John Bel Edwards keynote: Securing critical infrastructure in a changing climate

**SPEAKER_1** (0:05)
Welcome to the AiDASH Evolve 2024 podcast. AiDASH makes critical infrastructure industries climate resilient and sustainable with satellites and AI. Evolve 2024 in New Orleans, Louisiana was our inaugural event. We gathered industry leaders, innovators, and visionaries to explore how cutting edge technology and satellites and AI is safeguarding critical infrastructure and fostering biodiversity to ensure a sustainable future amidst climate change challenges. In this podcast series, we are recapping the entire event, every speaker and session. You can find it all on our content hub at ai-dot-com-slash-evolve2024 or check the show notes for all pertinent links. In this episode, you'll hear a keynote from former governor of Louisiana, John Bel Edwards. Governor Edwards expounds on how increasing storm intensity and frequency is putting American infrastructure at risk, creating danger for future generations. He talked about what steps have been taken at both the federal and state levels to fight this problem by allocating budgets and making climate adaptation a priority. He talked about how climate change-related disasters like storms are intensifying, how we need to evolve to ensure climate resiliency, and how technology is a key component of that effort. There must be collaboration on climate adaptation across academia and the public and private sectors. Here's former Governor John Bel Edwards.
John Bel, welcome to the stage.

**John Bel Edwards** (1:46)
And we are honored to be here.
Thank you for the opportunity to be here. Abhishek, thank you very much for that introduction. I do want to start by thanking AiDASH and their entire team for asking me to join all of you today. Have you been told, as you've been told, I'm John Bel Edwards, I had the great honor and privilege of being the governor here in Louisiana for eight years. I don't mind telling you this is the first real speech I've given since January when I left office. But I'm excited and my life is really good. I'm practicing law. My office is only about a block from here. So that worked out really well. Spent a lot more time with my family now and my wife and Don and I, we're proud grandparents of a nine month old. Our second daughter has one on the way in December and our son's a freshman here at Tulane, and I spent the night with him last night. He was not happy about that.
So life looks different these days, but we are enjoying it. And before I dive into the topics for today, I do want to start by welcoming all of you to Louisiana and to New Orleans. Some of you are probably here for the first time, and I will warn you that you can have a really good time if you want to here in New Orleans. I do hope you are taking advantage of everything that our state has to offer. If you are a football fan, tonight the Saints are going to beat the Broncos at the Superdome right over here. Actually, about half the Saints are hurt, so I'm not sure how that's going to turn out. We're actually going to host the Super Bowl in February. And when we do, that'll be... We'll tie Miami for the city that's hosted the most Super Bowls. I know that tonight you're going to the Sazerac House. I've been there many times. It is a wonderful museum. It's a great location. You're going to have a lot of fun. And it may not be technically true, but we do like to claim, and you're going to see at the Sazerac House, that New Orleans is the birthplace of the cocktail. And I know you associate New Orleans with things like jazz music and great food and so forth. But we like to believe New Orleans is where folks started mixing their drinks, rather than drinking their rum or their bourbon straight. So as I dive into, I'm sorry, as you dive into the important work ahead, I do want you to experience a little bit of our culture, see for yourself how we do mix things up in Louisiana, whether it's a great seafood gumbo, a cocktail, or game day. Now, one of the reasons that I was happy to accept this invitation is the topic of the conversation. It intersects with so many of the challenges that I faced as governor. A multitude of various national natural disasters, and intermixed with climate change. We have a rapidly disappearing coast here in Louisiana. By the time I'm finished talking, if you measure from when you got here this morning, about a football field worth a coast will disappear, the coast of Louisiana. And so that's a serious problem, 2,000 square miles since 1927 But we've got the energy transition that's happening here, incredibly important. So these are all issues that require companies to step up, be forward thinking, especially when it comes to creating a safer planet and more resilient communities. And that is what the topic of this conference is all about, Evolve. And I know you saw it on the slide a while ago with Abishek. So Charles Darwin's journey to the Galapagos Islands taught him and taught us that it's not really always about being the strongest or the fastest, that's the key to survival. It's also about the ability to adapt. And he saw that even the smallest creatures could evolve, changing and adjusting to their environment to find new ways to thrive. So it is a lesson as old as time itself, but it's one that's unfolding today everywhere including, and I would say especially, right here in Louisiana. You know, the great Mississippi flood came in 1927 It would have been easy to believe then that that was the end of the story for so many communities. The waters rose, families were displaced, neighborhoods just washed away. In fact, Randy Newman, a Louisiana native, captured the sense of despair in his song, Louisiana 1927, with the refrain, they're trying to wash us away. But just like the finches observed by Darwin, Louisiana adapted. We didn't just rebuild, we evolved. We learned to work with the river, to understand its power, to create a system of levees and spillways that transformed the landscape. We became stronger, more resilient, and more attuned to the challenges that we faced. And we're evolving again with sediment diversions that now connect the river to the marsh in a controlled fashion to deliver sediment to actually recreate that marsh that we have been losing, but without a threat of river flooding. And that's the lesson that we carried forward today. The world may try to wash us away, but if there's one thing we know in Louisiana, it's that we were built to rise, to adapt, and to keep moving forward. And as you watch the news and what's transpired in Florida and Appalachia with the recent hurricanes, it resonates. And the challenges we've had in Louisiana, they're being felt to one degree or another all over the country. I would tell you that, and this is true, according to studies, on a per capita basis, climate change and these natural disasters have affected Louisiana more than any other state on a per capita basis. We've been dealing with these challenges longer than most other places. It is not a distant concern. It's our reality every day. It's real for our fishermen and our farmers who see the effects on their livelihoods. It's real for communities that have had to relocate because their homes are no longer safe. We've got families who for generations had homes and camps in places where the land has just literally disappeared. We have climate refugees here in Louisiana. We know these challenges all too well, and therefore we understand better than most that climate change is not a future threat. It's happening now. That's why the work that we do to address it is so critical. It's why Louisiana must continue to find solutions, and we're going to lead the country in that effort in many respects. Not only is the state heavily impacted by climate change, but also one of the world's leading energy providers. When it comes to a changing climate, one of the biggest changes we've seen in recent years is the rapid intensification of hurricanes. You know, we've got 4.7 million people here in Louisiana. There were times when I was governor that more than half of them did not have electricity. The two strongest storms to ever hit the state happened in 2020 and 2021, hurricanes Laura and Ida. They were exactly a year apart, and they hit during the worst part of the COVID pandemic. We had to re-write the script on how to safely shelter people impacted by the storm.