Hello, Naval War College colleagues and welcome to this lecture of opportunity about maritime security in the maritime security index. My name is Commander Andrea Cameron, and I coordinate the Climate and Human Security Studies Group at the Naval War College. For those who don't know about the group, it is composed of faculty, staff and students interested in engaging on nontraditional and transnational security threats. In addition to climate security issues, we also look at human security topics like food insecurity, water scarcity, health insecurity, economic development, migration and the resultant humanitarian crises. If you'd like to join the listserv, please put your email address in the chat or you can email me directly at andrea.camron at usnwc.edu. Now to give you a heads up, we will be hosting a Human Security in the Maritime Environment virtual conference on October 28 and 29. This conference explores the intersecting strategic implications of human insecurity within the maritime domain and the interconnections between navies. We will be talking about IUU fishing, illicit trafficking and modern slavery, mixed migration, piracy and armed robbery, cultural heritage protection, and how all these interconnect with lives and livelihoods of the people at sea and ashore. We'll explore the issue itself, how it affects the maritime strategic environment, and what that means for navies around the world. Registration information will be out soon. And today's lecture of opportunity introduces the college to the range of talks that will be discussed during this upcoming event by one of our panelists, giving Dr. Curtis Bell the chance to exhibit his work as Director of Stable Seas with the Maritime Security Index. We are honored to bring his expertise now as faculty as he has joined the Naval War College. I'll introduce our speaker for today. Dr. Curtis Bell is an Associate Professor of Maritime Security and Governance in the International Programs Department at the US Naval War College. He is also the founder of Stable Seas, a non-governmental research program that specializes in multilateral cooperation at sea and the maritime activities of terrorists and other violent extremists. He has consulted and supported the International Maritime Organization, United Nations on Drugs and Crime, and International Maritime Law Enforcement Agencies. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Washington Post, the Economist, and academic journals like the International Studies Quarterly, and Journal of Conflict Resolution. He earned a Doctorate in Political Science from the University of Colorado and has previously taught there and at the University of Tennessee. We are honored to have Curtis join us today, bringing his incredible work from Stable Seas on the Maritime Security Index to our audience. For those watching, the presentation will be recorded, but we will stop the recording at the end and open the floor for questions from the audience. Curtis, thank you so much for joining us today. I invite you to share your screen and begin your presentation. Here we go. Good morning everyone, and thank you to Andrea and the other organizers. I try to catch these lectures as often as I can. I understand that the opportunities to give a lecture are very scarce resource and I appreciate being squeezed into the schedule. And thank you to you all who have joined. I understand how busy Mondays can be. Thanks for sharing lunch with me, at least here on the East Coast, it's lunchtime. And I'd like to talk to you about human security and propose the Maritime Security Index and the approach to quantifying some aspects of human security as a way to advance our agendas. So as Andrea said, I wear two hats. I am here at the Naval War College, but I am also the founder and now one of the directors of a nonprofit organization that provides maritime security research that focuses largely on these kinds of human topics called Stable Seas. And for several years now we've worked with governments and regional security organizations around the world on broadening maritime security strategies to think about security problems that see more holistically. We've really tried to focus on advancing some of these more holistic strategies that are out there. So I've learned a lot by doing this, some things to do and some lessons learned the hard way things not to do. And I'd like to speak candidly about some of that today. But let me start with the standard disclaimer that the views that I'm going to share today are my personal views gained through research and experience working on these topics, mostly in Africa, but also in the Middle East, Southeast Asia and Latin America. Not the views of the US government nor of the Naval War College. So let me start by taking us back about 10 or 15 years here. So, as we were returning the last decade, we were in the midst of a massive maritime security crisis in the Western Indian Ocean and this of course was the rise of piracy off the coast of Somalia. What began as a small problem closer to the coast quickly radiated out hundreds of miles out to sea, and developed into a significant security threat to the oil tankers container ships and other other trans oceanic commerce it was active in the region. It's an interesting place to start this talk because it quickly mobilized a large response, not only from militaries, but also from private actors, and the NGO and civil society community. This was the first NGO of the European naval forces which authorized Operation Atlanta to combat this problem, and through this work and some measures put in place by shipping companies and many other actors. We saw the problem, pretty successfully eliminated or at least substantially reduced from the levels that it was over a decade ago. In meetings about this problem that I've seen in the time since then. There's been a rift. On the one side, we've seen some parties to this be very concerned about piracy and armed robbery specifically. They've sought to solve this problem at sea. Well, discounting some of the links to other problems onshore, and by discounting I don't mean that they're not aware of coastal insecurity in Somalia, or problems like illegal fishing and poor fisheries enforcement across much of the western Indian ocean. I don't think they're blind to environmental damage, and the, the foreign fishing fleets that come through the area, often not permitted and operating illegally. But the response was largely focused on counter piracy operation specifically. There was also a camp that said yes there's a problem here but responses to this problem need to focus more broadly not only on counter piracy operations, but also on some of the root drivers. We need to think about maritime security as a system that acknowledges some of these other human security topics that drive acute problems like piracy. Folks in this camp would raise problems like illegal fishing, the absence of a blue economy, or good opportunities on the coast for men especially in legal sectors. And because of that, we didn't necessarily see eye to eye and and come to good agreement right away there have been some disagreements over what the response has been. I like to bring data to the table that's going to be clear in this talk. So I went through the original 2008 resolution to authorize the EU operation at Atlanta just to illustrate this. Now, at the time many maritime problems were acknowledged in the western Indian Ocean you see these lined up on the horizontal axis across the bottom, not only piracy and armed robbery, but also trafficking and drugs charcoal, which was a major enemy maker for all Shabaab at the time, IUU fishing weapons terror, anything illicit transnational organized crime, and what the bars represent our word counts in that 2008 document authorizing operation at Atlanta, what we see here is piracy and armed robbery mentioned more than a dozen times each without any mention of the other problems. Now, on the opposite coast of Africa, starting a bit later than the surge in piracy off the coast of Somalia, we saw a troubling and continued trend of piracy and armed robbery in the Gulf of Guinea, and especially in the waters near the Niger River Delta. Some aspects of the problem were similar multinational companies saw a pretty consistent threat of piracy and armed robbery from groups operating off the coast. There was similar disagreement about the root causes and the kinds of solutions needed. There was a response that involved governments, international organizations, private sector in civil society, both in the region and outside of the region and in fact outside of Africa. And in ongoing discussions about what ought to be done about piracy and armed robbery in the Gulf of Guinea. The meetings today largely illustrate a very similar rift. And again, this is not to exaggerate. It is not as if there are two distinct camps, but there are certainly two perspectives that we see present in these meetings and in the comments. On the one hand, we see solutions proposed coming from this camp on the left that think piracy is the real problem. And yes, while it is driven by some of these larger human security threats both at sea and on the coast. There are ways to address piracy without addressing some of these other problems. There can be a military solution. By some estimates there are as few as 1200 people involved in pirate gangs operating out of the Niger River Delta in West Africa right now. The total area that is at risk in the Gulf of Guinea is around 20% of the area at risk in the Western Indian Ocean at the height of the problem off the coast of Somalia. That calls for a certain kind of solution. But on the other side, there are very valid arguments about the drivers of this, the pollution, corruption, the absence of a strong blue economy, the poverty of coastal populations, specifically in areas that also have a lot of revenue from the offshore oil industry. And a solution may also involve addressing some of those root causes if it is to be sustainable. There we go. So what we saw in response to these two problems, I apologize for the ugly Matt but I think it gets the point across as we saw codes of conduct focused on the suppression of piracy and armed robbery at sea on both coasts of Africa. In East Africa, this red, you see African members of an agreement that emerged in 2009, called the Djibouti code of conduct. And this also involved most of the countries of the Arabian Peninsula, and it focused narrowly on the suppression of piracy in the Gulf of Aden, and in the Western Indian Ocean. And two years later in 2013, the green states, through the organizations that they were party to, mainly Echo was and ECIS these are the regional economic associations in Western Central Africa, respectively. They created the young day code of conduct, which sought to suppress piracy but also address many of these larger goals. I think it's fair to say that in their original versions. In East Africa code, largely reflected this camp and the white, and the young day code largely reflected this this camp in the blue, a broader lens, looking at some of the other human security problems. Now, the geographies of these two regions are very different and I would argue that that is why these agreements emerged differently, to some extent, in East Africa. In many states, but African representation overall was, you know, not overshadowed but definitely matched by some of the more capable navies and partners on the Arabian Peninsula, especially Saudi Arabia. And in the Gulf of Guinea, you largely had this emerging from states there in the region, and some of the larger navies were also some of the states most affected by this there are diversity of interests there. There are very different kinds of agreements. What ended up happening, though, is that by 2017, the Djibouti code on the East Coast started to match, and in some cases word for word match the more human security approach that was documented in West Africa and the young day code. So this Jeddah amendment to the Djibouti code started to open this up and think, let's not only address piracy. It started to name other topics, IUU fishing, trafficking in arms, drugs and wildlife, human trafficking and smuggling, environmental crime and especially toxic waste dumping, which was a major concern among the African representatives at many of these meetings and negotiations. The opening annex to the new agreement also focused on all kinds of solutions that reach beyond a military solution, and more into a whole of government or whole of society approaches, regional cooperation, legal solutions, poverty alleviation, information sharing, not only across governments but also between non government actors and private companies and governments that could create a more complete picture of what's happening at sea. Documents supporting these efforts also started to broaden. So a few moments ago I showed you the 2008 European Union document that authorized Operation Atlanta and how it focused narrowly on piracy and armed robbery. The red bars are the 2020 reauthorization of Operation Atlanta, and you can see that here the EU focus was broadened to also combat many of these other problems. And you would expect that because the threats at sea have changed, but I think it is also a nod to the approach that's becoming more common to zoom out from the acute crisis and think more broadly of maritime security as a holistic, inner, inner woven set of threats and economic drivers that needs to be addressed more comprehensively. Similar efforts to broaden approaches to solving maritime security are seen in Latin America and the Treaty of San Jose, and elsewhere in other documents Now, there are great benefits, I think I have an interest in this to broadening the perspective to think about the drivers of piracy, the economic impacts, the good governance inputs into the system that drives piracy, but there are also some challenges that come from this. What can we do how do we start to make progress. If now everyone is responding to eight or nine different problems, instead of focusing their resources and their efforts on driving down piracy and armed robbery. How can we keep an eye on the ball, as they say, and make progress and within these agreements create common goals so that so that steady progress can be made. One model for doing this is the sustainable development goals which come from the United Nations, if you're not familiar with these. These are some of the most ambitious goals ever made. So here within one framework, we have goals that range all the way from SDG one, just ending poverty to SDG eight, which is economic growth, kind of related but very different more focused on labor rights. We have an affordable energy in SDG seven, you have environmental protection on land and at sea and SDGs 15 and 14 gender equality, and it goes on and on. Now the way the UN has sought to drive progress and benchmark by creating quantitative indicators so that we could have regular assessments, based in fact, rather than in narrative or anecdote. On which goals are being met, which ones are falling behind, and some are doing doing statistical analysis to understand what kinds of links exist between these goals. You know by resolving or making progress toward goal number eight, do we start to solve goal number one these kinds of questions. So my team and I thought is, let's adapt this and think about how we can support some of these widely broadened maritime security strategies in a similar way by thinking up, working with partners to create a similar kind of quantitative benchmarking tool, so that we can start to bring some tracking and accountability to these human security topics that are very difficult to assess in this kind of way. So what we did here is we came up with a nine issue framework that I'll show you in a moment that we call the stable seas maritime security index, it's very similar to this kind of approach with the SDGs, very different I think from what other NGOs have done with various indices. For the following reason, we intentionally did not start with what kind of information is available that we could bring in. We started with a deep review of all of the regional maritime security strategies that we thought could benefit from a tool like this, reading them line by line, we tried to draw and represent the topics that were already of interest to our audience. Regardless of whether there was good data available, we tried to stay true to the cause of building a tool to support these specific agreements, rather than building a tool based on what we could readily find, and then hoping that somebody might pick that up. This has also been through rounds of revision after meeting with people involved in these agreements. And in that sense, I hope that it is a bit more of a dialogue, rather than a monologue when we go to these meetings and we try to talk about using this as a way to benchmark some of these agreements. So these nine issues break down into three groups of three, basically, where we have three pretty active maritime security threats on the left, piracy and armed robbery, illicit trades, and what we call maritime mixed migration, which is a confluence of smuggling trafficking and slavery at sea. We have three economic drivers along the bottom, which is the health of fisheries, the blue economy, more generally, and the welfare of coastal populations in terms of both their economic and physical security. And then the remaining three and the upper right are international cooperation, the rule of law and maritime enforcement capabilities. So what we've done if you go to stable seas.org the website has changed a bit as we've transitioned between funders, but what you'll find is a series of scores for each of these nine categories that we believe are pretty central to human security in which reflect the priorities expressed in documents, like I've shown you like the amended Djibouti code of conduct we're doing our best to try to reflect those. To date, because of community interest and the level of funding we've had, we have coded three versions of this, we're up to 70 countries across the Indo Pacific, and around the coast of Africa. And we now reach all the way from the Southern Mediterranean to the Pacific, and we have hopes to add partners to round off especially Latin America and the Caribbean, and the smaller Pacific Island nations those are high priority areas and something I'd love to talk about offline if there's any interest in contributing to an expanded index. In each of these issue areas, we also provide regional briefs that couple the data with some narrative and some highlights of some of the things the states have done to improve. I think it's always really important to lay out models for improvement rather than only showing the data, because if this is to be used to set benchmarks and goals. We also provide some examples from these regions of ways the states have have improved their scores or strive to do so. We also have country specific briefs that very briefly compare countries to the rest of the region and highlight some of the successes and some of the pressing challenges we hope that that can be a useful resource as well. What I'd like to do with my remaining time and then we'll go to questions is talk through how we code these different things what we see and where we've seen change since we started doing this in about 2017. The first piracy and armed robbery is honestly one of the simplest because unlike so many topics on human security you see, we have a pretty clear legal definition. Sorry, we have reporting agencies. Since I'm doing my screen share I can't pull up my thing to hang that up. There we go. Okay, are we back now. Okay, all good. All good. Thank you. Sorry about that. We have a new computer and the phone rings through it and it drives me nuts. I don't know how to turn that off yet. So anyways with piracy, this is more straightforward because we have good definitions we have many agencies around the world that report piracy numbers and even internally at stable seas. So the cost of piracy report that goes back about 10 years and compares and parses out the differences between these reporting agencies so that we have our best set of numbers available. We see that we have two main hotspots remaining as of 2020. This score is largely based on the number of incidents and the proximity to the exclusive economic zones of the littoral countries that you see mapped here. And the thing that this hides is that these are two very different types of threats, and that's something that maybe we try to improve in the future with more armed robbery in Southeast Asia for vessels that are stopped or moving very slowly, and not as many underway, and the Gulf of Guinea, of course we have, you know, by some estimates 95% of the victims of kidnapping for ransom at sea. Okay, illicit trades is a section that I'm quite proud of because the easy thing to do would be to look for seizures of the kinds of products that we're interested in, which are small arms and light weapons, wildlife products, and four kinds of illicit drugs. We have cannabis, cocaine, opiates and then synthetic drugs like methamphetamines and fentanyl. So it would be to look for seizures but then you're punishing the countries that are doing more to stop the problem. So instead what we did is we designed a survey that we sent to naval and maritime law enforcement officers to NGO experts, academics and regional and international organizations around the world to try to get their sense of the extent of the problems, and the extent to which these items move by sea rather than overland or by air. So what we have here is a really interesting mix of illicit trades involving origin points, including on the east coast of Africa, transit points, which are also on the east coast of Africa but then some of the ones across the Indian Ocean, South Africa is a large transit point, and then destination markets, which are, you know, in East Asia for some kinds of goods, especially like wildlife products. If you get on the website we also break it down by each of these specific trades so that you see a different map like this for cocaine for cannabis for opiates and small arms, light weapons, etc. This is a crowd sourced tool that we hope to update every couple of years, so that we can start to see how these enforcement efforts are paying dividends at least in the minds of the experts that represent these regions. Maritime mixed migration is language that is borrowed from the international labor organization. I think it is important in human security at sea conversations to say mixed migration and not human trafficking or smuggling. The knowledge is that the same person might leave a coastline smuggled voluntarily paying someone to take them to another place across the sea. But as soon as they're out of distance, out of swimming distance of land, they can then be trafficked which is being moved against their will to some other place, or sold into sexual slavery or slavery in the fishing industry, or some human trafficking so we use the term mixed migration to acknowledge that complexity. These are data that represent UNHCR numbers on refugees on people seeking asylum. It looks at laws, both domestic and international conventions related to the protection of people. There is a clause on another NGO tool called the Global Slavery Index, which has a really interesting way of getting to the vulnerability of people to being trafficked, looking at domestic laws, education, women's equality, rights of children and some of these other factors that you would predict would affect the likelihood that somebody could fall into forced labor or sex trafficking. Proud of this score because we generate eight different estimates of the prevalence of trafficking. We look at labor trafficking and sex trafficking, and we gender disaggregate and age disaggregate as well. So you can find a different score for men, boys, women and girls. And that allows us to see some interesting patterns in the data as well. The economic drivers of this fisheries health looks not at only the business of fisheries but also what this is doing to the environment, the health of the fish stocks, it includes not only fisheries biology data, which is developed by a great fisheries team called Secure Fisheries out in Colorado. It also looks at governance of fisheries and other topics like pollution. Here we see as we might expect that South Africa, Australia, some of these British Indian Ocean territories are doing better while some of the countries that have less domestic regulation and therefore more exploitation by foreign fleets are suffering lower scores. One of the things that we try to do is analysis to understand how this might be driving maritime crimes and that's still an area of working development. It looks more generally at the health of ocean and coastal economies, so it looks more at the economic contribution of fisheries, but then also at offshore oil and gas at coastal tourism at port development, and and the development of a shipping industry for all these countries and here is probably the starkest divide between Asia and Africa, a country like Malaysia or Thailand has very diversified blue economies, where we have some of the most productive ports in the world, great tourism and successful fishing fleets as well as offshore oil and gas all coexisting. None of that exists in most of Africa right now, but it provides a nice model where even even where some of the security threats are the same. We see paths to blue economy development and there's a real opportunity for for cross regional sharing there. The final one looks at coastal welfare and unlike other kinds of resources like a failed states index or tools that look at levels of conflict or economic development across countries. We look specifically at conditions in a coastal buffer that is usually within 50 kilometers of the coast. How many violent protests riots battles terrorist attacks. Have there been. How does the economic development of the people living along the coast compare to the economic development of areas inland. How does that relate to coastal grievances which can drive black markets and maritime crime, or inadequate state presence where you might not have enough law enforcement because an area is autonomous or is under a state of insurgent control and some of these cases and we get a map that looks like this where we see no distinct regional patterns but we we see pockets that are worrisome around the world in the southern Philippines the the coast of Myanmar Somalia and Yemen Niger and increasingly northern Mozambique which I think is one of the fastest changing areas in our region of study for now. And how this is linked to some of these other problems that we see at sea like piracy and armed robbery. And now quickly moving to the three governance solutions and then I'd like to open it for questions and we can come back to any of this. Our rule of law score looks at things that are likely to affect how well solutions that are legislated are then implemented. So this investigates corruption. The integrity of judicial systems. These are things that are measured by other NGOs that have people on the ground or have massive surveys that get at these kinds of questions. We also have a few maritime specific inputs, including things related to corruption specifically in ports. The World Bank claims and I think they're probably right that the longer ships stay in port and the more red tape that they have to cut to move containers into and out of a country. Very strongly correlated with the likelihood of corruption or bribery within that port and the World Bank collects data on this every year. So we can look at how much it costs to move something into a country. How long these vessels stay in port. How many different agencies have to approve something moving and we can start to get at that as well. We also have things like property rights broken down by gender by religion socioeconomic group by region so that we can better understand whether there might be sub populations within a country that are going to be more driven toward black markets because engaging in the legal market is that much harder. We get results that look like that. Okay, maritime enforcement is basically a division problem. What kinds of assets, do you have in terms of vessels maritime domain awareness, and what is the scope of the challenge. And here we look at the size of an easy the number of maritime neighbors, whether your maritime boundaries are established with your neighbors or disputed, which might make it harder to enforce. And then the length and the complexity of a country's coastline as well which is especially important for smaller smuggled goods. One of the interesting things we find here and I'll return to this at the end is that some of the countries with the most enforcement capability. For example, Nigeria has more vessels operating at sea than the rest of its region combined also have some of the more pressing maritime security threats. It's not an easy solution to the problems but it is part of a solution and that's something that these kinds of data allow us to illustrate without relying too heavily on specific cases to make the point like Nigeria. And then finally is international cooperation. And for me. We have a glass half empty glass half full kind of map it is the bluest map and I should have said before if it wasn't clear bluer scores are scores are countries that are performing better on these on these scores and the yellow and the orange and the red are countries that have lower scores in this area. One of the things that we notice is that many scores are many countries are participating in many of the most important international laws and treaties and agreements that govern this kind of activity at sea. Most countries are parties to unclass, they have signed a solace and sewer conventions and some of the drug trafficking and human trafficking conventions that are not specific to maritime activity that are important nonetheless. The other side of that is that there appears to be very little relation between whether a country has signed these things and whether problems have been successfully addressed. Okay, so how do we get from evaluation and benchmarking to starting to make progress as someone with a background in data science. This is what I get really excited about. So we have two main issues. We've now collected data for three years, some of it for 70 countries. So now we can start to look at some of the relationships statistically across these scores and try to understand how they're connected to each other without just relying on isolated stories. So what we did is we ran this data, looking for strong positive correlations, meaning that one set of scores tends to trend with another set, a reduction in one problem leads to a reduction in another problem. And then negative relationships, which I'll show you in red as well, meaning that not only are they not related, one problem might get worse as another gets better, there might be a trade off to consider here. So when we do that. Oh, there we go. When we do that this is what we find you can tell I'm not a graphic designer here on this slide. For the most part, we do see evidence of that camp I showed at the very beginning of holistic systems, where some of these maritime security threats really should be viewed as human security problems that need to be solved holistically both at sea and onshore, both in capitals and in small coastal communities, especially where there's relative economic and security deprivation relative to the rest of the country. The rule of law, for example, is a major driver of everything from the strength of blue economy. And I'm sorry not strength of blue economy from coastal welfare to the health of fisheries to maritime enforcement capability. And this makes sense if governments are able to implement the laws that they are passing. We would expect problems to go away faster than in places where there's little relation between legislation that's being passed and how it's implemented because of corruption, or low government presence in coastal areas or judicial bribery or some of these other things. Maritime enforcement capacity here in the in the top middle. It doesn't solve many problems, but it does seem to be linked to better success against mixed migration and strengthening the blue economy. I think this makes a lot of sense when we look at areas like Mozambique, or we look at the disputed zone between Kenya and Somalia, where some of this offshore development that could be very beneficial to the rest of the country is thwarted in a large part because there is not enough enforcement capacity at sea to allow oil blocks to be explored for coastal tourism to really take shape and draw foreign money and all this. We also see some things that we might predict like here there's a link between piracy and illicit trades. And what's interesting is this link is is especially strong with the kinds of illicit trades that can be smuggled on smaller vessels. I think that's one of the reasons we don't see a strong link between illicit trades and maritime enforcement capacity. For example, this is a it's a diverse bucket, looking at things that are coming in large containers, and also goods that are very high value like fentanyl that are being smuggled on small fishing vessels and freezers. There's more of a link for these small vessel crimes and small vessel crimes and there is between piracy and then things that need to be smuggled in containers that's going to be more closely linked to port governance rule of law inspections and that kind of thing. One of the ones I want to point out that I think is really interesting is this red line linking piracy to the strength of a country's blue economy. What this is actually showing you is that the stronger the blue economy, the greater the worse the problem with piracy. So solving piracy does not mean developing the blue economy and this will magically happen, because in fact some of the countries that have the strongest blue economies at least by the way we're measuring it also have some of the most severe piracy problems. There's an interesting intervening variable where if you think about countries like Nigeria or the Philippines, they might have very strong well developed blue economies where they have productive fisheries, their areas of the country that are amenable to coastal tourism, they have offshore oil and gas, but if those goods are not if the wealth is not distributed among coastal communities, if it might be affecting them adversely, which is certainly the case in the Niger River Delta, then the combination of wealth in close proximity to deprived communities could be a main driver of piracy and that seems to be something that we see around the world so that rings true. I'll stop there with explanation of this but we can come back to it in the Q&A if that's of interest. So, if you are not a data person I apologize for the talk. But let me tell you that through the generous support of some donors including the United Nations Office on drugs and crime and partners across the regions where we operate. We've been able to do book length reports on five different regions that have chapters on each of these nine issues. We've also done our best to translate these into the languages that are common in in the regions. So we have reports on the Sulu and syllabus seas in the southern Philippines and Malaysia Indonesia, the Bay of Bengal. We have a Latin America and the Caribbean report. We have a Gulf of Guinea report that launched last year, and we are just now coming out with a Western Indian Ocean report as well. And for each of those you'll see a book length deeper dive into these issues and how they connect with each other. You'll also see handouts like this that try to summarize this on a page or so. All of that material and much more is available on our website, which is stable seas.org. And I encourage you to visit it get in touch with me or anyone else on the team. If you're interested in this work, or if we can support you in some way. So with that, I'll stop my formal presentation and tell you that I appreciate your time and look forward to your questions. Thank you. Thank you so much, Curtis. Before closing the presentation, I'd like to ask you one final question. These students are our future leaders. Do you have any advice you would give them about how they could think about maritime security and their future positions? Yeah, one thing that I've learned is that many times I'm just going to back all the way up to this. Many times we share maritime security goals. But we look at the problem through a different lens, we may see a different facet of it. So my advice to students is even if your top priority or your Navy's top priority or your agency's top priority is one aspect of a complex problem, be well studied and think about the links to other problems because that is what is going to allow you to engage across different kinds of agencies with different kinds of priorities. There is a lot of commonality between counter piracy operations and fishing enforcement. But if you don't think about complex problems, if you don't think about this problem like a giant not, and if I pull on this, how's that going to affect your end of it? You really limit the number of relationships you can build and your creativity in coming to solutions. So I just encourage everyone to think about the holistic human security picture because it's going to allow for more creativity, more partnerships and hopefully more progress, which is most important. Excellent. Thank you so much. On behalf of all of us in the Naval War College community, of which you're a part, but I'm so glad we could bring you in and share your expertise from stable seas while you're here. I want to thank Dr. Curtis Bell so much for sharing his expertise with us today. This concludes the recorded portion of the lecture.


We just made our front porch rule sign using 5 fence pickets and it cost about 8 bucks and we'll show you how we did it right now. What is up a welcome back? Do you like to do it, build it, or make it? Of course you do, that's why you're here and we do this every week. Ask these cool guys down here. This week we're doing another variation on a front porch welcome sign. Well it's really a porch sign, I mean I guess it's kind of a welcome sign. Maybe it's not your front porch. I'm making this for my sister-in-law, my brother, we're going to go for a visit and they have the best back porch ever.  I think it's perfect for them. We might have a couple of photos of Kim sleeping on that porch. No please do not, please do not show those. You guys don't have to, they're really embarrassing. You guys don't have to beg, beg hard enough, maybe I'll show you. No, they're really embarrassing. Moving on, moving on, moving on. Step one, we're going to gather all of our materials.  Pickets, pickets, fence pickets, fence pickets. These are like a dollar 50 a piece, like all in eight bucks. No shoes, no shop. Gotta wear your shoes in the craft room. Right Kim? I tried to have my shoes on but I, Garrett's about to pull up his saw and I walked right into it just now and it about broke my little toe off so guess what? Hold on, shoes in the craft room. Shoes in the craft room. Ruin in the magic. Ruin. Go, go. Step two, we're going to make all of our cuts. We're just going to cut these dog-eared pickets down to 18 inches each. We're going to have like 10 of them, 12 of them, 11 of them. I think it's 11, yeah. And then we're going to cut the gothic ones down to about about 60 inches. They're going to be behind it. That's what we're going to pin it to. And we're going to do all of that with my pocket saw. Surprise, the pocket saw was down there. Surprise, you never see it coming. I know some saw dust in it. All right, a little sponge 80, burrs and stuff. Now we're going to stain and paint. We use this very thin weather gray for like four of the boards. Four of the boards are just going white. And then we're coming in with a serene, serene, serene. We're going to alternate colors. And this is going to be a horizontally stacked sign instead of the two vertical pickets like we normally do. These are going to be stacked one on top of the other alternating colors. Yeah. All right, let's do it. Have these all stained? Those are all stained, yes. We're doing all sides. They're just one side. Alexa, play pit with me. Now we're going to assemble it. We're going to take those pickets that we cut down to 60 inches and we're going to lay out all those 18 inch pickets that we just painted. We're going to glue them down and then tack them down with a one inch brad. The nail, not the guy. Now if you want to do this with no tools you could do it with original gorilla glue. You just have to wait a couple minutes before you can manhandle it. A couple of hours. Just put something heavy on each of the boards and let it set and you could do it without the nail gun. All right, that's what we got so far. Trippy, huh? I'll do it. Not so fast, not so fast. Making me seasick. Step five. Now we're going to put our words on the boards. We have this giant stencil. I created this 60 inch stencil with each of the different but sayings for each board but it doesn't line up perfectly so what we're going to do is just cut each word so that we can make sure it lines up with the each board in the correct spot. Did I get that out right? I think so. And the plan is to put this stencil in our store as well along with the SVG. We created the SVG for this one so we can put that in our store as well. A podge trick. Seal the stencil. Just a thin layer. The stencil didn't stick to the stain. The stain was a little wet so it didn't stick perfectly so I'm going to use this dabber.  Hopefully it won't bleed under. Hopefully it won't bleed under. We talked about which one was going to do it. He said, do you want me to do it or do you want to do it? I said do you want to get yelled at or do you want me to get yelled at and he said all right I'll get yelled at. I'll get yelled at. But then I followed up with it's going to look so perfect. Nobody will need to yell. He's such a good sport. I think the trick is super dry. See what we got. It's a little snack. I love it. I'm going to throw some feet on it here in a second. We get a lot of questions about how to get these things to stand on their own. We use some of these elk brackets that we picked up over in the garage organizing area. There's shelf brackets. Shelf brackets. So you just spin it around. Yep we actually use these same brackets for our herb pot. What was it? Yeah the vertical herb garden. Yes. I'll leave a link over here. Yes the vertical herb garden and I'll just tell you that that's been standing on our back porch for almost a year now and it's never fallen over. So they do a great job. What do you think? You like the colors? Would you have used different colors? Let us know down below what colors you'd like to use. I was thinking more of an aqua color like turquoise or something. I'm not always thinking this was really like beachy and you know kind of chill for the front porch. Serene right? It is serene. I guess I want to get it back. Don't forget to subscribe. If you're not yet subscribed hit that bell because we do this every week. Give us a like a share and we'll see you guys next week.


Welcome to JSA TV and JSA Podcasts, the newsroom for telecom and data center professionals. I'm Barb Mitchell, here today in beautiful Honolulu, Hawaii at PTC 2020. Joining me is Jamie Leverton, Senior Vice President and Chief Commercial Officer of East Structure Data Centers out of Montreal. Jamie, welcome. Thank you so much for having me. It's always nice to get a break from the Canadian winter and visit us here in Honolulu. Yeah, definitely a nice time to come for sure. So it's January 2020 and that means we just wrapped up 2019. Lots happened for East Structure last year. Can you tell us some of the highlights? Highlights are tough. I, for me, I'm six months into the role at East Structure and the entire six months have been a highlight reel. I have had the most amount of fun. We've done so much in such a short period of time and we've built a great series of surprises for everybody in 2020 as well. We're super proud of how the team has grown in 2019. We've increased our headcount overall by almost 30%. We announced an incredible acquisition in August of JSA's data center in Calgary, which we're very proud of. And we brought a really great team of professionals with us in that acquisition, which has been incredible to welcome them into the East Structure family as well. So yeah, very busy six months. We're proud of kind of everything we accomplished. We officially launched our Montreal 2 data center in the middle of October, which we couldn't be more proud of. It's our new headquarters, 187,000 square feet, 30 megawatts. We just are in love with the Montreal market and super proud of what we've built out there. It's been fun to watch, that's for sure. And I know that next year we'll be busy as well. I was going to ask, so last year we talked actually, I think at ITW, you were just launching your channel partners program. Can you tell us some developments since it began? Yeah, we've had a really busy six months around the development of our channel partner program and our ecosystem in general. So I'm a fierce advocate of a healthy ecosystem across all aspects of our go-to-market partnerships. We've made some really strategic announcements recently. In that regard, we announced a strategic partnership with Data Hive in Calgary, which is absolutely phenomenal. Data Hive is the preeminent carrier hub for Calgary, and we are now partnered with them so that our customers that want access to that dense carrier ecosystem can take advantage of it through our new data center in Calgary, which allows for high density on demand. We do 30 kilowatts a cabinet out of that data center. We've got six megawatts available, 60,000 square feet. So that partnership where we can work with Data Hive to get that carrier dense environment but be able to deliver the capacity and the density that our customers want is just so incredible and we couldn't be more proud of that partnership. It's an absolute pleasure to work with Marjorie and her team. So that announcement was fantastic and of course one of many that we've done over the past six months and really the tip of the iceberg of what you'll see over the coming year. And of course this week at PTC, you're speaking of news, you're announcing a new partnership, growth to the partnership I should say, you know, that was already in place, but high speed connectivity between Montreal and the U.S. So that's big and it's important and can you tell us a little bit about that? Yeah, absolutely. So here at PTC we've announced an expansion of our partnership with Beanfield. Beanfield is an incredible partner of ours and they've launched their hyper low latency route coming out of our Montreal One facility and going into the key U.S. markets so that our customers have access to ultra low latency routes to the major cloud on ramps in the U.S. So really think that that's a great differentiator for us in Montreal. We absolutely love working with the team at Beanfield. So the more we can do together to really serve us the mutual interest of our clients and the industry as a whole, we couldn't be more pleased. So yeah, that's a big announcement this week as well. So many great things happening. It just, you know, I feel like every time we talk there's something new, something going on. What about 2020? What should we expect? I would expect more than what we gave you in 2019. So as much as we've done in 2019, we've also been using it as a year to get us ready for some incredible announcements in 2020. So yeah, I would expect actually more than we've recently given you and that should be a trend that we continue to see. We just were just continuing to get ourselves ramped up and well, we're full of surprises. And busy, I think, yes. So for those of our viewers who don't know, can you tell them where they can go to find more information? Oh, yeah, absolutely. I don't get asked that question very often. You can, of course, go to our website. You can find us on social, LinkedIn, Twitter. You can reach out to our partners at JSA. I am the only lever and I know that's working in this industry. So you could just put my name into Google and you should find us. But yeah, anything at all we can do, any questions we can answer, we're here. Thank you so much for joining us again. And thank you viewers for joining us on JSA TV and JSA Podcasts. Happy networking.


ice providers to distribute premium pay to current and new employees to make a service commitment to the organization. And the agency will also be using funds to fund training for HCBS providers and to offer a number of grant opportunities designed to strengthen and enhance that HCBS system of care in Vermont. So these grants will be made available to HCBS providers and community-based organizations that serve individuals who utilize HCBS. And the agency is just currently working to define these grant opportunities which will include funding related to workforce recruitment, retention and training. When it comes to supporting organizational wellness and peer support programs, the Director of Trauma Prevention Resilience Development is currently providing a lot of supports both to state employees through AHS but is also working to reach out to employers in the broader community to act as a support. And is also consulting with InvestEAP as they create a workforce resilience certification. And it was discussed earlier on this call, there is definitely a need to reduce the administrative burden that is on providers. So Act 167 of 2022 included several points that address the administrative burden related to prior authorizations. And there's currently still work that needs to be done on that area. And the H220 and the legislature also contains language on exemptions from prior authorizations. And then there's also the work that's being done on the federal level that was mentioned earlier. So recruitment and retention recommendations are certainly in progress. Moving on to practice changes, the first recommendation is regarding maximizing Medicare flexibility and reimbursement through Vermont's all-payer ACO agreement. And that is in progress. So Vermont has proposed for Medicare to recognize and reimburse licensed mental health and substance use disorder treatment professionals to expand the number of mental health and substance use disorder providers who can treat and bill for Medicare patients. And there's also new Medicare billing rules that allow for licensed professionals to bill Medicare under general physician supervision instead of direct physician supervision. So it's also likely that work will be done in the future because Vermont's likely to propose additional waivers to allow less restricted Medicare payment for the skilled nursing care delivered in the home. Developing commercial reimbursement models for audio only services that is in progress and currently health insurers are required to cover audio only services. But the department has also exploring the department of financial regulations also exploring capitated payment models. So there's a lot of work being done in one area as well as then expanding telehealth coverage, healthcare insurers are required to cover telehealth with reimbursement at parity. And VPQHC is working on organizing all of the information about telehealth billing requirements. So it's easier for providers to access. Finally, establishing a statewide telepsychiatry program and emergency department. So there is a congressionally directed spending grant that VPQHC received. And there is work being done at the moment to really implement that grant to coordinate telepsychiatry amongst Vermont's emergency departments. And so quite a few recommendations in progress. Moving on to regulatory changes, there has been an effort to advertise and promote the fast track for healthcare professionals for all of the OPR regulated professions. And there is work being done. Currently OPR and the Board of Medical Practice are in the rulemaking process to create telehealth licensuring registration options. So this is another item that, you know there will be more updates just in a few months. So those are the recommendations for which we have updates. We also wanted to provide a list of the additional recommendation in the plans, additional recommendations in the plan for which at this moment in time we don't have any changes to report. That doesn't mean that there hasn't work that's being done in that area. It just means it's not necessarily work that has new sense the plan was implemented. So the list of additional financial incentives includes increasing the scholarship funding created by ACP 155 of 2020 and identifying permanent funding sources. So at the moment, these are still funded year to year from funds from the global commitment waiver and the renewals being considered in the legislature again this year. There was movement in the 2023 budget proposal from the governor's office to revisit tax incentive proposals, but it was not accepted by the legislature. So at this moment in time, we don't have any updates on that. And we also don't have any updates on the considering longer term grant incentives. And as far as the evaluating the effectiveness of existing scholarship programs available to promoters who attend dental school, this is something where it's not currently in progress but it will be before the end of the year. So there are plans to study the retention rate for those students who take up the scholarships. For education, there are a number of recommendations for which we have not observed any changes. Many of them relate to changes to the curriculum at kind of the high school or lower level as well as establishing a physician assistant education program. Ensuring that the healthcare career education is offered to all students before leaving middle school. There's many more, there's many programs in career technical education programs that kind of maybe provide students with college nursing prerequisites, but there haven't been any additional programs that we've identified related to that recommendation and supporting transition to practice programs for professional roles. So the governor's 2022 BAA proposal included a million dollars to fund transition to practice programs for new hires but was not accepted by the legislature. As far as recruitment and retention, so this is kind of a tricky one. One of the recommendations was promoting healthcare careers to new volunteers. So we've spoken to the Office of Refugee or Settlement and they do a lot of work to connect new Vermonters to careers, but they really focus understandably on connecting those new Vermonters to careers that suit their skills and interests and not necessarily specifically aiming at getting them into healthcare careers. As far as regulatory changes, there are currently no new changes that we are aware of in differentiating Canadian healthcare workers. There have been already some, there has already been some differentiation, but we have not observed any changes. Another area where we have not observed any changes is evaluating further opportunities from a barriers to licensure for mental health and substance use disorder treatment professionals. And the temporarily waiving licensure fees for first time licensed nursing assistants, one of the barriers to implementing that recommendation is that there would need to be a new funding stream to replace the fees. In the meantime, there do exist funds. For example, VESAC has a fund of the Montrade Scholarship For Giveable Loan Program that offers funding for, amongst other things, initial licensing fees. So I believe that is the final slide. So let me take down. I think we've seen a lot of progress, but there's still more to be done. Great, thank you. Do you guys have any additional materials for the board today? Okay, great. Well, I'm glad that you went today because a lot of this was topical to what we were discussing right before this. So your timing was great. I'll credit that to Susan Barrett who usually makes these things work out like that. Any board member questions or comments? No, I would just love to say thank you. That sounds like a lot of progress is being made and Laura, that was very extremely well-organized and really helpful. So thank you so much. Yeah, thank you all. And I think we have a copy of the slides and we'll post them. I don't have any other questions or comments. Any other board members? Anything from the healthcare advocate? And I see Ms. Murphy has her hand raised. Ms. Murphy, please go ahead. One quick question on the preceptor slide. It has not been clear from the very beginning of this whether the preceptor support and funding is at the RN level, it seems like. And I can take, we can communicate offline too to clarify that. You're looking for who would be eligible for funding on the nurse preceptor program? Yes. Great. Well, we will be issuing the grant application within the next couple of weeks and that will have a definition that includes who might be eligible to receive that funding. So that is forthcoming, but we'll be out there and available to the public very soon so that healthcare employers can apply to receive those funds. I'll open up to public comment more generally for both this presentation and for the primary care provider presentation because I don't think I took it for that. So if there's any public comment for any of the presentations today, please use the raise your hand function. John Aislin, please go ahead. Hi. Thank you, Chair Foster. My name is John Aislin. I'm the CEO of Primary Care Partners with the largest employer of independent primary care physicians, practitioners in Vermont. We've made public comments before about the CPR program and I know there were some comments by Jessa and by Rick Dooley and I just want to reiterate things we've said because it's so important and that is if the issues with low reimbursements and administrative burdens and physician burnouts, this isn't new, this has been going on for decades, right? It's just been going on. I wonder if we had this roundtable discussion 10 years ago, how much different it would have been and my role as a COO of I always felt that somehow I was supposed to solve the issues within our group. And it's hard to find the power to know what you need to do to resolve the issues for the practitioners. And I can't imagine if we had waited until 2023 when we had this roundtable discussion, it's great to hear the ideas. It's hard to feel like I'm walking out of here thinking the future is great because I'm not so sure the future is still great. But fortunately I'm not feeling doomed and the reason why is that back about five years ago, there was a senior leadership at OneCare was Todd Moore there who said, if we don't do something to help primary care, it will die on the vine. That was his exact words and it wasn't just making a statement and it wasn't concepts, they actually put out a program, the CPR program, the comprehensive payment reform. And yes, the program did tremendous success in terms of stabilizing our primary care practices. I can't imagine what we would have looked like today. But unfortunately we go through the pandemic, I think it's got a little bit slowed down but we merged out of that. And we're now in the next stages of this program that's looking at mental health initiatives, which we all know is very important for Vermont. But it's not some national program that somehow we think is going to fit and we use it to see what will work for Vermonters. It's a local focus program where OneCare is saying to the practitioners, what do you need to help Vermonters with mental health? And you know, you can throw money at a problem but you can't always, that doesn't always fix it. But when you're trying to solve a problem, funding is often important to be able to fix it. And to this day now, I'm hearing primary care physicians talk about mental health solutions that we never would have talked about before but because the funding now is being presented for by OneCare to engage us in those conversations. And all of this is coming from the CPR program. So I cannot, yeah, I don't know if it comes enough when I'm publishing these comments and editors or whatever, but we can't just say it enough about how important the CPR program is when we hear these negative comments against OneCare, our greatest fear is going to be destroyed. And if that, if you want to talk about assault against sustainability, blow away CPR because boy, that's going to be a huge negative impact for all of our practices that are in the program. So thank you. Great, thank you very much for your comment. We appreciate that very much. Other public comments? Walter, good afternoon, please go ahead. Hi, Owen, thanks much. I missed the first half of the presentation due to an appointment. So I can only comment on the second half. I like the comments about administrative burden. I keep thinking of physicians that I meet in other countries, England, France, blah, blah, you name them, they swipe the debit card and that's their administrative burden. I go into the prior authorization comments have a sweet spot for me because as a patient, 16 years ago, I nearly died from all these prior authorizations that I and my physician had to fight. In 2015, I was on a panel with the Green Mountain Care Board, specifically four prior authorizations to study that and they presented them to the legislature. And of course, the legislature did absolutely zero with it. But that has a resounding from a resounding spot for me as well. I had to fight two, three, four of them at a time. For physicians turnover and burnout, I've been with the practice for something like 20 years now close to what I've been through four general practitioners. I've worn them all out and they've all gone up. They've all left to the hospitals and everything. So that one was a good one. Tom Walsh made a great comment too. Another thing is we talk about capitation and all this and there was a woman that said fee for service is not the problem. And I agree with her because it's not the bogey. We're trying to make it the bogey. The real problem was said last week is at the presentation last week where where is all the money going? It's all disappearing upstairs into various channels and primary and floor people and everybody are being squeezed out for it. The major problem and when we say the payers as board members know I get really furious when you say payers being insurance companies public or private payers are us. The insurance companies only distribute what we pay them at great cost to us. We could live without them. When we talk about payers it's all of us on this panel with me it's everybody who's paying these things. They're just distributors. I'll leave it at that to let someone else go. Thank you, Walter. Any other public comment? Seeing none we'll turn to any old business to come before the board. Any new business? And is there a motion to adjourn? So moved. Second. All those in favor please say aye. Aye. Aye. Aye. And the motion carries unanimously and the meeting is adjourned. Thank you everyone especially to our panelists. Have a great afternoon and evening and I'll see some of you at the PCAG meeting. So thank you. Have a good night.


That concludes the debate on tackling health inequalities in Scotland. The next item of business is an urgent question. I call Rachel Hamilton. To ask the Scottish Government for its response to Lady Haldane's opinion on the petition of Four Women Scotland Ltd for judicial review. Cabinet Secretary, Shona Robison. We are pleased to note the outcome of this challenge, which is that the Scottish Therefore the gender representation on public board Scotland act 2018 has been held to be lawful and the petition has been dismissed, but as I'm sure Rachel Hamilton will appreciate, these are live proceedings with the possibility of an appeal. Rachel Hamilton, Thank you cabinet secretary for that answer. Throughout this debate, women's organisations have repeatedly warned that the gender recognition reform bill could risk the protections set out in the equality act, including single sex spaces. Yet SNP ministers have said over and over again that these will not be affected. Now we have a court ruling that from the perspective of the 2010 act trans women are included within the legal definition of women. By next week the Scottish Parliament could pass a self-id law, which could significantly speed up the process to obtain a gender recognition certificate. This would make it substantially easier for violent men to abuse the process and target women in abuse shelters and other protected places. Does the Cabinet Secretary now accept that the gender recognition reform bill may impact the rights and protections for women and girls under the Equality Act? Does she agree that we must now pause the gender recognition bill to consider the full implications of the court ruling? First of all, the judicial review was not considering the gender recognition reform bill. The gender recognition reform bill changes the process and requirements for obtaining a gender recognition certificate. It does not amend the legal effects of obtaining a gender recognition certificate, which has set out principally in section 9 of the 2004 act. The effect of a GRC remains what it has been for the last 18 years. It enables people to change their birth certificate to be in line with their acquired gender. The bill makes no change to this effect. It also clearly does not modify the Equality Act 2010, which is now stated on the face of the bill. Lady Haldane's ruling applies to GRCs as they are issued today under the current UK-wide process, and it will apply equally to those issued in Scotland under the process set out in the bill should Parliament agree with the bill. Even if that bill did not exist, the ruling would have been the same. It is entirely in line and consistent with that of the Equality and Human Rights Commission that the effect of the GRC is as I have laid out. I know that Rachel Hamilton takes a lot of store by what the Equality and Human Rights Commission says on those matters. Finally, exceptions in the Equality Act 2010 enable single-sex services to exclude trans people or treat them less favourably, whereas that is a proportionate means of achieving a legitimate aim. Those exceptions still apply, and I can do so whether the person has a GRC or not. We support those exceptions and think that they provide important protections. This bill does not change them. The SNP cannot close its ears to the dangers that the gender recognition bill presents. In just one week's time, the Scottish Parliament could be sleepwalking into passing a bill that will put women and girls at risk. The bill is one of the most controversial pieces of legislation ever bought before this Parliament. It deserves to be fully scrutinised, not rushed through. Can the Cabinet Secretary tell me and the thousands of women across Scotland worried about the implications of this legislation for them and their daughters why it is so essential that the bill is passed before Christmas? Rachel Hamilton, who I know was not in this Parliament over the course of the consideration of those issues, but we have been considering those issues for six years now. I consider that to be quite a long time to consider some of the principles behind the bill. There have been two full consultations on the bill, and there has been a lot of discussion and debate within the Parliament. The Equalities Committee had 12 sessions looking at the matter. At the end of the day, the Parliament has to come to a conclusion on the bill. In terms of those who are worried about it, that is why I have set out in my original answer to Rachel Hamilton what the bill does, but, importantly, what the bill does not do. It does not change any of the purpose and effect of a gender recognition certificate, which has been in place for nearly 20 years now. It does not change those protections and exceptions under the Equality Act 2010. Those remain the same. Those are the reassurances that I would hope that members of this Parliament would be able to communicate to anyone who asks them about the effect of the gender recognition bill. The cabinet secretary will be aware that there are amendments for consideration next week restating the provisions in the Equality Act 2010, including exclusions that can be applied in the delivery of single-sex spaces where it is proportionate to do so, and requiring the Government to publish guidance on the impact of the operation of the GRR for the public bodies and service providers in Scotland. Will the Government consider the position very carefully and ensure that services are not left to interpret the legislation by themselves? Obviously, we will and have and are giving consideration to all the amendments that have been submitted. However, as Jackie Baillie is more than aware, for those reasons, at stage 2, we agreed with the amendment from one of her members, Pam Duncan Glancy, that we would have on the face of the bill for the avoidance of doubt that nothing in the Equality Act changes. I think that that is important. What I would ask Jackie Baillie to reflect on is some of the competence issues of going beyond that. To select some parts of an act and not others is confusing in itself, but there is also the question about competence and challenge. All I would ask Jackie Baillie to reflect on are some of the utterances that are coming from the UK Government about the willingness and keenness to challenge this legislation. I do not want to give the ability for that to be able to happen by including things in the bill that would make that easier. I would just ask her to reflect on other occasions where that has been the case. While I am sympathetic to what Jackie Baillie is trying to achieve by this, I would ask her to reflect on that point and take it forward. The safety of women in our society is of paramount importance to my party. That is why we established a men's violence commission only last month. However, the conflation of the issue of women's safety and the provisions of this bill are sad, worrying and at times unhelpful. We have to uphold concerns that people have, but we can, as a Parliament, express to them the provisions that we have in this bill to make it easier to have the identity and the gender of trans people in our communities recognised on the documents that we as a state require them to hold is of paramount importance because the GRA is unamended harming people every day. Does the cabinet secretary agree with me that in the message around this consideration of stage 3 next week that we need to go into that and point out things like the fact that there are no single sex spaces in our society that require either the presentation of a GRC or a birth certificate? In fact, they are not valid forms of identification. By making it easier for people to have who they are recognised on the documents they are required to hold, it is not going to put more women in harm's way. I would agree with that. I cannot express and highlight enough the fact that those exceptions in the Equality Act 2010 are there for the occasions where it is important for all the reasons that we understand to exclude women or trans men for that matter from services that are discrete services that are very clearly laid out in the guidance around the 2010 act of what those services would be. The gender recognition bill changes none of that at all. If you look at the evidence from other countries, there are something like 250 million people now living in countries that have a process of statutory declaration around gender recognition. There is no evidence emerging from those countries that there is a systematic misuse or abuse of that system and I think that that is important reassurance. However, it is important as we discuss this bill that we try to do it in an atmosphere and tone that addresses concerns but does not lead to a wider culture war that unfortunately we see in some parts of social media in particular because that does not do anyone any good. I think that we all have a leadership role in trying to avoid that. That concludes the urgent question. The next item of business is consideration of business motion 7242, in the name of George Adam, on behalf of the parliamentary bureau setting out a business programme. I call on George Adam to move the motion. Thank you, Presiding Officer. As I indicated last week, the Scottish Conservatives are seeking to amend next week's business programme to bring forward statements and debates that should have been scheduled before Christmas. I also hope that the Minister for Parliamentary Business corrects the record of last week to accurately reflect that the bureau was not unanimous in its support of the timetabling of a GRR bill. I thank the Minister for agreeing to a statement on the climate change committee report next Wednesday. However, a whole week's worth of business is being delayed for no good reason. Our alternative programme includes a statement on the SDPR2 report, which was snuck out late last Thursday, and an update on NPF4, which we were promised. It provides an update on the Scottish Government's biodiversity strategy, which I'm sure all parties agree is important. On top of that, my colleague Stephen Kerr has tried to raise the curriculum for excellent achievement statistics in Parliament, but to no avail. There is no reason why an education statement should not be scheduled next week, so that the cabinet secretary can answer questions from elected representatives. We are also seeking to timetable two debates, one on the Scottish budget, a subject that the Scottish Government had previously only allocated less than one minute of questions per billion pounds of spending. The other is on the next steps of the agricultural bill, something that I know that the Scottish National Party Scotland has been pushing for. Those issues have been kicked into the new year by the Scottish Government in their unrelenting quest to pass the gender bill before Christmas. This is a bill that has been accused of lacking the usual scrutiny process of this Parliament. If you could just give me a moment, can we please extend courtesy to Mr Burnett and make sure that we can hear members when they are speaking? Thank you, Presiding Officer. Indeed, since the SNP and Greens joined forces, racing through legislation without scrutiny has become the norm. Their reason for rushing this bill is completely unacceptable, and we all know what it is. It is even more unreasonable when you consider all the issues that I have already mentioned, which are now being sidelined. It is interesting to note how much importance has been placed on finishing the gender bill before 2023, when you consider that the last week before recess is usually when the Government rolls out a list of its failures and embarrassments in the hope that the festive break will swallow them all up. Last week, the Minister tried to score a cheap point by suggesting that we would close down Parliament early for Christmas. Today, I asked the Minister to put his money where his mouth is and to support my amendment, so that Parliament has a proper programme of work next Thursday, instead of a half-day that he and his parties' MSPs may be hoping for. I move the amendment in my name, and I urge all members to support it. I call on George Adam to respond on behalf of the Parliamentary Bureau. Up to five minutes, Presiding Officer. Well, that was a thing, wasn't it? We covered this last week, Presiding Officer, and again at the Bureau this week. Yesterday, the Bureau agreed this business programme. As I said last week, we have already added a week to the timeline and doubled the length of time of the debate. Both of those changes were requested by the Labour business manager. As always, I am happy to work with colleagues. In fact, Mr Bibby is trying to make an intervention. As we speak, I am quite happy to take it. Neil Bibby. I thank the Minister for taking the intervention. As the Minister will wear the stage 3 gender recognition reform belt, it was delayed and extended over two days following our request for more time and detailed scrutiny. The stage 3 debate was also doubled in length following our request 2, and I welcome those changes. However, the Minister will also wear a request for statements highlighted by Alexander Burnett on key issues—most multiply the statement on climate change committee report and educational attainment, which Scottish Labour refers to request. Can I therefore ask the Minister to reflect on whether time can be set aside next week for additional statements and time that does not take away the need for detailed and proper scrutiny of the gender recognition reform belt? As always, Mr Bibby is reasonable in his requests. I am quite willing to come to the points that he makes. The timeline that we have already set out in the Parliament's standing orders and the convention agreed between the Government and the Parliament. In addition to that, I am pleased—this will help Mr Bibby out—that we are accepting all the requests of statements from business managers. Those include every single one in the Conservatives' amendment here before us, and I will be back to the bureau with dates for them as soon as possible. Finally, on the Conservatives' attempt to add a debate on the budget. I have one thing to say here. The Scottish Government would relish such a debate—I think the Deputy First Minister would relish such a debate—that would allow us to outline just how disastrous the Tory budget is for us here in Scotland. I am likely to come back to that at a later date, so I proposed the business as agreed yesterday by the bureau. The question is that amendment 7242.1, in the name of Alexander Burnett, which seeks to amend motion 7242 in the name of George Adam, setting out a business programme, be agreed. Are we all agreed? The Parliament is not agreed, therefore we will move to a vote. There will be a brief pause to allow members to access the digital voting system.