Its just gotten under way. The issue of Climate Change has been with us for decades. Esi stated all the way back in 1988 that addressing Climate Change is imperative. And experts have been working on the issue and proposing solutions all the while. Instead of just more frequent storms, i hope what were seeing and feeling is momentum to act on these solutions. I think there is some evidence that this is the case. Last week i testified before the Senate Energy committee and the need to reduce Greenhouse Gas emissions was front and center. That probably would not have been the case a few years ago. Again, not something around a few years ago. At esi, we know and our panelists know that inaction on Climate Change is making the solutions we need to limit Global Warming harder and harder to achieve. We have to act now and we need to contribute to the momentum to act and reinforce it constantly reinforce it and this is where esi comes in, to inform policymakers and share Lessons Learned to help them understand the urgency and most importantly that we can make meaningful progress in the race to address Climate Change. All we need to do is start. This mornings panel is very special. We have many friends at the World Resources institute to thank and were joined by a true champion. She holds appointments at the school of health at the university of michigan. She ran the first Environment Division of the White House Office of science and technology policy. Shes lectured on every continent and more than 20 countries. Rosina is most importantly a member of esi distinguished board of directs and we could not do the good work without her. Ill turn it over to you and ill come back up when its q and a time. Good morning, everyone. Im happy to be on esis board. So let me set the stage. We call the Global Commission on adaptation report delay or play or plan and prosper, because coping with changes is already apparent. I would argue that we have already delayed and we are paying. Time is of the essence. Half of my life ago when i worked for the congress for the office of technology assessment, i led this first and only report that the congress ever asked for on adaptation, one on environment which included water, coasts and agriculture, thats what the front is there at the bottom. And the second one was on natural systems, wetlands, forests and parks. And it was requested by three committees, the house then science and technology, and commerce science and transportation. Interesting that 27 years ago, congress was already thinking adaptation might be important. The u. N. Commissioned a report in 2007 there on the left and the world bank commissioned a flagship World Development report focusing for the first time on Climate Change in 2010 and both concluded then that we knew enough to say as we did in 1992 and as esi did in 88 that past is not prologue. Climate change is altering the baselines, the planning and management that we have done for the past 50 to a hundred years will no longer work. That most of the impacts will be negative. That all systems, coastal, infrastructure, water, health, agriculture and ecosystems will be challenged in every region of the globe in developed and developing countries and that enhanced preparedness should be a global priority. We argued then and these reports argued that both mitigation and adaptation are needed because Climate Change is under way. Adaptation becomes less effective. The faster the pace of Climate Change. I think it was fitting that two of the three commissioners of the Global Commission on adaptation asked for that asked for these reports are now serving on the Global Commission on adaptation. The world bank, the u. N. Joined forces with bill gates this year. Depending on how you count this, it took 31 years to get a call for an action year on adaptation and as you all know, the Paris Agreements that were made to date by 195 countries, if they are fully implemented, would put us on that blue line well past the two degrees c level that is called for in the paris accord. Well above the preindustrial levels of 1. 5 to 2. We would be at least at 3. 3. Its going to be hard to cope with that. If you took all the science thats in the inner Governmental Panel on Climate Change reports and digested it into one graph, here it is. What you can see by the length of the orange bar is that already present and nearterm risk is not insignificant. But the two bottom lines, if we move to two degrees sea preindustrial things get much more risky. Proactive adaptation can lop off some of that risk and thats the gray part that just popped up. Especially in the 2 degree case. But adaptation, you see at the 4 degree, becomes less effective and becomes much more costly as you head towards faster and greater change. We cant adapt our way out of a fourdegree world. And i said at the temperatures weve already reached are not insignificant. Were seeing crops and forests and pests shifting north, more potent poison ivy, cranberries and maples moving into canada and floods and brought and fires, disrupting supply chains and energy services. And this was reiterated by the four National Climate assessments that congressman dated by the Global Change act of 1990 and i think were all pleased that legislation on resilience is now emerging in the congress. Globally, natural catastrophes have been increasing and this is data that is showing the number of weatherrelated disasters and how theyve increased, the storms are yellow, the floods are blue, and droughts, heat and fire and red. You can see at the beginning of the chart, in the mid 80s, it hovered around 200 events, but its now at 600. Last year alone the fires in california cost 24 billion and in 2017, all of the extreme events in the United States cost 312 billion. Thats real money. Real money that were losing today. Were also seeing more powerful tropical storms and these are just the record setters, so the record is largest and strongest, and you see irma, maria and harvey didnt even make it on this. But harveys rainfall was a record at 50 inches. Irma has set a record of the longest category 5 and dorian just added to this hall of pain and all of these have happened since 2012. I think one of the most important changes in our science base is this, you are all used to hearing scientists like me say, we cant tribute any single event to Climate Change. The science has advanced to the point that this is no longer true as an unequivocal blanket statement. The sentence in yellow there from our National Academy of sciences, the ability to attribute the role of Climate Change in extreme events is a big breakthrough in science. Just to give you one example, the two feet of rain we had in louisiana in 2016 and you see at the bottom there, Climate Change increased the odds of getting two feet of rain by 40 . Thats quite a powerful statement. So at the temperature increase of 1 degree c or two degrees farenheit already, we are seeing, increase, pain and suffering and cost. In analysis of extreme events of last year, 21 of the 27 were seen to have a clearly increased probability from Climate Change, in other words, Climate Change made those events more likely. As you know, every sector is being affected by these ongoing changes in temperature, presip and Sea Level Rise, just the energy sector, very much in our minds, lower water levels reduces hydro power, a wild fire affects electricity supply. Inland power plants in the midwest are sometimes flooded. Water limits are reducing oil and gas productivetivity. Theres reduced ability to transport coal down rivers and cooling water intake or discharge may be too hot, depending on the weather. These headlines all recent bring home the frequency and intensity of extreme events of heat waves, flooding, hurricanes, and remember, houston had three 500year events in five years. Were going to have to change the definition of a 500year event. Past is no prologue. We cant plan the way we did before. And fires, the area has doubled since 1984, an area of fires in the u. S. And the area of burn total, and, again, the combined fires in 2017 and 2018 were about 40 billion and from our own military, twothirds of military installations threatened by Climate Change in the next 20 years, not 2100. What else will the coming decades bring . We know theres a lot of infrastructure in the path of storm surges and rising sea level and this Risky Business report brought it home after Superstorm Sandys wakeup call, it will increase the annual cost of coastal storms along the u. S. Eastern seaboard and the gulf by 2 billion in the next skd. That number, just in those regions, could be as high as 507 billion. Investors are sounding the arm, increasingly calling for risk disclosure and this was amplified at the u. N. Climate summit last month. The World Economic forum asserted that Climate Change is the biggest risk to business in the world and weve seen of course pg and e declared as the first causality. The global in addition on adaptation and the year of action tracks are needed. We can delay and pay or plan and prosper. With that,less me introduce the first of our speakers. So first, i guess we will hear from the executive Vice President and the managing director of World Resources institute. Before that he was the director of the Nonprofit Bank information center. But he also served as a senior economist at the World Bank Working on watershed and Rural Development projects in asia and latin america. And hes the overall team lead on adaptation. Please come up. Good morning, everyone. Thank you. That was an ive been looking at this issue for the past couple of years very carefully and even still i have so much more to learn from rosina. Thank you for that lovely opening. I want to start with two things. One is, i suspect on the minds of most people hear the issue that were here for, Climate Adaptation and baseball. Washington nationals. I want to bring these two issues together for one moment. I dont know if any of you saw in the Washington Post just a couple days ago, a really interesting article about Climate Change and baseball stadiums and how we will need to reimagine how we build stadiums for sports in light of Climate Change. Just, again, something that i thought was particularly interesting in light of where we are today. I wanted to start with a short video that says a word or two about adaptation. Is there sound . You can quietly read along there. [ laughter ] i dont want to read it for you. The city for unprecedented challenge of Climate Change, Climate Change is a huge threat, 2,100 expect 50 of Lower Manhattan to be at risk of coastal storms. 2100 we expect 20 of the streets of Lower Manhattan to be subject to daily tidal inundation. Storm surge, extreme heat, intense precipitation, rebuilt the boardwalk. Adaptation. We spent a little bit of time preparing these videos from all around the world in the voices of those that are on the front lines actually talking about what it means to adapt. What im going to do today is take a few minutes to tell you a little bit about the Global Commission on adaptation and the main report findings we released a couple months ago and then my colleagues are going to go a lot deeper in terms of explaining what this may mean for the United States on a couple issues related to Climate Risk Disclosure. Let me start with the commission. You saw the cochairs, kind of two main objectives setting up this commission. One as was alluded to, adaptation is one of the things that people have been talking about for quite some time, but not nearly as much leadership attention has yet been put on this, even despite the fact that recently this was the top risk seen by major ceos in an annual survey the World Economic forum conducts each year. The second point was not just to elevate the political visibility. It was also to mobilize action. We wanted this tomorrow more than just a report. We wanted this to lead to real world change on the ground. We set up the commission of people from all around the world, sitting ministers, ceos, mayors, Civil Society leaders. We had the republican mayor of miami from the United States. And a wide range of about several hundred ngo partners that were part of this overall effort. The commission was launched about a year ago in the netherlands. As i mentioned, the last year was largely around trying to set the intellectual or analytical agenda for what we felt needed to happen on adaptation. This next year is about translating that report into a set of very very specific recommendations. And the point here was that we have seen a lot of reports that talk about what the cost of the impacts might be, what the problems of Climate Change may create. Theres not been as systemic approach to talking about how does the world respond and how does the world respond in term of building resilience. Thats what this report aimed to do. There were five messages that this report could fill in and im going to go through each of them quite quickly. The first is the human imperative. The second is to rethink how we look at the economics of investing in adaptation. The third is to say that even with economics, were not getting the attention that we want to see because a number of barriers get in the way. We need to see revolutions in understanding, in planning, and in finance in order to scale up, to create the level of passion we need to see on adaptation. The fourth is how we apply that to keep economic systems and what that means. And the fifth is how do we stimulate that, how do we provoke that in the coming year. How do we jumpstart this new bold agenda on resilience. The first port, adaptation is a human imperative. We know that the people, it communities, the countries that offer did the least to generate this problem will suffer the most. But we also know climate impacts will spare no one. Climate impacts are happening here and now. Just to give you a couple of numbers, we anticipate that over 100 Million People around the world will fall back into poverty by 2030 if no action on Climate Change is taken. We anticipate the yields from major crops could fall by up to 30 by the year 2050. Massive implications. We anticipate that over a trillion dollars per year of damages would take place in coastal cities around the world by 2050. But the real tragedy here is that those that have the least, that those that are poor, women, future generations, will suffer the most. So this is an issue we know that gets very much at exacerbating inequality in a much more devastating way. That said, the second message is actually quite a fresh message. We make the argument that adaptation, investing in building resilient makes good economic sense. We looked at a wide range of different types of actions. We looked at how the returns on developing Early Warning systems, in making new infrastructure resilience. In approving dry land agriculture Crop Production and protecting mangroves or other Nature Based Solutions. Making Water Resources more efficient. And what we found is that for every dollar that we invest in these types of adaptation interventions, could generate 4 to 5 in terms of net economic benefits in return. This is a really significant finding, right . It suggests that actually countries, communities, companies, makes good, good, economic sense to invest. This has been further substantiated by u. S. Studies that have found similar conclusions conclusions. Why is that . Im going to use another baseball example. This is less than a mile away, Washington Nationals park, which is the only major sports stadium in this country that is leaf certified. One of the things they did, is they put nature to work in the stadium. So im going to explain why the economics of this make senses. You have green rooves, trees in the stadium. That helps you avoid losses when you have a lot of rain, it absorbed stormwater run off. It helps you deal with extreme heat. Hot days in the summer watching baseball, this helps cool the temperature downism thats the avoided loss part of why this makes good sense. In addition to avoided losses, we see two other nature benefits making these typ