Hi everybody, and thank you for joining us today. In this presentation, we're going to talk a little bit about what a recovery coach is. There seems to be a lot of confusion about the difference between a coach and a sponsor and a counselor. So over the next 30 minutes or so, we're really going to try to cover what some of the differences are and how coaches, counselors, and sponsors interact differently with people who are in recovery from mental health or addictions issues. So the first thing we're going to do is obviously define recovery coaching. What is it? What is the purpose of having a recovery coach? Then we're going to move on to differentiating recovery coaches from counselors or sponsors. So we can kind of get an idea about what does the recovery coach do and why might this be a good career choice for me or why might it be something that I as a client might want. And then we'll identify the knowledge and skills that are needed in general to be a recovery coach. Recovery coaching is a form of strength-based support for persons with addictions or in recovery from other mental health and physical issues. So what does that mean? That means we start with what the person has with their strengths. What do they already do well? When this problem has occurred before, maybe not as bad, how have they tried to cope with it in a way that's worked? What have they done that works for them? It helps us when we're helping people to recover to focus on what they already know because they already know it. So all we're doing is sharpening the tools instead of teaching them how to learn a completely new tool. Now, sometimes people are going to have to learn new tools, but if they can have a foundation that's built on things that primarily they know, it's going to be a whole lot easier for them to transition into a recovery lifestyle. A recovery lifestyle is really what we're talking about when we're talking about the way of living that incorporates positive thoughts, healthy relationships, and just in general happiness. It's not any particular theoretical stance.  What do you want it to look like? That's your recovery lifestyle. Coaches assist clients in stabilizing and recovery and maintaining the gains they achieved in treatment. So people will go to treatment, 30 days, 90 days. Sometimes they'll be in IOP and spend tens of thousands of dollars trying to get clean and sober or trying to recover from clinical depression or just overwhelming anxiety.  And a lot of times there's not a gradual step down from intensive treatment to outpatient that meets a few times a week. So they go from really intensive treatment to maybe seeing a therapist once a week. That's not enough for most people to maintain their gains. They need something to touch someone, something to touch base with in between. So a recovery coach serves that purpose. The coach solidifies and integrates new coping skills and lifestyle behaviors. So as a coach, I'm going to ask somebody coming out of treatment. What did you learn in treatment that was effective for you? One of the things after working in the treatment industry for 20 some odd years, I learned was people will start out using those skills and tools that they learned in recovery. And over the first month to three months, those tools start to wane and they start falling back into old behaviors and old habits. And a coach is there to make sure people are aware of what they're doing and remember to use these new behaviors. Coaches also help people identify and address triggers in their environment. And again, I'm not just talking about addiction. I'm also talking about mental health issues like addiction or anxiety and depression because when somebody is coming out of treatment, maybe they had a suicidal attempt and they're still a little bit depressed. They're they're stable, but they're not feeling great. They don't want to walk in and see reminders of the things that made them suicidal to begin with. So we need to look for triggers. What are things that might keep a person sad or might trigger someone's anxiety and try to address those in the environment? Not everybody is going to want to remove them. And obviously we want to empower our clients to do what they want to do. Sometimes they're willing to move those pictures or those triggers or those reminders to another room so they're not confronted with them all the time. But the coach is attuned to looking around the environment and go, what is it in this environment that makes you happy? What is it in this environment that stresses you out? And what is it in this environment that might remind you that you want to use, that you want to self harm, that you don't want to live anymore? Let's identify all those things and maximize the positive and minimize the negative. A recovery coach also wants to help people learn how to coach themselves to improve their performance, to learn how to set goals. Most people really stink at setting goals. So a coach is going to teach people how to say, OK, I want to get over here. We're going to call that B. And I'm at A right now. Imagine how that works, A to B. But how do I get there? What are the steps I need to take? People think, well, I want to lose weight.  That's kind of vague. What do you mean go on a diet? You're going to count calories. You're going to go low carb. You're going to start exercising. Specifically, what are you going to do? And what are the steps you are going to take to make it a lasting change? So a coach is really trained to help people hone in on those goals and make them specific, measurable, achievable, and time limited. You can't have a goal that goes on forever. If you're constantly striving and you're never achieving that end, eventually you get tired. It's just like, really, I don't want to do this anymore. I don't want to play anymore. So a coach will teach people how to identify and maintain motivation as well as implement rewards to keep their motivation up and keep them going until they get to point B when they can take a little breather. And then maybe they set another goal and that's wonderful. But everybody needs a breather. Everybody needs a plateau every once in a while. Coaches don't diagnose any mental or physical health issues or addictions. Now, coaches are trained to be alert to the symptoms of mental health, physical health, and addiction issues and refer clients out to their primary care provider, a mental health clinician, or a substance abuse facility. If those issues start coming up, if the coach thinks that the person needs to be in treatment, then they're going to refer the person out because the coach isn't trained to handle those issues and diagnose them and really get them going. The coach is designed to keep the person going once they've got the momentum from treatment. Coaches help people maintain the gains, explore their wants, needs, and choices, and get clarity, create a change plan, and move into action. So a coach is going to say, all right, you went through treatment, you're clean now. And a lot of my clients didn't really conceptualize the difference between clean and sober. They got out of 30 days and they're like, well, I'm cured. And I'm like, not so much. After 30 days, you're clean. You still have some old behaviors and you still don't have new tools that are strong enough when life really hands you lemons. So let's look at what you want your life to look like three, six months from now, a year from now. What needs do you have in order to achieve those wants? Maybe it means you need to have a new career. Maybe it means you need to move. Maybe it means you need to change people, places, and things. We need to look at what the person needs and what they think they need. And then we want to explore the choices they're making with regard to those needs and wants. You want this to happen. You need this to achieve your goal, but you're making choices that are contradictory. So I'm wondering how you're seeing that working together. And coaches are there to point out discrepancies between choices and desires, which helps people get clarity. They start to see how their behaviors can be self-limiting, self-sabotaging or downright destructive. Then the coach says, okay, let's create a change plan. Let's walk it through from point A to point B and there's going to be 10 steps in between. You know, I just picked 10 out of the air. It's not always 10. Let's take these little steps and see what we can break it down to so you can take small movements toward the end goal. So you always feel like you've got achievements. When people feel like they've met a goal, when they feel like they've achieved something, their motivation increases. This keeps them moving in action. We want to keep them moving forward, not fast. Fast isn't sustainable. We want them to be like the tortoise and when the tortoise and the hare, just keep going and slow and steady and you'll finish the race. We want to help people identify and address triggers and vulnerabilities to create the most supportive recovery environment. So we talked about those triggers on the last slide. Help them identify things in their environment. Now it could be in their house, it could be in their workplace, it could be in their neighborhood, that trigger their desire to use, trigger their depression, trigger their anxiety, whatever their issue happens to be and figure out how to address it. Sometimes you can avoid it, sometimes you can eliminate it and sometimes you just got to deal with it and it's going to be between the coach and the client to figure out how to handle those things. My suggestion is always to have three solutions for every single trigger. So sometimes, maybe most of the time you can avoid it but there's one time you can't avoid it so how are you going to deal with it? And if the first thing you try to deal with it doesn't work, what is your backup plan? Always have a plan B and C. I like threes. And then we want to look at vulnerabilities and we're going to talk a lot about vulnerabilities throughout the coaching certification program. But vulnerabilities are basically those things that make you more likely to get depressed, to get anxious, to get stressed out or to want to use. In 12 step recovery, one of the acronyms we use is halt, hungry, angry, lonely and tired. Those are some of your vulnerabilities. But vulnerabilities are anything that make you kind of more predisposed to be cranky, irritable, tired, and that can be anything from not getting enough sleep to being sick, to being frustrated, having negative self-talk. There's a whole litany of things. The awesome thing is that vulnerabilities are really easy to address. We can look at them and go, okay, we need to figure out something to do about that. What I encourage coaches to do is to work with clients and write down vulnerabilities on flashcards or index cards. And work on eliminating one each day or each week. Sometimes it's each week because we don't want to overwhelm people. That way you're not looking at this whole list of vulnerabilities going, oh my gosh, that'll take forever to get through. Take one off the top of the stack every day and look at it, try to figure out how to address it. Improve or maintain their motivation for treatment and recovery. Motivation, as we'll learn about, is not necessarily stable. It waxes and wanes. Think about if you went on a diet. Think about if you tried to quit smoking. Think about if you made a New Year's resolution. You start out really strong and then as you start doing it, you're like, oh, this isn't as much fun or as easy as I thought it would be. Do I really want to make this change? So that's when the motivation is waning and coaches will help people figure out tools to stop that waning and kick it back into high gear again. And one of those tools is called a Decisional Balance Exercise and you can Google it if you want to. The key is the coaches there to help cheer people on and keep them going and keep them from backsliding too far. Now sometimes we may need to address the service plan and go, okay, maybe we're moving a little bit too fast. Let's slow things down so you can really feel solid in everything that you've done. And then we'll start moving forward again. And that's perfectly fine. That's not failure. That's just acknowledging your own individual needs. And then we have the ability as coaches to help people explore their options for recovery or treatment. Not everybody wants to do 12 steps. Not everybody wants to do smart recovery. Not everybody wants to go to inpatient treatment. So as coaches, we say, all right, we've identified that this might be an issue that you need to seek treatment for. What can you do? Or what are you willing to do for treatment? Likewise, some people don't even wanna go to treatment. They're like, I'm gonna do it on my own. And as coaches, we can recommend that they go see a therapist. We can recommend that they see their doctor. We can make a lot of recommendations. But ultimately, if they wanna do it through self-help support groups, that's gonna be entirely incumbent upon them. So we need to support them the best we can. And if they start struggling, then again, we go back to pointing out the wants, needs and choices again. You want to find recovery. You want to be happy. You need treatment. And the choices you're making to avoid treatment seem to be undermining you. And it's a matter of just really rationally looking at what's going on. We're not treating anything. We're motivating people to make the best choices to get them to wherever they wanna be. So what knowledge and skills do coaches need? They need knowledge of chemical and behavioral addictions, mental health conditions, and an understanding of how these conditions interact. If somebody is an alcoholic and has major depressive disorder, how do those two things interact? We know that alcohol is a depressant.  But we also know that alcohol, when it starts wearing off, increases anxiety and increases the sympathetic nervous system, which creates like an anxiety reaction. So people who are depressed might start feeling really edgy and agitated, which often leaves them to take another drink to help calm themselves down. So you can see how the depression and the anxiety may or depression in the alcohol may interact with one another. And we talk a lot about the mind-body connection and how addictions are a way of coping when nothing else has worked. Addictions are a way of making pain go away when nothing else has helped or adding pleasure when there's just nothing that does it for you anymore. And we'll also talk about why that happens. What's going on in the brain that may create a situation where you just don't feel happy anymore. Coaches also need an awareness of current best practices in treating mental health and addictive behaviors. If we're going to refer people to treatment, we need to help educate them. We need to help them see, what are your options? What do we know that works right now? And how might we steer you in the right direction? We also need to be aware of multidisciplinary resources within the community. Now that can be anything from case management to helping people get a job, to helping them find transportation, legal help, knowing what resources are out there so people can achieve their goals. If they want to live independently and be happy and healthy, but they don't have a driver's license, it's going to, and maybe they live in the country, it's going to be hard to get to work, which is going to make it harder to achieve the rest of their goals. So we wanna look at what options are out there. We wanna make sure that people have knowledge of the scope and practice and the legal and ethical guidelines for coaches. So again, just what we've been talking about, what is it that coaches can do? We can cheer people on. We can help them strengthen their coping skills. We can help them implement their relapse prevention plan. And we can refer them to treatment and work with their therapist when they get out or even when they're in treatment if their therapist is open to it in order to help them achieve and maintain the quality of life that they want. And finally, we've talked a lot about motivation. Coaches need to be aware of the concept of motivational interviewing, how to do it and how to help people enhance their own motivation. Cause sometimes we've got to do things that we don't want to do. I didn't wanna go to the gym this morning. You know, I'll be flat out about that. I love to go to the gym, but this morning I just wasn't feeling it. So I had to enhance my motivation to get my happy little butt to the gym. And one of the things that I know is I'm a lot happier and a lot more energetic and a lot more focused if I go and I work out first thing in the morning. And I knew I had a lot that I wanted to get done today. So my wants and my needs were to get some stuff done at work today. And my choice, I had the choice to either not go to the gym or to go to the gym. And I knew that going to the gym was the better choice. So, you know, implemented right then and there. Coaches also need to have the ability to establish a coaching partnership through active listening and effective communication. A lot of us don't communicate effectively. We're so busy trying to convince somebody else we're right or trying to formulate our response while they're already talking, that we don't listen, we don't hear, we don't paraphrase. So we're gonna talk a lot about how to develop rapport and engage in effective verbal and nonverbal communication. We need to talk about how to establish a safe, supportive and trusting relationship. And just like counselors and doctors and you know, hey, your best friend.  These are the rules. These are the expectations. With your best friend, you might not be quite as clinical about it. But there's generally an informed consent, whether it's in a casual setting, whether it's informal or in a formal setting where it's written. Coaches also need to know how to gain an awareness of the client's needs and wants. Cause a lot of times, if you ask a client, so what do you want? They'll look at you like you've got three heads up. I wanna stay sober. Okay, well that's great. But that's a really big goal. What do we need to do to get there? Specifically, what does that look like to you? When you're sober, what do you want to be the same in your life? And what do you want to be different? Which takes us to learning how to kind of guide the client in effective goal identification. So sober is your big goal. That's where you wanna be or happy. If somebody's coming out of the crisis center after a suicide attempt, maybe they wanna be happy. But what does that look like to them? Happy to me is very different than what happy looks like to my best friend. So what are we going to do? Coaches have knowledge of specific skills, techniques and resources to help clients achieve their goals. Mindfulness and self-awareness. Too often, we go on autopilot.  And we don't even really think throughout the day about how are we feeling? What's going on? What are our vulnerabilities? Sometimes during the middle of the day you might start feeling an ache in your neck. That's a vulnerability if it's painful enough that it's making it difficult for you to concentrate. So we wanna look at what's going on and help clients maintain mindfulness and self-awareness. We've talked already about how we're gonna help them learn how to set goals. We're gonna learn how to help them find and evaluate self-help tools. Not every tool works for every person. It's not like when you go into a, well maybe it is. Let me take an example and try to make a metaphor out of it. When you go into Home Depot, there are certain screws for certain jobs. There are certain screws for sheet metal. There are certain screws for wood. There are certain screws for concrete. They're all screws. Just like you have certain self-help tools that are gonna work for some people and not others. So you wanna make sure to help educate your client about what works for them and help them understand that just because something doesn't work for them doesn't mean they're broken or there's something wrong with them. It just means it's not for them. I personally don't like artichokes. Nothing wrong with artichokes, nothing wrong with people who like artichokes. I just don't like them. Helping them understand that that's really what we're looking at is personal differences. We wanna help clients find recovery support. As coaches, we wanna be there. We wanna cheer them on but we don't wanna be their only cheerleader. We don't wanna be their only social support because that creates a dependence on us. And then if we're not there and they have a crisis, they could crash and burn. We wanna make sure our clients have a healthy, sober, stable support system. A lot of S's there. It's important in long-term recovery because we don't want clients to have to employ us for the rest of their natural lives. I mean, from a financial point, it would be great. From an ethical standpoint, no, definitely not. We wanna help people through the initial part of their journey, learn how to master the skills so they can do it henceforth and forevermore. Do they need to come back every once in a while for a tune-up sometimes? But most of the time not. If we do our job right, we teach them how to find the resources they need. And then finally, we do need to know about psychotropic medications, your antidepressants, anti-anxiety, anti-psychotics and the medications that are used to assist in addiction treatments such as Suboxone, Methadone, and Antibuse. There are a lot of others. But obviously, we're not prescribing these. However, if our clients are struggling to stay sober, if they're struggling with anxiety, if they're struggling with depression and nothing seems to be getting them out of the fog, and they're willing, not everybody's willing to look at psychotropic as an option, but if they're willing to look at it, then let's educate them. Let's show them where to educate themselves about these different medications and then encourage them to go talk to their doctor. Initially, coaches meet with clients who've completed or are undergoing treatment for an addiction or a mental health issue. So we're not generally their first stop. They may have tried, they may be in AA or they may be in some other program where they're trying to self-help and self-treat, but they're in some sort of treatment. And they come to us and they go, I need somebody that's gonna be my cheerleader, that's gonna keep me on task, that's gonna help me apply these things. And the coach goes, score, I'm right there for you. We review their current treatment and or relapse prevention plan in order to support them in achieving their goals. So we look at what are you doing right now to achieve your goal? And what are you doing right now to prevent relapse? Again, depression, anxiety or addiction, we're not discriminating between mental health and addictive disorders. Help them figure out what's working and increase that, intensify that, broaden that and help them figure out what may be on there that's just not doing it for them and get rid of it. If it's not working, either modify it so it can work or get rid of it because it's just frustrating the person. And then we'll help them identify and address the triggers and vulnerabilities in their current environment. This is all done in the first meeting or two with a client to help them get sort of a roadmap. We wanna help them develop that roadmap early on and then we can go on the journey together. On a day-to-day basis, the coach checks in with clients to prompt them to do a mindfulness scan. I have my clients do a mindfulness scan at every meal. It's really fast, really easy. They check in and they go, how am I feeling physically? How am I feeling emotionally? How am I feeling mentally? You know, am I feeling foggy headed, negative, irritable? Those are all things they can identify. We just talked about it in less than 10 seconds. If they think about it, it could take 30, but it's not something that's going to take five, 10, 15 minutes. It's something they can do really fast, easy-peasy, and then they have a plan. If they figure out that they're struggling that day, what are you gonna do about it?  And the coach can say, okay, you know, what have you done before when this has happened, that's worked? Or what is it that you're needing right now? Helping people identify the fact that, you know, sometimes you just gotta go, I'm out. I cannot get all this accomplished today. On a day-to-day basis, the coach also reviews what clients are doing on their own relapse prevention plan. So we wanna make sure they're still using those skills and tools, and focusing on changing the behaviors they need to, that they identified when they were in treatment. And we'll help them monitor their progress toward meeting their personal development goals, whatever those are. You know, like I said, a lot of times it'll start out way too broad, like being happy or being sober, or hey, both, happy and sober, score. But that breaks down to a lot of different sub-goals that we need to help them track. And I encourage coaches to help people identify a manageable number of goals for people to work on at a time. If they start trying to change everything in their world at once, they're not going to succeed. They're just not. It's, I haven't ever seen it happen in 20 years. Identify two, three things that they wanna start working on. As they start working on those, if they've still got more time and energy, add one more. But don't take on 15 goals at once, because it's just not possible to focus on that many changes. Change takes effort, end time. But effort, it's exhausting. The coach helps people focus on the present, maintain their motivation to prevent vulnerabilities. I keep talking about these vulnerabilities.  You know, these are not hard things to do. Stay healthy by washing your hands, taking your vitamins, trying to reduce your stress. Some days there's going to be stress. That's a vulnerability. Some days there are going to be things you don't wanna do. You have to do them. So you can't prevent that. How do you prevent it from triggering you to relapse? And part of that is identifying what you can and cannot control. When clients encounter distress, coaches assist them in identifying the cause of the distress in the present moment.  What is it that's causing that rage at this very moment? And a lot of times people look around and go, well, I'm parked on the shoulder, on the side of the road and I'm safe and nothing. And the coach would go, okay. So is it worth the energy and the emotional upset to continue to nurture this rage? And even if you caught up to that person, A, would it be the safe and smart thing to do? B, would they care? And C, is it going to change anything? No. So the coach can help people walk through the logical consequences. We can help them identify what tools they have to deal with whatever the distress is right now. When you've gotten cut off in traffic before, and you know, people do and it's irritating. What do you do about it? How do you handle it? How do you diffuse that stress? And then we can help them create a game plan for using tools to address this situation now and in the future. So you know, if they're struggling and they call you and you go, okay, what tools work? You identify some that work or figure out some new ones. And then you make a plan for what to do whenever this happens, henceforth and forever more. And then the person will start to learn how to develop their own game plans, if you will. During a stressful situation, the coach is also a coach. We help clients think clearly. We help them get out of that emotional mind. We go, okay, slow down. Let's figure out exactly what we're dealing with here. We identify what the clients are doing well because a lot of times when clients are in distress, they're focusing on everything that's going wrong. And we can focus on the fact that they're still sober, they're still alive. They called you. Those are all three strengths right there. And there's probably a lot of other stuff. So coaches are there to kind of balance out the negative and help de-escalate the person. And we help them identify potential relapse traps and encourage clients to address them. If we see somebody has been burning the candle at both ends for too long, you know, sometimes you do it for a day or two, but if you're doing it for a week or two or a month, eventually you're gonna get tired. And the more tired you get, the more foggy you get, the more frustrated you get. And your neurotransmitters start getting out of whack, which means your mood starts to go down. So it's really, really important that coaches point out what they see as potential relapse traps. And after a stressful situation, the coach and client can review the game tape. And what I mean by that is when you meet in your weekly, you know, coaching meetings, it's time to go over the game tape and say, tell me about the stressful situations that happened this week. And how did you handle them? What worked, what didn't, what do you hope to do better the next time? And then we also wanna review, like coaches do, we wanna review what you did really well. Because that is important. It's vital in maintaining motivation and maintaining optimism. So people can say, yeah, I did that. Okay, I had a little slip, but yeah, I did all those other things too. Score for me. So John's mother was an angry and emotionally abusive alcoholic when he was growing up. He never felt like he could get the one thing he desperately wanted, which was her approval. As he grew up, his relationships and self-worth became dependent on getting other people's approval because he never felt good enough. This caused constant anxiety and depression that he numbed with alcohol. He went to treatment and started to understand why he felt the way he did. Today, John is getting ready for a visit with his mother and is getting progressively stressed and wanting to drink. So what's the coach's role here? He's already been to treatment. He understands the underpinnings of his problem.  So what's the coach's role? The coach would help John identify what it is about her visit was causing him distress and what tools he could best use to deal with this situation. So if he's already gearing up for her to be insulting, okay, I hear that you're doing that. So if that happens, if she comes in and the first thing she says is, wow, you couldn't have even cleaned up before I came, how is he gonna handle it? What can he do to remind himself of his own value and how can he deal with hurtful comments to prevent a relapse? How can he kind of let it roll up like water off a duck's back? What can you do leading up to the visit and during the visit to best take care of himself and prevent vulnerabilities? So not drinking, not having alcohol in the house, trying to get plenty of rest, having some sort of social support to kind of buffer between him and his mother, maybe have some other activities that they can do so they're not just sitting there in the living room staring at each other going, what can I say? There's a lot of things that they can brainstorm to do in order to prevent him from being stressed out before he gets there, before she gets there, and in order to prevent him from ramping up his stress and just winding tighter and tighter and tighter while she's there. Now the coach would not delve into helping John work through his mommy issues. This is for the therapist. What we wanna do is help him figure out what tools do you have to deal with this situation in the present moment so you don't relapse. During the visit, the coach would regularly check in with John and get a status update, like half time at a game. When we would have clients go out from residential on to furlough, we would have them call in every four to eight hours depending on how long they'd been in treatment, just to check in. So we knew they were doing okay. We had a code word that they could use if they needed us to come pick them up. We wanna provide reinforcement for what John is doing well when he calls. You have to find something. Even if he is starting to melt down, we need to get an understanding of what's going on, but also an understanding of okay, what's going well. Again, he called and that's positive. He's doing the next right thing. He wants to stay happy and sober. What else is he doing? And then we wanna help him regroup and adjust his plans for anything that's not going well. Like I said, if she's sitting in the living room and they're just staring at each other and she's nitpicking, maybe he needs to make a suggestion of let's go out to dinner or let's go do something. That way there's a diversion. After the visit, the coach and John would review what happened, identify what was done well, address anything John wants to do differently, and then complete a mindfulness scan to ensure John has no lingering vulnerabilities. What do I mean by that? We talk about everything. We decompress, we do the after action, whatever you wanna call it. But then before he walks out of that room, I wanna know that he's calm, cool, and collected. So I want him to do a mindfulness scan and tell me if there's anything else that's still nagging at him. Or if there's anything else that's still just causing him pain, emotional or physical, so we can deal with it and we can address it. He may have gotten all knotted up and have a migraine from having mom there. How are you gonna handle that in a healthful way? In order to help clients achieve their goals in life and recovery, coaches need a vast array of knowledge, including symptoms of mental health and addiction issues, causes of mental health and addiction issues, ways to prevent mental health and addiction issues, because prevention and relapse prevention are kinda one in the same. They need to know adult learning theory because we're gonna help clients learn new tools so we need to know how to help them learn. And yeah, actually there are steps to it. We need to have effective communication skills, know how to motivate people and know how to help people learn how to set good achievable goals. The top ways excellent coaches work, they create a safe place for clients to be and explore themselves. I don't want John or whoever it is to try to put on airs to convince me that they're something they're not. I wanna know who John is because theoretically and hopefully all coaches accept people as they are for who they are. We all have foibles. So accepting people with their strengths and their weaknesses is a key to coaching. We wanna increase the awareness of clients and their situation through active listening and effective communication. We wanna understand what's going on.  They've been in their head for 20, 30, 40 some odd years. We wanna understand their perspective because the way I view something and the way somebody else views something is often really different. We wanna help them define their goals, desires and hopes. Not mine, not what I want for them, not what their therapist wants for them, not what their lawyer wants for them. What do they want? Then help them develop plans to achieve and maintain those goals, following up by regularly reviewing and refining the goals. Because as you go along your road trip, think about going on a road trip across the country.  Same thing is true with goal setting. You're going to hit little snags, little bumps and maybe that's because life has changed or maybe because it's something you didn't plan on. Whichever, you need to figure out how to adjust it and it's just refining it a little bit. We wanna help clients align their values with their goals and their style in the world and we're gonna talk about that individualization. Not every goal is right for every client and not every intervention works for every person. So ultimately, we're being an effective resource for clients in every way we possibly can. And through so doing, we model effective lifestyle management and authenticity. We wanna be authentic. We wanna be genuine with our clients. They're gonna sense if we're blowing smoke. So we want to be as honest and open about what's going on without being judgmental towards them because our job is to help them be who they want to be. Again, not who we want them to be.


And now, an ignoble prize favorite moment, with Kuyoshi Furusawa, unofficial winning speech done in Japan. In 2017, Dr. Yoshizawa won the biology prize for his study of Swapchintelia cave insect. He is a big fan of the ignoble prizes, but unfortunately he couldn't attend the ceremony since he was in the cave. Our university, Hokkaido University had a special science event with him following the ignoble format like welcome speech, paper airplane deluge, and imitation trophies, and his speech was excellent. He explained his study and gave sweets to Ms. Sweetie Poo. Oops, I forgot to give him this 10 trillion Zimbabwe dollars. Well, I'll take this one. It's not money anymore after all. The ignoble prizes honor achievements that make people laugh, then think. This historic ignoble favorite moment video stars Kiyoshi Furusawa, who helped organize many ignoble prize events in Japan. The 30th first annual ignoble prize ceremony will be webcast September 17th, 2020. Details about the ignoble prizes can be found at www.improbable.com


Good afternoon and welcome to the cost of inaction climate threats and solutions for Arizona a special presentation by the issue Global Institute of sustainability and innovation and the environmental defense fund. It is my pleasure to introduce Dave White today, please take over. Thank you, Jason. I'm very pleased to introduce Mayor Kate Gallego to provide our opening comments. Mayor Kate Gallego is the second elected female mayor in Phoenix's history and the youngest big city mayor in the United States. She graduated from Harvard University and earned her MBA from the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania. Before being elected to the Phoenix City Council, Mayor Gallego worked on economic development for the local utility salt river project. Mayor Gallego is focused on three key policy areas during her time in office, diversifying the economy, strengthening infrastructure investment and working to make Phoenix a leader in sustainability. And this priority on sustainability is one of the main reasons that we're very proud at Arizona State University to partner with Mayor Gallego. So, and I should also say that in my part time I serve as the chair of the water and wastewater rate advisory committee, working with the water services department city manager's office and and mayor and council, and it's been my great pleasure to work alongside Mayor Gallego and her amazing team at the city of Phoenix so thank you so much for joining us Mayor and we appreciate your welcoming comments. Wonderful Dave thank you for the great introduction thank you to ASU and the Environmental Defense Fund for convening us for this important conversation, leading on sustainability is important to me but it's also important to the future of our city. It's a great day for your service, leading our water advisory panel, and I'm pleased to share with you in recent polling, the number one issue that Phoenix voters agree on is securing our water future. We all know we have to get this right we are a desert city, as we can innovate in the area of climate change and sustainability, we can thrive. That's one of the reasons we're here today, climate change is a huge challenge but I hope also an opportunity for us to lead the way, I think, some of the folks here today, and many of you who are signed into the webinar are among the folks who are going to come up with the solutions and so many of them will come from Arizona. As you heard a little bit about it's an issue of personal importance to me. I hold an environmental degree from my undergraduate background in my original involvement with the city of Phoenix was serving on the art, then known as environmental quality commission. So it's now renamed and gotten sustainability added to the name of the commission. It's a degree in environmental resold that people didn't have sustainability degrees when I began and I don't feel like I'm that old, but that shows how much this field has evolved and how many things have changed and improved. When I first got involved at the city of Phoenix, we would talk about three kilowatts of solar and pat ourselves on the back and now we're about to cut the ribbon on our 50th project and now we're talking more in the 10 megawatt range and having multiple projects so it's been neat to see the growth rate, how much more we were able to do how much more efficiently and that gives me optimism about solutions, which we need to have here are voters in 2015 voted for a general plan and Phoenix saying that we would be the most sustainable desert city in the world. So high marching orders but I think that we are up for a great challenge and we hope to lead in a variety of different areas to get there whether circular economy, we have some folks at the city of Phoenix who are globally known as leaders in the circular economy. We hope to continue to invest in preserve our sonoran desert such an ecologically diverse and important place and I got to tell you as someone who's spent much of 2020 hiking with her four year old and spending time outside I am so grateful that Phoenix is the city with more acres of parks than any other in the United States because we've needed the great outdoors as we've navigated the pandemic. The city of Phoenix is updating our climate action plan so we've had one for quite a while but now we are moving on and trying to get more ambitious to to match what's happening in our community so many of our large companies now have ambitious climate action plans. Our utilities are moving forward with net zero goals. And so we are going to step up and do more as we talk about accelerating our net zero emission goals from 2060 to 2050 or perhaps with the innovations we're going to talk about today even sooner. We're going to talk even more at the city of Phoenix about continued outreach and equity work, understanding that we need to involve our entire community as we move forward with that climate action plan. People are policy and we're lucky to have great leaders at the city of Phoenix who are moving forward. Mark Hartman from our team is going to be providing you an update as part of the panel. And we're hoping to get even more support there. I'm a believer that people are policy. And this year in the budget I'm a strong supporter of our new heat office, which is about a $2.8 million investment with 14 additional positions to address climate change and heat readiness. This includes cool corridors program which implements tree plantings and heat mitigation strategies in our most vulnerable neighborhoods aided by the wonderful research from Arizona State University including our walk shed mapping tool which helps us target those investments where they will help the most. We do have a lot of work to do in that area the number of people we've lost in our community to heat is too high and unacceptable. And I hope that we can again invest in insolutions. The city of Phoenix has put out requests for proposals for $14 million in facilities to address those who are most heat vulnerable and we expect some really great innovative proposals that will put heat preparation and readiness at the forefront so that for those requests will come out at the end of April if anyone is interested in applying in that area. Our heat office is not yet officially approved so it does have to go through our full budget offer our budget proposal and if you want to join us on May 18 that our budget meeting and so show support for climate change tree investments heat readiness. We certainly welcome you at our 230 budget meeting, which you can participate from via WebEx. While I'm talking with folks from ASU I just want to say a huge thank you for your partnership and making us a smarter, more equitable and more climate focused city. It's not just a walk shed tool but helping us with measuring the impact of our programs whether it be our cool pavement program, or how we manage our water supply. Dave's been very involved with with that. Thank you for joining us and other ASU researchers thank you for your partnership it's not going to be easy to meet meet beyond those are current goals for climate change and net zero is ambitious but we want to make it. We want to make it there and do innovative partnerships along the way. We want to hear more about those partnerships from Mark Hartman from our solar work to electric vehicles to more, and we are very excited to just be getting started with this. We got to we have a lot of work to do but with the folks who are involved today and participating I'm very optimistic that Phoenix can lead the way. Thank you for rising to the challenge of climate change and sustainability, and thank you for helping Phoenix with our many investments back to you Dave. Thank you mayor for those comments and thank you to you and to everyone at the city. You have emerged as a national and truly a global leader in climate action and sustainability and you've mentioned only a few of the initiatives that I know you and your team members are working on. Thank you for example in your, your leadership in the C 40 cities network and we could go on and on about the initiatives, you know, Phoenix and our region has the opportunity to demonstrate how a city can be sustainable and resilient. It can be economically prosperous, equitable, just and inclusive, and really provide examples to cities in the US and around the world so we're very proud to partner with you and appreciate your efforts and look forward to hearing more from Mark in particular, as well as Jenny and LG about the partnerships that we can create together, moving forward to advance your ambitious agenda so thank you again, Mayor Gallego for joining us. Now I would like to invite our panelists to join to turn on your cameras as our panelists are joining. I'd like to remind all of our attendees that you are free to add questions through the Q&A button on the zoom link on the zoom channel. And that way we can compile the question so please put the questions in the chat in the Q&A section as we go. And that way we'll compile those and we'll ask those questions as we get to the Q&A section. And so I'd like to now introduce just briefly our panelists and then we're going to ask each panelist to give an extended introduction and a highlight of two to three of the most critical points initiatives efforts that are underway as we all collectively attempt to address these climate threats and our focus today is really on solutions. We know there's a significant cost to inaction, and what we'd like to do today is focus on those solutions that we're collectively implementing through our partnerships to address the risks. And so our panel today includes myself. I'm the moderator. My name is Dave White. I'm the Deputy Director of the Global Institute of Sustainability and Innovation at Arizona State University. And I'm pleased also to welcome Mark Hartman, who is the Chief Sustainability Officer with the City of Phoenix, as well as Dr. Jennifer Vanoss or Jenny. And she is a professor, assistant professor in the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University. And we're also pleased to be joined by LG Holstein, who is Senior Director for Strategic Planning with Environmental Defense Fund, EDF. And LG, you can go ahead and turn on your camera. And that'd be great. And so what I'd like to do is to go through the panelists and we'll have LG kick us off to set the stage. Talk a little bit about the challenges that we faced to share a little bit about what the costs of inaction will be, and to describe the priorities for EDF and your goals in partnering, both at the federal level, but also at the state and local level. So LG, please take it away. Thank you very much. And hi, everybody. It's great to be back with you. I recall being at ASU in person. And I had hoped we would deal with the with this pandemic in time for me to get back there but unfortunately, we're now all learning how to do this so forgive the backdrop of my messy room here and the cat may walk across the keyboard. But I do want to start by mentioning just a personal a quick little personal story this happened 20 years ago. I was working in the government at the time and I went to Alaska, and I was with some scientists and we were up on the tundra.   And I could feel the ice of the permafrost that I've heard about my whole life, but I could also feel that it was melting the permafrost was melting. And all of that means in terms of the indigenous people who live there, the shift in the whole biology of the area. The many consequences of that for releasing a carbon into the atmosphere that for so many centuries have been held well over those last couple of decades since I had that incredible personal experience of course, the science of measuring the impacts of climate change global warming has become so much clearer where almost virtually every field of science has been validating what the what we have long feared was happening with the impacts on our planet on animals and of course on our communities and of humans. And so we now know that climate change is driving growing amounts of drought and all that comes with it in terms of crop failures and wildfires. It's also driving the weird and wild weather of hurricanes happening with greater intensity. Even thunderstorms carrying dumping more water more of our precipitation, our farmers tell us is happening in intensive amounts in short bursts, rather than the kind of longer extended sprinkling that's so much better for the crops. And of course we've learned a lot about the impacts on human health and the environment, including the disproportionate impacts in particular for those communities that are less equipped to deal with extreme weather, or may live in places like airports or around airports or something where the impacts of localized pollution are greater, are greater for those individuals and families. Listening to the mayor. I'm reminded as those of us who work in Washington DC need to be reminded from time to time that even if the problems that we are describing are national and international in scope. The solutions are local and the solutions and we talked about this at the last ASU conference on this subject. The solutions have to be tailored to the circumstances, including the political environment let's face it, but also the economic circumstances, and the attitudes of the, and inspiration of people at the state and local level, if we're going to actually bring about the kind of change that we need and I have total confidence that we do have the greatest brains in the world at our institutions to be brought to bear on these problems and that we can bring about the solutions we need. But time is of the essence and that's one of the other messages we're getting from the scientists is that we have so little time to take the action we need in order to start bending that curve of climate changing greenhouse gas emissions downward. And that's why we're very enthusiastic at Environmental Defense Fund, the opportunities that we have working with the new Biden administration, which is coming forward with infrastructure proposals and stimulus proposals that take care of our long standing needs like roads and bridges, but also taking care of if you will the new infrastructure. How do we get our steel plants our cement plants to be more energy efficient to emit fewer greenhouse gas emissions. How can we go after the low hanging fruit, which is the transportation sector, and really electrify that. So we're not putting unnecessary amounts of emissions into the air, and other types of solutions that are going to cost money. Yes, but we'll also, I think, rely upon the local circumstances and initiatives of people like Mayor Gallego who has described some of the some of the efforts that are underway there in the Phoenix area so all of that is specifically important. I'm going to mention just a couple of things very quickly and just. Why don't we, why don't we, I want to come back to you on a several of these key points that you've mentioned including the infrastructure question and some of EDF critical priorities. Let's move through just the brief introductions with the other panelists and then we'll circle back and hit on some of those key priorities for EDF. Good. Okay, thanks. So next I'm going to move for the for the extended introduction to Mark Hartman with city of Phoenix and so Mark can you just tell us a little bit about your office your work. And then as we cycle through and we'll come back and talk specifically in depth about some of your priorities. Sure, and hi and welcome and good to be here in this conversation. So yeah as teach the stability officer for the city. The goal is to really fulfill with the mayor outline to be how does Phoenix become the most sustainable desert city on the planet. And I like the reference of LG who who made reference to local action, you know cities are through these actions rehearsing our future that they are able to try and pilot and do and see these practical solutions. So interesting as we talk about, you know, as a unique role, although I'll speak, you know, in general term cities that we talked to, there's many actions I'll talk mostly about Phoenix here but cities around the globe are doing some pretty cool things. But our unique role is certainly on the desert side and you know some some say oh what do you city shouldn't even be in a desert but actually, you know, desert are actually we're naturally desert adapted not only the trees are desert adapted the people are desert adapted a lot of our functions. You know, so, you know the idea of the extreme conditions of a desert well, you know, adversity has its own gifts, and it really does teach us things about how to do things differently. I would say though that, you know, with historic disparities it hasn't actually haven't equitably done applied those solutions throughout our city so I think the real focus has been in the last few years rightly so that we need to actually for those disproportionately affected we need to actually provide a disproportionate amount of investments in those communities, particularly cooling solutions and ones to actually make it, you know, as the earth is turning up the temperature, where, you know, we certainly will even have greater challenges in the future so you know but I, we're really fortunate for ASU kind of the epicenter of research related to heat. It is really, you know, we're so benefiting from being in the proximity of that research and being the recipients of that and it's really catalyzed where it was, I would say if I can, you know, say historically it was somewhat more on the academic side it's really moved the practical. And so working very closely with one of Jenny one of the co panelists working with her and phone calls with her about specific solutions in the specific schools and with with others on the faculty about solutions and even around the cool pavements that we're putting Phoenix now has more cool pavement than any other city in the world. So we're talking with C 40 cities around the globe and talking about how we're doing it and able to do that much more quickly than than typically in historically so really a lot of exciting actions, we're doing relating to cooling. And one last reference is just, we've mentioned the climate action plan and traditionally climate action plans are very much focused on just specifically looking at greenhouse gas emissions but for us we say hey climate's one of the five seas and our climate very much related to heat and water and and greenhouse gas emissions along with that. So our solutions is going to be a specific heat section related to that so many of the solutions we're talking about today will be things that will feature and set some ambitious goals related specifically to those.  Thanks Mark really appreciate that and a perfect segue for Dr venas to talk about her work so why don't you tell us, Jenny, what, what do you do at ASU what is a what is a professor of sustainability study and and how do you work with the city to advance the use inspired science as we talk about at ASU so thank, thank you Mark for recognizing that that the university, you know, in our charter we talk about taking fundamental responsibility for the economic social cultural environmental well being of the communities we serve so that's part of our our mission, part of our charter and it's, it's great to hear that that that's being recognized by our partners. Yeah, thank you so much Dave. Hi everyone, as Dave mentioned I'm assistant professor in the school sustainability. My background is in atmospheric and environmental sciences and I predominantly focus on the impacts of extreme heat and air quality to urban populations and really focus on those who may be more vulnerable to those impacts and that ranges from person to person. And it's extremely energizing to work at a place like ASU were smack dab in the middle of the hottest city in the country, and one of the hottest in the world, and one of the fastest growing counties. And I think that when we're able to have this living laboratory and have centers like the urban climate research center at ASU, we're really able to pull together a lot of different disciplinary experts to be able to solve some of these problems, and work hand with different cities around such as the city of Phoenix, and other community groups. So, bottom line up front, a few points that I like to hit and I'd be happy to expand on these as we move forward. It's just related to extreme heat all heat caused to deaths are preventable. There's a lot we can do about it there's a lot we know. And I think we need to move towards a zero vision on heat deaths in the city. Extreme heat and air pollution are problems now, they've been problems in the past, they exist now. And I don't, I think that we want to make sure we recognize that they are issues that we need to deal with now, and not couch them only in climate change because it might make people then assume we let's deal with it in 50 years, where we know we're losing lives now we have extreme numbers of hospitalizations due to heat related illness now. I think that's a really important point to get across and the last point I'll mention is just, there's a lot that we know that we can do now and take action and how we can adapt and how our communities can adapt. But working with communities as part of that working with the cities, and really getting boots on the ground to do some of this. It's a collective effort to really understand these cascading or compounding impacts that we see in cities, and that we are seeing increase. So I think it's important to understand that but also important to understand that what we know a lot there's still a lot that we do not know around these complex topics and therefore, you know, being able to do this research in a really applied manner with broader impacts can make a really big difference and now and into the future. I really appreciate those comments and, you know, a couple threads are emerging just from the introductory notes and, and one is the focus on urgent action now right climate change is not a distant challenge it is a challenge that we're facing. And as the United States National Climate Assessment concludes that the climate crisis is affecting American communities now. But American communities are also responding they're responding in ways to make their cities more resilient, more economically vital, more just and equitable. And so this is some not a future distant challenge this is a challenge that we must face now, but it's also a challenge that gives us great opportunity, great opportunity for innovation, great opportunity to advance on a number of fronts if we if we address some of these challenges will improve the quality of life for our citizens across the board. So I'd like to return now to LG and pick up on something that you noted in your initial opening comments LG and that is, there's, you know, unprecedented attention, proposed investment and policy discussion at the federal level. Now to address the climate crisis. So what are some of EDF's most critical priorities, and how from your perspective could federal activity support state and local action as you mentioned that the state and local level is often where these solutions are developed and implemented, where, you know, mayors are focused on, on solving problems and serving their communities they're close to their constituents, the federal agencies can provide investment guidance stimulation. So what are your priorities and working with the federal government and how can that help us at the state and local level. And there's no doubt about the fact that solving this problem of climate change is going to take everyone playing a role. Some, some of the things that need to be done are sort of uniquely federal responsibilities, but others are things that will only work if they can be managed, carried out and tailored at the local level as I said in my opening remarks. Let me give you an example of the first category what should the feds be doing. We believe that we need more investment in clean energy research and development. So whether that's bringing the cost of renewable energy down even more it's already the cheapest new form of electricity generation, but we can do more to bring those costs down more and we can expand our renewable energy generation for example into the offshore areas, as they're planning to do off the east coast. So research and development. That's an important thing and another aspect of that is, how do you decarbonize big industries like cement and steel. We want those industries to thrive. We just want them to be cleaner, and we need research and development sponsored by the federal government to including working through our university systems around the country to find the best ways to do that. Also, carbon capture and sequestration carbon removal. These are technologies that help us manage the emissions that come from the fossil fuels we're still using and that we will obviously continue to use for some, for some period of time. So that's the research and development component. What are some things that are in the on the federal agenda, if you will, and I'm here citing some things that President Biden has talked about but people on both sides of the aisle have talked about. There's just a couple of them. One of them is transportation, I call that the low hanging fruit, a few minutes to go. We really need to do something to electrify our transportation, the major US auto companies are saying this is where they want to go this is where they want to go. But we're not going to have electric vehicles in this country. And we're not going to, we're not going to be leading the world in electrical vehicle electric vehicle production, if we don't have charging stations. And so we need about 500,000 charging stations all around the country, and we need federal funds to make that kind of new infrastructure investment. So while we fix up the highways and bridges. Let's be sure that the rest stations have charging stations for rapid charging. That's going to be critical to electrifying transportation, and that's something the federal government should be should be helping to pay for, just as they did in the original construction of the interstate highway system back in the 1950s. Two other quick examples. One is school buses, you have a young population in the Phoenix area, and you have growing school systems, and you have hundreds of school buses on the road every day. And even though diesel fuel has gotten somewhat cleaner in recent years, the air quality inside a diesel fuel school bus can be five, six, seven, eight times worse than it is outside. And so we're essentially trapping our kids in these buses using old and dirty technology, when we already know and already have on the market, electric school buses, they cost a little bit more at the front end, but they save money in the long term because their operation and maintenance costs are lower. This is particularly true. If, as they're doing here in Virginia, if you were to link the school buses to the electric grid. So you have an electric school bus, it goes about its routes during the day. It's completely clean. And at the end of the, at the end of the day, it hooks up to the electric grid and provides that battery support just at the time of day that would be hottest time of day most people are turning on their air conditioning or maybe they're starting dinner. That sort of thing and so the electricity use in the home is going to go up, and you need more electric power at that time and guess what the batteries in the school buses can provide that. So at night, when the demand is dropped down again the school buses recharge to work the next day. That's something that we're very excited about seeing done at the federal level, and will be a priority for EDF and other organizations in working with Congress in the coming months. And one last one really does relate directly to the kind of economic growth engine that has been Arizona story in recent years. And that is a new federal green bank or green energy accelerator some people are calling it. And the basic idea is to provide and Joe Biden is proposed $30 billion for this to create an initial infusion of capital that would be available for entrepreneurs for business people for local governments let's say in Arizona on a totally voluntary basis. Let's say you build a you want to build a new warehouse, and you want to put it put on top of that warehouse solar solar arrays in order to help deal with the people needs of that building. You can take a loan or get a loan guarantee from this new federal green bank that we're hoping will pass the Congress as well. And then, as the loans are repaid, that money goes back into the bank like a revolving fund and becomes available for the next project. And so this puts capital into the system. It provides a place where local entrepreneurs and governments can go to get funding in order to finance these green energy projects. Well, all at the same time using the, the guidelines that a banking, a regular bank would use to be sure that it's a project that really is going to pay off in the end, and going to bring benefits to everyone. So that's an example of two or three things that I think are high priorities as we go forward and real opportunities for bringing both parties together in Congress to provide the funds to get going on some of these activities. Great. Thanks, Elgin. We'll pick up on a couple of those threads, I think, in our discussion here, especially, you know, talking about working with specifically with some of our most important and vulnerable populations, including school children, some many of much of Jenny's work has focused recently on building up resilience to heat impacts among schools, and also just the importance of integrated solutions, you know, you talk about the energy transition. For example, this is not simply a technical challenge of, you know, building new electrification capacity this is integrating across, you know, economic social and technological systems and that's one of the focal areas of the sustainability perspective that Jenny and Mark and others bring. So Mark, let me turn to you, as you've described the city is implementing a wide range of sustainability solutions to address the climate crisis, many of them are discussed in the updated climate action plan. Which we invite all of our participants to weigh in on there's a link in the chat to to the current version of the plan and an opportunity for your comment and feedback. One of the major found challenges we face is extreme heat. So maybe what can you narrow in what is the city doing to mitigate urban heat, and how are you partnering across your, your city departments and with universities and others to address this challenge. Certainly. And if actually I can just do one quick shout out to LG and just say, you couldn't hear me because I was muted but I was actually clapping you know I hearing these what he's advocating for at the national level so yeah that's great that people are we each have our roles so great he's doing that for us the cool, you know the idea of cool corridors has been is really resonating and people are saying yes this is what we desire here in the desert is we actually, you know asked people, you know, if there was a cool pathway from where would you walk more often than you do now and 86% of people said yes, you know so it's really something people go I'd love to have that and love to have Google maps give me the walking path of the most shaded route. Our cool corridor concept is very, very much in partnership with ASU and many of the research teams there. This idea of like a mile long corridor that goes in vulnerable neighborhoods that has, you know, basically 60 to 75% shade canopy through both structured and trees, and even on street corners shading. So to really I think the cool corridor concept and even could be supplemented by things like our cool pavement. You know the cool pavement technology really interesting is just how it can actually lower the neighborhood temperatures and really be a benefit particularly the biggest benefit is not so much right at midday but actually in the evening to be much cooler. That's really where you really see the benefit of that. So, so certainly, you know, and I think I think a greatest outcome of all of this as we talk about. Sure, yes, it's important to cities cooler and all these things but I think that a real what's not talked about much is the social cohesion that comes with that when people are out in able to walk more and able to be in their neighborhoods and find out who their neighbors are that actually is the most beautiful thing of all like that's really isn't that what we're that's a really side benefit that's not we can look at it from a scientific point of view and maybe kind of forget that beautiful human side. But you know we've gone away from the front court societies that you know what the you know where everyone was on their front porch in the evenings and visited you see a little bit of that in some neighborhoods in Phoenix but not so much but you know it's the whole idea of people being out and being walking more and biking more and finding other people are and really creates social cohesion I mean we. There's been a lot of dis cohesion lately, socially, and I think that that the benefit of this actually just recognizing and meeting one another because a real important aspect of this. Absolutely. Thank you mark and I'm sure the social scientists on the call and at the university will very much appreciate that commentary about the importance of the social cohesion the social capital that is built that allows people to create bonds with their community members, and that is an important benefit of the investments that we're making in the heat mitigation that you described and I want to just point out that we've shared in the chat if you want to learn more about the city of Phoenix's climate actions, specifically about the cool pavement programs and other programs. There was a series PBS peril and promise in which Mayor Gallego spoke with Frank says enough PBS about specifically that program, and also featured one of our students from ASU a master school of sustainability, a Dora Shortridge who studies with Dr. Vanoss and and Dora will actually be defending her master's thesis in about an hour. Focus on exactly these kinds of challenges so with that will will turn it over to to Jenny so Jenny your research, you know specifically aims working with the urban climate research center at ASU and other partners across the university and with the city. You specifically look at strategies to mitigate extreme heat impacts, and you often focus on vulnerable population, including school children. So how does extreme heat impact, you know different communities in the valley. And what do you find to be some of the biggest challenges in conveying the urgency, or the seriousness of this problem. Yeah, thanks Dave. So I think I'm, I'm glad you added extreme heat impacts, like impacts to the end because we often say what, how can we mitigate extreme heat but what about the impacts to people or water or energy. And so I think it's important to focus on those and therefore by mitigating some of those heat levels, we can try and quantify the benefits to these other societal outcomes and impacts to the economy and environment. But in our work on extreme heat, what we know really well is that every single person copes with heat very differently.  So it's really important to recognize those differences, because in a way it can turn into a one size fits one approach, instead of a one size fits all approach, and understanding that when we go down to the person level and and think about what could be an individual to die of heat, or to experience heat illness and end up in the emergency room. There's a lot of different factors we do know that age is a big concern, and that as someone ages they become less able to some regulate. And so we know that focusing on our elderly populations, especially those who might be more socially vulnerable or low income and not have some of the coping capacities. Whether it's an air conditioning or a working air conditioner. That's really important to focus on. And what's their occupation. We know that males and outdoor workers are extremely vulnerable to heat in the valley. What can we do about that and take action now from the policy level to ensure that they're getting what they need to make sure they can work safely. What connects to productivity and how does he affect productivity, and the bottom line for companies and so by mitigating heat and providing cooler spaces we can try to keep productivity up while keeping people safe I think that's an important factor. So what do you think of preexisting illness, if someone's on medications, are there are there issues with drug or alcohol use. What else, what else could contribute that are either extrinsic or intrinsic factors in this individual's that could have could have caused them to experience a heat death. And that's why I said at the start of this that all he does, he caused us are preventable because we can think about these vulnerabilities and do something about it. And that that that gets back to my, my idea about it this is a now problem and and there is a lot we know now to protect the most vulnerable from he and we know that even as the air temperature varies the vulnerability of our population in Maricopa County in the city of Phoenix can be a better predictor of the number of heat deaths than the temperature itself. The temperature is really important to mitigate for so many reasons and we need to keep striving for solutions to mitigate air and surface temperatures across the city. It's a collective action across all of these other different potential solutions, and just related to children I think, you know we're working in schools or working with schools we're trying to co produce some solutions such as working in neighborhoods in south Phoenix where students have input and what what they want their school yard to look like what shady spaces they want to see what plants they want to plant, and then they plant the trees. And that's where you get buy in and that's where you see empowerment to make changes on the small scale but as LG said those small scale changes will lead to big impacts. We know that while children are not as vulnerable to dying in extreme heat, we do know that there been just last year there were 925 emergency department hospitalizations of children who are elementary school in the county. So I think that's important to recognize that that there's these this continuum of impacts, and it's not only desk that matter but it's that productivity that health that learning the ability to be active and stay active and healthy is really important. So the last thing I'll add here around this is just, you know, as we think about what we know now and what we can do now that can help us adapt into the future to the changes we're seeing. We can think about looking back in, where have we made progress, where do we know that we've made a difference and how can we keep on from implementing that on larger scales. And so, when we think about the IPCC and their categories of adaptation behavioral adaptation is a really important part of that. And that means education, educating people that the climatization is important that staying healthy is important to be able to handle extreme heat. There's a lot that you can do from the behavioral level but then the infrastructure that we're talking about the technological adaptations and the physiological adaptations those all come together to help people stay safe and the think that's an important point to make as well. Great, thank you. I'm Jenny and I think one thing that really comes through clearly when you're talking about is extreme heat provides a perfect example of how you know this is a global challenge right because we need to reduce greenhouse gas emissions we need to reduce and limit the impact of global climate change on median temperatures or average temperatures around the globe, but that translates into a specific local context. And then we know there are some uncertainties about those future impacts but we have the knowledge and we have the capacity to act now to address many of those impacts and those outcomes. And we know how to do that in cooperation in collaboration with the people who are affected as you say to build that capacity to build that ownership and to build that agency for people to be able to take actions on their own. And so what I'd like to do now is I'd like to invite Sarah Porter to join the panel. Sarah is the director of the Kyle Center for Water Policy at the Morrison Institute at Arizona State University, and we've asked Sarah to listen into the panel, and to provide her comments on kind of the key messages that she's heard across the different panelists, and I'll say one last encouragement for people joining we have nearly 100 participants on this session. Love to hear some of your questions so please include those into the Q&A section. I see several of our ASU students in there if I don't get more questions from the audience I'll start calling out specific students. So let's let's let's put some questions into that chat. Sarah what are your sort of insights across everyone's comments so far. Well thank you I want to thank you Dave for moderating and organizing the panel and thank the panelists all of you, the insights that you've contributed have been really helpful and I also want to thank Jason and Lauren and Liz for all the work in organizing this important discussion. My big takeaways are, you know, LG started out by saying all solutions are local and I think that's because impacts are local, as well as other aspects that LG cited and clearly we've heard today that, you know, we often think about carbon about climate change in terms of, you know, greenhouse gas emissions are kind of data, but it's really, it's very meaningful I think here in this conversation to personalize it so much and to think about the impacts on people all around us that we, we see when we, you know, walk across the campus or I work at the downtown campus especially walking downtown. As Mark well knows it can be hot in the summertime and there are people there who may not have access to relief from that heat. So, so I appreciate the fact that this discussion has connected the dots from the big picture issues to the local. But LG said that that solutions need to be tailored to local is, you know, really makes sense. And I especially appreciated the insight that they need to be tailored politically as well. And there is a question from Adam Weichmann, which I hope the panelists will address which kind of gets to that how do we move the political process in a way to get to solutions. We heard from LG some really practical things that are kind of exciting. I had no idea. I knew that diesel buses were bad I had no idea how bad they were appreciated that input, and an exciting idea for a revolving fund so these are issues that we agree bank energy bank revolving and other things that we can get behind we can find out more about them and if appropriate contact our representatives and help support some of these things. But to get to go more local marks characterizing Phoenix as a place as with other cities that is rehearsing our future was a great insight. Certainly, the city is well along on addressing climate impacts, but it is in cities, and we've heard it loud and clear today working alongside researchers, like Dr. Vanoss, with where these solutions can be tested. I'm very interested to hear Phoenix being characterized as really kind of the test bed city for sustainable desert city, and it makes me proud as an ASU employee to know that ASU use inspired research is being integrated into that test bed process. And I think that we'll have a map of the cool corridors, one of these days so that we can go walk them and enjoy them ourselves. And then finally, Dr. Vanoss really contributed I think this, this important idea of how this, this affects humans and it, and it's, for me to think about how children are particularly affected. And of course reminded me that this is a discussion about their future, more than anything else. So they are particularly vulnerable as are the elderly but they are also particularly in the long term, affected by the decisions. And as you said Dr. Vanoss, it's happening now, these are things that it's not something out in the future, we want, we want these solutions to be implemented and we're seeing impacts now. So those are kind of what I heard is the big themes and I see that a lot of good questions have come in so I'm looking forward to responses to those questions. Great, thank you so much Sarah and Sarah please, you know, stay stay with us for the remainder of the panel. And what I'd like to propose is we have some great questions coming in so we're going to try to do is a bit of a rapid fire so give me, give me your, you know, 30 second, important insight answer and I'll try to get through as many of these questions as we can. So as Sarah mentioned I'm going to start with Mark on this one from Adam Weikman. I appreciate the urgency for significant local action, like transitioning built infrastructure. How can we channel this urgency towards the quote soft infrastructure, like institutions that govern our cities. So what kind of innovations are happening to change institutions as well. I think, you know, certainly the change of institutions is happening from both the grassroots and from individuals hearing about I mean I think that's the communication message of, as people are passionate I'm amazed as we bring out goals around tree planting and bringing organizations to donate to tree canopy and to adopt streets and to contribute that that it's transforming from the inside of people inside out to really see that change and I am inspired regularly by hearing people stories of where passionate from, you know, from all those of organizations that are really seeking and calling out for change. And so, seeing that happen is really, I, you know, certainly heard many passionate CEOs that I've heard from employees. And I think that that change in is, it's pretty unanimous. I think that, you know, we have society I think is itself is great suffers from inertia. Because the people are very much I think they're ahead, you know, they're ahead of where we are and where we need to be. And so I think there's really great support from moving forward. Great, thank you so much. So the next question I'm going to ask LG perhaps to attack this one first. This is coming from George Pettit, given recent weather induced electric grid infrastructure failure in Texas. What are the risks to electrical grids generation and distribution systems, perhaps here in Arizona or in other places in the country and, and what can we do to build up the resilience of those systems. Very hard question to answer really quickly. But the answer is no and yes, the situation does not have to be as bad as it was in Texas. Texas made a decision many years ago to isolate its electric grid from surrounding states and from the rest of the country, and they paid the price for that. They also paid the price for failing to provide resilience in the electric generating system that they do have and in the energy inputs that support that generation, they're going to have to fix that. And they're going to have to reconsider rejoining the rest of the nation in a more integrated grid. The other on the other hand, I think we have a lot of opportunities in the parts of the country that have seen that renewable energy needs to be moved let's say from Arizona to California and other load centers other centers of demand. So we do need more long distance transmission to move our clean power from the places where it's generated. But at the same time, even in places where there may not be a lot of new renewable energy. For whatever reason, we can make use of distributed energy resources like micro grids, like maybe, maybe it doesn't work for solar power but it works for wind power, thinking again about offshore wind that is booming off the east coast of the United States. From across the across the up and down the Atlantic seaboard so the short answer is we do need to make some investments if we want to bring more clean energy into our systems, mostly in transmission, but not only in transmission we also need utility scale storage, we also need micro grids and much greater integration of systems, including software as well as hardware systems to make the whole system work much better, and to be much more resilient it can be done. And it's, it doesn't have to be prohibitively expensive. If every region of the country pitches in, once again, with their unique contributions and look how well positioned Arizona is to be a national leader in in providing that kind of clean power. It's fantastic, and it really does underscore something I should have mentioned at the very beginning which is, when all is said and done, the icing on this cake is really about new jobs, new job creation something we're all concerned about right now is going to be a key additional benefit as we clean up the environment. Great, thanks LG. We're going to wrap up shortly just a couple final questions. One was addressed to the around the question of ASU research specifically in the. This comes from, I'm sorry one second get back to the question. I have a question about the cool pavement research and so ASU has been involved in that research Jenny. Can you just give us a quick summary of what the, what the action is what kind of research is ongoing Leslie Hammond asked this question, what are we doing in the cool road surface research and where are we headed with that. Thanks for the question so there are about eight neighborhoods that got cool pavement last summer, and around July, August, September, and ASU has been studying in some capacity all eight neighborhoods, surface temperatures, your temperatures and surface temperatures to see the impact on those so so some of that data has already been collected and we're in the analysis process, and then some is ongoing because we're trying to look at long term changes. So how much does the reflectivity potential decrease over time. We also help the lifetime of the pavement itself by keeping service temperatures down. We also have really nice helicopter overflights with thermal images showing how what is the impact on surface temperature of these cool pavement versus the asphalt seal that is often put on. While data analysis and collection is ongoing we do have some results just around what Mark mentioned earlier so seeing the largest air temperature declines versus areas with asphalt streets, just after sunset, which is nice because the greatest magnitude of the urban heat island occurs in the dark overnight. So that's great the magnitudes of those are not too high but. So if we see a point five degrees Fahrenheit cooling at that time which is what we're seeing on average across the neighborhoods we studied that can mean a lot for human health and for energy use and water use in those neighborhoods. So the surface temperatures can be about negative 16 degrees Fahrenheit lower in the middle of the day in those neighborhoods compared to asphalt. So the the signals differ by time of day by neighborhood we studied. And of course there's lots more research that we can do on this as we try and figure out what's the best place and way to apply these cool seals so that we can have the biggest impact on on the air temperatures. Fantastic. I gotta I gotta chime in on one exciting thing about that is that if it does truly extend the life of the pavement that it will be economic to actually then put this on every surface and every roadway and all of Phoenix because it's actually becomes cheaper last longer so then your department buys right in. That's fantastic and I want to make one final point mark pointed out in the comments there was a question about cop 26 and yes. The city of Phoenix will be represented Mayor Gallego will be attending cop 26 so we'll have we'll have participation both from the university and from the city. So let's take a final note that all of the resources that we've described throughout the event, including links to additional information, including the EDF costs of an action report, which was one of the reports that stimulated the creation of this panel so we want to say thank you to EDF for their work and highlighting that and then I also just want to say thank you once again to Mayor Gallego for her opening comments. Thank you so much to Mark for your work on from this, the city of Phoenix and in your role as sustainability officer. Thanks to Dr Vanoss for your work, doing research in partnership, you know having such great impact on people's lives. Thanks to LG and your team at EDF for your advocacy and for your action at all levels of government to try to promote solutions and thank you Sarah for your comments, bringing together the highlights and the insights from across our great conversation and with that I will bring our event to a close and say thank you so much to everyone who was able to attend.


Clustering, i.e. the detection of groups of objects, is one of the basic procedures we use to analyze data. We can, for instance, discover groups of people according to their user profiles through service usage, shopping baskets, behavior patterns, social network contacts, use of medicines, or hospital visits. Therefore cluster products based on their weekly purchases, or genes based on their expression, or doctors based on their prescription. Complicated, right? Well, not really. Luckily, most popular clustering algorithms rely on simple algorithms that are easy to grasp. In this and the following videos, I will introduce hierarchical clustering. But let me start with the data and the measurement of data distances. I will use the data on student grades. The data is available through Orange's data sets widget. Let me find it by typing grades in the filter box. Here it is. Let me examine it in the data table. 16 students were graded in 1, 2, 3, 7 different subjects, including English, French and history. We would like to find students whose grades are similar. If I were a teacher, it would be interesting to know if I have, for instance, students talented in different areas so that I can adjust their training load appropriately. While for this task I would need to consider all the grades, I will simplify this introduction to consider only grades from English and Algebra, constructing in this way a two dimensional data set. To select only specific variables from the data, I can use the select columns widget. I will ignore all features except English and Algebra. I can do this by selecting all the features, moving them to ignored column and then dragging English and Algebra back to the features column. Let me check the result with the data table. Right, English and Algebra are here, Maya, for instance, excels in English but struggles in Math, while it's the opposite for Olga. Since we have the data with only two features, it is best to see it in the scatter plot. I will label the dots representing students with their names. Alright, I see Olga with a high Math grade on the top left and Maya in the opposite corner of the plot. They are really far apart and definitely would not be in the same cluster. On the other hand, George, Phil and Lea have similar grades in both subjects and so do Jenna, Cynthia and Fred. The distances between these three students are small and they appear close to each other on the scatter plot. Oh, did I mention distances? There should be a way to measure the distances formally. In real life, we would use a ruler and, for instance, measure the distance between Catherine and Jenna by measuring the length of the line that connects them. But since orange is a computer program, we need to tell it how to compute the distances. Well, Catherine's grade in English is 20 and Jenna's is 39. Their English grade difference is 19. Catherine scored 71 in Algebra and Jenna 99. The Algebra grade difference is 28. According to Pythagoras, the distance between Catherine and Jenna should be square root of 19 squared plus 28 squared, which amounts to about 33.8. We could compute distances between every pair of students in this way. But orange can do this for us. We will use the distances widget and, for now, remove normalization. The grades in English and math are expressed in the same units, so there is no need for normalization now. We'll keep the distance matrix set to Euclidean distance, as this is exactly the one we have defined for Catherine and Jenna. We can look at the distances in the distance matrix, label the columns and rows with student names and find that the distance between Catherine and Jenna is indeed 33.8 as we have computed before. We can also see that the distance between Nash and Demi is only 5. Going back to the scatter plot, we can see that Demi and Nash are indeed positioned close to each other. Fine. Now we know how to compute the distances in two-dimensional space. The idea of clustering is to discover groups of data points, that is, students, whose mutual distance is low. For example, Jenna, Cynthia and Fred look like a good candidate group. And so do Phil, Leah and George. And perhaps Henry and Anna. Well, we would like to find the clustering for our entire set of students, but how many clusters are there? And what clustering algorithm to use? Well, all of this and a bit more in our next video on hierarchical clustering.