 Hello and welcome to this meeting. I'm sorry I cannot be with you in person today But we're very grateful that and excited that STS and Andean is meeting today And of course, hugely grateful for UNISO to host the meeting For the government of Ecuador to lend its support to act and to participate so strongly For the partnership with you with the United Nations for members and partners in Colombia and around the region to convene of course also for WWF civil society and so many others to convene today to discuss The challenges or the opportunities of localizing the sustainable development goals in in Ecuador and in the Andean region This is an exciting opportunity And I wanted to just share a few thoughts With you on how the work of the Global Sustainable Development Solutions Network might support you and how we will use the work that is coming out of this meeting For advancing the cause of the sustainable development goals more broadly. The STSN as you know was it was set up in 2012 at the request of UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon We're very pleased about close collaboration and partnership with the United Nations is continuing under the new Secretary-General Antonio Guterres who has pledged a strong support to the mission and work of the sustainable development solutions network We work on three sets of broad issues number one is We're working with members of our network. We're now close to 600 members in the STSN families we're working on Finding better answers to the technical questions of what do the STGs mean and how can they be achieved and this is something that we found extremely powerful we found it extremely powerful to Infuse knowledge and to apply knowledge to some of these technical challenges because all too often We start with the politics of achieving these goals of these transformations and we end with the politics and Don't really discuss enough of what actually needs to happen. So we've done a lot of work for example on the energy Transformation, what does it mean to to move towards zero net greenhouse gas emissions for energy systems? These are very tough challenges of engineering or financing of Business regulation business challenges and they're difficult challenges for every country in the world Many of the richest countries in the world struggle With this and through our network. We were able to to mobilize teams and in dozens of countries to develop long-term pathways for achieving this energy transformation of these pathways We're taken up by policy. They inspired action in China in the United States They inspired the commitments of the presidents of both countries to pledge border And further action on climate change which then in and of itself And then which then became a basis a foundation for a successful Paris climate conference We're now launching a similar project focusing on land use change that would look at agriculture biodiversity water food production forests and And the overall food systems nutrition as you know, these are very deep and interrelated challenges We face major issues of Of obesity in the Indian region. They were still a little bit of malnutrition Agriculture is unsustainable. We're still deforestation. We're losing biodiversity We're using too much water and on top of that we're also beginning to use Agriculture crops for biofuels. So all of this is is a very very complex challenge and we're building a project that we're calling fable to to work on these issues and calling on Interested countries to develop to put forward and put together analytical teams of research institutions working on these issues Issues that would be delighted to have teams from the Indian region from Ecuador from Colombia other countries joined as effort the promises to be a lot of work, but also very exciting and with the cutting edge of Providing answers to some of these most complex policy challenges There are many other types of analytical projects that are fostering within The growing within the SDSN many of them initiated by members or individual networks are now taken up More broadly the second big priority for us is of course education Education is critical for training the next generation of leaders But also for equipping today's leaders with the skills and knowledge they need to make better sense and of the sustainable development challenges and to And to work more effectively towards achieving them. So to this end we launched last year Our SDG Academy, which is the first online University for the sustainable development goals. We're offering over 12 courses now Covering the spectrum of the SDGs many are still being added being created that are available for free That are also available for universities to consider whether they might be able to use them to complement their own teaching to complement the teaching by local professors with The teaching by some of the world's leaders And so we are very keen to work with interested members of the Andean SDSN To explore how these tools how the promise of modern technologies can be used to improve education And we're also working with many companies that are looking at using these kinds of tools to improve the training and to provide Continuing education for their own colleagues and staff members The third priority for the SDSM of course is to support the development of national regional networks I mean we're extremely pleased when the SDSN Andean was created again grateful for the local institutions also for the government of Ecuador Dending its support to this effort The purpose of these networks is to mobilize universities, other knowledge institutions working with civil society and business Around the questions of first what do the SDGs mean for our countries? How can we how can we operationalize them? How can we support a society-wide debate on what the priorities are and how they can be achieved Second education and third solutions initiatives What are the practical solutions, new technologies, new business models that we can that we can develop together And scale up in order to find more creative, less expensive, better ways of addressing key implementation challenges And the SDSN is quickly becoming a powerful network to generate new ideas many of them are being taken up And the power of this network rests in the fact that we have so many institutions involved that are looking at the country level, at the regional level What are some of the biggest challenges? What are the assets? What are the tools that we can bring together? We ask you or we invite you to consider opportunities in your region and look very much forward to hearing what you come up with But you're of course coming together today in particular to discuss what this same development calls mean for your region And to help you and others in this effort the SDSN has put out last year, an SDG index that collects available information for countries around the world It's a very simple tool, we basically look at what data is available for 80% of countries in the world and then aggregate it in two ways One is we add it all up into an index and the point really is just to get an overall sense of how countries are doing and where there are differences within the region And it's always helpful to see if a country does better than another country on certain dimensions That often generates and raises some of the most interesting questions, what we can learn, what we can do differently And second, this tool presents the data in the form of a dashboard where you get a color rating for every goal to see how the country is doing On that particular goal, the purpose here is of course to help identify priorities for early action in each country Noting that of course the SDG is defined a very broad, a very vast agenda that we need to specify and make clearer So I hope that this very simple tool will be helpful, there are many others available The United Nations is helping governments pull together the data and ultimately of course every government needs to use the data that is most appropriate for itself or its own purposes So this is the tool that's out there and we look forward to hearing from you what you come up with and how you decide to use the same development goals in the Indian region and the countries that make up this region We will use this information as we gather in about a month's time at the end of May with leadership council in Berlin in the preparation for the G20 summit that will be held in Hamburg this year To discuss and to chart the way forward for the global SDSN, so your timing is perfect Please send us your conclusions, send us your recommendations and also task us, tell us what we should be doing Additionally, better what else we should be thinking about in order to support you as you try to make this the same development goals real and actionable in your countries Then we wish you a wonderful, inspiring and fun meeting, lots of great exchanges and thank you again for coming together Thanks to the host, thanks to the chairs of this network and goodbye to you all