 Having heard some of our remarks earlier, I think it's now clear to just about everyone that the nonprofit sector alone is not enough to reach the sustainable development goals. This is a massive undertaking is going to require all hands on deck. Governments NGOs individuals and most definitely the private sector. We are thrilled that so many companies both in the United States and globally are joining in this effort, including the one represented by our keynote speaker today. Based in the United States, Xylem water solutions as a global provider of water technology, serving the commercial agricultural residential industrial and public utility markets. The company operates in more than 150 countries worldwide and employs more than 17,000 people. Xylem has committed to donate 1% of its profits and employee time to water related causes, including technology solutions to reducing pollution and reusing wastewater. Our keynote speaker today is Austin Alexander silence vice president responsible for sustainability and social impact. In that role, Austin oversees the company's efforts to increase diversity, equity and inclusion in the workplace and Xylem's Xylems corporate social value program watermark. Since she joined Xylem in 2013, Austin has worked in customer service, sales engineering and investor relations throughout her tenure she has been involved in volunteering and leading events through watermark. Xylems corporate social corporate citizenship program that provides water resources and communities around the world and education about water issues. Before joining Xylem, Austin held what sounds like one of the most fun jobs outdoors in the United States. She was a range technician for the US Forest Service, working out of Big Timber, Montana. She studied, studied engineering management at Gonzaga University and earned an MBA at Wake Forest. We are delighted to have her as our keynote speaker today. Please join me in welcoming Austin Alexander. Thank you so much for the introduction and good morning, good afternoon, good evening to everyone. That was incredibly powerful and a different way to introduce a conference so I really appreciate as means creativity that really grounded me ahead of this morning. Again, thank you for the opportunity to join today, I have been learning about this program the impact engineering and the impact the engineering for change work the last week or so and just completely impressed about the incredible work that this program is doing. And something I hope we can continue the conversation on it's absolutely wonderful. As, as I said my name is Austin Alexander and Vice President sustainability and social impact at Xylem. I'll share more about Xylem in a minute. But in short, we are a global water technology company. I'm currently working remote from Montana which I was where I was born and raised and had the pleasure of moving back to in 2020. Today I want to talk briefly about what, what I think engineers and the role engineers play and how corporations and companies in partnership with nonprofits can really work to achieve the SDGs. I'm also as mentioned it engineering management degree but a civil engineer underneath that so please don't hold that against me. I have a few slides to help with the first few minutes of this session. There we go. And if you can move to the next side please. I'm not very great at talking about myself so I decided to do it with some pictures. I'm from an entire family of engineers, my mom, my dad, my two brothers are all various engineers. So it may be easy to think that I was that I stumbled or perhaps was directed into becoming an engineer. And yes, there was some pressure to smooth that direction. And the real reason I was leaned into engineering was in high school. And it always been stem inclined, particularly a really like math and I was pretty good at it. I also found I had a deep love for toilets. And it was early in high school that I realized the, the immense impact that safe sanitation has on elevating individuals and communities out of poverty with profound health impacts. And so as I move into my education journey. I was considering how I could take this newfound passion and interest around waste and something many people do not want to build a career around. And it was something my mother, who's also an engineer she's pictured below in the blue hard hat with me. I continued to buzz in the end into my ear that engineers saved the world. So fast forward a few years later I'm walking across the graduation stage with my newly minted engineering degree, EIT certification, and I took a job at Xylem. And it's been an incredibly rewarding journey so far. Both my background as an engineer but also working at a company that's global in nature and crosses so many different geographies has opened a lot of doors for me, both in opportunities for my career and expanding into different areas, but also in meeting people around the world and traveling to different geographies and being able to stay rooted in my deepest passion, wastewater. So if you can move to the next slide let me touch quickly on who is Xylem. We are a global publicly traded company roughly 16,000 employees, we operate 150 countries and our mission is to solve water. But why water, and then I'll sum it up across three challenges that we think about scarcity resiliency and affordability. As you can see on this slide, three out of 10 people globally do not have access to safe drinking water. And by 2050 about 40% of the world's population will face absolute water scarcity, unless they're a major intervention interventions. And this issue of scarcity here I feel it in Western United States, as well as many of you around the world in different ways that we're experiencing a significant drought over the past several years. And this is being exasperated by climate change. Additionally exasperated by climate change is the resiliency of our existing infrastructure by 2050 over 200 million people could be displaced by desertification sea level rise and extreme weather events. And all of this has a price to pay roughly $40 billion of clean water is lost annually we call that non revenue water. The water that where infrastructure is broken pipes leak, and we're losing the most valuable resource we have, and the resource we spent so much energy to obtain and treat is lost the long way. And if you're here in the West like myself infrastructure has been a hot topic and the cost to make the improvements we need across our water infrastructure in particular is immense. There's also a couple other stats not on this slide I'd like you to consider that water and wastewater utilities globally account for just over 2% of the global greenhouse gas emissions. So that's about the same as the shipping industry and water use and management across all sectors accounts for 10% a tenth of the total global greenhouse gas emissions in the world. So not only do we face the challenge to continue to provide improved and expanded access to sanitation and clean water. By doing so we need to do so in a way that has a reduced carbon footprint, so we cannot exasperate those challenges, I laid out head just now. So to give you a flavor where we play, you can move to the next slide. Perfect. Just to give you a flavor for xylem we are the company that provides the equipment the software and the services to treat and distribute clean drinking water. Collect and treat wastewater assist the users of water like industrial companies and commercial buildings to be more efficient and to protect and monitor the water bodies around the world. Roughly, half of our revenue comes from public utilities to give you a flavor. So what I want to talk about today is what is under the surface of that set of solutions under the surface of what we think about the technology, the equipment, the hardware that we as engineers are so familiar with working with. And so for that I'm going to turn to the sustainable development goals. And it sounds like from the previous comments. Let me move to the next slide please. This audience is very familiar up one more I'm sorry. Thank you. This audience is very familiar with these 17 goals that the world aims to achieve. And if you are not I highly encourage you to go to the UN SDGs website to learn more. So while all of these goals are important at xylem we're focusing on six in particular that we align not only our sustainability strategy, but our business strategy as well. That includes the good health and well being gender equality, industrial industry innovation and infrastructure, sustainable cities and communities climate change. And the SDG that I spent much of my time considering access to clean water and safe sanitation. So how are we going to get there on these goals I mentioned earlier in the session we have a steep curve to reach in particular SDG six but many of the SDGs. And if we continue at the rate of expanding services that we are today we will not reach our goal. By doing so if we continue to use the same technology and processes we use today, we will expand the greenhouse gas emission impact of our sector even worse. As I just laid out those stats on greenhouse gases they're expected to double across the water sector by 2040. If we continue to expand services in the same way that we do today. If we do so, using the existing technology and processes we use. It's going to cost a whole lot of money. Typically impacting and raising the rates to those that cannot afford services today. So how can we do this in a way that expand services is good for the environment provides a social benefits of clean water and sanitation. And is it a reasonable price that we can reasonably make happen over the next few years. And where my call to the engineering community comes in. And I have three areas where I think we can solve these challenges as engineers. The first is innovation. The second is accountability. And the third is a depth of consideration across equality and social considerations. So first innovation something this group is probably very familiar with. In my role I have the great pleasure of meeting with hundreds of startups nonprofits, individual designers coming up with the next greatest invention or innovation to solve water. And these are really important it is the only way we'll be able to advance to get to solving the SDG six and the other SDGs. But I'm also the most comfortable with that, because of the rate of innovation that we see. We have mentioned the technology in our hands today. And we, if we don't, it's in line to be achieved quite quickly. So I'm less worried about innovation because I know that will be an important aspect to solving the SDGs, but that's well underway. One example of that is how quickly we're able to produce vaccines and vaccines and respond to a global pandemic using technology that's been developed the past 10 to 20 years. And I think the same thing will be rapid innovation across the water and sanitation sectors over the next years. And the second area is perhaps a little less clear. And it's what my boss, who's our chief sustainability officer told me when she hired me into the sustainability role that she wanted an engineer running sustainability, because the most important thing that we can have as a global company based on sustainability as part of our strategy is that we are accountable, incredible in our sustainability claims. You're probably familiar with the term greenwashing happens a lot. Some claims of really fabulous sustainability goals or impact or technology that will save the world. And while I don't want to dismiss the excitement around sustainability, we should be as engineers holding ourselves extremely credible or accountable excuse me, that the claims we are making about the innovations we are putting out there are accountable and impacted the impact is assessed in a really engineering and thoughtful way. And then later, can you be the engineer that is purely chugging out technology which many of you I know are not, but you must also be credible in the in the way that we're accounting for the impact, and holding our organizations accountable as well. Finally, the third is, we need engineers that can think about the breadth of challenges across our collective society in all dimensions, not only the technology technological advances, but also the environmental and social impacts that we need to balance. And we need to incorporate all three of those into our design and application of technology. So, for example, on climate change like I mentioned, using if you go to visit a wastewater treatment plant in the US, you're up, even the new new plants that are being built at a rapid rate in areas like China and India. Roughly, they look the same. You're really and they probably look the same as they did in the 1990s and the 1980s. And that's because it works. We also have to think about the environmental impacts and the associated greenhouse gases with each new implication of that treatment plan. And we also have to think about the communities in which we're putting in new technology. We can't only use the technology we've always used, we must also innovate in a way that is thoughtful of the entire community. And we also need to bring the community into the design process. We'll wrap here in just a minute, but a book that I recently read over the last year, which I really like, it's called Waste by Catherine Pullman Flowers. And it's a book guarding the issues of septic tank access, sanitation access here in the US in what we call the Black Belt or Southern US. And we as engineers can have a tendency to design a system without thinking about the full impact and cost to the community we're serving. And in order for us to truly achieve the sustainable development, we must consider the implications of the end user and bring them into the design process as we are designing new innovations and designing the applications. Thinking about the full circularity of the system we're applying the environmental impact, the social impact, the technology technological advances and associating community communicating credible and accountable data to hold ourselves accountable as we apply those new advances. But who is better prepared to do this and balance this and think about the different inputs than you engineers. So my call to you is you're already here, you already care about this you're thinking about this continue educate the next generation of engineers and inspire those being educated today to take the same thoughtful approach to the technological advances we need. So again, thank you for the opportunity to join. I'd love to hear from you find me on LinkedIn or Twitter or elsewhere of shoot me an email I'd love to hear from you and thank you ASME and the program for the opportunity to join you. Thank you so much, Austin. Those reflections are really powerful and we are so grateful that you have this commitment to redefining social and environmental value creation and focusing on circularity, as you noted. So in this form, engineers need to be holding themselves and their employers accountable and make those claims credible by applying engineering tools and mindsets. We are so honored Austin to have you as one of our programmatic optimists in our corner.