 ond o gweithio o'r dweudio a'r dweudio ymddangosol o'i llain a'r ffrygeddol a'r ysgolodau gan hynny. Rydym yn gwirionedd o'r ysgolod wedi'i unid yng nghymru yng Nghymru. Ac ynghylch ymwrdd economi sydd yn ddod i'r cyfnod o'r sefydliad yma, gan ymweld yng nghymru erbyn yng nghymru yng Nghymru, ac ynghyd i'r unid ynghymru ynghymru ar y cwrdd ynghylch ynghylch ynghylch. I'm really excited to hear from our excellent panel, including voices from Walmart, Philips, Sweden and startups. We want to make today's session as interactive as possible. Use the QR code coming up on your screens now to ask questions as we go. But why is today's conversation so important? Our speakers will talk about how we can make value chains more sustainable and circular. We're also going to focus on how Stockholm plus 50, a major global environment conference in June, can accelerate action. It's important to remember that local communities can be severely impacted by unsustainable value chains. For example, badly-disposed e-waste can leak toxins into the water, soil and even food systems, causing severe health impacts in young children. And many of us consumers want to know that what we buy does not cause harm. The good news is that improving sustainability is among the top three objectives for companies in their supply chains. We're also seeing more and more action by governments to make trade sustainable and circular. To help us understand these issues, let me turn to Annika Strandhull, Minister for Climate and the Environment to Sweden for opening remarks. Minister, please, the floor is yours. Minister, I think you need to unmute. Well, thank you very much for the introductory words. And let me first say that I'm very glad that we are having this side event here today, highlighting the importance of sustainable value chains as a contributor to a healthy planet. Many thanks to the World Economic Forum and One Planet Network for their collaboration and welcome to all around the globe for joining us at this event. Distinguished delegates and colleagues, unsustainable consumption and production drive planetary health and equity crisis. Here again, the science is clear. The patterns of unsustainable consumption and production throughout much of the world are key drivers for the environmental and human crisis that we are currently facing. People, planet and prosperity are closely interlinked. The choices we make now will affect the future and in turn our own future prosperity as well. Still, we are currently degrading the ability of the nature environment to support human needs and livelihoods. Clearly, we can't continue on this path. We need a game changer and we need a transformation towards a net zero, nature positive and zero pollution. We need a transformation that leaves no one behind and that creates a healthy planet for the prosperity of all of us. In June this year, the world will come together in Stockholm to commemorate the first UN conference on the human environment. We believe that Stockholm plus 50 provides a unique opportunity for progressive governments, business actors, youth and other stakeholders to advance the sustainability agenda, bridging gaps between climate, biodiversity, economy and the recovery from the pandemic. Stockholm plus 50 could be that transformative moment that contributes to a new understanding of how our economies, societies, a stable climate and resilient biosphere are inseparably interconnected. Business has a key role in realising sustainable transformations, delivering a green and inclusive recovery and climate nature and pollution goals. Sustainable value chains capture all that. However, companies cannot do this on their own. Policy, finance and business must work together to create a whole of society solution. The sustainable transformation of global value chains must be our shared priority. We experience increasing interests from a variety of stakeholders in accelerating the sustainable transformation of global value chains to address the interconnectivity between climate, nature and social equity. Stockholm plus 50 is a moment for global value chains to begin their transformation to net zero and nature positive. It's a moment for the nature positive and net zero agendas to be aligned. This is the kind of action oriented outcome we envisage for Stockholm plus 50 with clear and concrete recommendations, charting the way forward and driving key actions for governments and other stakeholders to deliver on the 2030 agenda and beyond. An outcome that will mobilise the global community behind strength incorporation and accelerated innovative action. We aim to engage a wide variety of stakeholders that reflect the richness and diversity of voices and perspectives on the planet. We encourage all of you to contribute to the journey towards Stockholm plus 50 and its outcome with transformative actions for people and nature. The future is common in community. We must share it together. We will create it. Let us start the journey here today. Thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you minister for the very helpful framing of today's discussion. Let's turn now to our panellists. This is a group whose daily focus is on building sustainable value chains. We have Anki Ti Bose, co-founder and chief executive officer of Zilingo, Robert Metzger, global head of sustainability at Royal Philips, Tom Smith, director global government affairs at Walmart and Deborah Natty, who's a research analyst at Footprints Africa. Anki Ti, let me start with you. Zilingo is a cutting edge technology platform for the fashion industry. What's the biggest environmental challenge in textile value chains? That's a fantastic question. Textiles and fashion have historically been one of the biggest culprits in making the world less sustainable, contributing to climate change. It takes 4,000 litres sometimes more to make a pair of jeans and 10% of global carbon emissions come from our industry. Little children in factories are making products that's end-to-end in an industry that is mired with a lot of problems besides, of course, the fact that we should look into how much people are consuming and then how much of that ends up in landfills and so on and so forth. It's a large industry. It's almost 3% of global GDP. It employs hundreds of thousands of people on an end-to-end basis. Perhaps the challenges are threefold. One is in literally what is going into the product, which is the fabrics, and are they sustainable because they're eventually going to end up in a landfill. Second is what are the practices, how much water are we wasting, are the labour practices okay, and essentially the production and the manufacturing is being done in a responsible manner. And then the third is, is there an aspect of circularity and responsibility in the way that it's being consumed? So it's definitely an industry that's mired with many, many problems across these three buckets. And of course, because of the nature of the work that we do at Zlingo, we believe that digitisation eventually leads to transparency and more margins, which leads to businesses being able to solve these buckets of problems, not just because it's good for the climate of the future generations, but also because it actually positively benefits the business lowering costs and increasing revenues. Thank you. That's very interesting. And I like your framing of the three very clear challenges. And we'll come back to you shortly on how we can solve those in the technology, potential technology solutions. Robert, let me turn to you now. So Philips has committed to reducing CO2 emissions across its supply chain in line with a 1.5 degree scenario. But tell us a little bit more about the challenges that your suppliers face concretely in doing this and how Philips intervenes to help them. Thanks, Kimberley. Great question. The challenge, of course, is to the entire industry, not just our suppliers. If you consider that the healthcare industry is emitting more CO2 than, for instance, all airlines on this planet or shipping lines, then we understand that actually curing people can never go at the cost of the planet, so to say. And also considering that three and a half billion people do not have access to healthcare, why already today the emissions and the environmental footprint of the healthcare industry is so enormous, we really understand that we need to do something to make healthcare not just accessible, but also sustainable environmental sense. Having said that, a large part of these environmental footprint is in the supply chain of the healthcare providers, which means also in our supply chain. And that is exactly the reason why Philips became one of the first health technology companies to become operating carbon neutrally, but also to commit to science-based targets, one and a half degrees. And that, of course, is something that we want to share and drive in our supply chains and work with our suppliers. So not as a policeman of the supply chain, but more or less as a doctor sharing the insights that we have going there, going beyond auditing, really trying to understand what the maturity level of the different suppliers is and starting to act together with them where they are today. And that really means also, for instance, sharing the knowledge that we have acquired, making capital accessible, bringing experts on the ground and really helping them to get them also to sign up to science-based targets. Last year we have committed to, by 2025, have at least 25% of our suppliers also being committed to science-based targets. And at the end of last year and the first wave of disengagement, we were already at 28%. I think the going will get tougher, but it's very encouraging to see that this is a topic that really lives the impact of our supply chain as about the factor 10 bigger or magnitude, or magnitude bigger than our own operations. And we really think that we need to engage with our suppliers to make the difference. Excellent. Great to see that you're already at 28% of your suppliers committed to those science-based targets and aiming to get to 35%. Hopefully we can continue to accelerate that action. Tom, let me turn to you. Given that Wormut is also a recognised leader in value chain sustainability, can you talk us through that journey over the past decade, so zooming out a little bit? And what does that come to mean for the company and what are the lessons you've learned? Yes, thanks, Gimbyllian. Thanks. We'll be coming back for this event. Some great talk so far. I look forward to the rest of it from the panel. So, I guess I'm going to plagiarise a bit of a speech that CEO gave back in 2020, because I think this piece about this question about the journey is really important to us, and I think it really helps other companies understand the journey that we've gone through to understand how they can project. So, I guess firstly, we learn that as companies grow and mature, like we all do as individuals, our mindsets and perspective change, and one big period where the business made a shift was about 15 years ago, just above that now, when we made a significant commitment to sustainability as a whole. It was a big inflection point for Wormut's history, so then, as is now, we're a big company, but not fully understood what was meant to or was required of us socially and environmentally. As young companies often do, we were very focused on customers and associates, you know, we were doing some charitable giving and felt generally that we were doing good by serving others. We were also succeeding financially, but there was this disconnect with how we saw ourselves and how others saw us. So, initially, the business thought that this was a communications problem. It obviously wasn't, and there was this wide acknowledgement across the business that we needed to change. I think the world had been expecting us to serve people, all people, much more broadly than we saw at the time, and so they were pushing back. So, there was a lot of listening to various stakeholders and associates, and inspiration had also come from the sort of emotional impacts of our actions to serve others right after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans. So, the business stepped up. We committed our company to achieve, I mean, this was at that point achieving 100% renewable energy, zero waste strategy, more sustainable supply chain, increasing the minimum wage, and I think really most people inside and outside the company thought the goals were unrealistic or financially questionable and not operationally possible, but they've been proven wrong. 2020 was also a key milestone, fast forwarding a bit, was a key milestone for our sustainability journey as we committed to becoming a regenerative company, one dedicated to placing nature and humanity at the center of our business practices. So, I could talk a lot more about this. I'm conscious of time. We've got loads more questions, but that's probably just a bit of an insight in how our journey's gone so far. Indeed, thanks for taking us through that journey. You work with tens if not hundreds of thousand suppliers, correct me if I'm wrong. So, tell us what are the challenges of actually delivering on those goals? You mentioned it was a bit challenging or there was some skepticism when you set them. So, how are you going about implementing? Yeah, we could talk a whole session on this. I think it's trying to understand how best we can use our size and scale for good. You know, as you say, we're sourcing everything from everywhere, a whole bunch of different sort of challenges and opportunities. It's really understanding where best to focus our attentions, where can we really make that impact and use the size and scale. And that's a challenge and an opportunity I suppose, but that's probably the issue that we question ourselves and others every day is to understand how best to target those efforts. Great. We'll come back a little bit more to the solutions in a minute. Deb, let me turn to you. We've read your recent work and Footprints Africa is doing some great efforts on supporting small businesses in adopting future-friendly practices, particularly around the circular economy. So, in your view, how do sustainable value chains drive development opportunities, particularly for local firms? Thank you, Kimberly. I think that when we started our work as Footprints Africa, our focus was that we were on a mission to prove that businesses can be a force for good, so that businesses were not being excused in our transition to what was sustainable and what was circular because that's our focus. So, we were using the B core assessment, which is a global assessment, and then we later on added circular economy where we wanted to support the transition to circular economy. We realized that, unfortunately, pardon me to say this, but the term sustainability has become kind of a buzzword and is kind of losing its weight, and so we wanted to define what sustainability means and how we wanted that to be implicated in whatever we did. And so, our focus, our targets when we speak about circularity and when we speak about sustainability had to do with regeneration and it had to do with inclusion. So, we wanted things or businesses that were regenerative, the value chains that were regenerative, and value chains that were inclusive. And so, when we talk about sustainability, then what does it mean in specific terms? So, we are looking at paying living wage across the value chains. We are looking at zero waste emission across the value chain, which includes zero transactions, and it also includes less use of fertilizer, maybe not using fertilizer. Thinking of soil health, we are thinking of local resources and community resources. How do we respect those things as businesses? And we are thinking of fair payment terms for the local value chains. You know we sometimes have the local and small businesses not being treated well because they are measured as bigger companies would be measured. And so, those were things that we were thinking of when we talk about sustainability, when we talk about circularity in general in the value chains. Thank you. Great. I really like that last reflection that local and smaller businesses were being measured up to the same standards, and that's a real challenge that we all need to think about how we address that. On this topic of challenges, tell us a little bit more about other challenges or elaborate a little bit further on the challenges that are holding back small business circular strategies, particularly in Africa. Thank you. So, when we started the circular economy project, we wanted to profile at least 500k studies that were practicing circular economy so we could understand what the circularity state of Africa was. We are going to publish that very soon. And speaking to some entrepreneurs, we had to interview some of them, interview a little about 200 or a little over that, and we realized that they had some trending issues that cut across most of these companies. I can only highlight a few, but first one I'll talk about is how they had to take on so much in the value chains because they didn't have ready resources available for them, and they didn't have people to take on the different separate value chains. So, instead of just focusing on producing one thing, they should think about how the resources come about and where the resources come from before they could feed it into their production, and because they are small, they are not able to take on the pressure that comes with that. They also have to compete with bigger companies because these are usually small businesses, new concepts that are coming up, and they have MNCs that they have to compete against who are probably in the linear economy, and they already have all the policies and all the opportunities favoring them, so these businesses would have to build their customer base, they have to build, they have to do their own, give exposure, marketing to their product, and reach out to people, new people who would understand their concept, and that also takes some time for people to get to know what you're doing, understand why you're doing it, and buy in. So, that was also another challenge in there, and there were also part imbalances, especially when it comes to decision making and when it comes to policy making. So, we would say that we are bringing stakeholders together to make a policy, but usually policies are far first from what exactly is going on on-ground because we are not speaking to the right people, the indigenous, you're not speaking to those who are actually being affected by this policy or who need to implement this policy, and there's one thing I've been saying that policies don't have to be thought of as separate things on their own, they have to be thought of as things that are rules that govern people, that these people are the same people that are setting up the policies, and so how do people set policies that work for people, and so when I am at the table to set a policy that I'm thinking of, how does it affect me as an individual, and what's the implication on the environment, and so I'm not just taking myself out and trying to put out some set of rules and regulations. A friend, I'm not going to mention this, but a friend told me a story about how he was into reusable bags, producing reusable bags so that the advocating for not using plastics and single use plastics, and they approached one of these big companies in the country so they could partner with them to use the reusable bags for shopping, and this company wouldn't want to buy in because they already had a foreign partner who was taking off their plastic bags, and these plastic bags were supposed to be composable, and so they were just finding what they are doing. Solutions are supposed to be linked to the indigenous, they are supposed to bring in the individuals on the ground, and we are supposed to be looking at how do we support the people we are serving and not just trying to put something across because we feel it's going to support the environment or it's going to, it's good for everyone, so I would hold it there so I'm not going to stop talking too much, but yeah. Excellent, many thanks, indeed I think later on we'll start to talk a little bit about what policies are needed and how we really send those right market signals both for the business that are trying to drive that change and also so that we ensure that we really have that meaningful impact, and Kiti, let me come back to you, earlier you taught us through the challenges in the textiles value chain, you mentioned issues around fabrics, you mentioned issues around production, and also creating more circularity. Talk us through some of the opportunities you see to address those challenges and how can Zilingo help? Absolutely, Kimberly, I think the main thing that is a reality is that the consumer wants something that's affordable and desirable, and unless and until we are able to help businesses make their products competitive, affordable, desirable in a way that's sustainable, it'll be very hard to drive a large-scale transformation, which means that business goals and sustainability goals have to go together. What we do in our work every day, which is sort of what we think sort of applies to the larger industry and many other supply chains as well, is that if you can use digitisation to create end-to-end transparency, to digitise the flows of data, of goods and of money, if you incentivise that digitisation and that transparency, so as to give the businesses across the supply chain like little factories and maybe mid-sized factories and fabric suppliers and traders, if you give them an incentive to digitise and be transparent, such as access to better financial services with that transparency or access to better tracking because of those, because of that digitisation and that transparency, or access to better raw materials, access to better pricing, access to better markets to actually distribute their goods, then it starts to make sense. So just to sort of put numbers to that entire flow in fashion because in textiles, the whole industry so on digitised at large, that when you digitise it end-to-end from fabric or let's say from yarn to closet, you end up creating 15% to 25% more value even fairly conservative, which means that you've opened up 15% to 25% margins for the businesses across the value chain and that means that you've made it transparent, you've made it digital, you've made sure that the labour was fair, you've made sure that you've used the right kind of materials as well, you've made sure that you can actually share those details like you know how a food label is, imagine if your clothing could have a label of what has actually gone inside it and you can plough those profits back to make sure that you can have sustainable practices. So I think it's important to use technology as a tool to drive profitability, business goals and sustainability together and then it works. So that's what we do. Great, I very much like that, putting profitability at the service of sustainability. Let's dive in a little bit with you here. I'd love to get really specific examples. So imagine I'm a retailer and I'm looking to work with you to source sustainable fabrics. How would that work? Typically what retailers would do is they would have a design in mind or they would have a specific clothing has spec sheets, it's called tech packs, which are the exact specifications of what your design needs to come out manufactured. What we would do is we would match a retailer or a brand with the right suppliers who can actually manufacture that product. They would sample that product, they would see what kind of ESG verifications the supplier has and so on and so forth, labour verifications, working conditions and so on and so forth. At the factory end, which is the supplier, we actually have the software which is tracking every movement across the assembly line of that factory and we are also selling or bringing in the fabric into that factory as well with our technology. So literally from the fabric business that's selling the fabric to the factory, then the factory is actually taking those raw materials manufacturing the product, up until that retailer who plays the order. There's full traceability on a poor piece basis, which is what other industries like precision instruments and pharma, industrials and electronics have had for a while but was missing in textiles, which is why it was so inefficient and fairly unsustainable and that creates this value. Excellent, I really again emphasising that you sold in inefficiency, which is helpful from a cost perspective, but you're also then addressing the key sustainability challenges, so excellent. Robert, let's turn to you for the buyer's perspective. Global companies have a lot of procurement power, so tell us a little bit more about how Philips is using that power to affect the transition to a more circular economy, which I know is a big priority for you. Thanks, happy to do that and I just wanted to applaud also Deborah and Ankiti for the wonderful examples that you have been sharing. So I fully recognise of course the enormous value creation potential for digital and combining the two comments of you. I think it's not just about creating that value, but also making sure that the value is fairly attributed and distributed over the supply chain and that's I think exactly where, for instance, circular and more sustainable purchasing models can play a role. Now we try to implement that also at Philips, I already spoke about knowledge sharing and capability capacity building. Supply chains and supply organisations of multinational are very well-trained muscles. I'm sure that Tom can also refer to that right, so I mean they have been trained over decades. The question is how do you use these muscles? So if we also infuse in the target setting for our supply organisations goals like reducing the carbon emissions in line with science-based targets or optimising, let's say, and making more smart, for instance, circular purchasing agreements or leveraging the capabilities of our suppliers to help us equal design our products and lower the carbon footprint, we can achieve incredible things together with our suppliers. I think that's a different way of thinking. The same goes of course for our customers. So if you think about large healthcare providers in the world or governments, public procurement is an extremely important muscle that the world needs to learn to flex to push supplier preferences also towards more sustainable choices. What we do, for instance, is also linking the conditions under which you can access working capital or working capital is being financed to supply sustainability performances, using things like a CDP supply chain ratings and our own assessments, and increasingly also using circular metrics to really help our suppliers understand what our priorities are. A lot of things that we can do and that others can do and also public procurement organisations can do to signal to the global markets that we need to shift towards more sustainable models. Excellent. I was really interested in that last piece on circular metrics. Can you tell us a little bit more about those, how those work and how you use them with suppliers? Yeah, happy to do that. Maybe we talk about it later also. We have been very active in really driving the transition to circular economic models because half of the global carbon emission reductions on the world need to come from this transition. You mentioned in your introduction Kimberly also that less than 10% of global materials are currently recycled, but there's a huge space that needs to be addressed. We are moving as Philips to offering integrated solutions rather than selling products. Of course, that is also something that goes upstream. Now, in order to drive that, you need to have also metrics. There's a lot of metrics out there that try to measure circularity. They differ by industry, but for instance, one metric is to measure which percentage of your total global revenues comes from circular models. We try to go to 25% by 2025, and we have underlying definitions. That's something that we share with our suppliers. Then, of course, a more easy thing maybe to say, okay, what percentage of recycled plastics are you using? For instance, metals are largely recycled anyway, and signaling to your supply chains the amount and kilotons of plastics that you are willing to buy in terms of recycled materials because that creates demand and demand security for your suppliers so that they can invest. There are a lot of things that you can do, but of course, that's metrics is always an interesting topic. I think the most important thing here is to understand how we can increase the amount of circular models across the globe regardless of the metric. Absolutely. Indeed, metrics can be challenging given the diversity of them. They're so important. We need to measure what we treasure, but as you say, we also have to move forward in the interim. Tom, let me come over to you. As Robert mentioned, you're also a very large buyer in lots of areas, but you've particularly been doing some interesting work around carbon emissions in your suppliers over the last year or so. You've called this project gigaton, so tell us a little bit more about that. Yeah, thanks. It's very much to this point that I was saying before about trying to leverage the size and scale of Walmart for good. Gigaton goes back to 2017, so a few more years before that. I guess it works on the central challenge that most emissions in the retail sector, which we were hearing about before, lie in product supply chain scope 3 rather than in our main stores and distribution centres, aka scope 1 and 2. We launched project gigaton back in 2007 to engage suppliers, NGOs, and other stakeholders to challenge climate change. Gigaton aims to avoid one billion metric tons, aka a gigaton of greenhouse gases in the global value chains by 2030 by inviting suppliers to set targets and take action in six key areas, energy use, product design and use, waste packaging, deforestation and sustainable agriculture. The very much objective is to democratise climate actions by making resources available for any suppliers to get started and increase their ambitions and impact over time. It's very much trying to catch and support all those suppliers in our supply chain and really understand and how to improve. We designed or the team designed gigaton, the extra specific gigaton platform to support suppliers from a range of progress. So some that might be already in this journey, some that are starting up, very much just trying to offer resources such as calculators to help set and report goals, interactive workshops, guidance on best practices and additional links to resources initiatives. Back to the point of collaboration, we're working with a number of different NGOs such as Wildlife Fund, Environmental Defence Fund, Carbon Disclosure Project to help us improve the methodologies, support supply submissions on their support on their progress and leave many initiatives of their own to support suppliers. I'm trying to look at some of the latest stats on that. I think it's about 3,100 suppliers already on the platform, and I think from last count, and this gets reported through our ESG report, what are we on? We're 186 million metric tonnes of CO2 in 2020. So we're kind of getting progress and really, I guess, a great example of how to collaborate with suppliers and actively giving people practical advice to help them on this journey to really gather that change. Indeed, yeah, a really good example, as you mentioned, that you provide those supplies with the tools to be able to get to where they need to get. So helping them on calculations, best practices, et cetera, really, really interesting and important, especially with that gigaton that we need to get to. Debs, let's come back to you. You talked a lot about challenges at the start. I'd love to hear if there's an example of a startup that you know that's offering circular solutions, particularly helping in the context in the value chain. Thank you. It's really interesting to hear what Robert and Tom has to say, and that's uncanny as well, like practical steps and tangible steps have been taken. And it's interesting to see, I'm excited that we have these big organisations taking these steps because, sorry, if I get to my response and the example, I wanted to make this comment that even though we're expecting businesses or small businesses to make these huge changes, it's going to be very huge and tangible if MNCs or existing large businesses are able to make these changes because they affect and impact greater portions of the global, greater parts of the world. And so it's really going to make meaningful impact if they make their inputs and they make it tangible. And I'm excited to see that. I'll leave that and come back to that later. For the example, I'll speak about meat eco-foods. They are an organisation here in Ghana, and the introduction of, that's Margaret's, for animal feeding and compost for fertilizer for farmers. So meat eco-foods actually started as meat-meats when they were selling meat and food, that's food products, animal food products. Then they realised that the waste coming from the avatar was very enormous and they didn't know what to do with the waste. And that was all going into their environment. And so they thought about it and tried to design out solutions that could design out the waste they were going to produce. And this was going to add up to the existing avatar waste that was already enormous because meat is one of the things that is hugely consumed in Ghana. Let me speak to Ghana because I am speaking from Ghana. And so meat eco-foods decided to produce these margot and to produce these compost from the avatar waste. Now, in doing that, they realised that, oh, okay, we cannot just use our waste to produce these things. And so they decided to reach out to the community and they started getting waste products from the community, the local breweries, and they started getting from the local porridge seller because they had organic waste. And so they tried to engage them and they decided to take all of this waste in to produce, to make their products. And now the product is being sold back to farmers for their farming processes. And farmers don't have to use this chemical waste and chemical fertilisers which is already not so good for their environment. So farmers don't have to use that. And the feed is also used at their animal house to feed the animals for their avatar. So this is them trying to close the loop and trying to involve indigenous, the indigenous and the local community to help do that. I would, yeah, this example I would like to give. Excellent indeed. I love the fact you mentioned closing the loop at the end there. That's critical that we don't see waste as waste but that we see it as a resource and an opportunity. And that's a really positive story from the context of the food value chain. Remembering of course that agriculture accounts for a third of global emissions. So really important to get solutions and reductions there in those value chains. Yes. We have, thank you all panellists, these were really great insights and a tour around the challenges and also some positive messages on the solutions. While you've been sharing we've had some questions come in from the audience watching today and hopefully the QR code can go up on our screens again for those of you watching in case you want to ask additional questions. But let me pose now some that have already come in and Kitty, I'll start with you first. We've got one on technology, something you spoke about a bit. Now the question is, is technology alone sufficient to address sustainable value chain challenges? Please. Actually I think technology is an enabler perhaps the other couple of things that play or play a big role is how consumers feel about it and how policy makers are going to guide us in all of this. So the consumer part is fairly obvious I guess, but the policy part of it is getting more and more interesting. So technology along with strong policy and governance around this would really help. So for example there's a bill, it's not a lawyer, there's a bill that's just been introduced in New York which sort of the whole industry is looking at because that means that the US in general would look at it and therefore perhaps Europe would look at it and other countries and so on, where any company that is retailing online or offline in the US with over 100 million dollars of turnover has to expose very transparently at least 50% of their entire supply chain. Now what that does is a couple of things. Firstly it doesn't put pressure on small businesses or SMEs who might think, hey okay this is great, I want to be sustainable, but I don't know the first thing about doing this and imagine coming out of a pandemic, I don't want to be penalized for not meeting certain requirements. So it does the right thing, it forces the bigger companies to do it first and sort of pave the way for how it has to be done. And along with that I think what it does is it creates incentives for banks, financial institutions, certification agencies to all sort of work together with retailers quickly. So I think policy is the one thing that goes really well alongside with technology and consumer interest that can make this happen very fast. But obviously policy not not policy alone but along with national institutions supporting it as well. So it has to be a very concerted effort. Indeed and in the opening remarks we heard from the minister that we need to blend the business practices with the policy action and that's been a theme that's coming up again and again throughout this panel. So Robert, Tom, let's turn to you both. I think you might want to weigh in on the policy side. We have another question here and the question is are governments doing enough to deliver sustainable value chains? And if not what more can they do? What types of policies are needed to build on what Ankiti just said? Tom, you want to go first now? So thanks Ankiti, great points. What I would maybe want to add I think policies. So governments can set policies of course government can engage in dialogue and formulate clear long-term visions also in terms of outcomes, not so much in instruments. I think that's important and of course governments are one of the biggest procureers in the world which comes back to the earlier point that we made in terms of public procurement. We see quite a lot of governments really thinking about their long-term obligations to future generations also. I mean climate change is just one of these things but also actively engaging in social development and in driving the circularity agenda. There are quite some governments also engaged in pace, the platform to accelerate circular economy. So I think there are quite a lot of players that are really trying to develop that long-term focus and create conditions conducive to sustainable development which is encouraging to see but it can be happening more I would say on the public procurement and policy setting so agree with Ankiti. Great, green procurement an important topic. Tom over to you, your thoughts here. Yeah, a bigger focus and I think it's encouraging to see policies developing and I think it has a real opportunity to level the playing field for a lot of companies that are doing good already in this space. I think some of the key points to be aware of, I think it's key to get policy coherence. You know it's fabulous to see so many different pieces of legislation popping up in supply chains and domestic markets but I think it's key to get them to all connect and synchronize otherwise it then has this unintended consequences of making things much more complicated for supplies and you know these great comments so far today about SMEs if they have to comply with you know 12 different pieces of legislation it can get people tangled. You know and we said this before policy and legislation is one, two and the toolbox we're increasingly seeing this sort of new buzzword around smart mix of complementary measures, national, international, mandatory, voluntary you know I think it's this whole toolbox of things that isn't just legislation isn't just going to kind of fix everything it's a combination of all these different pieces and I think the other point to be aware of that we've got to get this you know this really careful balancing act is to make sure that the legislation is practical and doesn't have the unintended consequences of companies just removing sourcing from markets or from suppliers but are deemed too risky or aren't the journey of the sustainability journey yet so just getting that that careful balance it's going to be a challenge but it's the right thing to do but I think that's just something for us to all be conscious of. Indeed getting the balance right is critical. Debs I'd love to bring you in here because I know you mentioned the importance of policies earlier so your thoughts are governments doing enough to deliver sustainable value chains? Thank you so much for the question and thanks to Tom and Robert for the submissions I really relate to the fact that I think it was with Robert to mention that governments need to provide that conducive environment. We have policies first off but I feel that what most of these policies are fixed on or they are focused on specific sectors we have a lot of policies around plastic waste and we need to think about the economy because these things are interconnected and we cannot just focus on one thing and say that we are solving the situation so just just putting that out and secondly I see the government as the mediator because if government does not provide that support for businesses especially SMEs then nothing is going to happen because you already have the system that has been built to work for the linear economy to work for wastage to work for all what we are trying to avoid and the system is already fixed and if nothing changes then nothing if nothing happens nothing is going to change you're just going to be on that high streets going towards wherever maybe I wrote to distraction not to use negative words but I think government has to be that mediator and make a practical these policies not just some high level high ended set of rules and regulations that we feel can solve the situation but it's not actually been implemented on the grounds because no one understands no one is ready to implement what is put on them so government has to be that mediator and provide incentives I feel that we are giving the wrong incentives of your incentivizing the wrong behavior our policies are incentivizing the wrong behavior and we need to change that so that we are giving people the opportunity to to transition to the circular economy but we are making that fair and we are making it firm so that businesses who are already on the highway of linear economy are already not sustainable are thinking of how do we come to the other side but they know that there are consequences from the government if they don't and those who are providing value on sustainability those who are providing value when talking about circular economy they are providing they are being provided incentives tangible ones like tax reliefs like government was he um you mentioned was it Robert mentioning that government is the biggest procure does the biggest procurement and so are they are they engaging those that are trying to be innovative and those that are trying to bring in sustainable solutions so that government is taking the lead to engage these people and we are also going likewise because if government does not trust these solutions that are coming up then the ordinary or the private investor is not going to trust these people so government needs to do these practical um staff and we need to think of long-term investment um in the ministry she spoke she spoke about how policy finance and businesses have to come together as one unit to support this transition to a sustainable value chain and so what financial um processes that we haven't right now the finances that we are having supports quick quick incentives like quick quick um returns and people are in a hurry to make returns so that they have to feed um for lack of better word people have to feed people need to make their profits you put me to pay back your loans and so they are just on the high run but how do we make long-term investments so that we know that we are going to get the um impact in the future and that is also needed we should remember that things are interconnected and so we can't focus on just one part thing this is me ending out out um stop here but these are some of the points I think we should think about and government needs to think about and not just crash the back of things um there is this um saying that we say in the local I don't know it's just a local thing you know that and you can't you can't say that your mother is alive you can't pretend your mother is alive even though she's dead but then when it's time to go to eat and you are home everybody goes home and there is no food for you then you're going to accept that your mother is dead and so this is us claiming that we are actually solving the situation governments are make all the claims and do all the PRs and be out there saying that we are making solutions but if nothing is actually happening then we are going to go back home and we'll see the same challenges in our faces and we would have to deal with it so it's better we actually put in the work now out thanks indeed we have to see real policy change so that that enabling environment works for for the business and the startups that are trying to shift within these value chains you spoke a little bit about investment and access to capital Robert I wonder if we could come back to you you mentioned that some of the work you do is around linking access to capital with circularity and sustainability standards could you talk us through a little bit on that front I'm happy to do so and I just got inspired also by the the nice saying from from depth I think the other one that comes to mind that's often attributed as an African saying I'm not sure whether this right if you want to go fast go alone if you want to go far go together so I think capital of course is one of the many many means we are talking about large-scale transformations here not just of a company but of industries or supply chains right so you need to have a couple of pieces in place first one is a story that binds people something common narrative I think climate change is one of these running out of resources is another one local injustice and social refugees is another one so the pressure is mounting when having that integral narrative for instance around the sustainable development course of the nations is important encouraging leaders formal and informal leaders to share that story and walk to talk and building capabilities is another one and then of course embedding in the system is the other one so if our suppliers are all fired up and know what we want and they have the capabilities to do so and we punish them at the end of the year by not aligning our financial incentives with what they're doing that we are shooting in our foot right and we are would be damaging these relationships that's why I think it's so important to also align the financial structures not just on the business model side but also for instance working capital financing or internal long-term incentives and performance incentives we see sustainability goals but that's exactly what we are working on with for instance giving better conditions financing conditions depending on supply of sustainability performance so that's one of the many wings but I want to stress that's part of the package that you need to transform large supply organizations or anything in the world indeed I think another theme that's coming up here is the need for many different levers across the value chain but also from policy to be able to get to where we need to go and we have one last question that I'll ask to each of you in turn coming in from our from our audience and it's a tough one so I'm preparing you and it really goes to the core of the issue which is can we really address over consumption within OECD economies to reduce their global impact on other parts of the world and allow also then developing nations to have that opportunity to to grow and develop and kitty I'm afraid to put you in the hot seat but please let's start with you all right it's always uh I guess uh you know let me let me start with the statistic from our industry which is again you know one that is driving a lot of that over consumption especially in OECD countries and it's specific some specific countries actually do consume a lot more than a lot more than others so you was a bit 10 years ago was a bit 10 years ago an average fashion consumer in a developed country buys three times more in the sense in terms of frequency right so not in terms of dollars but let's say if I was buying one shirt every quarter I'm going to buy three shirts now and that's because of various factors many of them are social societal psychological social medias made the world an inferno of desire right so I see it I want to buy it there's like there's not much you can do about it it's not that we're spending money on making sure that it's uh it's sustainable or it's healthy for the environment or the supply chain or its fair trade um so while we are saying a lot of these things the statistics actually indicated in industries like fashion especially past fashion people are just consuming a lot and a lot more in terms of the number of times that they're buying it so uh can we can we limit that consumption um well I think the jury is still out on that can we make it sustainable responsible such that it you know A is made responsibly and B the benefits of that consumption that hyperconsumption in some economies is passed back down thoroughly through the supply chain right down to the to the person that actually made it who may not actually be from that economy because these supply chains tend to be very global that is a definite yes and and definitely you know policy technology interoperability of supply chains all of the good things that we discussed here can play a role in that um but there is definitely merit in thinking about can we consume lesser but higher quality or higher value but I think the juries are at least as far as fashion is concerned on that front great very interesting consuming less but higher quality the jury being out I like that we'll have to reflect further including after today's session Robert over to you over consumption through value chains where do you stand yeah I love the question um I think it's a nested question also um I would say um there is the element of reduction and there's of course the element of global equity right um and and chances and there's seems to also be an applied dilemma between growth um and sustainability and of course that cannot be a dilemma it needs to be solved I think and Kitty spoke very uh uh clearly about it also um so a couple of things come to mind first of all uh what is value and how do we define growth right and think we still talk very much about GDP but of course everybody knows you cannot eat money um and there is a decoupling also since the 70s 1970s actually that is so that uh global happiness is not further increasing while of course GDP continues to rise so I think you see also an increasing number of politicians that start to talk about broader welfare um and they try to pitch these these concepts um the same goes for companies you see a lot of purpose driven companies including ourselves that embrace impact metrics at the highest level in the constitution of philips we say we want to improve the lives of two and a half billion people now making money is a very very important boundary condition to be able to do that because we are stock listed but it's not the primary goal of the company so I think that is also an interesting shift that helps you to solve these type of dilemmas I think it's really also about decoupling what we value from an increasing waste of resources and here again I think energy efficiency resource efficiency circular models are very very important opportunities that we need to embrace make sure that everybody on earth has opportunities and can live a decent life without depleting the resources for future generations great so we had Ankiti on quality and now we've now raised the point on decoupling tom your thoughts please on this this dilemma and this question yeah a great great question and great points also made um by the other panelist I think probably the the piece that I'll I'll put in because I agree with what's been said already I think it's about educating customers as well and taking them on this journey um I think uh as we've kind of mentioned a few times you've got a whole wide range of customers at a different point in their own individual sustainability journey and helping educate them into how they can be better consumers is I think really really critical and again different markets uh different products people have a different understanding of exactly you know how to do the right thing and there's a tremendous opportunity of the business community to to help bring customers along with that I think the other the other point sort of sub point to that is to understand what the barriers are what are the barriers for customers in making those more sustainable choices understanding that building it into product development um you know not just putting a certificate it's you know not just as simple as putting a certificate really understanding what the needs are in terms of the quality or the the product design all these different things and building that into the whole product journey right from the start and so back to this whole circular point it's critical in helping address some of those kind of big challenges absolutely I was just thinking circular when you said when you talked about the design elements that's really critical to help consumers actually make those circular shifts to excellent excellent points there devs please your thoughts here thank you and thanks for the inputs that have already been made I particularly want to recognise with terms inputs on education and also identifying um okay what was that last point but um the last point was an identifying the barriers yes so that's very true before I make my point or I add them to it I feel that education is needed we need to educate people can we make it practical so that when people know that okay this is the implication of what you are doing or of over consumption the other just hearing that this is the implication but they also hearing that you have to take you have to be responsible for whatever you're using for how you're using it and this you need you need you need to pay for that so there is a fee that someone is going to pay on the other side and the father you're not seeing it doesn't mean it doesn't exist and so can we make people pay that fee upfront um an example is closing the loop and they make customers pay a compensation fee when they get a new device that is an IT device Africa has been at the receiving end of most of these over consumption behaviour for most of these countries sadly now and I think fashion like auntie said fashion has one of the key areas and IT or technology has also been another key areas so to focus on these two so how can we make people pay for these upfronts so that they know that in as much as you're not seeing the indications someone somewhere is being affected by it so can you take that responsibility and make sure that whatever you're using doesn't affect the environment in someone else somewhere so we can make people pay a compensation fee can we also block out the loops so that people feel that I can easily throw this after using it for a day or two I can easily throw it this way and not think about it and we have people throwing things out over consumer and they guys that oh using it for charity words or someone else needs it you know that's not true but you're just using to satisfy your guilt but I don't know how this is coming out but you know it's not true you're using to satisfy your guilt and you're still going on to reuse new stuff which is being released into the environment going to end up somewhere not being valuable so why don't you make the right choices and not talk about some charity work somewhere so people have to know and people have to be held responsible and we need to block the loops it's so easy to send these um reusable stuff all first um what can we call it second hand I don't know it's easy to to send these waste materials down to Africa because yeah we need it okay we know we need it but we don't we don't need all those second hand stuff and they come here and they end up in the trash so how do we block it from coming here so that people who are producing it are taking care of their own mess and they are putting in they are putting the right um measures to take care of whatever they are creating because if it's in your face let's say you are throwing out garbage into your back end and your back end is is covered so you don't see what's going on there all right let's bring that back into your front your front view keep on throwing the waste and see if you are enjoying the view if you enjoy the view nice let's go on if you're not you're going to do something about it so people have to see and they have to make um these solutions then um I want to also talk about um the barriers that's also true because we can educate people all we want we can tell people what's the best thing to do is but if people don't have the right places that they need to to they need to use this um educated the knowledge they have they don't have the right places to implement it then they're going to just go back to what they know for example I know I have to recycle my plastics how do I do it I don't know where to do it how to do it how to get access to it then I'm not going to do it at all because it's time to want to not having the knowledge at all people want to use recyclables or they want to use but gradeable stuff but if it's not accessible to them if it's expensive and they don't know where to find it then they'll just go back to doing what they already know so how do we identify those barriers and build the solutions making the solutions accessible to people closer people so they can come towards a solution and actually make these solutions work for them I mean I start too much thank you I really liked what you were just saying back then that value chain sustainability does not mean dumping waste elsewhere where you can't see it that's not actually solving the problem and we've really then also got to get our trade frameworks right so that we cut down on illegal plastic and even electronics and other materials waste dumping but then we incentivize the right types of trade for the recycling and for the alternative materials so I think that's an area which governments and indeed in partnership with business and NGOs really need to think through on how we realign our trading systems for circularity to have the right impact thank you so much for answering those questions from our audience I'm sure they appreciated all of your reflections we'll go into a last round of questions for me I'll start with you and Kitty again and when you were speaking you talked a lot about some of the policy developments that are ongoing particularly in the US but can I ask you to dive in a little bit deeper on what's been Zolingo's experience with value chain sustainability policies to date um I think throughout our journey over the last six seven years that we've been in this industry we've seen a huge shift in the mindset of both businesses, policy makers and in the conversation that happens from hey is this an issue to yes this is a really serious issue and we need to figure out how to actually get something done I think I think Tom made this point earlier is that you know but everything's got to work together though right so the data the systems the regulations everything has to be interoperable I can't have something coming in from China then being you know finished in India or Vietnam and they're finally getting shipped to Europe or to the US and every country has its own piece of little legislation but nothing actually talks to each other so um so I would say that you know five or six years is a is a very short frame of time wherein you know at least the conversation has moved from hey is this a real problem to yes this is a real problem that's invested a lot of dollars and mine space in it and I guess now the challenge to solve is really how do we make it interoperable so that companies like us start up technology companies um we have a very clear path of how to execute so um so I think that's where that's where we are at in terms of you know what are the problems that we're trying to solve and I keep using this for interoperable because on a day to day basis you know it's great that there are legislations in different parts in different pieces but a lot of the work of hey what does this mean does this mean I need to match a Vietnamese supplier to a brand in the US because their original Chinese supplier now cannot fit the bill any longer that sort of there's a lot of sort of lack of clarity there which I think gets resolved only as we solve for operational sort of smooth operations right so so I think that's that's uh that's our experience right now but we're very hopeful that it's going in the right direction great thank you good to hear the hits going in the right direction there uh Robert coming to you what's the role of government here or how can you see government accelerating circular value chains yeah thanks Kim um echoing also what Ankity said I think this interoperability is of course really important which is not always in the hands of a single government especially if you're operating globally as as we do uh but being open to the dialogue and um and listening I think that's already a very important piece then secondly what I wanted to say of course the challenges are enormous but so is also the momentum right so I think there's a lot of good intentions and now we know that good intentions are not always a guarantee for good outcomes but I think governments can head to uh to structure that I think both Ankity and Tom earlier spoke about Francis policy harmonisation so not just between different uh departments within a government but also interregional so that's really important to understand taking into account unintended consequences really thinking stuff through end to end from a supply chain perspective that really helps also um and coming back um to the point uh at the risk of sounding like a broken record I think really thinking about how to get sustainability criteria including Francis circularity into public procurement really will make a difference it's a huge market um and power supply chains and also public procurement can really create these incentives and signal um demand uh on the on the on the government side also great to hear that message on public procurement repeated again um Tom coming to you and also taking a little bit of a look forward now what are some of the policy developments that are on your radar in the area of value chain sustainability yeah great a lot probably I think it's top level summary there's a huge amount going on out there as we've kind of alluded to before and as you know all this conversation about policy coherence I think probably some of the key trends that we're seeing is uh I guess obviously the main theme of it is moving from voluntary standards into these kind of formal pieces of legislation seeing the merging of the environmental and the social agenda um you know great example of that was the latest draft of the european due diligence legislation I should start that was released what they were for yesterday started many years ago on a human rights focus and now it's incorporating lots of elements on on on human rights likewise the deforestation regulation in europe has human rights elements I think that's a big thing to kind of watch and to understand how these pieces all come together I think yeah so probably the three other kind of key trends is kind of one around ESG regulation um so not necessarily formally kind of government legislation but just understanding how the investment community is operating we're seeing that in US and in EU that this is going to have this kind of knock on effect on value chains depending on how investors view criteria and how companies report we're seeing the multilateral standards and policies from a kind of global level we're obviously you know we'll all be very fit what came out of COP26 we've got COP15 looking at nature this year we've got UNIA 5 looking at plastics today I mean we've obviously heard about that earlier today um and we've got the UN draft treaty on business and human rights as well as a variety of standards coming from the OECD so you've got this kind of high level global standards piece and then thirdly which is what we've been I suppose talking about a minute ago we've got in this kind of country specific legislation seeing that across across Europe and France, Switzerland, Germany also in the US um and you know we're seeing kind of similar pieces of legislation developed in many different countries as well so probably that maybe some thoughts of some of the pieces we're following three big trends there if I can ask you a quick follow-up on that third level the country legislation to what extent are you seeing that those countries policies are following the international guidelines that you mentioned on that second layer yeah I think broadly speaking they are to what extent I think it's probably the variation on that certainly a big thing that we encourage everyone to align with these central standards which is where uh you know the UN guiding principles and human rights the OECD due diligence guidelines those are really kind of core pieces I think they all refer up to them uh I think to which degree it will vary but obviously the key important point on all of these legislation is about implementation which needs to be done in a local context um so there is slight variation though indeed it's and and Dems will come over to you but you've mentioned this earlier in the panel there's a difference between having a policy and then actually seeing it implemented on the ground um so Dems for for your last question here for you what really needs to change to help circular solutions kick off and really scale up particularly in your region thank you um but this I think I'll start from us as Africans so we are already aware and this was confirmed when we started our research but the concept of circular economy has never been new on this continent it's something that we practiced for long but we're trying to transition or rather leave that because we felt oh there was a better concept somewhere we needed to we needed to implement a book elite or to book high and mighty now we we are gradually noticing that mistake and we are coming back to where we started from so right now all we need to do is to make tangible tangible take tangible steps to um to implement in the circular economy principles um I'm excited to know that the WCAF is going to be held 2022 is going to be held in Wanda so that gives that exposure that puts the spotlight on the continent and on the country so that we are able to explore what we can do as a country or as a continent to be able to transition to a circular economy then we can institutionalize it and make sure that we are making meaningful impacts instead of just talking about what solutions are supposed to be done I think I cannot emphasize the regeneration or regenerativeness and um inclusivity inclusivity if that is of our solutions because whatever solution that circular economy is trying to achieve is to make these um projects or solutions regenerating and to include locales or indigins as much as possible because we are affected by whatever happens and I'm not talking about just africans but wherever solution is going to be implemented you should think about the locals the indigins and how that solution affects them and how do you bring them in so that we are thinking about building solutions that will work for them so um I can just shipping this month in Ghana we are celebrating the Ghana month we want to celebrate things that we have as a country and how good they are so when we are we are talking about solutions this takes me to my next point then we are supposed to build in solutions that tallies or works with existing systems because we cannot say that oh everything that you come and meet is wrong wherever you want to implement a new solution you can't say that everything is wrong and you just want to bring in this new savior solution to come and help the system but the system has things that are working so how do you build in your solutions to match what already exists so that people do not feel that this is a new thing that is being built but people can just have that easy transition is going to be fair is going to be easy and people can relate to it and actually want to implement it because they identify with it and then who is at the table and who is making decisions when you talk about the policies who is at the table who is talking who is making decisions that is very important because if it affects me I should be at the table and I'm not talking about picking one person who probably can understand and speak English because oh these people this person is high to the group but trying to be diverse as much as possible their ministers spoke about that being diverse reach out to diverse group of people stakeholders and get to understand what the indications of whatever solutions you want to introduce are then bring their voices in and try to implement these solutions is very important and we need to also support SMEs to capture value and not just capture it but get value from whatever value they are creating so that they can see that well I'm doing this and I get this impact and so I continue to do it if I'm not motivated by what I'm doing I'm going to stop because profit is one key aspect of doing business of making solutions profit is one aspect and we don't want to ignore that so I think these are the points I would make and yes let's not forget that the locals or indigenous solutions are the best and they can be the best when we are able to take in policies that work with them thank you excellent thank you devs and and you mentioned the world circular economy forum that's indeed taking place in Rwanda later this year I know we're excited about that too to be able to continue these conversations thanks to to all our panelists for those reflections we're going to ask you one last question and also to check whether you've been listening to each other devs let's start with you if that's all right we'll go in reverse order here okay our question is based on what you've heard from each other today what would be the one message you'd want to convey to leaders when they gather in stock home in sorry when they gather in stock home plus 50 in june thank you I think I've enjoyed the last parts for this session but I was thinking of what to say earlier and then I've thought about all the solutions that everyone spoke about and all the things that they said was happening that was not well I wasn't even knowing about most of these things and so I thought about transparency there is a need to be transparent in whatever we are doing and Anki to spoke about it so we need to make whatever solutions we are talking about very transparent so everybody knows about it then accountability we need to be accountable for whatever we are doing and we need when we make it transparent transparent then people are going to hold as accountable so I feel that accountability is also one aspect and the last one is collaboration we need to collaborate existing big companies need to collaborate with smaller businesses in their value chain how do we make these collaborations tangible and how do we make it open so that everyone can assess it it's very important if we have these set of rules that is preventing people from getting close then we're not going to achieve anything so I hope these three words actually say what should be done but I'll go with collaboration accountability and transparency thank you excellent thank you devs tom over to you based on what you've heard from the panel today what would be your one key message uh yeah I mean great great question and unfortunately it would be something that I brought up as well but I know others agree with me I think it's a piece about policy coherence um I think it's fantastic to see so many new calibrations so many new addictions so many governments stepping up and engaging on this agenda but we need to make sure all of these pieces fit together otherwise there's a risk the movement will not be as effective as we want it to be so we'll keep it nice and simple for that indeed good a good good key takeaway message on policy coherence Robert your thoughts on this based on what you've heard from others your one key message yeah I very much like what I heard today um I think one of the centerpieces that came back throughout all discussions is the element of circularity right that touches all of us um so if we could get our shoulders behind the idea of doubling circularity in the next decade wherever we are that involves all the elements I think including digitalization including transparency including harmonizing the policies around it but embracing a vision like can we double circularity as governments as individual businesses in our supply chains I think that would create a huge momentum um so I think that that would be my message good I like very much that ambition indeed to double circularity over the coming years and kitty based on what you've heard what would be your one key message I think all great points around circularity and policy but maybe one thing that I learned and I was reflecting on is just on responsible incentivization I think governments can incentivize I think you know there was a point that Robert had made about financing Tom about different businesses across the supply chain working across different countries Deborah talked about education I think governments can do a good job of incentivizing people across the supply chain in different countries to achieve this goal so maybe that would be a thought to end this with excellent thank you so I think we heard some key messages from our panelists including accountability policy coherence circularity and ambition particularly there as well as incentives I thank you indeed panelists for those thoughts we now have an excellent closing speaker Isabella takes her who is the co-chair of the international resources panel Isabella will guide us on how we go forward from today towards Stockholm plus 50 in June Isabella please the floor thank you thank you very much can really good morning from Brazil I'm very delighted to join me today and yes we have really excellent inputs in this debate and there's dialogues more than the debates a close dialogue and I'd like to thank you very much the minister Annika and also the panelist Tom Robert and Keith and also Deborah I think that the discussion today has shown that we can no longer think of values purely common in terms in reality there are many forms of value such as social environment once we need to understand value as a common good something very important that should be observed considering all the inputs that have seen from green finance like transparency be fair transition fair transition etc these are the comments and really important inputs that have during this dialogue green procurement etc etc we need to change your mindset value change demand for not another change approach to demand for narrative change and also to make transparent and the diversity of realities to manage sustainability business and green account groups we have a really diverse of situations not only developed but the development economies and I think that there are they mixed very clear when she suggests for example that we need to deal with transparency accountability and and collaboration this is really with a diverse politically is really have a diverse a diversified world that we need to understand how value change in companies world and how indeed we manage business and people commitment and engagement supply chain we need it's very my opinion it's very important that we observe the new relationship between nature and humanity will drive us to be planetary players not 20 global walks it's a new understanding the triple environmental crisis when you manage nature we need to understand that we are interconnect and the impact go beyond the countries or even the trans transbonding impacts we need to understand how we impact into today nature and how value change will come it's coming exactly to make we have a better performance more than this be committed and co responsible it's very important to understand the concept of co responsibilities and connect the dots and also how we'll go beyond the short term perspectives as I think Deborah mentioned the the importance of long term investment but we need to tackle to deal with the short term perspectives and the dispute of the past with the future and I think that value change has an important role to come into this new reality to address concrete solutions and how we can act based on act how connect based on science but modern modern this committed in the right direction that some of you mentioned this so I think that we need to learn how to grow with nature not against nature okay it's very important and that you can have a transformative education to bring people back and committed to integrate to nature it's really something that we need to understand how we mobilize middle class middle class in developer economies has one role in developing emerging economy that another realities and also poor people don't forget that we need to host and tackle social inequalities and value change when you have the decoupling of the all the phase of value change and to understand better the relationship between natural resource efficient and how we use nature we need to understand how we did indeed will prove our performance to deal with social inequalities it's really something very but even when we discuss sharing technologies as some of you mentioned during the debate so supply chain supply chain versus value chain we have this debate here I think that what I mentioned before acting use science this is what value change means okay and also how to be committed to science based targets as some of you mentioned and it's about global transformation based on natural resource efficient and how connecting the dots how we can connect the things not playing silos as we used to play today and moving from the beyond moving from and beyond the green wishing not greenwashing is green wishing we need to understand our role how we can convince consumers people our choice to move beyond and off role green wishing that everyone wants to act consider the green world but how can go beyond also this is very important to be seen to be observed when you discuss a value change approach the supply chain approach has probably useful to provide goods and service for consumers and users it can address concerns of the environment impacts and exploitation of labor okay and for example through product traceability and fair trade practice the value chain approach builds on the knowledge of production process that the supply chain approach provides so this is not about adding something new but it was about connecting what the web exists to address low social and environmental change local and social environmental change efficiently by by applying assistance lens we can identify the social economic driving barriers as some of you mentioned during the debate that influence value chains operations of different sectors taking account the complex feedback looks that influence the operations and the behaviors of actors along the vital chains it's not easy it's not simple all of you mentioned this this approach shows that the key points of interventions are often not the same as where natural resource use and environmental impacts take place that makes systems analysis ascension finally as you like to remember here because I don't have much time I know this to manage something that also was discussed here stakeholder cooperation this is not only individual players or some individual society we face a triple planetary prize as mentioned before and climate change by diversity by diversity laws and pollution and social economic challenges these are complex issues that cannot be addressed in isolation cooperation scheme so we need to know how we'll come but it's not only based on the north and the south the traditional north and south cooperation that we used to have in the past we need to understand the new dynamics of the world that is coming into the global south considering the western and western international cooperation it's very important to observe how these countries are looking for to come to tackle for example climate change crisis this is for me really important because we have a country like my one Brazil and also African countries like India, China and other developing emerging economies we have natural resource assets you need to understand how we'll come into this agenda and how we need to address and be committed together with developed economies to change the world and to take the pace for example for international trade finally we cannot forget the role as I mentioned before middle class and poor people please don't forget it because they are part of the equation local needs are also global ones don't forget it okay if not to get need to understand how you come into this different reality and when we have this approach to value change be sure we need to know more about how you can connect things and how you give back the good outcomes of this approach for people considering local needs to address local needs a good example is what's happening in amazon vision in my country what's happening in amazon vision is not the same what's happening on the north side of the country or the south side of the country and we have 27 million people that live in amazon in amazon in brazil okay and this eight percent of these people live in cities so sometimes when you go into value change you have this coupling process you understand better how the things are connected of course that will be committed we need to be committed but to be transparent and we'll be dealing with fairness we'll be with inclusion and also need to deal with online and offline world take care of this okay because it's not easy sometimes to to manage shorts and perspectives how did we manage this as all of you mentioned that to be efficient to be competitive is to have new business model business model of business and also how you can be fair how can be inclusive how indeed you can have a just transition all of you mentioned this in different percent even if you go into circular metrics or you go value change methods it's important to understand the gap of data for example or how you can use science better to address local and region demands finally it's also important to engage actors at local level because there are different realities across the world and within countries for the complexity I'd like to remember you that as we approach this summit I want to underline that conversational value is not about ideas please okay this is not ideas it's about pragmatics okay it's about putting values in action to bring to bring about sustainable human development indeed when you're pushing the the use of social inequalities and looking forward to address better human development in the new relationship between nature and humanity in stocco plus we will see the launch of the global strategy for systemic consumption and production and sustainable development goal 12 this strategy is based on the value chain approach and is aimed at promoting transformative and candidate partnership across high impact sectors and value chains of course the style industries is one of the key ones that foods supply chains another one it's very important mining also you need to understand how this the supply change today will come to become value chains as you have been discussing here so I think that we are also taking concrete steps in my opinion cost a week of approach for example to food value chains a new approach and also to measure that is coming addressing social concern on primary production stage of food value chains a good example that countries are looking for to change more modernities to perform in a different way my plea to you is to use I can have this Kimbler please commit to the value chain approach engage those who have power and those who have not okay expand the horizon of what value means put values in action and let us come together around a common agenda for sustainable future but don't forget the future is today bring the future to the present take the right decisions today and be prepared for a process of transformation that's not easy but it's the right way I'm I'm fully confident after almost 40 years working in this agenda that we need to do this now not only because we have the trip environment cost but because we have opportunity to have a better life and to promote in a new base on new base the human development around the world let's do it and I do apologize because I don't have much time to discuss this but look we need to act using science and value chains is really a good opportunity to connect things to drive things together and modernities to use science to allow us to act based on our realities and our challenge in our ambition thank you very much back to you Kimbler excellent thank you so much Isabella for those powerful closing thoughts thank you very much to our panel and thank you to all of those that were watching with us today we look forward to continuing the conversation through to Stockholm plus 50 in June thank you