 Thank you. So, ladies and gentlemen, it is a special day to be here at Columbia. I thought it was fantastic to listen to the Prime Minister of New Zealand. She's such an inspiration to people in New Zealand, to young girls and women, young leaders, but to all of us really and beyond New Zealand as well. So it's fantastic to share the stage with her. And it's nice to be here at this world leader forum, the Kapinski Development Lecture, the International Conference on Sustainable Development, and to talk to all of you and everyone who's following online. I actually wanted to go to Columbia and study at one point. I wanted to study development. So Columbia was definitely on my list there, and I wanted to go to Earth Institute and study with Professor Jeffrey Sacks. I actually decided in the end to stay a bit closer to home, so I did my Masters in Europe. But it's quite special for me to be here at Columbia. So today I'm going to talk about development, human progress, and why I believe in a brighter future. So I'm optimistic and hopeful. That's going to be my main theme. But if we look at the news today, we see that we have a world where we hear about population growth, we hear about poverty and inequality, we hear about war and conflict, more people leaving their homes, more refugees than the last couple of years than the years before, and we hear about pollution and climate change. So all of these quite depressing news items coming in. But underneath all of that, even though there's a lot of suffering and a lot of challenges in the world, underneath all of that is also a very positive story that's more hidden. So we need to look at that as well. We need to look at both. So I'm going to focus on three things. Innovation, leadership and hard work. So those three are going to be themes for my talk to you today. This is data from NASA showing how the climate is warming up since 1900. The yellow is two degrees Fahrenheit warmer and red is four degrees Fahrenheit warmer. You can see that the whole planet is warming up. And when we get to today, it escalates. So now we're in the 19th and we're getting close to 2018. So that's a real challenge. But underneath all of that, and in addition to that, we know that the last 20 years have been a time of unprecedented growth and development around the world from many points of view. If we are to look at the future and understand the present, I think it's a good idea to start with history. So I'm going to take you through the history of ideas and innovations. In two minutes, at the same time as we're going to look at population growth. So there'll be a blue line which is showing population growth and the rate of population growth. So 400,000 years ago, we discovered fire. That was helpful. We could get warm and cook maybe. And 4,000 BC, we invented the plow so that we were able to farm the land much more efficiently. 3,500 BC, we invented the wheel so that we didn't have to do that again. And then 3,200 BC, we invented Sumerian, the first written language so that we could share stories not only orally but also by writing. In year zero, Jesus was born. At least in the West, we started counting our years from that event. In year 1,000, Abu Qasim al-Sarawi was a doctor. He was a surgeon. He wrote books on surgery that we used 400 years after they were written. Now you can see there's 300 million people in the world around 1,000, year 1,000. And the blue line will show you how much population growth is happening. In 1302, we invented the compass so that we can navigate the seas safer. In 1445, Gutenberg invented the printing press so that we could print books quicker. In 1656, we invent the clock so that we can start being late for everything. And in 1712, we had the steam engine that's invented. There's now 500 million people in the world and the Industrial Revolution slowly starts taking shape. In 1803, we invented railways so that we could actually transport goods and people much more efficiently. There's now 1 billion people now. 1849, we invent the telephone so the foundation is laid for Snapchat. And in 1879, the light bulb is invaded by some of the students of Thomas Alba Edison. And in 1903, the brothers right were able to fly a plane over some distance. There's 1.7 billion people in the world today at that time. In 1908, we start mass producing cars at the T-Ford. And in 1928, we invent penicillin, so modern medicine and we can now see that population growth is growing really rapidly, 2 billion people now. In 1971, the computer chip is invented and there's 3.7 billion people. In 1991, the World Wide Web is invented and there is now 5.3 billion people. And today, there's around 7.7 billion people in the world. So if we take a step back and look at this, we can see the first point I guess is that innovations, they drive development, good ideas drive development. I want to say something about population growth as well. Because fertility rates, you might know, have already been falling for a while. Fertility rates in the world, how many children per woman has been falling since 1965, 1965. That has been going down a lot. The other point is that it's not going to continue to grow this population. When we get up to 2050, it's much, much flatter than what it has been. And the reason for that is the people that have better health and trust that the children are going to survive have less children. We see that all over the world. So in 2050 and in 2100, there won't be many more babies born per year than there is now. That's pretty flat, but there will be more grown-ups. So that's actually a positive story that we have better health so we live longer and that's exactly what we want. I wanted to show you also development the last 200 years. Hans Rosling was a professor, Swedish professor on public health. He sadly passed away last year. He's made the graph I'm going to show you next together with his son Ola Rosling and his wife Anna Rönlund. And they are continuing a gap-minded organization that they started together with Hans. So I'll show you development the last 200 years when it comes to income and life expectancy. So we see all the countries of the world down here and in 1800, none of the countries had life expectancy over 40 years, right? So life expectancy here on the y-axis and income per capita on the x-axis. Over here is where you want to be high income, right? And you want to be up there high life expectancy. And we see now we're in the late 1800s and the development is slow. A lot of the countries are moving up to the right and we will see the first world war here. That's the first world war and we have the Great Depression in the 30s and then the Second World War and then we really see that development is taking off. The yellow is the OECD countries. The blue are the Sub-Saharan African countries and we're getting close now to our own time and we see that all countries are moving up on life expectancy and almost all countries are moving to the right. And here we are in 2018. So this is a tremendous success story. We need to remember that the world has actually been moving a lot in the right direction. And I want to stress this because I think it's really important to remember that a lot of things have been going well because if we only talk about the negative all the time maybe we forget that we have been doing something right. We don't want to stop doing what we've been doing right. We want to do what we've been doing right and continue doing that, improving it and then finding even new ways to do it even better. There's a few things, of course, this doesn't show there's many things. One of them is there's a huge difference variation within one country. We only see sort of the mean in each country here. But anyway, I think it's important to have that as part of our understanding of history and our understanding of development. Part of this story is or has been the Millennium Development Goals. So these eight concrete goals that the world created in the year 2000 that we were supposed to reach by 2015. We didn't reach all of them, but we did make a lot of progress. We halved extreme poverty and we've made progress on health. There's more children in school now than ever before, both girls and boys. So the Millennium Development Goals gave us some focus and something to measure when we were moving forward. And now, of course, it is the Sustainable Development Goals. That's the next natural step, a more comprehensive agenda than the eight goals we had before. So how many of you are already a little bit tired of looking at this one, this graph here, and the Sustainable Development Goals? Stand up if you're a little bit tired of talking about the SDGs. Okay, so you are very courageous, the ones that just lifted your hand. Actually, I think they are way too important for us to be tired of them. I am a big fan. I really like the Sustainable Development Goals. I think we need to talk about them more. We need everyone to think about them and chip in. There are some differences between these and the MDGs. One is that we're all in this together. That's more reflected, I think, in the SDGs. It's, of course, about countries, but it's not only about top leadership, politicians, and countries' policies. It's also about communities. It's about private enterprise businesses, NGOs, education, et cetera. And we can all use these goals. These are goals also, I think, for individuals. So it's much more personalized this time around. Also, we see that there's a wider scope. It's economic, social, it's environmental. And it's sort of beyond quantitative and more focus on quality. What type of education we want, et cetera. And there are some completely new goals here. We have number 14 on oceans. We have a goal on sustainable cities. We have a goal on peace. So these are brand new goals in the SDGs. So my goals are number one and 14. End poverty and oceans. What's your goal? Okay, good. We need, of course, all of them. They're all important. Okay, I've been talking about innovation and development a little bit. I'm going to continue to talk about innovation, but now about clean energy. Climate change, it's not to underplay climate change. Climate and man-made climate change is a real challenge and a real problem. And we don't have all the answers yet on how to tackle that issue. But I'll show you a few things that I learned from Professor Ramez Naam from the Singularity University. He did a talk in Norway that I was at just two weeks ago at this Norwegian energy conference called the ONS. And I harassed him until he gave me some of his slides. He was like, go away. I'll give them to you. So he was very kind and bored me some of his slides. And I'll show you just some of the figures that can give us a little bit of sense of that there are certain aspects here that gives ground for hope. Okay, so this is a coal power plant in Asia. And if you build a new coal power plant right now, it will cost approximately five cents to the kilowatt hour. And this is, of course, emitting a lot of CO2. If we look at what has happened to solar and prices the last 40 years, we see that the cost has had a 250 times price decline. So from $77 down to 30 cents. So a huge price decline in the cost of solar modules. Now let's look at what a power plant will cost. In India, remember there was five cents for the coal power plant. In India, one power plant now costs four cents per kilowatt hour. Now that's in a low cost country. If we look at Germany, we can see that there's four Euro cents per kilowatt hour. And I think this shows that we are making some progress also when it comes to renewables. But we're not there yet. Energy storage, that is another aspect of this. The last eight years, I'll show you an example of battery packs. The last eight years, since 2010, battery pack prices have dropped by 79%. 2017 are our last numbers. So battery packs in electric cars, for instance, have also been dropping a lot in prices. So those were just two examples of clean energy and how that is progressing. Now I've talked about innovation. Let's move to leadership. If we are to create the future we want by 2050, if we are to find all the solutions, we need everyone to step up. So obviously we need our political leaders, our thought leaders, and everyone to go and lead us in the right direction. But I think also everyone needs to step up in their own way. And in particular what gives me hope are young people and young people's leadership. And here is one of my leadership role models, Nula Enders. I met her last year in Liberia when I was there with the UNDP. She is an engineering student. And works as an intern at the Mount Coffee Power Plant, which is a hydro power plant that Liberia is reopening around this time. And she grew up in a community without a lot of resources. And she understands the importance of energy for light to study. And we asked her to record a little message for you. My name is Nula Enders. I'm 21 years old and a final year on a graduate studying electrical engineering. Growing up with electricity made me understand the dangers and mishaps in living in the dark. So I've committed myself to acquiring as much knowledge and skills as possible to help rebuild our electricity grid. This year, a journey of a thousand miles begins with the first step. So the first step begins with you. So imagine, I think we should give her a round of applause. So imagine what will happen now when we're bringing millions of people out of extreme poverty. And we have people like Nula being able to use her resources, her brain power, her energy to find new solutions, better solutions for the future. And that's exactly what we need, one of the positives of bringing people out of poverty. I have one more example for you on a problem that leads to someone thinking about how to solve it and again to leadership. So as you know, plastic in the oceans is a big problem. Our oceans are not doing well. The ocean's health is not the way it should be. We are polluting it and also with climate change, it is also threatening marine life. So we see that plastic is, even in remote areas, you can find plastic on beaches and a lot of it ends up in the ocean, which is a challenge. So Boyan Slat, he's a Dutch guy that looked at this problem when he was 16. And he thought this was serious and he didn't want this to continue, so he wanted to do something about it. He went on to study engineering, rocket science actually, and he quit his studies to start the ocean cleanup. He had this idea of how to do it when he was 19. And I'll let this little video explain it to you. 1.8 trillion pieces of plastic float at the surface of the Great Pacific garbage patch. Here, the ocean cleanup is deploying the world's first technological solution to this growing problem. The principle behind it is simple. Create a coastline where there are none. Concentrate the plastic and take it out. So this is yet another example of how you have a problem. Someone's engaged and motivated to solve it. They have trials, they fail, they try again, and eventually, hopefully, they'll be a success. So last week or two weeks ago now, the first ocean cleanup device was towed out in the Bay Area through the Golden Gate Bridge. It's now doing full scale testing, and if that goes well, it will be towed all the way out to the garbage patch in the Pacific and start harvesting plastic and sending it on shore for recycling. And if that goes well, the hope is to have 50 of these systems, 50 or 60, the next five years so that if they produce or go into the garbage patches for five years, the estimate is that they will be able to collect 50% of the plastic that is there. Okay, so that's another example, I think, that should make us hopeful that all these problems that are created by people can be solved by people. Okay, I have one last point, and I'll show you another one of my heroes. This is Therese Jakobsen. She is from Balstur in northern Norway. I met her in 2015, and she was 100 years old at the time. Having her own little business producing mittens, and she was 24 when World War II broke out. She's still alive and well, and I asked her, what is the most important lesson that you have learned in your experience? And she said, when I was young, we worked hard. But I don't think that was a bad thing, I think that was a good thing. I think we need to work hard, and I think working hard is part of having a good life, a meaningful life. So Therese, I think, is going to leave you with the last point of the three, that if we are to succeed in creating a bright future, we also have to get at it and work hard. So we need to take ownership of the goals. We need to domesticate and personalize them. So I've talked about innovation, leadership and hard work. Let me leave you with three messages. One, remember, please, everything we have achieved in addition to the challenges. Number two, have faith in your own ability to make a difference, to change the world to the better. Don't underestimate what a few good people can do to change the world. In fact, I guess that is the way all change starts, right? And three, thank you. Well, thank you for being here and showing interest in these topics. I know that all of you are already doing work to reach some of these goals here. So thank you for your dedication and for your will to make the world a better place. Thank you for your attention. Fantastic. Wonderful. Thank you very much for that great amazing lecture and history lesson. We covered 10,000 years, all key technologies and important trends, and I think it was very, very illuminating. And I would say also in my own reflection, when you think about all that the Crown Prince just showed us, one common feature is acceleration. Now, change is faster than ever and we are accelerating. That means that if we're in the right direction, we can move faster than ever to make things right. Poverty can end faster than ever. In China, poverty has gone down from 80% perhaps 40 years ago to essentially zero today, an unmatched human achievement. If we're going in the wrong direction, then the acceleration is disaster. That global warming map at the beginning is a map of acceleration because not only is the planet warming, it's warming faster per time period than in the past by far because the human impact is so much faster. So I think one could say that it's not an argument about whether things are getting better or getting worse. The answer is both. It's an argument about what direction we're going in when we know that we're in a dangerous direction on climate change or a dangerous direction on inequality or a dangerous direction on destruction of biodiversity or destruction of the oceans. Then we should appreciate, I think, that the acceleration means that the damage that can be done is faster than we can imagine because we're in an overwhelming wave of change right now. I was taken and I had not seen the example of collecting the plastics. That was new for me. I did not know about that. I wonder, since you are helping to lead SDG-14, what other areas are you engaged in to save the oceans? Because we had, for example, with us a couple of days ago, the minister of fisheries of Indonesia. What she told us, and she is a really remarkable minister, but she told us basically that Indonesia is being completely fished out by illegal fishing and they can barely control it because there are so many fishing fleets there, Chinese, coming from all over the world, and they're now using satellite data to try to find who is doing what where, but the ships turn off their transponders or they have ten flags that they're carrying to be able to maneuver and so on. I wonder whether you're taking on the fisheries because, after all, Norway is one of the great fishing countries of the world, the depletion of the fisheries, microplastics, and other areas. I'd love to hear more about the oceans. Yes, well, first of all, I think my love for the oceans just come from growing up during the summer very close to the ocean. My family has always been very fond of activities that are connected to the ocean. And I think when we're in the element, when I'm pushing one of my kids on the wave on a surfboard, I get this feeling that I'm connected to nature in a very profound way. And I think that in all our modernity, we've maybe forgotten that we are actually part of nature. It feels like it's nature and then us, but that's not the case. We as human beings are nature. And I think if we understand that on a profound level, we're more equipped to take good decisions when it comes to the environment, because if we take care of the environment or taking care of the environment, it's actually taking care of ourselves. So it just makes perfect sense. So I was about 30. I thought food came from a grocery store, not from a farm. I finally found out, someone told me, they never mentioned it in my economics classes, by the way. But I finally discovered it. So the oceans are hugely important. We don't know enough about the oceans. We need to find out more. But we do know that there's a lot of things that we're doing that is harming the life below the sea surface. Now Norway is doing quite a lot. My government has taken an initiative for a high level panel on the sustainable oceans. So that's happening and also taking initiative to fund, supporting that. And my government is focusing on sustainable use of the ocean. So not only protecting, but it's the right mix between fishing and taking the resources out of the ocean, but in such a way that it can continue in an infinite way so that we actually do it in a sustainable way. And I think also for the future, there are many challenges ahead. We're going to be 10 billion people, not too far into the future. And a lot of the solutions lie in the ocean for medicine, for nutrients, for food, for livelihoods, etc. But all of that depends on us managing the oceans in a sustainable way. So it's really core, I think, to bringing us forward and getting us closer to reaching these 17 goals. I was speaking with the Prime Minister of New Zealand earlier, noting that her country ranks high, very high on the sustainable development goals and happiness. I have to say Norway ranks even higher because it's, I think, number two on the SDG index and usually bouncing around between one and three on the happiness. Can you explain that to us so we can copy it? We're trying to figure out what's going on there because we need it. We keep falling in happiness here, so we're trying to figure out what is the recipe. I love getting this question from you because I read Jeffrey Sachs' book to understand the world and now you're asking me the question. So this is interesting. And I'm going to write it in a book when you answer it. Okay, so Norway has been doing well. I think one, I don't have the complete answer to this. One is, of course, that we're in a peaceful part of the world. War is the most costly, the most problematic, what really jeopardizes development and produces, of course, a lot of suffering. And we've been lucky that we have not been in an armed conflict on our own soil since the Second World War. So peace is important, hugely important for development. Secondly, I would say gender equality. In Norway, we are not there yet. It's not complete gender equality. But I do think that Norway has come quite far on that topic. And it just makes complete sense, both, of course, from an ethical standpoint that all people should have the same prospects of a career, the same possibilities, but also from an economic standpoint, instead of using 50% of the population to create value, you're using 100% of the know-how, the brain power, and I think that has been an important part of the Norwegian success as well. And just one comment about the happiness index. I think that we were ranked very high in the happiness index. One year we were number one. I think that came as a big surprise to a lot of Norwegians. Because, of course, we see a lot of challenges and problems. But it somehow rotated between the Norwegians, the Danes, the Swedes, and the Finns, trading places for number one. We have a little pet theory at home that I don't know if it's right we're actually testing it this year, but Norway is about the highest coffee per capita consumption in the world. I heard that, too. This may be the direct effect. But if I may, I hope not presumptuously, and very heretically from an American point of view, another part of Norway's success, and clearly Scandinavia's success, is the incredible success of politics. That you have politics that is consensual, stable, directed towards the common good. And very different from ours in that it's at a human scale still. Maybe this is also the scale question of a country of a few million people and a continental country. But I've always been impressed in Norway we've been at dinners, and the Prime Minister would drop in sometimes. And that's nothing special. No big motorcades, no cordoning off neighborhoods, just driving over by himself and spending the evening. And that, I think, keeps the humanism of it. And now I'll say something very heretical from an American context. But to my idea, you also represent something that is quite special, which is that the really happy countries are constitutional monarchies. And it's an empirical fact I'm just telling you. I'm using the occasion. Think of it, Americans, we could have, as our head of state, Queen Elizabeth or Donald Trump. I rest my case. But constitutional monarchies really have worked. I've got to ask you about that, because what do you think about that? You know, Hans Rostling that I mentioned in my talk showed me this graph, I think the second day or the day after I met him the first time. And he showed me how development had been going and which of the countries were monarchies. And he was very clear that he was a Republican. So in Europe that means that you're in favor of a president instead of a monarchy. And he showed it to me and he showed me how these monarchies were doing really well when it came to development. And he said, well, you can read this in two ways. Either the monarchies are good for development or these are countries that have been doing well and because of that they've kept that system. Didn't have the revolution. That they haven't had like a crisis on their path to development. But I think in all honesty there are many ways of creating a good political system that works well. I don't think one necessarily needs to completely copy one system, you know, to other places. There's many ways of making it work for people. Well said and we will end here. We thank you for being with us. Really inspiring. Thanks.