 So, excellencies, distinguished guests, colleagues, ladies and gentlemen. I want to give you good morning, good afternoon or good evening, depending on location we're coming in from. I think by now we're all pretty used to the Zoom meeting drill after more than a year at it. I want to welcome you to the second day of the Global Symposium on Soil Borderocity. My name is Alex Jones. I am the FAO Director of Resource Mobilization and Private Sector Partnerships. Yesterday we had a wonderful opening of the symposium with quite a range of speakers and activities. Today we'll be continuing with a plenary session for about one hour and then we'll be breaking into parallel sessions. So for the first session here we have a number of very interesting speakers and we'll be focusing on private sector activities and contributions to soil biodiversity around the world. I do a couple of in-house reminders here. Unfortunately from today forward we will not be having simultaneous translation. I apologize for that. There are cost concerns that we have to be aware of so it will be in English as of today, the meeting. So in the plenary session we do want to focus as is it on private sector actions. We'll be having a number of interventions from speakers that I'll invite to take the floor now. I keep saying the stage but of course that's no longer appropriate. It's automatic. But obviously soils are in the global agenda and the private sector is joining our call for sustainable soil management and healthy soils. My team here in FAO is working with many of these partners and we're very much expanding the reach around this. There are a number of private sector initiatives globally that it would be thought we thought it would be good to learn from some of them. Now obviously these are a sampling. There are many, many interesting initiatives around the world. I just want to remind you that each of these interventions will be a maximum of about 10 minutes after which we will have about 20 minutes for some question and answer time. You may want to already put some of these questions in the chat box or as we go through raise your hand. I'll of course be going in the usual priority. So without further ado I would like to invite Mr. Philippe Schauss who is the CEO of Moid Hennessy to come and forward to the floor. Sir, the floor is yours. Thank you. Thank you for allowing me to speak to this group. Let me try now to share my screen with all of you. Yes, here we are. So yes, so I guess the beginning of the second day is about wines and spirits. So I hope it's a nice distraction in a certain way. What I want to do to you is really give you the perspective of our business, which I would say is representative of the wines and spirits industry as a whole whereby we may have some aspects where we go a little bit further than others, other go even further than us. And this is not going to be a presentation by a specialist, I'm the CEO of Moid Hennessy, but I want to give you the business perspective and also the philosophy with which we address the topics around sustainable development and biodiversity in particular. So let me get into this and move to the next chart. So what is Moid Hennessy? Well basically we are winemakers on five continents. We have 25 centuries old mesons, we call them mesons or houses of luxury as each of these mesons is a brand but with its own production, with its own strategy. We have more than 8000 employees and we believe that we have a unique expertise in viticulture and winemaking. I'm going to come back to that. What are the brands which we have in our portfolio very quickly so that you understand what I'm going to talk about later on. We have champagne brands which you see here like Don Pagnon or Moite Chandon or Berth d'Ico, we have sparkling wines which we produce in many parts of the world including in China, in California, but also Brazil, India. We have a portfolio of still wines. We have a still wine in China, Aoyun, but we have of course Cheval des Entres in Argentina or Newton in California, New Mancia in Spain, or we also have two estates in the Provence of Rosé, and then we have our spirits of course starting with Hennessy which is the leader, the world leader of super premium spirits, but then we have also whiskeys, vodkas, and recently we have even a tequila. So if you look at this, the map of all these estates, viticulture and agricultural estates, you see that it really covers the planet, maybe with the exception of Africa where we are not yet present, but we are well distributed in Europe, North America, Latin America, Asia, and Australia. And of course each one of these estates is in different terroir, comes with different climate issues, soil issues, pressure from insects or fungus or whatever. So we are of course looking at solutions and approaches which can be similar throughout the world, but can also be very different. Our terroirs, our salts, they are both our heritage and they are our legacy. So of course we are owned by LVMAGE, and LVMAGE as you know has very strong environmental commitments on circularity, on the transparency of the raw materials and the finished products, on biodiversity, and carbon footprint. Recently there was an initiative announced, you may have heard about it, called Live360. But by on that of course, Moethens is very special since we have this particular business in wines and spirits, and our activities I would say are anchored in eternity. Some of the lands we are using, we have been using for centuries. I mean we are in, you take Champagne, we take the land where we produce Moethi Chandon, where we have been on that same land for more than 200 years. We have more than 6,000 hectares of win yards, and we are working, the majority of what we use is not coming from us, but from partners where growers, typically small family businesses, which we influence, develop, work with, and some of these partnerships also go back 100, 200 years. And so most of what we do is grape base, and that's why you're going to hear me taking, talking essentially about grapes, about win yards. But of course, when we talk about tequila or whiskey or so we come, we have other raw materials which we use, agricultural products which we use to make those. We want to be an inspiring leader for sustainability in the sector of luxury wine spirits, and make a positive impact on the planet, and thus meet, I would say yes, consume expectations, but sometimes more than that, the expectations of our own employees and partners, and the communities in which we work. And we have tried to put this all together into one program, which we launched last year, and which we called Living Soils, Living Together. So what is this made of? Well, there are basically four different access to that. The first one is about regenerating our soils. The second one is about reducing our climate impact. Then it's about engaging the society wherever we are. And lastly, empowering our people, which has also aspects of diversity and inclusion and things like that. I'm going to focus only on the first one, regenerating our soils because this is what comes close, of course, to the whole notion, which includes the whole notion of biodiversity, which is the focus of this conference. Now, what you have to understand is that since we come from where we're running companies, which are 200, 250 years old, these companies were founded by very important people like Claude Moët for Moëté Chandon or Madame Clico for Verve Clico or Richard Hennessy, who created Hennessy more than 250 years ago. Look, these people from the beginning, they were already thinking about the eternity, about the stories, about what they would give over to next generation. So they were perfectionists, not only in creating the greatest winds and spirits of their times, but also in being able to hand it over to future generations of which we are part of today. So you could say that the sustainable development part is ingrained in the very foundation of all these mesons. Now, over the last 20 years, there has been enormous efforts to move further than that. And it was very much driven by the search for the best environmental certifications from the mesons. And you may know some of them like the viticulture durable certification champagne, or there is a Napa Green land and winery certification in California, et cetera, Bodegas de Argentina in Latin America. So this has been the big focus, I would say, the last 20 years. And then more recently, we have tried to go by on that and take decisions like grasping the winery arts of our champagne houses or introducing biocontrol solutions so we could get rid of insecticides in most of our properties or our estates or using electric tractors. So as, of course, not to pollute, especially in France, where we have we have the benefit of nuclear energy or also engaging the entire regions into becoming more and more sustainable. And, of course, we are continuing to go. And I must say there's a lot of learning we do here and a lot of ideas which you see here on these examples. For instance, we had recently we put in place a program for our Maison Ruinard, in which we took 40 hectares of the historical winery art and and and dedicated it to an agroforestry pilot project where we are planting now about 14,000 trees in and spread across across four kilometers of edges and 800 square meters of islet. The idea being that we want to create more biodiversity and measure what it will make for the winery art, which is, of course, at the core of this. So so a lot of ideas also on agroforestry projects. And maybe let me highlight one or two of these projects. One I'm particularly excited about is the project around Chateau Galoupé. Chateau Galoupé is a is a wine property in Provence in the south of France. And it has about 60 hectares of winery and 100 hectares of other lands. And our idea has been, as we acquired these three years ago, to make this an absolutely benchmarking domain in sustainable development. So of course, going to organic and biodynamic farming, but also testing agroforestry in the winery art and around it. And then this natural area, which which surrounds the winery arts to transform it with the help of the Provence Conservatory of natural spaces towards making it a state of preservation and biodiversity area using pollinators. And we have been installing hundreds of hives to bring to contribute to this biodiversity in this area. So this is, of course, an experimental project, which we want to to make an example of what we could do in other places and where we really want to go all the way to maximize biodiversity, natural cultivation. And then, of course, measured result of that and hopefully produce a wonderful rosé wine, which will bear the fruit of these efforts. Another example I can I will give is with Hennessy. You know that cognac is made out of aging of wine-based Odovies in barrels produced from oak. So we are big consumers of oaks. We have our own oak forest. But through that, we, of course, we also know how fragile the forest is. And so Hennessy, the cognac maison, has engaged in massive reforest actions, real foresting actions with reforest action and a company specializing in reforestation, not just in France, but throughout the world as a contribution to reforestation, to richer ecosystems and and also a kind of echo to what we do, namely cognac and the fact that we have been using for more than two and fifty years, we have been using oak barrels to to create the best cognacs we can. And lastly, of course, as I said, it's a lot about learning about studying, about experimenting. And of course, this is one of the objectives of this is to really sharing what we do. And so for the first time last year, we used the wine fair, which is called Vinexpo, which took place in Paris in January. We use it, we use it by renting a large space, which you see here in the pictures, we invited experts from sustainable winemaking throughout the world. We invited the entire industry. We invited also people who are competitors of us to have a two, three days sharing of best practices, of best developments so that we can contribute to the whole industry to further develop its knowledge, its expertise and become better and better at managing in a sustainable way our terroirs. And that does make sure that for the next hundreds of years, it will still be possible to create wonderful wines, spirits, champagnes in our terroirs and thus contribute also to the sustainability of the overall environment. And that's all from my side. I hope I was able to transmit to you our inspiration, our views. Of course, I'm not a specialist in biodiversity. We have we use a lot of specialists where we are still doing a lot to progress every day, but our philosophy is very clear. And I hope it was also clear to all of you. So thank you for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Schaus. And thank you for the presentation. I wish we did have more time. One thing I can say is that, of course, the concept of terroir precedes our knowledge of soil biodiversity by several hundred years. But it does enshrine many of the same values of preservation of continuity of soil health. So I think there's been very valuable lessons for all of us to learn from that. Things which were known by by viticulturalists when they were just farmers and which we are now finding out, I would say, more of the science behind it, all of us, but these are very important values for all of us. So thank you once again. I would like to invite our next speaker, who is Mr. Alexander Charabaica from Fosagro, who will make a presentation on sustainable, eco-friendly fertilizers for conservation of soil diversity. Mr. Charabaica is the deputy CEO for finance and international projects of Fosagro. Over to you, sir. Could I just make one comment, please? We'd like to use the chat box for questions for the speakers for the later session. So perhaps we could close the greeting session, because at the moment there are so many questions, so many salutations flooding in, which, of course, we're very happy to receive. Well, it's very difficult to make out any questions. Thank you. So over to you, Mr. Charabaica. Do we have the speaker online? Mr. Charabaica was here, but. Yes, we are here. Yeah, we. OK, please go ahead. Yeah, colleagues, can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Thank you. Please go ahead. Good day, dear colleagues. Let me start. According to the UN, the world's population is set to grow by more than two billion by 2050. This will require significant increase in food production from 8.4 billion tons to 13 and a half billion tons a year. Today, one third of agricultural land is degraded. This area and this area continues to grow at the current rate of consumption and without fertile soil, humanity will not be able to produce enough food. As one of the world's leading producers of mineral fertilizers, where we are our responsibility for food safety and for the environment. It is impossible to provide the human population with high quality and affordable food without effective mineral fertilizers. That's why we are working hard to combat nutritional deficit and hunger by providing consumers in more than 100 countries with high performance plant nutrition systems. Our portfolio currently includes 53 grades of fertilizers, 12 of which contain micro nutrients. Today, we pay special attention to the science. Fosagra works collaboratively with innovative foundations and specific organization to develop new products. It's bio stimulants, bioactive additives and nutritional characters. Thanks to the current creation of databases, laboratories for analysis, so analyzing soil properties and the availability of these information farmers can carry out ecological sustainable agriculture and make efficient use of resources, including the use of fertilizers in line with the four principles. Our fertilizers addresses and inquire range of challenges, including providing soil, preserving soil fertility and providing plant plants with necessary nutrients. While applying environmentally sound, soil cultivation technologies and preventing carbon dioxide emissions. This ensures the company's sustainable development, enabling costs even during the pandemic time to increase the production of fertilizers in line with quality benchmarks. The latest studies of Russian market confirms that farmers have more confident in integrated solutions. It is not the seeds, fertilizers and safety features that are of interest, but products with a minimal ecological footprint that take into account the specific specifics of the soil and climatic conditions. I'm sorry, we can't see a presentation. Did you share your screen? No, we don't. It's just good. I was only worried about that. Please go ahead. Please go ahead. Thank you very much. The company supports global soil initiative such as FOS Global Soil Partnership. We are working with FOW to implement the Global Soil Doctor Program, which teaches farmers about sustainable soil management and improving soil fertility. We also support the Global Soil Laboratory Network, GLOSALAN, in Africa, Latin America and Mid-List. The company is introducing resource and energy saving technologies and is searching for new solutions for the use of chemical industry byproducts. For example, for SAGRA, technology for the use of phosphogypsum and road construction is included in the International Fertilizer Association guide for the best practices for the use of phosphogypsum. We always welcome measures to increase the transparency of our fertilizers production and supply chain. At our initiatives, eco-libles were developed and supports by all members of the Russian Fertilizer Producers Association and certify the excellent environmental performance of Russian Minimal Fertilizer. This is especially important in view of a historic European Union decision to restrict the sale of fertilizers with high level of harmful heavy metals. To sum up, I would like to say that for SAGRA is celebrating its 20th anniversary this year. During this entire period, environmental protection, human health and sustainable development have remained our priorities. Our philosophy is not only to provide humanity with quality products, but also to conserve nature for the future generation while contributing to the achievement of sustainable development goals. Thank you very much for your attention. Thank you very much, Mr. Sherebika. Thank you also for having been so prompt in the presentation and also for sharing with us that experience. I'm, of course, well aware of the work that Fosagra was doing on reduction of heavy metal contents and monitoring for that. We've had a long, long history of exchange on technical information with Fosagra on that. So thank you very much. And obviously this is a very complex subject and we're very glad to be engaged with you on that. So thank you once again. We may have questions then in the technical session at the end of the thing, of the mini. So I'd like to go to the next session here and I would like to invite Martin Johnson of Rabobank who will be presenting ACORN, which is a program for stimulating small holder agroforestry at scale. FAO has been in discussions with Martin Johnson for some time around ACORN, so I'm delighted to invite you back here. Over to you please. Thank you very much and good morning, good afternoon and good evening wherever everyone is. I'm very pleased to present on behalf of Rabobank a new initiative we've been working on in the past few months. Unfortunately due to Rabobank restrictions I cannot access from a computer and therefore I've asked the FAO colleagues to manage the slides. So if you can go to the next slide please. Thank you. Yeah, so what I'm going to present is a new initiative launched by Rabobank which we call ACORN, which stands for agroforestry carbon removal units to organically restore nature. And if you can go to the next slide. With this new initiative, we anticipate to make a small contribution to a number of very large challenges we are all facing in this world around climate change, land degradation and ensuring food security in the long run whereby we focus on supporting small holder farmers in making the transition to agroforestry. If you can go to the next slide. So why do we focus on small holder farmers? First and foremost because there's so many small holder farmers and they manage such a long or such a large amount of land jointly that we feel that supporting them can make a huge contribution. Also because there's so many people dependent on the small holder farmers for their livelihoods and for the supply of their food. Going to the next slide. As I said, we'd like to support small holder farmers in making the transition to agroforestry. And we believe that that is very important for the small holder farmers for multiple reasons. The most important perhaps being to improve the quality of the soil in the long run and ensuring diversity and high quality nutrients and increasing the climate resilience of small holder farmers. We feel that it's very important to state this very clearly that this should be according to us the reason for small holder farmers to make the transition to agroforestry and not necessarily the carbon credits that can be generated because we very much believe that these long-term benefits should be the driver and should also ensure long-term sustainability of these projects. At the same time, we do believe that compensating small holder farmers for the carbon that is being sequestered and then we're initially talking about carbon being sequestered in the trees might help in making the transition to agroforestry more financially sustainable. So going to the next slide, that is what we try to focus on is to provide a scalable manner to measure, monetize and market carbon sequestration on behalf of small holder farmers to create an additional income stream for small holder farmers to make that transition more financially sustainable and hopefully also to unlock financing to make the transition at scale, realizing that access to finance is obviously a large bottleneck for scaling agroforestry for small holder farmers. Going to the next slide. So what is it that we are working on within Bravo Bank? We are developing a global transparent marketplace to enable small holder farmers to have access to the carbon market, whereby we focus on an ecosystem driven system meaning that we think it's very important to involve the local stakeholders in the system and we're building on them to collect data that is being collected anyways already. We're looking to focus on technology to ensure a scalable model to reduce cost as much as possible, working with remote sensing data for the measurement of the carbon sequestration or for the delta and biomass, hand machine learning for scalable and transparent measurement and monitoring. We've been talking to a lot of potential buyers of the carbon credits or carbon removal units as we call them and believe that there's a large demand for high quality credits. And what is considered to be a high quality credit is a credit that focuses on actual removal that is an actual sequestration that has been taking place. So looking at exposed credits as opposed to ex-ante credits where you're selling a future promise of sequestration and ensuring transparency and traceability all the way back to the smallholder level is something that is important and that is what we have been implementing in this system to ensure that there is a market for those credits. So going to the next slide, what would such a proposition look like and how would the ACORN proposition work? On the one hand side, you have the smallholder farmers making the transition to agroforestry. What is not mentioned on this slide but what is very important is that those smallholder farmers work with local intermediaries and those intermediaries could be local cooperatives, could be NGOs, could be traders that work with those farmers on a regular basis and can support those farmers in making the transition ensuring that there's local resources available to support and monitor whether the trees will remain in the ground for example but more importantly to ensure that the agroforestry design meets the local needs of a farming community and ensuring that we're using local trees that are preferred by the farmers and where there's a market for the produce if there is any produce coming from the trees. The intermediaries will on behalf and with the consent of the farmers collect data of the farmers that will be used to onboard the smallholder farmers onto the platform. And the most important data point there is the GPS polygons of the farmers and in addition to that we'll need to collect some social economic data where we try to align that as much as possible with data that will be collected anyways to increase efficiency and also increase the quality of the data points. The GPS polygons are obviously a very important point and on the basis of that we will measure the delta in biomass on a year by year basis and that will be translated into a carbon removal unit that will be sold to corporates looking to offset their carbon emissions whereby we find it important to work with buyers or potential buyers that are first and foremost looking to reduce their emissions and only then look at offsetting the remaining emissions. We're currently looking to sell those credits at a minimum price of $20 per ton and we've done a first small proof of concept with Microsoft who's been a buyer of the initial credits. The payment will be done through Acorn whereby Rao maintains a 10% margin to cover our costs including the measurement as well as the certification and the remainder will be paid out to the intermediary for the benefit of the farmers. So as I mentioned what is super important in this proposition is scale and therefore we're strongly looking at remote sensing data for the measurement of the carbon sequestration or the delta in biomass. Going to the next slide we've been starting with a number of proof of concept with a number of organizations to test the quality of remote sensing-based measurements of smallholder every forestry assistance but at this point in time the accuracy levels of that are not high enough. So in order to further enrich the algorithms and to improve the quality of the algorithm so the confidence levels and the accuracy we've been collecting on an ongoing basis collecting the ground truth data to further enrich those algorithms and we expect that over time we will reduce the amount of ground truth data that is required to reach the levels of confidence and still provide a scalable solution and that is based on basically the developments of those algorithms but at the same time also the development of the remote sensing technology that is currently going on and still ongoing. So with this we hope to provide a first scalable solution for compensating the smallholder farmers for some of the payment or some of the ecosystem services being the carbon being sequestered in the trees but we see this as a first step and hopefully over time we'll be able to compensate those same farmers for more of the ecosystem services such as soil sequestration or larger biodiversity. We're very much looking forward to work with partners that are on the ground working with smallholder farmers and supporting them and making the transition to agroforestry and seeing if we can make that transition even more financially sustainable and interesting by providing an additional income stream for the farmers. Thank you very much for your time and I'm wishing you a pleasant continuation of the symposium. Thank you very much for that intervention very dense very specific I've received several questions in the chat asking about when we can find the symposium materials I suspect that many people want to study your presentation in great detail so I'm asking my colleagues in the secretariat maybe to publish a response in the chat box about where they can find all the materials from all the presentations. I'm looking now to see if our next speaker is here Mr. Funabashi are you here? I cannot see oh yes yes okay welcome. So I would like to invite our next speaker Mr. Masatoshi Funabashi from Sony CSL who will present a cineculture on cineco-culture and human augmentation of excuse me this is a tongue twister cineco-culture and human augmentation of ecosystems a project overview of their work Dr. Funabashi the floor is yours. Oh yes thank you Mr. Chairman and just trying to find how to share my screen yes I think I got it can you look at the presentation now. Yes we can see that thank you. Alright thank you for the introduction and I'm a researcher at Sony Computer Science Laboratories and I'm working on the project on sustainable agriculture that is called cineco-culture just briefly I had this is just 10 minutes presentation so this is just the overview of our project and my concern is how to recover the great loss of diversity biological diversity and we are living in the six months extinction and there's so many scientific reports that are citing the agricultural land use change as the massive driver of such huge loss of diversity but in reality these activities called agriculture is not confined in just you know large scale practices that we see in the media it's more like there are many many small holders working as a reality of production that is still producing like about half of the world food and these people are also on massively on the loss of biodiversity and here is some statistics that are aggregated to explain the situation you can see the reference if you want to know the detail so my project is trying to tackle these small holders that is left a bit behind of the development of aid or you know scientific initiatives and business incentives are actually leaving these people behind and that is not for the biodiversity so this is an eco-culture concept is to create very small but biodiversity ecosystem so here this is the first experiment of plot in Japan this is just one thousand scale meters but on which we associated more than 200 edible plant species so including vegetables herbs, fruit trees and many more including medicinal herbs for example and we based on the association the mixed association of these edible crops species excuse me could I ask you to put it on full screen in your presentation it would be easier to see all right it is fine now we're still seeing there perfect thank you very much all right yeah there's time difference because I'm just talking from Tokyo Japan yeah so the concept of this project is to replace all the external input like fertilizers and agrochemicals by the self-organizing process of ecosystem and that was my PhD specialty in complex system science so there are many species interacting here that are forming rich functions of ecosystem including material cycles and these complex systems can replace all these external input and that was a hypothesis and we are testing that and this is just the example of the harvest that we have so it's very different from the conventional supermarket product it can take various forms but they are quite nutritious if we looked at the food component actually we measured that and also it's very powerful and in terms of food diversity it can produce a very high variety of these food stuff so this is the additional intuitive concept on how the systems is increasing the biomass and how it reaches the underground ecosystem as well so we have this concept of natural agroecological succession that is well known in the field of ecology but such natural formation is not very productive as agriculture so we are trying to replace as many species as possible as the species that could dominate the system as useful crop species so the upper right state is something that we call the augmented ecosystem that is far more useful including economic and ecological values compared to the natural ecosystems and this is the scientific background that I created to evaluate the productivity I cannot explain details but they will integrate the monoculture productivity and the mixed polyculture productivity such as cynical culture and these two ways of producing edible biomass is not contradicting it's just a matter of the different functions in terms of the difference of the environment and in terms of the difference of biodiversity response but to be short and this theory indicates that the system, the complex system such as cynical culture can perform very well in rather hard environments like in dry land agriculture rather than rich environment like in Japan so I brought this system to sub-Saharan agriculture principally at Burkina Faso we had the transition from Sahara desert to a more humid sub-anid formation there but the land we started is just abandoned land because of the inappropriate practices of traditional agriculture that's the term they were using so basically the monoculture method are depleting soil and they abandon this land and on which we actually reintroduced 150 edible species through the methodology of cynical culture and the result we got was after one year of introduction of these species and just adding water, no fertilizer no chemicals they had the transition from left to right actually and the right actually made of crops we can just cut and sell on the market and in terms of the soil topsoil formation was also significant as you can see on the left the initial condition and this is almost sun there's no organic matter actually to the right side we have rich developed forest structure and we couldn't actually measure soil component and soil microbiology in Africa but as we measured in Japan the natural development of such structure including my microbiological profiles were very significant and even exceeding the best profile in conventional agriculture yeah and we had a very rich harvest in Burkina Faso which was providing high impact to address poverty, malnutrition and also to increase the security by providing decent forks and here it's just a summary but you can look at the proceedings of our international symposium that is showing the data that is showing the statistics and how this system could be beneficial in the global scale as well yeah so the local government joined the movement and also we had the support of UNESCO and we just held five times symposia on Africa Jones site yeah I'm mostly inviting people from Saheian countries and now this is actually the map of this year we have basically three main projects and also personal projects that is catering around the project and you can see in the middle that there are farms supported by Sony that is operating as a demonstration farm and on the left for example we had ECOVAS budget on the support of agriculture technology and so this is a kind of international project and we are creating several dozens of farms bottom up in this region and we are also providing high impact on the local productivity and especially this points red points are actually classified as very dangerous stone because there are so many terrorists and sometimes the villages are wiped away but in such situation we are continuing the production and try to augment the livelihood of the people and this initiative is well accepted by local people and local government as well and on the right downside we have another national project from Togres Republic Government and it is actually using the rescue fund of COVID-19 so here we are creating 30 Hextile or Silicon Cudger farm to train 2,000 people and eventually distribute the products to some million people in this region alright you can also see on the Facebook some pictures of our local NGO that I established with the local collaborators CAF and you can just search that on Facebook and you will see some pictures that is growing now and the reason why I hold this project at Sony Computer Science Lab is that such complex ecosystem require lots of information so the management of the ecosystem requires big data sometimes very complex analysis using artificial intelligence so this is the overview of the system that we are developing in the team and we are trying to provide as open source this system is still under development that we are gradually trying to introduce and do the proof of concept on site including sub-Saharan Africa and here is one example on this complex network we visualized the ecological interaction between different plant species that we introduced on the site and from this analysis you could see that there are hub pollinators that we should actually protect and expect to increase the harvest so we notify to local farmers that if you find these species this has a high possibility that they are having as potential hub pollinators on your farm so this is a good sign and so we are making these sort of suggestions according to the analysis of the ecological interactions so here is another example of suggestion on the left side we have the analysis of already introduced species and which plant species so these are crops acting as the hub of ecological interactions so we have to probably increase the dominance of these species to better have the stability of the Sineko Kacha field and on the right side these are examples of plant species that haven't yet been introduced in our farm but which according to the ecological interaction analysis has a high potential that it could serve as hub species so very high functioning species yeah so that's the end of my presentation and we had 10 years of research scientific research activities on the Sineko Kacha project and this April we've found that Sony Group founded the Sineko Company and I'm serving as president now and we are trying to provide the services to the management assessment and also the augmentation of biological diversity starting from Sineko Kacha but any projects that goes in line with this philosophy the human augmentation of ecosystems and this means that with the assistance of human the ecosystems which may be not natural anymore so the answer of course ecosystem could be more diverse than the past ecosystem without human so thank you very much and here is the reference and you can see the overview of the concept from this perspective article from Nature Research thank you very much thank you very much Dr. Bonavati could you share your screen excellent so thank you very much we have a very very short time available but first of all I want to thank all of the four speakers we've had a pretty broad range of interventions here just to look at it we've looked at very traditional but evolving modern concepts from one of if not the world's premier wines and spirits producers we've looked at one of the world's largest producers of phosphates which is engaged in an important transformation now one of the most cutting edge programs on soil carbon market transformations through Rabobank and the Acorn project and a very interesting technical presentation on Sineko culture great deal of complexity for many many initiatives out there the idea was to give you a bit of a glimpse of how many things are happening in the private sector that we often don't notice maybe one question that we really have 10 minutes left they came up many times in the chat box and I would really like to toss out maybe to all four of the speakers in sequence just for a quick question is how can we promote and accelerate investments on soil health this is something which is coming from all of your sectors you're all big actors in this maybe I could start just very quickly with Mr. Schaus over to you do we have Mr. Schaus with us maybe he's dropped off the line I don't see him here okay maybe I could go to Mr. Schaus over to you hello colleagues so yes this is quite an important issue and so we understand that only combined efforts together of international organizations and private sector can support to promote the sustainable land use and to maintain the soil quality and fertility simultaneously we understand yes combined efforts that science based approach is also very important for us so we are working together with Russian Academy of Science for example and with international organizations to promote the sustainable soil management it should be always very smart and innovative because in some areas we have significant degradation of the soil cover and in this case farmers there cannot produce enough food even for themselves and it doesn't matter if we want to feed anybody else so in this case we have together and also we support biodiversity on the different land plots in different regions of the world especially if we are speaking about the tropical areas where the biodiversity is much higher compared to the northern hemisphere where we allocated for example like our company in Russia together so we understand that this is like boom and we need to be very proactive to talk to the users of our product to talk to the farmers to speak to them share the information and this is also quite an important aspect that is sharing of information so teach people if you know anything new share this information so this webinar and these platforms are very important to share the information great thank you very much Mr. Shatabayka I have a question there was an issue about the acorn project and there was some concern about the fact of resources flowing through intermediaries to farmers and to know maybe more about how the project ensures that the bulk of the resources coming from this does in fact flow to the farmers themselves and not get intercepted Martin over to you very good relevant question obviously and what we envision to do and what we're currently working on is to see if we can work with different parties to ensure traceability of payments all the way up to the farmers in the ideal situation we would do that through for example digital wallets of the farmers and in certain some of the products that we're currently doing we're actually testing that so that the payment goes directly into a wallet of the farmer and we can actually track how much is then coming to them at the same time we do think it's important to ensure a ecosystem that makes sense for all parties involved so it might be that from that wallet there will be a deduction for some of the costs that intermediaries for example have made in terms of purchasing set things in bulk to reduce costs so that is one we do see however that in some of the pilots that we started there's no possibility yet to make a digital payment or to create a digital wallet and in these cases we ask the intermediaries to confirm the payment to the farmer to ensure that that has been paid up to the level of the farmer and do some cross-checking with text messages and calling on a basically not every farmer but a certain percentage of the farmer to cross-check and validate the actual payment great thank you very much I'm well aware of call center procedures they're not easy we use them in many cases ourselves one last question I'd like to ask to Mr. Fonabashi that came from the text box there was there seem to be a focus primarily on local but not commercially grown crops so more either lost varieties or so on is there a discussion of also scaling this up this approach to commercially commercially viable crops well actually depend on the regions and available crops of course and in Japan we have the seed genetic resources mostly dominated by a few seed companies well I'm not criticizing I'm just talking about the reality so it's quite difficult to find something other than the F1 seed while in African countries what we discover is that there are still so many varieties of local seed that are vigorous and that are very adaptive to synacro-culture situation and we also have very high variable crops like cacao or sesame or other moringa trees that are going well in our system as well so yeah our company is not producing these crops but we are providing consultation to inform people how to introduce this system and how can they be profitable at the same time increasing local biodiversity so if there's any one just contact me and we can discuss on how we can set up the commercial farms on site in any person in the world great thank you very much so we've pretty much run out of time and I do want to keep on schedule I do want to thank everybody from the number of questions we've received we could have probably gone on for a couple of hours here but I would encourage people all of these programs as you know have websites have programs please do contact them please again there's a lot more and of course bear in mind that what we've introduced today is a small number of private sector actors who have volunteered their time and their enthusiasm to be with us today it is a huge range out there this is a key message that we're trying to say we must engage with the private sector most of the action happening is happening thanks to the private sector in terms of achieving the STG so please do reach out through us or through them we're just about right on time we're handing back here to Ronald I believe over to you thank you very much Alexander it was an excellent moderation on a session in which we wanted to to of course show that the private sector is also engaged in the cause of healthy soils which for us is very important I hope we will be able to answer the questions because that's something we will do when reporting and now we will move into the parallel session so technically I will hand over to my colleague Isabel who will explain in detail how these parallel sessions will work but I want to thank also all the presenters and to you Alex for the great session Isabel please can you tell our great participants more than 2,000 people how to reach the different parallel sessions that we have thank you very much again many thanks Ronald and Alexander well for the next 2 hours we will all sit into 6 different parallel sessions structure around 90 presentations you can switch between parallel sessions as many times as you like and attend the presentation interest you the most I'm not sure who participated in our past physics or symposium here in Faro it is just the same you simply move from one meeting to another in total freedom we know that your camera will be on but you will not be able to unmute yourself if you want to intervene raise your question on the chat as the moderator we will select some key questions and open the discussion now how to enter the parallel session you can refer to the email and to you recently with this check attending the symposium it contains a lot of details on how those four days are organized just keep that handy the alternative is to simply enter the symposium website my tags are right now posting on the URL let me share my screen quickly so I will guide you too okay so you can see here on the screen there is a home page of the symposium so you just need to click here join the symposium and click on the different parallel sessions so if you see when I roll over parallel session 1 you click directly and you enter the parallel session use that passcode here because each different parallel session has its own passcode agenda of the parallel session is also available directly from the home page you have it here I don't know the PDF and the virtual format also finally a few more things because I saw a lot of requests on the chat regarding certificates of attendance please note that certificates will be granted distributed, prepare upon participation to the 4 days of the symposium just send us a message on the GSOB mailbox if you need one and we will check the participating log and prepare them accordingly also don't forget to check the GSOB website regularly as we are currently uploading all presentation and recording all those day sessions I hope everything is clear we will now all meet directly in the parallel session many thanks to all of you and see you there