 The ecosystem for social impact is multifaceted and interconnected. The SDGs offer a unified framework to orient all the stakeholders engaged in sustainable development. To ensure that we're on the right track, it is important to know exactly where we are today. To help us get oriented, I would like to welcome our Impact Engineers steering committee member and Senior Sustainable Development Officer at the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, Astra Bonin. At UNDESA's Division for Sustainable Development Goals, Astra works to identify new and emerging issues relevant to sustainable development and the 2030 agenda, with an emphasis on leveraging interlinkages among the SDGs and applying science, technology, and innovation to achieve these goals. We are grateful to Astra for providing us with an overview of the state of the SDGs, shared trends, as well as key directives for the technical community for the decade of action. Welcome Astra, over to you. Good morning. It's such a pleasure to be here with this innovative and action-oriented group of problem solvers. Thank you to Engineering for Change, ASME, and all the sponsors for creating this forum to advance the role of engineering and technology and sustainable development. I started my career as an engineer right around the time that the first Earth Summit was held in Rio de Janeiro. The Bruntlin Report had just been issued, and the need for sustainable development and for attention to climate change was gaining traction among policymakers. There was an optimism about the potential for engineering and technology to contribute to transitions towards sustainability. Fast forward several decades, and that same optimism holds. But the networks linking engineering with social change are much stronger, and the need to build and strengthen these bridges and partnerships by breaking down silos is well understood. As was stated in the 2019 Global Sustainable Development Report, different levers of transformation, including science and technology, but also including governance, business, and individual and collective action have to coherently work together to drive change. Today, the promise of technology for humanity's collective response to the COVID-19 pandemic, for building resilience against climate disasters and disease, for moving toward a carbon neutral future, and for eradicating deprivations, whether poverty, hunger, or lack of schooling, is immense. This is a crucial and exhilarating time for engineers and for science. At the United Nations Department of Economic and Social Affairs, where I work, in the Division for Sustainable Development Goals, our aim is to integrate scientific evidence, technology, and policymaking to help countries realize the aspirations of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development and the 17 Associated Sustainable Development Goals. The SDGs and the state of progress toward these goals are what I would like to focus on today, because the need for engineering, innovations, and working across silos for social change is an essential element of the coming decade of action and delivery as 2030 approaches. In case some of you are not familiar with the SDGs, they're shown in this slide, and there are a set of 17 goals and 169 specific targets that countries committed to achieving by 2030 with a promise to leave no one behind. They include such ambitions as eliminating poverty and eliminating hunger, ensuring universal access to clean water and sanitation, and reducing inequalities. They also include climate action, reducing biodiversity loss and deforestation, and responsible consumption and production. It's now been five years since the goals were agreed, and we have 10 years left to make extraordinary progress. There are challenges that will require concentrated and collaborative efforts from engineers and from other experts and decision makers toward deep structural changes in our energy systems, our food systems, and our economies. These changes may have seemed too expensive or too disruptive before, but we're now at a point where we have to move forward. Even before the pandemic, assessments like the SDG Progress Report and the Global Sustainable Development Report indicated that progress along many dimensions of sustainable development had slowed. For example, poverty reduction was being accomplished at a much slower rate than in the past, and hunger was even seen slight upticks. Trends in several other areas were not even moving in the right direction. This was the case with inequality reduction and reversing biodiversity loss and climate change. With COVID-19, we now face more conditions with even greater challenges to eradicating extreme deprivations and ensuring a green transition for greater resilience. Looking ahead, estimates of the ultimate impacts of the pandemic on SDG Progress are still preliminary, but initial estimates are sobering. Allow me to highlight just a few. SDG 1, no poverty. The latest estimates are that an additional 100 million people could be pushed back into extreme poverty in 2020, causing the first increase in global poverty in more than 20 years. SDG 2, zero hunger. Economic slowdowns and disruptions in food value chains are exacerbating hunger and food insecurity. It is anticipated that levels of acute hunger and food insecurity could double in 2020, affecting some 265 million people. SDG 4, quality education. School closures have affected 90% of the world's student population with impacts on the learning of 1.6 billion children and youth. When we look to SDG 5 and progress toward achieving gender equality, we know that women make up 70% of health care workers and they do the bulk of unpaid care work under lockdown conditions. They're at risk of domestic violence and they depend on informal work. All of these create vulnerabilities that are exacerbated by the crisis. SDG 8, which emphasizes decent work and economic growth. Disruption of the global economy is pushing the world into a recession with anticipated GDP growth of negative 4.4% in 2020 and 1.6 billion people who work in the informal sector are expected to be hardest hit and at risk of losing their livelihoods. SDG 13, which is about climate action. Here there is some promise for the future as lockdowns and travel restrictions with much economic harm have resulted in a projected drop in greenhouse gas emissions by 4 to 7% in 2020 and air quality has improved. But this is temporary without systemic shifts toward low carbon production and consumption models. As it stands, an annual decline of 7.6% in greenhouse gas emissions is estimated to be necessary over the next 10 years if we are to be on track to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius above pre-industrial levels. Even with all of the disruptions due to the crisis, we are unlikely to achieve this in 2020. The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to derail the achievement of the 2030 agenda. But this could also be a turning point where the immense response resources could be directed toward transforming our systems to ensure greater human well-being and better stewardship of the environment. Let's look to the future. The engineering community and in particular the part of this community that focuses on social impact is well placed to collaborate with and across other sectors. So the investments made deliver maximal returns to the SDGs and address trade-offs between growth and sustainability. This is already happening and let me give you just a few examples. Engineers have developed a knowledge hub about engineering solutions that can be used to help businesses quickly adapt industrial production lines during COVID-19-related interruptions and to retool operations to support medical responses. In Cape Town, South Africa, engineers have collaborated with the city government to open a waste-to-energy plant that utilizes household, municipal, and industrial waste from the city to generate clean fuel. In Fiji, engineers are working together with government and civil society to improve building construction standards for greater resilience against natural disasters like cyclones and floods that produce serious financial and social setbacks. UNDESA is ready to mobilize such efforts working at the interface between science, policy, and multi-stakeholder action. Right now, we are gearing up to support the 15 independent scientists who will draft the next Global Sustainable Development Report due in 2023 and expected to further our understanding of how to build back better from COVID-19 and accelerate progress toward the SDGs. More immediately in 2021, the multi-stakeholder Science, Technology, and Innovation Forum is a space to underscore the role of engineering for delivering on the SDGs, including recognizing the many innovations in developing countries that have the potential to be scaled up and shared across regions. The online platform 2030 Connect takes this network online, providing a space dedicated to facilitating the adaptation and adoption of sustainable knowledge and technologies, especially in how they can be used in least developed countries. 2021 is going to be a big year. Several global events, in addition to the STI Forum, will take place bringing stakeholders from across the world together to advance knowledge and generate action for the SDGs, including the Second Global Sustainable Transport Conference, the High-Level Dialogue on Energy, and the Food Systems Summit. Engineering has an absolutely central role to play in all of these, and I hope that the engineering community will be actively engaged. I would like to conclude with optimism. Science and technology are powerful agents of change, and if they are guided by the 2030 Agenda, they can steer us toward a sustainable and socially just future. Forums like Impact Engineered are generating a strong momentum for change and action that is solution-oriented and geared to radically rethinking partnerships. Initiatives like this open up opportunities to tackle challenges in their full complexity and to mobilize stakeholders to work together. I wish this meeting all success, and I look forward to the innovative outcomes that will come out of it. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Astra. We agree 100% with you that the SDGs are key to achieving sustainable development for all, and we're grateful for you setting the stage for our panel discussion.