 Hello, everyone. Good morning, good afternoon, and good evening. Welcome to the first-ever 24-hour webinar hosted by the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. My name is Alayna Cree. I'm with the SDSN Secretariat, and we are thrilled to have you all joining us here today as we go around the world, around the clock for the next 24 hours. SDSN is a global network of academic and knowledge-producing institutions who are charged with helping to progress on the UN Sustainable Development Goals in an effort to create a sustainable and happy world for all of us by 2030. In these challenging times, focusing on how to live a happy and sustainable life is more important than ever. Most of our participants today and our panelists will be joining from home. Throughout the next 24 hours, you're going to hear from different regions and different stakeholders how they're addressing the COVID crisis and sustainability more generally. I'm going to start today just with some quick housekeeping tips. So to increase our sound quality, all of our attendees are automatically muted. We do, however, want to engage with you. So you should see a chat box in the control panel for go-to webinar. We will have live staff on for the entire 24 hours where we will answer any technical questions you may have there or any substantive questions that you want to provide for our panelists. We'll do our best to answer those in our Q&A sessions at the end of each of our network sessions. So we have about 24 hours of programming ahead of us. You can find the details for the actual program in the next upcoming sessions on the website link that's included in the welcome message. We'll be connecting with more than 20 networks across five continents. Our stream is going to start here shortly with Hong Kong and our Southeast Asian networks. And then we're going to travel to Africa, Europe, and the Americas. We're planning to cover topics as far as public health, climate change, sustainability, and well-being. Several of our sessions will also discuss the COVID crisis and how it's being addressed by different stakeholders and in different regions. And finally, we've also planned a few celebrity spotlights and musical interludes to keep you entertained along the way. So stay tuned for those. So without further ado, I'd like us to get started. So I would like to now welcome Professor Jeffrey Sachs, who is the president of SDSN and also the director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University to start us off with some remarks. Jeff, would you like to join us? I certainly would. And I want to thank you, Elena and Cheyenne and the whole team for this remarkable 24-hour extravaganza ahead. And I want to thank everybody joining for being together. We need to be together these days more than ever. When the epidemic began, the term social distancing was used for a few weeks to talk about the kind of public health response to the epidemic. But people realized soon that it was a terrible phrase. What we meant was some physical distancing because of the reality of transmitting the virus. But we didn't want social distancing. We wanted social cohesion. We wanted to be together. We want to stick together within our families and friends, schools and classrooms, and to stick together globally at this time of crisis. And so it is an accident, but also very relevant that we celebrate the 50th anniversary of Earth Day at the same time as we contemplate the rapidly changing state of the world because of the COVID epidemic. Indeed, we have a lot of anniversaries this year. The 50th anniversary of Earth Day, which I am old enough to remember very clearly as a 15-year-old in high school when we were just opening our eyes to the realities of pollution and a crowded planet that was putting strain on Earth in ways that we had never really spoken about or understood previously. We are also celebrating, and I do hope we celebrate the 75th anniversary of the United Nations. Probably there is nothing more important for our future than for young people all over the world to embrace the UN, its charter, its institutions and its moral code, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which is a code of human dignity that every part of the world has signed up to. And we are at the 75th anniversary of multilateralism, and we really need to embrace that now. We are also in the fifth anniversary of the sustainable development goals. That's a 15-year project that was initiated in 2015. Our organization, the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, was actually established three years before the SDGs themselves when then UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon recognized how important it would be to mobilize students around the world, faculty around the world, non-governmental organizations, think tanks, to work on the real nitty-gritty of how to achieve sustainable development, and for our network formed in 2012 to be ready in 2015 to help support the new sustainable development goals. So here we are also celebrating the sustainable development goals and recommitting ourselves to them as a guide for us. It's a guide not only on our responsibilities for universal access to healthcare, for example, an issue that could not be more important hour to hour at these days in the world, but also a guide to how we're going to rebuild the world economy to form a truly sustainable economy. As we pass through this terrible scourge and look to a much brighter future, I think the SDGs will play an ever more important role as guideposts for how we overcome what is undoubtedly an extraordinary crisis. Well, Earth Day was about the whole Earth and the fact that we're all in this together, the fate of the planet. And the Sustainable Development Solutions Network is dedicated to the proposition that we need to learn from each other. The world was complex even before the COVID pandemic broke out. It is now more complex than at any time in our lifetimes. The dramatic changes in the economy, the rapid shifts in society, in how we're living our daily lives, in politics, in geopolitics, all of it requires that we are working together, both to understand our situation, to mobilize science and knowledge to fight the epidemic and to recover from it and to mobilize our connections for goodwill. When it comes to COVID-19, it's also good that we're starting in East Asia, because it's the fact that the East Asian countries, places like Hong Kong, which will host the first session just starting in a few minutes, have really shown the way on how to respond to the epidemic. I'm afraid that in this current case, my own country, the United States and Western Europe have not had a good go of it since this epidemic broke out. And my home, New York City, has become tragically the epicenter of the epidemic during these past couple of weeks. We hope we're passing through that worst phase right now, but there have been a lot of deaths and a lot of suffering. But one of the things that gives us hope is that Hong Kong, Taiwan, mainland China, Singapore, Korea, Japan, Vietnam, other countries of East Asia, though facing huge challenges and certainly not over these challenges, have shown pioneering strategies in public health to contain the virus. And so far, thank God, have been able to keep the rates of infection and deaths far lower than what we have experienced in the US and Europe. I hope and expect that in the coming hours, we're going to hear about that and we're going to learn from the successes of East Asia, how they can be applied in other parts of the world. It is remarkable, as Elena was saying, how we're going to be handing off one segment after another during the 24 hours. That also reminds me of my childhood in the 1960s, growing up listening to the space dots, part of the US moonshot, a truly wonderful achievement, but also how the space capsule would be handed off to the next ground station, the next ground station, the next ground station as it all circled the world. We will be circling the world. We hope you can join us for your at least awake hours and your daytime hours. As Elena said, we start in East Asia, but it's exciting that Afghanistan's Sustainable Development Solutions Network chapter will be hosting a major session, our network in Greece, SVSN, now the middle of the night will be waking up and hosting an important part of the programming over the next 24 hours. The Black Sea Network, which includes the countries all around the Black Sea, Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Bulgaria, Romania, and others will be joining and hosting a session. We'll move to Italy. We have a wonderful set of sessions and presentations from South America, Colombia, the Amazon region, the Andes, and tomorrow evening, after circling the world, we'll be culminating with an evening discussion with several university presidents in the United States to talk about the role of universities in our world today, the fast changing role, now the online role of universities, which have all moved to a new kind of instruction and new kind of partnership, but one that is also effective and that is part of our engagement today. Well, what I what do I hope comes out of this 24 hour webinar? It is a kind of global learn in and global teach in. I will be hearing wise words and inspiring words from around the world from scientists, young people, artists, business people. So from all sectors of society, we are in search of solutions for a pandemic. They do exist. We see the successes we can build on those successes, but more deeply we're in search of a new kind of economy and a new kind of politics. Our existing politics hasn't delivered. It hasn't delivered planetary safety for the environment. And it did not deliver the kind of smart and timely and urgent responses to this pandemic when it broke out. Too much corruption, too much pandering and populism, not enough attention to science and knowledge. I'm afraid my own country and our government in Washington has been an example of old politics that has to go. We need a new politics. In SDSN, we emphasize the politics of happiness. That is that our politics should not be based on dollar values of GNP that are built on economic activities wrecking the planet, but should be built on the value of human beings on human dignity and on the sense of well-being. This can also be measured. We recently have been discussing the new results of the World Happiness Report, another production of the UN Sustainable Development Solutions Network, which is measuring well-being around the world and showing the importance of strong social connections, good governance, human health and other non-income dimensions of well-being. This is the kind of economics and politics that we are seeking and that we believe the sustainable development goals can help us to build in the future. Let me close by thanking all of the networks around the world that are involved with this teach-in and learning over the next 24 hours, but day-to-day, week-to-week, month-to- month with the great challenge of the sustainable development goals. Young people are SDSN youth, which will be hosting part of the programming over the next 24 hours. It has been doing a wonderful job engaging students around the world and young entrepreneurs around the world with exciting projects and programs to promote the sustainable development goals. And let me finally say a word of thank you also for the United Nations system. Over recent weeks, I've been having the opportunity to discuss the current crisis with the leaders of the International Monetary Fund, of the Food and Agriculture Organization, the World Health Organization, and the leaders of the United Nations itself. And I can tell you, I don't know of a more committed, dedicated, decent, professional group of people committed to the common good than the leaders of the UN system. They exemplify the purpose of the United Nations, which is for we the peoples, human well-being around the world, they embody the values of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. That is that we should be working on behalf of all of humanity with no one left behind. And I'm very, very proud that all of us tonight as participants and as programmers for the next 24 hours are acting in the service of the UN on its 75th anniversary on the service of multilateralism and of global cooperation. It makes me feel very good and very proud and with a lot of confidence for the future that we have a multilateral system led by people of such dedication and such talent. So thank you. Thanks to all of the fun things ahead. And Elena, I will turn it back over to you. I know you're going to run a video. And then let me say good morning to our colleagues in Hong Kong. Thank you for all you're doing. Thank you for teaching us about fighting this epidemic. It's so important to what you are showing us. And we look forward to your segment of the 24 hour webinar. Over to you, Elena.