Thank you everybody for joining. This is a bit of a kind of last minute bite size that we've thrown into an empty slot that we had in the schedule and we thought we'd take advantage of that by telling you a little bit about what's happened in the past week or so with the NFCOR community and some kind of updates which affect us all. This has been a little bit of a last minute talk even by my standards. Apologies for it not being a very flashy slide deck but hopefully we can talk through the different points and please feel free to drop something into the chat if you have any questions or maybe Fran can relay any questions to me as I go along. This can be a bit of a kind of discussion bite size talk rather than just me presenting at everybody. Especially if there's anyone listening from the core team, please do stop me if I get anything wrong or miss anything important. So the reason we have some updates for September is something a bit out of the ordinary happened last week which is for the very first time the core team of NFCOR got together in person because of COVID and the lack of in-person events we've had recently. Many people in the core team had never met one another in real life although we spend a lot of time online chatting to each other. And also over the last couple of years, especially as the NFCOR community has grown, when we do have in-person events, hackathons and things, we're always so busy running the event that we don't really have any time to actually do any kind of core team work ourselves. So I kind of kicked this off this year for the first time that we'd have a little retreat just for the core team where we'd spend a few days getting to know one another and also trying to get through some work for the core team and make some decisions and really get into in-depth discussions about kind of community scale things which are very difficult to take over Slack and Zoom. I'm glad to say it went really, really well. We had a fantastic time. Everyone came to kind of hang out in over in Sweden. We got to explore our surroundings and we went on a nice walk in the forest and everything which is where this photo comes from and kind of played games in the garden and stuff like that and did also do a little bit of work. We managed to drop into SciLifeLab and use a couple of offices there to spend a couple of days really getting some work done. So we had our own kind of mini hackathon. So I looked over all the notes that we took over the days and kind of broke out these points which I'm going to talk over today. The first one's going to take up most of the time and I'll just kind of mention the others in passing. So the first thing is teams. So we started NF Core end of 2017, started 2018 and from very close to the start of that we had a core team which is again, it's not very good naming for NF Core core team but all of you will know who we are. We are quite visible and we have been kind of running the NF Core community and it's worked really, really well but the NF Core community is getting bigger and bigger and bigger and the core team has got a little bit bigger recently but it's only so far that we can kind of stretch ourselves and so they've been feeling for a little while now but it would be nice to formalize the community structure a little bit more, create some more teams and formalize responsibilities a little bit within those teams. So we spent a good chunk of a day talking through all of this and which teams we'd like and how they'll be organized and what they should do and by and large we try to structure around what is already happening within the community. So this means that it's pretty easy. We don't have to change very much. It should be no real surprises because this is basically how the community is already functioning but we're just kind of hoping to formalize things, make things a bit more transparent and a bit clearer and all of this will go up on the website pretty soon. We just haven't got quite yet. So this is an overview. You can see the core team is still kind of at the middle but we have a handful of new teams here which are on this plot. The one which is completely new is a new steering group and this is kind of the top level of the community if you like and the steering group won't do very much on a day-to-day basis but we'll be there kind of to look after things like finance. In the early days of NFCOR we didn't have any finance so we didn't really need to worry about that but with funding from channels like a Berg Initiative and other kind of actual personnel working on the project now full-time we do have some kind of higher level decisions to be made. So the steering group would kind of take charge of all the finance and all those large initiatives and think about some big picture planning. The core team is basically remaining unchanged, same people and but again we're going to just write down what we actually do. We're doing a day-to-day running for community making decisions and generally we make decisions by kind of committee. If anything's not clear we take a vote and what we've said now that we have a steering committee is that if ever the core team is split then anything, if there's no clear majority on the topic then we'll push that to the steering committee. I don't expect that to happen anytime soon. It's never happened in in the what four or five years that we've been running so but now we have a policy in case it does and the core team at the end of the day has administrative access to everything and another important task is they make final decisions on new pipeline requests and basically you know who should be within NFCOR and how the NFCOR pipeline community runs. So no big changes there. We wanted to clarify membership a little bit. Again this is basically how we've been doing it until now but we wanted to try and make that as transparent to the community as possible. So it's kind of a meritocracy. We basically invite people who have visibly been heavily involved in the community and if someone's interested in being part of the core team then they can join and we want to try and make it explicit that we will try and have as best representation as possible but to mirror the representation of our community. There's a new team here called Infrastructure. This one is kicking off with Julia and Matias basically because these two are now employed to work with NFCOR as of this year which is fantastic. So Julia is employed with the Translacoburg initiative money to work on NFCOR infrastructure code and Matias started recently at the SciLife Lab data centre to work on the same thing and because I've been historically involved in this a lot I'm kind of the leader of this team. So and this team will work purely on kind of the tools, code base on the websites and any kind of framework work around NFCOR and again we've been working on this stuff for a long time already so there's no big change here but now we have an official team. Outreach team has existed for a while but has been not super well organised and so we want to kind of take turn over a new leaf with outreach a little bit. We've set some new leads so Chris, Marcel and Fran and we will kind of go over the membership of the outreach team soon and check whether people want to be involved and who wants to do what and we're also setting explicit responsibilities here. We're hoping to pull back a lot at the moment the core team does a lot of the outreach work so we're trying to sort of separate those two teams a little bit more now. The safety team again has kind of existed for a while but has been not super obvious to find this information it's listed in the code of conduct and it's been sort of done basically on a completely voluntary basis so now it's still the same but now we have an official team which will be listed on the website. So Sabah, Michael and Chris have been doing a fantastic job with us kind of year or two and now we're kind of making it explicit about they are responsible for the code of conduct and they are kind of a go-to people if there's any ever any problems basically either events or on slack. A key difference with the safety team is that they skip the core team and they will go straight to the steering committee with any recommendations if action is needed. Another new team maintainers this is still kind of in flux at the moment but we're thinking because basically until now the NFCOR community is just everyone has been maintainers everyone has full access to everything everyone is expected to help out but it's not really the case in reality because many people are just not developing pipelines just using pipelines people involved to different degrees have different levels of experience within NFCOR so we're trying to add an extra kind of tier in here where there's going to be an explicit maintainers group which will be people not necessarily in the core team but who are heavily involved in maintenance work it'll be quite a big team and we want to try and do this so that we can scale with reviewing pull requests for example at the moment it's quite difficult to get a first release out of a new pipeline because we say that core team has to review that first release but there's not that many of us and there's lots of new pipelines so we're going to share this out a bit more if we can and basically share out some of this kind of maintenance task this would be really key for the NFCOR community and more information will go out soon we're going to come up with a list pretty soon of people we'd like to invite in the first round and we'll start rotating that list every six months and sort of see how we go and we'll see also exactly how we do this in the future but at the moment everybody has right access to every repository within NFCOR and we may change that and we may make it so that most people have read access to most repos and then the maintenance team basically adds people to the pipelines where access is required just to try and streamline everything a little bit more and make sure that accidents don't happen and for eagle-eyed of you may have spotted the word ambassadors noted a couple of times and the ambassadors team will sort of be a bigger extension of the outreach team and we have some kind of pretty cool stuff planned but there's a bit too much to write here and it's not very well settled yet so just stay tuned if that sounds interesting feel free to ping us any questions but otherwise to keep on the lookout and we'll be pushing some more information out about ambassadors soon right that's all the team stuff any questions before I move on or is everyone crystal clear sorry it's a bit of a dry talk I appreciate that but I gave everything the right to unmute themselves so if you have questions just shout out cool right well um hopefully everyone's happy with kind of a decision to have come to you like I say hopefully there shouldn't be any big surprises here because this is pretty much how we're already operating yeah Enrique says the teams will get slack handles to be easy to contact so we'll set up some infrastructure around these teams um some other things then we talked through the guidelines a little bit but NFCOR guidelines have been mostly untouched since the very start of NFCOR um 2018 um we've added a few bits over time and they were getting a bit kind of unwieldy the structure of the page like some stuff with bullet points some stuff with sections and things like this and some stuff was outdated and not really valid and some bits we thought were missing so um we've updated the the guidelines page a little bit underneath docs and then contributing and then guidelines and so now our overview page kind of lists all of them in one big list recommendations and requirements and each each requirement then has a dedicated page with a bit more kind of information uh just so that you can give space to dig into a bit more details about what we're talking about with the requirements more than just a bullet point and but also gives you an overview at the same time so hopefully this is this is helpful this is useful we point to this page a lot so and we're going to continue kind of linking to specific things when it comes up in discussion and if you're developing within NFCOR you should try and be aware of all the guidelines especially if you're developing a new pipeline so uh how do the guidelines influence existing pipelines the the new recommendations basically nothing's really changed um so there shouldn't be and if you if you've got an existing NFCOR pipeline um there shouldn't really be anything you need to worry about um we've made a couple of things a bit more explicit that we have previously been saying on Slack anyway um and mostly you've just fleshed out more detail about the reasoning like why does your pipeline name have to be lowercase without punctuation and why does uh does it work like this way all that way so it's mostly organization of the page and more detail um and yeah but any questions of course shout once you've had time to read through these and you know we're happy to take any questions and then update and modify as as appropriate um actually someone requested this I think this morning obviously uh was there anything written about uh guidelines for reviewing this is ties in with the new maintainers team as well that as we're asking more people to do reviewing um we need to kind of better standardize how reviews should be done we have some documentation already for the modules I believe about how pull requests should be reviewed and we're going to try and write up some more guidelines and some more help for this um and we'll probably do a bite-sized talk about it as well at some point um so this the aim of this is to standardize our reviewing process and also make it easier for new people to get into reviewing which is a big big part of NFCOR and can be very uh rewarding in itself and is really critical to the functioning of the community um test data we talked about quite a lot um so a couple of things are going to change one of the things we're bringing in is a new requirement that we want some more information about what test data is and we want that in a structured way um so we're going to have a new requirement pretty soon for each test data directory to have a yaml file um and that yaml file will have to have certain keys um so really just to make sure that we know what the data is where it came from how it was prepared and everything um because at the moment we're meant to have readme files but it's a bit kind of um hit and miss um having this will also allow us to add some continuous integration tests to be sure that those files are there and populated properly before a new test data is added which will again will make reviewing a bit easier um and then James has also written some new guidelines specifically for test data so again under docs contributing test data guidelines um so this is an entirely new page again spelling out what we had already been saying on slack in a informal way but now everything's listed here about if you're if you're generating new test data this is how you should do it um one of the things that came up several times as you might imagine is about maintenance um and how do we do this and when should we do it and i was very keen to try and make all of our plans kind of scalable sustainable not just like yeah we should do that and then forget about it because that's very easy to do um so one of the things we're going to try and start doing is do a bit of spring cleaning every year um James and Chris from the core team are going to take the lead on organizing this and we'll send out reminders and stuff but the hope is that basically everyone in the community can just kind of have a little think about this once a year and do a bit of tidying up um things like looking at pipelines to see if pipelines are being actively developed we have a handful of quite old pipelines which were maybe started at hackathon years ago and then sort of abandoned and and other pipelines which might know might no longer be maintained and maybe kind of getting out of date so things like looking for those and archiving them were appropriate and again we're going to write up some policies about how that process of archiving old pipelines should happen um and also just going through all the different pipelines and sort of checking for old branches which have been merged and can be deleted old pull requests where which have been superseded um and kind of are never going to emerge because it's already been done in a different way uh and kind of curating the issue list um checking for things which have already been implemented or duplicates and just just cleaning up all this stuff on github um this is a constant thing that we should be doing all the time uh but it's just a good time to go once a year and say have a real focus on it and try and have a community drive on it we tend to have hackathons in March so we're thinking it's kind of nice to do a little bit before then so that as we go into a hackathon we've got nicely curated lists of issues for people to work on and everything's fresh and ready to go um there's a lot of papers and published papers about NF call pipelines um so if you go to publications you can kind of see we've got a list of publications here that we collect for with different pipelines where appropriate um if you didn't know about this if you have a publication about a a pipeline um whether it's dedicated specifically for that pipeline or it just kind of describes the pipeline please do add it to this page because it's really helpful to have it here um and it's a bit of a difficult thing because with NF call we're a huge community project and especially when it comes to things like DSL2 modules um you know I could go and create a new pipeline today import all these modules that other people have written stitch them together and very quickly have a pipeline up and running which would be great um but it'd be nice to be able to cite the people who've actually put the work into those modules who actually wrote the code within the pipeline so we are going to try and kind of hit this head on and try and write up some some recommendations for how manuscripts and papers should properly acknowledge the community um this is we've already picked us up with again this week so it's obviously a hot topic um and basically it'll be about kind of thinking about where you should look for contributors um how you could potentially cite them and we might even come up with a little helper tool to automatically get a list of GitHub usernames and things like this um this will only ever be a helper tool for you if you're writing a paper it's never going to be like a hard requirement or anything like this um we realize that publications are uh highly political and very important for the people working on pipelines so at the end of the day it will always be your decision about who you acknowledge and who you cite within your paper um but this is just a bit of a helping hand hopefully um want to give us shout out for a couple of Slack channels there was one we created last week uh we're talking about how to try and make the community as inclusive to new members as possible and one of the things that came up is that um it's easy to sometimes get kind of imposter syndrome when you come and join a new Slack uh you know you join Slack as always people chatting about things you might not understand if you're new to NextFlow or new to the community and you feel like the question you've got kind of is a bit of a stupid question and maybe you should be able to figure it out but of course that's not true there's there is no stupid questions and there is no um every if you're thinking a question then chances are very high that other people are as well and that's what the Slack is for so we want to be as welcoming as possible and to lower that that threshold um and we created a Slack channel specifically for this this feeling called no stupid questions um which was based on another Slack organization um I forget who it was who suggested it and what the other Slack organization was now but the idea is that this is like a really friendly place to come and ask questions so you can find that um on Slack now and I think anyone who newly signs up to Slack will join it but I haven't yet added the whole community so please go and dig that out and have a look um and another one which I think is is a fairly fresh freshly minted Slack channel which deserves everyone's full attention is a NF core means so go and have a look for there and your copy break if you fancy it and remember that there's the channel browser in Slack you have a look through there there's a lot of channels on the NF core Slack partly because we have one for every pipeline um but there might be some interesting ones kind of hidden in there so do do have a poke around and see if there's anything in there which might have been added you might not have seen uh final points uh just to talk about the NF core website a little bit um Matthias especially has been working on this lately and will continue to do quite a lot of work on this and we've been doing a lot of planning work um first up you may have seen duplicate tweets appearing about releases or wrong times and things like that I think we're pretty sure that's fixed now so hooray um next on the list is if ever you try and go to a stats page you'll notice it takes a very very very long time to load and if you're if you're lucky it will load if you're unlucky or crash and if you're really unlucky it might crash the website for everyone who tries to look at the website for a little while so this is not scaling well and we're we're as a top priority now trying to fix that um so that the website's a bit more nimble before all of the events we're having in a week or two um so hopefully we're going to get get that sorted very soon a few kind of visual fixes and stuff coming up and things like uh in the on uh what we used to do for for pipelines is um in the documentation for pipeline we used to have any number of markdown files structured however you want it and we decided a little while ago to try and standardize that to two files uh there we go that's the error I'm talking about uh two files usage and output and that's good for standardization it means it's easier to do template syncs it's easier to build the website in a consistent manner um so that when you're used to looking one pipeline or another way will kind of look the same but we have found that there's a bit of kind of pushback against that because it limits a little bit um if you have a lot of documentation to write for example if you want to write tutorials or if you want to write kind of pipeline specific stuff in more detail then it's useful to have more kind of sub pages so we're reverting that decision and we're going to soon open up the website so that you can have any number of pages in the docs but you'll still have to have a usage and an output file as a minimum but you'll be able to add others um and then the big picture plan with the website is we're going to do a big refresh hopefully um at some point we're going to rewrite the whole back end so it's much much faster um scalable and actually built in a modern way and we're also going to restructure the website in a big way we've got some plans where we're going to try and make all the documentation much easier to navigate come up with a search bar which actually works and finds documentation within any pipeline or any part of the website and a whole load of big improvements coming so please stay tuned right that's all i've got uh oh two things i've forgot to make slides about one of them is quite a big one is um uh some of you may have noticed in the the DSL2 modules repository there's a folder called um sub-work flows which is being quietly lurking here for a little bit of time uh we worked quite a lot on sub-work flows last week and made a lot of progress um so this is coming and hopefully pretty soon i was hoping i would talk about it a bit today but i think there's some decisions which are still kind of in flux so maybe at the um at the summit we might have a bit more to say about it but certainly coming soon we will have um sub-work flows up and running we hope that includes both structure and kind of everything within the NFCOR modules repository and also we got a proof of concept running for NFCOR tools um to work with sub-work flows so that's really really exciting i know a lot of people have been looking forward to that and working on that for a long time and i think we're getting close um and one other thing i've already spammed everyone about this a great deal so hopefully you've not been able to miss it but the next flow summit is coming up and we also have a bunch of other events around that coming up so we have free online training which is next week which has got a ridiculous number of people signed up to it um it's completely taken us by surprise and i think we've got over 700 people now signed up to join the training which is just fantastic um but there's always space for more so if you're interested in getting some training please do hop onto that page get the details and um and register it's the first time we've run it like this where we're running in three different time zones at the same time so running for three days for two and a half hours but you can choose which time of day you want to run it in um so that's really exciting then of course we've got the hackathon coming up in Barcelona and also online and then we have the the main next flow summit coming up as well um we've been updating the the program a lot recently with different speakers and things and we've got keynote talk by Rob Patreau who's just put up his talk title last night um so lots of really exciting stuff happening there and hope to see many of you there right with that please ask me any questions or point out anything i've forgotten or got along happy to put more detail into stuff i i'm slightly on yeah Moritz i think you can um yeah go on um i was curious regarding test data if you have discussed in the core group and made a decision against support or whatever um what about having test data being built by pipelines themselves because it can be quite tricky to uh for example if you want to just add on to existing test data and so processes for them create another output it can be quite tricky to reproduce all those steps um that led to that old test data yep absolutely uh james mentioned this in the new documentation he wrote which is basically saying like do exactly what you're suggesting uh if the test data for your module can be quickly generated is don't add that to a test data repo instead in your test workflow that you've got in the modules repo as those other upstream modules to generate it each time um bear in mind that that means every single time that module was tested it will be running those previous steps so um kind of think about the polar bears a little bit think about the resources needed for the ci tests uh if it's heavy lifting to generate those files and you should do it once and upload the files that are just downloaded and used but if they're fairly quick to generate then absolutely don't feel like you need to add that to a test data repo instead put it into the ci workflow i actually meant um more what about starting putting pipelines into the test data repo that generate the test data um so pipelines are already in a test data sets pipeline repo we've got a branch for every pipeline that's how the ci tests run for pipelines but i feel like that's not what you're asking um generating test data sets somehow exactly yeah so so having uh some kind of more reproducible definition of how the test data i mean right now it's basically put put the commands in in a readme in whatever test data repo uh or branch but basically how about making that itself more reproducible by having problem pipelines and i'm with you now uh yes this is what this is about basically um but in a moment we uh we are not super happy with the the readme files uh which is just massive massive readme file describing what all the files are and where it came from and how it was generated so we want to move away from this kind of readme file approach where people can add as much of as little information as they want to a structured documentation format we're mostly thinking about origin but yeah absolutely we we haven't defined exactly what fields there are yet so we could also define you know a command that was used to generate that test data if it if it originates from some other kind of file um we've got a test data slack channel so if you if you have something specific in mind hop in there and spell out exactly what you mean and we can discuss it in more detail and put something together great question something else core team you're happy that i haven't forgotten anything maybe you should have included more more photos great okay in that case let's wrap it up and thank you everybody for for joining and listening um it's it's all kind of pleasure it's been a really really fun week um and i feel like we made tons of progress last week so i'm really pleased um so if you have any ideas or feedback on decisions we've made then please let us know and otherwise we'll continue kind of writing everything up that we took notes on adding it to the website and um i'm making it easily easily accessible for you


Hello, Naval War College colleagues, and welcome to this lecture of opportunity about the Climate and Ocean Risk Vulnerability Index. This event is brought to you by myself, Commander Andrea Cameron, the Director of the Climate and Human Security Group, and my colleague, Professor Kate Walsh, the Director of the Oceanography and Maritime Security Group. This year has seen significant developments in both climate change and in prioritizing the oceans. We held the first open and free PME conference on climate at the Naval War College this winter, and the links and the presentations for the conference materials can all be found in the chat. We've also hosted a series of lectures of opportunity with key academics, private industry and scientists from the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and within the government. As you all know, climate change has been placed at the center of US foreign policy with countless projects across the government agencies as we ramp up in this field. It is our shared interest between myself and Professor Walsh that lead us to this lute today to learn about the Climate and Ocean Risk Vulnerability Index. The information sharing of the Climate and Human Security Group is now open to members both on and off campus. And for those students who may be graduating, you may want to drop me an email if you want to stay connected to the group when you leave, and I will add your personal email to the listserv. Please contact me directly. Again, my email is in the chat. This event is being recorded, so we will listen to the presentation and hold our questions to the end. I now invite my colleague, Professor Walsh, to share her thoughts and introduce our guest speaker. Thank you. Thank you, Andrea, and welcome everyone. I'm very pleased to co-host this event with Commander Cameron and the Climate and Human Security Group. The group that I direct is the Oceanography and Maritime Security Group, or OMSG, which is focused on the nexus of issues that touch on maritime science, technology, and innovation, as well as international security, particularly focused on the Indo-Pacific region. Because climate science and maritime security overlap, climate and science and maritime security, it makes sense to at times combine our efforts for events such as this. Today, we are very pleased to host Ms. Sally Yosele, Senior Fellow and Director of the Environmental Security Program at the Stimson Center, a Washington, D.C. think tank focused on international security issues. And in the interest of full transparency, a place where I once worked, actually twice I've worked there, they're not at the same time overlapping with Sally. Her research examines environmental threats that have the potential to undermine the national, regional, or global security. Her work focuses on ocean security, climate security, natural resources protection, environmental crime, and wildlife protection. She's an accomplished expert and well known in these areas of research. Prior to joining Stimson, Yosele was Senior Advisor to the Secretary of State, where she provided advice and technical expertise to advance US policies in the international arena related to ocean, climate, and wildlife protection. She's also served, pardon me, previously as Director of Policy and as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Oceans at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration or NOAA. She worked as Regional Director for Marine Conservation at the Nature Conservancy, Vice President in the Applied Marine Science Group at Patel Memorial Institute, and worked for almost a decade in the US Senate as an environmental and energy advisor to then Senator, now Secretary John Kerry. Sally has a Master's Degree in Public Administration from Harvard University's JFK School of Government and a Bachelor's Degree in Political Science from the University of Vermont. We're very honored to have Sally here to explain to us the new and innovative climate and ocean risk vulnerability index. For those watching this presentation, it will be reported, but we will stop recording at the end of the presentation and open up the floor for questions from the audience. With that, Sally, welcome to the Naval War College. Flora is yours. Thank you, Kate, for the introduction. Obviously, I must be old if I've done all those things. But no, seriously, thank you, Kate, and thanks to Andrea for hosting today's discussion. And many thanks to all the great work of the oceanography and maritime security and climate and human security groups are doing. You know, I am from New England, and I'm very jealous. Newport is such a wonderful place to work. So I look forward to visiting you in person. So as Kate said, I am the director of the environmental security program at the Stimson Center, and we are a nonpartisan think tank in Washington DC. The program really examines the links between how environmental degradation and exploitation of natural resources can affect the economic food and ecological security of nations, particularly in developing countries. Often those are the countries who are often the most vulnerable. So we try to look at how these issues can impact geopolitics, which can ultimately lead to instability and conflict. And this seems particularly in your wheelhouse. So our work covers illegal fishing, the impacts of the climate crisis and wildlife trafficking. All of these issues are connected to domestic, regional and global security. So understanding security implications, what we do is we then work with this diverse range of partners to develop and implement policies that address the associated problems and concerns, and we work on what we call a research to action model. Now today I'm going to, as Kate said, I'm going to talk about the climate and ocean risk vulnerability index, or Corvy, which is a lot easier to say. Corvy is a tool that we developed at the Stimson Center, and it measures climate security risks in coastal cities. And what I'm going to do today is I'm going to outline why Corvy is particularly important today, and to discuss some of the projects we have going on. And right now we finished, or in the process of finishing eight Corvy projects in different cities around the globe. So two weeks ago, President Biden held a leader summit on climate change in Washington DC, which brought together over 40 world leaders. So a small number of wealthy nations, as you know, represent about 80% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. They were all in attendance. Also attending with small island developing states, or SIDS as we call them, and the least developing countries known as LDCs, who emit the least amount of climate pollution that are the most affected by the climate crisis. And at the summit, really the alarm bells were sounded and increased ambition for greenhouse gas reductions and financial assistance were really demanding. With this heightened awareness and demand for decision makers to really take action, the participants at Pence agreed to act swiftly. But to get there, they really need smart planning tools like Corvy, which can help them prioritize urgent action needed to meet the goals to address climate change. So Corvy is a decision support tool, and it's designed to be used by decision makers in the US and other coastal governments, international organizations or private sectors to do just that. Prioritize action, make smart and build investments to build resilience where it matters most, while also unlocking additional investment. So today what I'm going to do is I'm going to begin by outlining the security impacts of climate change, then provide a detailed overview of the Corvy project and how it can support nations and cities grappling with the climate emergency. And then I'm also going to highlight findings from one of our Corvy projects to showcase really how it works and how the results from these kinds of assessments are being used today. So we'll discuss some of the other Corvy projects and have a question and answer period. So let's get rolling. Let's move on to the next slide please. So, as I said, you know, the Biden administration has really brought climate security to the forefront of the US foreign policy agenda. And it's for a good reason. By 2100, it is estimated that flooding caused by sea level will cost a trillion dollars every year. And if the planet continues to warm at current levels, over the next 50 years, up to 3 billion people could be living in areas that are just too hot for humans. Or in 2018, the World Bank is estimated that three regions, Latin America, Sub-Saharan Africa and Southeast Asia, will generate 143 million more climate migrants by 2050. So these are just some examples of why the Biden administration has prioritized action across the government. President Biden has instigated a whole of government approach, both domestically and internationally, to move us forward on climate mitigation, resilience and adaptation from science to renewable energy infrastructure, international diplomacy, assistance, military readiness and intelligence. All of these areas are included. You know, right at the beginning, as you know, the administration rejoined the client Paris climate agreement on day one, and then enlisted my former boss, Secretary of State John Kerry, as the White House special envoy for climate. We've already seen benefits from this approach. In recent meetings with China, for example, Envoy Kerry successfully isolated the climate change from the other contentious issues with China and negotiated a joint statement which reaffirmed climate commitments. As we move towards COP26 this fall in Glasgow, cooperation between the two largest emitters is essential, if they're going to account for the over 40% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Secretary of State Blinken has named climate change as a key security threat. He highlighted that out of the 20 countries the Red Cross considers most vulnerable to climate change, 12 are already experiencing armed conflicts. Moreover, climate change is creating new theaters of geopolitical competition when you consider the Arctic. Also, Secretary of Defense Austin has called climate change a profound destabilizing force for a world. He noted that climate change is causing billions of dollars of damage to do the installations and impacting joint exercises with allies. For example, in February 2019. Uta forced DOD to pause naval exercises with Australia and Japan. And this sentiment is clear in the recent National Intelligence Council's global trends for 2040 report, which identified climate change as one of four most issues most likely to drop security the next 20 years. In context, what does this mean? It means that climate crisis is listed alongside financial crisis, demographic shifts, rapid technological changes, all of which have the potential to strain societies and really generate catastrophic shocks. In the Climate Leaders Summit at the Climate Leaders Summit. US outlined several new actions. Department of State and US aid will support countries around the world to help them meet climate adaptation and mitigation goals. The assistance will be provided to help build resilience in small island developing states and streamline climate finance that is so badly needed. So it goes to those most vulnerable communities. And the Department of Defense announced, it'll increase efforts to incorporate climate risk into wargaming and strategic planning. In other term, it will complete climate exposure assessments at all major US installations within 12 months and all major installations outside of the United's continental United States in the next 24 months. So it's really easy therefore to understand why this is a security risk. Extreme storms, drought, heat and sea level rise are really upending economic, environmental and food security of people in communities, degrading livelihoods and fueling mitigation. If this is left unchecked, these stressors can mix with existing social and economic grievances, corruption and weak institutions, and have the potential to lead to unrest and conflict, particularly in developing countries or marginalized communities. There are numerous examples of this from Iraq to Somalia, drought and heat related climate change has been fueling violent extremism. Resource scarcity is harming agricultural livelihoods. And as affected populations from more vulnerable, they can become targets of recruitment for extremist organizations like ISIS or Al-Shabaab. And as these organizations proliferate in fragile contexts, they also contribute to displacement towards urban centers and refugee camps. Increasing water and land scarcity have even fueled intercommunal violence. For example, in Nigeria, climate change and desertification have pushed her communities into agricultural farmlands, leading to conflict over the scarce land. This kind of violence and insecurity along the middle belt of Africa is also leading to displacement and really contributing to migration to coastal urban centers like logouts, for example. So these just represent just a few of the examples of the national and global security risk of climate change. So for countries to counter these risks and reach serious ambitions highlighted last week and leading up to COP26 this fall, they really need to take on bold actions. Funders and governments first need to be able to assess climate risks in specific geographies and across different sectors. And finally, measuring these risks have been too narrow, kind of in a still fight way, and to folk narrowly focus, particularly for coastal cities. And as a result, they often miss the true magnitude of the myriad of climate risk that a coastal city may face. So let's look at the coastal cities and move on to the next slide please. So, the world's coasts are becoming increasingly urban. According to UN's most recent World Organization prospects report, 55% of the world's population are in urban areas. This is expected to grow to 68% by 2050. Approximately 40% of the global population lives within 100 kilometers of the coast today, and coastal cities are among the fastest growing population centers on the planet. As recent reports by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change or the IPCC make clear, coastal cities are also at the forefront of climate change. And as you can see on this slide, climate change risks from sea level rise, increasing storm intensity, heat and drought are exacerbated when they are considered alongside the social and economic issues that confront most urban areas. And these changes really stress ecosystem upon which millions depend to grade outdated infrastructure and have the potential to upend economic stability. Coastal cities are often rely on their blue economy for generating, you know, money from fishing, tourism, or shipping, for example, all of which are under threat from climate change. In addition, as I noted earlier, from the land side drought and heat and up and agriculture which in turn can cause climate induced migration. Furthermore, underlying economic and social issues that any city faces such as poverty, inequality, governance gaps just add to the climate risks. So when you think about this fast paced urbanization that's occurring, it's really increasing the number of vulnerable residents living in informal settlements. And with that, political tensions from high unemployment or inadequate government response to climate event can degrade the security of city residents and overwhelm the capacity of coastal cities to respond to climate related events. Across the world, we are seeing these impacts play out in real time. Records continue to be broken. He, our foods, hurricanes, floods, they continue to get worse. In many parts of Africa, for example, drought induced rural, the urban migration is leading to hyper urbanization. I mentioned logos a little while ago but let me just reiterate. The population of logos Nigeria has roughly doubled from 7 million in 2000 to just under 1515 million today. Yet such rapid urbanization has led to this proliferation of informal shanties that are right at the water's edge, roughly two out of every three people in logos live in slums. And with climate change further exacerbating these poor conditions. Or in small island developing states, climate change is really degrading the marine environment. And as I said, the fish stocks would support food and their blue economy. Also extreme storms and rising sea levels are threatening the future existence of several island nations, making them potentially uninhabitable. And this is leading to some of the world's first climate refugees. The hurricanes are also contributing the migration to the United States. Late last year hurricane, Edda alone caused over $7 billion in damage and affected almost 8 million people across Central America. It destroyed livelihoods and displaced entire communities. And this is added to the serious migration problem along our southern border. The problem line is this, we need to develop a holistic understanding of how climate change intersects with social and economic risk to truly design resilient solutions, safeguard future and safeguard future investments and enhance our future security. We're coping with limited financial resources, and in a post COVID environment, governments, international financial institutions, and the private sector really need tools which can help them identify the issues that most warrant investment. So let's jump into exactly what climate vulnerability is at the city level and move on to slide for please. So, um, I'm going to talk now about for me the Corby tool, and the Corby tool really takes a holistic approach and assesses these diverse risks by measuring the vote vulnerability of coastal cities climate change. So I don't want to be too wonky or too technical. But as you can see from this equation, it highlights a climate risk is commonly understood as the function of the hazard. The hazard is like the physical threat such as a storm and exposure, the asset at risk of at risk, such as infrastructure and vulnerability, the capacity of the city to withstand the hazard and become more resilient. So global data sets for climate and ocean risks have really improved. And there is high resolution data on hazards, and there is good resolution data on exposure, those are available. But accessing high resolution vulnerability data remains a major challenge. And with that challenge what happens it really leads to blind spots and biased analysis. So the Corby tool is designed to plug those gaps by mapping vulnerabilities at the city level through this bottom up data collection process. Next slide please. So this is the Corby wheel. And so Corby is made up of 10 risk categories, and they're grouped as you can see in the world in the wheel under the ecological, financial and political risks. And then under those three, there are 10 categories, which in turn are made up to close to 100 risk indicators. That is a lot of information and data. So to give you a sense of what risks are included under each risk type. Ecological risks, for example, include the extent and health of nature based defenses, such as mangroves and coral reefs, the quality of freshwater resources, and the state of fisheries. As just a few of the examples, for financial lists, some of the financial risks include how dependent is a city and country on vulnerable industries and infrastructure, and the level of poverty is also included. Finally, political risk. Political risk assesses demographic factors like the migration to coastal cities that I talked about, and the capacity of key government institutions to respond to climate events. Corby is different. A lot of people say how there are a lot of indices out there. Well, Corby is distant, is different from a lot of existing indices in three main ways. First of all, many other indices tend to focus on the national level. Corby is city-based. It provides city level detail on the nature and impact of climate notionless. Second, Corby looks at a broad set of risk factors. As I noted, ecological, financial, and political, which are connected to the vulnerability of cities and their residents. And third, Corby uses a methodology that we've created that combines empirical data and expert survey data to plug the data gaps. For each product, project we conduct, field work, and survey experts all across government, academia, civil society, and the private sector, who live in or have knowledge of climate risks in each city. We then wait this data to reduce bias and prioritize which risks are most in need of immediate action. So to visualize the category and indicator scores, we then place them on a one to 10 scale, which is relative to other coastal cities in a region. By scoring each indicator, Corby provides decision makers with detailed data on the diverse range of climate and ocean risks and how they impact their cities. So just to reiterate, the risk scores are also supplemented with field research, expert interviews, best research to produce a written profile for each Corby coastal city. And again, this risk profile is a holistic assessment designed to provide information as decision makers across government, financial institutions, and development agencies. And it really helps them target investment into the highest risk areas, safeguard future investments, and build resilience where it's needed most. And honestly, at a time when climate ambition ambitions are really at their highest level around the globe. It is so critical for decision decision makers to get the planning right, and not squander this opportunity for waste site resources. So let's move on to the next slide, and I'm going to talk a little bit about one of our pilot studies that took place in Castings, St. Lucia. So, while each profile really tells a different story. What we have found is that the risk to coastal East ecosystems seem to be really important in every city we've looked at. And we've noted also that integrated urban coastal zone management. Is so important to address climate security risks. So let me drill a little bit into castings. So what we found is due to urban expansion. Oh, also, just another thing to note. So what we did is, we decided to expand outside of the city of castings limits in our assessment assessment to also include an area called gross is left. An area which is just north of castries where most of the islands tourism industry is concentrated and where a lot of the castries residents work. This decision was made in consultation with experts in St Lucia. So again, our desk research said look at the city, but when we did our when we got to the city and started talking to people, it became clear we really needed to expand our geography. So the castries Corby risk profile showed us that vulnerability is greatest under the ecological and financial risk types that you can see on the slide. Specifically in the economics, ecosystems and climate categories. And these scores were driven by risks related to unemployment loss of poor coverage and extreme heat events. And as you can see, Corby scores in the political risk area for generally lower. And this was driven by a confidence in the rule of law and civil society engagement indicators. But urban and youth unemployment, inequality and a large informal economy contributed to high financial scores. So tourism is a critical industry for castries, as it is throughout the curriculum, and it employs about 70% of the castries population. But the ecological risk scores under the ecosystems and the climate categories were also high due to losses and national for the mangrove coverage. We noted a number of heat events, and the number of people affected by extreme weather, and so this was confirmed by all the experts we interviewed, who really talked about the importance of mangroves and quarrels, as well as the danger of heat events to the tourism industry. While tourism is a vital part of the economy, it is also we found it was an unforeseen negative and had negative consequences. Unregulated construction and pollution from a lack of effective waste management and street damage drainage, excuse me, have negatively impacted the health of the coral coastal environment. And in addition, unregulated housing has also impacted the quality of the fresh water supply. Finally, critical infrastructure risks were driven by a lack of renewable energy generation, or dependence on oil imports, energy siding in the coastal flood plain, extensive coastal development, or road conditions and inadequate street drainage. So the profile was released. And the good news is, its findings have really been a resource in efforts to unlock additional climate investment for St. Lucia. For example, the World Economic Forum and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development for the OECD have been working with the government of St. Lucia to develop a country financing roadmap initiative. They have integrated several of the core refinings into their own work on climate impacts, including the need for economic diversification, renewable energy promotion, and the importance of ecosystem health. So this risk, this risk profile and a second one we've completed in Kingston, have really added to the kind of decision making that we see when we provide a holistic assessment, which includes financial and non-financial risk to the city level. As noted, while the COVID-19 pandemic has slowed government work, what we have found is key findings from our risk profile, risk profiles are really beginning to be incorporated into urban resilience planning. If we could move on to the next slide please. In 2021 this year, we are expanding fast. We have an additional six assessments underway in Basseteer San Kitsunevis, Chattogram Bangladesh, Dagupan Philippines, Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Lombasa, Kenya, and Suva Fiji. So the initial Corvi pilots in the Caribbean have demonstrated how Corvi can aid governments and the private sector by providing a holistic assessment of the diverse risk they face. In armed with this information decision makers can make effective priority actions and smart investments for risk reduction in coastal cities. Before cities get added to our Corvi matrix, there will be a comparative body of city level data, and it'll provide really fights into the risk these cities face around the world. So our vision is to expand Corvi to 100 coastal cities around the globe, and really have it become the gold standard for decision support and coastal resilience and adaptation. So building a comprehensive website and visualization tools to analyze for the data scores across the globe. So to finish, I just want to reiterate again the value of Corvi. At a time when financial resources are tight, the climate emergency is upon us. We have developed a tool that provides granularity on the climate vulnerabilities facing coastal cities. This type of information can help decision makers prioritize actions to target reduce climate risk, while providing a level of confidence to investors that their funds are being used wisely to improve the safety and security of city residents. So as the US government looks to upscale climate finance, as I mentioned earlier, it can use tools like Corvi to assess a climate is impacting the security of coastal cities and ensure really that its resources are being used in the most effective manner. Climate change will increasingly drive migration and urbanization is trending upward. It will exasperate those risk dynamics increasingly act as a catalyst for insecurity and potential conflict. In this environment, security experts like you need to know which popular population centers are most at risk, so that scarce resources can be really directive to ensure that we have proactive rather than reactive strategies. So I'm going to end there. I'm going to thank you for your time and I really look forward to our question and answer period. Thank you. Thank you so much Sally. I'm impressed by the index you've developed and how it's being used around the world. Before closing the presentation I would like to ask you one question. These students are our future leaders, do you have any advice you could give them regarding how they think about climate and the oceans in their future positions. Not surprising from what I just presented.  Consider the climate emergency holistically environment, energy, social and economics all have to be part of the equation. Also, we have to remember that as we think about climate change moving forward. There's such a great opportunity for innovation and new job opportunities. I mean, I really see this as, you know, we are hitting a new industrial revolution, and it's all about the new innovations around renewable energies and batteries and thinking about ways of protecting our coastal environments. I mean, think about this. The ocean and climate as I noted are really linked. And the IPC report I talked about noted all of this. And I can't tell you for years we tried so hard to help people understand that linkage. And it was really hard to do. In fact, I can remember during the, when we were in Paris for the Paris climate negotiations. We worked so hard to get one sentence for the word ocean in it into that treaty. And it wasn't until this IPC report came out that that the world kind of an experts kind of acknowledge the importance of ocean in the climate context. And ocean and coastal ecosystems, the other thing I really want to highlight, they offer a lot of nature based solutions. You know the ocean is a climate sink I think it absorbs something around 25% of the world's carbon. And our coastal wetlands the marshes the mangrove sea grasses also absorb carbon. In addition, when a storm hits they help take the punch out of the storm. The mangroves themselves they store up to five times the amount of carbon than tropical forests. So think about that when you're thinking about safeguarding nature. So it's really important that we protect these important coastal natural systems. They are valuable. In fact, another area to think about is, how should they be monetized environmental economists right now are trying to put a price on what is it, what is the price of protecting nature, what is the value, you know, countries, particularly developing countries, and the else of the, obviously as I talked about, you know, they deserve credits and incentives to protect nature. And this should be added to what we call nationally determined contributions or NDCs. And what NDCs are they really make up the United Nations balance sheet, as countries show how they're going to mitigate climate change. So, there are a lot of different areas to focus on a lot of different places to go. And I think looking to the future, not looking to the past is great for the folks who joined today and I'm so grateful for everyone's work moving forward. Well, Sally, on behalf of the Naval War College community, thank you very much for sharing your expertise and information on the Corby tool. This concludes the recorded portion of the lecture. So Laura, if you would please stop the recording here and then we will move to questions.