Good morning. Thank you for joining us. My name is Joe Hewitt. I'm the Vice President for Policy Learning and Strategy at the United States Institute of Peace. Welcome to this morning's event, Ecological Threats to Peace. Over the past two decades, maybe a little more, the peace building field has built a stronger and really more nuanced understanding of the complex relationship between environmental factors on one hand and the kinds of dynamics to lead to violent conflict on the other. This morning, I'm delighted to say we have an opportunity to learn more about the ecological threat register, the latest research product from the Institute for Economics and Peace, which is an excellent example of how our field is applying more sophisticated understandings of this relationship. There was a time when, and I'll say again a couple decades ago, where our understandings of the relationship between changes in the environment and conflict was, I'll say linear, where we attempted to make claims like increased drought will make violent conflict more likely. Increased scarcity of water will make violent conflict more likely. Increased temperatures will make violent conflict more likely. And what we've learned over the years is that the relationship isn't that straightforward. The relationship is conditioned by other factors in these contexts, particularly quality of government, governance, the quality of the relationship between state and society, the extent to which governance is inclusive and responsive and effective. All of these characteristics condition the relationship between environment and conflict. And so if we're going to understand anything about the relationship between environment and conflict, we really need to understand something about the sources of resilience in these places and the kinds of things that might chip away at that resilience. At USIP, we call those factors of fragility. So USIP is establishing a new environment or portfolio on how the environment interacts with conflict dynamics that will be premised on this understanding. We're just getting started and we hope to have more to report on this soon. But we're really delighted to be partnering with IEP today because the ecological threat register is also recognizes that it's the interaction between ecological threats and resilience that matters. Our attention should be drawn to these places where the greatest risks for environmental challenges intersects with fragility. And this tool helps us do that in a more rigorous manner. So USIP is really delighted to partner with IEP to host this event this morning. I want to thank Michael Collins, IEP's executive director for joining us and sharing the details of the ecological threat register. And I want to thank our fantastic panelists as well for joining us. Our moderator, Tyler Beckleman, who is USIP's director for international partnerships, will introduce those panelists when we turn to that facilitated discussion. So again, thank you all very much for joining us this morning. I think this event promises to provide a really excellent discussion. And I'll now turn things over to Tyler Beckleman. Thank you. Thanks very much, Joe. It's indeed a true pleasure to be able to join all of you and moderate this really timely and important discussion. Before we begin, just a quick word of housekeeping. I would just like to remind people that they can follow along at usip.org on our YouTube, Facebook, and Twitter feeds. And you can pose questions for the panelists in the comments sections of those pages. So please do that and remember to stay engaged. As Joe mentioned, we're really delighted to have such an exceptional panel with us today. I'll go ahead and introduce them now. First, we're joined by Michael Collins, the executive director for the Americas at the Institute for Economics and Peace. In this role, Michael develops partnerships with America's based governments, global society organizations, foundations, universities, businesses, and think tanks, and builds opportunities for IEP's presence and impact. Next, we're joined, we're very honored to be joined by Segal Abshir. Segal is an accomplished lawyer, writer, and researcher with 20 years of experience across the private and public sectors in the U.S. and Africa. Currently, she serves as the senior governance and inclusive politics advisor at the U.S. Agency for International Development, and she researches political and governance issues in the Horn of Africa, as well as serves as an associate with TrustWorks Global and a non-resident fellow at NYU and Center for International Cooperation. She is also the author, her recent paper, Climate Change and Security in the Horn of Africa, Can Europe Help Reduce the Risks, was recently published by the Climate Security Experts Network. Finally, we're really delighted to be joined by Dr. Catherine Loon Grayson. Dr. Grayson is a policy advisor for the International Committee of the Red Cross, where she focuses on the experience of populations affected by armed conflict and violence in the context of migration, internal displacement, and climate change. Previously, Dr. Grayson worked in East and Central Africa for several years for the Danish Refugee Council, UNOCHA, and UNHCR. She was the lead author of ICRC's tremendous recent publication When Raines Turned to Dust, Understanding and Responding to the Combined Impact of Armed Conflict and the Climate Environment Crisis on People's Lives. Thank you all so much for joining us. Michael, why don't you get us started and walk us through the key findings of this year's inaugural ecological threat register. Excellent. We'll do. Thank you very much. Tyler, I'm just going to share my screen here. Excellent. And unless I'm mistaken, you should be seeing the first slide there. That's great. So, let's jump straight into it. So, the ecological threat register, essentially what it does is it compares countries' exposure to ecological threats with their underlying level of resilience, much in the way that Joe described. So, the general objective is essentially to identify the countries that are most at risk, so that we can focus resilience-building efforts in those areas. And more broadly, of course, you know, it sort of aims to act as a catalyst, if you will, for resilience-building efforts more broadly. So, this is the inaugural edition of the ecological threat register. It covers 157 countries. That's about 97% of the world's population for all of the countries where we had data available. And it covers eight areas of ecological threats. Now, that's split into two domains, essentially. One is resource scarcity, so that would be food security, water stress, and population growth. And the other would be impacts from natural disasters, so droughts, floods, cyclones, sea level rises and temperature rises. Now, the ecological threat is the project's out to 2050. So, it basically provides a snapshot of the number of ecological threats that countries are going to be subject to over the next 30 years. The sort of the methodology for putting all of this together for making all of these different indicators globally comparable is developed by IEP, much in line with what we do for the Global Peace Index, for example. But it does use publicly available and well-regarded data which is detailed in the report. The measure of resilience that we use is IEP's positive peace framework, which I can explain in a bit more detail later on. Let's jump straight into some of the key findings for this year's report. So, overall, we find that 141 countries are exposed to at least one ecological threat between now and 2050. Half of those, slightly more than half of those which is home to about 6.4 billion people will be living in countries with exposure medium to a high number of ecological threats, two or more. Now, 19 of those countries with the most threats are home essentially to over a quarter of the world's population. Now, the important factor here is that more than half of those countries are in the 40 least peaceful countries on the global peace index. Now, broadly, we've been able to identify through the sort of the combination of the exposure to ecological threats and the underlying levels of Brazilians, three clusters of what we call ecological hotspots that are susceptible to collapse before 2050. This includes the Sahel region from Mauritania to Somalia, the southern African belt from Angola to Madagascar, and Middle East and Central Asian belt from Syria to Pakistan, Iraq, Iran, Afghanistan, Kyrgyzstan. Now, when taking all of these factors into account we estimate that 1.2 billion people are at risk of displacement by 2050. Now, there are three major immigration routes that we see which largely mimic some of the immigration that we have already seen to date. So Latin America Latin and Central and South America to the US and Canada and to Europe Sahel, Sub-Saharan Africa as well as South Asia and the Middle East. Now, the important thing to note here is that even without climate change, a number of these ecological threats that countries will be are or will be subject to will likely lead to failed states given the very low levels of underlying resilience. It's also important to note and there's a dedicated section on this in the report that only three of the countries that we determined to be most at risk are currently among the 10 largest recipients of climate aid. So those are Iraq, Uganda and Ethiopia. So, you know, this is somewhat of a sort of a broad speculation, but it's also you know, a consideration as to whether we are investing in the right places and at the right times. So this is just a breakdown of the 19 countries that I mentioned before. Once again, these are all in the bottom quarter of the global peace index. You can see the names on the left hand side. Iraq, Afghanistan and Syria are among the least five peaceful countries and currently in conflict. This is a mud-bump which is actually available in interactive format on IEP's website allows you to be able to see the different threats that individual countries are subject to. A couple of things to note. Counting as one ecological threat has to be over a certain threshold deemed to be a threat and it's not necessarily, it's not completely representative of the potential impact because of course, the intensity of an individual ecological threat can vary. So for example, both Sierra Leone and Germany are exposed to one ecological threat, but in the case of Sierra Leone, it's that 90% of the population is food insecure and quarter of the population is essentially undernourished. In the case of Germany, it's exposure to floods. They have had severe floods in the last three years, but basically just reported one fatality since 2018. So this is why it becomes really important to bring in a country's underlying level of resilience in the overall analysis. So this is a mud-map of exactly that. This is a mud-map that cross-compairs a country's exposure to ecological threats, the number of it, and their underlying resilience as well. And hey, you can kind of sort of really see the three bands that we were talking about before. You can also see a number of countries that had higher ecological threats but are generally more resilient and ones that had a lower number of threats, but are less resilient and of course, more vulnerable. This is just reinforcing those immigration routes that we talked about before. You know, UNHCR currently estimates that one in five people essentially make what these routes that I'm showing here in arrows, but of course, as the majority of the countries around these areas become more susceptible to the impact of future ecological threats, the more likely it is people are going to make this long-term transition. In fact, we estimate that over the next 30 years, migration is going to regularly surpass immigration into Europe or the refugee crisis of 2015, for example. So in terms of population growth, population is projected to reach 10 billion by 2050. By that same time, those 40 least peaceful countries are going to have 1.3 billion people. That's essentially going to be more than half of the world's population. 17 countries in sub-Saharan Africa, largely the ones that we saw before, are projected to double their population by 2015. Niger, for example, is expected to increase its population by 171%. Now, this is a chart basically sort of breaking out that population growth between countries with very high levels of peace, countries with very low levels of peace, and it kind of sort of broadly speaks to the relationship between peace and sustainability, or also I suppose you could say unsustainability in the sense that what we find is the countries with the highest levels of peace and also the most well-developed actually are expecting a decrease in population of 20% as it has exposed to very large growth in countries with low levels of peace. With regards to water stress, 2.6 billion people live in countries experiencing higher extreme water stress. That will more than double by 2040. There's now 60% less fresh water available per person than there was in the 1960s. That rate, that 1% rate of usage is expected to continue throughout the foreseeable future. Developed countries currently use 10 times more water than developing countries do. So the number of water related conflicts and violent incidents has increased significantly over the last decade but it should be noted that overwhelmingly the water related conflict is resolved peacefully but nonetheless this increase is significant and in fact just the other day there was news of Molotov cocktails being thrown and dam doors being opened on the US Mexico border due to drought and water limitations in that area. So this is a sort of a combined map of global undernourishment and water scarcity. There's no exact measure of food security per say so we use global undernourishment or undernourishment in the countries that we look at. An estimated 2 billion people currently face food insecurity by 2050 that's expected to increase to 3.5 billion. Now nearly 60% of the people in Sub-Saharan Africa face food insecurity, that's the highest of any region and 65% of the population in each of the world's least peaceful and low income countries, that's 13 countries experience food affordability problems. Now more specifically and you can find a lot more about this in the report, the prevalence of food insecurity increases as countries experience deteriorations in global peace indicators and domains such as safety and security internal peace and increases in violent crime as well. Going to touch on natural disasters very briefly, it's more difficult to provide projections for natural disaster so we generally avoid doing so but based on historical data, flood and storms count 72% of natural disasters. Floods alone account for about 40% largely in South Asia. Natural disasters displace 25 million people in 2019 very much along the average and this is three times higher than the people displaced by armed conflict. If we think back to those immigration routes that we talked about before, we can understand how the impact can be significant. An overall 1 billion people live in areas that combine high natural disasters with low and stagnant levels of positive peace. So Joe brought it up and please allow me a couple of extra minutes to delve into this in a tiny bit more detail because I think it would be useful. Negative and positive peace are two terms that you're already familiar with, especially if you've done peace building studies. Negative peace is essentially the absence of violence that's something that we track in the global peace index. It includes indicators such as homicide rates, battle deaths, military expenditure, the impact of terrorism, etc. Positive peace encompasses a much sort of broader definition of peace. It's essentially the answer to the question, well what is it that peaceful societies have in common? Now IEP has arrived at this quantitatively. So what we do is we cross reference countries GPI scores with thousands of measures of socioeconomic development to see which correlate most strongly with subsequent ups and downs in levels of peace from this. So this work became the positive peace framework which is what we use to track countries level of positive peace over time. But the reason that this is very relevant in this case is that we see that countries with high levels of positive peace are significantly more resilient to all forms of crisis and this includes pandemics, it includes political shocks and environmental stress as well. And we have positive peace report which obviously goes into this in a lot more detail. So if we kind of sort of then factor in these two elements here and once again there's more information in the report, you can actually see here the countries that are not only susceptible to high number of ecological threats with regards to resource scarcity, but also have very low levels of positive peace as well. So in this case, 6 face water stress, 13 face population growth, all of this, all of these more than 100% in the next 30 years and 3 face food security. And in terms of natural disaster hotspots, this is one also highlights countries with low levels of positive peace, particularly vulnerable to natural disasters. Now 11 countries are in both tables with at least 6 of those are going to be doubling their population in the next 30 years. So hopefully that provides a bit of food for thought and I definitely look forward to breaking out more during the discussion. Thank you. Thanks very much Michael for that rich exceptional and indeed alarming concerning presentation. I'd like to turn now to Catherine Loon and Segal to comment on all of that. Each of you has conducted important research and studied the intersection of conflict, climate change and humanitarian risk. What elements of these projections and the issues identified by Michael bring most true with your own research? Segal, perhaps we can start with you. Thank you so much Tyler and first let me say greetings from Nairobi and I'm really happy to be here on this panel with all of you. I do want to say that the views and opinions I'll be expressing today are my own and do not represent my employer or any institution. So I undertook research on the linkages between climate change and environmental degradation and conflict in the Horn of Africa so a lot of what Michael has just been saying resonates a great deal. I think the threats that you highlighted Michael, population growth, water stress, food insecurity, droughts, floods I mean all of these are present in the Horn of Africa and obviously the Horn of Africa is an area that's no stranger to conflict either whether that's on the sort of local communal level or the Civil War level or it's even sort of bigger than that where we've got this particular region of course has the two newest countries in the continent Eritrea and Sudan that were created out of Civil War. So I think what I was looking at you know the idea that all of these pressures already there and climate change is basically exacerbating all of this and the climate change that's being experienced in this region sort of practically is the scientists agree that everything's getting much hotter but they can't really agree whether the region is getting wet or a dry overall but it's certainly getting the rainfalls getting a lot more unpredictable as you can see some of the floods happening. I most resonate with your focus on the concept of resilience because I think a lot of the studies sort of are looking as Joe said are quite linear going from ecological threat to the actual conflict but I think this focus on resilience and positive peace is a really important one. I think when it comes to the corner of Africa a lot of the examples of this kind of linkage from ecological linkage to climate focus is around the local levels and so you'll hear about people who have been driven into the arms of extremist groups for example because of their livelihoods being affected or displacement whether that happens within a country of people moving from different parts whether it's pastoralists or whether they're moving sort of across borders but I just wanted to bring your attention and I think that the linkages are always complex and I think we're going to talk a bit later about how human intervention can make them worse or better but I just wanted to bring your attention to two examples which I'd say are transnational and I think it's interesting because I think your register talks a lot about within nations of how these linkages can be quite sort of unexpected rather. The first one is around the current locust invasion or the locust situation in the Horn of Africa and this was sort of unusually wet weather in the Arabian peninsula in Somalia and the cyclones in 2018-19 encouraged above average locust breeding. This wasn't unusual but it was above average but I think that the Yemen Civil War which has had tremendous destruction also damaged the usually robust locust response system which meant that these locusts which would normally have been sort of culled to some extent in Yemen have found their way to the Horn of Africa in these sort of massive numbers and like able to breed in ways that they weren't able to. This of course is leading to a massive food security crisis in the region and they've decimated the farmlands. The UN estimates that about 25 million people will be affected so I bring up that example to sort of show an unusual linkage between conflict and climate because I think sometimes we think about you know again we think about specifically like a drought and people and the second one I think which is very is on everyone's minds is the ongoing negotiations between Ethiopia, Sudan and Egypt about the Nile, the sharing of Nile water which as we all know it would always have been a pretty fraught and difficult negotiation as all trans-boundary water negotiations are. I think that the what we're saying is climate change is making it that much more difficult because the water levels are that much more harder to predict the rain you know is affecting it dramatically of course now we've got high levels of rains but I think everyone's concerned about drought and of course the risk of this not being gotten right would be to lead to another ecological disaster in Egypt where if the Nile goes below a certain level you'll get salination of the farmlands and the potential of sort of some sort of military response of course is on everyone's minds and then the third example I just wanted to give about how some of these linkages the risks show up in the horn I think is the risk of sort of second or third order effects where the political and economic responses to climate change in other parts of the world might affect the horn so for example you've got Gulf states that might be investing in massive bread baskets in Ethiopia and Sudan that could have obviously a knock on effect or acquisitions of large forests as part of these international climate offsetting mechanisms that can also lead to conflicts where local communities are forced out of forest habitats and things like that so these are just I just wanted to give sort of some initial examples of how I was sort of thinking about these connections but I really do appreciate an index of this kind and the breadth of it for us to sort of go deeper into analyzing some of these issues stop there Thanks Segal, that's wonderful and we have I think a lot to chew on from those remarks and you know like now to turn to Catherine Lune and sort of offer the same question and hear your perspective on the report and how it aligns with your own research on this topic Thank you so much and thank you so much for the invitation that is a fascinating starter in discussion so I'm really pleased to be there I think in listening to Michael a few points to me the starting point of ecological threats is super interesting because there's quite a great focus on climate change where is what we see is an exacerbation of existing environmental degradation, ecological degradation by climate change and so looking into those what you've called ecological threats is super interesting in that regard because I mean in most cases what we are seeing is existing threats that are being exacerbated by climate change but not necessarily created by climate change and in that regard I find that super interesting as an approach and looking at your mapping when you were showing ecological threats and resilience what was really quite fascinating to me and I would love to do that exercise is when we looked at the humanitarian consequences of climate change we overlapped a map of climate vulnerability so where are the countries that are considered the most climate vulnerable and the least ready to adapt to a changing climate with a map of countries that we qualify as countries in a situation of conflict and there we have I mean a clear disproportionate representation of countries in situations of conflict in those that are amongst the most vulnerable so we ended up with 12 countries out of 20 that would be among the most vulnerable to a changing climate in a situation of conflict now I could not, I don't have the details of your map but in looking at it my sense is we probably end up with an overlap of many of these countries there and so to me that's interesting in the sense that we know that I mean to me there the defining factor is what you looked into under resilience where we would probably speak of how conflicts are impacting institutions weakening them weakening societies and that affects profoundly people's resilience and community resilience making them much more vulnerable to shocks and so to me these elements are interacting and this is why you end up with such a representation because there I would fully agree with the idea that we don't have a linear relationship between climate change and conflict and therefore when we see this overlap this overlap is not telling us there is a correlation between climate change and conflict it's not that climate change is causing conflict it is that climate change is leading to that conflict is leading to very particular or inducing very particular vulnerability so limits the resilience of communities now to that I think I would like to comment on the fact that to some extent to us that overlap is not so much a conclusion but the starting point of a reflection on how do we then help these communities become much more resilient to various shocks and that includes shocks related to climate but also to environmental degradation so to us it's really the starting point of a reflection that recognition that these communities are particularly impacted by environmental degradation and by climate risks the other element I wanted to comment on is on the fact that well on one thing you said Saagal and that connected to what you were considering Michael in terms of more regional implications to us one thing that is extremely interesting and requires further work at least from our side in terms of better understanding is what you've called knock on effect Saagal but I mean when we carried out the we did a fairly in depth research looking at the humanitarian consequences of climate change in a number of countries and we carried out a part of the work in the Central African Republic and there what we were seeing is changes in transhumance patterns that are induced among other things so it's not the sole factor by climate change environmental degradation and armed conflict in the Sahel and the Lake Chad region so there we were really looking into how changes in one part of the continent might lead to changes hundreds of kilometers away and to us I mean this we need to better understand because it does require that in some cases we adapt the way we work on these threats because we might need to be providing support in the Central African Republic but we might also need to be working in the Sahel to address some of the tensions that we are seeing in the Central African Republic so there to me there's a great deal of complexity and how these elements influence one another and I mean we have similar examples with water sharing if we look at Iraq there you really have questions related to how do we manage water and how do we share water within regions and what are the consequences of an over exploitation of resources or environmental degradation in neighboring countries when we are looking into the southern tip of Iraq that relies on water coming from neighboring countries so to us there there was really an intersection that's interesting to unpack if we want to be able to respond adequately the two very short points I other short points I wanted to flag is unimmigration I mean I think it's important to bear in mind that in most cases what we're looking into is internal movement so cross border movements will remain less important than internal movements and that means that significant work needs to be done at an internal level to assist states in looking into how do we help populations relocating in a manner that makes sense and so on and so forth so this I think really needs to be kept in mind because we know that this placement tends to be internal before cross border and on that when you were mentioning the levels of displacement induced by disasters and by conflict one element we've been trying to convey is the fact that we need to bring these two types of displacement together because quite I mean they don't are they don't happen in isolation I mean if we look at Somalia is displacement induced by drought or is displacement induced by the fact that institutions are have been weakened by decades of instability and conflict that therefore means that they're not able to support populations in the face of a drought because I mean where I come from a drought will not lead to displacement so there there I think we need to be able to build in greater complexity into the equation because a disaster may displace communities but usually not massively unless you have other factors that are also coming into play the very last element I wanted to comment on is on the fact that so you flag that the countries that are the most vulnerable and less resilient to ecological threats often are not those that are receiving the greatest support in terms of climate aid and this to us connects very much with so we're seeing the same when it comes to climate on risks and conflict affected communities and one of the points that we're constantly making is we need to find ways to ensure that climate finance does reach those communities in during conflict but we know that there are a number of clear obstacles there I mean you need institutions that are able to channel money to design comprehensive programs and so on so to us there there's really something that needs to be unlocked if we want to ensure that adequate responses are going to be provided for these communities but again thank you very much that was a super interesting presentation and those were super interesting remarks thank you Catherine Luna I want to take that your last point maybe a little bit further as we think about the intersection between climate and conflict and different sort of adaptation strategies you know a lot of this comes down to issues of governance and maybe to turn back to Segal to speak a little bit more you identified a number of areas where governments are on the hook to put in place different adaptation strategies to deal with these long term trends what have you seen that works and where are many of the sort of institutions that are most affected by these trends falling down yeah thank you thank you very much I think definitely when we're talking about a situation of we talk about in the horn of scarcity and limited resources it's really the institution of governance that is going to sort of help bring the societies together and figure out how this is going to be shared in a way that is peaceful the governance in this region of course is different levels but like we've got quite a few governments that are quite fragile coming out of wars or like in Somalia dealing with violent extremism or like in Sudan very transitions let's say going through transitions so I think one of the first points I want to make is that it's very they tend to be responding to crises or responding to the outcome rather than having the focus and the attention and sometimes the resources to deal with prevention whether that sort of prevention of sort of the shorter term like disaster management preparations or even the more longer term adaptation that's required related to that is sometimes that in the in the efforts to do some of the long term adaptation isn't always done in the most conflict sensitive manner so there is a bit of sort of knee jerk type of things where like I've mentioned communities being moved out of forests because it's like oh this is a water table we need to protect it but like it can be very hard to get it right let's say so I'm talking about sort of governance that's well meaning but that isn't getting it right I do think there are situations when there's actual poor governance and so one of the sort of importantly pathways let's say from environmental damage to sort of conflict is cases where the conflict or the low level communal or resource conflict can actually get politicized or manipulated and get caught up in larger political issues let's say and in that case you've got sort of human action human intervention or politics that's exacerbating the situation I think the example the best example I saw this in the literature was essentially a water conflict between a pastoral community in Sudan and a farming community where you know there would be this kind of the herders would move into the farming community when there were low rains but a combination of sort of very poor or failed rains made the farming village less willing to share the water and then this essentially got laid over this was the conflict between north and south Sudan essentially and these two communities where a conflict that had started out as a water conflict ended up as essentially a civil war so that's the case where sort of poor governance is making things worse and I think one of the important things that needs to be done is for all of us to get a better understanding of how some of these low intensity conflicts because there will be more of them as you know ecological threats and climate change worsens how to make sure they don't escalate in terms of sort of actual interventions I think you know we've talked quite a bit about the importance of protecting the resilience or strengthening the resilience of vulnerable communities I think improved natural resource management and so helping people do better around resolving these issues I think strengthening dispute resolution in a lot of cases in places like the Horn it isn't the state that is playing that role it's either local or communal or traditional systems that are helping people resolve these issues especially in a context where you've got pastoral a large pastoral existence so to the extent that these dispute resolution mechanisms are under pressure or or over strained I think supporting those can be a way of strengthening resilience again where there's resilience to the actual ecological threat but then there's like trying to make sure that that strain doesn't break out into conflict I think bigger interventions I mean that I've seen on the peace and security side I think there's our efforts to integrate it into like the regional and the continental security architecture whether that's EGAD or the African Union I'll draw attention specifically to EGAD's early warning mechanism which is very good it's very good at identifying and escalating cross-border conflicts which again are related to some of these pastoral movements they've started inputting climate data into this so that they'll have a better insight into whether there might be some sort of ecological related problem yeah I think I'd say two takeaways on that I think the one thing to keep in mind when it comes to this work is trying to work sort of the peace building work around this is inherently political so I think it's important that peace builders and analysts get a better understanding and comprehension of the climate risks and ecological threats and I think this is something that this register will be really helpful I think we tend to sort of peace building you tend to go in with like these frameworks of oh these are the people that live here but I think understanding the climate and ecological aspects is going to be very important and then I think especially in this region as this climate conflict nexus gets more attention it's going to be important that the first responders are people who work in peace building and mediation and adaptation rather than security actors I'll stop there Thanks very much, that's excellent Katherine Loom maybe pose a similar question to you to unpack perhaps a little bit more about what resilience to the climate and conflict nexus looks like in practice so because I work for the AACRC and we work in conflict situations in situations of violence I'll focus on these situations because I mean to some extent I'd like to say strong institutions but we tend to be working in a place where strong inclusive governance may not be what qualifies the what describes the situation so what we're looking into when it comes to helping people be more resilient in the face of what we consider to be combined risks or threats we are both looking at how do you help people anticipate and reduce the risks that they're exposed to and there I would say that this is an area where we clearly need to be able to strengthen the way we work because at least in the humanitarian world we tend to be in a very reactive mode which means that we will respond to something that has happened we're less good at putting in place systems that would reduce the risk and ensure that people's homes are not going to be destroyed by the next storm or that their livelihoods are not going to be destroyed by the next storm so there to me there's really an element of becoming better at everything that relates to early warning systems to longer term resilience building but I'd add to that that as much as we recognize that it's important we recognize that it's a major challenge in resilience building and the absence of institutions that are strong and the absence of access to basic services think of energy for instance that is quite key when we're looking into how do we help people diversify their sources of income so they're less vulnerable to the next storm these elements are often missing in the areas where we are we're working so I mean I'd like to be providing a straightforward answer and say this is how we address this in reality what we're looking into and I mean we're looking at what are the gradual steps that can be taken to help build that resilience and if I I'll give you an example from what we saw in the Central African Republic when we carried out the field work in the Central African Republic there was 100,000 people that had been displaced by the recent floods with thousands of homes destroyed and so on what happened is people literally had to flee their homes in the middle of the night after heavy rains had been flooding fields and swelling rivers for days so to us there were two things there if you're looking at building resilience in the long run well you should be working to ensure that people do not settle in flood zones in the first place now if you're looking at how do we reduce people's exposure to immediate risks there should be an early warning systems you could know that if you have days of rains and if you're seeing that rivers are becoming or swelling it's very likely that there will be a so all that action to reduce the risks that people are exposed to should be taking place in a much more consistent manner so there I'm not dealing with all the measures that can be taken to help people adapt to a changing climate we are certainly dealing with some of the measures to at least reduce risks because I mean climate adaptation which is what we would be speaking about can happen with small actions so changing the type of seeds that people are using but in most cases we're actually speaking of long-term ambitious measures that we'll be looking into how do you transform a whole agricultural system how do you handle new diseases in certain areas and these actions in situations of conflict tend to be limited and I mean Sagar was mentioning the fact that she was referring to governance in situations of conflict speaking of the fact that there might be other priorities than resilience building and climate adaptation and this is very clear I mean security priorities will come first so what we're really looking into is what are the measures that can be taken in the meantime to help people be stronger in the face of risks knowing that it's not, we cannot wait for fragility or conflicts to be addressed because we know that these may last for an extended period of time so that's a long answer that should be more straightforward than that but I guess the response would be what are the gradual steps that we can take to help people build their resilience and we really need to shift the balance between a focus on reactive responses these remain absolutely essential but we need to do more when it comes to anticipatory responses and we as humanitarian actors but that goes way beyond humanitarian actors, it's development actors it's the private sector it's the academic community that's looking into how do we do better so I mean there's really a question there of joining forces because it's clear that we are not going to respond to these risks alone as humanitarian actors sorry for the convoluted response no that's wonderful I appreciate it and I think it's spot on being cognizant of time I think we could continue to unpack these issues for another couple of hours but being mindful of people's time I wanted to turn to a question from one of the audience members which gets at an issue which I wanted to touch anyway which was to dig a little bit deeper on the issue of migration and refugees Catherine Lune you noted the importance of seeing internal displacement and refugees as inherently linked and part and parcel of the same trends and challenges but certainly Michael in your presentation you highlighted the risk of quite substantial and significant refugee flows that will dwarf in many ways what we're seeing from this most intractable conflicts taking place around the world now and the question actually comes from a former member of parliament I'm not sure where but they asked how can we get developed countries to accept the phenomena of climate refugees they have tried to introduce this concept but met huge resistance and I think this gets to the demographic changes that we're going to be seeing and how the broader set of international actors in the international community should be thinking about these issues and addressing different responses I don't know Michael do you want to start or would you prefer that we sort of throw that to Segal or Catherine Lune No I mean that's fine I think a large amount of it is obviously trying to get those headlines out there which is in many ways what the ecological threat register is trying to do but more often than not and especially being based here in the US we always see this as something external obviously Europe has been impacted much more than that and we can definitely use that as an example with what is the potential societal impact of mass migration so in the case of Europe increasing hostility to foreigners increasing civil unrest new political parties and elements related to that as well and part of what we're trying to do is precisely to kind of sort of underlie some of the challenges that countries face as receivers of this and we're focusing on these international flows but like Segal and Catherine both said a large amount of this displacement is also going to be internal or interboard mostly internal so a lot of it will come down to the government. I think additional emphasis can definitely be played on how this will affect a country's national interests abroad both in terms of security risk but also in terms of foreign investment for example. Thanks very much so maybe turn to you Segal to speak to this a little bit. You made a number of recommendations of steps that Europe can take in light of these crisis I mean facing you know pushing those out a little bit to the sort of broader set of international actors what do you see as some of the priorities for the international community at large can take to address some of these emerging trends? I think that certainly I think that the issue of climate in general is gaining a lot more focus internationally and I think that most sort of developed nations are becoming very aware and I think the world I think I've written about the EU and how they're thinking about intervening in this climate conflict nexus and I think we've touched on many of them including helping to strengthen the resilience of vulnerable populations helping to strengthen dispute resolution and natural resource management I think supporting sort of peace and security architectures that can sort of take a more early sort of preventative action I think that this question and I'm not an expert but I'm going to bring up something that's very sensitive I think the whole issue around the sort of global climate negotiations and the sort of equity around climate change and the fact that many of the countries I've probably on the list that are at risk today are not carbon emitters nor do they have manufacturing sort of large industry I think this conversation is a very vibrant and ongoing one around how do we do this as a world I mean I think to be on I think within countries within the EU there's probably a lot of tension around which countries should pay for what and I think when you take this and you sort of writ large on the global level and you put climate change into it I think it's very very challenging too so I wonder if this climate refugee question is sort of related to this broader conversation around sort of equity and responsibility so I'll just say that but I do want to say one thing about sort of the IDP and sort of migration issue really interesting World Bank study that was done in 2018 that was looking at internal climate change migration and they were looking at sort of relating it to this other massive trend of urbanization in Africa and one of the things that I took away from it which I found fascinating was they did a case study specifically for example on Ethiopia which is a country that's very very rapidly urbanizing and one of the interesting things they found is that Addis Ababa where we would expect as a capital city that that's going to be a sort of climate in migration hotspot they found that by 2050 I forget the actual finger but it's actually because of the environment and the water availability and everything it's actually going to be climate migration out it's an out migration spot which basically for urban planners and as Catherine was saying this is going to take everyone's effort but if you think of that from an urban planning perspective that means we need to start thinking about not just sort of developing the urban environment of Addis Ababa but secondary and maybe tertiary cities in that country and so if we're trying to absorb the IDPs within the countries we have to start thinking a bit more creatively because that might help manage the sort of bigger out migration issue because that makes sense I'll stop there That makes absolute sense and I wanted to give Catherine Lune the option to come into this as well specifically around questions of urban resilience but also anything you want to say about the broader international dynamics inequity issues that I think very rightly were raised by Segal So I'd actually like to come back to the migration question for a second because I think I mean when it comes to migration I mean I stress the fact that most this placement or migration is internal this is where we see the greatest levels of movement then most of it is happening within a region so I do think we need to be careful with projections that are saying that the US or Europe are going to be receiving large numbers of migrants because the reality is that when the situation is difficult in Somalia it's Kenya, it's Ethiopia, it's Djibouti that are receiving large numbers of people and this will continue to be the case in part because moving requires means most people don't have that much means so I really think we need to be careful with projections that may suggest that there are large flows of people going into Europe or the US because what is clear is that at an internal level states have to be able to deal with movements in their population and Segal's example of urban growth that will need to be managed is extremely important because this is what we're speaking about in most cases the management of movements inside countries that require that we adjust availability of public services in certain places and so on and then movements across borders but I mean most often to neighboring countries that may not have a great capacity to receive migrants so to me this is really where the challenge lies and this is not to diminish the importance of further migratory routes but I think we really need to bear in mind that this is the level at which it is happening it's often at a national and sub-regional level hardly ever at an intercontinental level and so this I think is important because we run into a risk I think with the migration question that is the the securitization of the of the issue and I mean there I would really beg for an approach that looks at this through a human security lens so goes beyond the hard security risks and is also looking at what are the human implications in terms of human security that captures food access to food, access to water and so on and so forth because I really think that if we want to be looking into responses that will truly help communities face growing risks the response of course hard security risks need to be addressed but the response has to be holistic I mean we have to be looking at water security food security access to essential services and so on and so forth because otherwise we may be able to contain issues but this is not going to help communities adapt to a changing climate so I these are the few points I wanted to add to the discussion on people's movements related to climate change and fragility I appreciate that one final question from the audience if you wouldn't mind indulging us and it's an interesting one I'm curious maybe we can start with Michael on this but how is in what ways are trans national corporate investment and speculation especially the extent to which the sort of different models of economic recovery if I'm understanding the question I encourage that taken into account when considering the climate conflict nexus so I mean I think that historically we can definitely only make a case even if we kind of sort of don't think about formal businesses but we think about the exploitation of natural resources in other countries we can of course make a very strong case for how that is kind of sort of negatively affected the security security situation in many countries for decades if not hundreds of years you know having spent a lot of time in Haiti specifically you know you kind of sort of still see the impact of colonialism and kind of sort of sugar plantations essentially there the impact that has had on the ecology which it continues to have and then of course the implications for human security but thinking about it sort of more formally in terms of businesses I mean you know generally sort of a sound business environment is something that we consider one of these pillars of positive peace so that is the critical part of any sovereign nation with regards to its ability to withstand the crisis if you look at sort of COVID-19 and the ability of the businesses to be able to sort of step up and change what they're doing to be able to provide essential services of all kind that's definitely something that can expand across borders and should and it can focus very much around opportunities as well so you know with all of the critical needs arising and the importance of you know technology innovative forms of food production being able to find ways of alleviating water stress these are all going to remain focus priorities internationally so we think that there could be a lot of potential there for business what we would generally say and just feeding off some of Katharine's comments about large scale interventions versus small ones we tend to see when we look at the positive peace framework that the countries that improve most sustainably in terms of peacefulness but also resilience do so by making small progressive improvements in a variety of different domains it's not by over investment in a particular area such as making the country a lot more open to foreign investment without due consideration for the impact that we could have Segal also shared a number of examples related to that as well so there's a lot of opportunity there but once again be wary of doing actually too much in that area and the potential implications it could have Thanks very much Michael appreciated we're running up against time but I wanted to give all three of you maybe the opportunity to sort of leave us with your final parting thoughts this has been an immensely rich discussion we've touched a number of key areas perhaps Segal we can start with you and what do you want to leave us with after this conversation I would want to leave you with maybe the idea that the climate change or ecological threats do not have to lead to violent conflict and I think that a lot can be done and I think that human action of course we can always exacerbate things but we can certainly try to make things better and then I think the second point is I think we need to think regionally I'm talking about the Horn of Africa but I think like Katherine said I don't know if borders necessarily hold some of these risks I don't think something happening here means the result will be felt in that country so to think regionally and then the final thing is again I want to emphasize that the response I think to all of this shouldn't be again a bit something like Katherine said less of a hard security or security focus response and more mediation peace building other types of interventions to try to allay these risks thank you thank you Katherine Lune over to you so I'd first like second Segal's recommendations I would very much agree with those avenues I think I'd add to that that the analytical efforts and I mean such as what as those that Michael has been presenting need to continue these are absolutely essential and we need to find ways to test approaches and help communities while these are happening it's imperfect we would wish to have a full understanding before we start developing responses but this is not going to happen so we really need to be able to lead those efforts side by side and I mean to us it's extremely clear that we need to find ways to help communities that are living in fragile states or in conflict affected states because otherwise they're really left alone on the front lines of climate change environmental degradation and this is of extreme concern so I would really beg for finding ways that where we can work in such environments that are extremely challenging but we need to be able to build on what is there and start testing approaches to see what is working so we help building that resilience in the longer run Thank you very much Michael any parting thoughts from your end Yeah just a couple going back very quickly to governance and just kind of sort of reinforcing that yes we're well functioning government which is another one of these sort of pillars of positive peace is absolutely critical and that we sort of reverberate very strongly throughout the positive peace framework sort of with a governance or conscious sort of caught in the violence trap it's very easy to be able to see this weakening of institutions that creates conflict but then weakens institutions further and basically what it means is that any individual government then is forced to spend working on the emergency essentially on one critical issue which is essentially what the international has led the international community to focus on security but that does not mean that any of the other issues are no less important of course and they should be focused on so in terms of how this can be solved I believe it was Catherine noted diversification there's a tendency to focus on the theme of the day but understanding other ways of generating resilience is absolutely critical simple things like improving the free flow of information within a country can improve resilience in boundless ways as well and then just to return slightly previous comments about making small progressive interventions in a variety of different ways micro and macro and and then in terms of kind of sort of pure speculation as to how this could be done something along the lines of establishing an investment ratio of a government and the activities that it plans to undertake and limiting the amount of intervention that it plans in any particular domain to the benefit of another one that may not have an immediate security implication but no nonetheless has a long-term impact I think with regards to country analysis we perhaps can get sort of to caught up looking for a magic bullet so embracing complexity embracing correlation can be helpful and basically recommendation for any individual countries what do you need to do to be ready for the widest array of threats possible and how can you essentially home grow what you need not only in terms of food and water of course but people products and services not to the detriment of multilateral cooperation of course that sort of remains a mean to an end learning a lot from current crisis such as Covid-19 I will not even dare to summarize the richness of this conversation I would simply encourage people to continue to follow this work in the work of all of our panelists as we continue to think about these issues and build the case I will say to end just a note of tremendous thanks to all of our panelists and to Michael and to IEP at large for this incredible product I will say that we are already walking down a very dangerous path but I think I leave everybody with all sentiments that climate change doesn't have to equal violent conflict and I think we've heard a number of suggestions today of the ways to that intervention now taking a preventive approach and building the strong principles of peace building can hopefully help forestall a more disastrous humanitarian situation in issues there and so thank you all for joining us today continue to follow us on usip.org along with IEP and ICRC and Segal's ongoing work and thank you all for joining us


is like kind of cliche to be like, no, your job is valuable, but it's like, really it is, but it's just trying to understand like the value in that. The value that you provide is a lot different than the value that services provides, you know? It's like, you guys have totally different concepts of a job. I can't do my job without them. And a lot of people want to think like, they want to do it all, right? They want to be the one that saves America. And it's like, you can't do that by yourself. Like you're just a piece of that puzzle to protect America. And so it does sound cliche, but even after getting out, as I've like done job interviews with people, the more I learned about different jobs. And I'm like, I didn't know you guys did this and did that. And you're like, you start to appreciate stuff more. Cause when you get in, and you're new, a lot of times people just, they don't see the full scope of things. And so that's been a really unique experience and cool thing. That's why I like talking to people about their experience and their jobs.


Welcome back. Elections beyond presidential race. The presidential elections in Nigeria often receive the most attention due to the high-provide nature of the role and its significant impact that the president has on the country's politics and policies. However, it is important to also pay attention to the state and national assembly elections as they also play a crucial role in shaping the country's political landscape and determining the direction of policymaking. These elections have the potential to bring new leaders and ideas to the forefront and it is important to ensure that all levels of government are held accountable to the people they serve. They need to pay attention to other categories of elections such as states and national assembly elections can lead to a lack of accountability for elected leaders. If the focus is solely on the presidential election, there will be less scrutiny of other elected officials which can lead to a lack of oversight and a lack of checks and balances in government. This can create an environment where leaders may be less motivated to act in the best interest of their constituents and may be more inclined to engage in corrupt or incompetent behavior. It is important for citizens to be informed and engaged with the electoral process at all levels of government to ensure that the elected leaders are held accountable for their actions. So, I beseech you, as we approached these 2023 elections, let us pay attention beyond the presidential election to other races such as those for the Senate, House of Representatives and the state governments as they also have a significant impact on the direction of politics of the country. Well, advocates, it is good that we are having this rave, this attention that the youth are giving to this election, their awareness. But if you take a look around, you will see that discussions only center around the presidential race. And it is important that we pay as much attention to what happens in our state and local governments. So, you see that the presidential election takes the greater attention, but when it gets to states, it lowers, but by then it gets to the local government level, the attention between those to the various minimum. And I think that is the reason why we are here. What do you think, guys? Well, you said it all, you know, even if you have a good president, it's true that the president, the box stops in the stable. He has to do more of the job, he has to influence, he has to give a direction. But, you know, there are certain laws or certain policies that he cannot or certain procedures, governance procedures that he cannot just execute without passing through other tiers of government. Every tier of government is important. We have to try as much as possible as we are trying to vote in a credible candidate for the president. You also look at credible candidates, look at their proof-wise and their manifestos, what are they offering, what are their personality, their achievement in pass and who they are, basically their intent or purpose and all those things. From the presidency to the House of Representatives, to the Senate, to the governor, state of the House of Assembly, down to the local government even consulates. So we have to do that. We have to pay detailed attention to these things because they are important. But the thing is, for what I just know, 2022 election, I'm very glad and happy that their awareness is more now. We are tired of poor leadership. We want to take back our nation. But it's not just beyond the, we should go beyond the mayor, should I say euphoria of the moments of all this, we are working.  I've been paying attention to many political candidates and what they see. So let's just keep paying attention to them and see what we can get from them and then make our decision. Victor, one of the factors that people have said that a particular candidate in this coming election might not win is that they are looking at how many other positions at the National Assembly, the state and then does he have or does the party has as a whole that would make him be able to achieve on the manifesto that he has brought forward. So do you think by just paying attention to just the presidential candidate of such party will be enough for us to see the manifesto come to bear when he wins the election? Yeah, I think it's very, very important and it's important to underscore it. I mean here we call it speed is speed, right? So I mean you're talking about Pitobi and when you look at it right, the Labour Party, APC is currently the government in administration, right? And it's not like there are APC elected officials all over the, you know, the federation, you know, at the national level. So the idea is that there has to be a lot of cohabitation and which is why it's important to underscore unity, harmony and peace.  Or if Tinimbo or Kuangkuas or anybody, right, they are not essentially going to, if I'm going to invent a word, partify the entire, you know, positions with their own party. It doesn't work like that, right? So in Vegas, for instance, you know the party that is quite the strongest and it's funny that, you know, some parties are at the Senate level, some parties are doing poorly. When you come to some local government, let's say in some remote village, they are doing so when you're wondering, is this the same party that is evil and so parties are not evil. There's nothing like party being evil. It is people, right? It is people and that's why you see somebody living APC. I mean we saw it in this country, jump shipping from APC to PDP and we've seen a lot of recycling. So if we go by party, we are going to judge wrongly. I think it's about people and I agree with you. When we begin to look away from the fact that, you know, of course the office of the president is like the office of the CEO in a company. You know, everybody looks at the CEO to provide direction, to tell us where the business is going and all of those things. Nobody thinks about the security. Nobody thinks about the janitor. But guess what? You might be shocked that the janitor has the secret key to the next level of growth in that company just by watching people coming and go out, you know. So it's also important that as young people, right, it's very key that we begin to also get involved at the grass food level. So a lot of mobilization. Like I think I've said it on the advocate several times that we need to start learning about what's going on in our local government.  You don't understand what's happening there. You need to get involved. Always our local government chairman or what are the things he said is going to do. Where is APC PDP label? It doesn't matter who is the person. What are the initiatives? How can I get involved? When are the meetings? How can I attend so that I can say, oh, I've attended four meetings in this month and I can say this is where we are at the local government level. And because of that, we focus on the bigger picture, the bigger demon, the bigger devil and we ignore the lesser evils, right? Which is very important.  You know when we say that we focus on the bad politicians, the politicians who, you know, we focus on things like maybe armed robbery or the smaller vice is happening, armed robbery, kidnapping, ritualism. These are evils. These are societal menaces, right? Well, guess what? Let's look at it this way. When the airplane crashed like this or so days and things like that, you know, let's say an airplane carries about, let's say maybe Max give or take 100 people. Let's say if a plane crashes because of under maintenance and poor maintenance culture, right? Let's say we lose 100 people. Now think about a politician who withholds allocated funds to fix bad roads. And think about it that there are some roads that when you look at the count, it takes close to 10,000 people die on those bad roads every year. Now we look at all the armed robbery, the kidnappers and all of those evils that looks very pronounced and we forget that the bigger evil is a politician who is sitting on, you know, the public funds. And as a result of that, indirectly killing people. Now he's not using gun to kill people, but by withholding those funds, they are also murdering people. So we need to also look at it from, let's not focus on the bigger things we can see, the presidency. Like you said, so I agree. I was going to look at the grassroots level. Lots of things are happening there and the next president, guess what, is coming from that. Very something. So let's go to Suleyman. Suleyman, can you hear me? Yes, Suleyman, I think we all in agreement that it's a good thing that the youth are really enthusiastic about this coming election. But where we think we are not doing well is not focusing on some other areas, like the representatives from different constituencies who will in turn fight against a particular policy if it's not in favour of their own personal goals. What do you take on this? So just as other advocates have said, the president is known to not make the government. The type of democracy we practice in this part of the world, require that all other hands of government really form what is government. And this has always been my point, just like other advocates have also said, that we must make sure that we don't just look at the president alone. It is true, the book ends on the president's desk. But democracy is beyond that. The president is known to not run everything. So we must also look who are those who are sending to the us of rep, who are those who are sending to the Senate, because they complement the effort of the president in this type of democracy we run in this part of the world. So it is our time and you can see the robust thing is that both of these elections are even tied together. That is the presidential, the Senate and the us of rep. It happens on the same day. The simple implication is this. That is, in most of the parties, actually the awareness is very, just like Phoenix said, that the awareness now is on the high side. People are now aware of what they need to do. But in most cases, the destiny of the president and the senator and the us of rep are always tied together. In most cases, they either sing or swim together. So it is our time and we are also looking at other people who elect in other positions, not just on the president. We can always, I mean, speak and interrogate every other areas that we need to before we get the friend or candidates given to us by each of the parties that we have in Nigeria. Suleiman Akonde is next after the break.


So today I want to talk about the question of how many Leonard Jones atom types of force field ought to have. And to introduce this topic I'm going to go back to a slide that David Mobley used in his talk for this workshop, which is shown here, which is about automatic parameter fitting in open force field. So the basic idea here is that one starts with a force field with a set of initial parameters. And then uses the open force field infrastructure and in our case, focusing on force balance parameter optimizer to compute a set of quantities that one can compare with reference data. So these are experimentally available data like heats of vaporization and densities of pure organic liquids. As well as quantum mechanical, the available quantities like the torsional energy profiles of the rotatable bonds was so one computes these quantities using the force field. Does a comparison, and then does it an adjustment of the parameters that should yield an improved force field. So here goes back runs the calculations again compares with the reference data again and iterates to convergence at which point one has a set of presumably better force field parameters one can then benchmark the force field and if it works well, have a new force field release. But what this process doesn't address is exactly what parameters one is optimizing. You know, what are the appropriate Leonard Jones types for which one has numerical parameters to adjust what are the bond types, and so forth. This has been the topic of some work at open force field really led by Caitlin Bannon when she was a graduate student in David Mobley's lab. The process the idea of coming up with a method of automatically assigning types, but it's still, I think an unsolved problem. So we'll look at Leonard Jones Adam types in a recent force open force field release it turns out there are 20 for the elements hydrogen carbon oxygen and nitrogen. It turns out there are actually a number of types for hydrogen and fewer types for carbon, as shown in green oxygen and red and not and only one for nitrogen, and to get a sense for what's going on here. So like at hydrogen, there's a default string so all hydrogens will match this string, but if the hydrogen you're typing in your molecule happens to be bound to an SP3 carbon as shown here, then it'll be assigned to specialized parameters for that. If that carbon happens to be bound to one, two or even three electronegative elements, as shown in the next three lines then it'll be assigned further specialized parameters and so forth and you go down the list doing these assignments. Similarly for carbon there's a default parameter which could get modified if it turns out to be an SP3 type carbon. Putting this set in context so as I said there are 20 HCO and Leonard Jones types and open force field currently Gaff 1.8 has 48 as best I can tell and CGNFF which is a charm general force field recently has 130 but it's important to note that it's not really clear certainly for Gaff and I imagine for CGNFF how just really different all these parameters are in Gaff certainly many of the nitrogen parameters are identical and probably should be not be viewed as independent types even though they're listed as independent. There may not really be so many independent Leonard Jones types in these other force fields but they're listed that way and when it comes to doing an optimization like this it's not entirely clear which one should be considered as identical and kept together and which one should be allowed to vary independently. With that as background the question is how many Leonard Jones types should a force field have and I would argue that we want the minimal number of types required to reach maximum accuracy. And of course that depends on the data set you're using to assess accuracy and on what the other force field terms are but the basic ideas diagram in this little sort of conceptual graph with the y-axis shows accuracy and the x-axis shows a number of Leonard Jones types one can imagine that if you treat all elements as identical so you have one type for all elements you won't get very high accuracy. If you allow each element one type and you'll see that we're going to try that in a moment you should get better accuracy if you allow perhaps two types per element it should get better and so forth. But there's probably also some sort of asymptotic limit because at a certain point a carbon is Leonard Jones parameters probably are not very dependent on whether there's an oxygen or a sulfur five bonds away. So why do we want to minimize the number of Leonard Jones types you know why we want the minimum number to achieve maximal accuracy I think there are two reasons. Aside from just plain simplicity, one of them is to reduce the dimensionality of the optimization problem so this is a diagram of some objective function some measure measure of error. So we want to find a global optimum the epsilon and sigma as shown here with lowest error that may or may not be a simple problem but as you add more and more dimensions so more epsilons and more sigmas, it's likely to get more problematic. In addition, having fewer parameters reduces the risk of overfitting where you get good looking results on your training set but they. It doesn't really force field doesn't work well on data outside your training set. So I'm going to talk about here is a study that was led by Michael shell Pearl postdoc in my lab, where we define a set of at Leonard Jones typing models, really keeping them quite simple. For example, one of them would be each to see when so to hydrogen types, one carbon type, one oxygen type and one nitrogen type. So I think Wang's force balance gradient based optimizer to optimize the parameters associated with this model against experimental training set data, and then we evaluate the accuracy of the resulting force field against test set data. And then we compare with other models so was thrown off 99 frost a fairly recent version and gaff 1.8. The other parameters and these calculations are drawn from Smirnoff 99 frost. And then we look at a number of the Leonard Jones typing schemes we looked at, and they're, they're in several groups, the top group starts with HCO and so that's one type per element so all hydrogens are the same, all carbons are the same etc. And then we looked at splitting the hydrogen types in a chemically motivated manner, but keeping the others the same splitting the carbons splitting the oxygens or splitting the nitrogens and then taking all the splits putting them together to make a 12 type model 303 and two. The next set starts with a split between polar and a polar hydrogens, keeping the other elements the same so one type for carbon one type of oxygen, and then did similar splits for carbon, oxygen and nitrogen. And finally here we have Smirnoff 99 frost, which has 15 types represented in the training and test sets that I'll share in a moment, and gaff 1.8 which has 28 types in our content set. So I'm not going to go through this table in detail, but this is really just to give you a sense for how we did the splits. So for example, for carbon when we split carbon into three types, they were simply sp2 sp3 and sp, when we split oxygen it was simply carbonyl alcohol and ether, and so forth. And then at the bottom we have the a polar polar hydrogen splits based on whether they're bonded to a nitrogen or an oxygen or not. But we use a set of compounds with 78 molecules in it that capture 15 of the 20 Smirnoff HCO and Leonard Jones types and we did the calculations with two splits training test splits of the set of 78 compounds I'll be showing the results from only the first split today because time is short, but the results are virtually identical for the other split. So the first split is shown here the training set on the left test set on the right and the other training set. We just drew the compounds colored in orange out and use those for training and the rest for testing. For training we use heats of vaporization and densities with these pure organic liquids and for testing we use the same types of data plus dielectric constants. So let's look at the results. One simple result is that when we use the ridiculously simple model of one Leonard Jones type of element it's not that bad it's not great, but it's not as bad as one might have imagined. These are test set results. In the table we see the pictorial representation of the types here's the name of the model so we'd see when Smirnoff and Gaff. This is mean percent error on densities mean percent error on heats of vaporization mean percent error on dielectric constants and the objective function is a nice summary. It's the objective function that force balance minimizes to reduce error so a low number is better and the cells are colored where orange is worse and blue is better. So here what you see is that the objective function for HCON is 243 Smirnoff and Gaff are better. Perhaps not dramatically better if you look at the actual numbers here heats of vaporization are similar in accuracy dielectric constants are similar in accuracy maybe it's a little better but the densities for this for this model or a little bit worse. A very clear result was that simply distinguishing between polar and non-polar hydrogens gives you a huge boost in accuracy and it gives you almost the almost the entire boost in accuracy that we've seen in any other model. So you can see that in a few comparisons. Let's look at the top two lines. We go from HCON to H2CON so that polar a polar split and the objective function falls by not quite a factor of two. And these other results tend to get better so heats of vaporization get better densities get better dielectric constants that's going to be a little worse. But here are some more comparisons let's go from HC3ON and split the hydrogens we go to H2C3ON. And we get a drop in the objective function from HC3N to H2C3N we get a small drop in the objective function. And from HCON2 so split nitrogen is and now we split the hydrogens H2CON2 we get another nice reduction. And so in all cases, splitting the hydrogens into polar and a polar improves the results. And in fact gives us results that are at least on this you know test set better than Smirnoff and Gaff. I'm not trying to claim that this is a better model necessarily which is a very limited test set but it's certainly something to think about. We then can look at more generally we looked a little bit at just a very simple split for the hydrogens but if we split the hydrogens into four types we get improvement so that's 243 to 153 this first green arrow. If we split oxygen types from HCON to HC3N we also get improvement actually about the same as splitting hydrogens. Interestingly for this both for both test sets, splitting carbons makes things worse on the test set and splitting nitrogens makes things worse on the test set. Not a lot but not but it's not better. So that's losing to split seem to be of secondary value, if any value at all in this context. And finally, we find that some runs and don't find the global optimum. So here we look at a training set because that's where we're going to see whether the optimum was found or not. And I want to give you two comparisons. Let's start off with HCO3N and add parameters to make this 12 parameter model H4C303N2 objective function is worse after training. And or if we just split the hydrogens in the last line the objective function also gets worse than for the simpler model. And we know that because the more complicated models the ones with more parameters have more freedom in principle. The achievable objective function with a more complicated model has to be at least as good as that with a simpler model and probably a little bit better because there's more freedom for optimization. And we're seeing the opposite. So what happened here and actually Michael did a really nice analysis of this. What we noticed is that so HCO3N is considerably better than HCON which I don't show here. And what's happening of course is that the three different types of oxygens are being assigned distinct parameters. When he looked at H2CO3N from this optimization he noticed that the oxygen parameters were actually pretty similar to each other. And basically what had happened is we got in a polar-ray polar-hydrogen split. So that raised the possibility that somehow this optimization wandered off into a false optimum or a local optimum where the hydrogens were split but the oxygens weren't. So to check that he did a fresh optimization of H2CO3N starting from HCO3N. So we start with the split oxygens and re-optimize to get this re-optimize model and now the objective function is a little bit lower maybe the same in effect as HCO3N. So it's fallen relative to the prior optimization where we had 84. So indeed when we looked at the parameters for H2CO3N re-optimize the oxygens were again split and the hydrogens had very similar parameters. So there seem to be two pretty good ways of optimizing H2CO3N parameters. One is to split the hydrogens the other one is to split the oxygens and the optimizer risks getting trapped in the false minimal. So let me wrap up by summarizing and suggesting some implications. It looks you know from this preliminary study as though using surprisingly few atom types may be advantageous. We get competitive test set accuracy. It's a way of avoiding overfitting and it limits the search dimensionality. And indeed, even for quite few parameters so H2CO3N is what is it, you know, take the number of types and multiply by two that's so many parameters it has. There is danger of getting caught in local optima. So this suggests that in future optimization work it may be worth at least using multiple starting points in our optimizations and maybe considering other ways to improve the global search. So going back to our graph from before we can maybe put sort of an impressionistic set of data on here. This is not meant to be quantitative. But if we look at accuracy versus number of Leonard Jones types. It's not so great for HCON we get a nice boost and accuracy by adding by splitting hydrogens and we get modest boosts potentially by splitting nitrogen and oxygens. So I'll wrap up by acknowledging primarily Michael Shopperl who's really done all this work and done a beautiful job of it. Unfortunately, he'll be for us he'll be moving on to greener pastures or different shade of green pastures soon. Sophie Canton and a grad student with us who developed some of the initial ideas and leaping long who's helped with force balance and interpretation of the data. Thanks everyone in open force field especially for earlier discussions of this work and to NIH for funding. Thank you. That's great thanks. So, yeah, I guess if we were continuing. Well, I want to make sure Simon is thinking about this if we were continuing on with, you know, maybe trying to connect some of this with the new Leonard Jones refitting going into release force fields it might make sense to do a couple of slides that start with a pretty minimal model, like one of the ones you guys have tried and see how that fair is which one were ones, which would be your first picks for for trying. I would. I totally depend. Okay, so if we were only going to do one. I would do either a, I would probably do H2CO3N. And if we were going to do two or three, I would probably do the three at the top here. So H2CO when, even though I say it's lower accuracy than the other two. It's not impressively lower I mean so if we look at where is that each to see when is 139 on the objective function. That's amazing. If we add oxygen split, we get to 142 which is not as good on the test set and end to is not as good but I'm tempted to split the oxygens and nitrogen anyhow because we've seen that on their own they can improve things. What do you Michael Schapro is on the line I think he may have some thoughts on this as well. Michael Schapro you're muted if you're trying to say yes. Yeah, I'm more or less would have the same suggestions so H2CO3N would be my first choice if you only test one. And if we would test two or three. I would probably take this one and then probably the ones Mike suggested those were the ones which are standing out. You could even go further and set the bare minimum as a HCON so the just the element wise atom type or type model which would be interesting. Do you are the smart patterns you guys use for those in the paper. So, um, they wait they're here to, they're here, you see the right. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. We've, I think what we did is essentially take sort of top levels, sort of parts. Yeah, smirk, whatever they are. Cool. Yeah, so I'll make sure you know Simon is thinking about this. I think it'd be neat, you know, to some extent this just depends on compute because automating it is trivial so be need to repeat whatever fitting he's doing after the 1.2 release. You know, as he finishes, as he finalizes how he's going to be fitting and testing his LJ refits to also just do the same thing with your, you know, one or two of these types of typing and see what works best. Yeah, this is a larger scale version of your same experiment. Yeah, exactly. And I think that would be fascinating.