve community as well. There are so many issues with the programs and the funding mechanisms and the ways that they're just so challenging to implement And so we're working on some policy ideas that would help make the wait times for relocation assistance shorter help make multiple options available to residents who so they're not just based at the end of the day with the last worst of whether to stay or go but can plan ahead make decisions for the future. And ways that help local governments also do sort of longer term land use planning for areas that may need to be relocated, like Lori was talking about where can people go so that they can stay close to home but aren't at risk and more, or at least not as much. So that's an area that it's hard to say that you're excited to talk about force relocation due to climate change but it is an area where there is I think such a growing interest and research and there are a lot of really smart people who are working on this issue. So I think it's something that I'm, I'm glad to be to be a small part of and contributing to some of this work. Thank you. Um, Heather. Yeah, I think the thing that I would add would be one thing I'm, I'm very excited and hopeful to see and hope will happen is that federal grants can be streamlined and and directed in a way towards a holistic approach to resilience things like break funding and CDBG and and other kinds of things that are that are quite complicated and particularly, you know, I think, for communities that don't have dedicated staff that don't have, you know, people a lot of experience with administering federal grants that are processes streamlined programs and more integrated approach to to getting funds from those programs out where they're needed before disaster strikes so I would love to see this is more of a wish list then and I hope with the new administration coming in and some of the recommendations that we've seen floating around but a hope that we can get money again that's how to get that money to flow uphill right we need new processes and approaches intergovernmental interagency collaboration better collaboration between HUD and FEMA and some of these other agencies to to think proactively before disaster happens how to get money on the ground to implement some of these things. In ways that create value for for the community and and you know are that more holistic approach that that vision so I think there's an opportunity to strip it down to to get the money out there to get the money and get it out there to communities and help them really implement some some important things on the ground. Thank you, and you mentioned brick we haven't talked a whole lot about wreck today. That's a new program, the building resilient infrastructure and communities from a few years ago Congress authorized it. That actually may be a good place to wrap today's briefing. Benjamin or Anna or Heather. We're not going to be able to explain brick in one to two minutes, but I'd love to give any combination of you sort of the last few moments of our briefing to say anything about perhaps what brick means to these efforts. And, and, and how that program is operating I know it's I think about six months or so since the funding became available, or thereabouts but I'll leave it up to you for maybe a bit of a free for all any final words on brick I think that's something that our policy audience might appreciate closing on. I defer. I can I can speak to that or maybe the best person to talk to but in her absence. So brick essentially is a hazard mitigation grant program that is operated by FEMA that's replacing a previous hazard mitigation program called the PDM or the pre disaster mitigation program, which used to be an annual grant that relied on appropriations from Congress to get the money and then make it available for grants the exciting thing about brick is that the amount of money that goes into like the piggy bank of brick that can become available for grants is tied to disaster spending. So if there's a lot of disaster spending in a given year, and recently when isn't there, a certain percentage of that money spins off and becomes available for these hazard mitigation grants and then there's going to be to our understanding an annual application process where local governments can go in and apply for that money but it's going to be, we think a much more consistent source of funding, a larger source of funding than PDM ever was. And also something that is sort of more certain, as opposed to the sort of sporadic or uncertain funding from from before so yes, you can find out a lot about brick on FEMA website they've recently published some really interesting information about the application pool of projects that are coming in under the first round so go check that out on their website. I can jump in. Yes, please do Heather. We've been doing a bunch of interviews with with different cities that we work with around what their experience with brick has been in there and with similar federal programs and there's sort of majority who are saying this is really complicated it's really going to be covered and we just don't even know what to do with it we're going to leave it on the table, and a few others who are really being pretty proactive and figuring out how to get that money, exactly where it needs to be. I think the city of Houston is one that's doing some really with Marissa Aho their chief resilience officers really thinking about how to get this. How to get those dollars, get them where they need to be and get them into low income communities for new approaches so just a shout out to that effort. And that's exactly what I'm saying of hoping for for streamlined and more accessible way to deploy that doesn't just go to those who are, you know, really savvy. So a great note to end on I really appreciate those comments. We are about a minute almost to over so apologies for that to our panelists for sticking with us right through the end. Unfortunately, we lost Lori I think there may have been a power or internet outage that affected our connection so I'm sure she was with us for at least the brick conversation or a brick portion of our q amp a in spirit. And that program is near and dear to her heart. Thank you to Benjamin Thank you to Lori Anna and Heather, being amazing panelists today and sharing your information and expertise with our audience. I was an excellent session I learned so much about this issue. Thank you very much. I'd also like to thank everyone on team ESI who is behind the scenes pulling all of this off. I would like to thank Curtis who's helping us on the tech side today. I'd also like to thank also Dan O'Brien, Sydney Shaughnessy, Amber Todorov, Anna McGinn, Omri Laporte and our five fabulous interns Celine, Hamza, Jocelyn, Kimmy and Rachel. We had a great discussion today and we couldn't couldn't have had it without them so thanks to them. Thanks to them very much. Let's go ahead Curtis and put the next slide up. This is our survey slide. It's ideal when our audience shares feedback with us if you have two minutes. I encourage everyone to take the survey we read every response. While you're taking that survey I'm going to take the opportunity to plug a couple things coming up from ESI. Next week is a big week in climate policy. Thursday is Earth Day. We're expecting big announcements out of the administration with respect to the Paris Agreement. And we are going big next week. We have two briefings. The first is climate adaptation and resilience. The road to COP26 that's on Monday. Thanks to our co-sponsors, the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change, COP26, the British Embassy Washington and the American Society of Adaptation Professionals. That is going to be an awesome panel as well and I hope everyone will have an opportunity to join us. And then on Tuesday we're going to be rethinking, reduce, reuse and recycle policies and programs to address waste. Thinking about plastics and recycling and the really incredible challenge that that problem presents us in terms of waste but also in terms of emissions. Stay tuned. Also next week we are going to be making an announcement about a quick turnaround briefing to analyze the contents of the NDC which we expect to be released mid-week next week. And the fourth installment of Congressional Climate Camp, adaptation mitigation double whammies is going to be Friday, April 30th. And many of you have already RSVP for that. So thank you. I hope everyone enjoys it. We're going to be doing a bonus installment of Climate Camp in May. Specifically look at how budget reconciliation, that legislative vehicle could potentially be deployed or leveraged to advance climate solutions. We're going to end it there. I hope everyone has a great weekend. Thanks again to our four fabulous panelists and everyone in our audience today. Thanks to those who submitted questions. They really contributed a lot to our discussion. With that we'll end and hope everyone has a great weekend and hope to see you next week at the next ESI briefing which is on Monday after Monday morning at 11 Eastern. Thank you so much.


I can tell you my problems, meditate in my silence. But I keep butchering my pain, rotate my stylist. Roping this feeling like seeing now no graph low dollar. Used to be left on red, now all the girls go holler. Good morning everyone, today is Tuesday. I have a jam packed, I never used that in real life. So the first thing I need to do is I want to stretch, especially because I woke up with pain in my neck again just because I have that neck strain and it hurts the worst in the morning, just because I think there's a lack of blood flow. Running from pain, running from strain, running from things, running from skin. And then I'm going to straighten up the living room, wash the dishes, and then head to Cafe Kitsume here in Brooklyn to get some work done. For that, I'm going to be meeting Tom, who is the founder of Small Screen in Manhattan. And we're gonna go grab lunch around like 12.30, one o'clock. And then I have like three work meetings after that. So yeah, it's gonna be a busy day. Before we continue, I want to thank Formation for sponsoring today's video. Formation is a fellowship program for software engineers looking to make their next career move and land a job they love. Formation helps engineers feel skill gaps and get mentorship from senior engineers while being supported and trained unconditionally until you are placed at a company you love. The program started in 2020 when a group of meta and next-door engineers noticed that thousands of software engineering candidates had similar skill gaps when conducting interviews. This incredible insight is how Formation created a more effective way to better prepare for the fang level hiring bar by helping engineers gain confidence through personalized training, mentor support, and unlimited one-on-one mock interviews. So I had a really cool talk today with Tom. Shout out to him for having lunch, for meeting up with me today. Now I'm on my way home, I forgot my microphone so hopefully this audio isn't too bad. It was started out as a sunny day, now it's gray, it's kind of chilly. I'm a little under addressed. So today I decided to take a walk. It is later in the day. What time is it? It's like five p.m. And I just needed to take a walk just to get some fresh air. Decided to walk to Fort Green Park, this nearby park in Brooklyn. It's really beautiful, even though the trees are pretty much dead. But you get a nice vantage point of Brooklyn and can even see some of the buildings in Manhattan. We're feeling a bit anxious, so I just needed to take a mental health walk. Anyways, wearing this art-tier, I think it's called a toque? Maybe not, I think it's just a beanie. And AirPods Max that I stole from Lee. Actually she stole from me and I stole them back. I know I make these videos to be relaxing and inspiring.  But sometimes it's nice to be vulnerable, kind of using my platform as like my own personal therapy session. Before I drink my coffee, I'm gonna have some Bloom Superfood Greens, which is like this probiotic drink that helps you with your digestion and reduces bloating. And I think coffee actually causes a lot of bloating in the morning. And I'm trying not to drink coffee the first thing in the morning. I'm not even gonna front. This doesn't taste good, but I feel like the coconut is probably the best tasting one. Maybe not, whatever. Could be worse, you know? Hey, it's all about having a healthy mind, in order to have a more productive day and actually feel good throughout the day. It's one thing to like be productive and get stuff done. It's another thing to have a free mind and also a relaxed body. Always try to go for a light and a dark color. I don't know, makes sense to me. My wife goes for two of the colorful ones. So there's this really interesting perspective on YouTube and video trend, which is like living alone somewhere. Like living alone in New York, living alone in London. And those videos do so well because it's a unique perspective. But I don't see a ton of like not living alone in New York City type videos. So why not? I don't live alone, I live here with my wife. Most people I know either live with their partner, their roommates, or they're like family. It's so expensive here. A lot of people choose, especially in their 20s to live with roommates just to split these outrageous run prices. So I still consider myself somewhat of a software engineer. I do have developer in my job title, but when I was programming full time and prepping for thing level technical interviews, I remember how difficult it was just trying to figure out what to study for and how to prepare. Throughout the fellowship, fellows trained with senior engineering mentors from companies like Google, Microsoft, and Airbnb who provide actionable feedback during unlimited 101, small group and mock interview sessions. When you do well on a topic, you'll advance faster. When you need more support, you'll receive additional mentorship and learning sessions until you've truly mastered each concept. So you're confident going into every interview. Thank you to Formation for sponsoring today's video. Be sure to check out Formation with this link down in the description box.  So I like to wear my long sleeve or short sleeve, but for the long sleeve, white t-shirts underneath my sweaters, specifically the ones that are cashmere because cashmere's kind of itchy on my skin. My favorite thing about New York is just being able to walk everywhere. Not needing a car in New York City and taking a transit and just walkable cities in general. But after really experiencing it the past like 90 days of living in Brooklyn, I never need to use a car. I got rid of my car and I just love that I actually do have everything within like one to two miles of where I live. It sounds crazy to say that because I feel like there's not a lot of places in America or really any place in America where you have everything you need within one to two miles.