 We will now come back to your first issue briefing on the day 3 of the Global Agenda 2015, and it's a warm welcome for you to join us in the room, and you are watching us live online at WeForum.org. It is a crucial time to be talking about climate change as there are some rather large talks looming in early December in Paris and I'm very pleased to be joined by an expert panel who represents a breadth of expertise and knowledge across y holl range of climate-related issues. As you know from previous issue briefings, we don't have long to cover very complex and interesting discussions and challenges. So I'm going to keep my minutes moments here very, very short, but I'm going to ask my panel here to say a few words, answering a few key questions, and then we'll take questions from the floor and from social media. First of all, Cengwar Wahoo, you're a member of our Meta Council on Governance for Architecture and the Council for Governance on Sustainability. You're also director, Greater China for the Climate Group, based in the People's Republic of China. Perhaps you could give us your view on the roads to Paris so far. Thank you for having me. And in six weeks' time, the global leaders will be gathered in Paris with all the negotiators, different parties. I think the momentum is on that everyone is trying to contribute to the process to make sure that the international process will remain active so that we have that sort of foundation platform so everyone could come together and figure out how to solve the global challenges of climate change issues. In the last couple of years, particularly this year, and if you look at the momentum building up, the UNDC's intended nationally determined the contributions, the sort of bottom-up actions, we pretty much gathered the majority of them already. I think I haven't chatted a number this morning, but at least yesterday there were about 164 nations already submitted. Their commitments actually to the Paris process. If you look at business community, there are more than six million companies already committing to all kinds of sustainability goals. And if you look at a subnational government, actually, they are also committing to join the leagues. So this momentum is on that offers the optimistic sort of view that no matter how difficult the international process negotiation will be, but somehow the willingness and the desire to collaborate is on the table so that hopefully in six weeks' time or seven weeks' actually, we are going to really reach a certain agreement at least actually at the starting point to really work together to address this issue. Many people also say, would this say be enough? I think if you look at it, all the UNDCs by different countries put on the table, definitely it's far off from the two degree sales, the target, the international community agreed in Copenhagen, but somehow from my personal view I think it's a good starting point. I think we need to create a sort of incentive mechanism in the international process to make sure countries aim high. And so at least actually we're going to have something coming out of the Paris process. I think that's a good starting point to work with. I mean, just reading the papers, it seems that everybody wants this to succeed. There are 10 Catholic bishops signed a letter in the paper this morning. There are vast numbers of business groups, as you mentioned, signing pledges and cooperating. And yet talks aren't without the bumps in the road. There have been disappointing talks in bond just in the past couple of days. So is it possible nothing will come out of these talks? I wouldn't really. I think the international negotiation process is always complicated because it has to take into consideration all kinds of proposals from different countries, from different interest groups. So that's normal. I don't think that it's always complicated that we're going to fail. Rather, I see that it's a normal process. I think if you look at BONG and now we have something like 34 pages with a lot of brackets, actually uncertainty included rather than this short version, short version, that's going to be submitted actually to the Paris process. That tells about a couple of things. One, it won't be easy. There are still a lot of proposals, the interest, and people desire to be included in the Paris process. In the meantime, actually, if you look at the details, market-based instruments, if you look at different elements actually being included, expanded the version, I do not see them as necessarily a bad thing or a negative thing. It's more like we need to consider all those different elements. So make sure somehow we include them. So everybody will be willing to join the league actually to take actions. Rather than say, okay, I'm going to only take into consideration those interests, those elements we're ignoring the others actually. So I definitely see that as a positive, constructive process even though it's difficult. I guess an interesting comment to be made was made yesterday in our sustainable development session actually when I believe it was David Victor who commented that the talks that have just completed in the UN regarding the sustainable development goals were actually a sign that diplomacy is not sophisticated enough to handle these multilateral challenges, big treaties such as Paris. It's going to be a big test even so. Well, as I said, the modern lateralism actually has been very bumpy in terms of addressing global challenges. And we've seen that particularly from the Copenhagen process around climate change issues. The international community people are recognizing and saying, yes, multilateral process actually would be necessary, but that won't be the only way actually to solve the issues. Rather, besides that piece of the multilateralism actually on the table, more and more so actually we're going to see more bottom-up inputs from different sub-national governments, business community, different sectors, only by combining actually those sort of forces elements together there will be a hope actually to address this issue. Thanks very much. Lars Josephson, you're a professor at Brandenburg University of Technology in Germany. You're a member of our decarbonising energy council. You'd be very busy over the past months in the council, putting together guidelines and a report outlining the state of play and offering a path forward for decarbonising. What do you use, what do you want to see happen in the realm of technology to decarbonise the energy? Let me glad you mentioned the report which we issued here, the white paper scaling technologies to decarbonise energy was released yesterday, which I think is hopefully gives a great picture of what is possible from the technology point of view. It is our deep conviction that we will never be able to handle the climate change issue without new technologies. So this is a must. But then if we take stock of what has happened over the last years and I think some people think that we have moved very slowly, I would take the other view because if you look at solar and wind for instance, we moved fantastically rapid. We have achieved a lot in the last 20 years. And why is this? Well, this is because it's been a political will. Why has that been a political will? Well, because it's really uncontroversial. There is the public understand and it's a political backing, a will and it's easy to say and then most politicians say, and by the way, you customers, you will pay. So there we have achieved a lot in the last 20 years. Unfortunately, this is not the only thing we need to do. So the more complicated things have been then pushed to the back. And we raise those in this report because there are clearly areas where it's much more difficult because looking at electricity, we need decarbonised baseload electricity. Unfortunately, solar and wind is not baseload. It's intermittent electricity. If we should get decarbonised baseload electricity, we have to have a renewed look at nuclear for instance, which is in many parts of the world a very controversial issue. But as we point out in the report, it now seems actually realistic that we can move relatively rapidly into the fourth generation of nuclear, solving most of the problems of the present generation. That's one example. Another one, which is also controversial because that's called CCS, carbon capture and sequestration. That is very effective to use together with coal plants. But many people are religiously against coal plants. So it's a controversial issue. It requires huge investments to get down the learning curve because it's too costly. If we look at the transportation sector, of course we need to get out of the fossil fuel as a feedstock for that engine. But of course, when looking at advanced biofuels, we need to invest much more in technology, come down the learning curve and get the price down. If we don't fix that price difference, it will never happen in that sense. But that can be done. We probably need a new pricing model, a new tax regime maybe, which is very effective. Of course, on the transportation sector, we have the electronic vehicle coming. But there you have to allow also the technology development. We need to get to the next generation of batteries. But that is still five years away. And people believe it will happen tomorrow. It will not. And probably we need another generation before everyone can have an electronic vehicle. So we speak about time scales, and we need actually to educate politicians and ourselves that the expectancy of what to be achieved in what time frame is to our advantage if we understand it. But if we understand that, we can actually manage the future. And then the problem is suddenly much more manageable. And if we can get out of Paris, or out of a club of nations or whatever, concerted efforts into these areas of technology, I think we will actually be able to speed up the fight against climate change. And it's really worthwhile because the money you put in here is much less than the money you put in different subsidies today. It's an interesting point. And I suppose one could think that the petrochemical industry has had 100 years to optimise itself. And we're asking wind and solar to optimise itself in 20 or less years. But even so, with the technology we have at hand and the timeline horizon, we need to get these big projects like CCS, like advanced nuclear, up and running. I know my home country, the UK, has been discussed at the moment in the context of a 10, 20-year programme. Do we have enough on the table right now to make a meaningful contribution to the goals that are going to be discussed and hopefully achieved in Paris in December? In my opinion, I think we can have the fourth generation of advanced nuclear commercialised in 10 years, which is a very, very short time period. And if we can then have multiple nations and companies involved in this, we could also scale up relatively quickly. So, in the timescales we're talking about, this is incredibly fast. But that, I mean, the base is to do that would be a concerted effort in many countries working together with many companies at the same time. Daniel Zarian, you're a member of the Forestry Council and you're also the director of programmes at the Climate and Land Use Alliance in the USA. What do you want to see happen in Paris and going forward possibly outside of Paris in a separate process to protect forests in the world? Well, thanks. It's a pleasure to be here with you. Very interestingly enough, the topic of forests has probably gotten more progress in the international process than many of the areas that are seen as more in the mainstream climate agenda. There's been a very effective development of the rules, the processes, the safeguards around an initiative that goes under the heading of reducing emissions from deforestation and forest degradation, so-called Red Plus. So, the architecture is largely there. There are big issues in Paris with forests as with other issues around finance. And there are questions around the timing and so on, but we do have in place a remarkable example of cooperation between developed countries and developing nations in terms of partnership working together developing that process. Now, is that enough? It's certainly not enough for us to realise the potential that exists there for reducing emissions from the sector if tropical deforestation were a country or a region in terms of emissions, it's about equal to the European Union. So this is a very, very significant source of emissions and one where there are real opportunities to achieve reductions in the near term and achievements that actually have proof of concept we've seen in Brazil, for example, probably the largest single emission reductions of any nation over the past decade, occurring with respect to the drop in deforestation in the Amazon basin by almost 80%. And the demonstration and the proof of concept that that can happen at the same time as agricultural production has gone up in the same region, essentially closing the frontier, stimulating intensification of production. So we have very effective examples. And at the same time, though, we have real crises going on in the world, the climate crisis of this year is going on right now in Indonesia. We have, this is above and beyond that European Union size emissions. We have for the past six to eight weeks emissions from fires in Indonesian peatlands that are on a daily basis equal to the average daily emissions from the entire US economy. As of last week reaching the amount of emissions that are coming annually from Japan have occurred just from these fires just this year. These are fires that are caused by illegally set, illegal land clearing that's done for the expansion of palm oil or wood fibre production. They're terrible fires because they're occurring on peatlands that, as part of the land preparation, is drained in order to make the land adequate for growing those crops. And that drainage means that peat, which is really, geologically speaking, a precursor for coal is very ignitable, particularly in years like this one where we have very strong El Ninos. And the fires burn underground. So they really can't be put out until it's rained for a while. So we have a very, very serious situation in terms of climate that at the same time and even more immediately is causing the worst public health crisis in Indonesia since the 2004 tsunami, affecting tens of millions of Indonesians and citizens of neighbouring countries as well, billions of dollars in cost to the Indonesian economy. But even there we now have a very, very interesting leadership emerging from the Indonesian president who has put forward some steps that are really unprecedented in that country. Steps that are, first of all, confronting the immediate crisis. Secondly, imposing very serious accountability on those who have been responsible for the fires. And thirdly, putting forward policy to really address the underlying causes. So even in the past week, President Joko Widodo has been announcing a comprehensive moratorium on the clearing of peatland and a major commitment to restoration of peatland, including blocking these drainage canals to rewet these areas so that they won't be able to ignite causes similar catastrophe in the future. So we see challenges, but we see response, proactive responses, examples from major countries that are significant greenhouse gas emitters as their economies are growing. And they're making progress towards growing their economies in ways that are climate friendly that address really what need to be looked at as kind of twinned goals of food security and climate security. You have best practices emerging in Brazil and you have an ongoing crisis in Indonesia, albeit one that looks like it may be turning around, but is this a global governance issue that we don't have an architecture in place to stop this happening elsewhere? Well, it certainly is a governance issue. It's certainly a governance issue at the national level and subnational level in the countries that are to whom these forests belong. The global governance side of it is one in which we do see some progress in terms of the global community essentially acting to reinforce governance at the national level. So perhaps the best example of this that we have now is around the illegal timber trade where in both Europe, the US, and a growing number of examples in importing countries, we have the architecture of very strong laws that place burden on the importers to ensure that the product that they are importing was produced, harvested legally in the country of origin. So it's not imposing any kind of global or foreign standard on the producing country but rather reinforcing national law. That seems to be growing in effectiveness. The EU has a very significant and important program in the area of forest legality, governance and trade. In the US, just this past week, the largest suit was just settled against a large company called Lumber Liquidators in which they've pled guilty in this area. So we do see real progress on that front around the trade issues as well. Important areas to develop further that we see with attention in China where there is growing attention to this issue around legality and really a need for the uptake of at least the analogous structures around importation in China. Since China is really the world's major hub of import and subsequent export in terms of taking in raw materials, processing and then exporting finished or semi-finished wood products. I'd like to come back to that and talk about China and emerging markets in general. First, Carl Ganter, you're the management director of Circle of Blue based in the US, a member of our water council. What do we need to know about water as we head towards Paris? Well, everything. I'm a journalist and I was in COP15 in Copenhagen and watched the talks unfold but also watched it from the journalist's perspective and the story was really hard to enter. It was a very complicated issue as we all know and so a pack of very interested reporters with very complicated stories to tell. Well, the good news and bad news is is that now we have the water story. We also have much more visible changes. I mean, right now we have the big story in Indonesia that's a story that we can tell. So in the waterfront over the last really eight years we've seen some transitions as far as thinking goes. So it used to be just talking about water supply, water for food. Now we're talking about a water nexus, a water food energy climate nexus. So you have this interconnection between all four and in a sense a mantra that we're really in our council and across the water world are talking about is you can't talk about one without talking about the other. So let me tell a little story from Inner Mongolia. So we do a lot of work in scenario sessions and what not but I like to get out in the field and so I went to Inner Mongolia, one of the epicenters for climate change, the big open pit coal mines, a shaming hot Inner Mongolia and wanted just to see what do these places look like. So I found a shepherd family and I went to their home and their wells were going dry. Their wells were going dry because of the coal mines, right? The six coal mines, some of the largest in the world and the next day the family took me out to their gir, their yurt out in the prairie in the grasslands and I got up at sunrise and hiked up these little sand dunes. Now these are supposed to be the grasslands of the world. These are little sand dunes that we're standing on. I'm watching the sunrise and the daughter comes out and stands there and she's wondering where I disappeared to. So we watch this and we see the sand and then the next evening we go into town and there's a performance of this beautiful video of grasslands, et cetera and I type out on my phone my Google translate because I don't speak Mongolian or Chinese fluently and I say can you take me there next time these beautiful green grasslands and she turns pale white and she types on her Google translate on her iPhone and says is no longer and I say why and she says not since the disaster. So right now we're seeing water because in a sense one of the front line stories, one of the most important stories in this nexus of water, food and energy and we're also seeing on the waterfront and in the journalism world we're always looking for the next story and the next big story is groundwater and it's almost like climate change. It's very hard to grasp because we can't see it but now we're starting to see the impacts of that in California and North India even in North Africa and other parts of the world. How are we going to feed our population when we're drawing on groundwater supplies because our snow packs say in the American West and the Sierras are at 4-6% of historical levels? So we have from the journalistic perspective a big story unfolding that we can finally see so the optimistic side of that is that when we can see the stories we can act on them and we can move the public to act better beyond very ethereal concepts of carbon trading which we all understand but is very hard to tell as a story into what this actually means to people whether you're a Native American community in Arizona or whether you're a farmer in Punjab. A quick whiz around the room if you have any questions? Okay, let's just go back to looking at the path forward and please free or free to make comments. Emerging markets are going to be key to grappling all of these issues of forestry, for new technologies, for keeping economies gunning along but at the same time being sustainable and not making the same mistakes that advanced economies have done in the previous industrialization periods for water. What are we seeing here? We're also seeing bringing about to the real world the economy is slowing down in many of these markets too. What kind of level of complexity and difficulty does this add to the whole process? A couple of ways of looking at it, particular I work in China so I think China's story is a sort of good reflection of the complexity on the positive and also probably on the negative side there as well. I think after Copenhagen, the international process basically one thing actually Copenhagen did is really the awakening of the international community among the different countries, among the society about the climate change risk so it's recognized as a major global challenges so that sort of awareness exists today even though there are still climate skeptics, whatever but I think the majority actually tend to agree that climate change is a big issue. China definitely has become became the largest emitter in 2007 and since then actually if you look at it we continue to be the largest emitter and if you look at the absolute contribution and annual basis actually in the new growth of emissions China contributed to about more than half of the global emissions which is really a sad news story and it's a huge burden on this sort of the largest emerging economy in the world today rising to the second largest economy today of the world and so on one side of course we need to grow because it's a developing country and so people need to get better life quality of life, wealth, whatever and the other side actually we have to deal with global challenges like climate change issues which is also linked to air pollution environmental issues, challenges in China so that's where China has gradually coming out of the situation basically saying ok this is the reality particular because actually the society the public does not like where we've been you know where we were and we need to figure out the way out so the momentum building up in terms of addressing domestic challenge but also global challenge interesting enough China is showcasing the alignment perfect alignment actually it's not just addressing carbon issues rather we have to address actually carbon issues energy issues water issues food issues forestry everything actually together so if you look at China's commitment to the international process we said for the first time finally we said we're going to manage to peak their emissions no later than 2030 in the plan if you look at the details actually not only say capping the emissions but also say how do we achieve that so we are putting more emphasis on energy efficiency renewable energy clean technologies you name it we pretty much put together it's not just addressing the environmental issues rather this is how we're going to grow our economy differently we actually from where we've been actually in the last three decades also but the lessons we learned actually and basically saying ok what have ever happened in other developed countries over the industrialization process we cannot carry on like that we exactly repeated the mistakes we said we call them mistakes that's why we ended up where we are today so now is a critical moment to sort of driven by all the momentum globally domestically we need to shift so that's where China is today I think that's properly set an example for other emerging economies as well we cannot just talk about your mistakes whatever we're going to not repeat but rather we need to take actions and try to figure out what the way actually we're going to really take it differently it's not only say just for the environmental issues but really most importantly how the economic growth and the recession in particular so I think it's exciting to see a lot of negativities are actually the difficult challenges in reality but I feel very very encouraged by the determined sort of political leadership in China particular for this generation of leaders if you look at it we say ok we need to shift the gear towards sustainability I think China is today actually a good example for the international community rather developing countries say let's really do this together and China is going to try to set an example hopefully we're going to shift towards sustainability rather you know falling the track of industrialized countries and last presumably great leapfrogging potential for emerging countries to adapt and adopt new technologies absolutely I wanted to raise a special aspect of it which we discussed and worked out a concept in our council that is looking at the people who doesn't have any energy access at all or very unreliable because they are of course number one priority they should have energy access number two priority they should have deco-organized energy access and our concept was that if we look at the individual household and and the products and products not but technology are there in actually to give them affordable energy access the problem is that there is no market and the problem is that until now there's been no way to accumulate the demands of millions of households but if we can do that we will create a market big enough for big companies to develop customized products and also and if we do that we create an energy access module and you can make a comparison with a piece of Lego because then we can add the Lego pieces and suddenly we have a bottom up very strong energy system and I think that to me this is an intriguing possibility that we would like to push forward because we know there is a lot of goodwill and this is part of all international organizations because the energy access people for the low income people is a great problem or a big problem in the international negotiations how do we serve these people or how do we enable them to empower their own future I was going to say that's exactly one of the same issues we're dealing with in our council on the water side is how do we provide access to clean and safe drinking water and we've made huge gains in that side in looking at water and sanitation globally and one of the risks is we've made huge gains but now we're faced with climate change so we really do have to we have to manage our water much more with much greater innovation and also with much more entrepreneurship on the ground but there are a billion people on the planet I'm rounding up but that don't have access to safe drinking water when we bring access to safe drinking water and when we provide that water security we provide much more stability for just geopolitical stability Dan, what do you have to say from a forestry perspective? I think as we look at these issues and step back from really even just the immediate climate change crisis and recognize where this comes from we start from a need to understand that we live in a world that is characterized by major market failures and governance failures across the board at all levels and to address this this crisis that we're in it's not just about governments and there is an enormous role for private sector to be playing, enormous roles for civil society to be playing in this space as well in the forest space the private sector has been playing a very interesting role that's really grown over the past two years particularly with companies that are in the supply chain business that are have huge demand for agricultural commodities as feed stocks for their businesses so the consumer facing companies the agricultural commodity trading companies producers of these products and there's really just a handful of products that are the major majority drivers of deforestation responsible for the major part of deforestation globally and we've seen a wave of corporate commitments to no deforestation commodity supplies this process began over 10 years ago in Brazil it's accelerated recently in the palm oil business in Southeast Asia and is creating whole new structures to try to ensure transparency traceability around these commodity crops part of what's really needed to address the market failures so that when major companies like agricultural commodity traders are looking at what it is that they do in the world which has historically been based on providing a high quality grain say at a cheap price everywhere in the world providing really not only a core for their business but actually a public service in doing so now they need to actually and they're stepping up and recognizing that inherent in that grain are the conditions of its production that what they're selling is not just the grain they're selling the conditions the social conditions of production the environmental impacts of production in the 21st century they cannot hide because in another aspect of technology growth everywhere on earth is readily visible all the time from high resolution satellite platforms there's open access to them now developed by a number of civil society organizations working together on those platforms so we have the opportunities for different kinds of governance as well as addressing the market failures for all what we look at the emerging economy issue what we're fundamentally saying and what they are fundamentally saying the ones that are taking on leadership in this area is that the development paradigm that the northern countries have developed in actually has got a shift if we're going to really be able to have sustainable development we have a historically trodden development paradigm that has essentially has natural resource depletion conversion of natural capital into other forms of capital as the base of development at national levels, local levels and globally that needs to change because we cannot sustain that certainly the climate cannot sustain that and that affects into water cycles associated with clearing forests that go well beyond the carbon cycle issues affecting climate globally and we need to shift from seeing the natural resources as conversion capital to feed economic growth to being viewed as natural capital natural assets that need to be looked at as the basis of services and products that sustain the global economy and we could talk at length on this as a fascinating subject and we're running overtime but if I may I'd like to just ask you to stay behind for one or two more minutes and look at this problem through the lens of the unofficial theme of this meeting which is the fourth industrial revolution which is looking at the innovation the invention that is going to have a huge impact on the new landscape that is unfolding before us what technological innovation do you think is going to have the biggest impact on your field, Carl? I'd like to answer that question A couple of quick things just to pick up on that our measurement, accountability and transparency and also valuing water what do we grow and where agriculture traditionally uses 60 to 80% of the world's water so again that's a key point how do we feed the world but how do we measure that water and we have new satellites that can estimate groundwater river flow data now we can actually allocate water for the highest use and we can also predict droughts and floods better and also one more thing too on the conservation side when we look at water use we look at desalination investment on that side often times the best investment is in conservation up front done I guess I would second the vote on the water technology that has to do with transparency so in the forest world that has to do with satellite technology and the processing capacity information management technology for that information as well as information technology more broadly and knowledge management to bring the vast and growing amount of information down to the level where it's available on anyone's smartphone so that a Indigenous person in South America or in Southeast Asia can be reporting on illegal logging get that up on a global platform in real time and spur responsiveness to issues as they're happening on the ground Lai, it's difficult one for you because you look at all technologies but which is going to have the most impact do you think in the coming 12 months 24 months? 12 months and 24 months is nothing when we speak about the energy system of the world but I where we see most progress? I take the question as the progress or the most hope and I would disregard the time mistake but I would say first energy storage that is batteries it's fantastically rapid development at the moment that will continue secondly I would say which is dawned on me actually in the process of this council is the realistic promise of the next generation of advanced nuclear third maybe unexpected I would say the commercialisation of the use of CO2 I tend to stay away from any one particular technologies I think technologies are progressing continues to progress for addressing climate change issues the weakest link today in the coming short term long term is the systematic infrastructure redesign that will be able to accommodate actually the plug-in of all different technologies actually in order to energy smart or whatever the technology is out there in order to really capture the potential of the energy productivity which is today the weakest link so I'm not worried particularly about technologies if I have to pick the second point I say I probably would pick at this moment the energy storage look at the landscape actually of smart solutions the telecommunication technologies energy technologies and logistics whatever rather than talking about the fourth industrial revolution I think China today actually is more looking at a third industrial revolution and in that landscape in order to address climate change issues actually the fundamentally as I said is the systemic infrastructure redesign that would allow the plug-ins of all the other technology places and in it actually technology-wide is the energy storage fantastic well you guys have got a lot of work to do this is the last day of the summit so we must close here thank you all for joining us thank you for watching online thank you very much for joining me on the panel today this session is now closed