 I now wish to turn to the main event of this afternoon, the 2015 wider annual lecture to be given by Nobel laureate Professor Amartya Sen. More than three decades ago, Amartya was a member of the group that met in London in March 1982 to explore the possibility of creating a UNU Global Economic Research Institute. It was Amartya who subsequently came up with the acronym WIDER, which has so aptly described our work over the last 30 years. Another founder of WIDER is President Amartya Artisari. He was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 2008 for his important efforts on several continents and over more than three decades to resolve international conflicts. It is with a deep sense of gratitude that I request President Artisari to welcome and introduce Professor Sen. Distinguished guests, ladies and gentlemen. Two years ago at this place, I was standing in this very hall about to deliver the 17th wider annual lecture. I was particularly delighted to have been introduced on that occasion by a respected colleague and a good friend, Professor Amartya Sen. All the more grateful I am to be able to return the favor today and honored to welcome and introduce Amartya Sen as the 19th annual lecture on this 30th anniversary of UNU WIDER. Professor Sen is a man who surely requires no introduction to this audience. Any attempt to make such an effort and to do it briefly will at once be faced with a difficulty of making just to his vast experience and numerous contributions. Amartya Sen is an economist with exceptionally wide range of research areas and has and continues to have a deep influence not only on field of economics but also in moral philosophy and social theory. More than any other economist I would claim, he has in his sophisticated and engaging ways succeeded in bringing to the fore the ethical aspects of economics and stressed the importance of not seeing them as separate but deeply interlinked issues. Amartya Sen is a professor of economics and philosophy at Harvard University and was master of Trinity College Cambridge until 2004. Professor Sen has served as the president of several economic associations including the International Economic Association. He has been awarded the Nobel Prize in Economic Sciences in 1998 for his contributions to welfare economics and social choice theory. Professor Sen has also played an influential role in the establishment of the institution we are celebrating today as we heard. UNU WIDER was established in 1984 by the United Nations University in an international effort committed to producing high level economic research and establishing in-depth understanding on how the global economic system functions such as poverty and growth have remained similar to our days and has the need to approach social at the time to think of development studies in a broader sense across disciplines. As an advisor to the United Nations University and founding father UNU WIDER, Amartya Sen was a key figure in realizing and implementing this vision during the organization's first years and establishing a solid and ambitious ground to the institution to build a bond. One of the key issues some 30 years ago was how to link economic growth to social development and ultimately ensure it serves to enhance the quality of human life. This challenge has not disappeared and I would argue continues to be as tropical as ever. When welcoming Amartya Sen as the annual speaker, I wish to highlight the importance his thoughts have had on my own thinking regarding egalitarian societies. His article The Quality of Life, China versus India in the New York Review of Books in 2011 was one of the most thought-provoking articles I have come across in recent years. In the article Sen highlighted that the significant question for development in a country has not simply been the economic growth in terms of GDP, but what the governments in fact do with the revenue generated by the growth. We must challenge the view that GDP always increases the well-being of people or that stronger democracy would automatically ensure that economic growth benefits all. My thinking on just and fair societies has been profoundly inspired by Professor Sen's thoughts. I have been convinced that the fate of our societies lies in equity. Egalitarian principles and practices have to be consciously promoted and in my view, the Nordic countries or the Nordic model if you will, has been a prime example of this thinking. The basic idea of the Nordic model is to pursue universal welfare state policies, which means that public programs, services and transfers are designed to serve everyone living in the country. Strong public institutions create social trust which promotes democratic participation and the rule of law. I will remain a strong advocate for this model and I am grateful to Amartya Sen for his contribution to a report and following discussions we, I and my colleagues in the Elders Group have had on this topic and we will continue with that. As we celebrate its 30th anniversary, it is our hope that UNOVIDA can continue to play its important role and that the young researchers passing through its doors will continue to embrace the wider challenge of development. We need research and new champions of a more equal world. I urge the youth and the young researchers not to underestimate their power, influence and responsibility to confront the biggest challenges of our time. Many of you are here today, we need your dedication and dynamism in tackling the challenges of development. I am pleased that we will all have the chance to hear from Professor Amartya Sen today. I cannot think of a better champion for the young, a professor enthusiastically engaging in intellectual discussions with his students. Today we will hear Professor Amartya Sen to talk about development research and changing priorities. He will deal with issues of poverty and development but I hope that also new challenges that have emerged such as catastrophic climate change and increased global insecurity. These issues are as intertwined as they are challenging and I cannot think of a person better qualified to address these topics and to deliver these 2015 annual lecture. Ladies and gentlemen, please join me in warmly welcoming our honored guest, Widers' annual lecture 2015, Professor Amartya Sen. President Atissari, director of Sintracht and other friends. I feel very privileged to be here today and of course I'm extremely grateful for my friend President Atissari for his very kind remarks. He has been such an inspiration in my thinking that getting any mention from him would be a wonderful boon from me and he was very kind indeed. It doesn't feel like a very long time but it was a little over 30 years ago that Alex Crofong, who sadly very recently died, the former vice chancellor of the University of Ghana and I were going from place to place and country to country to assess along with the team of the United Nations University of which Crofong was vice-vector, the suitability of the alternative location that had been suggested for situating the new research institute that the UNU, United Nations University, was about to establish. Helsinki emerged as an excellent choice not just because Finland was offering generously to host the institute. There were excellent offers also from elsewhere including the Netherlands but also because Helsinki seemed like such an attractive and work-friendly place in which to base the institute. We talked with, I hope you heard me before, I'm not going to repeat it. We talked with some Finnish academics, some government administrators, a few ministers, listened to some great music and I take this opportunity of complimenting the musicians and the music we heard earlier and we walked in awe in Helsinki's historic center. At the end of it when Alex and I sat down to chat on our decision he said, I remember looking at me saying so it's going to be Helsinki, right? Shall I draft a letter on behalf of both of us to the rector? We were indeed in agreement as was the team of your new leading administrators who had come with Crofong and me. The new institute got going in Helsinki with Matkasto. It got named the World Institute of Development Economics Research which yields the functional acronym WIDA pointing to the importance of making development research wider and more inclusive than it had tended to be. Since we had roles in selecting the name, I was particularly relieved that the pairing of the name and the acronym seemed to have stood the test of time working in a reasonably informative way. When actually WIDA started I could not for a while join the events because of a huge personal tragedy in my life. My wife Eva Koloni suddenly fell ill with cancer and after a short but valiant fight she lost the battle. By the time in a state of depression and dejection I came to Helsinki and joining WIDA with two small children accompanying me. It's quite important to make sure that they as a single parent they like the place and I have to say they loved Helsinki instantly which is not a vindication of WIDA but certainly a vindication of my being there and this is a this is really wonderful summer to ground one sorrow. The sorrow we were concerned with of course was the sorrow across the world of poverty, hunger, deprivation. And I was delighted to see on arrival that the work was already under top gear with the insightful direction of Lal Jayavardana the first director of WIDA. The high-tempo of WIDA's work and its boundless optimism helped me to get away from my own personal tragedy and re-own in myself to join the battle against deprivation across the world. Things were happening fast then and new research was being planned out. Those were exciting times and I was bubbling with it and on that and one evening at the end of a working day when I was dictating on an ancient dictaphone sitting in what I thought was the privacy of my office room what further research we need to start doing on hunger immediately I got a very anxious call from director Lal Jayavardana who explained that one of our colleagues had called him and told him I quote Amartya had locked himself in his office and is speaking extremely loudly to himself. That anxiety passed and so did our initial concern about how work on hunger and poverty would be received across the world since we were lucky enough to get and it passed because we were lucky enough to get strong support from the academic community in the world and it was pleasing to see how widely the early search findings in WIDA were being cited. The story in Finland was, however, a bit more mixed. I'm going to the subject with some hesitation because there is it's always looking historically back there elements that one recollects and and is worried whether that's appropriate to discuss or not but after some thought I thought if you're talking about history you have to talk about history a bit. We had huge cooperation from Finnish academics I think particularly of several Honkafeuer, Pente Curie and many others and we also had cooperation at the highest level of politics getting solid support and a great deal of guidance from none other than Mati Atissari. This was before Mati was elected to be the president of Finland though he was already very well known across the world. The leading paper of Finland did not have like the idea of Mati Atissari becoming president of Finland and carried against him what can be described if I'm any judge an energetic negative campaign without success I might say and after some initial support the newspaper also carried quite a powerful campaign against WIDA as well armed with some of the really biased reports on what is going on in WIDA. I was lucky personally to escape assaults but that was little consolation since so many of my close, talented, dedicated and hard-working friends and colleagues at WIDA especially director Lal Javadana got lots of undeserved attacks. One thing I mean always when you're looking at a slight bit of sad episode is question to ask is did I learn something from it. One thing I positively learned from the episode is how hard it is to get to get misrepresentations of facts corrected in a country with one dominant newspaper. Having been used to a plurality of wide reach newspaper whether in Britain or the United States or for that matter India the blessing of having a plurality of powerful papers was suddenly much clearer to me. If the Hindu Sun times attacks you there's times of India, India and express there's the Hindu and plenty of others. That was not the situation here however over time and this I'm happy to report the financial reporting of what was going on in WIDA did slowly change and there was more coverage of research achievements of WIDA and I was told that eventually even the newspaper that seemed to run a campaign against WIDA in its early days did change its tune quite wholesomely. So what was WIDA doing in those early days? Right from its initiation led by Lal Javadana WIDA undertook really broad-based research what was described with some justified as research for action. The work was not confined to economics in a narrowly defined sense and the interaction of economics with anthropology, sociology, politics and history in which the academic exploration that were being pursued in WIDA. Fredric and Stephen Marlin were concerned among other subjects with the interface of economics and culture including diverse manifestation of social features in the relations within and between communities. There were works on a large variety of subjects varying from global finance to comparative civilizations. There were other development problems that were also receiving attention in the young institution that drew numerous to go through them one by one here for example work on gender equity and on the growing recognition of the influence of global relations on national and regional economies. Let me comment a little on the research on hunger and poverty in the early days of WIDA with which I personally was involved. There was plenty to investigate about different aspects of hunger and its far-reaching consequences including the role of nutritional inadequacy in the deprivation of human lives and in handicapping the economic and social relations of families and nations. Siddiqui Rosmani from Bangladesh who was the resident director of the hunger project played a leading part in the research that WIDA did on various aspects of this critically important subject. Soon the team was further strengthened and very much strengthened indeed by the joining of Jean Dresd who became a lifeline collaborator of mine with whom my first book was published by WIDA with whom I have gone on to publish I think seven or eight more books and had to report having a wonderful division of labor with Jean Dresd as a result of which she does 90 percent of the work and I get 90 percent of the credit. We wondered why there was so much hunger around the globe. The contemporary world is enormously richer in terms of averages and totals of incomes and wealth than it used to be indeed vast number of people on earth enjoy living standards today that are ancestors who they've found almost difficult to imagine. Why has this global opulence not solved the problems of hunger and undernourishment? In answering the question we had to go into the nature and far reaching impact of economic inequality but also into the way people's entitlement to food what food they can get and use get determined and makes the relation between food production and food entitlement often quite distant. On this subject I had written something in the decade preceding the birth of WIDA which initially had a rough ride I have to say. The director of FAO had initially described I recollect with some amusement in a BBC exchange shortly after my book poverty and famines came out in 1981 that this is the worst book he had read in his life in order to soften things when I looked at him and I said you mean the worst book on the subject to which the director replied no this is the worst book I have read in my life on any subject. I told him that that was quite a distinguished position to occupy in the assessment of one of the leading public institutions of the world but by the time the word WIDA got started a few years later it shifts from the perspective of food availability to one of food entitlement was becoming was beginning to get some traction and indeed became quite quite a natural and common way of thinking about it there's nothing in it except in common sense and the work at WIDA made it possible to see the past ramification of an alternative approach not a food center approach but an economic center approach aided particularly by the research of Jean Rez and Siddi Koshmane. There was also a different kind of concern that emerged as being really important the distribution of food within the family between men and women between adults and children not every member of the family earns an income infants don't very old people may not and in many societies women typically do very hard work at home but are not seen as bread earners quote-unquote bringing an income from outside in the market economy even though the market-based earners of the family may not be able may not be able at all to do their outside work and earn an income from outside if they had to look after household work as well including taking care of children and of the old and sick and even though household work is essential ingredient of the process of generating and earning an outside income the social conventions in most countries of the world had tended to discriminate in favor of the so-called bread earners and again those whose household work make that bread earning possible typically women it's about that time that they or softly before that WHO had published a study on the intensity of work and among sedentary work it was mentioned household work and it's never been quite clear to me which petition by the way this commission didn't have a single woman member where this particular piece of scientific fact had been arrived at so gender inequality had to be included into the causal explanation of poverty and hunger entitlement analysis had thus to be extended to go beyond legal entitlement and market ownership and to cover also such issues as the use of social norms establish conventions of sharing which may determine who is accepted as having an entitlement to what the work at wider also attempted to go beyond the entitlement of people to the resulting capabilities people managed to acquire as a result of economic and social opportunities in addition to their personal conditions such as disability or pro-ness to illness and aspect aspects of social environment such as epidemiological circumstances this also was a work I had just started before wider came into existence in fact in 1984 the year before and published the book called commodities and capabilities but I can't say that the the impact of the book got any kind of traction until a number of researchers and workers here research workers here did a great deal of really significant work on the subject among others particularly master most one joined in this work in the late 1980s and vastly enrich the capability based perspective poverty it was increasingly become clear was not just the lowness of income but the deprivation of human capability and that capability depends on a variety of factors and this is where I'm so delighted that Mattia Tissier referred to the Nordic model and that understanding is absolutely essential to understanding the implications of the of the of the capability based efforts though again there's no originality in that Adam Smith in 1976 has already talked about these including people forget and people think of the market economy as being the subject on which Adam Smith was the guru that when at some stage he explains why do we need good political economy he said we need it for two different reasons one it increases people income and they can do what they value most doing this is capabilities straightforward and because it increases income in the hands of the government so that the government can do those things government as commonwealth as you put it so the government can do those things with the government alone can do well and you cited example of public education in this context and the Nordic model in many ways and in some ways and this is not the time to discuss it the large feature of what they so-called east Asian model have had that aspect the classic issues of hunger poverty gender inequality and other deprivation remain relevant even today and there's no scope for declaring victory in any of these battles though some of the battles are going a lot better now than it seemed possible in 1985 and yet newer challenges have also emerged and our understanding of deprivation has been undergoing very considerable change there are many new child so the two things that were changing and also our understanding of the world developing there are many new challenges that we have to consider and one of the most important among them is the problem of environmental sustainability our global environment has many problems if the high volume of carbon emission is one i have to say i'm often tempted to think that the low level of intellectual engagement with some of the major environmental challenges is surely another there are of course many engaging and well-researched studies of particular environmental problems such as global warming and we have good reason to be appreciative of that and yet some of the foundational issues have remained unresolved indeed unaddressed so there were the rest of the time i have or not have to point things to some neglected areas of research for action environmental analysis is seriously hampered by not having anything like an adequately broad normative framework involving ethics as well as science that could serve as the basis of debates and discussions on policy recommendations despite the ubiquity ubiquity and reach of the environmental dangers a general normative framework for the evaluation of these dangers has yet to evolve i think the biggest contribution on that of course was made by group windland in the windland commission report where the whole idea of sustainable development was presented but it needed development particularly i have been concerned with the fact that we have to see not only keeping human standard of living as the guide but also seeing human beings as thinking creatures so that it's not just our standard of living but also everything we value if we value uh spotted owls and we don't want to get them instinct sustainable development requires that not in an extra human perspective but in a human perspective because these are things we do value and this is not because spotted owls affect our standard of living i don't think i've ever seen a spotted owl and if i'm committed to not going extinct it represents values that we happen to have and we can reason about so this is group windland plus moving away from a needless needs-based framework to to a more human freedom-based framework which fits into the capability of quite well well there has been not concerned with reducing emissions and cutting down the use of fossil fuel which are good objectives very good objectives in themselves there's an absence of a broad enough framework for assessing the comparative costs of different sources of energy from fossil fuel and nuclear power to solar and renewable energy inclusive of of the externalities involved which can take many different forms that the market costs do not capture one of the externalities the evil effects of carbon emission has certainly received enormous airing and that in it in its context is an excellent thing and yet there are other externalities that also demand our urgent attention this includes the growing danger from rapidly increasing use of nuclear energy for example in China and India and elsewhere because and and they don't have to become a very substantial part of the total energy intake for them to be dangerous entities to exist and and and that is the position i believe in china and india and a number of other countries and yet the dangers and externalities of nuclear energy have received astonishingly little systematic attention in scientific policy discussions environmental thinking has to be multi-dimensional rather than single focused therefore the main message of why do i believe even if the focus is something as important as the dangers from carbon emission and this has to be a new application of the approach of widening the domain of research that this institution has stood for since 1985 and i thought briefly about some persistent biases in thinking about the benefits and penalties of energy use in different forms in the contemporary world first the recent focus on energy thinking had been particularly concentrated away the means of reducing carbon emissions as i mentioned and linked with that cutting down energy use rather than taking energy use as essential for conquering poverty and seeing the environmental challenge within a more comprehensive understanding india ought to do something for example about coal but there's no escape from the fact that india needs more power just to eliminate the poverty that we happen to have there would appear to be an insufficient recognition in global discussion of the need for increased power in the poor countries across the world for example in india a third of the people do not have any power connection at all this is partly of course the politics of dominant classes but there is also an issue of total power supply making it easier to produce energy with better environmental correlates may thus be a contribution not just to environmental planning but also to making it possible for a great many people to lead a fuller and freer life second there is insufficient recognition of an empirical fact that may at first glance look rather trivial and when i first mentioned in a class uh people seem to be amused that i was making a point which looked to them like trivial but i believe it has somewhat greater importance than it one immediately recognized many areas of the world where poverty is common are also particularly sunny and i hugely and offer hugely underappreciated opportunities for the generation and use of solar power if the scientific and engineering problems using the source of energy including the development of cheaper and longer storage of seasonably or daily variable power adequately addressed the availability of a strong sun of which bangladesh in india and much of africa get them incomparably more than does europe it depends actually shindland in summer is all right but in winter no i mean no problem which is currently europe which is currently the center of environmental activism in the world much to its credit in other ways and and this availability people keep gambling that we don't have any oil but some days like having a lot of oil underneath the ground makes this makes it possible for many of the poor areas of the world to utilize a gigantic supply of energy if environmentally sound ways of harnessing storing and utilizing solar energy can be developed this could benefit some countries with very little availability of known stocks of fossil fuel such as large parts of sub-saharan africa but also other countries where some fossil fuel sources are abandoned such as called in india and in china but the use of which has to be restricted over time because of their impact on climatic change third with the growing recognition of the dangers of global pollution from fossil fuel the attractions of nuclear power have naturally become quite strong the attraction applies into alia to the scientific community but seems to have a strong hold on global policy makers as well for example in his presentation of data on i quote clean energy the world bank loves together lumps together nuclear with solar and other renewable sources of energy i quote clean energy is non-carbohydrate energy that does not produce carbon dioxide when generated it includes hydropower nuclear geothermal and solar power among others unquote is nuclear energy really clean i would argue that this is an absurd diagnosis the climatic implications reliance on nuclear energy are indeed enormously better than the continued and accelerating use of fossil fuel i said climatic implications however threats from externalities do not come only through climate change nuclear power also has extremely strong negative externalities of very different kinds there are penalties and perils which are not included in the evaluation of market prices at the cost of nuclear power at the part of the cost of nuclear power thereby making the alternative appear to be much cheaper than it actually is from a social point of view energy evaluation as a part of environmental planning demands much more extensive and proving accounting of costs taking note of externalities of every kind for example there are at least five different kinds of externalities that add significantly to the social costs of nuclear power one the possibly huge effects of nuclear accident as in chernobyl or in fukushima fukushima happened to happen in one of the most sophisticated technically sophisticated country the opportunity of that happening in many other countries which are not that sophisticated i would have thought is no less to the risk of sabotage a strong possibility in countries like india we still think about the what happened to a bombe hotel not that many years ago three the consequences of possible nuclear theft a potential everywhere but particularly strong and less guarded plants and when you think about the world being being dotted with these plants that's a very considerable risk indeed four the difficulties and safely disposing of nuclear waste which will grow over time cumulatively with a huge half-life well beyond anything that we can immediately imagine and possibly quite fast if the world comes to rely more and more on nuclear power and five nuclear reactions that may be set off if and when a nuclear power plant is bombed and blasted with conventional weapons in a conventional kermish even in a rather limited local occasion this is not often recognized you just drop a standard tnt bomb uh it's not certain it would need to melt down but there will be a very considerable probability of a nuclear disaster beginning with that probabilistically each of them carries possibilities and probabilities of huge adversities both to the human life and of course also to ecosystems around us even with tiny probabilities of each of the sum of the five but and i have not even counted in already what we know already about leaks of nuclear power which has gone on in a number of countries including in india multiplied by the growing number of nuclear enterprises the the the sum of this tends to produce a very sizable overall probabilities of real disaster estimates of probable harm from terrible to catastrophic could be gigantic nuclear power is in this sense quite sorry nuclear power is in any case quite extensive even in conventional terms and if in addition they expected this value of this utility of externalities is added to the cost of power production the sum total would begin to move up very substantially it's unlikely that in the near future fossil fuel use can be eliminated by nuclear power in fact it occupies if relatively small proportion of the total power supply in china india and nearly every country in the world with a few exceptions like like France though the picture could change in the long run but the dangers of nuclear accident and sabotage and theft can become very large even before nuclear power becomes anywhere near replacing coal or oil and other fossil fuels across the world so that the time to act might well be just now furthermore to the extent that more safeguards are put into the basic design of nuclear power production and supply and that would never quite plug the hole the cost of nuclear energy will also become significant just market-based nuclear energy cost will become significantly larger even in conventional terms and alternative that seemed very small and possible use only a few years ago but which is coming into more and more serious consideration now is what I've already referred to the renewable energies through solar power and and to some extent wind power as well recently the cost of these renewable sources of energy particularly solar have been falling very fast quite a bit faster than I was expected and without any government subsidy the sustainable energy production in the world is growing up right now at about 30 per cent a year and when I say no subsidy it's actually reverse fossil fuel is often subsidized not particularly targeted but that's the way it works out when the energy policy that is end up subsidized so some changes have happened and I think for the better in India and that's respect recently but when the fossil fuel is subsidized and new and sustainable energy is not then and there is a further distortion but quite aside from fossil fuel subsidy the case for the government deciding what it can do to encourage sustainable energy with the market is doing plenty already but you have to do in a much bigger scale because unlike nuclear sustainable energy can actually over time and fairly rapidly become the mainstay of our of our power-based existence there are many other issues to be faced in coming to rely more on renewable energy including of course the cost of storage to integrate the time pattern of energy used with time pattern of energy production and and this requires particularly much greater public support and and governmental support for scientific and engineering research dealing particularly with the issue of storage and if you think about how scientific progress in the world has taken place whether you're dealing with antibiotics and going back to my childhoods the original sulfur disease the sulfur drugs all the way to internet the government has played a very big part in making that possible it's not my contentions that these problems are easy to investigate and ascertain there are empirical gaps in our knowledge as well as analytical difficulties with the evaluation of uncertainty but the problem is present in the analysis of global warming as well and the recent works of estimating global dangers from emissions from fossil fuels have moved inescapably in the direction of including uncertainty inclusive epistemic evaluation the problem of the so-called fact tale emphasized by my colleague Marty Weitzman and others in the probability distribution of dangers from global warming is a good example the comparison between the two sources one nuclear power two renewable power from the sun and wind require urgent evaluation with special attention to the respective consequences on human lives and well-being as well as concerns about ecosystems the note need to go beyond unidirectional thinking about the environment is extremely strong right now we need the same kind of widening of research as and as was demanded by the challenge of hunger and poverty in which the institution this institution wider played a leading part from about 30 years ago there's a strong need for radically broadening the priorities of environmental planning and energy related scientific research in view of these empirical and evaluative concerns a normative framework for environmental evaluation would have many demands and another requirement is that it has to be it has to have both evaluative soundness and the possibility of informed application and reason public use the issues that have to be considered in developing an applicable normative framework must include one politics and public reasoning two science and epistemology and three ethics and morality I would have liked to have gone into the specific demand more fully today but for the fact that I don't have the time and I can only hope that during the discussion following my presentation we might be able to discuss some of these issues but just to mention a few things the politics and public reasoning about our environmental threat involves perhaps the most difficult set of problems to be addressed even though scientific evidence on the fragility of the environment has been growing and is quite firm now the politics of environmental understanding has often been running defiantly again accepting the scientific reading particularly in the United States and it seemed to be somehow mysteriously run as a dividing line between the republicans and democrats not absolutely obvious why the party of Lincoln should not be concerned with the with with bringing science and understanding and a basic humanity into into the reach of the republican platforms however the problem clearly goes beyond party politics the bulk of the american population seemed basically unconvinced or only a little convinced that the threat is large enough to warrant any great sacrifice today on the part of the present population for example even as president Obama are gathering enough traction for trying to impose strong cause constraints on allowable allowing and on allowable emissions particularly affecting the older plants and factories the democratic candidates in many states seem to be getting ready to dissociate themselves from Obama's initiative more moving closer to the republican position as the next election gets closer so there's a problem beyond the party division america of course is not the whole world but public understanding and policymaking in the usa are important both because it's such a big polluter but also because the willingness of other countries to make sacrifices today would be hard to arrange if americans go on polluting the environment with little attempt to restrain there has been a lot of research on climatic studies over the recent years and the science of our vulnerability to global warming and other changes associated with massive continuing and typically increasing emission is as clear today as scientific prognostation can ever can be as next time says in his recent book what are we waiting for and if this is an area where the primary challenge may be seen as communication rather than basic science that is not so in considering threat to environmental uh environment coming from other direction the epistemic aspects of making extensive use of nuclear power as a substitute for fossil fuel has barely started there's a huge necessity of proving research on the rational assessment of externality inclusive costs of energy production and use to conclude i've end by pointing to the need for moving from unidirectional priority to coming to terms with the multifaceted threats that the environmental danger poses it is for example odd that the negative externalities of nuclear energy have figured much more in public fear than in scientific attempts to provide an estimate of the range of values within which the negative externalities of nuclear power can be placed in probabilistic terms if there's needs for more politics and public reasoning including on global warming based on scientific evidence there's also a strong need for more scientific and epistemic research in many different types of environmental threats we face today including the likely result of increasing nuclear use across the world this will take us well beyond global warming that is the kind of widening that bears comparison with challenges that occupy the wider in its early years the challenges have changed but the need for widening the research agenda has not and i fear 30 years on we have reason to pay attention to the basic approach that wider have been tying to pioneer namely to make our research activities as well as public communication more inclusive rather than exclusive thank you very much