 Good morning again and many thanks to Gretchen, Mary and Rafael and many others who have pulled together this excellent symposium. I'm really looking forward to the discussions. So I'm representing the Nature Conservancy. We entered India almost three and a half years ago and I think my preceding speakers have really nicely set up the stage for me to talk about what is it that TNC is trying to attempt in India in the context of natural capital, whether or not we use the word natural capital because of the political sensitivities involved. So I refer back to what Bhaskar said in his last slide that basically the landscape in India is on natural capital is extremely uncoordinated and there are efforts taking place but they are piecemeal. And to some extent I think Madhu Varma's work which we are also very supportive of and have joined hands with in regard to the Finance Commission is helping build the momentum. And the critical thing is that that momentum needs to be retained and it needs to be multiplied if India is to get to a place where China for example is very impressive what is happening in China today. I'll begin on the right side of the slide and talk about what there is at stake in India. A lot of people in the United States in particular are not quite clear why we should work on nature in India. People only think of India as a sacred country, a country of 1.2 billion people and that it doesn't have very much to conserve. Actually there is a lot to conserve. India is probably one of the least recognized countries in terms of the conservation successes it has had. It's 8% of world's biodiversity is to be found in India and it's not just the tigers. We have plenty of animal and plant species and all of it is also under threat and that's got to do with the fact that the economy is really hurtling along which is very much needed because we have 300 million poor people and they need to be brought out of the trap of poverty and development is going to be essential including economic growth. However the fact is also that India's population is growing. We'll soon overtake China as the most populous country and if you look at the statistics for 2050 while India will become the second largest economy in the world it will need to have 230% more electricity and there's going to be a doubling of water use as well as other resources. So with all this growth is coming urbanization and infrastructure development and the landscape as already mentioned in terms of actors on natural capital they are very uncoordinated there is ideological polarization between human rights centric folks and wildlife centric folks and there is a lack of solutions orientation which of course requires very strong science. So in that scenario let me talk of two critical trends and what is it we are trying to attempt with respect to those two critical trends. The first one is urbanization and the second one is infrastructure development. After I've spoken to you about what we at TNC are trying to do about these issues I'm going to talk to you about how we are thinking about the landscape beyond TNC because it's not one TNC that is going to change things. We are coming into India in all humility we think there is a great urgency but there's also a need for coming together of forces that can bring science linked solutions to the table and that ecosystem needs to be strengthened. So starting with you know Chennai, Chennai is in southern India it's a coastal city it's the poster child of climate change. Every year in Chennai is now either a drought year or a flood year and the result is obviously not very good but one positive outcome is that the level of awareness amongst the citizens is extremely high that this is linked with how we have treated our natural resources so that's the silver lining. Just look at the map on the right side of Chennai and you'll see that the red is of course the urban sprawl and the blue is the lakes. Chennai used to have 450 lakes it used to be called the Venice of the East but today only 150 of those lakes survive and they are in extremely poor condition. They have been totally silted they cannot hold water and that you know they could be a bulwark against floods and droughts but they are not being allowed to play that role. So Chennai also has the last remaining wetland for southern India it's being nominated as the Ramsar side but I'll just play how this last remaining wetland has shrunk to 10% of its original size and the changes that you will see on the screen are in five year bites and what you see here is just for the one wetland but it applies you apply it to all the infrastructure in Chennai think about what's happening in other Indian cities and the situation is pretty grim. So now the good news the good news is that the city of Chennai has decided to prioritize its lakes and restore its lakes as part of its smart city plan. The second decision that the city of Chennai has made is to formally acknowledge that they are growing and as a result they've decided that they are going to revise and refresh their master plan. The next master plan will increase the size of the city to seven times and this provides an opportunity to come in and provide support in terms of identifying hot spots for ecosystems and ensuring that natural sex infrastructure will get its rightful place and that's what we are aiming to do and we hope that we'll have NAT CAHPS engagement and support in that process. We've already started working in Chennai we've been supported by one of Stanford University's board member to advance the work with respect to creating a scientific pilot of how lakes need to be restored and we will build out from that work and we want to do what we in TNC jargon call green printing which is basically about identifying ecosystem hot spots and ensuring that the that they get conserved. Let me now turn to the second trend which I mentioned which is the huge infrastructure that is coming up in India. The situation is such that the NGOs all have been kind of put on the margins because the approach that most of the NGOs have taken in India has been of naysayers and not solution providers. Not to say that there aren't solution providers Madhu Varma's work has been very much in the solutions orientation but there are very few people like that and very few organizations for a country that size and scale. Some of you might be familiar with the Narmada Bachao and Dolan and all the controversy that happened around it. The dams are still being built in India but you the government has had such extreme reaction to the NGOs because of that naysayer attitude that it is unwilling to engage and in this kind of a polarized environment we thought that the fact that India wants to really go after solar and renewable energy wind power in a big way offers an opportunity. Perhaps many of you in the room know that solar and wind power have a massive land footprint so they are not all you know clean as one might want to believe they can be clean they could be clean but it's all about how we will do our land planning. And the fact of the matter is that India has also made two very important commitments in the Paris conference of parties which provide us an excellent opportunity to leverage them. The first one is that it wants to have 40% of the share in electricity generation from renewable energy and the second one is that it wants to sequester 2.5 to 3 billion tons of CO2 through land measures essentially around avoiding deforestation and more importantly deforestation. Now if you put your renewable energy infrastructure in sensitive ecologically sensitive places you will be actually running asunder of your second goal. So land planning is extremely critical and it is not happening. So what TNC did was to engage with the state governments of Madhya Pradesh and Maharashtra which are two of the states with the highest potential for these renewables and offer our services in terms of building out the land planning piece of it. So both the governments have been very receptive to it. We also conducted an all India study to see you know what the implications of this renewable energy build out would be. My colleague in this room Dhava Nigandhi has been leading that work and the study has found that if India pursues business as usual then just achieving the you know NDC commitment of 2030 would require a land mass equivalent of two Austrians or two states of Telangana within India. But the good news is that that you know if India does appropriate land planning there is no dearth of land. There is 12 times the available land to achieve this goal. So with equipped with this analysis we have been working to actually develop a tool for state governments which will allow them to place their infrastructure appropriately so that they both know where solar can come up and renewable wind power can come up with least social and ecological consequences and where they should prioritize reforestation. So having given those two examples of what we are trying to do I want to go back to the fact that you know one PNC alone cannot do it. Even the four panelists together cannot change India given the size and scale of what's happening there. We really need to build an ecosystem in which natural capital approaches will get embedded in policy making in decision making by businesses as well. And that really requires that we break the silos in which science and policy and decision making is happening in India. So PNC has had along with many others I think Wildlife Conservation Society and WWF are also partners in it. We've been running a program called Science, Nature and People Partnership in the United States. We looked at that model and we said can we bring this to India and what adaptations do we need to make so that we can connect policymakers with good science. And so that led to an idea called the Indian Collaborative for Applied Sustainability Sciences. The Tata Trusts have come in as a big partner to us in this venture and we have just developed a business plan for the ICAS or the Indian Center Indian Collaborative for Applied Sustainability Sciences. And very soon we plan to go into a mode where we will be inviting requests for proposals from actors in India to respond to very specific needs of policymakers. So the starting point for us in India in advancing ICAS is going to be where is it that policymakers need support? What are the questions they are grappling with that science can actually solve? And when I say science, we don't just mean conservation science. We obviously all mean sociological sciences, economic sciences, political sciences. We need to bring all of these together. This requires a new way of working in India. It requires multidisciplinary and multi institutional collaborations which have mostly been absent. And so that's ICAS is our way of really trying to play the role of a catalyst in India. So to bring it all together in terms of the trend of urbanization, we are trying to integrate natural capital in urban planning. We will focus on Chennai as our city, but we will be building, you know, amplifying strategies to amplify it across other cities in India. We will be working on infrastructure growth. We've started our and land planning to ensure least ecological damage. And we've already started the journey with solar power, but we have to get into more contentious territories like hydropowered and building roads, building electricity, lines, et cetera, et cetera. But the journey has started with a less controversial or rather a non controversial area. And then finally, you know, in order to really respond to India's sustainability needs at the pace that matches India's economic growth, we will need to really build partnerships with other NGOs and we need support of everybody. And I think ICAS could be an excellent platform for NATCAP to support and really make a big difference, multiplier difference in India. So I'll just stop there. Thank you very much.