 Hi, my name is Karni Wignaraja, I'm the UN Assistant Secretary General and UNDP's Regional Director for Asia and the Pacific region. I'm here at USIP to discuss the future of development and a crisis response in increasingly turbulent times. This has been a massive shock. I think it's been about a $2 trillion loss already to the Asia-Pacific economies. Now if I look at that in human development terms, according to UNDP, all our countries have lost human development gains over the last few years and we've fallen back to 2016. Now that means getting to those SDGs is going to be near impossible at the current rate. If I just take this as job losses, that alone sees a generation of young people who are probably going to come back into a job market but earning at least 10 percent less than pre-COVID times. Now we hadn't even put on all of this the damage, the emotional loss and distress to these societies. You add to that along comes the Ukraine war and I hadn't even realized how much the dependency on wheat and other grains from Ukraine, fuel and food coming from Russia. This means countries like Sri Lanka suddenly saw a food and fuel price hike that took inflation through the roof, over 70 percent inflation that we've probably never seen ever in any of these countries and a domino effect that is very alarming across the region. The long-term costs are counted and measured by economic losses but I would say that that's not the only cost of delayed development. Why not being able to respond fast and continuing development investments? If I just take one statistic, some countries just the interest payments on debt are now higher than public expenditure on health and education. We never thought in our lifetime we'd see this. How are we going to get to those SDGs if the cost on probably two of the biggest human development indicators, health and education, is falling so dramatically? I think there's a bigger cost that we have not seen yet which is a political and social atrophy that's going on where people are just not responding to regaining their strength and institutions and services coming back fast enough to really look at how we can respond quicker. So the worry, again if I look across countries like Afghanistan, Myanmar, Sri Lanka, Laos, now Pakistan, you add a climate shock to this. It's not just debt distress. It's an entire political shakeup and an economies that cannot recover fast enough to really get to those SDGs by 2030. So the cost of delaying development investment is huge. Well the good thing is there's a lot we can do and have been doing and as UNDP certainly a lot of the preparation work we've been putting in place, the prevention work is starting to pay off. So let me take just a few. Just the investment in digital transformations. This is allowing services to reach people who never had access let's say to health care or learning before but our digital payments, cash payments being made through mobile networks. And this is actually reaching huge vulnerable populations who were otherwise left behind. A second I would bet on solar. You know the energy security question is so shaky these days but if we invest in solar much of Asia and the Pacific the sun shines almost through the year and that solarization including of schools, health clinics just keeps the lights on and the cost of this is minimal compared to the cost of current oil and gas prices. And I would say the third big one is most of our countries in the region are run through informal economies not just the formal economies. So even when the formal economies shut down like it did in Afghanistan the informal economy usually run by women. Just in them and the countries just jump start the people's economy keeps going. An example you give a thousand dollars to a woman led enterprise in any country Afghanistan Myanmar Sri Lanka it already immediately the next week they employ four to five people each one feeds a household of about ten. Just think we don't have to fly in food aid. People will feed themselves take care of their families protect their communities if given a chance. So to me investing in agency in people's will to get on with it that's where the answer lies.