 Thank you very much Mr. Chairman. Acting Director General, Mr. Mollert, Chef de cabinet of WMO, Christian Blondant, principal of LISSE International of Ferner Voltaire, principal Jean-Paul Breche, distinguished Fairman 2014 delegates, distinguished colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. Happy New Year! It's a great honor for me to be here with you this afternoon and it's great to feel the enthusiasm in this room. This is the first week that the ITU is open after a two week holiday and I must say the excitement that we feel in the ITU over the past two days is because of you and and I thank all of you. I'm here today representing Dr. Hamadun Toure, Secretary-General of the ITU. He really wanted to be here with you today. He was able to join the Fairman 2013 event that we hosted last year and he was really looking forward to this event but he had another commitment and he sends you his wholehearted support. ITU is greatly honored to be hosting this Fairmoon event and we are very delighted to be offering you our facilities as from tomorrow. We're happy that the event this year has attracted even more students than last year. Last year we welcomed some 350 and I understand that this year we have some 550 and 50 teachers and we are very much looking forward to your discussions on this very important issue facing humanity as was emphasized in the video and that is the issue of climate change. Why is climate change such an important issue? To begin with climate change will affect every single person on this planet whether you're rich you're poor and regardless of where you live and we're already seeing this happen. The video showed what happened after Hurricane Sandy. We saw what happened after Typhoon Haiyan in the Philippines where more than 6,000 lives were lost and we've seen over the past week what's happening in North America with this dramatic polar vortex that has basically put New York with the lowest recorded temperatures ever. It's something like out of the movie that was released in 2004 the day after tomorrow but it's actually real. While these events cannot be contributed to climate change alone it's a wake-up call. It's a wake-up call for all of us to show the effects of climate change and this is according to the latest IPCC report. Ladies and gentlemen climate change is a challenge and if we are to successfully address climate change we need to transform. We have to transform the way we live we have to transform the way we work we have to transform the way we move and we also have to transform the way we entertain ourselves. We will have to build sustainable lives we need to phase out non sustainable energy sources and we need to use natural resources more efficiently and this is for the long term. The carbon dioxide that has already accumulated in our atmosphere and the heat that is already accumulated in our oceans will continue to have effects on the global climate right through the 21st century even if we reduced global greenhouse gases to zero today. What we need is a sustained vision and commitment. Everybody needs to work together on this to address this historic challenge of our time and to do this we need to tap into you we need to tap into the power of young people we need to leverage your energy we need to let leverage your creativity your capacity to innovate your passion and your ideas. So let me challenge all of you over the coming days to come up with concrete proposals and solutions as part of your outcome to this conference. Share with us and share with the world the ways that you think climate change should be tackled. Tell us how you believe we can leverage information and communication technologies to do that. Get engaged and when you go back home stay engaged. Let me also challenge you individually to consider developing future careers in developing sustainable solutions. A lot of you are now contemplating what you're going to study in the University. This has a tremendous future so let me encourage you to think career-wise and getting involved in developing sustainable solutions for our future. Distinguished delegates let me let me just close by inviting you to look specifically at the contributions that information and communication technologies can make in delivering a sustainable future. And let me tell you what the ITU is doing in this area particularly in terms of monitoring mitigation adaptation as well as disaster preparedness and response and I believe a lot of you will be visiting our ICT discovery and so hopefully you can see hands-on some of the contributions that the ITU is making in this domain. We are also working very closely with our partners in the whole UN system in particular with WMO and as the Director General has mentioned the UN Secretary General has himself made this a top priority by convening this special summit on climate change next September just prior to the General Assembly where he will bring the world's heads of state together in New York. We are all very much aware that our future has to be sustainable. Otherwise there won't be a future. So let me commend you on behalf of the ITU Secretary General for choosing this vital issue as the theme of your conference and let me offer you the warmest welcome to the ITU headquarters over the coming days. And finally as the ITU Secretary General said in the video just go and do this. Thank you very much.