 Yeah, very good afternoon to everyone and thank you so much for joining us. This is the first press conference of each year 23 the annual meeting of the European Geosciences Union and I'm Julian de Souza. I'm the media and communications officer. This year we've got over 17,000 abstract submitted to the meeting. So that's a really large number and we've shortlisted some of the best, most exciting abstracts and research papers as our press conferences. So throughout the week you'll be hearing about the latest developments in the Geosciences during the press conferences. And I will be a host for the press briefings as well as to help you with any media interactions and interviews you'd like to do during the week. Each press conference will have time for speakers to make their presentations, which we will then follow with a question and answer around collectively at the end in the last 10 or 15 minutes. So for those of you who are joining us virtually I would ask that you please mute yourself and we will only take questions at the end of the press conference. So I'm going to now go ahead and introduce all of our panellists to make for faster transitions between them. This press conference is titled, what do cretaceous volcanoes forensic criminology and the finance sector have in common water. And our speakers for today are Steven Graspi from the Geological Survey of Canada. Alessandro Gargini from the Department of Biological, Geological and Environmental Sciences, University of Bologna, Italy. And Rick Hochbaum from the University of 20, Engineering Technology, Water Engineering and Management, the Netherlands. So thank you all of you for joining us and for agreeing to do this press briefing. We're really eager and excited to hear what you have to share. So we will begin with Steve's presentation, and then I will queue you in for the next speaker. Thank you everyone and all the best. Thank you at the slides going I guess. Sure. Thanks. All ready to go. Great. Thanks. So the title of my presentation and the work I'm doing is volcanoes, the gifts that keep on giving. We're looking at the impact of 80 million year old eruptions on the modern environment today. I'll just start by pointing out I'm not wearing a mask here in the photo because of COVID, but it's just to protect myself from the hot sulfuric acid gases that you see in the background. But this isn't a volcano that I'm standing on, but there are shales that were deposited back when the volcano was erupting. And now they're spontaneously burning today. And we're trying to understand the processes of burning and the impacts this has in the modern. So, 80 million years ago, there's large volcanic eruptions that were happening along the west coast of what's now North America. And these were just spewing metal or rich acid ashes into the oceans and depositing into the marine basins at that time. And what you see here is a photo of the shales that were being deposited at that same time. And the volcanoes had an impact of the oceans of depriving it of oxygen so it became an anoxic environment. And this helped preserve organic matter in the shales they're very organic rich. And the organic matter also draws the metals that were released from the volcanoes into the shales as well so we had these very metal rich organic rich shales that are being deposited at the same time. In this very stressed environment 80 million years ago. So you move forward to today. All these same shales are being weathered and they're spontaneously burning, and then they're oxidizing which releases all the metals back into the environment. And we're trying to understand and what the broader impacts and the modern environment is these metals that were deposited 80 million years ago. So you can just see in a photo these red acid ponds that are being formed. And as a great quote from Armstrong he was one of the people searching for the loss Franklin expedition in the Arctic in the 1850s. He identified it as sulfuric acid from his taste. So there's a lot wrong with that because first of all, why would you think to taste waters that look like that. And why would you think they even know what sulfuric acid tasted like but this is identification back then. Next please. So there's an old history with this area and there's a photo just showing what it looks like in the modern, but the Inuvial of it are the indigenous people in the region and they have legends of people. Spirit people that were living in the mountains and having campfires that produced all the smoke and the people searching for the Franklin expedition had a very similar conclusion that these were campfires and perhaps for the people they're searching for the loss Franklin expedition. And this is called Igniruat by the Inuvial with people but also named the Smoking Hills by the people searching for Franklin. Next. And the burning is just the natural process that occurs and this is a shot you can see of the sort of the shale cliffs that form and the white lines you can see here that ash layers that are produced from the volcanoes that we're erupting and get deposited in with the shales. What happens is that when you have slumping of this rock and it just gets all intermixed together and it gets oxygen into this organic rich shale, and then it starts to oxidize and produce heat and that heat just gets a spontaneous burning going on so you can see here where the slump has occurred that there's the natural burning process going on all that smoke that's being produced. The red is the acid waters that are also being produced. So there's a lot of pirate mineral pirate in these shells, and they're oxidizing and forming these acid waters that are processed very similar to modern acid mine drainage. But this is producing some of the most acidic waters in the world we measure the pH so fortunately we didn't have to do the taste tests like they did in the 1800s but we measure the pH for the probe and some of the lowest pH we ever measured is negative 1.44. So it's very acidic waters is basically is sulfuric acid so Armstrong was correct but we just used a more modern way to confirm that. And next place. But also, these waters are just toxic they're absolutely toxic. We looked at the concentrations of different metals and this is just some examples I pulled out to illustrate today. And these are the measured concentrations that we have on the slide and just put it into context they have the percentage above what's considered the safe drinking water standard in Canada. So for copper is 500% above zinc is 12,000% above arsenic 19,000 uranium 54,000% and cadmium 700,000% above the safe drinking guidelines. And the technician who was measuring the waters at the time she was shocked has never seen anything like this. She sent me an email saying quite convinced he found the exact location of hell and sampled right above it. Just to give a good indication of how bad it was. And we're just still remain uncertain about the broader environmental effects of these waters and their pristine Arctic environment. And this is especially important for you be all of it from communities of politics and talk to you talk that are nearby that still harvest country food from the region. So we're going to go back this summer trying to get a better understanding of what the broader impact of these acid toxic waters are in the broader environment. And then also this whole process again is is being led by slumping and that's related to permafrost melting. So we also had the question of if we have increased global warming is that going to increase the rate of permafrost melt. And is that going to exasperate this whole process and release even more of these toxic metals into the environment or re release what these volcanoes deposited 80 million years ago. Hello, can you. Yeah, thanks so much Steve and we will now move to Alessandro's presentation. Yeah, maybe you'll have more luck with it. I try to go ahead with this show the slides. Thank you. Good morning. My name is Alessandro Gargini. I am from the University of Bologna I am a hydro geologist so my topic of research is groundwater, and in this case, the contamination of groundwater. And the title of this presentation that I'm going to make in a few minutes in another room here is about the use of isotopic fingerprinting in order to identify the polluter of two contaminated sites in Italy in this case. Okay. Why it is important to identify the polluter in contaminated sites because you know that both at European and Italian level. There is a very important principle polluter pays principle. The polluter pays principle tells that whoever cause an environmental damage has to bear the cost of the necessary preventive or remedial measures, and this is not important also only for a real environmental disaster but also to put in danger to induce an environmental disaster against citizens and ecosystems. But many times, it's not easy to identify the polluter. So this research explains how, in this instance, it was possible to identify the polluter by the use of isotopic fingerprinting. I will present two sites in Italy, one in the Abruzzo region we are in the central part of Italy. And you see that there is. There is a pointer. Okay, but by the way, there is two rivers pescara river and Teorino river. And along the Teorino river, there is a big petrochemical plant. Over there in nearby the petrochemical plant, a all the landfill a illegal dump, where they were discharged some industrial very dangerous wastes. This is the location of the plant. And along a bit more than two kilometers away from the plant. There is a well field, a well field for public water supply to the citizens of pescara province in the Abruzzo region. So in that case, you have a dump the source of contamination, you have a plume moving in the groundwater, and you have a receptor represented by the public water supply wells. In the other site, we are in Ferrara, Emilia-Romagna region in northern Italy. And here we have other two dumps, not far not far from the ancient walls of Ferrara city. And from these two dumps, there are, you see some houses buildings around two plumes of contamination coming from these two dumps are wandering below the houses. In this case, the hazard is represented by the plume below the houses and the possibility of the inhalation of vapors coming from the plumes. The contaminants are chlorinated solvents so our contaminants that could move both in the groundwater in the soluble phase and can be briefed by the inhalation process. We're talking of two compounds, trichloroethylene and perchloroethylene, TC and PC, and it's important to know that these two compounds could be derived in two ways. From coal through the chlorination of acetylene, it's the formation of the commercial product. When you go to the supermarket and buy trichloroethylene, the trichloroethylene is coming out from this process, but the same two compounds could derive from the thermal chlorination of methane during the industrial process of production of chloromethane. They are the same compounds, the same chemical concentration, the same chemical structure, but the very different is the isotopic signature of the carbon 13 respect to the carbon 12. This is the example, this is the proof. You see on the y-axis, on the vertical axis, the delta per mil, the concentration of carbon 13 respect to carbon 12. On the x-axis, the different boreholes that were sampled, and you have two different signatures, commercial product above and chlorinated pitches coming from the production of chloromethane. In these two sites, it was demonstrated in this way that the origin of contamination was derived from the production of chloromethane, and so it was identified the polluter. And for that reason, the polluter was convicted to be involved in the remediation cost of the site. Thank you. Thank you Alessandro. And we will now hear from our virtual speaker, Rick, who will tell us how the finance sector has a role to play in addressing the global water crisis. If we can have Rick's slides on please. Hello. Am I audible? Very clearly. Thank you. Very clearly. Okay, that's wonderful. Thanks for being here and EG for allowing me the opportunity to present here our latest research. This is a work that I'll be presenting that I worked on. Yeah, with Joanna Dobrescu, my colleague over at the Water Footprint Implementation. I'm on my way there. I still have some teaching obligations here in my University of Twente. I'll be heading for Vienna and I'll be there tomorrow for the presentation. The work that I will be presenting now and tomorrow has not been published yet. We're about to submit it. So let's get that clear. But we do expect it to make some ripples and that is because of our main conclusion. And that is that our work demonstrates that the world's most powerful investors fall short of assuring water sustainable business practice. So this might be a slightly different approach from the previous speaker. We don't need an awful lot of technical detail to to find out who the culprits are of some very harmful activities on water systems. We simply follow the money because globally operating banks, pension funds, insurance companies, they allocate allocate hundreds of trillions of dollars or euros to business activities, businesses and corporations, from which they do not know whether or not they have a business or do not know whether or not they harm water systems or cause any water related crises. And what is more, we find that they fail to do so not just slightly but by a very large margin, even the best ones, even the front runners. So the simple answer to the question that I posed in the title is the finance sector a help or a hindrance is a hindrance. I assume you will know that humanity at large is exerting numerous pressures on crucial earth systems and the climate crisis of course is the most known and notable one. But the water crises are rapidly gaining momentum to and rightfully so, because the collective water footprint of humanity is exerting a very large and a growing pressure on earth systems on earth water systems and it's exceeding critical thresholds. The figures to the left shows that we are already exceeding the green planetary boundaries so that's for green water use that means that we are disrupting the soil moisture dynamics of earth. And the map to the right shows you that also the blue planetary boundary that refers to water use from rivers from lakes from aquifers is also being exceeded, namely in all those catchments that are colored orange or red in this map. So even though on a global level, the picture to the left says that for blue water, we may not have a problem yet. I think the map shows to the right shows that we actually do have quite some issues in many places. Next slide please. So what this looks like or what this could look like on the ground these water crises is the following and we observe the pollution of resources we observe what a scarcity destruction of aquatic habitats pollution competition and conflict over water water insecurity just the name of you. And what is also clear is that our water footprint does not only affect water systems directly. It spills over into social cultural political economic domains as well. All of the sustainable developments virtually all I think you can argue depend on getting water right. And I just got back actually from another conference the UN water conference which was held in New York, and they're the secretary general of the UN Antonio Gutierrez made I think a very remarkable speech. And he stated, as humanity's most precious global common good water unites us all and it flows across a number of global challenges. That is why water needs to be at the center of the global political agenda. Next slide please. So how is this relevant for finance. Well, because financial institutions and able a lot of these water harmful activities through their investment practices. They are very powerful actor, if not the most powerful actor to realize the SDG agenda. Through their lending through their investing their borrowing their underwriting practices the finance sector like no other stairs and shapes the state of earth's water resources of tomorrow. And how do they do that, because they enable businesses and corporations to employ activities that use water that pollute water, in other words to generate a water footprint, and thus contribute to the pressures and the crisis. Whether it's your smartphone or your clothes or your coffee or well I don't have it here but even your eGU batch, they all needed water to produce. And behind every producer is an investor. On the one hand, the paper is predicated on the idea that investors should be held accountable for their investments that enable such adverse water impacts. But on the other hand you can also see that finance might be a very powerful lever to mitigate some of these crises by steering investments away from detrimental water practices. We really don't know it's largely unknown if or to what extent the finance sector is indeed a help or hindrance in getting these water crises out of the way. So that is what we set up to do with our research the first in its kind I would say by asking the question to what extent do these financial institutions institutional investors include water aspects in their investment policies. We selected the 50 largest investors worldwide who collectively manage more than 118 trillion US dollars in assets. We meticulously scrutinized all the relevant policy documents that these investors themselves publish disclose on this topic, and we ranked them using an assessment framework which we developed specifically to this end. Just to digest that number of 118 trillion that is way more than even the GDP of the entire globe. It's, I looked it up it's 330 times the GDP of Austria, or about 700 times the worth of Elon Musk. So that's a lot of money that they have under their control. Now you would go to the next slide please. In the bar graph to the left here you see the results of our assessment of these 50 super large investors, and the maximum score that they could reach on water sustainable investment practices is if the bar would extend all the way through the charts to charts to 100%. So what strikes first by just looking at the graph, and that's also our main finding is that all financial institutions we assess fall short of assuring water sustainable business practices. We are margin right, I mean, even if you just look at the numbers one and two which is the Norway government pension fund and BMP paribas, even they barely score above 50% and the rest way below that. So what it means and what we also saw from all these documents that they disclosed is that investors have very limited oversight of the water footprint associated with their investment portfolios, especially when it comes to the value chains of the assets in their portfolio. A lot of this stems from a lot of ignorance on water on behalf of the on account of the investors, if they consider water, they typically do so through a risk lens so meaning will water crisis somehow affect our bottom line, but not the other way around our our business practices also harming water systems, but in any case, it was a way to narrow perspective on the complex issues water that we found in their reportings. Next slide please. The implications of the status quo is that well first of all investors don't know the harm that they are namely, because no one knows they're also not being held accountable for their practices either. And despite that they are so powerful, the sector is not leveraging this power to actually come to a solution to the global water crisis ergo investors are hindrance. But there's positive side it does not have to be this way. Financial sectors can be a force for good on water. And our analysis showed that all investors at least disclose some information on water so it seems to be starting to hit their radar. We also found examples of investors that had good corporate governance structures in place to help the water cost, often because they copied it from the way they address the carbon or the climate crisis. And that's why I pronounce is that there seems to be a leader pack developed within Europe as European based investors really gave more attention to the water topic than other geographies. So that might be a good learning opportunity for the other regions, and a big driver of that in Europe for sure is a growing awareness of and also a regulation for stopping such unsustainable business practices by corporates, including unsustainable water practices. So in a nutshell what we found in this first global assessment on the role of finance. I'm happy to take any questions on this or welcome you at my talk tomorrow and the details of those are indicated in the last slide. Thank you. Thank you so much Rick, and to all of our speakers for their time today. I think we can all agree they were really insightful presentations. So that brings us to the next part of our press conference, which is the question and answer round. We will be taking questions from journalists both present in the room and those who joined us virtually. So if you have a question, please raise your hand, and I will hand over the microphone to you you can introduce yourself and your publication or affiliation. And then let us know which question you have with speaker. If you're joining us virtually you have two options you can type in your question in the chat, or you can use the hand raising function and zoom and you can then ask a question out loud. So over to you now if you have any questions for our speakers. Thank you. My name is from to the University. I'm just teaching teaching science journalist, and I have a question to Steven recipe. So is this is it specific these type of ash and metal for the volcanoes that you are looking on or is it something that is getting on all over the world so it's a specific regional problem, or are there other hotspots like you have you have researched on thank you. That's an issue that we are area we've seen in northern Canada along the Arctic coastline. And this is one of the questions we have because the same age rocks extend all the way through southern Canada into the US but this burning process and and producing of very acid metal rich waters seems to be more isolated to the north, and we're not quite sure why. But at the same time of saying that if we look at kind of central Canada where these same age rocks are, they're all covered by thick glacial till and in that region there's a lot of issues of ground waters from the till the glacial sediments that have very high metal contents as well. And these have been somewhat of a mystery. And now starting to think that this could be the same issues that these metals for being released but they're just buried by glacial sediments there that you don't see it. There are similar reports of burning shales on Western Greenland as well, which I believe are the same age as these ones. So the burning kind of process seems to be something a bit more in the north and we're not entirely sure why, but the metal contents. There's a broader region, but it just hasn't been as closely attributed to it because they're all coming up through glacial sediments there. Good afternoon. My name is Mila Nilić I live in Vienna and I write as a correspondent of DELO the leading Slovenian daily paper from Ljubljana. I have one question for Mr. Haugebum and that is actually many large global multinational corporations they know that their behavior is, let's say, euphemistically suboptimal. Do you think that if you confront them with their relation to water problems in the world that they are going to change the really to change the behavior or they will try to implement their efforts in the in the greenwashing. What many of them do. Yes, thanks for that question. It's hard to say of course what the direction of the entire financial industrial complex will do. But I do think that even though I may have started this whole endeavor also with a more skeptical view on would they even change and they are knowingly I did come to appreciate that there really is a large knowledge gap with most investors and they don't have a natural engineering or let alone a water background off the right and they also don't really spend the means to get this in place a lot of the water risks that can play out over the destruction of for instance, of ecosystems that will not affect them in the short term that they typically think of so these are longer cycles very akin to the climate cycles, often. So I think that there is on the positive side a lot of education to do. And once they know the impact that they are causing, then I think there is room for that question are you also then going to, well, abide by say a polluter pace principle and of course, and I think they're just as in any other business there will be a differentiation within the pack where you say some will be front runners who actively take their responsibility and make a change we see that also in the distribution among the scores over the different investors, and some will try to hide it as much as possible or greenwash their way or blue wash their way which might be a more appropriate term here, blue wash their way out of it that might very well be. I do think that another very important development here is the development of all kinds of regulation, be it on the side of due diligence so that when companies make investments they make need to make sure that they don't. Not just harm water systems but also on biodiversity loss or deforestation or labor, labor topics that they really need to do their due diligence upfront that there are reporting guidelines so how do they report on their on their business earnings that those also include wider sustainability criteria also on water, and those become increasingly more specific so even if they don't want to the regulation seems to be forcing them on multiple fronts to comply. So I don't think that the finance sector will just say oh we didn't know we were harming water systems we'll just you know do our best now to not do so. That will take a while, but I chose to be optimistic in this and I think that if we even get a few percent of this massive trillions of dollar industry to move the water the move just a little bit in a better direction that can already have quite profound consequences for the health of water systems. Thank you Rick we have a follow up question again. I'm just signed. Okay great. All good. He was just trying to communicate that he appreciated your response. So thank you. Do we have another question coming in. Looks like we have no questions from our virtual attendees. Yeah, okay. Oh, hello together. My name is Joe Nicos. I'm a student of science journalism. In the at the normal university where Mr. Warmer teaches us. And my questions also directed to Mr. Or by pronounced correctly, the virtual participant, which is if it is a realistic concern that access to fresh water could in the future become subject to public. I don't want to call it a civil war but very calm. It has the conflict, the potential to conflict. Because as you said the consumption exceeds already levels that are that would be sustainable. How do you comment on that. Can I reframe that question as do I foresee a water war erupting or I was, I'm a bit nervous. I apologize. How, how great could the problem of water accessibility become in easier terms. Well, I suppose there are, I mean I can try to answer that in one minute and I can probably lecture about it for five hours, because there are so many nuances to it. But in general, we are using way more water than we have sustainably available in many places. And that leads to several problems and those problems are perceived to be very grave depending on who you ask. And that water is being used for a variety of purposes so we need to make very smart decisions who gets to use the available water given these limits that we have. So those are mostly environmental limits right so if you look at the planetary boundaries, but there's also a lower limit on water because water is also a human right. And so people also need to have access to the basic needs for washing for drinking for cooking, etc. So within that band of a just and a sustainable boundary we need to make sure that all the activities can take place. That the debates will become much more clear on who takes the water now who uses it. So who wins and who loses. And if those are big corporations and the investors that are backing them that are the winners. And there are many losers on the side of communities are on the side of the environment or of smaller users. And I think that the first step would be to get the transparency in the consumption of water on who wins and who loses, so that the policymaking can also adapt to that so I don't think that this is something that will just erupt it's something that will gradually evolve evolve where transparency really is key here. I mean we already see many conflicts over water in many places. Yet I also think that water can be a great connector because this means that people have to sit together around the table to make sure that they agree on how the water is being allocated and divided amongst the users so there are geographies where the conflict might be a higher risk, but there will also be locations where we can actually have better management, because powerful investors are now starting to mingle in the discussion. And that's also maybe maybe that's good to qualify because that's one of one of the one of the rationales behind the study. And I will not name names, right, but you can all think of the big multinationals, especially those in food and agriculture they have an incentive to sell as money, as many beverages or burgers or whatever they happen to be selling as they can. And if the public asks for better, better water management in their chains they may not be too susceptible for that. But when their investors are asking them hey, are you water sustainable then they will give a listening ear at the highest levels within their territory. And that is why we also try to pull that lever of finance that they can really influence the companies that they support with their with their finance to to well be better water stewards. Much more to say about that but I'll keep it at that I guess. Okay, if we have no more questions coming in, then we are okay to wrap up this press briefing. So thank you once again for the speakers time and availability and to all of you for joining us. I would like to add that the recording of this press conference would be available a couple of hours from now on each use YouTube channel so if you'd like to follow up on that story. If you would also like to request time for interviews or chats with our speakers then feel free to write to me, or just approach us at the press center and we'll try our best to do that. And if you're still around I would encourage you to join our second press conference today which is at 330. It's the Emirates Mars mission. First results from Demis, which is Mars is mysterious moon. And this is the first interplanetary mission by an Arab nation. So that's pretty cool they have some really exciting images and videos to share with us as first looks from the mission. So stay tuned for that. Thank you everyone and see you later.