 It's a pleasure of being here and I really couldn't resist coming out here when I saw the subject you want to focus on. It's been five years that I'm in charge in Brussels of environment policy and five years ago when I came in. Environment policy to 80% roughly would have been climate, energy and climate issues. It was 2009, it was leading up to the Copenhagen Climate Conference. Everyone had understood that there is some problem in the way in which we produce and consume on this planet with regard to energy use and the effect of energy use on the world's climate. Since then we have been trying to broaden this issue and we have come up with a wider assessment of how soon to be 9 billion people will be able to live on this planet enjoying a standard of living that we enjoy here in Europe. If you think about this, if you start looking at what we need for the way in which we live today and these 9 billion people who are expected to be around in 2050 so it's not in a couple of hundred years but it's in a very short foreseeable future. We have come to understand that we probably need natural resources that we would only find on two and a half times planet Earth and obviously despite technological advances cloning a planet is unlikely to happen within that foreseeable time frame. So we need to rethink, we need to become resource efficient as societies. The key pressure for this reality is coming from the developing part of this world because that's where all the expected demographic growth is taking place. Europe, the United States, Japan have barely grown over the last decades. All the growth to the 7 billion people that we are now starting when I was born at a rough 3 billion people on this planet has already taken place in the developing part and the expected growth to 9 billion is taking place there also. So we will have over exponential demand for consumption because these people on average don't benefit of the standard of living of consumerism in the way in which we see it in Europe and I'm applying European levels, I'm not even trying to think of US levels then we need to clone the blue planet a couple of times more I'm afraid. So the real issue that we have in today's economic reality is how do we make sure that we use the resources of this planet in a way to allow 9 billion people to have a decent life. That's the question that over the last 4 years we have tried to address and my department has just made a proposal, a text, drying out what we want to focus on in the next 5, 6 years and it's called living well within the limits of this planet and that really sums up how we look at the nexus issues. We have started being specialists, specialists for food or specialists for climate questions on energy issues, on water issues, on chemicals, on air quality and we have tried to define policy replies answers that would focus just on this one narrow aspect and we're beginning to see that by doing this we take very often the wrong turns. One example that people are beginning to talk about this year is the year of air quality in Europe and Europe has on air quality a significantly different problem from other developed parts of this world, notably the United States. Why? Because we have focused due to climate change and energy use a lot on taking private transportation with diesel engines. Diesel engines were said to be less energy consuming. You get more mileage out of a liter of diesel with diesel engines than you got out of petrol and it's also said that it would be therefore less CO2 emitting and you were doing something good for climate. The problem with these diesel engines is that they leave through their exhaust fine particles in the air that have damming consequences on human health. The air quality or the lack thereof in Europe is today the biggest killer that we have, bigger than car accidents or bigger than other diseases. So we have produced by shifting a fleet of cars away from petrol to diesel because we wanted to be doing good for climate. We have created in our cities a problem with the air quality that we now have to address and addressing it now means that we have to take another U-turn, introduce additional forms of controlling had we thought through the nexus issue before just going for something that would be energy saving, we would have made smarter policy. In the introduction I heard that water, energy, it's quite clear that the two are linked. If we want to have water we need energy and water can be used to produce energy, the relationship between the two is very, very direct and food is very directly related to it also. My key message on the nexus story is it's great that here you're talking about not just energy but that you've added food and water. It would be even better if we looked at all of the different environmental challenges and impacts if we took biodiversity and ecosystems and our effect on those into account. If we therefore made clear that we have a better understanding of what chemical substances we use in our production processes because unfortunately those substances we find back through wastewater in our surface waters that we see these substances possibly in the air as additional pollutants and that it's also very clear that where we have water and air quality problems we're immediately having soil problems also and soils is what we need, fertile soils is what we need to produce food. The way in which we consume, the way in which we produce is really circular and what we put out there into an environment eventually through food chain or through what we drink, what we breathe, the air that we breathe comes back to affect our own health as humans and I think it's very important that we begin to be a lot more focused and aware of those issues. Last but not least in to describe a little bit the overall nexus picture we need to take a lot more attention to waste. The way we produce and consume so far is extremely wasteful. We have learned, we have developed over the last century to dig up the ground to take out the raw materials that we needed to produce goods and when we didn't like them any longer to put them back into the ground, into landfills. That was the kind of life of our products. We're producing incredible amounts of waste and this waste very often is rather toxic and dangerous. It's not only the very direct toxic forms that we have to worry about. We see today in our oceans, we call it plastic soup, fine particles of all kinds of plastics that are prevalent in all our oceans and that through the oceans again through food chain are beginning to come back into our direct lives. We can no longer afford, particularly in going forward to 9 billion people that want to consume, we can no longer handle waste as waste. We have to begin to use waste as a secondary raw material and to bring it back into a circle economy. We are beginning to do this and I think in Europe we're rather more advanced in moving in this direction than in many other parts of the world and perhaps this has to do with the fact that we are not that well endowed with primary resources. So trying to use secondary resources is something that economically is more easily understood but we still have among the 28 European member states where 95% of household waste of municipal waste goes into landfills. We have member states where that percentage is at or below 1%. So we have a huge difference in understanding and in moving forward into a resource efficient circular economy that takes account of the interrelations between availability of natural resources of raw materials and the way we treat them. But that is going to be the real big challenge for the future. Now let me say a few words on the more narrow nexus also that you have put up here. We know that today we have already a rough billion people who have no regular access to drinking water. One billion now. We're adding two billion in the developing countries to our population. So you can imagine what challenge we have. We have some 2.5, 2.6 billion people who have no adequate nutrition today as we speak. We have another 2.6, 2.7 billion people who have no adequate cooking and heating facilities. We have over a billion people who have no access to electricity. We have 2.5 billion people who have no access to decent sanitation. All of those numbers are very directly related to the three elements of the nexus that we're talking about here. And that situation is very rapidly degrading. It's getting worse. It's not getting better. So we need to focus on these issues. And I think the ways in which we are trying in Europe to define these policies is to basically create an awareness of the availability of these resources. When I give a presentation, normally people are very surprised when I say that we are moving into a water scarce period. I had to give speeches in Brussels about water scarcity. And everyone was telling me, you must be not quite right. Look outside. It's raining again. As always, you can't try to pretend that we have water scarcity in Belgium. The groundwater levels in Belgium are coming down. We are abstracting. Even in rainy Belgium, we're abstracting more water than mother nature is regenerating as we speak. And that is as problematic as if you were spending more from your bank account than you're putting into it. At some point in time, you're going to be without the resource. So we need to create this awareness. And awareness in the systems in which we work very often comes with price. If something has no price or a low price, then people feel that, well, there is no problem in using it or even abusing that resource. I learned that lesson when I first started to talk to European beer producers about their use of water. Thought it might be a story that is of interest in Ireland also. But I was talking to Belgian breweries about the water they use in producing a liter of beer. And when I raised this question three years ago with them, they were saying that they use roughly 7 liters of water for 1 liter of beer. But having had a discussion between us, they said we actually think we can do better. And we are going to commit to reducing the water use by 50%. And over the last three years, they have made really substantive progress in that direction, which shows that it was not all that difficult. It just needed awareness. It just needed started to think about the fact that you can reuse water. You don't just think that water is going to be plenty and you just take it out. And the used water is sort of dismissed back into nature. So this awareness raising is what European policy is very largely about. But I told you in the beginning that the issue that we're talking about is a global issue. Who's only for Europe with no demographic growth, the challenges would be very different. But we are part of a planet. So we need to find these global solutions. And we were last year in Rio, 20 years after Rio 92, the first sort of sustainability world summit, to try to see how we can collectively address this challenge of 9 billion people on this planet. And there I think we still have a lot of work to do. For the moment, it is very largely Europeans who argue for resource efficiency and for a better, more sustainable growth path. Developing countries are very largely still copying the way in which they think, probably they are largely right, Europe and the United States have industrialized and have developed the level of wealth that we're enjoying for the moment. And they're just basically saying, you did it that way, now it's our turn, we want to do it in exactly the same way. And when we come and say, hey, we have to collectively be aware that there's only so much a limited amount of natural resources on this planet, then they basically think that we're trying to slow down their growth. So what we need to do is we need to come up with development models, with economic development models that show that resource efficiency works and that a circular economy not putting waste into landfills, but using waste, bringing waste, keeping waste within the circular economy for next generation of products, that this is at least as competitive and at least as good in creating jobs and creating wealth for people who are desperately looking for being lifted out of poverty. That debate is taking place for the moment and we need to really move this debate forward. It is relevant when we look at the food issue. One of the issues that in Brussels we are still striving with in terms of understanding the nexus is what happens if in Europe we produce less food, we shift to producing biofuels? How does that affect the global availability of food? How does it affect availability of soils and what does it do to climate change? We know that breaking up grassland, breaking up cutting down forest, breaking up forest land to produce food will set enormous amounts of CO2 free that will very directly and very seriously add to our climate change problems. On the other hand, from a development point of view, for the last 30 years we have been pushed to produce less food in Europe and to have food produced in developing countries for their own needs. Development of developing countries very often will have to start with agriculture. It's one of the things that everyone relatively quickly can pick up and some startup industrial sectors but agriculture always is a key sector there. The point I want to come to is called ILOC, Indirect Land Use Change. Basically the reasoning is that we say that land use change can be problematic for biodiversity on this planet. We cut down forests, we dramatically reduce biodiversity, we weaken ecosystems and this will have very significant negative effects on the capacity of humans to exist on this planet. We therefore should be careful about how we do this but if we want to increase agricultural production in developing countries then somehow more soil, more territory will have to be used to produce this food in these countries. If as a consequence of that in Europe we produce less food should we leave our soils unused or can those soils be used to producing renewable energy which is something that we all collectively need. We need to move away from fossil energies to renewable energies and biomass can be one of those renewable energies that we're looking forward to. We're here in a way trying to deal with a chicken and egg situation. What is there first? What is triggering the land use change? Is it the demand in Europe, possibly in the United States for biofuels, for renewable forms of fuel? Or is it the fact that we are shifting food production anyway to those parts of the world where demographic growth is taking place? Are we moving food production into developing countries to face their growing numbers? And is that the starting point? Or where do we start? Looking into this has very concrete outcomes because if it is taking place anyway, if food production is supposed to move into developing countries to move towards the demographic growth areas, then there is choice in the other parts about the use of land, of soil in their territories. If, however, we are the beginning, we're the starting point, we're shifting out of food production into biofuel production, then we are creating shortage globally for food and therefore we would be held responsible. So this chicken and egg question is not just a theoretical question, but it is one that has very direct consequences on how policy can be defined, can be formulated. If you take a moment, you will see that in this communication living well within the limits of our planet, we have tried to address all those different linkages in making it clear that Europe is linked in to a global environment, but also that all the sectoral aspects are very directly linked with each other and that we cannot, as policy makers, just say that my driving motivation is to have clean water, clean surface water all over Europe full stop and I don't look at other issues. If I don't look at other issues, A, I will miss my clean water target because if I forget that the water, surface water is in direct contact with soil and with air and if those two other resources are polluted then my water will be polluted, I'm missing that, but I'm missing also the fact that without or only with clean water we won't be able to have a livable life in our respective areas. So we need this global understanding, we need to take holistic approaches, we need to define policies that become more scarce, aware, scarcity, the limits of this planet, this planet cannot be expanded, therefore the answer since we have demographic growth, and that to me is the starting challenge, if we had a way of making sure that we're not becoming more and more and more on this planet, things would look differently, but we are going to become more. Every projection that comes up is talking about the 9 billion number, what happens after that is less clear, but we're quite certainly going to be 9 billion. That is true, then we have to be more resource efficient and resource efficient means circular economy. We have to make sure that we have water balances where we understand that we're not abstracting more water than the world, than the region where we're living can regenerate. We have to make sure that our air is of a quality that is worth, that takes into account health needs. Our Chinese friends are just beginning to realize that air really is something of very, very high value and that you have forgotten about air quality, then the environment is going to make you pay very, very dearly for it. We need to look about balance on soil. Soils are very much abused also. In Europe, we completely seal off every year a surface equivalent to the size of Berlin. I'm using Berlin not only because I'm German, but because in Europe it is the biggest city in territorial size. Every 10 years, we take out one complete member state of the European Union. Every 10 years, we seal off soil equivalent to the surface of Cyprus. When you think about it, I think very quickly you can understand that this is not a sustainable way to move forward. How are we taking it away? We're taking it away because our cities are growing. There's growing urbanization. There's growing use of infrastructure and all of these need to sealing off soil. When it's sealed off, there is no more biodiversity. There's no more alternative use for all this. So we need to think in all the key natural resources of this planet of how our policy can be made sustainable. And sustainability, true for financial sustainability also, is that you cannot, over an extended period of time, take more out of your bank account than you put back into it. It's the old story. It should be so easy, but so many of us have got it wrong, both in the financial area, unfortunately also in the environmental area. And I hope that the kind of talk that we're having here today will create a better awareness for the needs to plan policy, to plan policy in a sustainable manner. Anna goes through respecting the limits of the planet and moving into a circular economy. Thank you very much.