[audience chattering] - All right, let's get started.

Good evening, everybody.

- [Audience] Good evening.

- Oh, y'all are gonna be a great audience.

Welcome to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences.

My name is Chris Smith and I'm the coordinator for current science programming here at the museum.

And I have the pleasure and privilege of kicking off tonight's program, "State of Change."

Just a few weeks ago, not too many weeks ago, the folks at PBS, North Carolina, Frank Graff reached out and wanted to partner with us here at the museum to bring tonight's event to you.

And immediately, it was easy to say, "Absolutely, of course."

There are no two institutions maybe that could work better together to bring science, nature, technology, engineering, art, mathematics, to the public, right?

Here at the Museum of Natural Sciences, you saw it when you walked in the door or maybe if you visited before, but we had this passion and this mission to bring the natural sciences to the public.

We care for specimens, we do research and we find ways to educate and engage the public in science and nature.

And really, as the history of museums like ours has unfolded over time, that's adapted to include caring for nature and finding ways to engage people in things like conservation and issues like climate change.

One of the great challenges that we face and that fortunately institutions like ours, PBS North Carolina.

And I would guess since you are here or since you're watching this program online, that you're interested in this too, and want to be a part of the solutions to issues that we face.

So together, all of us here, the museum, institutions like PBS-NC and across the state of North Carolina, like from the panelists we're gonna hear from later, we have a great opportunity to make a difference.

And so I'm so glad that you could all be here with us tonight, whether you're watching online, we're sitting right here in the WRL3D Theater.

Next, I want you to hear from another voice from PBS North Carolina, I'd like to introduce to the stage, Justine Schmidt.

Justine is the Chief Content Officer for PBSC.

[audience clapping] - Thank you so much, Chris and good evening, everyone.

Chris you're so right.

Our organizations could not be more aligned and share in the same mission.

And I'm so thrilled to be here tonight.

Thank you all for joining us for the special screening of "State of Change" and a special hello to our online audience.

I'm Justine Schmidt, Chief Content Officer at PBS North Carolina, your statewide public network, and one of the largest PBS affiliates.

PBS North Carolina is so proud to bring you content like this new original program, "State of Change," highlighting the impacts of our climate right here in our home state of North Carolina.

To many of us, climate change may seem like a problem that is too big to tackle, or simply too intimidating on an individual level.

But the reality is that it's a global problem with very local solutions.

And as you're about to see tonight in the sneak peak of "State of Change," North Carolinians are forging ahead, providing tangible solutions for a more resilient state.

From building backyard greenhouses, to installing oyster beds along our shorelines.

This film illustrates ways that individuals are taking action and that how all of us collectively can make a difference.

This film inspires us all and gives hope for the future and for our future generations.

This beautifully crafted film has taken over a year to realize.

It's been a labor of love with the help of our amazingly talented team.

Matrine is tuning in tonight from Costa Rica.

We've got some of our very talented producers here.

Michelle lock, Frank Graff contributed as well as Rossi Eisler, who is not here with us tonight, but we sent her thanks, our post and audio engineers, our production manager, and all the marketing folks, many of you here tonight who have labored to bring this project to life.

Thank you all.

I also wanna acknowledge the exquisite and talented, Rhiannon Giddens who lent us her voice and who makes us all proud to be North Carolinians.

And most of all, I wanna thank our partners without whose trust and support this project would never been realized.

We're so grateful to Secretary Wilson and the whole team at the Department of Natural and Cultural Resources as well as the Pulitzer Center for Crisis Reporting and a special thank you to our event partners, our friends right here at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences and the Science Film... NC Science Festival.

Sorry, I go to so many film festivals, I was about to put a film in there [laughs].

And of course a huge thank you to our esteem panelists, who you'll hear from very soon.

Tonight, you'll see a sneak peek of the film, and hopefully it will wet your palettes to tune in for the full film tomorrow on PBS North Carolina at 9:00 PM.

And of course you can also watch it streaming anytime on our digital platforms.

And now I'm delighted to introduce you to our in-house science guy, Frank Graff.

Thank you all again.

[audience clapping] - Justine, thank you.

Thanks to everyone that's here.

Thank you to everyone who's tuning in online, and thank you to our partners at the museum and the Science Festival and the panelist who you heard from just a few minutes.

It's been a big project.

I just wanna give you just a real quick snapshot why "State of Change?"

As Justine said, we started this project last year, the first stories in this program that you'll see tonight were in our fall season of "Science NC."

We have new stories in production.

Those will be seen online, but also in the new season of "Science NC" which debuts in September.

So a little plug there for the show.

September 1st is our first episode for the fall season.

But again, why State of Change?"

So picture for a second our state.

We have 322 miles of ocean coastline.

Move in a little bit, we have Pamlico Sound, Currituck Sound, we have 12,009 miles of estuarine coastline.

Second largest amount in the country, by the way.

And I think when you think of climate change, you naturally think of the coast, coastal erosions, sea level rise, hurricanes, makes total sense, but come a little farther inland, and you start thinking about severe weather events.

Remember all that flooding from a couple years ago, think of droughts, think of temperatures.

The state's temperature has risen one degree in the past century projected to rise from two to 10 degrees by the end of this century, that affects agriculture, city planning, entire ecosystem.

So we right now are living in a state of change.

Again, we have a panel who's gonna talk about the show.

Answer your questions in just a few minutes, but for right now, as they say, roll em.

[audience clapping] [soft music] - [Narrator] In nature, major shifts are often easiest to recognize at the largest scale, but if you zoom in, sometimes the smallest indicators, the ones right under our noses or in our own backyards, tell the most significant stories.

[soft music] Over the last several decades, the rate of Earth's changing climate has been accelerating and its effects are being felt across the globe.

[soft music] But even as the perils of a warming planet continue to be revealed, new possibilities are emerging from around the world that offer hope, for not only addressing immediate dangers, but also mitigating human impact.

- [Girl] This is only the beginning of the beginning.

- [Narrator] And extending the life of the planet.

- We share a common goal.

- [Narrator] But a global redirection of this magnitude can't happen unless we first, by looking locally.

With how we are living, working and being.

And what more can be done right here at home.

[soft music] [bird chirping] Picture, the North Carolina coast.

your first thought might be a sandy beach, but the bulk of North Carolina shorelines are actually along estuaries.

A lattice patchwork of bays, sounds and salt marshes.

These shallow waters are crucial for juvenile fish, oysters, and clams.

And of course the fishing industry, which brings in millions of dollars a year.

Estuaries are also home to many North Carolinians who wanna be close to the water.

But like the sandy beach's iconic to North Carolina, shorelines along estuaries are feeling the pressure of sea level rise.

And the communities that live there are trying to figure out how to save their property from an ever encroaching ocean.

Linda and Kurt Wargin have lived in Newport, North Carolina for close to 30 years.

- Being right on the water is just...

It's a moving picture every day.

- [Narrator] But over the years, they've seen their property erode at a faster pace.

- We saw maybe at least 10 to 15 feet of loss for us.

Now that's over 20, 25 of years, but it was marching.

It was moving.

- Erosion is a natural process, but it's happening more and more frequently because we've had a lot more storms, a lot more frequency and intensity of storms.

As sea level rises, we are seeing higher water levels than we have in the past.

So we're seeing erosion along the entire length of the shoreline.

- [Narrator] In the past, the default solution for homeowners in the face of erosion has been coastal hardening, installing a bulkhead or a rock wall revetment.

Essentially, a line of rocks dumped along the shore.

The designs vary, but the goal of these structures is the same, hold the line against the ocean and they often fail.

- We had a neighbor down here.

We'd only been here about three years when we had a big hurricane and he had a wall and it took the whole wall out and it took half of his yard out.

And so that just left a terrible memory in our minds.

- [Narrator] But that's not the only problem with these structures.

When you harden a shoreline, it damages the ecosystem.

- When that wave energy comes from the sound and it hits a hardened structure, that energy has nowhere to go.

So then it comes back with it and in the process, it takes away all of that habitat in front of a bulkhead, a sea wall, or a rip rap revetment.

- [Narrator] Up to 90% of the species that make up North Carolina's commercial fishing industry depend on estuaries at some stage in life.

Without that habitat, they won't survive.

- So they have no place to hide, have no place to eat.

So it really affect all of the organisms that are in that location.

- [Narrator] Across the country, coastal communities have been hardening their shorelines to protect against erosion for years.

Research shows that overall, we've hardened 14% of our country shores.

In urbanized areas like New York City, it's more like 50%.

But over the last few years, the North Carolina Coastal Federation and other groups have been promoting an alternative to hardening.

They're called living shorelines because they're made of oyster shells or other natural materials that can become habitat for ocean organisms.

- So a living shoreline is something that's very nearshore, but offshore a little bit, so that it attenuates the wave energy instead of deflecting it.

And it slows the wave energy down.

They perform much better during hurricanes because in a hurricane, the high water's gonna be over top of the structure, still gonna slow some of the energy down, but it's not getting battered the way like a wall does.

[soft music] It also, as the wave slows down over the top of the structure, the settlement drops out and you can actually build the marsh and make the land more resilient on its own.

So you're allowing the coast to heal itself.

[cow cawing] With help from the Coastal Federation, Linda and Kurt installed a living shoreline in 2017.

- It works.

- It works.

I mean, 'cause we've seen, even after the storm, there might have been half a dozen bags that got tumbled off, easy to pick 'em up and put 'em right back on top.

And that was it.

It stayed and our dock was nearly destroyed.

[soft music] - I love that the oysters grow on it and then they clean the water too.

So it's growing all by itself and it's cleaning and it's protecting.

The more projects that we build, the more people see them.

Once we build one, the neighbors will come out and they'll want one as well.

So we seeing this domino effect of installation of living shorelines, which is gonna help to protect our coast much better than hardened shorelines like bullheads.

- [Narrator] Living shorelines are still rare in comparison to hardened shorelines, but the tides are shifting in North Carolina where the Coastal Federation has helped build over 10,000 feet of living shorelines over the last two years.

- We've met with so many landowners that would talk about where the shoreline was generations ago.

Where it was in their childhood, and they're wanting their children and their grandchildren to still have a coastline.

And so they're very invested and wanting to protect it and wanting to protect it in the most environmentally sound way possible.

- It's such a respite.

This is a getaway.

Put things down and just take your shoes off and go walk out in the water.

[soft music] [soft music] - [Narrator] In Wilmington, a senior coastal scientist draws inspiration from a lifelong love of the ocean.

As she works to protect North Carolina waters for future generations.

[upbeat music] - I'm happy if I'm in the water every day.

It's really a bad out being part of something that's much, much bigger than ourselves.

Surfing for me is inspiration for the work that we do.

Hey, I got your message.

- [Tracy] My name is Tracy Skrabal.

- So what you got going on?

- I am a scientist with the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

- [Interviewer] I know it has to do with your work in Brunswick County and some storm water.

- I'm a mom and hopefully a good friend to some.

- Okay.

So what I thought would be a lot of fun.

I think we'll go out and see some of the projects that we've done.

So this area is pretty much a classic urbanized barrier island and the wet lands that once fringed these areas pretty much have eroded away.

- I am an optimist by nature.

That said, we are working on coastal protection in a very challenging time.

The local rise in sea level in my community, New Hanover County, has doubled in the last 15 years over the previous 50 years.

Since 2013, the rate has really taken off.

And if you look at local tide gauge data for the next 30 years, it's close to half a foot.

- There have always been hurricanes, but what used to be called a 100 year event is now something we might see every few years.

If you drove down the road, you saw people's belongings all up and down the street.

And that's true up and down all of our barrier islands.

And really, I think the urgency of the situation on our local coastal region has really been a factor in how I approach my work.

There's no question.

It's not a matter of if, it's how much and what are we gonna do about it?

[upbeat music] So we are standing in the front of Bradley Creek Elementary School in New Hanover County.

One of our favorite projects is Bradley Creek Elementary.

We partnered with them to see if we could take all the storm water, put it into the ground into a series of stormwater wetlands, large rain gardens, rather than it going into the drain and out into the headwaters of Bradley Creek.

If you walk in there right now, you'll get your feet wet, but you won't get your feet wet in the parking lot where they used to have flooding and the teachers had to take their shoes off to get out of their cars to get to school.

Early gardens experienced some erosion from boat wakes.

So we partnered to construct basically an oyster reef along the eroding edge of their coastal marsh.

If you could see below the water here, you would see a really healthy fringe of natural oyster reefs.

Living shorelines really allow you to preserve what we call the sacred cow of the estuaries and that is the coastal marshes, which is so critical for water quality for habitats.

And what we're learning is that they sequester huge amounts of carbon.

So we need to do everything we can to protect these natural areas.

They're going to be the best chance of mitigating climate change that we have.

[soft music] - [Narrator] Across the Pamlico Sound and up the Tar River from Ocracoke lies the historic majority black town of Princeville, an inland town, that like Ocracoke, has a long history of flooding and a resilient local community determined to weather the storm.

[soft music] [water trickling] ♪ Oh, freedom, freedom hill ♪ ♪ We built thee round by round ♪ ♪ From the waters Princeville came ♪ ♪ Birthed from by thy hallowed grounds ♪ - Princeville has flooded many times and we've been asked as a group collectively, "Well, why don't you all just leave?"

Especially after the Flood Matthew, people were saying, "Okay, enough already."

When you love something or someone you just don't give up on it that quick.

- [Narrator] The historic town of Princeville sits on low lying land within the 100 year flood plane of the Tarra River.

In 1885, it was the first town incorporated by African Americans in the United States.

Even with the levee between the town and the river, big storms like Hurricane Floyd in 1999 and Hurricane Matthew in 2016 have brought devastating floods to the town.

Hurricane Matthew flooded 80% of Princeville, filling most of the buildings with over eight feet of water, including the elementary school.

- When I first arrived here in Edgecombe, it was maybe two years after the flood.

And when I walked in the building was pretty much a shell.

Furniture destroyed, it looked like an abandoned building, a lot of broken windows because it had been left vacant for a few years.

- We lost our school so therefore we lost everything, even personal belongings of the children and the teachers.

It played a very big impact on our students because they were displaced.

- We had to stay at another school for a long time.

- I was wondering what was gonna happen.

- I was kind of scared, 'cause like, are we gonna go back to school?

- [Narrator] Despite the devastation of these floods and the potential for future flooding, residents of Princeville are working to rebuild.

- Princeville is not going anywhere.

This is family.

This is home.

Our ancestors', blood, sweat, and tears, paved the way for us so the least that we can do and where we are today is continue to build upon that momentum.

- [Narrator] But with climate change increasing the likelihood of storms with even more rainfall in the future, they're rebuilding with flood resiliency in mind.

NC State and the Princeville community developed a flood print plan, converting vacant land into community garden plots and building green infrastructure like rain gardens around Princeville Elementary.

- That's making the school's site more storm friendly if you will, because it's dealing with the water that's coming off, parking lots, roofs and other impervious surfaces.

And then at the same time, it provides a multitude of benefits through working with teachers on how it's incorporated into the curriculum.

And so think of the landscape as the largest classroom at Princeville Elementary School.

- [Narrator] The landscape around the school, isn't the only thing being redesigned for the future.

- The whole building is still original, but the inside was good at 100%.

Some of the things we did such as raising all the light switches and receptacles above four feet high, removed the sheet rock so all of our walls now are masonry walls so that if we were to have water again, it's just a matter of coming in, wiping them down.

The interior doors are now what you call FRP doors.

You just wipe the doors off.

Or we actually put in flood vents that if the water ever came in, instead of it being trapped in here, the doors will open up automatically and they'll allow the water to escape.

We put the conditioning air handlers on top of the mezzanine and we moved all the electrical panels above the ceiling as well.

So now that if we were to experience water, we would not lose the major systems.

- [Narrator] The mezzanine also serves as an elevated storage space for critical parts of the school if they hear that a flood is coming.

- [Man] People don't think about it's simple as buying books.

Like it takes a while to get those books ordered and restored back into the building.

- [Woman] I pray that we don't have another flood, but it won't take us a long time to get back in our building.

- [Narrator] Beyond all the financial implications of a flood, being displaced from the school they're familiar with can have a big impact on kids.

- I felt scared 'cause there are some other new kids there and all of them... My friends moved away.

- A lot of times, school is a place that kids feel safe.

You already know, okay, I'm coming to school, I know I'm gonna have breakfast and I'm gonna have lunch and you have a place that you can just be a kid and learn.

And so when you first walked through that door after three years, it was just like, I'm getting emotional, just thinking about it.

Like it was just like we're back home.

[soft music] - Each time Princeville floods, it may take some time for it to be come back to a livable condition.

But each time we bounce back, even before my time, somebody bounced back.

So I said, well, if they bounced back, if Turner Prince and the crew bounce back, I can stay here and help it to bounce back.

[water trickling] [soft music] - The highest elevations in our Southern Appalachian mountains are very unique.

They support some species of plants and animals that occur nowhere else on earth, only in North Carolina in the high elevations.

And there's a very long winter, a very short growing season, and there is a huge amount of rainfall and precipitation in these areas.

- Most of the environments here have thin soils, they're very acidic.

Here at Grandfather Mountain, we're known for our winds.

We're one of the windiest places in the state.

[soft music] - [Narrator] The extreme environments of North Carolina's high elevation peaks play host to an ancient and rare ecosystem.

The spruce fir forest.

[soft music] - This ecosystem is so important for providing habitat for several species of plants and animals that really are unique to this area.

Red spruce, frasier fir, galax, a variety of mosses and lichens, prairie blazing star and mountain bluets.

These species are adapted to survive in these harsh conditions.

They grow very slowly, they don't disperse very far so they're really limited to these mountain peaks, which we can think of as almost like islands in the sky.

And so in order to survive over time, really, they just hunker down.

Their strategy is to persist.

So this is a small frasier fir.

And this is a good example of a small sapling that could be 40 to 50 years old, just waiting for its opportunity to get sunlight and grow to the canopy.

When we're walking through old growth forests, we often think about the trees as being old, but many people don't think about the herbs.

This patch of galax took decades to establish.

It's another reason we need to protect these natural areas and to think about how we can connect them to a resilient landscape.

- [Narrator] Because of the 2000 foot elevation change from its base to the peak, hiking from the bottom to the top of Grandfather Mountain can be compared ecologically with hiking from Georgia to Canada, which allows the area to support a huge diversity of species.

- So Grandfather Mountain is an international biosphere reserve.

There's over 400 biospheres globally and they identified the most unique places on the planet.

And here at Grandfather, we have more than 70 listed rare and endangered plants and animals that call this place home.

Many of those are endemic, meaning they're only found in two or three places on the planet.

- [Narrator] But because they are so specially adapted, these species are threatened by shifts in temperature and precipitation caused by a changing climate.

- We don't know how the species are going to be able to adapt over time.

Historically, the earth has warmed and cooled periodically, but the changes that we're seeing today may be happening faster than they happened in the past.

- One of the things that's been interesting the last few years have been really heavy rainfalls in the spring, especially in May.

We've had two really epic 300 year flood events that have happened in back to back years in May.

And of course that's followed by droughts.

- [Narrator] Warmer temperatures also mean that fast growing species from further down the mountain could creep upwards and out-compete the slower growing species at the top, like the red spruce and frasier firs.

- We believe about three degrees would cause 1000 foot retreat of spruce fir forests.

So three degree annual temperature could potentially take spruce fir forest off the top of Grandfather Mountain with time.

- And so it's so important to protect them now because if we lose them, we're not gonna get 'em back.

- [Narrator] Land conservation efforts are a critical tool for producing human impact and keeping these unique places around for the future.

[upbeat music] - Organizations like the Natural Heritage Program and the North Carolina Land and Water Fund work together with local governments and land trusts to establish a resilient network of nature preserves across the state.

- So when we conserve a piece of land, we preserve and protect that land forever.

Grandfather Mountain is remarkable ecologically in its own right.

And fortunately, it's permanently protected.

The entire mountain.

But it actually extends well down the valley.

For example, Wilson Creek has its source on the highest point of Grandfather Mountain and falls 4,000 feet into what is some of the best trout water in the.

Southeastern United States.

This landscape scale conservation like Grandfather Mountain and the areas below it in the valley are so important because it gives plants and animals a migration corridor during this time of intense stress with climate change to migrate.

- [Narrator] And beyond protecting our prized natural spaces, conservation can actually play a critical role in mitigating the effects of climate change.

- We've long recognized the value of conservation for protecting these unique ecosystems.

What we've learned more recently is that land conservation also helps reduce the effects of climate change by pulling carbon dioxide out of our atmosphere, restoring carbon in our trees and our soils and below ground.

We need to make sure that we're able to get these places into conservation so that they can persist for future generations.

- When you think about climate change and you think about the things that are happening in our world, there's some optimism there that we at least have protected the place so that plants and animals an ability to move and adapt as things change around us in our world.

[soft music] [crows cawing] - So there are days when like today, it's pretty sunny, there's no rain, but you see a big puddle right around your storm drain.

What's happening is ocean seawater is actually coming in through the pipes and up and out onto the street.

- [Narrator] A puddle of water in the street may not seem like a big deal, but this isn't rainwater, it's salty ocean water.

And it's incredibly corrosive to cars, pipes, and infrastructure in general.

It's known as sunny day flooding, and it's a problem all along the East Coast where the frequency of these floods has doubled since 2000.

- Climate change has caused sea levels to rise.

And with that, our storm water infrastructure, which was built decades ago is not behaving as intended.

With rising seas, water can go up through storm drains and overflow onto streets.

The challenge is really the frequency.

So even just in the past couple of decades, we've seen places that used to only flood a few times a year, now they're seeing flooding 20, 30, 40 days a year.

You hit these tipping points where all of a sudden, every high tide or a high tide every three weeks is above that threshold that you're worried about.

And so when it happens that frequently, we start to worry because it's disrupting people's commutes to work.

It's forcing school buses to operate on a different schedule.

It's preventing customers from getting to businesses if the entire parking lot is flooded.

And so it goes from being something that was maybe a concern once a year, to something that's a really disruptive weekly occurrence.

- [Narrator] Miyuki, Katherine and their team are trying to discover the extent of the problem in Beaufort so other communities can better understand how to manage these floods.

- And what we have come up with here for the town of Beaufort.

And some other towns in Carolina is to create a really cheap sensor that we can put in storm drains and get the data in real time.

But it's hard to sometimes tell how far that water has traveled on the road.

So we have a camera, so you don't have to drive through a salty lake.

You can check our website and see if water's actually coming up through the drain.

- Having that information will be very powerful.

And I don't think we're the only community that's dealing with it all throughout the coast.

So we can also partner with those communities.

What have you done?

What has been successful?

What have you struggled with?

So we don't always have to reinvent the wheel.

- These are really, really important places.

I get lots of questions about long term futures of coastal communities.

The answers to this type of flooding are gonna be different from place to place.

So in some places, they might choose to invest in their storm water infrastructure that might also involve elevating some of the buildings that are most exposed and in others, they might just say, this stretch where we're really concerned about how often it's flooding may be the best use of that land is a park where it can flood, the water can recede, and it's not going to put anyone in danger or put any buildings into any type of physical damage.

- We know that our boardwalk, the sub-structure is starting to crumble a little bit.

So we've gotta be able to fix this.

Can we work with UNC and the experts there, and then determine when we repair the bulkhead, how do we do this in a way that'll help protect our community?

- [Woman] The most important thing is that we're trying to preserve what the community values in the long term.

And that means that people from outside of the community, aren't going know what's best.

- And we can do our part at a local level, but this is a national problem, this is a global problem as well.

And we need the US to help be a national leader in reversing the effects of climate change.

- Our ecosystem is becoming off balance.

That is really beginning to talk back to us in a very different way.

So we're gonna to have to listen to it.

[soft music] [audience clapping] - All right, well, I hope you learned, I hope you were inspired, not horribly depressed because we are in a state of change, but we hope that got you thinking and we have a wonderful panel to inspire that thinking as well.

Quick reminder, that was some clips from the show.

The entire program, "State of Change" is tomorrow night at nine on PBS North Carolina.

You can also watch it on the special webpage we designed for the whole project, and that is pbsnc.org/stateofchange.

So with that let's to bring the panel up and I'll introduce them.

So come on up and we can get the questions going.

So we have someone walking around with a microphone.

If you're here in the audience type in the chat, the questions we have someone monitoring that and we'll get going.

So panelists, let me introduce them.

First is Dr. Kathie Dello.

She is North Carolina's State Climatologist and Director of the State Climate Office.

She is involved with climate resilience, planning and impacts assessment.

She has a PhD in environmental sciences from Oregon State, master's degree in Geography and a bachelor's in Atmospheric Science, both from the State University of New York at Albany.

Todd Miller is the founder and executive director of the North Carolina Coastal Federation.

He has grown the organization from a one man and one dog set up in the back room of a house in 1982 to a federation with 16,000 members, 30 staff in three offices along the coast, and a multimillion dollar budget, all aimed at educating the public and policy makers and taking on projects to protect the coast.

He is a UNC Chapel Hill grad.

In 2015 was given a Hero of the Seas Award by the Peter Benchley Ocean Awards.

Dr. Amanda Martin is North Carolina's Chief Resilience Officer, a position in the NC Office of Recovery and Resilience that was created by Governor Roy Cooper after Hurricane Florence.

Dr. Martin leads climate resilience efforts through policy and planning.

She holds a doctorate in City and Regional Planning from UNC Chapel Hill, master's degree in City Planning from MIT and a bachelor's from Harvard.

And last but not least, and you'll probably remember her from the... [laughs] I had to say that, sorry.

From the clips from the show Dr. Miyuki Hino is an assistant professor in the Department of City and Regional Planning and Environment, Ecology and Energy Programs at UNC Chapel Hill.

Her research examines the linkages between climate hazards, governance and public policy to drive effective and equitable adaptation to climate change.

She holds a doctorate in Environment and Resources from Stanford and a bachelor's degree in Chemical Engineering from Yale.

That is our panel.

Thank you again, let's give them a hand before they even... [audience clapping] - Before they even get started, we appreciate their taking a little bit of time tonight to answer your questions.

So again, if you have questions in the audience, raise your hand.

If you have questions online, type them in the chat.

Let me just start with a couple things.

First off, polls seem to indicate a shift in the public's opinion from is climate change happening to, it's happening, we need to adapt to it.

So given that and given your areas of expertise, what does climate change mean to you?

And climate change and resilience I should say.

What does it mean to you?

Go ahead.

Anybody's start.

Dr. Dello, go ahead.

- Sure.

Am I on?

- [Frank] Is she on?

I think so.

I'm facing the wall.

I'm sorry to the folks over there.

there are large future changes in store for North Carolina's climate if we continue to rely on fossil fuels as our energy source and the we, is the higher planet, the global community, and in North Carolina, that means hotter.

So both daytime and especially nighttime temperatures, it means more humid.

So those hot sticky August days are just gonna get a little bit worse and that atmosphere is holding more water so it's going to be wetter.

So we see the extreme precipitation events that are happening across the state, and we see flooding statewide.

So when we're talking wetter, it's not just the rain from the sky, but what happens on the ground.

And certainly our coast is vulnerable, but we saw a big flooding event last fall, tropical Storm Fred, up in North Carolina.

It was a fatal event.

20 years ago that would've been a tropical storm that passed through the mountains and dropped some rain, but it wouldn't have been as devastating as it was.

So we're seeing climate change here and now in North Carolina.

We'll just go right down the line there.

I think the biggest impact it has on myself and my family is just the uncertainty of what the future holds in store for any of us.

And we think about the big acute events, the hurricanes and the major catastrophes, but it's that day to day uncertainty of are you gonna be able to drive down your road because of the sunny day flooding or watching the ghost forest emerge along our shoreline as salt water intrudes, and it's uncertain times in a state of change and it really makes you have to think forward about what you can do to make your communities more resilient, not to really worry about what the future holds in store for you.

- [Frank] Dr. Martin.

- Sure.

So, I'll take the other side of the coin and talk about what resilience means.

And sometimes I like to use an analogy we're in a small theater today, and we're in person for the first time in a long time.

So imagine that you are standing right outside the doors to a theater, and you see a friend that you haven't seen in two years, and you start chatting them up.

And while you're not paying attention, someone comes right out the door right behind you and the door swings open, and it runs into you, it hits you.

And you sort of stumble to the side and hopefully you collect yourself and nothing bad happened.

But in that moment, what do you do?

You don't go stand right back where you were standing before.

You take a step aside and you see where you are and you make sure you're standing in the way of the door anymore, and you continue your conversation.

And this is what resilience is about.

It's about learning from the hard things that happen to us, and being able to take that learning and transform it into a different kind of action that prepares us for the future that we want to have.

- I love, love the answer [laughs].

- That's great.

[laugh] good analogy.

- Yeah.

I was gonna say actually, a similar thing.

I feel like resilience is about embracing the fact that changes are coming our way and recognizing that the future isn't necessarily gonna look like the past and that's okay.

I think we talk a lot about the physical changes that are in store.

Things like new infrastructure, changing the way we build and design infrastructure, but it's social systems as well.

It's intangible things, whether it's government programs and policies or legal systems, for example, we drew a line in the sand decades and decades ago where we thought the high tide was and said, that's where the public beach and the ocean end, and that's where private property starts.

But that line is moving, it's been moving and it's gonna be moving even faster in the future.

And so our social systems also have to evolve, to cope with those changes.

So I think adaptation and resilience are really about this inter connected system of physical and social infrastructure evolving together.

Not just once, 'cause the climate's gonna keep changing, but continuing to evolve as the climate changes.

So we've talked about the awareness of climate change and there's a lot of money going into climate change.

Now you had the the Federal Infrastructure Bill, the state legislature put a lot of money into various aspects of addressing climate change.

Combine awareness with funding, it seems like this is a pretty rare opportunity if you will, where everything comes together to address this, how do we not miss this opportunity?

That's always the big question a few years down the road.

Well, we had that chance.

What are some thoughts on not missing this opportunity?

We'll start here this time and go that way [laughs].

- Sure, well, so I guess first of all, hopefully, resiliency remains a priority for funding for many years to come, not just when the political winds blow in the right direction.

But this of course is a big opportunity and we don't invest in infrastructure very often.

And certainly not at the scales that we're talking about.

To me, I think, some of the investments that we need are what I would call climate specific investments.

They're things that we might not have necessarily done without climate change, but what not missing the would be not thinking about climate change with every single investment that we're making today.

Because every road we build and every power plant that gets built, it is going to have to weather extreme weather that we hadn't anticipated before.

And so if we don't mainstream this understanding of climate change, if we don't embed this concern about climate risks into every investment that we make, then it's a missed opportunity.

So I think it's not just about things we might not have done without climate change, it's really about putting climate change into all the investments that we're gonna be making anyway.

- Time out.

One second.

Let's move all our chairs over just a little bit.

I'm just realizing...

Sorry about that, folks.

Hold on one second.

[audience clapping] Sorry about that, we just started talking and shadows.

Okay, thank you.

Go ahead, Dr. Martin.

- Yeah, I'd like to build on what Dr. Hino shared.

I think there are two important pieces to consider here in terms of not missing our opportunity.

One is to make sure that we are investing in the science and the modeling and the information that we need to make sound decisions.

And this is something that Dr. Dello's team specializes in.

And they are acutely aware that it's not just the need to create the science, but to create information that's actionable.

So to create from the science, information that can be incorporated into decision making.

And then one other thought about how we ensure that our decision making around these historic investments in resilience is not a missed opportunity is for us to ensure that we are taking into account the lifespan of the investments that we make and building into those investments and understanding of how we expect our climate to change.

So, for example, if, the Department of Transportation decides to build a bridge, they believe this bridge should last 100 years.

They are looking out to 100 years of climate impacts to ensure that the infrastructure that they design today will withstand 100 years of climate impacts.

And the reason that this is so important, or the kind of the thing that takes it home for me is that this is our children's fiscal responsibility that we are dealing with, because if we don't invest wisely today with the information that we now have available to us, we are really leaving it to the next generation, to invest in a way that they probably will not have the resources to do.

This is really about the kind of, not just the...

The climate that our children will live in, but the responsibilities that we leave them in terms of whether or not we make wise decisions today, based on the information that we have.

- Todd, go ahead.

- Well, as you mentioned, we're making historic investments in resiliency.

Currently in this state and I've said this probably too often, but it's sort of like the dog that caught the car.

So now that we have all this money available, what do we do to make sure that that money is spent wisely?

And that's gonna take leadership in good direction.

I mean, you're talking about investments, they have to be made all across the state, by hundreds of local governments, they're gonna need good guidance to spend that money wisely.

If not, the tendency is always to fall back on things we've done in the past, which have gotten to send the mess to begin with.

And so, number one, I think the science is there, I think that our technical knowledge is there.

It can always be better.

It's really making sure we have the governance in place to really deliver on what we're trying to accomplish and that's really hard to do.

- That's a challenge, yeah.

Dr. Dello.

- Yeah, and I will just add on to all those great answers that the cost of inaction is much greater than the cost of action.

So the IPCC third working group report came out a few weeks ago, and this is conservative.

The US could see $2 trillion worth of damages by the end of the century due to climate change.

So we are putting money at the problem.

It's really positive.

It's still not enough.

We need to be investing in all the sorts of policies that Dr. Hino talked about and just thinking about our future as North Carolinians, what we want for our communities, what we want for children.

A lot of the things that make for good communities and rearing good children and having safe families are climate resilience too.

- A couple of...

Following up on a couple of comments.

I mean, it's always been the case if subdivisions are built or roads are built or things like that, there's a lot of engineering that goes into it.

But it seems like we have to be...

There's another lens that we have to look through now.

It's the lens of climate change.

I think about some of the flooding in Houston from the hurricane a couple years ago.

It seemed like a nice subdivisions, but they were all built on a flood plane that nobody really paid attention to apparently, and they flooded, but that's the kind of due diligence that we need to do now for really any project.

'Cause that sounds like what you were saying.

Is that correct?

Anybody.

- I guess we'll go back this way.

- Okay.

Go ahead.

We'll start in the middle next time, but go ahead [laugh].

- Yes, we do.

But what you're highlighting is that right now, climate change is not a problem for people with means or people with wealth.

It's a problem for the most vulnerable among us, the low income populations, the people who can't have their house flood, and then they just go by another one.

And it's a lens we need to be looking through absolutely when planning policy.

As we saw the past two years, it's not the only thing we're thinking about.

And we could learn lessons from COVID, but I think we also got distracted by COVID and we think about climate change all the time up here, but we know that other folks aren't.

So yes, it needs to be deeply integrated into all sorts of planning and policy.

Is that a challenge though, because I mean, a lot of engineering as well, for the past 50, 60 years, this is the kind of winds.

I mean, you can't really look in the past anymore, can you?

Because the future's changing and a lot of it we don't know or do we know enough to kind of predict, well, this is what we think is gonna be happening as far as flooding or I don't know.

That would be a challenge, I would think.

- Am I back on the hot seat [laughs].

- Well, no, no.

- Physical science- - No, we'll start in the middle this time.

So Dr. Martin, go ahead and then we'll go back or anybody to that question.

Go ahead.

- Sure.

Sure.

So I think that there is kind of some truth on both sides of that question.

We would love to be able to draw some shapes on a map and say, "This is where it's gonna flood in 30 years.

And so if you plant your mortgage there, you probably are gonna be flooded by the time you're done paying for it."

We would love to be able to do that.

We can't exactly do that.

What we can do is, we certainly know where the flood plane, the regulatory flood plane, which is based on historic data, sometimes data that doesn't even incorporate our most recent hurricane events, but there's still a lot of development going in in that flood plain.

So I think that there are some low hanging fruit and I don't mean to put this out as sort of a simple answer because development is very complicated.

It's a source of of local revenue for local governments..

It's part of why...

It's a wealth building technique for the United States.

There are reasons this is a very complicated issue.

But I think that there are elements of good policy and planning that don't require the degree of specificity in our projections.

That might be nice to have.

- I think, part of the answer is to sort of stick to some fundamentals.

Number one, if we protect the environment, it will protect us.

And that's why nature based strategies going forward are so appealing because nature has done a good job of adapting to these changes.

I mean, 18,000 years ago, our coast was at the edge of the continental shelf.

So if we look back, we know the enormity of change that can happen going forward.

And the world is gonna continue to evolve.

But there's also even in the development community, that people have figured out you can make money by adapting.

We have farmers in Hyde County that figured out a long time ago that if they worked with the conservation programs and the Farm Bill and other things, that they could actually get updated drainage networks that use restored wetlands.

So discharging water directly into Pamlico Sound.

So that by being adaptable, they're actually getting government help to update their infrastructure in a way that is a win for them and a win for the environment.

And that's the type of thing we have to think about as we go forward.

- Yeah, one thing that I think is a little bit of a danger is that we let the uncertainty lead us to inaction.

And it is certainly true that we know enough to act now.

We're not gonna get the projections perfectly right, but we can't let the uncertainty paralyze us from moving forward.

And I think there are really sensible things, win-win type options.

And I think about it a lot as safety margins.

We know that if we build that house one foot higher, it's going to be less likely to flood.

We don't know that it won't flood, but we sure know it would be less likely to, and that if a flood were to occur, less water would get in the house.

So there are some things that I think, we know enough to act and we can move forward even though we don't know how the future is going to unfold.

- They said it all.

- Oh, go ahead.

- I will just say that there are known knowns and known unknowns and there are still some things in the physical system that surprise us.

I'm thinking back to last summer, just outside of Nashville, they got 17 inches rain in 24 hours.

That's not in any climate models, it's not in any projections.

And when you're thinking about planning for that, that's a huge amount of rain and that's 2021.

So what does 2080 look like?

So we still need to be working on the physical side exactly As Dr. Hino said, it can't paralyze us, we know enough to act.

- All right.

Quick reminder.

I don't know if we have any... Oh, yes, we do.

Yay.

All right.

Couple questions from the audience.

Go ahead.

- First of all, I want to thank you for a tremendous educational effort.

And my question revolves around that.

I think that what you all have talked about so far really does speak to the engineering mentality and I don't mean to sound whatever, but you all are operating in a universe that probably 90% of the country doesn't even understand.

What are we going to do to truly educate the public, because we sure as hell haven't done a very good job yet.

- I'll jump in and just- - Go ahead.

Yes.

- I think- - Thank you by the way.

Thank you very much.

- This segment on the work with living shorelines, when we did our first living shoreline project back in 1999, we actually had a Marine contractor from Jacksonville that took the job cause he wanted the money to build it.

He thought it was a crazy idea but it was at Hammock's Beach State Park.

And after watching it for a couple of years, he was so impressed.

When he got elected to the General Assembly, he passed a bill to expedite permitting for the living shoreline work.

He was very otherwise not too favorable in environmental regulations, but he really loved that project.

So demonstrating successes I think is critical because people do observe and they are aware of the changes that are occurring.

And they're looking for answers just like the rest of us.

And I think the more they see successes, the more opportunity there is for that to catch fire and spread rapidly.

- One of the most important predictors of the success of local climate resilience work is the presence of strong leadership.

And I think that that is gonna be one of the keys to transforming public opinion about resilience.

And I don't think- I think we are in a place, as Frank started out by saying, in North Carolina, of understanding that our climate is changing, but I think we're still struggling to all be on the same page about what we should do about it.

And we can all sit here and kind of apply from this stage, but it be impactful if you heard about these kinds of strategies and solutions from someone who was in your faith community, or was friends with your grandma or a teacher at your kid's school.

And so I will say that part of what we are working on at my agency in partnership with the North Carolina Rural Center, we are funding a leadership development program that integrates components of climate resilience with leadership development and economic development.

Because we truly believe that getting those local voices to see what resilience is and make it make sense from their perspective and in their world and with their tools, is probably one of the most important things that we can do.

- Anybody else, or I think there's another question as well, but sure, go ahead.

- Yeah.

Two questions.

The first one was already kind of addressed kind of speaking to education side.

I'm personally an environmental educator and like super passionate about environmental literacy and climate literacy.

And I think that something, it wasn't necessarily mentioned there, but you've already kind of addressed it of the need for climate literacy, not only in the general public, but also in our K-12 education system.

And there is funding in the pipeline for some of that, but I think that there needs to be more advocacy for long-term funding, but my second question, is that in terms of addressing a lot of the development that's happening along our coast right now is at exceeding amount of level.

I've lived out the coast for a number of years, but a lot of that development is in response to the access amount of tourism that we're having out on the outer banks, particularly where I've been at.

And I'd be kind of curious of like I see the two kind of different approach for our homeowners, but then also for our tourists.

Like how do we tackle both, even while tourism is like a major part of the stakeholders of many of the residents of our state.

I'll start with the first question on climate literacy.

I think, from where I sit in the university, what we see or what I think we're striving towards is the idea that every job in the future is going to have a climate angle to it.

So every student needs to have an exposure and a basic understanding of climate change.

So that means that if you're going into public health, if you're going into law, if you're going into finance, whatever it is, climate change is going to affect your job in some way.

It's gonna affect your industry in some way.

And so we need to train students to that end so that they all understand what it could mean for them, what it could mean for their job and how to contribute to these shared goals of building resilience and reducing emissions as much as possible.

So I think mainstreaming, getting that basic level of climate literacy, whether it's in universities and K-12 is really, really important and something that we should all be working towards more absolutely.

- I can take a first crack at the tourism piece.

It's a really excellent question.

And a few thoughts.

One is that our coastal businesses have really been through the ringer in the last several years.

I mean, these are resilient businesses.

And so from the perspective of the strength of the tourism industry, I think working with business owners to understand how they have weathered these disasters, both the climate disasters and the pandemic, and quantifying that knowledge, spreading it through peer-to-peer networks, there are some great examples of how this has worked.

It can be supported by chambers of commerce, kind of traditional economic development players who can support businesses in becoming more resilient, but kind of on a different angle.

I think the quality of our environment and the health of our ecosystems is very closely tied to tourism and recreation opportunities at our coast.

And so I think that needs to be a centerpiece of how we think about combining our interest in climate resilience with our interest in tourism.

I think the environmental piece is really at the heart of where we can see that there's something for all of us in this effort.

- One quick note, you didn't see the story, but another piece in our "State of Change," program that's airing tomorrow night is about beach nourishment.

And how communities up and down the coast, we're spending more money than we ever have on beach nourishment to try to keep up with climate change, but also to adapt to it.

So just a little plug there for the show.

Is there another question there?

- I have another one here.

And then we're gonna take some questions from the online.

- Oh, great.

Yes.

- Thanks, first just thank you all there for doing what you do as a part of your professional lives.

And obviously those of us here are already on the same page, but my question to you beyond... More specific than the what can we do is we may or may not see parts of this in our lifetime, but I've got a 14 year old here who absolutely will.

And when we talk to the, her, and this next generation, is there a particular area that you see more of a gap than others?

Do you see a need for more scientists, for more engineers, for more policy makers, for more PR people like, where do you see a need?

'Cause you've got someone who's obviously concerned about the environment, obviously apply it with her interest, but where do you see the need coming?

- I'll start and say, all of the above.

Every job will be a climate job in the future and truly, targeting your wants and your needs for your career is very important.

But also I trained at a time where we were like this is a physical science problem.

Let's just get a bunch of physical scientists together and figure this out.

But we've learned that the arts and the humanities and social sciences have equal if not greater weight in some of this.

So you can find an entry point to a career, but also in thinking about the younger generation, this gets to some of the climate literacy.

Some of our messaging can be very doom and gloom and dooms day.

And thinking about how we're talking to those who maybe want to go into a climate focused career, even though I listed that's all of them, understanding that maybe the path is toward working toward more solutions and not doing what I do, which is the problem person I tell you what all the problems are.

And I think me, as a scientist, I've had to learn how to change my messaging when talking to younger folks.

And I think that could be incorporated into our K12 as well.

But thank you for thinking of about a career in climate.

And give me a call if you're looking for an internship.

- [laughs] There you go.

Anybody else?

None of us should forget the need to get out and actually experience the beautiful environment that we have and celebrate that because think having that appreciation is what drives a lot of the interest in trying to solve these problems.

And if we always view the things we're dealing with as terrible problems, it's hard to get inspired to try to do what's gonna be necessary to turn the tide.

So don't forget to explore nature and realize just how much good stuff out there to be protected.

When you look across our landscape, the hardest areas to address going forward, I think are gonna be our urban buildup areas.

There's a lot more flexibility to really do forward looking action for our working lands in the areas of the state that are yet to be fully developed.

And prevention of problems is still much more cost effective than trying to come back and fix everything later.

I guess the basic message, is don't forget our rural areas, 'cause that's a huge opportunity to prevent many of the problems we're gonna unfortunately face in the developed landscape that we have.

- Good.

Chris, some folks online, I think had a couple questions.

- Yes.

Hi.

- Thank you, virtual folks.

- Thank you for being here.

I have the pleasure of asking some questions from our friends who are watching online.

So question about living shorelines came through, how much does it cost if someone wanted to add one and another viewer asked about if that's available at a lake, has any of you heard that question before?

- Go ahead, Todd.

- The price can vary a lot depending on the location.

They've been as inexpensive as $50 to $70 a foot, if the homeowner or the landowner is involved, up to much more in some of the more challenging locations, but it it's basically comparable or even many cases, less expensive than doing the hard stabilization approaches and the science that's been done after the hurricanes have shown that these systems have actually been much more resilient than the hard structures.

So the life cycle costs are actually much cheaper.

And there's really no reason they wouldn't work on a lake.

It just we've done living shorelines in fresher water systems such as along the Chowan River that have been very successful.

So it has to be designed for the nature of the shorelines you're dealing with, but it's really just working with the natural system, trying to create some baffle for the wave energy so that the plants can survive along that shoreline.

- And I'm assuming if someone wanted to build something like that, I guess called the Coastal Federation or are there companies that, the Living Shorelines Are Us or something like that?

- We're trying to work ourselves out of a business in terms of encouraging private contractors to get into the work.

And one of the people that was interviewed is a company here in Raleigh, that's actually started a Living Shorelines Division 'cause they see a market there.

And we're also pleased that the General Assembly, this last session provided $2 million in cost share funding to help property owners as an economic incentive to move them away from them more traditional ways.

Their total investment in living shoreline just from the general assembly was $4 million in this past session.

And then number of funders like the NC Land and Water Fund and National Fish and Wildlife Foundation are funding projects.

DOT has gotten appropriations to do projects on its own and have really become an advocate for expanding that.

I would say anytime an agency tries something new, they run into roadblocks that went from a regulatory sense and we have to be careful that we don't stifle that interest by agencies like DOT because they're trying something that's not their normal way of doing road construction.

- Okay.

Other questions online?

- Yes.

Thank you.

Thank you for that.

That was very, very cool to learn about and great to hear about the funding too.

One question from one of our online attendees.

Many of our critical systems are at risk, but much of the disaster remediation efforts simply focus on rebuilding without changing the fundamental approach to sustainability.

How do we transform systems to create real change?

- That's a big question.

I'll let, whoever wants to take that one.

Good question.

Thank you.

- Well, I'll start on a hopeful note, which is that our streams of Disaster Recovery Funding in United States are slowly starting to turn a corner in terms of understanding that we don't wanna rebuild exactly what was there before.

We wanna rebuild stronger, better, more resiliently.

I think on the other hand that a challenge is that a community that's been through a massive disaster they've been through a trauma, a collective and individual trauma, and to make a major decision about, for example, changing the layout of a community to look a different way, that would be more sustainable.

It's a very difficult time to make that kind of major decision when people have undergone that experience, and it's not something that should be done top down without that level of community participation.

So that's one of the challenges that we face, certainly disaster recovery is an an opportunity, but it's also a really difficult, challenging time for people in communities.

And just to add onto that, I think how transformational change can happen is when people are plugged in and talking about it before the event occurs.

When those conversations might be a little bit easier to have.

You're not trying to think about where you're gonna sleep that night.

And so you can think a little bit more about the long term future of the community that you're living in and what you really care about and what you value and what you wanna preserve.

I think the challenges that we neglect that day to day conversation, that day to day discussion, and then face this incredibly challenging time after a disaster, when that's the window of time, when everything is supposed to be happening all at the same time.

And it's incredibly hard to not put your house back where it was in the aftermath of an event like that.

So even when it's clear skies, that's actually the best time to have those conversations so that you're not having to have them right after the event.

Another online question.

One more for now and then maybe we'll circle back after we take some more from the room.

So are you speaking change in the attitudes of educators and administrators.

Hello, that see this topic as a critical focus.

- I'll start because our office does a fair bit of work with K12 education, I would say yes.

In October...

I started my position in July, 2019.

And in October, I kept getting all these calls from fifth grade teachers.

And I'm thinking, there has to be something else going on here.

It's not just a coincidence.

And it's that weather and climate was in the fifth grade curriculum and they wanted some resources and every year that's gone past, we get more and more of those calls.

So Rebecca Ward in my office, who's a really talented scientist, started putting together curriculum with the help of education experts so that people could teach that in schools.

And I think we're only seeing positive feedback from that.

I think they are being empowered in their schools to talk about it, but also feel maybe they have more of the tools to do so.

- This might be a good time to mention public service announcement real quick.

The the science team at PBS North Carolina works with incredibly talented educators and graphic artists.

And we put together lesson plans, free lesson plans that meet state standards, they are interactive, we've won several Emmy Awards for the work and we are putting together a lesson plan tied to "State of Change."

And it's looking at the question of what is water and is water... What kind of resource is water?

Is it a renewable resource, is it a finite, what about water?

And we're working on it now.

It'll be ready by sometime this summer.

So in time for the school year.

So if you get that call again, or you can let people know, the lesson plan on that, all of our lesson plans, we've got one on Newton's laws of motion with the Durham Bulls, genetics, all kinds of lesson plans.

They're all free again on PBS Learning Media.

It's pbslearningmedia.org.

If you go there and you search, Science Sea, you'll find all the lesson plans.

So there you go.

You can answer that question.

Anybody else from the audience?

Yes.

- Thank you.

I'd like to lean in a little bit on the issue of funding availability and it's true right now, there's a tremendous amount of funding available to fund resiliency programs and initiatives.

You look at what's available in HUD.

You look at the state level, I'm thinking, about the FEMA building resilience, infrastructure in communities, a break program, the money is out there, and there is this near term opportunity that could have long term impacts.

The challenge right now, particularly for small coastal communities, is that they neither have the resources to pursue that money, nor do they have the funds to provide the matching funds, which are often required.

And Dr. Martin, I don't know if coming from the inner core, this may be a question for you, but do you have any thoughts on how the state institutions and the state university system, how others might come together to be able to support these small communities in pursuing these grant funding opportunities?

- Definitely, that's a really important point that just because the funding is available, doesn't mean that a community has an equal shot at getting it.

And one of the sources of inequity in climate change adaptation is the very fact that we have left a lot of the climate adaptation work to local communities or in a different light, we've empowered local communities to take leadership in climate adaptation work.

But the reality is that this favors larger communities that have the staff bandwidth to pursue a grant application, to spend the time on it, whereas in smaller communities, especially more rural areas, staff are already wearing four hats and that fifth hat is just not gonna happen of grant writer.

Some of the ways that my agency, the North Carolina Office of Recovery and Resiliency is addressing this is through providing technical assistance to help... We are working at a regional scale to help groups of counties come together and identify top priorities or projects that would make their region more resilient.

we also are supporting some work through North Carolina State University, the Coastal Dynamics Design Lab.

You heard Andy Fox talking in the film about their work in Princeville.

Were funding some of their work where they really come in work hand in hand with communities to hear their priorities and then reflect them back in site design, and then translate that into grant language essentially.

So really crafting a vision that is tied to those grant opportunities, so that it's implementable.

The Department of Environmental Quality also has a program that works with counties or towns or cities called the resilient Coastal Communities Program.

Very similar to the regional work that we're doing.

They fund communities to develop a plan, and then to some degree to do pre-development work.

So kind of getting together the pieces of a grant application that they would need, or the design in engineering that they would need.

The match piece is really challenging.

And it's one that the state has off been answered with state allocations.

For certain types of grants, to pay the local match for those for some types of projects, but it continues to be a really difficult issue and one that we need to continue to raise awareness of and look for different solutions to.

And I think even some of the funding programs are starting to look at their match requirements and see that it's having a disparate impact.

And think about maybe it's time to take a hard look and change some of those.

One opportunity is if we can convince these communities to pursue the nature based strategies that some of the existing pools of money that we have out there, like through the Land and Water Fund, can be used as much.

It's interesting actually looking back in 1994, North Carolina ranked near the bottom in the nation in terms of investment in land conservation.

We are now fifth in the nation largely due to the investments that the legislature made, to create the Clean Water Manager Trust Fund at that time.

But that also became a magnet for other matching federal dollars.

And I think there's even potential probably to pursue, getting dedicated appropriations for that match because what our experience with legislature has been that they love to leverage their money against federal dollars.

So if they sell the payback from doing that, I think it could be this potential to expand those resources.

- We've got just a couple minutes left and I don't wanna end this with people massively depressed.

So let me ... Again, thanks for all the questions.

Let me just ask each of you.

We've kind heard what keeps you up at night?

What has you worried?

What gives you hope?

Talking about the grams and a lot of really good questions, what gives you hope that we got a lot of work to do, obviously, but people are aware of climate change, they're taking some actions, what gives you hope?

Dr Dello, we'll start way down there.

- Well, I feel very positive for 2022.

I could say, I hope I'm going to have ice cream for dinner, but I can actually make that happen.

And we have- - You can't have it though, if you want.

I mean, yeah.

Okay.

- I don't know.

I'm gonna go home in a few minutes.

But we have the tools to address this.

That's the thing.

We're not waiting for some solution that hasn't been developed.

We know we can solve this problem.

We just need courage and the will to do so.

So I wanna reframe hope into, I know we can do this and I want us to do this, and I want everybody to want to do this, but time is running at, there's no set number on it, but if you're on the bus and you fall asleep on the bus, when you wake up, you get off at the absolute next stop If you've missed your stop.

we've missed so many stops.

We need to wake up and get off the bus.

So it wasn't exactly uplifting, but that's my message to leave you with.

- [Frank] I will not fall asleep on a bus ever again.

That was a good analogy.

Thank you, Thank you.

Todd, go ahead.

- Well, I have a board member that constantly tells me hope is not a strategy.

So it's gonna take effort in a vision of what we need to get accomplished.

And you look around, there are lots of success stories, so we see progress being made, We just need to ratchet that up and it's gonna take leadership and I think the leaders are listening.

- Two things that give me hope are... One, is the challenges that we have seen overcome in many communities, especially in our most vulnerable communities that there are tremendous examples out there of grassroots community based work to recover from disasters to overcome systemic barriers.

We are home of the Environmental Justice Movement.

There is just a tremendous history in North Carolina of overcoming massive challenges and having a vision and coming together collectively and I see that in disaster recovery work, and it gives me a lot of hope for climate resilience, long term climate adaptation work.

The other thing that gives me hope is the nature based solutions and the natural working lands, kinds of work and one aspect in particular that I wanna highlight is that it brings together disparate parts of our state.

It brings together the natural heritage folks, It brings together our agricultural community, it brings together our hazard mitigation thinking.

And I think that kind of cross cutting collaborative work is what will be needed in the future.

And so the nature based solutions piece gives me a lot of hope.

- I think we do talk a lot about the challenges that climate change is going to bring, but I often see the other side of it, which is a whole set of offer opportunities.

We have lots of problems that have been longstanding problems, and we've never seen the urgency to address them.

We've known for decades that our disaster recovery programs are inadequate, especially for the households that need it the most.

We've known for a long time that we've neglected our natural ecosystems, that us so much benefit and take so much care of us.

And so maybe climate change brings us the urgency to tackle those problems and not just fight to preserve the status quo with all of its inadequacies, but actually to improve things moving forward.

And so echoing what Amanda said, I think there are real reasons to think that by adapting and by going through this challenging process, we can actually come out better in the end.

- So we have a lot of work to do, but we know what to do for the most part.

All right.

Very good.

We're almost outta time.

I wanna say thank you again to our panelists, Dr. Kathie Dello, director of the State Climate Office.

Todd Miller, executive director of the Coastal Federation, Dr. Amanda Martin, North Carolina's Chief Resilience Officer and Dr. Miyuki Hino, assistant professor at UNC Chapel Hill.

Let's give them a hand.

Thank you.

[audience clapping] - Thank you.

Thank you so much.

Thank you also to the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences for all their help in hosting.

It was great to be in person.

Thank you to you for being here.

Thanks to everyone who's joining us on line, but again, thanks to the museum for hosting and helping us stream this event.

Thank you to the North Carolina Science Festival for helping promote it, and a quick reminder, one more time tomorrow night, you can see the whole "State of Change" show at nine o'clock on PBS North Carolina or it's also streamed online at pbsnc.org/stateofchange.

Thank you again.

Thank you, everybody.

And and have a good night.

[audience clapping] [audience chattering]