Good afternoon. My name is Venkat Lakshmi and I'm the John L. Newcomb Professor of Engineering in the Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering at the University of Virginia. My name is Casey Callaway. I'm the Chief Resilience Officer for the City of Mobile in Alabama. As the co-chairs of the Planning Committee, we welcome you to the second day of the National Academy's fourth workshop in the series on communities, climate change, and health equity. We are hopeful that these workshops will help pave the way toward exploring health risks posed by flooding events and able discussion that will lead to effective adaptation strategies for community resilience and foster partnerships among government, academia, and the private sector, allowing us to implement workable and successful strategies at the local level. I'm sure some of you have been, had attended or had seen the recordings of the workshop, the first day of the workshop on Wednesday the 13th of March. Some brief recap of what we discussed and what kinds of ideas we came up with at the end of the day are as follows. Firstly, I think the most important conclusions which the participants engaged with are communication, communication and connection with communities. Everybody having different expertise such as engineering, landscape planning, community groups, community activism. All of these are very important to help advance advocacy, empower people for a shared solution and breaking down the silos between people and, you know, harness that social community expertise. Flooding is a risk. It's a huge risk. And, you know, FEMA maps have to be updated to mark up areas of flooding. A hundred year flood yesterday, another hundred year flood today results in a much larger number for tomorrow. Interventions, multiple touch points between insurance, property insurance, health, health care, zoning, community groups, clinics are really important points of emphasis which the participants arrived at on Wednesday. Surveillance, interpretation and resources allocation during or after a disaster. The supply chain of resources is very important because all disasters are different and getting disaster relief to the ones most impacted is quite important. All of this leads us to conclude that reinvesting in communities with the express idea that long term equitable investments, long term solutions and especially investing in excellence of workforce development is very important. So, and the goals for today's for the second half of the workshops are really to focus on solutions, adaptation strategies that will improve community resilience and remove reduce health inequities. To accomplish this we have four sessions and in the interest of time all the biographies can be found on our website and Charles is posting that on the on the link. In session one today you'll hear from keynote speaker Amy Chester from rebuild by design who will set the stage for today. In session two we have three speakers who will share partnership success stories. Session three will hear from a panel of experts in different sectors as we start to co create and suggest solutions to the barriers we identified in our breakouts on the first day. A lot of the work that Venkat just talked about. This will include an invitation for you to get involved all participants we want you to enter your solutions online as well. And finally in session four will invite you to join the breakout rooms to address and flush out the most popular solutions. At the end of this workshop series will produce a report in the format of a proceedings and brief or PIB. The link to the last PIB on extreme heat was posted in the chat. And these workshops are designed to be highly interactive and to look at case studies reflecting people's lived experiences. So we hope that all attendees will take advantage of these experts that you have in your hearing today. Ask questions and share your thoughts about how complex problems can be solved. Those complex problems especially focusing on today on flooding and that it's disproportionate impacts on low income communities. The overall goal of this workshop series is to help pave the way for your communities to engage with these and other experts who have found and implemented solutions to climate change impacts. We're excited for what has started and we're looking forward to today. So it is my pleasure to introduce first our moderator for the first session, one of our wonderful planning committee members Sarah Hughes. Sarah is associate professor of environment and sustainability at the University of Michigan and a senior policy researcher at rant. Great. Good morning everyone. Thank you. It's a real pleasure to introduce this first session. So as Casey said, the goal of this first session is to really get us started focusing on solutions and thinking about and envisioning what innovative adaptation solutions look like in this space. And specifically digging into the need for multi sectoral strategies and collaboration as we explore flood adaptation strategies to support health equity in particular. So we have a fantastic speaker for this first session, Amy Chester, who is the managing director of rebuild by design. Today, Amy will provide some insights from her work into how multi purpose infrastructure can provide opportunities for responding to climate change in ways that provide a whole range of benefits. So just a couple of logistical items before we bring Amy on. And a reminder that we've got about 15 to 20 minutes for the presentation so that we have enough time, lots of good time for questions at the end. Amy also knew a two minute warning in the chat. So as members, you are very much invited to submit questions at any time using the Slido platform. So that link will be in the chat. And you can add questions in Slido. You can also upvote the questions that you would most like to hear answered if someone's if someone's put an idea in there that that you'd really like to see highlighted. So we'll address as many of these as possible after after Amy after Amy's talk. We can use the chat for comments and just ask that you use that function wisely. And with that, I would like to bring Amy on and welcome her to get started. I'm Amy Chester at the same time that I'm speaking so I gave myself a timer so we should be okay. I'm Amy Chester I'm the director of real rebuild by design and this is actually how he got started. This is Hurricane Sandy hitting the Northeast United States now 11 and a half years ago. And this is how it left our community 650,000 homes damage are destroyed 8 million people without power, mostly focused on New Jersey and Connecticut but these images could be from anywhere they could be from Hurricane Irma or Harvey or Irene community are dealing with this more and more often. And what it has shown us is the interconnection between physical resilience and social resilience that we need to have that social infrastructure that brings us together that enables us to know our neighbors that enables us to be able to check on each other at these really crucial times. And these times are happening more often these this is Noah's significant anomalies for last year, but they actually publish anomalies every single month so it's not something that is happening once in a while, even though the definition is something that deviates from the standard the normal or the expected. And we also know that planning ahead really pays off every dollar that we put into flood infrastructure has at least a $6 return on investment in public health and property value and cleaner water, etc. So you have to ask ourselves like how do we want to adapt and what does adaptation look like for us. And there's many different ways to approach this and we can look back at some of the experiences that other cities have had around the world. Venice has been adapting for more than 100 years, and for a very long time they put out these kind of walkways and just pretended that everything was completely normal and tourists had a good time just playing in the flood waters. But what we also know is that those flood borders are not healthy. They have a lot of pollutants in them they have a lot of garbage in them and it's actually going to make us sick. So we built by design, I was launched by the federal government right after Hurricane Sandy, and the idea was to bring federal I'm sorry bring international experts to communities and local governments around the world to rethink the opportunity to adapt to change. So always looking at big scale infrastructure policies, and it was created because at the time, you know a typical design process did not work. Here is Hurricane Sandy the only thing that we had really experienced in our lives was Hurricane Katrina five years before and we, you know, kind of looked at that as a one time off. Now with Hurricane Sandy we realized this is going to happen more and more often, but a typical design process means that you know what you want to build at the end and you back into it to let's say it's a school or hospital, you know how many beds you know the land that you have and you basically back into that line and budget and figure out how to get it done, but after Hurricane Sandy we didn't have the answers so we had to create our own process. And we took kind of a nod from what product design has done for a long time, and the definition of innovation and project side innovation in product design is taking two things that already exist and putting it together in a new way. Here's some examples of this. This is kind of an image that I remember very well for my childhood. This is the LL Cool J I grew up in Brooklyn, I saw kids on the street that were older than me with that boombox and it was kind of like, it felt like you had the world at your fingertips because everybody can hear what you wanted to listen to. But then products kind of changed. And all of a sudden we had a Walkman that we could put in our pocket that had a tape. And then before you knew it we had CDs that could store a lot more songs. And then lo and behold, we used to think it was great to store 25 songs but all of a sudden we could start storing a thousand songs. And then these iPods actually got smaller. So you can put them even in that fifth pocket that you have on Levi's I remember that being in the commercial when it was rolled out. And then of course now we have that same device that we use to listen to music but it wakes us up in the morning and it gives us our news and it connects to our friends, and it takes pictures and it's the only thing that we need to have an hour pocket. And this is kind of same approach could be also applied to multi-purpose infrastructure and here are some examples. I think a very easy one that we have in a lot of communities now is our shared road. Roads are not only for cars but they're for pedestrians and they're for bikes. There are many different types of buildings that are also producing energy like this one is. And then you have larger scale infrastructure that is producing flood protection that can actually mask that flood protection in a different purpose. So this is in the Netherlands. This is a parking garage that you can see also has public art on it and has more recreational space and it divides the water from the community. Another example in Netherlands has been exported all around the world and that is water squares. There are playgrounds during dry days when it rains a little bit. They're just a bit of a water square and you could splash around. If it rains more it's rain storage and then it even can be an ice skating rink. And this is what it looks like in Rotterdam but you can actually see this now even in Hoboken. There are parks that are also flood protection but they also host museums and other social value. And then if you want to go kind of far out but it actually exists too. In Denmark there's a ski slope that's also a power plant. So you can actually ski down it whether it's snowing or dry days. So we created what we call a design detour which is not a typical design process but really about collaboration. Having collaborative research and collaborative design so we are both researching and designing with the communities that are going to use the infrastructure with experts from around the world with interdisciplinary people who bring all different types of their background and experience. And one of the reasons to do it is because the outcome and the projects are much better because they deal with a different host of vulnerabilities but you also have an enormous amount of people that will support the project. So as our infrastructure needs to be upgraded over the next generation, as different mayoral terms change, as budget cycles move, you have a group of people both in government and outside of government that want to see these visions happen. And we've taken the same process all around the world and have worked on many, many different scales. And after going and spending in a long time in the Bay Area, I became really interested in what was or was not happening in our hometown of New York City and realized that as I've been working at rebuild by design for many years and paying attention to what was happening on the coast. Actually, all over New York State, there was many issues of flooding. And we created this very simple map that showed the frequency of disaster declarations. In this case, it was only for flooding. And in this case, it was both for state and federal disasters and realized that upstate was having the same experiences that downstate was, whether you're a Democrat or Republican, it was a coastal problem. It was a riverine problem. It was a Great Lakes problem. And me with a background in political organizing, I realized that, wow, we can actually convince the governor to do something pretty big to adapt. So we asked him to create a resilient infrastructure fund and did an enormous amount of work and got an enormous amount of people lined up to support this. And within three, within one year, he introduced a $3 billion, what's called a bond act in New York, which goes to the voters to approve. And it was put on the ballot within a year, taken off the ballot within a couple of months during COVID, but then put back on our ballot with our new governor, Governor Huckle, who raised it to $4.2 billion. And this was passed by voters about a year and a half ago. And New York now is $4.2 billion. I wanted to step back and wanted to understand like, what was it that made this work within a year? We went from no organizations or very, very few organizations working on climate resilience at the state level to creating a $4.2 billion bond act. And we thought that we have figured it out. It's because we were able to show that climate change is here. It's not about what's coming in the future, that communities are suffering, and that it's happening on our governor's watch. And it's his responsibility to do something about it. So as soon as the New York Bond Act was introduced, we started looking at all the other states and trying to figure out if we can replicate this research for the same purpose. So we can come up with funding solutions for different infrastructure for all different types of communities that need it. So we released Atlas of the Disaster. It's a huge report. It's about 670 pages. It has 300 maps. It has a lot of different pieces in it. It talks about the cost of inaction. It has a step-by-step guide for states to build a collaborative program, new financing tools, etc. And what we found is the same thing as we found the New York. Whether the state was urban or rural, Republican or Democrat, coastal or riverine, they were still suffering just as we were. And we know it's not just the first impact. It is the longer-term impacts that also have our community suffering over decades. This is an image that we created for our report that talks about the different health impacts, the short-term, medium-term and long-term health impacts of different types of climate events. It was recently republished by Scientific American who took our same data and put it in their February magazine. And these events are really hurting people. More than 3 million people lost their home to a disaster. And that's going to keep on happening whether there's disasters. In addition to sea level rise, there's going to be slow movements of people from the coast and also slow movements of people from other countries really changing where they're living. We have learned that in the last 11 years, over 20 million people have moved because of a disaster, a climate disaster, 80% of those people being women. So you can check out our report, Atlas of Disaster, and kind of the most interesting piece of it, I think, is that we created packets for every single state so you can see what's happening in your community. So here's an example of a packet. Every single state has a kind of global view of where the states sit so you know if it's on a coast or if you know it's in a dry area. And then we have a summary of statistics that are both our statistics and other statistics such as superfund sites and wastewater discharge sites and what the American Society of Civil Engineering gives us an infrastructure report card. And then we create the same red map for every community. So this is the state of Alabama and you can see that there are 22 disasters that happened. Where FEMA is putting their funding, the social vulnerability index, the energy reliability index, and we create a new way of looking at it that essentially gives the argument that if we wouldn't want to have the biggest financial return on investment, but we want to have the biggest social return on investment, what would be the indicators that we might use to figure out where to invest first. So on the left hand side, we have a number of different, probably about a dozen different of sources that we've used to create this map. And then we make it very simple on the right hand side, just using some indicators that we kind of collapse. So health indicators, we have three different health indicators in here, poverty rates, different types of climate events. And you can see the areas that would have the biggest social impact. Then we published all of the data. And here is what it looks like. So for every single state we have the years going across the top, the FEMA number so you can look into it, what type of storm you had. And then we have the counties on the left hand side and the number of disasters so you can look up how your community is faring against others. And this is what it looks like for the entire US. We found that 90% of the US counties had a federal disaster declaration between 2011 and 2021. So that's 90%. We took it to FEMA to the White House to HUD. You know, as soon as we learn this and we asked them, does anybody know this? And it had not been figured out before then. And it was interesting to look at the disasters kind of ranked next to each other. And we saw that California was on the top, but we were very surprised to see Mississippi, Oklahoma, Iowa, Tennessee, Louisiana afterwards. These are some places that we know might have had a storm here or there, but we didn't realize that these are areas that these are places that have had 20 or more disasters during this time period. We also realized that Arizona and Nevada were at the bottom and we knew at the time that they had the highest heat deaths in the United States. And we wanted to understand why. And what we learned is that the federal government doesn't give disaster declarations for heat because it doesn't have an economic loss. It only has a mortality loss. And this is a big issue for our society because it's going to continue to get hotter and hotter and hotter. NOAA has said recently that there's a 45% chance that 2024 is going to be the warmest year in history. And a 99% chance that it's going to rank in the top five. And I can tell you I'm in New York right now and we had a beautiful day yesterday. It is not March weather here in New York. But we look at this as an opportunity because we can imagine our communities differently with infrastructure that actually improves them. That we can take a step back and say, what are the type of communities we want to live in and how are we going to build that together? How can we create infrastructure that increases health and mental health outcomes, it's lines new recreational space to decrease cardiovascular disease, uses green infrastructure which has a ton and ton of benefits. We can actually create whatever we want. If we decide up front, that is what we want to design for. So in 2013 we launched a hurricane Sandy design competition with the federal government and many partners and that design competition resulted in seven projects that were originally awarded $930 million. We now have over $4.3 billion in those projects. And what's good about them is that they're actually examples of what I'm talking about. You can take a look at these projects and you can see the social benefit, the recreational benefit, the health benefits in these projects. For example, it's the Big U in Lower Manhattan. About half of it is under construction right now. And that's rethinking public space to be parks and other social infrastructure, and also to provide that flood protection. Living breakwaters are offshore breakwaters off of Staten Island, which is the area that has really hard beach erosion that has taken away the beaches and essentially showing the infrastructure. And the home is making it very, very vulnerable. And these are offshore breakwaters that are created with a special type of concrete that really thought about increasing the ecological benefit. And even before the breakwaters were finished, there was a seal sitting on top of it during construction. We know it's already working. And lastly, in Hoboken, New Jersey, they have a really amazing program called resist delay store and discharge, which is totally rethought their streets and public spaces and is using green infrastructure. And as they implemented the green infrastructure, they've also done it in such a way that has completely gotten rid of pedestrian deaths. So there are now zero pedestrian deaths in Hoboken using green infrastructure. And you can learn more about it at this time to article. So what I want to tell you today is that climate change is not coming. Climate change is here. And we can do something about it together. Thank you. Hey, thank you so much, Amy. That was a fantastic presentation. And what a great way to get our day started today so much to think about and include or get our get our minds going. I'm looking at some of the Slido questions one quick to kind of clarification question that came in is whether Puerto Rico is included in the statistics you're showing. Yeah, so it's not included in the statistics, but it's included in our report. I actually don't remember the technical reason why we couldn't use that territories I think it's because we couldn't find that's what it was we couldn't find all of the data for territories. Great. Okay. Yeah. Great. Thank you. Lots of themes that I saw come up to that tied into some of the things we're talking about last week. Where do I want to start I think for the first question I might pose is having to do with issues around green gentrification so this came up at least in my sessions a fair bit. And I know I'm curious probably I'm curious how this comes up in places outside of the US but even just let's think about the US. How are you thinking about green gentrification in your work or what kinds of strategies have you seen that are promising or useful for kind of navigating this kind of issues. I'm just asking that it is a really hard problem that's happening everywhere. I remember the first time during our research stage of the hurricane design hurricane Sandy design competition. I took one of the designers to good old Lowry side which is environmental justice justice advocate amazing community group that's been there for about 20 years, and just told them about what we were working on wanted to get their feedback wanted a partner on it. The executive director de Maris Reyes said, Nope, I don't want it. I don't want any of it, because that's going to gentrify our community. And I literally took the presentation that was on a laptop and I slapped it down because I knew that she wasn't going to be talking about anything else. And I said, look, how can we work together to make sure that it doesn't happen. And I don't think that we have figured out what that looks like but I think that calling it out from the very beginning and making sure that there is a affirmative way to to deal with this is really important in her specific area, most of the lower income, if not, I mean like most meaning like probably 85% of the people who are lower income in that area live in either NYCHA or affordable housing that that cannot be. They cannot raise the rent. So those are protected in that area and we talked about that a lot. One of the things that rebuild is doing right now is a project that we call making space for our neighbors. We actually did a study with Milman to understand what the displacement risk is for New York City. And we did that by understanding who lives in the areas that are most at crisis. For that, who are the people that might be able to afford to move first, where would they likely move, and then who would they displace and where would they likely move and that's according to how much they're paying for rent, and how much the other areas in New York City are cost for rent. And what we found is that without intervention, up to 40% of New Yorkers could be displaced for climate just from storm surge, just from storm surge up to 40% of New Yorkers could be either primary displaced or secondary displaced. So we now are have created a program called making space for our neighbors, and we want to make sure that every time we're talking about any type of mobility. We're also creating housing opportunities nearby in the same neighborhood. So if people need to move they're not being displaced from their neighborhood. They're able to stay in their neighborhood and give them opportunities before it's kind of a reactionary. That makes sense of sense so certainly thinking about it and and planning for it way up front and and this is something I heard a lot last week too is the importance of having those conversations and dialogue and keeping keeping those channels. Really open I think I think that makes a lot of sense. So the first question that came in. So you mentioned at the beginning the importance of social infrastructure you're kind of talking about their, you know, the importance of both physical and social infrastructure for community resilience. And I think I think the question is, you know, how what does what does it look like to have strategies that are targeting that social infrastructure side. Specifically, how do you think about those strategies for supporting the social infrastructure as a as a resilience investment, let's say, or kind of policy change. Yeah, thank you for asking that and rebuild by design is in the Institute for public knowledge at New York University. That's our home now and that institute is headed up by Eric Kleinberg who did this really incredible work on the 1995 Chicago heat wave. And that was a horrible heat wave where 700 people died in about a week. And the government didn't really kind of fast up to what was really happening they're trying to hide it. And his study looked at two communities that are very similar, both had the same type of income, the same demographics, but one community had 100 less staffs than the other community. What they learned is that the community where people were living near each other, they're able to check on each other, they know that their neighbor usually passes, and, you know, they didn't see them for a while. If you are getting evacuated the neighbor can say come with me to the evacuation shelter, they wouldn't maybe necessarily do that. The government said to evacuate. And it's really a life or death situation. So we hope to put in all of our projects we're not we hope we put in all of our projects infrastructure that can help bring communities together that could be parks that could be educational for the neighbors that could be programming in addition to what we're doing because if you are in areas where you are used to seeing your neighbors you are more likely to fare better during these horrible events. Yep, I think that makes a lot of sense. The next question is how are you prioritizing projects co produced with the most vulnerable communities. And I might I might take liberty kind of tying this to what you're talking about with green gentrification or, and even this next question actually to which is for lower Manhattan. You frame the economic argument for the lost tax revenue from the high rise commercial properties, the cost of disaster versus tax revenue. So to me I think some of you can interpret this how you like to I feel like some of this is getting at how do you, how do you kind of navigate the project priorities of the community with other policy conversations you might be having kind of how does this all get, how does it all end up kind of hanging up and getting navigated. That's, they're all good questions and what we have realized working around the world is that there is major this plus this trust and government everywhere. Every time I'm in a new place they tell me oh but our community doesn't trust us. And I would say yes but nobody's community trust them. So what we try and do is two things we for the big hurricane Sandy design competition we put actual designers in between government and communities. So government and communities weren't negotiating the project. It was more that the designers were hearing from government hearing from communities creating designs going back to them hearing feedback iterating on those designs so ultimately you have something that everybody can support. And a lot of our other processes, we usually get brought into we don't actually do you know kind of decide where to work. Usually a local government or local foundation or partner asks us to come and work and solve some type of problem that usually has to do with climate infrastructure. And then with we always design a process that has partners coming in at the very beginning so we're making sure that government is working with partners and then together we design that process. So it goes back to what I was talking about about interdisciplinary minds. If you have a bunch of different people who understand the challenge in a different way, you start learning from them and then you start advocating for what they care about to, and then it becomes very easy to create something that everybody wants because everybody really understands where each other is coming from. And none of that makes a lot of sense and actually that that feeds into a question I was thinking about kind of towards the beginning of your presentation as well when you were talking about all that public support and that public support piece for these kinds of initiatives. And so I think you kind of answered answered my question, but it was, how do we get that public. Of course, it's so critical for, for, you know, leverage for getting money active activated, you know, for getting political support. How would get this public public support and engagement. I'll offer another story because I think you need to have the way you get public support is with data and showing that it's actually real so Atlas of disaster or the work that we did in New York was like very tied to data and saying this is what's happening in your community and you're responsible for it and we have solutions to do that. Another example of how to get some public support with data that isn't necessarily numbers data is after Hurricane Ida. Well, let me go back and say Hurricane Ida hit New York and it was a huge wake up call because all of a sudden every single community no matter where you were flooded. And this was the first time that it happened. We lost 13 of our neighbors. It was a horrible moment for us. And we woke up the next morning and realized that there's like this collective feeling that we didn't have the answers, but there's many people have been talking about this for a very long time. So the first thing we did was publish what we called ideas for Ida. And those were essays from 20 people that were able to show from different backgrounds of what the city could do right away to make sure that this doesn't happen again. And then in that as I was talking to reporters, I realized that I'm advocating for turning New York into a sponge and using green infrastructure at the degree, but we couldn't figure out where we're like what that look like for New York. So I was Googling and showing other cities, but it didn't really look like New York. So the second thing we did was to create a, excuse me, a report that called out all the impediments for using green infrastructure at the degree we called it rainproof. So towards the rainproof New York. And we in that created images that shows what green infrastructure would look like in New York. What would it look like in public housing? What would it look like in a brownstone and a walk up so you could really get a feeling of what that works. And because of that, and because we literally called out what wasn't working well, our city's Department of Environmental Protection reached out to us and said we want to work with you on this. And fast forward now and another about year and a half or so. We are leading three working groups that are co-led by an agency head and an NGO on rainproofing New York that looks at three different ones of the others impediments. And we did a big application process for calling out for people with live or lived or professional experience. And now those working groups are half made up of agencies and half made up of city, I'm sorry, of people with lived or professional experience. So we have broadened the opportunity to not be just about what governments doing but what are we all doing what can we do together and how can we support each other. Just another example of some of our work. Yeah, that's fabulous. And it's really bringing home for me the importance then of tailoring is the right word, but really specific and place based looks at some of these solutions I think makes a lot of sense. I think we've got a couple of minutes so I think we should be able to get to these that are rolling in. Here's an interesting question. Okay, so how tall and how many stories, can we rightfully and reasonably expect and advocate for urban planners to build as cities are growing. This is a question of density but we expect to go. Yeah. There's no cookie cutter approach for any of this. It depends what's underground, it depends what's next to it depends what the zoning is depends what the uses are. So, we need to model the type of work we want, but then create the projects that are very specific to that community. Here's a question. This is something that I heard. I know I heard in my session last week. How do you encourage the use of green infrastructure among folks who don't trust it haven't used it might fear the maintenance of it. When it's something that's not desired in in a place. I know what we're trying to figure it out right now, but we are battling that even when New York City, because the standard that New York City uses as green infrastructure is not what we're talking about we're talking about using a lot more. And they don't have it in their toolbox. And this is just an example, it could be any city, but one one of the things that I like to do, for instance, it's to show where it's working. And Hoboken is just across New York City has just done the most amazing resilience parks. They have rethought all of their open space they acquire new land and they are creating parks that have both green infrastructure and gray infrastructure and that's because the green infrastructure even at the fullest extent wouldn't be able to absorb or hold all of it. They have you know pumps and other things that were were needed, but I would say check out what other cities are doing use them as examples. You know I'll tell you like people say well we can't do that and I was like, well why Hoboken is a tiny place with no budget and if they can figure out how to do it then anywhere can figure out how to do it. Yeah, yeah, the power of examples I'm going to flag that as a take away your theme as well that's fabulous. And so that brings us to the end of our time. Amy, thank you so much for such a wonderful presentation and just really thoughtful responses to these questions it's a great way to kick off our second day here. Thank you so much. We're next to my colleague and fellow committee member Katia walk to get us set up for the next session. Thank you Sarah, apologies for the delay there. It's a bit of technological challenges thank you very much. And hello everyone I'm Katia welcome and senior social scientists with the Water Institute and I'm very happy to be here with you today for our second session on shared stories. We have shared success stories that are focused on these cross sector partnerships that as we've already heard today and last week are so critical to the addressing the complex challenges that we're discussing so the goal of this session here today is to highlight shared success stories. Those that are inspiring right that are forward looking solution base and action oriented. We're looking for those interventions where participants work directly with communities with affected populations, state governments, researchers, implementers associations the private sector right really getting at that cross integration. And we have excellent storytellers today to talk with us speak with us about their experiences, and please. Take your questions as they're speaking send them into us we want to know what they are. And we'll have some of that iteration later on. Each speaker is going to have about seven minutes to tell their story and then if there's a burning question from that that I can see then we can have just a couple minutes after the presentation but otherwise will reserve that q amp a for the end of the session. So, our, our first storyteller today, I believe is Bronco Kirk as we have, we have three joining us today. So, yeah, okay, we're going to move ahead with. Oh, hello. Great, we've got you on video. Welcome. Welcome. Thank you so much. So, Bronco Kirk is our first storyteller today. Thank you for joining us. I hope I'm pronouncing that correctly. Go to the Arthur f turnout associate professor and associate department chair chair for research at the University of Michigan. And we've got you we've got your slides here and we're looking forward to your presentation please take it away. Okay, awesome. Thanks. Can you see my slides. You've got them. Yes, thank you. Cool. So, I think we've had some really great intros already so I can just try to build on some of those ideas. And so this is just like a almost a one dimensional technology perspective and some things just to sort of offer a slightly different perspective and hopefully a complimentary one by no means by no means something that this place is other ideas so basically I wanted to introduce and I think similar to the discussions that we've seen so far. Just a perspective in Southeast Michigan where we've had some really massive flooding in fact in 2014 was one of the largest floods recorded in the country I think flood damage was actually the largest in that given year so it's like an inland location we don't necessarily need to be on the coast to be feeling that pain. And a lot of the folks that are working on this here locally, and these are partners are span from municipal managers to community groups all the way down to residents who are addressing a lot of these challenges with the tools that are being sold right now so that could include big infrastructure solutions which are only affordable to some like these big tunnels to kind of take away that flooding. Or as we're hearing more and more now, these kind of green solutions that are distributed and are supposed to sort of be able to sort of soak up what what the big challenges, what the big solutions are also trying to do so what we're doing in our lab is kind of having conversations with these folks on the ground and our partners to try to figure out what role if any right and that's to be determined still do some of these emerging technologies pose potential solutions right and so we think about different infrastructure sectors like transportation self driving cars are becoming a thing so the question is does that have anything to do with water and so what we did in collaboration with a lot of those folks that I showed in the photo earlier was sat down quite a while ago like over five years ago and said, what does the city of the future need to be viewed from a technology perspective so complement these these existing green green solutions with things like sensors that are measuring your water levels your flows in real time your water quality or some moisture your weather and integrating that into some sort of place that helps you figure out is what we're doing working to put it you know kind of one way like that. And then secondly, could we steer these things to do something different so just like a self driving car steers itself could a system like this to your itself and in response to changing conditions so again, adaptation strategies through the lens of technology and so what we've been doing is building the sensing devices so you can see some students installing a water level sensor this is a wireless device connects over cellular. We mounted over bridges culverts highway overpasses floodplains you name it wherever you can put a sensor, it reports back in real time to tell us what's going on in the ground. And so then we put those out with community partners in tandem across their communities across infrastructure across natural systems to start obtaining that data and real time to see how the systems are functioning and so you can just see again some images of students dispersing these throughout our watersheds throughout our communities to make these measurements available because as we heard earlier sometimes we don't have enough data to see what's happening and so this shows you an image of about over a year ago how many sensors we have in southeast Michigan so we're talking about a few thousand square miles and really sort of like almost 10 xing the amount of available data that was already that was there on the ground to figure out what's going on and so all those measurements stream back in real time. They go to our lab for analysis and all the kind of research that we do but they're also piped in real time to the various folks on the ground. And so we're doing stuff with it and that stuff takes various forms so when we first rolled this out like I've been here for almost 10 years now, you know, it's like dashboards it was like tossing data on the Internet seeing here, here's some data. And we learned very quickly from people is even though that's useful it's not exactly usable because a lot of municipal managers and residents, they don't have time to look at data and discern what's happening we got to sort of like get straight to the application and maybe find some compelling use cases and so some of those things are very simple like you have a sensor on a bridge or a highway overpass, and as soon as it detect flooding, it can alert people it can alert motorists to route around that traffic, preventing people from going into these kind of situations and so simple things like real time flood warnings is something that we started looking at. But I wanted to focus today on an application real quick in the story about that we've been having collaboration with the Sierra Club and the friends of the Rouge which are two community Detroit so here we see Irma and Cindy, and they've been deploying as part of various grants and projects have had green infrastructure throughout the community, and they were interested to know is it working, you know just kind of asking that question of the things that we're doing are they accomplishing what we want to do and in this case we're trying to figure out how well it works in terms of how well it's infiltrating water into the ground so to do that traditionally what you would do is you stick a ruler in the you pour some water in it and then you figure out how long it takes it to go down so if it goes down very quickly that's good and if it doesn't that's not good, basically ponding and so to supplement that way of doing it we build a sensor system that you can stick into the ground, and it can measure water levels in real time and then kind of create a historical record not just one moment in time but historical record of multiple storm seasons to see what's happening. We deployed them with Irma and Cindy and all those various things across the city so here we see about 20 stations measuring GI and we got a lot of data so this was again the same story that we saw earlier here's a lot of data but what do we do with it because the data themselves are inherently useful it's useful to have it but they're not very usable so again how do we turn something that's useful into something that actually works for people right and and that's embedded in a lot of these discussions we're having with folks on the ground and so what we've been able to do with them is sort of summarize all of this in like maps for example maps that show you if I put GI in this part of the city versus this part of the city. What are I am I getting how well is it going to work is it going to pond and look like it's flooded is the water going to infiltrate and make people feel better if you will if you're looking at it. So what you're seeing right now is basically a an empirical map using sensor data not assumptions about how the city is laid out not assumptions about soil types or any of those things. So this is an empirical map that shows us how it's working strictly from data. And if anybody's got any questions about why it looks the way it does. It's very counterintuitive the assumptions we had about how GI should work when installed did not actually end up handing out the way we were thinking and I'll be happy to go into it later so again this was just an example of why having data is is important. So again that's a little bit more usable but one thing we also found out from folks was that they have their own ideas so this could be community residents on the ground that have their own ideas about what they'd like to do but they don't have the tools to explore if that's going to work so for example, I want to install GI my neighborhood and I wonder if that's going to help with combined sewer overflows or flooding. So what we did for them is we're riffing off of like an old video game called roller coaster tycoon where people can like build their own roller coasters. This is called sewer tycoon underneath the hood is actually a fully functioning stormwater model like all the latest greatest math and AI and all the other stuff, but in the front end it's a web interface that allows residents and community groups to go in and explore their ideas, get immediate feedback and the feedback that comes back is technically the model that's being used by the city and by the state to make planning as well so it's putting these tools whether it's sensors or data or models into the hands of users through these kind of simple, easy to use interfaces again going from something really useful and trying to do the work to make it usable. So this is a GI placement thing. And then I'll just close off by showing go evoking it again at the idea of the self driving car. It's one thing to get measurements it's a completely different thing to do something about it when you're sensing it and so a few years ago we started building these valves these are internet connected devices they can attach to infrastructure whether it's green infrastructure and this came to stormwater basin. And when you press a button over the internet, it opens and closes and you're effectively able to guide the flow of the water in the city. So rather than just letting the water flow downhill which is what we teach in classes that's so we design our infrastructure, you're able to say stuff like okay, it's raining a lot in this part of town, I should let the water flow it's not raining a lot over here let me close that valve, and you're dynamically changing what's happening and we rolled this out in the city of Ann Arbor in partnership with the county in the city. And this was actually their idea. And what they basically figured out is by adding real time control which is actually fairly cost effective compared to the building giant infrastructure assets, you're squeezing more performance out of the infrastructure, making more use of it in real time depending on the storm depending on the situation. And what they saw is that just by adding these control elements it makes your infrastructure look as twice as big as it actually is. And it's really counterintuitive but actually you're using it in a better way and you're changing how it's using adapting not just over years but over effectively over like intervals of like minutes to hours. And so what they calculated just for one of those valves that we put in which was not that expensive really is that they save them $1 million and just one of these sites and so what we've been doing with folks is exploring these ideas at scale so in the city of in their sewer system hundreds of sensors and they're actually not controlling small valves but they have these giant flatable pillows that can inflate inside a sewer system and block the flow that water and then you're basically changing how the water flows based on whatever decisions you're making and so we're building these AI systems for the water operators that take in all those sensor feeds and create intuitive interface that's allowed to make decisions about when do I open this gate this valve this this thing. And so the optimizations and everything is running in the background and hopefully trying to make it easier for people to make decisions on how to repurpose their infrastructure and so I think we're really living in an era right now where not only can we build new things. We can also reprogram existing things which is a really strange concept to reprogram infrastructure and it's possible right these gates and valves can be reprogrammed to do different things. In any given day, depending on the size of the storm. And so in Detroit that became a conclusion that even just for a small portion of the system just by reprogramming the pumps and doing something different, depending on the storm, you would have you can do as much as building a brand new storm water basin which they would cost half a billion dollars so again these digital upgrades which is a really strange way to think about some of this stuff it's still emerging are not just feasible but we can do it and so I'll leave it off here this was the state of our network. A little while ago and we put out a bunch more sensors and this is the state of the network right now we're working with folks who've inspired this research across the scale of the whole entire state and all these dots in a map our sensors and they've been deployed by students and collaboration with various folks in the communities. So, I'll stop right there. Thanks. Wow, that is really cool for black with a better word. Wow that's just got my great feeling that's really neat. The resources that are saved by the technology just incremental grains save so much that's, that's really fascinating. Do we have one, maybe we have time for one burning question from committee members. If we have one. Okay, save your questions for the end because we definitely want to dig into that presentation. Thank you so much Bronco okay. Next. Oh, sorry, we do have a question from Riley Hurst. Do you have your hands up, Riley. Okay, that may have been a mistake. No worries. Okay, cool. Thank you Bronco. Our second storyteller then is Priscilla Rahalmo Alvis who is the lab manager and postdoctoral associate at the stormwater infrastructure resilience and justice lab of the University of Maryland. Okay Priscilla I see you wonderful. And are you able to share your screen. Yeah. Let me do that now. Can you let me know if you can see it. I see it perfectly. And we're looking for the hearing from you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you everyone for the for the invitation is really nice to be here and to listen to all of this amazing research and it's I'm really happy for being here in this group. So today I'm also talking about the story that I'm working at the University of Maryland so it's about sewage overflow events and also basement backups. And I just wanted to start with this image as we know that it's sewage. This is happening everywhere, not only here on the US but also in other countries. If we just do a quick search on internet like Google or actually research articles we're going to see a lot of implications for the sewage inside our homes inside our streets. And as we know as you can see here on the pandemic. We also saw a lot of research about Coronavirus and what were the implications inside with this virus in our in our sewage. The fact is sewage can bring a lot of implications to our life. So for our health, we can see we can find a lot of diseases, a lot of bacteria, but it's not very clear how we can analyze them when we do have the sewage backup events happening. So we do have implications for infrastructure. And if we check the data set, if we check maps and location of sewage backup events, if we get the data, we're going to see that this is happening in multiple cities. So the infrastructure that we have for sewage should be protecting us from having this inside our homes, which is the study case for this research, but at the same time, we are still seeing this everywhere. So this map is for Baltimore, you can see the data from 2017 until 2019. And you can see that again, it's happening not in one or two neighborhoods of Baltimore, but actually in many places. So the sewage overflow events and basement backups will release the sewage from the sanitary sewer system, so the municipal sewer system into the environment before it is treated, which this can bring to us the contact with this hour that are contaminated and also can cause property damage and also can threaten public health. So the sewage backup events will be this relationship will create the impact for the communities with both environmental and also social perspectives. With this case, we do have our project, which is called water emergency team. So we call us ourselves the wet team. So again, from the University of Maryland, where we want to translate our findings, not only with the city and community level, as you can see on this scheme here, but actually looking for the household level. So we actually create this methodology with five steps. So we go from resident survey visual inspection to environmental sample collection analysis and results, where we also translate our results for the community. The community is involved in all of the phases of our research. So since the beginning, when we go to the properties and then we apply the surveys. We also analyze the properties itself. So that's why we have the visual household inspection tool. We collect some samples from the basements, especially when they had sewage backup events in the past. So we analyze in the retranslate the information for the community members. The main objectives that we have on this research is actually to determine the presence of bacteria in ascending water, but also surfaces from homes that were impacted by the sewage overflow events in the past. But we also want to understand the awareness of people that are having the sewage inside their homes, their previous experience, and the last part, as I say, is to share the results with the community members for actually bringing more empowerment and more information for them. One challenge that we have is actually how can we integrate the environmental side, but also the community side inside our methodology, as we said in the beginning, the sewage backup events, they will have implications for the environment, but also for the people, so the social impacts. And then what we are doing inside this project is actually with all of the bits of it, so always in the property level, always interviewing people that face sewage backup events in the past, always trying to inspect their properties, so analyzing their infrastructure. So assessing the social context, assessing the current infrastructure. Getting the samples from the places that had sewage backup events in the past, so we prepare this kit. And I'm going to show a little bit of it for you afterwards, where we can actually collect the samples from these areas and take this to the lab to have this analyzer to see if they have any presence of any type of bacteria because of the sewage backup events. In the past, analyze the data from the surveys analyze the data from the inspection tool, and how to actually translate that in a way that the community members that will understand that, and they will also learn how to deal with the sewage backup events. So as I showed in the first map, or the beginning of the presentation we are our project is mainly based in Baltimore. So Baltimore is a is a huge city so the larger city in Maryland, we do have the majority of black Americans in the city so 61%. At the same time, we also have a high rate of people that are in poverty, so almost 20%, almost twice of the national average. From the data, we also see that there is a lot of sewage backup events happening in the city so according for the Chesapeake Bay Foundation. We do we did have more than so this is not only for 2011, but we actually see a lot of sewage backup events happening in the city. And we do want to have the engagement with the different community members in our research. So we kind of build this engagement model so you can see the steps ABC and D, we are always interested in the in the property level. So how can we actually put all of the information together this was one of the our main challenges. So the first step is actually to see the sewage backup events is not very easy to have this information where we actually go to the data sets. The challenge is to see where the events are happening because people need to complain about it. Sometimes the data is not available to us. So we are building these maps to understand more about the location of the sewage backup events we are also identifying stakeholders. So we are doing meetings door to door recruitment we are attending community fairs and events and also doing some educational sections as you can see on the schemes. When we go to the property. We apply some strategies with the community members so surveys the inspection to and also the sample collection and the last part is actually to report back the results for the community members. You can see our team here. Some of the photos one strategy that we are always doing for the engagement issue actually find a way to communicate with them. So we really thought that we learned from the experience with this project that we actually need to find people on the ground that can help us because people will actually want to communicate with them and then they can get to know of us and actually we saw that we can communicate with us with the community so we prepare these flyers we are attending the events and then we are getting signups of people to actually have so people that had sewage backup events in the past they can sign up. And then we will go to their homes and do and apply all of the strategies so you can see some of the materials that we have in our sample collection kit. The last part is also important to mention that it is another challenge that we that we find that we need to collect the samples and then we need to fulfill a lot of rules to actually have the sample analyzed in the lab. In this part we actually take the sample to the wall lab at the University of Maryland, and then the samples they need to be analyzed in 24 and 48 hours for us to see if they have the presence of any bacteria inside their basement so so far. We actually sampled 88 houses, so this is from 2021 until now on the second phase of the project now we are actually expanding the project not only Baltimore but other places inside Maryland so Prince George County. And also Montgomery County in the future we are attending the community events so we now we have more than 600 participants of festival community meetings, school events community organization events. And then we all, we also have students involved from the different levels so PhD master students undergrads from open planning where is the lab that I work so this search lab but also from public health. Where do we do have one of the PIs of our project so one is from women planning and the other one is from public health so we have students in both places so the main takeaways of this project. We do need an interdisciplinary approach for understanding sewage backup events. So we do know that the sewage backup events will have implications for public health and infrastructure, but we also want to understand more about the social implications is also to understand more about the location itself so the nature of the sewage backup events, which can be from dry and wet events or more related to critical infrastructure but also the rainfall itself, and also that we need to encourage community collaboration and engagement from the different phases of the research which which is one of the main things that we have on this project so since the beginning with attending the community events finding champions on the ground that can help us but also translating the results of our research through the people again so they can understand what they are facing and how can they mitigate the sewage backup events so give information and support. And then that's it, that's us part of our team, the University of Maryland, and then we also have some social media for the project if you are interested you can contact us for the water emergency team. Thank you. I will be following y'all for sure we had one question come in, we'd quite a few, one was how is this approach community driven toward the beginning of your slides but I think we will understand now. Okay, we'd approach so we'll hold questions until we have one more panelists today and then we'll have a good discussion so please can continue to contribute your questions to slide up. So with that I'd like to introduce our final storyteller here today, Angela chalk who is the executive director of community health services. Thank you, Dr chalk for joining us today. And please, are you able to have slides for us today. Oh, I think, if you could unmute I'm not sure that we can hear you yet. My apologies. I've submitted the slides to Charles so it's one slide. And our organization is healthy community services, we're based here. My apologies. No worries, no worries. We're based here in the seventh ward of New Orleans Louisiana and through the NAS grant that we received we are the lead community based organization with other community based organizations. Waterwise South, bunny friend neighborhood association and the Greater Tremay Consortium. However, we work, we work across six predominantly black African American communities but specifically the funding that we received from NASA is looking at each and each modeling for the seventh ward, the upper ninth war in the Tremay communities.  And what this does is it allows us to share resources where there's overlap so that we're not competing for funding. However, each organization operates separately and autonomously, but we work together collectively, where we have common interests such as advocacy for for policies around stormwater management. To give you just a base about healthy community services itself. We work at the intersection of climate health and public health. Being that we focus on stormwater management resiliency climate adaptation for coastal resiliency and urban ag, which allows us to provide community education to residents for those who are lacking access to healthy food choices. And so, being a part of a collective like this, we're able to complement each other services and complement the goals and values of each of the organizations. And we pull together our resources so that we are stronger together, so that we can have the benefit in all six communities that waterwise South is concentrating its efforts in. And most importantly is that we all share, excuse me, we all share in this in love the city that we live and work in so we live and work in the communities where legacy residents of the communities that we work in. We know that because of the lack of maintenance in an aged grade infrastructure, we know that we need green infrastructure and green interventions to help us to mitigate the effects of repetitive flooding due to severe weather impacts. And so what you see in the center of the picture here is one of the turbines that the company is no longer in that manufactured it is no longer in existence. And so it's not able to keep up with the amount of rainfall that we're receiving. Because of the intensity and the frequency. It's a 100 year old pump and you if those of you who are familiar with New Orleans you always hear about turbine. Number four does not have enough power to generate to push water out to reduce flooding in our streets. And so as you see the pictures this just above that. That's just an indication of a hard rainstorm that does not include flooding that may occur as a result of hurricanes. This is just plain old, everyday hard rainstorms that are current more frequently. If you all look at the, the weather reports you know how in areas where that may have never flooded before are currently flooding because of the intensity and increase changes in our, in our weather patterns, but nonetheless, these actions are that actions that provide residents with the opportunity to take to lead on projects that residents may see based on the funding that we receive from the philanthropic support and now federal support where we want to see green infrastructure This spring and in fact in about six weeks from now, we will be taking a delegation of 22 neighborhood champions to Amsterdam, so that we can use and compare the technology in Amsterdam to how we can apply here in the New Orleans with the hydraulic and hydrological studies so that we know where we're best placing our assets to mitigate water we know where residents say that it's flooding. However, we need to make sure that the science is also backing up what residents are seeing and experiencing in real time. To date, we have 175 neighborhood champions with 180 projects and counting. We're managing 300,000 gallons of storm water per rain event. And we know that according to the earth economics report that we commissioned that the equal service benefits are $19.3 million annually on both proposed and interventions that are currently in the ground. We know that because of systematic biases, the disinvestment have been in African American communities and so we can't wait for government to take the to take the lead on this because if so, we would really be underwater and so that's where the advocacy comes in that we can engage and educate with residents for residents to make the lead on these interventions and what we want to see in our communities because we're trying to being studied instead of worked with. And so we use the community spectrum model to engage with residents to see where we're at on that spectrum whether we're just being tokenized, or if we have full engagement and ownership of what we produce as a community. And then finally, I'll say that working together in a collective not only provides us that professional support, but it provides us personal relief so one of us is down, the other one can pick up and maintain the continuity of our projects. We are normalizing motherhood, because one of our one of our leaders is a new mom to a toddler. And so it's important for us to make sure that we're normalizing work life balance is that if she chooses to bring her baby to work. It's okay for her to bring her baby to work and no one is is looking side-eyed at her and so that helps to make what we're doing a normal, hopefully a projection for the for the future of how the workplace will look. And then finally, what we also do is work with our neighborhood champions who are subcontractors so that we can create that circular economy within our communities by hiring people that live and work that are trained green infrastructure professionals, as well as working workforce development training organizations so that their their participants can have real time real life experiences with green infrastructure and so our motto is to leave tangible assets in the communities that we live and work in. Thank you. Thank you so much, Angela by night and as a as a researcher just coming off of maternity leave myself I appreciate your work to normalize motherhood that's really it's unfortunately unique but much appreciated I'm sure. Yes, it is in fact he started our baby cold has started. His mother started him with nursery twice a week and he has been at all of our meetings from birth until now and when when she came in it was like, Oh, that's right he's at daycare and so everyone is it's normal everyone is expecting him to be here. We know that working with our children because our children and youth are the leaders we have to start them young, and we've literally started from the womb. That's what I was thinking I mean talk about raising our leaders right that's really impressive it does take energy and resources to do that so it's significant for sure. Thank you to all of our stores for joining us here today and providing us with some excellent examples to consider on how we build these partnerships. We're going to turn now to q amp a we've had a lot of input to our slide out questions. So I'll, I'll start going through those. I have some questions myself to but I want to make sure that we get to y'alls insights right and for that discussion. Just one operational question we had one for everyone asking if we could provide the links to the reference materials in the presentations and we'll work with our speakers to see what we can offer for our audience so that you can have the excellent resources on which they build their studies. So getting into the presentations more thoroughly. I'm going to start with Brian go first. And there's two practical questions there. One is how well have these technologies worked in real time, and not just in a predictive fashion so do you have any examples about that. So that question, I guess that we just think about like real world implications of this I think the caveat is obviously we're researchers right like there's only so much like real world scale that we can have given our physician sometimes you just come up with some of these but that said, I think we've seen some examples in our own use of these, even at a small scale when considering that like, it's a bunch of grad students and undergrads carrying out the work right so when we talk about these potential savings to building new infrastructure and building the as actual like decision support tools like these these software systems that help people tell tell them when to open and close gates and stuff like that we're seeing those savings that I put in there. So on this scale, you can look at like South Bend Indiana is a great example where they adopted real time control strategies, meaning like these gates and valves are opening and closing themselves in real time. That was actually when Pete, Pete Buttigieg was mayor right so they they did not have the money to build massive infrastructure solutions and so as part of the EPA consent decree they actually got real time control approved and there's a decade of data being collected and massive decline in combined sewer overflows and flooding and things like that as a result of the adoption of these solutions so there's, there's a number of examples and the technologies are scaling out now you know talking about Detroit they're adopting it buffalo is adopting it internationally you can look at a bunch of different places like Denmark and other countries I can just name a list, but the stuff is being used. It's just a different way of thinking about it because oftentimes when you invest in the infrastructure or it doesn't feel tangible does like it's like bits right as opposed to infrastructure which is this physical and tangible things and you can't cut a ribbon on software right it's not how these things work. So it's usually kind of like early adopter communities they're using it but there's sufficient evidence of the last at least based on our research over the last 10 years or so that shows that the stuff is is is achieving what it's set out to do I think one thing to note there is that when these systems roll out there's measurements associated with it. So typically when we install infrastructure we just put it in and we come back 50 years later and say it's not working with these systems you're measuring in real time and therefore you know if it's not working and you can adjust so, unlike a lot of other solutions you by nature you're forced to measure and those measurements can tell you if it's working or not. Sure, sure. Thank you for that. And while I while we're, well I have you one more practical question we live in an era where unfortunately packing is prevalent. And so this question was just wondering if there's manual overrides to these systems in the event of in the event that the network is packed. So, any new technology is going to have some risks associated with it there's no silver bullet that just provides all benefits. So naturally when you connect infrastructure to the internet which is a strange. It's like not as strange as it used to sound it sounded really strange like 10 years ago, you're going to assume some sort of risk and I think it's up to the folks that make those decisions. You know, all the way from residence all the way to the sort of decision makers and the planners and the municipal managers to trade that off versus the drawbacks and so one thing I can say though is water systems in the United States are vastly under measured we have no clue what's happening actually most of the time we're kind of operating the dark. We're literally just managing infrastructure dark and kind of implementing and praying and hoping that it works so it's not uncommon for flooding to happen in a city, and, and nobody except for the residents knows that it's going on because it's literally affecting them and so when infrastructure breaks oftentimes we don't know that it's actually happening and with systems like this by connecting them you find your problems kind of in real time so that creates some challenges and so when you add that layer of real time control which is more, I suppose more exotic than just a measurement you're going to have some drawbacks but somebody's going to have to look at this and weigh it and oftentimes with new technologies and all this clothes on this. When you introduce a new technology whether it's sensors or real time controls, you have to somehow show that it's safe, but nobody is that other infrastructure is actually safe right we just build these things and say they're good and we just build it and so I think a more holistic question would be one of how do we compare the pros and cons of everything as opposed to just the new solutions, right because, because building a tunnel is fine nobody's going to complain but like is that actually working I don't know so anyway I think the answer to that is kind of complex and perhaps nuanced, but I think it can be some leads some cool discussions. Sure, understand the fuller suite of trade offs and then make gather those data right and then make sure that they are usable. Very cool. So we do have a question from Priscilla which is really interesting, however, we'll circle back to that Bronco if we have time because I want to make sure that we get to our other panelists so Priscilla I'd love to turn to you next. So, we've been thinking a lot about equity during these discussions and we do have a question from the Slido, asking about the tool that you used to distribute the wet survey. Regarding your project and how you insured equitable access to that work. I know I saw that and thank you so much for these questions it's really important. One challenge that we see on the project is about the data, right because it's not very easy to find the data we do have some sources and we do have some access, but even though we feel that's not complete. So we truly think that the sewage backup events are happening in other places as well. What we do is to put this data together with the location of the sewage backup events, but also talking about the issue with the community again. So we do have people on the sites that are helping us. So the representatives of the community, they know so much more than us, the research team. So we are always communicating with them because the representatives they know where the sewage backup events happens because the community members. They speak with them because they trust them. So what we do is actually to put all of the information together, and then we are also attending the events to have people signing up. So if they hear about the project we offer an stipend so they can participate in the project because of the stipend, but also because they had the sewage backup events in the past. So we try as much as we can to actually go to all of the different groups of people that are having the sewage backup events inside their place. And then it's funny because the residents themselves, they start saying, oh, but I know someone that actually also had the sewage backup events. And then we feel that we kind of, we are starting kind of this network of people that are having the sewage backup events and always trying to put all of the different data together to actually have everyone to participate. That's really important. And I heard some important lessons there about local knowledge and harnessing local knowledge as the experts, right? Not non traditional ways of knowing right about trust, you mentioned, which is absolutely critical. And then having the resources to make sure that these local experts are supported and can participate in the project is really critical. It's one of the things that we highlight because we are going there, of course, that we want to, as researchers, right, we want the data, we want to see what's happening, but they are facing the problem. So the least thing that we can offer is something for their participation. And then so they, of course, they will receive the stipend. We will have the data, but then the last part of the project will actually be, okay, now you have the results. And then with the results, we also offer some strategies that they can do to mitigate the sewage. And these are the impacts of the sewage backup events inside their homes. And then they will also try as much as we can to put a list of resources for them to actually mitigate and then to speak with other people. Yeah, so the local champions, just talking about that very quickly, we also have the blue water Baltimore, which is a nonprofit organization in Baltimore, and they also deal with sewage backup events. So they are also helping us in finding these people and the champions and the leadership, the representatives in the community, and also with some of the resources that we can offer to people to mitigate the events. The local champions are like that. And I think it moves us closer to the spectrum, the end of the spectrum that Angela discussed, which is something you said really hit home with me. We're trying to be in study. Right. We want to leave these projects. This is our home. And that that concept of reciprocity becomes so so important. So thank you for that. And Angela, I'd like to move to you next and we have a question here for you as well. One of our participants noted that they really appreciated the community driven study that you presented. We all did. And they were wondering in terms of solutions. I know that you mentioned, for example, you had philanthropic funding and then that expanded to additional funding. So this question is wondering how your results have helped to bring those resources to the community in addressing some of these these issues that you're facing. Can you give us a little bit more about that? Well, first of all, let me just say that here in New Orleans, we don't have a combined sewer system. So that's the good, that's the good news for us. So we don't have a combined. There's just the wastewater and sewage are separate. What has increased our capacity is to be able to access funding through the Justice 40 initiative and having community leaders participate in Justice 40 cohort to be able to learn what federal agencies are looking for in the way of grant applications, how to create a grant application, how to have that capacity and policies in place. And so for us, that has been a game changer where we were constantly being denied because folks would say, well, you don't have the capacity. You don't have the skills. You don't have the knowledge. When we know that community science, community participatory science is a valuable asset to communities in a way differently from the way academics may study what what we're doing in the community. So for us, having access to those federal dollars, learning what we need to learn in order to build capacity as small community based organizations. And then finally, receiving that funding, that federal funding and having the capacity and knowledge to be ready to receive those funds. So it's important for us and we realize that it's not only good enough to just be able to be awarded a grant, but have the capacity to be able to make those deliverables and whether that's from having internal policies continuity of structure, being able to receive the monies because we're not we're talking about more monies than organizations would ordinarily receive from philanthropic sources, but to be able to have those resources to put tangible and leave tangible assets in communities. But first of all, engaging, educating, empowering residents to see what they want to see in their communities. I can't presume what someone wants in a community just down the street from me, unless we engage residents to understand what their needs are. And let me just add being a community leader and living and working in a community that I serve, I can't be both. I can't be the one who is securing funding and resources for the program for programming and still have residents participate and participate as a resident. And so all of us as community organizations, we take that step back from being a resident and let the residents see things through a different lens that we may not be seeing. And so that has worked for us as community leaders to let the to let it be the residents to speak about what what's what's needed in a community and as a benefit. We've all said, Okay, we get that. The other most important thing with that is that as working in a collective you can imagine we have challenges on personalities. But what we did agree upon early on, as a part of this collective is that no one person's personality would supersede the needs of our community. Let me say that again, no one person's personality, which would supersede the needs of the community and we have said, we have said, we've been steadfast in that. Do we have arguments? Of course we do, but we know what's our priority and that's our communities that we live and serve in. That is a powerful message, Angela, these powerful presentations today. So thank you very much to our storytellers for joining us and helping us think about these challenging issues. We're going to transition now to session three, which is going to be moderated by our wonderful and excellent committee co chair. Casey Callaway, but first we'll take a short break about a three to four minute break and we will reconvene at 135 Eastern time. Thank you so much. Hi everybody. Welcome back. This next session is geared to explore an integrated and multi sectoral approach to arrive at a set of effective innovative actions for addressing the identified problems and challenges that are related to flooding adaptation and the issues and health equity that we all generated on day one. In other words, today we are diving into solutions. And the goal is to build on the discussion from last week. Very importantly, the national academies and the committee are committed to this being very participatory and inclusive discussion. So keep on populating the slide out with questions that we have a little bit more that we're going to do today. But first we're going to start by hearing from panelists across multi multiple sectors and we'll ask you the audience to propose solutions. Each panelist is going to be proposing one solution. They're going to talk about we need to hear from you on the solutions, the actors and the actions again in that slide out platform. This panel will be most effective as collaborative discussion between and among the panelists and you. So first things first to accomplish this the session is going to be divided into three parts. The panelists will each take just two minutes maximum. There are six of them. So we need to keep it really tight and we'll include their opening remarks, their name position and one major action taken at their levels towards solving a specific flood issue, especially as they relate to health and equity. The panel will then have 10 minutes to debate and explore innovative integrated solutions that align with all sectors presented. I'm sorry, facilitators are good. Sorry, Mr. Park, the facilitators from each of the four breakout rooms from day one are also going to present the summaries of the barriers and challenges that were out there. So we'll represent what y'all talked about on Wednesday with the challenges and the panel is going to take the time to go through and debate and explore innovative integrated solutions and those solutions also being geared toward aligning with each of the sectors that are represented. Now, again, while the discussion is happening, y'all all play a role. We're asking the audience to submit your ideas for solutions. No more comments and challenges today. We're going to stick with what we've got and collected. But we want to get your solution ideas on the slide platform as you're inspired and while you're listening to the panel discussion. Additionally, attendees are asked to an upvote solutions that you find particularly innovative and cross cutting. So, with this kind of blueprint outline, I want to welcome our esteemed panel. I'm going to have y'all pop up. Hopefully the team is going to put everybody in so we can look at each other. But I will start with Jesse Bell. Jesse, you have two minutes starting now. Hello. Thank you for allowing me to be here today. I'm Jesse Bell. I'm faculty at the University of Nebraska Medical Center. I'm also faculty at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. And so there I'm the Clarem Hubbard Professor of Water, Climate and Health. I'm the director of the Water, Climate and Health program. And I'm also the director within the Doherty Water for Food Global Institute that runs across the University of Nebraska system. I've spent most of my career trying to understand the impacts of climate change and environmental change on human health. I'm particularly interested in how extreme weather and climate events impact human health and impact society. I've done a variety of different projects, looking at a variety of different extreme weather events with flooding being one of those. You know, when we talk about flooding, a lot of times we talk about coastal areas or we talk about areas in higher density areas, higher population density areas. But one of the things that became very apparent to me was the impacts that it has in rural communities. About five years ago I moved to the University of Nebraska for my previous role at the CDC in NOAA. And when I made that transition to this position, within a year we had the costliest inland flooding event in U.S. history. This event led to where Nebraska was kind of at the epicenter of that event led to wide scale damage throughout this region. And one of the things that became very apparent was that these types of events don't just have impacts on the immediate, but it has the long term and delayed impacts as well. What became a two hour drive in Nebraska all of a sudden became a five to six hour drive for hospital or healthcare. We saw damage to infrastructure and roads. We saw damage to a lot of other issues, infrastructure throughout this area as well. And so for me, there's still a lot of work that needs to be done in rural areas to make sure that we're communicating and engaging with communities on the best practices to move forward. Great. Thank you. Our next panelist is Ben Money. Sorry, Ben, make sure you keep your focus on what is your one solution along with your telling us a little bit about who you are. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much, Cassie. I'm Ben Money. I'm Senior Vice President for Population Health at the National Association of Community Health Centers. And with those of you who may not know, Community Health Centers are integrated medical, dental, pharmacy, behavioral health and enabling service providers across the country. We serve one in 11 U.S. residents through 1500 organizations operating out of 15,000 clinical delivery sites. Importantly, health centers are patient governed. So the people that use the services comprise the board of directors. They also serve anyone regardless of their ability to pay. So over 90% of the patients served by Community Health Centers live under 200% of federal public guidelines. They're located in medically underserved areas and they serve medically underserved populations, which means that most of the sites are in environmentally impacted areas. They flood a lot. EPA, FEMA, Justice 40 communities. We also care for people during and after disasters. So health centers sit between the public health and the hospital preparedness programs. And they provide care in the clinic and out of the, out in the community with mobile clinics and outreach during times of disasters. They help people address social drivers of health. So food, housing, transportation. We are working right now in partnership with 2 other organizations. Capital link and collective energy on a storage, a solar and storage program called the charge partnership. We recently won an award through the Department of Energy to create solar micro grids on rural community health center sites in the, in the southeastern part of the, the United States. I currently live in North Carolina and I was involved in supporting recovery efforts after hurricane Floyd and Fran in Eastern North Carolina. And the solution that I propose is extending that solar micro grid concept on community health centers and leading to the development of community resilience hubs with health centers and local community based organizations. Pre plan through the lived experience of the community residents and preposition with resources, strategies and supports to assist the most vulnerable doing these times of disaster and during the grueling months afterwards. Excellent. Thank you so much, Ben. Our next, our third panelist is Nicole Boothman Shepherd. She's representing an industry perspective for us. Hi, I'm Nicole Boothman Shepherd. Thank you for the introduction. I'm so pleased to be here. I'm vice president of resilience and recovery at a common that means I'm the senior technical leader on our global disaster resilience adaptation and post disaster response and recovery operations. And I've responded to about 16 events, 14 of those have been flood related. And I spent about 17 years in total on the road responding primarily to majoring catastrophic disasters. So the one example and best practice that I want to talk about today is in relation to the rebuilding of the public school system in New Orleans following Hurricane Katrina. I think, you know, community consultation, community consultation, community consultation is number one. And then being an advocate to fight for what the community wants and supporting their priorities to the extent to which you can leverage your power as an organization and as an owner and the infrastructure. So that's sort of one half to really be meaningfully and authentically engaged when the schools were rebuilt. Almost 300 meetings were held to develop the school facilities master plan, but instead of approaching FEMA, for example, on the $2 billion request for funding as a fight, we sometimes fight when we sit across the table, just by nature. But looking for the triple win where the federal state and local government can agree on successes in supportive community will was absolutely integral to the decisions that were made. We had massive amounts of mold and mildew in the schools and remediating those and having asset performance standards, including things like commissioning buildings. We knew that the air quality, the indoor air quality was going to be good when we had so many health vulnerable kids who had asthma and then were exposed to again really high levels of mold and mildew was absolutely critical. So that's what I would posit as a key solution. Just move to the additional concentric circles of the agencies you're working with, whether they're your funders or they're your collaborative partners or the people who make the rules, and then, and then do the work of the community.  You know, we had community members come out all the time when we were fighting on for the things they asked us to fight for. Thank you. And I think you teed up our next panelist perfectly. Charles clip is representing a state government perspective, though he has changed jobs just recently. So I'll let him talk to you about what's going on with him. Wonderful. Thank you. Thanks for having me here. Yes. So I'm Charles, I've recently left the Louisiana governor's office after 12 and a half years of working primarily on the coastal program. So kind of the big coastal master plan we've been implementing BP funds and to some of the world's largest, you know, ecosystem restoration projects and flood protection projects. But towards the end of my time in the governor's office we also kind of started to kind of grow what we were worried about in terms of flooding and the future of the coast to be more, more aware of other types of climate hazards to be more inclusive of things like the health implications and things. So as chief resilience officer, we started to just kind of redefine the issue to be to allow more state agencies come in and talk about the problem. So I think my main solution here is a governance model that does kind of reach across different actors in state government. So that's what we set up that we also empowered the CRO to engage directly with with federal agencies who had programs that were kind of happening in different parts, and then also reach down to communities to kind of really work with them to kind of go after grant funds to get access to the data they need to kind of think about the future and make plans that made sense in there and so by doing all that stuff we're trying to address more of the cascading impacts of flood. We're trying to address the things that might not have a home and a specific state agency or they might not be somebody specific job to work on it and provide a space where we can kind of address those long term challenges. All the time. Thanks. Perfect. Our next panelist is Polincia Mobley and she is representing a local government perspective so she and I work together probably. So good afternoon everyone. I'll tell you a little bit about myself I'm currently a private sector person but formerly served as a deputy director chief engineer of Detroit's water and sewerage department and helped split the utility during the city's bankruptcy into a regional water authority and a retail entity. I will talk about a couple different things that I think are critical in terms of a solution. Solutions have to be holistic and whether it is that the local level the state level or the federal level. There is a need for interdisciplinary coordination and a simple way of saying that is we all have to work together. We cannot operate in silos and so at local levels what I see is land use planning economic development and integrated infrastructure planning all need to occur at the same time. It's not just about what the city can do in terms of or the local agency can do in terms of its public infrastructure it's also about what the private corporations can do. And we do not think holistically enough. We get so excited particularly in urban environments that have seen a lack of investment. I'm excited when the big shiny thing wants to come whether it's Amazon not to name any names or some other large corporation that wants to invest. These are the same places that wanted to invest and then they disinvested in the 70s and 80s and left you swaps of land that were vacant overbuilt infrastructure etc. And so we've got to think a little bit more about how we plan and allow these projects to come. We're in southeast Michigan and you know we are probably the most racially segregated area in the entire country of the United States. We were in the 2010 census I'm sure is no different in the 2020 census. It's no reason I can step five minutes away from my house literally across the street and there be absolutely, you know, no diversity in terms of majority versus minority populations. And so I say all that to say we've allowed urban sprawl here to dictate and control everything. And this is why land use planning is critical and essential. We have the exact same population we basically had in the 50s and 60s, except we just have moved and increased the land area. I believe it's almost by like 1000% like it's an extreme number in terms of how much more built area we've created. And so I say all that to say we bring this all home. This is all about planning. Ultimately, we cannot stop these events. You can I cannot build enough great infrastructure to eradicate the next flood. But what I can do as someone in the public sector is figure out how to better plan, use and allocate existing resources and how to best leverage resources to have integrated implementable actionable infrastructure plans. Thank you. Thank you. Our last and six panelists is and Baker, and I'm going to represent the advocacy perspective for us. Welcome man. Great. Thank you so much. Hello everyone. I'm Anna Baker from the American flood coalition. Just for a brief background on who we are. We are a national nonprofit nonpartisan coalition focused on advancing flood adaptation solutions. We work to drive improvements to state and federal policy. And we support key champions like local elected officials who are members of our coalition, as well as state level agency leaders to advance flood adaptation overall. I lead our local and state level efforts in our core geographies, which includes states like Florida, Texas, North and South Carolina and Iowa. So that's a key part of our perspective I can bring to today's discussion both from our local partner based pilot projects as well as at the state policy level. My background in a nutshell I'm a licensed landscape architect so I started in the private sector working on flood infrastructure projects. And after that moved into the policy and advocacy advocacy space, working with the Army Corps of Engineers, the coastal states organization and now AFC for over five years at AFC. But yeah, in terms of the one solution, we do a lot of work at AFC we've engaged a lot with Charles and other state level resilience leaders on taking a really systematic approach at the state level. And looking at a framework for how state government can really step in and support some of these, especially technical and capacity and budget barriers at the local level. I think for today, just to drill in a little deeper I would highlight watershed level governance as a key solution. It's often a place where there are resource gaps. Everything was highlighted very recently as such a critical space and in many of the geographies where we work, being able to organize data to prioritize projects and to ensure that communities of different sizes and backgrounds are really being considered and are able to step into a holistic kind of watershed scale approach is a really important solution and one that we've been doing a lot of thinking about. So I'll leave it there and pass it back to you. Great. Thank you so much. Thanks to all of the panelists for being quick and getting right to the point on this. I'm going to now open the floor door facilitators from the four breakout sessions from day one, starting with Sarah Hughes who is an associate professor at University of Michigan and a senior policy researcher at the Rand Corporation. Again the facilitators are going to briefly present a set of discussed complex barriers or challenges, and the panelists are each going to have about 10 minutes to debate and explore innovative create coordinated integrated solutions, especially those that align with your ideas or if you want to hear from you. And in parallel again I want to remind the audience to submit your ideas for solutions through the online Slido platform. Again solutions right now instead of challenges or questions. Attendees are also invited to upvote solutions so if you love an idea that you see as innovative or cross cutting please make sure you upvote that solution. Any instructions can be found in the chat so our team is leading on that. I'm Sarah I will turn it over to you you represent the blue, green and gray infrastructure breakout group. What are the major takeaways you want to share with the with the panel today. Great. Yes, thank you we had. We had a great conversation we did the world cafe model so I think we had three different groups come through in the end. It was hard to narrow down my takeaways but I will, I will give it a shot I think some of the key things I heard were on the challenges side let's say challenges around permitting and funding for green infrastructure in particular and people navigating those. We had a lot of discussion around how to build and maintain trust of communities, especially when it comes to doing things in a new or innovative way I'd say that's a theme I've been hearing today as well. You've talked to you about the sort of nuance and tailoring that's that's involved in building the sort of health equity co benefits into infrastructure projects and those infrastructure investments. And that that could generate that need to tailor our solutions could generate new knowledge gaps, as we go, let's say. Well, we shifted to solutions. We talked about some of the same things we just heard the importance of cross sectoral cross department planning in order to really capture and embed the full range of benefits and infrastructure investments. Really talked about, again, the importance of partnership and relationship building as integral to to any solution and even identifying the solutions that make the most sense in a place. We discussed the importance of building capacity for grant seeking or going after different parts of state and federal funding. We know that having the resources to invest in projects that mitigate that mitigate flooding that promote health equity, it requires resources, and communities talked about different different folks were talking about the importance of building that capacity, so that they could go after that, to go after those resources. And then the last solution, I'd say sort of make somewhere between a solution and a challenge, but is the importance of investing in infrastructure before there's a problem, and just how valuable it can be to be thinking about a planning for, you know, gathering the resources needed to make investments and build the partnerships that are needed before before the solution comes as opposed to after it's already happens. Thank you, Sarah. Well, I want to, I think they're going to put everybody on the screen for us for this next bet. I guess I would love to start with Nicole. Nicole, will you kind of give us your thoughts, your take on that? Especially would love to hear, especially from an industry perspective, I think this makes good sense. What does it mean for you to invest in infrastructure before there's a problem? Yeah, you know, I think that we've come a long way as a field. I think Congress has become a little bit more sensitive to it. The multi-billion dollar investment in famous building resilient infrastructure and communities program, the BRIC program is one example that is beginning really based on rebuild by design. So going back to how we open the day and rebuild by design, I think what it was intended to do, it didn't just fund those projects. It showed the art of the possible and the need and what can be accomplished and how many additional resources can be attracted when you set sort of an ambitious vision to drive down risk before an event. Now, of course, that was after an event, but the national competition really, I think, made communities alert and then we've seen tremendous progress in the last 10 years. Of course, to meet the Sendai framework, we all need to work harder and faster and with more collaboration and innovation. You know, to me, one of the things that it can be a key driver in making progress in response to what we're discussing is kind of something that doesn't cost any money. And that is taking that watershed level approach that was just mentioned or a regional approach and harmonizing, even just harmonizing policy and deadlines and building grant incentives in for climate adaptation and resilient approaches can dramatically reshape how dollars are used so that we amplify the benefits and, you know, it's the same concept of delivering co-benefits to communities and this is very relevant to our conversation, of course, because health benefits have to be part of how that is framed.  Everyone kind of wants to be part of a winning team. I don't really like that turn of phrase, but the reality is that when people see something ambitious that has potential, they're excited about it. It taps into their passion and they want to be part of contributing to the solution. And that creates these kinds of ripples that create movement to challenge, you know, really vexing problems and to help us, you know, fight the climate crisis in a coordinated way. Thank you. Anybody else want to tackle that? So what I will say is that there's always, when something happens and it's flooding in most locals, it gets put on the water department or the public works department, depending on what that level of coordination is because it's water. But oftentimes there are some issues that actually have nothing to do with the water or the public works department. There are things that happen due to changes in river levels, right, and you have flooding coming over a sea wall that is private property that isn't even in the public domain. So a big piece of this is there's a lot of money out now through Bill and IJ and very specific types of programming. But again, most of the funding for some of this work, particularly when you start talking about green infrastructure and or traditional great infrastructure projects, people are going to look to water departments and or those public utility agencies to pay for those projects in most places. That's the cash cow, so to speak, right. But that's not the only place and that's why I keep bringing up holistic, coordinated planning. So when we talk about watershed level planning, we have to know that this is going to be inter jurisdiction. Water doesn't know the boundaries water could care less if I'm on this side of eight mile if I'm north eight mile or so it does not care. So how do we look at things in a way that says okay, this is how the water wants to move. What type of projects allow us to facilitate that water moving. And then again, we have to be mindful that the way the infrastructure funding is coming down in terms of water infrastructure, it is absolutely nothing. It's a lot of money in a school and people think it's a lot of money, but I, you know, literally it's 50 billion right. I could have taken 50 billion invested in infrastructure in southeast Michigan, and probably may like a little bit of a dent, but not, you know, expanded that out to the, you know, 80 plus communities that are some portion of that system. So I think we all have to be mindful that the bill is due on water infrastructure and what makes a lot of things very, very challenging right now, particularly when it comes to flooding is we don't have the most reliable predictable models about what's happening. A lot of people don't even have models of how their sewer system functions today. So let alone what is going to happen when there is some catastrophic event. And so there's a lot of planning and due diligence that now has to go into getting us to where, you know, Nicole was talking about, because ultimately we need to be able to layer a lot of funds together.  Generally, you can have the most talented team ever. You generally are not going to be able to navigate that process on your own. You're going to need assistance. And we just need to be mindful of that. Thank you. Any other solutions that we really need to be thinking about, especially in terms of the green, gray, and blue infrastructure. Anybody want to throw another one out. Scott Charles. I would just add, you know, I think that two of the challenges that were mentioned were just kind of like that we all kind of alluded to also was just kind of the need for these cross-suttle partnerships and then also to build capacity for all this grant sink that was just talking about. I found that like, you know, the grant is the vehicle to do that partnership building and it can be on the one hand, you know, we had all these meetings and it's all theoretical about how we should partner and, you know, that sounds good. But it was just talk until an opportunity presented itself through one of these Bill or Ira grants. And I think we found that we had a lot more progress, a lot more true partnership when we had a reason to go out and engage the community to get some money. We had a reason to kind of meet more than once a quarter to talk about what could happen if it flooded. And so it really was, I just wanted to kind of highlight the opportunity of Bill and Ira. I totally agree that the dollars are not as impressive as they look when you roll them all up to the big federal spend and that should not be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. That would probably be more regular than that, but given what it is, it's still, it could be a way to kind of jumpstart a partnership and you might not get that no grant or that EPA grant. But now you've got a partner, now you've got a, now you've been talking to the community, hopefully you've got a project in mind that you can kind of take with you to CDBG or you can take it to your HMGP program or you can take it to your state legislator. But that's the kind of long-term stuff that we need to be doing anyway, and this can just be an opportunity to kind of get the ball rolling. Thank you. Yeah, I'll just add briefly, I'm dropping in the chat a link to a really small example of this building on those examples. It's a great example of multiple communities of varying sizes, some quite small communities coming together to pursue a vulnerability assessment that was designed for single communities. They proactively banded together and kind of navigated that and use the grant as a vehicle. So whether it's large, large dollars or a state-funded vulnerability assessment, it's a great opportunity. Thank you. Jesse, any last comments? Sure. In listening to a lot of discussion, one of the things that comes to my mind is, you know, how do we avoid a repeat of the urban renewal movement of the 1960s and 70s that divided black communities, destroyed businesses and economic progress. I live next to Durham, North Carolina, and they had Black Wall Street in the Hattie section built a highway right through it, and it just destroyed the community and the effects of that are still pervasive. So, you know, we talk about pulling out maps and seeing where it's going to flood. I think one of the first maps that needs to get pulled out are the redlining maps and every city has them. And really look at the historic discrimination that allowed people to be placed in areas that were prone to flooding. And then really look at how do we repair that? How do we repair that? How do we assure that there's flood insurance for people that have been historically redlined in the flood prone areas? How do we assure that when properties are condemned, you know, residents are receiving valuations that are adjusted for that historic redlining and then allowing them to be able to afford a replacement property within their municipal jurisdiction. So I think to engender trust in communities, I think it's important to really lay the history of why things are the way they are on the table. Speaking of laying things on the table, I think it's important. We also always mentioned mitigation and the fact that until we curb greenhouse gas emissions, we're never going to be able to address these problems. And these problems are going to exacerbate and worsen for future generations. Thank you. Well, from that, we're going to move on to Megan Williams. Thank you to all the panelists for answering that first question. The second, the second panel discussion was on economy recovery resilience and stability. Megan Williams is a registered professional engineer and civil engineer. She serves as the urban water program manager at the city of New Orleans office of resilience and sustainability. Megan, why don't you tell us a little bit about what the major takeaways for your group so the panel can react. Absolutely. Some of the things we talked about in the economic recovery and resilience and stability breakout room. One of the big things we talked about was the complications of evacuation. There was a big issue here in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina. And I think sometimes we forget about the cost of evacuation routes, evacuation access, where people go once they are evacuated. That was a huge issue, especially when it's a mass evacuation. Access to people who maybe have disabilities as well. I think there, there was a lot of conversation around the complexities of what that means to substantially fund evacuation access. That was one of the big topics in the first breakout room. We also talked about the economics of mitigation, both the public mitigation as well as the private mitigation. So for citizens, it's often elevating their homes if they're in flood prone areas. A lot of those grants that are available are hard to access. There are some barriers in and of itself just to submit an application for that. There's a lot of assistance that's needed to gain access to those funds that are available and public mitigation is also very expensive. And that tends to be focused and to benefit the most wealthy areas, most of the time as well. That also kind of adds to the complexities of gentrification, which was a big topic for us as well. Most of these implementations, whether it be large scale green infrastructure or gray infrastructure investments, home elevations. They are highly targeted to those who are either already wealthy or areas that can be wealthy at some point and it often pushes people out of their own, their own neighborhoods. And one of the big complexities we talked about in terms of economics is the disjointedness of the federal families, so to speak. And I believe it was Nicole that talked about it. With all of the federal dollars that are out there, there are a lot of different policies that are required. There are a lot of just different requirements in general. It's a huge lift to even submit for a lot of these grants that come to mind. The local match can be a lot. The state match can be a lot for some areas. And they all just have such different deadlines and requirements and all these, you know, all the red tape that you typically have to go through for federal funding. And that can create a barrier, particularly to smaller communities that may not have the most experience in that. And one of the solutions we did talk about to sort of curb the idea of green gentrification is investing in the, and fostering relationships in the local communities where a lot of these flooding areas are happening. So pouring those economics back into the community and into the businesses and the different organizations that are operating at the ground level within those neighborhoods. Thank you, Megan. Well, I would love to. I think Jesse was going to start or answer the last question. So I'd love to start with you. I'd love to hear your reaction to the breakout session. No, that's an excellent points. And, you know, one of the things that definitely came through is the importance of making sure that we have communities involved in the conversations. Sometimes we either have these at too high of a level, or we don't actually involve the community in the early part. And that's one of the things that I've definitely with interactions with communities that I've had in the past. One of the big limitations, especially when you're talking about local entities, that lack of ability to go for some of these grants. I think one of the panelists in the previous section was talking about that where they're trying to be involved with the community, but then also trying to write for these grants. And sometimes, although done and with good intentions, there's been a lot of issues that have been come up with some of these grant funding opportunities that make it more challenging for communities to go after this funding. And there are, you know, like was mentioned, there's not as much money now as there was. Or there's more money now than there was in the past, but we're still dealing with historical issues that are causing huge disparities in a lot of these communities as well. One of the things I really like to see moving forward is more of these private public academic partnerships, kind of what similar to something maybe that Anne was putting up in the chat. I think it was the University of Indiana or Purdue, I forget, had a really nice partnership where they were helping with grant funding and going for grant funding for communities. I think this is a potential model that can be out there. I know for my own experience as an academic that is a large portion of what I do is going after grant funding managing grant funding. And so providing that kind of a resource to the community is I think incredibly beneficial. One of the other things I highly recommend, this is one of the things that we're actually working on. And this kind of talks about those evacuation routes, but one of the things I'm always thinking about is in the context of health care. And whenever we see some of these disasters, it's health care that typically has to respond to the issues at hand. Whether that was Hurricane Maria that hit Puerto Rico where they estimated that one third of the excess deaths was result of a lack of access to care. Or when you see things that happen like here in Nebraska where we had major flooding events that limited people's access to hospitals. And that's where I think every hospital, health care facility, nursing home, pharmacy, et cetera should be thinking about creating climate action plants for their facility and flood action plants. For example, the medical center here when we had major flooding, all of a sudden we had populations, health care professionals that weren't able to actually make it to the hospital. And so all of a sudden we faced staffing issues locally, but you can see this time and time again. So I think that's something else that we should be thinking about more collectively and working with our communities to make sure that we're identifying these issues, especially in the context of health care. Thank you. I think Ben mentioned in the last section about redlining maps. I know in my community of Mobile, Alabama, I know in many of our arms across the Gulf South, but probably nationally, our redlining maps often put people in the way of a disaster. They put them in the low-lying flood prone areas. And there are challenges to how do you fund fixing up an older home? How do you do it in a way that doesn't over-gentrify and then move people out or disproportionately affect them financially?  Are those issues that y'all have thought about or y'all seeing any areas where there are solutions to that end? Charles is not muted, so it's going to be him. I was going to say something else, but I'll answer that first. I think that's where, and this is maybe something Anne was kind of raising. We need to see not just cooperation at the state level, but if the Army Corps has an elevation program, it can't be independent of HUD's installation and weatherization program, independent of EPA's Solar for All program. We need to find a way, because like you said, these homeowners, some programs will pay for relocation while they're elevating your home. Some will pay for this. People aren't getting like an actual resilient home necessarily from some of these programs, and they've got to align across the different FEMA core, the whole deal buckets so that these programs are more useful to people. And we've not had tons of success in getting that to happen. You know, the core is elevating more homes than they ever have in Southwest Louisiana. It's long overdue, but it's also like a lot of people already had their home destroyed by the two hurricanes in 2020. And so it's, it's just a lot to ask them to participate in a program at this point in it. So I'll stop with that if people want to respond at that point, and then I'll come back to some of the things I had for May and later. Yeah, I wanted the things that that we're seeing a lot. I live in the Azores, Portugal, although I work, you know, all over the world and predominantly in North America. So in the EU for over a decade, they have already had codified in law regulation and policy the notion of changing the flood fight. And when I supported as a flood advisor to the city of Calgary when they had a major flood in 2013 to the bow and elbow rivers. We were able to activate for their they don't have flooded. Well, they're about to make the jump into the private market for flood insurance and we'll see. I wish Canada well with that and I hope we can help them with that because we have a lot of lessons in the US right. But one of the things that that they did was after a home was flooded, if it had 50% more 50% or more damage so it was a major rehabilitation or replacement, they offered the household the opportunity for relocation. But the concept of changing the flood fight is when you give the opportunity for local government to pull back the infrastructure and then either support or not support, perhaps based on means testing, whether or not they give people redundant energy and other solutions to manage their utility needs for the home, because we're seeing communities in Tampa in St. Petersburg in New Orleans that you know no one's a little bit different because of the operation at scale, but we're seeing communities consider pump systems that are billion dollar systems to support 50 houses 100 homes 200 homes, often for affluent households or upper middle class households at the expense born by the entire community. And so I really think that we need to put on the table not just wholesale retreat, but pulling back the infrastructure, which will save hundreds of millions of dollars in operating costs and allow communities to invest in infill and other equitable development in lower hazard areas. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Other ideas. Yep. Just really quickly the way to cause benefit analysis is done in the federal programs need to change. It definitely values higher income properties or higher valued properties more than others. But at the end of the day, should we be benefiting the number of square feet or should we be benefiting the number of people you work in the nonprofit sector anybody who funds you wants to know how many lives have you impacted how many households that you touch how many people did you touch. And so the way we currently do the BCA has to change so that it actually values human life over property, because right now that is not how any of that is set up, and it drives you to prioritize and people who quite honestly, you talk about climate migrants all the time, they can quickly move to Michigan, you know, Illinois, Indiana, you know, Wisconsin, and never bat an eyelash and pay a million dollars for our house and it, you know, it's never going to bother them. But what about the people who cannot move. How are we ensuring that they're safe for the future. And so it has to be more than just dollars and cents, we all have value as people. And if I could, if I could jump in there, I think that was one of the points I was going to raise earlier I think that you know where possible you if you are in charge of the metrics you can change the metrics that you use to evaluate a project I mean, getting the core to change I know they're looking at some things right now that that's a federal battle for for all of us to participate in but at the state level you know we try to decide where does it make sense to raise homes and where does it make sense to build a levy versus not build a levy. And we used an economic damages formula for for the longest time and this last master plan we switched to a structure structure by structure so if it's a house it's a house it doesn't matter if it's an expensive house, or an inexpensive house. We want we measured it as one house and so that gave us a slightly less, you know, biased way to kind of look at the data and the other thing that we did was we started just making this the things that we knew about flood risk more available to more types of people so we know where cell phone towers are that are going to be impacted in