 Because, as you know, SEI has offices across the globe, and it's nice to Kerstin, who is the chairwoman of SEI Global Board, and has really extensive and impressive experience in international environmental policy and research as well. So thank you. Excellency, former ministers, colleagues and friends of SEI. It is indeed a great pleasure for me and the board of SEI to be here in Tallinn, this beautiful city so rich in historical memories. When SEI was set up more than 25 years ago, with centers in different parts of the world, Tallinn was one of the first locations selected. Estonia is geographically important on the border between East and West, and also to Central Europe, and of course many links with Sweden over the centuries. Today, both Sweden and Estonia are fellow members of the European Union, which makes Estonia even more important as a center location, not least in view of the upcoming EU presidency. The achievements here are impressive. You are a forerunner in digitalization, and also in the field of energy environment. You have already reduced substantially your CO2 emissions, and you have ambitious strategies and plans to achieve even more. We believe that SEI could help in the work that lies ahead. SEI is a global organization. We have centers in the US, in Great Britain, in Bangkok, in Nairobi, and of course also Stockholm. We have outstanding scientists working in close contact with decision makers, public and private, on all levels, local, national and international. We have experts involved in the ICCP panel. Our projects range from sustainability and the Arctic to bioscience innovation in Africa. We do not just make scientific reports for the bookshelves. We do concrete work on the ground with local experts. There are many environmental think tanks. We are proud to be considered one of the 10 highest ranks in the world, in fact currently number three. We are very much involved in the new climate economy initiative, and of course the new sustainability development goals. Over the years, we have developed a fruitful cooperation with the Swedish government. We discuss regularly their needs and our potential projects. And when Sweden had the EU presidency, we helped to prepare the informal meeting of environment ministers. Through our network of experts working for the different centers, we have access to a wide range of knowledge and contacts. We hope that we can develop a fruitful collaboration also with the Estonian government. We are really pleased to have Lauri Tamiste as our new center director with his excellent experience and background in several ministries and financing. And we have great expectation for the center under his leadership. Today's seminar is about energy and environment. This link is obvious to all of us in this room, hopefully also to most policy and decision makers in all over the EU, as well as the people. And we know now that the ways how we produce and use energy are crucial for the environment, not least the future climate. But this awareness has not always been there. In fact, it is rather recent. I know from my personal experience, I have worked with environment and energy issues for almost 50 years. In the 60s, the technology optimism was overwhelming. Nuclear power for energy production was considered a blessing. The only environmental concern was that cooling water could increase the temperature of coastal water. In the 70s, the understanding of risks with nuclear power as well as fossil fuel increased. Acidification was a growing problem in several European countries because of sulfur emissions from fossil fuel. But when we raised this concern with the big emitters, Germany and the United Kingdom, we were laughed at. In the 80s, discussion about CO2 emissions and climate change started to spread among scientists. For instance, the Swedish meteorologist, who initiated the ICCP and also chaired SCI. In 1992, we had the UN conference on environment and development in Rio, which started the UN work on climate change and the annual COPS. In the EU, environment ministers at that time were very much aware of the threat of climate change. Angela Merkel was one of them. But they did not have much support from their fellow ministers. They were rather lonely and media attention, as well as public awareness, very limited. The Kyoto Protocol gave some hope, but when President Bush decided to kill the Kyoto process in 2001, despair and resignation were near. The EU managed to save the UN princess, and gradually the awareness increased remarkably, I would say, more than we could have dreamt of. And as a result, political pressure increased. Nick Stern showed the economic costs of inaction, Al Gore produced his film, and suddenly we had the finance ministers and prime ministers and energy ministers speaking about climate change and the importance of action, and also the private sector. At last, we had a successful UN COP in Paris last year, which demonstrated the commitment of so many countries, including Estonia. And as you said there, Minister Pomerance, economic growth does not need to come at the expense of the environment. You also mentioned the example of digital signatures and the savings possible if this was applied worldwide. There are many such examples of technological development, both for production of energy and more efficient use. I'm a strong believer in the potential of technology and the spread of best practice. And I think we now have a better chance than ever to achieve the goals set. I look forward to listening to your achievements in the areas of transport and housing, and I hope very much that SCI, with our worldwide network, can become a useful ally in the work ahead. Thank you. Thank you. Can I give you a small gift? And thank you for the kind introduction and words. And yes, I was just reminded also that the whole seminar will be transmitted electronically, so also warm welcome to the viewers over the web. And now we have time to start our panel discussion. So it's my pleasure to invite here Marco Pomerance, the Minister for Environment. And also Mrs. Kate Pentus Rosimannus, former Minister of Environment, currently a member of parliament. But we get five ministers for the price of two, actually, because Marco, you've been minister also of social affairs and internal affairs. And Kate has been also minister of foreign affairs, so very energy and resource efficient solution instead of having huge panel. So thank you very much for coming here and accepting our invitation. As Kerstin was also saying, I think people coming from outside and viewing at Estonia, they really notice and appreciate the actually huge changes that we have gone through. Sometimes we ourselves tend to forget how bad the situation was and how big transition we have actually made. So maybe we should first start out by really what is your kind of personal experience and feeling that what have been the key drivers behind this success that we have really started from zero and reaching quite a high level of renewables in our energy mix. So we see that there's a huge decrease in greenhouse gas emissions. So what has been in your mind the key drivers behind this transition? Yes, well, thank you. First, I must not must, but I'm happy to admit that I also think that SEI has played a quite important role in keeping that issue on the agenda and keep on pushing also among the politicians to have the issue of energy efficiency, but also climate policy on the agenda. But I think I would start even not mentioning the very concrete political decisions that of course have played an extremely important role. But I would rather start from 1990s and from the switch in the mindset that happened at the time, at least as I understand it. Because I do think that since we started, like you said, we started from zero, which meant that our economy was in very, very bad shape, well, in debtors. And it was very clear that the country was very poor. Sometimes I say that it was our luck to be poor because if you have not many resources, if you are not very rich country or if you are not very big country, you have to find a way to do more with using less. And I think this has also and always been a mindset that has been extremely important also in energy efficiency field, for example. So for us it was clear that if we want to be competitive as a country, we had to find ways to be innovative, to find new ways and to be effective in economical sense. So that was one thing in our mindset. And another thing that is, I think, very important when we talk about the energy in Estonia is that we have always had that strange noise back in our heads saying that we always have to do everything we can to be as independent as possible. Our electricity production, as you know, is based on the oil shale, has been based on oil shale for a very long time, which has given us independence from other countries or what other countries, from Russia, when it comes to the electricity production. But it's very clear that also renewables is extremely important part of being independent. So again, this mindset of having and supporting those possibilities that helps to be independent is and has been very, very important. So this is one of the things why renewables, I think, are or have been growing very quickly here in Estonia. But of course, there are also concrete political decisions, like having this support scheme or subsidizing scheme for renewables that has been criticized heavily here in Estonia. Just like probably in every other countries where similar kind of schemes are there because it's not very popular among the consumers to have those subsidies and to see on their bill, that electricity bill that they also pay for renewables. But again, I think in Estonia there is an understanding that having independence is something that does not really have the price. And having renewables makes us more independent also in energy-wise, and this is one thing that unfortunately has also the price tag with itself. Good afternoon. I just gave a first word to Kate, not because to use that moment for thinking, but ladies first even in Estonia, and so it should stay. What a happy week. We talk right now about low-carbon economy, and we celebrate just in the same week our 100 years of oil-sale industry. So it means that both they are in our schedule and even in mine as a minister of environment. And just comment about that signage which was given by myself in New York I did in old-fashioned way, which might not be the excellent hand, but everybody can read it, Marko Bomerance. So it is, and I took it seriously. Kate actually already mentioned all those factors. I do it in very concrete way. First factor, how we happen to be here where we are, first it just happened because there was a change of state system we can say, one collapsed, and there was need just to build up a new economical system. It's the first one. Second, of course, we have political tools also, if we talk about green energy subsidies or just that small support, which is not so small, which was given by our environmental investment center during seven years for more than 100 projects just to go over to the biofuels. And third one, which is a natural factor, we have a lot of easy accessible biomass. Aspen, all the trees, it's just here. But you have Marko's background in geology and actually very intimate knowledge of the oil shale. From really the time you studied and then you went on to work in actually environmental protection and civil service, how do you see, how has changed the perception of the oil shale and the discussion over these years? To see now that there is actually the shift in mentality, there is this shift of perception and discussion, what's the difference between 20 years ago, 10 years ago now? I think the difference is huge and if we talk about where from we started and if we have a scale, I think we started from 100% of oil shale in scale and today the mix is totally different and most of people still think that if we talk about stone energy as a stock company then it's just a company which produces only oil shale or just electricity from oil shale or oil, but people who know, they know that Estonian energy company also moves as all the world or Europe does. If we talk about wind energy, for example, they participate are all, if we, why we have now such a difficulty with that biomass topic and how to use it and how much and where and to produce what, it's again because of Estonian energy because they started it very heavily how to say and maybe in that time not in the best way and now we should find a right track and be smarter. Can I add, although not being a geologist and not having a background in geology, I still want to add that I think the image or the perception of oil shale industry has changed especially during the last years and it has changed into better and I think there are several reasons for that. One is that the oil shale companies themselves admit and have done huge investments to make the energy production cleaner and that they are in fact finding ways how to use the resource, the oil shale itself in a more efficient way, how to get more out of it, not simply so to say burn but finding new ways, innovative ways to use it and to do it more and more environment friendly way. And again I also think that now it is very clear that the road towards the cleaner energy production and cleaner economy is very much there and that is the road that we have chosen as a country and also the industry itself now tries really hard to not be an obstacle but to work with all the rest of the society. So I do think that the image has turned into better and of course since the oil shale industry is not very big, I think it is the biggest polluter as well but as they are the biggest polluter they also pay the highest amount and the biggest amount of the resource taxes and the pollution taxes and since the Estonian environment tax system is organized so that it is redirected to the environment projects I think also that has been recognized as an important thing. So yeah I think they have worked and then of course they must work to have their image improved. A guest who was saying that in the early 90s environmental ministers were feeling alone on this issue, Marco are you feeling alone on this issue or not? Honestly. No. At the moment not yes, you are with Kate but other than that I mean now the Ministry of Environment has put together this low carbon road map up until 2050 so what has been the discussion with you for a long minutes so what's the perception? I think it's not so complicated. In Estonia people think that if we talk about environmental issues then it's only about protection but it's also about use and I have such a thought that if we think about how can which kind of impact can have a minister of environment to say industries and which impact can have minister of economics or entrepreneurship. I think here is a huge difference and I can say from my sides that my understanding is the same at least from 1995. I was interviewed and as a question was you was I started to be a governor of West Viru County. It's a question from a journalist was that now you came from a field of environment. I was head of environmental board in West Viru County and now you should take care of jobs and working places and so on. And I said then and I can say it now for industry yes not for every price and so it is today and if we move to low carbon society I think it's wise despite of the fact that we have now understanding that carbon causes climate change and so on. It's wise anyway it makes us richer and despite of the fact and just if we try to put together some kind of strategies for 2030 or 2050 I think all parties understand the need of course everybody has their own attitude and economical people say more production and I say more protection but I think if wise people are in room you can have also good results. But Kate also as I introduced you served as a Minister of Foreign Affairs. So Estonian I think foreign policy has been very much about security policy and really tighten the relations with allies but how much to see your fellow colleagues how high has been rising the issue of environment and international agreements on the table of foreign ministers. Again I think that it is the overhaul question of competitiveness it's the question of competitiveness just not just one industry not even just one country. I think it is huge importance of whether you can be competitive on a worldwide arena. And as I see it is I mean it's very clear that population is rising in the world increasing. So they will be more and more consumers. There will be more and more demand but resources are there as much as they have been. So it's very clear that the urbanization is a trend that will influence the world entirely not only the Europe but the world during the next 30 50 years. The prediction says that after some before the 2015 around 70 percent in the world in the cities at least so that will be 70 percent out of nine billion people. It all directly influences also the demand demand of energy and of course it is very clear that to have more innovative solutions in the energy field is directly connected with the competitiveness. It's directly connected with the people's health. So it's not just the question of ministers of environment. It's very clearly the questions of practically every minister I would say. We have the ministers of economy and finance on European level who work hard to find and discuss about how we could be more competitive. And also the energy and environment issues are more and more also on their agenda. So I would say that it's and of course also for the ministers of foreign affairs especially when it comes to the energy independence. I guess I made a fresh story in the moment of knowledge study and we asked especially about energy production and how how people feel about that. And what was interesting most of it not surprising that most of people just support renewable energy production and 89 percent from them from wind and 76 from biomass and 49 percent were totally against energy production. But was there also a question of if it's OK in their backyard? I would say but there is always but if you go to West Estonia which is actually by different reasons only reason where you can have new windmills and if you read what happens for example in the Hiuma against open sea wind parks then you can see that maybe there are those 11 percent who said no no no never. And they don't really so much care what happens in East maybe various oil sale products and area. But of course people in East Peru they support still production of oil sale and the energy from that and reason is totally different. It's working about the working places. But what is also interesting. What is the reason why people support such understanding that renewable energy is most important or or what is important in energy production. And it's so that 46 percent said most important is sustainability of production. And as we politicians always use that price argument. It was a price to me also that 31 percent considered a price of energy to be the most important one is 31 percent. And security issue was always also very important to Estonians. And from us that study we understand that 23 percent of people think that security argument is most important. So there have been changes in in our minds and people minds also. So it really seems that this study is kind of. I think it really reflects the change in mentality. It used to be energy security and price issues. I remember there was a lot of discussion about when the electricity market was opening and when the first subsidies came and and it went on the bill. But now it seems that actually a minister of economy who has been working tirelessly I think for six years to reform the subsidies. They can now stop it. The work because actually people are now willing to pay. No it's not all so true. I think when we talk about the subsidies to renew the renewable subsidy system things that are not very often discussed or that some politicians are afraid to say it out loud was that is that the whole system the idea of subsidizing whatever industry field or whatever industry is that there must be some obstacle on the market. And for me the renewables subsidies are there to help the renewables that technology to become competitive and to become or to make them as competitive as other technologies. And at least as I see the finally the final goal should be to have those technology as competitive or to have them functioning on a market based market on a market based way. So also this the subsidies cannot be there forever. So I think this is something that we must acknowledge as well once the renewables are competitive also the subsidies must come to an end. But it's also it means that also the fossil fuels or the fossil fuel based technologies cannot be subsidized. So there must be a fair treatment of both technologies. So regarding the taxation and subsidies I mean on one hand we have had excellent I think resource taxes and charges system where really if you use the resource if you pollute you pay and this money goes back to the environmental projects but on the other hand also government took the decision to exempt oil shale industry. So Marco what's your take on this. Yeah it actually the process was also was in different stages. When we started in Narva there was idea that we that would be exemption also from pollution taxes. And for my understanding it can't be so because if you use resources you pollute you pay whatever is economical situation and then in the second states it turned to only resource taxes stayed on table. And my conclusion is very simple. Of course from one hand for the minister of environment it seems very nice that all factories are just not working knew any pollution at all. But you know what is behind that that it's huge system where you have mines you have factories you have people and you still have your environmental problems in the area. So for me just working factories better than just factory which doesn't work and problems are still in the area. And hopefully we can reach to the situation where all system or new system which we also prepare where all outside costs are taken into consideration and market prices are changing. Still then start to work for the same purposes that we have more money to invest again to tackle with those environmental problems. I take it in very patient way now is that result which we got out of it. OK. But we have talked quite a lot about the energy sector or oil and oil sector. But I know Kate you have been really advocating that looking beyond and about the green economy and clean tech and all these innovative solutions. How do you see it has a stone in progress in that field to see new businesses emerging in other areas as well. I think we are we are doing excellent job actually to be honest. And I also think that we don't even realize ourselves that some solutions we have on our table or some solutions we are using are also doing a huge a very good job also when it comes to the environment protection or again energy efficiency. I sometimes use the example that you know we have this digital signature solution here in Estonia is to secure digital signature. We have here and thanks to that we save about two percent of the GDP each year in Estonia which is approximately the same amount a bit less than we use for our defense budget. Two percent of GDP in Estonia. And that is but what we don't always think is that we always also save the pure energy. So to say if we didn't have the digital signature if we didn't use it as much as we do we would produce each month a paper mountain that would be as high as Eiffel Tower each month in Estonia. So why I'm saying is that this is only in Estonia think what would be the effects if we had the similar similar system at least between and in the Nordic countries. You know in Estonia we are working hard to have the the each road at the similar system working between Finland and Estonia but also Sweden Denmark so on. And if we had the similar system in whole Europe what would be the effect for the European economy and for the energy efficiency. Lots of standing paper. Yes but but but again I mean you don't have to run and drive with your papers between the cities and fly between the countries. So this is just one one example that sometimes for us it is so natural that we don't even connect it anymore and we don't see that it's also it does have effect also on the energy efficiency side. But honestly I do see the possibilities everywhere in Estonia still 40 percent of the energy is used in the housing. So think what is the potential there 40 percent of energy used in housing transportation and so on. So yes there are huge possibilities still out there. There are a huge amount of very very active innovative open minded young entrepreneurs who try to find solutions there working also very closely with universities that I think is is very very important to have that connections there. So I think if we will gather in five years there will be many new success stories to talk about. I am such a old man I remember ministers from 90s also every Tuesday in that time they went to cabinet meeting and they had just two kilos of everything available. Today we have still ministers with portfolio and without but actually there is no need for portfolio anymore. But I still have one Italian one. I have a fresh socks there inside. The socks really come handy when changing the climate. But I'm really shocked to discover that actually we are really running close to the end of our panel. I know that you must be three o'clock back to the parliament. So I will have two questions maybe from the audience to really. Yes. As if these we are there but also broadcast it then please use microphone. Thank you a lot to CVSS secretariat. I have seen four or five latest government decisions locking Estonian energy production system to the ocean. What do you think the damage done by those decisions and creating such uncompetitive competitive situation for the renewables. How many years it will take to overcome this damage. Nobody can count it I think but you should see what happens in long run and you should know that as a cabinet member that if you have a company we call it for example Estonian energy there are assets also so you can't just throw them away and start from next day as nothing happened. So for me it's interesting what happens during next 14 or 34 years when I still alive and can see what the movements have been done during those years. Well I cannot really answer that question and I cannot name the number of years. I very much agree that persistence in policy is something that is hugely important when it comes to the path towards the cleaner and more or less CO2 emitting economy and also when it comes to the renewables. And this is one of the things that has been the biggest or the worst claim towards the politicians. Not not in Estonia but in the whole EU not to have persistent policy. And this is why I think that the Paris Agreement had really really huge importance before the Paris Agreement. You all know that there were huge speculations that finally finally this climate policy is dead. You know there are a lot of skeptics who keep on hoping for that. But the Paris Agreement did happen. It has been ratified already for very many countries already for a couple of EU member states. I very much hope that Estonia can ratify this as soon as possible. And that has been a very clear signal again that there will not be a change or switch on the climate policy. The direction is still the same. I very much hope that the politicians no matter in which countries do not send mixed signals towards the private industries because sometimes there are questions whether the private industry industry can be on board or how can we get the private industry on board. I think the private industry is ready to be on board and it is already on board. But in order to make investments that are huge they must have certainty that the way we are going will be clear and there will be no switches and some sudden turns on the way. So I agree that persistence and clear policy line must be there from Estonian government as well as all the other EU governments. OK. So Helen one more question from a gentleman from the audience just as a hint. He actually is also former minister of environment from Sweden. Our board member. Thank you. And just with that background now also as a member of the SEI board I really appreciated your contributions today. And I just curious to hear a little bit more on how you consider a cost efficiency looking at the energy system as such. And I think maybe that could be also a topic where we could also create further cooperation between SEI and also the the political needs here in Estonia and other places. I mean compare Sweden with its long goal of really getting rid of oil oil and where I think we have been successful. You can still see that costs on different energy resources has shifted enormously during these decades as we have been within transition. And I think it's due to our experience so important really to both create build a broad political support for a system which is clear. And now today it's mostly about the green electric certificates where we had five parties a broad minority majority of the parliament agreeing on creating further subsidies within until 2013. 2013. And it's really based on a market economy system which is the most I would say cost efficient way of really creating those supporters or subsidies and definitely more so than compared to within a feeding tariff system. So I think it could just be interesting on elaborating further on that and really to create further visions on how to create cost efficiency linked to certain targets and objectives and let them steer the result in the end. That is politically beneficial I think. I think again the picture or static point of Sweden in 1990s and for Estonia it's totally different. As I started 100 percent was oil sale production. Today there were already efficiency proven because of if we talk about electricity market because of open market and nor north pole and we can produce electricity from oil sale only when it's efficient is from one hand. And secondly if we think about how to now move whether on with renewables then efficiency is again an issue and why is the debate was so long now with new energy development plans and the one. And the issue is just there not to overcompensate because in the end of the day it comes from people's pocket and how to make changes so that it's not too costly. But lots of people Estonia tried to argue that we started with very high subsidy level when we went over to renewables. I think because of such a high level there was just a good start also. And now we should look ten years later what might be just reasonable level all the steps now for next 10 or 20 or 15 years. I will just add one thing that. Yes cost efficiency is something that we need to discuss and unfortunately we do not have that extra hour that at least would be needed here today. But but I think also the so to say the alternative costs must be shown or and explain again also by the politicians by the experts that what will be the cost if we do not pay. And if we do not chose the road we have chosen. What will be the cost for health. What will be the cost for economy. And how it will influence the competitiveness. What one thing that I every now then argue with with some Estonian politicians is that. When we explain the changes we made we make in our energy portfolio in order to make it more mixed not just based on one energy resource. We don't do it because somebody demands us to do it. We don't do it because because of Kyoto. We don't do it because of Brussels. We don't do it because of anybody else. We do it because it helps our own citizens and it helps our own country to be more independent to be more competitive. And this is the reason why we do it now. And also again to have those costs very clearly at the table so that people would understand what would it mean if those decisions were not made. But yes the cost efficiency debate. I very much hope that one day we can have that too. Actually we can have today after the seminar in the buffet when you're welcome to join. But you have to run. So I run too. Yeah. But before you run I will give a small gift back and thank you really a lot for coming and discussing. Thank you. OK. We luckily only have one event and it seems I'm next one. Yes. OK. So let's see. I hope this works. So I would I would say I will try to put some context around this discussion that we had. But but also share some of the insights that I just during the month that I have worked now at the CI Talin actually gained already in the network. So some interesting new things. If you look at Estonia where do we want to go. I think at least on paper in documents in strategy and policy that seems to be very clear direction. There's the new long term energy plan that has taken several years for the Ministry of Economy to prepare it. And it actually has really ambitious targets for 2030. So sure for renewables 50 percent to keep final energy consumption at almost or similar to today's level and and really to cut the greenhouse gas emissions from energy sector and ETS sector by really significant amount. So the the energy long term plan puts a competitiveness environmental issues at the heart of the strategy. And it's really emphasizing that we should try to move at fair market prices. So this is one of the very important issues that it's not only about energy. It's not only about environment. But it's very much competitiveness issue. It's it's an issue much wider. We also mentioned Ministry of Environment came up with the new foundations for climate policy which had really extensive involvement of stakeholders. There was working groups of many experts from all of the sectors academic public institutions private sector. And again what it says is that the Estonian government wants to have the ambition of of decreasing the emissions by approximately 80 percent by 2050. Again these two documents they they outline very clear vision and very clear message. And this message I would say is the strongest in in in in the in the context and history of environment and energy policy in Estonia. So is it doable. Of course we can ask and shoot us. Well that was also extensive work on the possible impact of different scenarios for the long term energy plan. There was many analysis conducted scenarios and analyzed and the results from this study. They were saying yes it's doable. Also for the climate policy foundations. There was again lots of scenario building lots of modeling lots of analysis. The answer was again yes it's doable. Also our organization in 2013 made a study on on the possibility of moving towards low carbon economy by 2050. Again extensive analysis modeling using different tools. And again the message was yes but actually throughout all these analysis that I I mentioned here in the background modeling that the the message was yes but with business unusual approach. So business as usual doesn't cut it. With business as usual going in the same direction or using the same tools as we have done so far. We don't reach these targets. So you need significantly to change the the policy incentives the economic environment. And also you need change technologies change the behavior. And it's so it's it's a huge effort to actually reach these targets. So is it going to be easy. No definitely not. The investment numbers. Well they varied from study and assessment to study. But they were all in hundreds of millions of euros. So so the the order of magnitude was significant. So how do we get that. How do we reach these targets then. Well it's it's very encouraging to say that actually all of our public institutions in Estonia are working very hard. There are lots of things in the pipeline and actually it's not only about very nice strategy documents which are nice. I can assure you. But there are also lots of things in the pipeline like updating the renewable electricity subsidy scheme that was discussed. Further liberalizing the heat market linking up gas markets which like like electricity market 10 years ago we didn't have connections. We didn't have multiple supplies. We didn't have actually a marketplace. So now we all have all this in electricity area. So now it's time also to do the same in gas markets. So there's lots of also public support for investments in fuel switch. There's lots of support in energy efficiency in buildings industry. There's also in transport. That's the plan to promote uptake of biofuels by blending and so on and so on. So many of police instruments are already there or in the process of designing them. But these are most of them are kind of regular to push. And what was even more surprising was that if you convert this food amount into CO2 that has gone into the production of this food then it's I did this in the morning when just using fingers and some Googling. So if it's correct then it's hundreds of millions of litres of petrol. So maybe it's more effective actually to really work on the food issue which is very tangible rather than building new mega metro systems and switching to new technology. So the message is really that actually the climate issue is in surprising areas and you can have a big impact really by pointing out to the issue. And just last week there was the executive order by President Obama on the behavioral insights. And it was interesting really that one of the areas that they emphasized was that it helps to switching to carbon low carbon economy. And really sometimes it's not about actually investments. It's about lowering the barriers for entry making doing the right thing easy simplifying the information. Also if there are so many complex choices you have to make to be a sustainable and prudent citizen then you give up. And like I said the non financial incentives they are very important. So as a conclusion I would say there are lots of challenges ahead but even more so opportunities ahead. Thank you. OK. We are running a little bit tight on a schedule but warm welcome to Charlie. Thank you. Is this working. OK. So what I would like to talk to you about is some of SEI's experiences on the issue of energy planning. I'm not going to claim to be an expert at all on the situation here in Estonia and I'm going to keep my comments primarily to the situation developing countries. But some of the things that some of the topics I will raise I think are relevant also globally. So the basic thesis is that energy planning as a topic really is in crisis today. So traditional approaches to energy planning in primarily in developing countries are beginning to fail and the problems we're beginning to see today are only going to get much worse in the future. But that's not an excuse for not doing planning planning. I mean I come I live in the US where planning is almost one of the dirtiest words you can say. But I'm not saying that we should throw it away. You know markets alone cannot be relied upon to solve the challenges ahead especially the climate and pollution challenges. So we do need planning but it has to be something different from before. So I'm going to tell you give you some thoughts on what needs to be different and also just say a few words about some of the things that SEI is doing to address the challenge. So what can we say about traditional planning. Well this I'm some of what I'll say applies mainly to planning of electricity but I think it applies to energy and climate planning more generally as well. So traditionally energy planning has been a very relatively simple top down process something that coupled very simple forecasts of what the demands for energy would be in the future with most of the focus being on supply planning. So we would have very sort of top down forecasts of how the demand for electricity and energy would increase over the coming years. And basically the question was how many power plants we're going to build in the future. That was essentially the process that governments would go through and as markets of liberalized over the last 20 years you know a lot of that activity has moved down to the utility scale. So these approaches worked reasonably well. They never worked all that well. And in fact going back to the 1970s these kind of top down approaches were seen to be vastly overestimating the growth in energy in the U.S. famously the utilities always forecast much more growth than really happens. But they worked reasonably well in certain situations. So they worked well when prices were stable and the supply of energy was fairly reliable. They were you were able to get away with these simple approaches when when your energy system was relatively simple. You had large centralized monopolistic utilities. And there was a kind of a one to many relationship between the utilities and the energy system and sort of millions of planners out and millions of customers out there. They also work well when the supply was dominated by a few relatively large power plants and you could dispatch those power plants in a fairly predictable way. So when the system was dominated by fossil plants and hydro plants things weren't so complicated. Also you could do this planning in a context knowing that you had many years ahead to get things right or wrong. So the plants took a long time to build. They had very long lifetimes and the demand was growing gradually and predictably. So things were relatively easy. And also we didn't have to worry about externalities in the past. You know we didn't realize that the climate problem was emerging. It was as bad as we know it is today. And you know air pollution was really just an an emerging problem. So we could largely ignore that problem. So when you have a simple system like this in developing countries you had a large monopolistic system. This is actually a very good vehicle for for pursuing some of your social policy. So in many countries over the last 20 years and still today energy systems are used to pursue your social policy. So they used to try and give cheaper power to poorer customers particularly in countries like India and China. That's been a way of helping your development issues by cross subsidizing your poorer consumers and asking your industries and your commercial consumers to pay more. And also because of this large system typically you'd have parastatal utilities so large government owned utilities and they would be a vehicle for government to pursue its social objectives. And this was usually done by just directing the utilities and telling them what to do. And the upshot of that is usually the utilities had to do it regardless of whether they could afford it or not. So you end up with these utilities that tend to be under financed under capitalized and not very profitable. In fact many of them make losses. But emerging trends are threatening this model. So we've been able to get away with that model for the last 30 years. But things are really beginning to change fast now. There's been unprecedented growth in renewable energy technologies. There's been large improvements in energy efficiency technologies. So all of those things go to make the whole system much more complicated much more complicated and hard to predict. Large utilities are increasingly facing competition from private power producers. Partly that's as a result of government policies to open up the electric market. But it's also because we have this sort of behind the meter energy production going on now. So we have the emergence of solar power is a very important factor. People are referring to people producing power at home as prosumers. So they're producers and consumers. And there's been growing volatility in fuel prices partly because trade has increased in the energy sector. So the fuels needed to go into into power plants are a much more global commodity now. So if there's demand or supply shocks those tend to reverberate around the world and things are getting much more volatile. There's also emerging technologies for better managing loads. So demand side management energy efficiency smart grids those kinds of things. And the technology for energy storage is also getting much much better. So all of those things are making the whole system much more complicated. There's also important emerging new markets for electricity. So it's not just that you know electricity demand is staying constant. There's a likelihood of really big new markets emerging. So key areas like transportation electric vehicles are going to be very important over the next 20 30 years. And also in areas like heating and cooling of buildings. So we have the emergence of sort of heat pumps as a very possibly very important way of heating and cooling buildings in the future. So the upshot of this is that you know traditional ways of doing planning just aren't going to work anymore. Utilities are at risk of losing their highest paying customers. So and government on a what's the wider scale governments are probably going to lose the ability to use energy systems to cross subsidize one group of customers with another. You know you just can't keep asking the higher paying customers to keep paying more because they're going to go off and make their own energy using solar power or whatever. And then we've got this sort of broader trend which I'm sure most people in this room are fairly familiar with. I know my colleagues are of you know we've really got a much better understanding now of the importance of air pollution and climate change. So there really is a need now for governments to step in and manage this process. And I'm just going to go into a few of those things in a little bit more detail. Oops too much detail there. Whoa it's got a mind of its own. Think that's the right one. OK so let's just unpack a couple of those things. So the first one is the emergence of renewable energy technologies and those really are changing the game in a very dramatic way. Non-hydro renewable energy is increased by a factor of seven capacity for non-hydro renewable energy over the last 10 or so years. So enormous increases. And we're only just beginning to see that trend happening now. So you know if you think it's been an important trend so far you ain't seen nothing yet right because as prices come down renewable energy is going to be extremely competitive with fossil based energy in the coming 10 20 years costs from solar modules fell 75 percent. I won't repeat all the statistics there. Similar not quite as dramatic improvements in in in wind prices. And those are those are forecast to continue reducing in the future. Partly is the technology gets better as the wind turbines get larger and the capacity factors go up. That's all going to help drive down the price of wind power and it's going to be very competitive. It already is very competitive in many situations and that's just going to keep on coming. At the same time the technologies that you need to complement your variable renewable energy those beginning to improve as well. So the prices for large scale utility scale battery storage are coming down. They fell by 20 percent in 2014 and apparently fell by another 15 percent in 2015. So there's a really big improvement going on there. You get to the price of one. At the same time we've seen this trend of increased volatility in fuel prices. So that's very important especially for oil importing or energy importing developing countries. But it's also important in even in countries that have large domestic resources. So we've seen countries like India which are very dependent on coal. They've really suffered from the increased volatility in the price of the fuel. They've had to import much more of their coal recently. And bear in mind that this is an important issue because renewable energy technologies are really immune from this issue. And then there's the environmental imperative for change. So maybe I won't go deeply into this but just to say you know we can talk about having climate change targets and low carbon futures. But let's not kid ourselves. The world is not reducing carbon emissions at the moment. So carbon emissions are growing by a couple of percent per year. The chart down the bottom here shows you what we need to do. So this was done a while ago. So what we really need to be doing for some hope of keeping in keeping warming down to two degrees is to be on that red line there. So we need to be you know according to the best science eliminating carbon emissions by 2040 and there's no way we're on a path to do that. At the same time the issue of air pollution. We're beginning to understand that much more fully now. This chart at the top is from the global burden of disease and you can see that health issues related to air pollution are actually the fourth and seventh most important global issues in terms of global burden of disease. So air pollution from fossil fuels which is a key part of that is really vitally important. So those all tell us why we have to make dramatic changes to the system. It's not enough to just tinker around the edges. OK and developing countries are really not in a good position to deal with these challenges. So you know we have to address some fairly major challenges here and we're not really ready to do that. So the kind of planning processes that are going on at the moment in the developing world really are not suitable for addressing the kind of detailed planning that needs to go on to take on these challenges. The data available in most countries is in very poor condition. We don't haven't been collecting data on technologies and energy services. Some of my colleagues here know what I'm talking about. So just trying to do that. And more broadly than that we have very limited capacity in government agencies. So we don't really have the people we need to take on the challenge analytically. And the result of that is that most developing countries are highly reliant on foreign consultants to tell them what their energy policy should be. So we're not really in position where developing countries can sort of set their own agendas for energy planning. The modeling tools available tend to be too expensive, too complex and too data intensive. So we're really in quite a bad situation. So what can be done about this. Well we require new approaches for integrated energy planning. We need approaches that are much more holistic, much more bottom up and service based. We need to take a scenario approach. So rather than trying to sort of do a single set of forecast and do least cost planning, we need to take more of a scenario based approach where we can identify robust solutions. We need to properly account for the impacts of efficiency, for the growth of renewable energy and storage. We need to fully consider environmental dimensions. So not just thinking about greenhouse gas emissions, but also thinking about the impacts of air pollution on human health, agriculture and ecosystems. And we need to move away from this sort of technocratic approach where we trust our energy future to a sort of single planner to get it right. We need to have more people involved because really, really the issue is about sort of what future do we want? What do we want our energy systems to look like? So we have to have broader conversations about these trends. So this is a huge challenge. You know, to do this is really expecting us to do something that's much more complex than the traditional planning. And even that's something that's, you know, a challenge in most developing countries. So really, there's a long range agenda here. We need to build the capacity in agencies and governments and elsewhere to be able to do this kind of activity. Just a couple more slides. So what is SEI doing about this? Well, we're trying to make a small contribution on some of these issues. One of the things we've been doing is developing various modeling tools that are really based around this idea of doing sort of holistic integrated energy planning. In particular, there's a tool we've been developing for the last 25 or so years called LEAP, which is very much targeted at the needs of developing country planners. It's now being used in 190 countries and we have thousands of users all over the world. We've been disseminating that tool for free to developing country organizations for more than 20 years. We also do a lot of work teaching the basic skills that are needed to do this kind of analysis. And then we've been fostering communities of practice to build planning capacity. We've also been working to advance the science on these issues. A couple of things I mentioned that we've been doing recently, but just a couple I mentioned. One is we've been developing new tools to assess the human health and ecosystem impacts of energy scenarios. And we're also currently working on improving our tools so they're much better able to think about some of these emerging issues. For example, like what kind of levels of storage are you going to need if you can have very high penetration of variable renewables. OK, so that's basically what we've been doing. Just to give you a quick hint, here's some of the screenshots of the software we put out there that's called LEAP. And if you're interested in knowing more about what we're doing, please visit the website here. We already have over 30,000 members on this website. So it really is a community of practice of people thinking about energy policy in the developing world. So please come and visit. And I'll leave it to that. Thank you. Thank you very much. And here's a small gift. Thank you very much. Yes. And now we will have a coffee break. We are a few minutes behind the schedule. Just a few. So can we come also five minutes later from the coffee break and continue at quarter to four? Yes. OK. So use that time for for discussing and taking coffee. And we'll see quarter to four. We are ready now to move on with the program to move on to the speed talk section in our seminar. My name is Helen Zahnid and I am the marketing and communication manager for the Stockholm Environment Institute Telling Center, SEI Telling. And today at the speed talk section we have planned a series of of presentations about seven minutes each after which we have planned a question or two from the audience. And unfortunately we had a cancellation this morning. Our colleague from SEI Stockholm fell ill and was not able to travel to Tallinn. But we will move on with with the program as planned. So I am very happy to ask my colleague from SEI Telling, Kaja Pettersson, to come up on stage. Kaja is program director and senior researcher for SEI Telling. But in addition, she is also the chairwoman for the Sustainable Development Commission, which is working under the Estonian Government Office. And for example, a year ago, Kaja went to New York to the UN Sustainable Development Summit where the SDGs were adopted for the first time and Kaja was part of the Estonian delegation. So she is very much an expert on the SDGs and how Estonia is performing in this sector. And her talk today will be concentrating precisely on that. SDGs relating to energy and climate and the Estonian performance. So please go out for floor resource. Thank you Helen. I already got the applause as an as an advantage and as a promotion. So thank you for that. And since we are performing a speed talk, I think it's not just speaking quickly, but perhaps speaking the messages and to getting through the not very many messages, but some of them. So as to the SDGs, as we all know, and as Helen was also referring last September, we also introduced a new metrics, which is sustainable development goals, which will be the common goals until 2030 all over the world. And formerly when the climate and energy wasn't in the millennium development goals as explicitly as they are now in the in the global goals for sustainable development. However, there are maybe all the 17 goals can be said they are all energy related starting from the hunger or poverty issues or or even going through them, the ecosystems or or consumption and production issues till the very last ones concerning the partnerships and governance issues. But there are two SDGs that are explicitly addressing the energy agenda, number seven, which is a renewable energy, or also some have said that this is more an access to energy and access to renewable energy. And the number 13, which is about climate change or climate action issues. So there are maybe two more energy and climate focused objectives. This is a small figure, but just to give an overview where Estonia stands or stood last year when first such an overview of the implementation of the SDGs in the OECD countries was first published. And again, looking at the number seven and number 13 for Estonia, the climate action is all red, which means that this is something like the traffic lights that we should be very concerned about while the energy issues that go number seven. There is one red and one green indicator. So this is very much about indicators, what we can take on board. Usually they are measuring the CO2 emissions from fuel combustion or per GDP. Also, the energy intensity is an issue and the share of renewable energy. Again, when we look back what Estonia been among different performance indicators, then climate and energy, according to the Yale Environmental Performance Index again, shows that Estonia is performing not very well in terms of climate and energy portfolio and ranking has even decreased in a way that Estonia is lagging behind. There is always this dilemma of being energy secure and also to conserve environment. This was also touched upon early this morning in the presentations that whether we should be choosing again a security or how to also not to harm the environment. And there is also a third dimension, the energy equity which places Estonia relatively in a high position, but again as you can see from the security point of view and especially from the sustainability point of view is not in a very good position. And surprisingly or not so surprisingly also according to the ecological footprint based on the 2012 data it shows that Estonia is almost using four times more global hectares per person in order to bufferise all the environmental impact compared to the global medium, sorry the average which is 1.7 global hectares. The most recent SDG index that was just published this summer it also shows that as far as Estonia is concerned the climate action is in red but as you can see it always depends on the measurement and here the Sustainable Development Solutions Network has put the energy-related CO2 emissions per capita as in the red zone but also the climate change vulnerability monitor data. And in the energy access and renewable energy SDG that we are still lacking behind the other countries but not in the red zone. Last year we also Estonia Ministry for Environment conducted an overview or just ask the people's opinion of experts and different public civil servants which SDGs would be the most important for Estonia. And here is just the first five SDGs that were regarded as the most important ones. Education, consumption the third and fourth place was shared by energy and biodiversity issues and health came as the fifth area. So energy is very important but not as perceived as the most important issue. Of course we should take into account this is among the 17 SDGs. So what is the way forward? And it has also been emphasised in the previous presentations today as well that there should be a very strong governmental commitment on how to deal with our curse and blessing so to speak the oil shade, Pulevkiwi. And just referring back to some other exits I also have introduced a bookseed term that we should start planning and really very seriously looking at it not only from the energy and the resource perspective but also from the social perspective because this governmental decision that was described in the early panel was exactly that there was there was no plan B thought of what to do if the oil price would drop as low as it is today. And certainly there are serious questions that to be addressed concerning the transport energy intensity and also the housing issue as it was also emphasised by the previous Minister for Environment that housing is an issue and there is a considerable room for improvement. But these two issues transport and housing will be shortly discussed by my two of my colleagues so thank you for your attention. Thank you very much Kaja. I think bookseed is an excellent term and I hope it will go viral and you can all share it after this seminar. But now are there any questions to Kaja from the audience. If not Kaja I would like to ask you in your talk you were concentrating on SDGs relating to energy and climate but then again SDGs are very much interlinked. They have an intersectoral and cross governance nature. So in Estonia who is or should be in charge of the full implementation of SDGs in our country. Yeah as you already said it is very interlinked and intersectoral issues so it shouldn't be just a matter of one minister or two or three ministers it should be the the whole government and since from the Estonian administrative structure I would see that that the office the government office could be the most appropriate place for that because this is where all the different sector of plans and the linkages between the plans and issues are discussed and are continuously on the table. So yeah I would suggest that it should be at at the governmental level. Thank you very much Kaja. One question from Valdur please. What do you think would Estonia benefit cooperating with the other Baltic Sea countries on implementing sustainable development goals or not. Of course I think the cooperation is always always good just to have the same issues on the table and to learn from the others and share practices and I think this is very important that Estonia is will be at the table. I somehow feel where you pointed with your question. Yes currently Estonia is in a reserved position at the Council for Baltic Sea States in the expert group for sustainable development. Yeah I agree that with those who think that yes Estonia should be at the table there. Yes please. When I was in Stockholm visiting the SEI Stockholm office then that was the minister of public affairs what's the correct name. So and it was surprising to me that he was in charge of actually really in response but for the sustainable development goals and there was a kind of lots of tools and work towards helping municipalities and local administrations to integrate and take responsibility to see that this potential in Estonia also that local governments could take a stronger role in this issue. Does it resonate at all with them or is it after the local government reform that they pick up the phone on this issue. Yeah the local governments I think are very important and when I was reviewing the voluntary national reports to the UN high level political forum and then I also observed that most of the countries also stressed that there is a very big importance to not just to have those SDGs at the national or federal level but also at the local government level. But I think from what I am suggesting is that first there should be a very strong political commitment at the government level and then this should be transferred or transposed also to the local level. But yeah you are right. I think nothing will happen if the local governments will not be on board. Thank you very much Gaya and here's a little gift for you. Thank you. And now we are ready to move on with the presentations. I'm very glad to introduce my colleague Gerli Kirisima junior expert at SEI Tallinn and she will be telling us about the Estonian housing sector and energy efficiency measures for the housing sector which is a topic a very important and interesting topic that is affecting most of us here in Estonia. So please Gerli. Thank you for this description. My name is Gerli and as Kaya said that we are in Estonia lacking behind in the energy and climate program then I will be going more specific and talking about the possibilities what we could do in Estonia in order to improve the energy sector. And I start my slides with my key message that renovation is the key to the energy efficient housing in Estonia and I will be now further on speaking why is it like that. So my presentation is based on a project that I've been working on within the last one year and the name of the project is HEDAW for all the new building stock. So my business as usual scenario turned out that the future is not that bad because you could tell that it's only growing 2% the consumption where we are standing now and where we would reach 2030. However, the future is not that bad but it could be better because it could be better depending on what you compare it with. And I compare my results with the EU targets what is not only Estonia but also other EU countries need to achieve by 2030. So according to this we still miss a lot from our baseline in order to reach the targets and for that reason I also worked on two different energy efficiency scenarios and probably many of you in the audience are very well known about the National Energy Development Plan up to 2030. So my work is actually based on the same assumptions what's where I worked on during this Development Plan scenario analysis. So the first scenario that I looked at is called the minimally intervening state energy efficiency scenario which means that as I described before my business as usual scenario is already taking into account the fact that the new buildings to be built comply with already quite a high energy standards. So really the key to focus is the current housing stock where we could implement renovation parameters and so my first scenario has less ambitious parameters than the one on my next slide and according to this scenario the state would give out about 25% of funding to renovate the current housing stock and according to that scenario we would still actually miss 13% from the target so that's why I also worked on a second efficiency scenario what have more ambitious renovation funds given out by the government and instead of 25% the government would be as friendly as give out 35% and according to that scenario it looks like we would even be 8% better from the target but as I said before it really depends what you compare it with and as the last target was is based on the scenario what was worked out in 2007 then at this time there are no minimum energy performance requirements what Estonia has to now comply with. So really the key is that the more you invest the more you achieve and if you fly to Thailand there are probably a few over one of those districts where our main program relies so in Thailand there are like Lasnamegi and Mustamegi where a lot of panel buildings and this is where also one of the key problems is that these houses are there's loads of those houses what needs energy improvements and I hope that we could get there soon. Thank you. Are there any questions for Gerdly about housing? Yes please Johan. Thanks a really interesting presentation. Just a question when you talk about this energy efficiency programs and you also show this last picture which of course is certainly in areas where there might be also economic challenges and so on what kind of discussions do you have in terms of financing energy efficiency even though you may gain eventually because of lower energy consumption but how do you finance these programs in Estonia? What's the idea behind that? Well in Estonia we actually have this beautiful foundation called Credex which is now working pretty well because all the apartment associations are applying more and more for for this funding what they give out and my the best ambitious scenario was based on the fact that well now they have like this scheme that they the funding is really project-based so it really depends about the building project and depending on that how much funding will be given out but then there is the possibility actually or potential if according to this scenario there are no other let's say sectors where the government would focus on and they really would focus on the housing sector then there would be this potential to fund more Thank you. Any other questions for Gertlie? Because I would like to ask renovation you mentioned renovation is the key to energy efficiency for the Estonian housing sector but what other measures or policies could our country could the state implement to increase the efficiency? Well in parallel with the renovation funding there is also demolition allowance which would be given out so there are a lot of houses which are would be could be demolished because they also actually increased the graph of energy consumption in a way and also there would be of course pilot projects for nearly zero energy houses especially done or initiated by the government so the governmental pilot projects then also awareness raising in order to assure that all the nearly zero energy houses will be built in a correct way and yeah so the legislations should be changed and also the planning documents so that we could require carbon dioxide assessments for the buildings so really a list of measures so thank you very much Gertlie thank you and I will ask my colleague Mari you see to join now and yes there's a little gift for you Gertlie thank you so Mari is a senior expert on concentrating on sustainable transport policies and that's what she will be looking at during her presentation also so energy efficient solutions for the Estonian transport sector for 2030 thank you good afternoon I will go straight on my slide so actually the project that Gertlie mentioned so this most of this research that I've done for this presentation is also related to the Heron project funded by Horizon 2020 and in the transport sector the key research question was that what are the policy measures that can deliver our national energy efficiency and climate policy targets by 2030 and what are the key barriers for the energy efficient transport system in Estonia but I'm focusing rather on the policy measures and we did the analysis or it's still ongoing work so we also used LEAP tool to analyze these policy measures in different scenarios so what are the current trends in energy consumption in transport? Transport is like a quarter of the final energy demand is in the transport sector and it's one of the few sectors where the demand for energy is still growing and with this business as usual current trends until 2030 there would be no change in the growth of the energy demand in transport and the key drivers in this growth for demand are drivers so it's basically the car use that is driving this driving this trend for increasing demand and also currently the low oil prices and what are the same problem as Charlie had and we also asked many experts in Estonia like 30-50 experts what do they think that are the key barriers for this kind of trends in Estonia and besides this word cloud that was generated with these names of barriers the two key barriers are lack of integrated planning in the transport sector and spatial planning and the current fiscal instruments in the transport sector in Estonia are not encouraging fuel efficient transport patterns so we just for the foreign guests to let you know that we have basically only fuel access duty in the transport sector now whatsoever vehicle taxation so this is when you look out on the streets in Estonia and in Tallinn so you might see a lot more bigger cars than elsewhere and actually also what's the problem is that it's not just the existing car fleet that is not so fuel efficient but that the new cars that are purchased in Estonia are the least fuel efficient ones in Europe so looking at this possible alternative scenarios we can see that there is a great potential for negotiating in the transport sector and this is a fact that it's also increasingly recognized by the national policy processes like the energy strategy and the climate roadmap 2050 but what are the measures that actually can deliver this downward trend so I'm just putting here the measures that have the highest potential and first like I said it's the fuel efficient vehicles that could deliver the highest potential in fuel efficiency until 2030 then integrated urban planning so it's dealing with the demand for transport and car dependence third is the price demand management that we have a high increase in the road transport sector and with smart road pricing we could manage this demand there then the next one is investing public transport and active modes so that the alternatives could be more attractive for the users then eco driving traffic calming so that's to reduce this kind of aggressive style of driving can also deliver energy saving so and now when we compared it to the national targets in terms of CO2 emissions by 2030 so with the effort sharing decision target of minus 13% compared to 2005 levels so we see that it's quite challenging target for Estonia and we need to take into account and really implement all these measures to be able to achieve this targets by 2030 so the 2020 targets that still allow us to increase the emissions it seems quite realistic that Estonia is going to deliver these targets but not for 2030 and just to say that many changes are starting from the head let's say and maybe in two years when you go out from this building that picture on the street will look like that this is currently the plan by Tallinn city and also supported by the national government to redesign the main street of Tallinn it's a stretch of three to four kilometers just in front of this hotel and from to the left and to the right and this is a good example that there is will and good examples for changes in this policy making but like Kate Bentus-Rosimano says that we shouldn't give too many mixed signals in this transport policy either so on the other hand we have this main street plan here happening but on the other side of the building there is a ready road, ready street and road development scheme that would put like six to eight lanes of cars between the sea and the city so many old policies are still have a very strong inertia and this needs to be changed thank you Thank you Thank you very much Mari Any questions for Mari? Yes, Valder, go ahead I apologize but I waited unless there was no questions then our government is exceptionally good implementing policy measures which encourage energy efficient vehicles penetration by increasing the fuel tax raising the fuel price and every car driver thinks of looking for the more efficient car because the fuel cost is increasing year by year but the car drivers are also the those who vote every four years for the new parliament the party is there how this contradiction is in Estonia reflected that the consumers are fighting against the incentives and the government is then fighting between those different one is the target to get the car free cities and the low carbon transport and the other target to get elected into the parliament and the government Thank you, Valder Well, first we have analyzed also that this hasn't been very efficient method to increase the fuel excise duty to reach these targets so it's just the consumers don't notice it even especially combined with increasing economic or the purchasing power of the people and also that the oil prices are going down so actually the consumers currently are not noticing the increase in the excise duty and also it's true that the current government has also promised in their in their platform for the four years that they will not implement any vehicle based taxation whatsoever but I think it seems that government is sort of melting in this field it's already taking now the issue of the company cars and how much you can actually deduct from your taxis when you're driving a company car so the current government is I hope so it's more open to the new and more efficient taxation issues and it's not only the national government of course that has to be responsible for that but it's also the cities because it's many of the solutions that I and measures that I mentioned actually have to happen in the local municipalities and in the cities and the voters are not all drivers and the drivers also are pedestrians some part of the day their grannies are using public transport so it's just I think it's a media bubble that we just only drive everywhere and it would be a harassing of a personal personal rights Yes, one more question Can't say it's a question or not but in fact probably one of the measures I can be if we restore back the normal public transport because at the moment in a lot of the rural areas it's not existing at all and we can pick up the taxes on the fuel but it means only that the people will leave these areas and will be concentrated in the cities Yes Yeah and also that our research also proposes more smart measures for taxation not just this kind of static ones that would be kilometer based charging which is more concentrated on the cities and not posing these taxes on the rural areas so fuel duty is enough for the rural areas, let's say but the new fiscal measures should be more around the congested and in these kind of regions where you have alternatives for public transport and shorter distances to be governed by Bicycle Thank you very much, Mari A little gift for you and now we are ready to move on to our panel discussion so I will pass on the moderation and the microphone to Lauri Yes, and thank you very much, Helen Thank you Round of applause So I'm really pleased let me see the topic what we promised to deliver so we promised that that will be a discussion on low carbon energy system new practical steps and financing solutions don't know about the practical steps but definitely that will be about financing solutions so it is my absolute pleasure to welcome here to discuss this matter first Mr. Alan Pollock, SEI board member but also a CEO of a big pension front from Denmark also very long standing experience in banking and asset management so warm welcome Alan and secondly, great pleasure to also welcome here Dr. Steven Litter also our board member but having very very extensive experience across the globe in advising governments in helping out with setting up financing solutions from different sectors most notably water and infrastructure and others and also visiting professor at King's College London so welcome and finally, also representing Estonia a man also with very various experiences having worked in commercial bank but also having worked in EBRD one of the big players in financing these related areas and now very recently also stepped into the pension games founder of People's Pension Fund Tullava so don't know back, welcome having such a diverse group of people around the table here so maybe it would be nice to really understand and create some common ground that the please just make a small tour of Table and explain you know what's if you're talking about green financing what are you talking about and what's your interest in this area so maybe we'll start from here Steven well first of all it's a pleasure to be here in Estonia and have an opportunity to talk about this issue having worked in Estonia quite a bit in my past particularly when I was with the World Bank it's a pleasure to see a number of colleagues I work with quite closely on the energy sector and also on the environmental questions more broadly in the Baltic Sea I think this morning we really started out very well because we had two really key things put on the table in that first discussion with the current minister and the previous minister and they're really related to the whole question we're here to talk about and that is the most critical shift is a shift in mindset how we think about things is the real basis to make this transition and I would argue I have an optimistic background that's what you see people involved in multilateral development banks and bilateral development organizations having an optimistic background I think we are now making that mind shift and I'll talk about that a bit secondly we also have to realize we've got challenges and these challenges involve contradictions Estonia is one of the most advanced economies in many ways it's an intellectual center of innovation it's incredible what's happened here in the last 25 years but you have a challenge everyone's been very open about it you've got a big program for renewables you have tremendous amount of renewable energy resources here and you still have what to do with the reliability and security of your supply which ties you back into the whole question of what to do with oil shale which clearly will be discussed for the next several days in the parallel conference it's happening so when one looks at this what do you do in reality what we're in now is a transition if you look at what's happening with the multilateral development banks and the bilateral development organizations you're seeing very, very rapid mobilization of financial resources to support climate change with energy transition folded into that there's about 25 billion dollars a year now that are being put forward by the various large multilateral development banks and that's growing many of them are setting targets but that is possible because the governments and the private sector have chosen to change their approach and are also requesting on demand that investments be made so I think what we're seeing is motion I think what's also important is we just had the G20 summit hosted by China many people look at the sustainable development goals they look at the Paris agreement but I think the G20 summit hosted by China is very important because that's where the major report of the G20 green finance study group was made and that report very much focuses on how do we really mobilize funding on a voluntary basis for voluntary actions if you look at what's happened with the sustainable development goals and the Paris agreement there's a lot of focus on voluntary decisions voluntary identification of what to do to move forward and that voluntary approach is something we saw embraced in G20 so this has had a big role on effect with China and other developing economies major developing economies stepping up and joining underlying this is a view that one of the major instruments will be green bonds which I think my two colleagues are much better placed than I to discuss Okay, thank you very much Dunno Stephen was mentioning the voluntary aspect Do you see, does it, I think it resonates with you It's actually, thanks that you just brought it to a level I was already afraid a little bit that you started and at such a high level or the discussion that I certainly, I'm not qualified to comment on a global agreement but the reason I'm probably here was I had a chance this beginning of this year to work with environmental investment center with Lowry and his colleagues devising ways how the Estonian governments agency can use their money better for supporting green finance and energy efficiency and already prior to that I always had a feeling so when looking at the recent developments in the market that there are two great obstacles now coming up the way of green finance and energy efficiency one is that just looking around you see that a lot of stuff has been done so the easy apartment blocks the outer walls being kind of insulated perhaps even windows changed and that's one so these were the easy gains they also probably for the cost of paint already or the benefit of having a nicer appearance they paid for themselves and the second thing is obviously the oil and energy and gas price the natural gas prices have fallen 30, 50, even perhaps more percent so I'm an excelled person so then in my model obviously the hurdle goes much higher so and together with the environmental investment center we looked basically how the chance to brainstorm together with them we visited several foreign institutions who deal with green finance like EBIB, IB green investment bank several private like bridges ventures, et cetera also in Estonia to discuss with the people who actually are supposed to kind of employ these funds and basically came to more or less two conclusions that one is that despite that it's getting harder and it's perhaps less profitable it's still all these projects are business projects so that eventually they pay for themselves and so given from that one what the government should or the government found that perhaps given it's again it's even though some projects longer some projects shorter payback time they still pay themselves back in most cases not in all but in most cases and so that we could stretch the about 50 million program the government grant into at least 120 million investment program with the help of loans for example we looked at more complicated instruments like the ESCOs, et cetera but I think the conclusion we came to that you don't even have to be EIB type very kind of financial engineering guru to do sort of like public private participation projects even a simple combination of grants and loans would do so I hope Estonian Investment Central will implement some of the projects and probably it helps to kind of shape the mindset as well when they set new policies and as Lauri mentioned in my new role as mobilizing Estonian Pension Savings I see also from our members side that there's actually there is a demand for long term investment projects and there's which should be also taken into account that people I think it wouldn't be wrong for them to wish that part of their long term savings were somehow directly aligned to the well-being of their kind of environment and so the government should make when they invest some of their money into the project in a business projects of supporting green energy and energy efficiency then they should always make room for pension funds as well because that's what people want thank you Alan so I think it's it's really a good time for you to step in and say that is it a hot topic for you is it shareholders do they want this is it you know are looking at these international kind of agreements and political things or it's a business case or it's a combination now there has not been a miracle so it's still so that investors won't return that has not changed but that something has changed because if you just look at the development it's it's pretty fantastic I mean last year was the first year when there was invested more in renewable capacity than in the old world capacity that's fantastic so despite that it will take us up to 2030 before actually CO2 emission has peaked so but there is a change so why is this change there and I think there are three drivers and we should use those drivers now because there's an open window now it might close again so let's look at these three drivers one is that is has already been said particularly by Charlie the technology now technology has changed in such a fantastic way that now you can actually even without substitution you can even get business cases now where at least in some parts of the world you can get solar energy and you can get wind energy without governments having to put extra money to support this and that's of course fantastic you couldn't do that a couple years ago now even in areas like like UK for instance you can now start to to build solar farms now there's still some government money supported behind it but it has improved a lot and you can expect that the next two to three years it will improve even further so technology is really supporting us here then secondly and that's from an investment point of view extremely important what about the alternative now the alternative is that we invest our money in what we call bonds and fixed income and the return on that has gone into zero not even low but zero and what happens and that's the whole purpose of this monetary policy that is that the people like Tory and me we have to move to put money somewhere else and then we look for excess return somewhere and this excess return that you can obtain in some of these let's say environmental friendly investments are actually becoming attractive so before you might say okay four five percent was not attractive now it starts to become attractive and that's a fantastic driver the last driver is in private investments now we can talk about government's investment but private investments you actually see that there are single persons behind and they are interested it is true that they want to to to optimize the return but they want to do it in I called it in a responsible way they do actually want to earn clean return so to speak and you can still optimize your return in a decent way and that's an enormous change in behavior among investors that they actually want the business models to be sustainable and that requires from an energy point of view that it is pretty clean energy renewable energy behind whatever business models you have so there is a really important change going on and I think we should do whatever we can to support that change because there is this open window right now but talking about the green bonds I mean it's also well it requires a certain level of sophistication in terms of and regulatory environment and offering so do you see is it something that will you know that's the Juncker package and green bonds in Europe developing fast and look rather it seems that there is more money kind of waiting and looking for projects than actually projects to be financed does it create kind of inequality or does it support more advanced economies or is it relevant also in transition and developing economies well I can start at least but you could say green bonds is a buzzword I mean it's just something you call it to get to gain some interest etc there is no clear definition World Bank has put up a definition but there's no criteria if you breach this definition you can still distribute it as a green bond so but the important thing is that there is a there's a bond which is a loan and then you can that's one kind of investment and the other one is actually that you own the project you own the the field the wind field or the wind farm or you own the solar plant etc so there's ownership and loans that's important in all these green bond loans there are very often a kind of guarantee behind somewhere so governments are not going to totally away quite often they are in with some kind of guarantee and that is complicated because sometimes the guarantee is not done by the government but by a government owned unit and because a unit or company is owned by a government doesn't mean that it cannot go bankrupt it can and so you have a very interesting idea who's actually behind these bonds but that's a bond where you basically get your four and a half percent and that's it then you have what is maybe more interesting is is that you can actually buy entire units you can buy a windmill production unit and then you make an agreement with the utility company and they here comes important thing they guarantee a minimum price for a pretty long period often fifteen twenty years despite the world price of energy you can expect to get this return so what does it actually mean it means that governments commit for the future it doesn't cost money right now but it costs commitment for the future and this is this interesting thing does that go on the on the balance sheet of governments sometimes not but they have committed for the future and that's why there is a political risk in this which which can be debated but this is how it works so so there are you will always have some kind of government influential into into this steven how do you see the green bonds uh... password or is this green financing somehow replacing complementing or it's actually the same that intergovernmental banks and organizations have been doing to see an actual content change that can i think i think they're too they're two issues here one is is green bonds something that's being discussed but not well defined uh... i believe it is being widely discussed and not well-defined however their structures uh... within the international system be at the initiative of the world bank that uh... was just being spoken about or the work of this g twenty working group which the world banks heavily involved in uh... as well as a major european financial institutions to try to come up with a definition and a characterization of what is a green bond so there's no doubt people are seeing this as a way forward what format will take will continue to evolve but clearly this is a term that's being used but it's like sustainable development there's a continuum but i think in this case is gonna have to be defined because it's an instrument that's going to be used financially so it's evolving then you've got the question of the investment programs the more classic one's finance let's say by the world bank the european bank for reconstruction and development european investment bank agent development or the two new banks in asia the new development bank or the asian infrastructure investment bank if you look at those lending portfolios of all those organizations they've got a lot more work where they're looking at energy generation which is more friendly uh... conservation being heavily invested in because you get good returns on conservation uh... issues of supporting renewables uh... issues of supporting integration uh... you heard about that uh... in the discussions earlier today how do you integrate the energy system so you've got greater flexibility so now if you look at the current investment programs they don't look like the kinds you had ten fifteen twenty years ago they actually look different and then going back to the discussion we had earlier this afternoon about energy planning i think that's where the gap is the energy planning is a real challenge historically uh... what you did is you did optimization investment models the WASP model was the one the world bank used to use and as charlie described it it said how many power plants are going to need how many hydro facilities and then you come up with a mix and you'd use that to generate uh... the investment programming it's much much more complicated in some countries developed emerging market economies and developing countries have various skill levels and various ways to meet this challenge so i would say the investment patterns are changing but the planning patterns are changing but there's a big gap on the planning side that needs to be addressed and that's going to make it very interesting for all the professionals in this room there's plenty of work to do in the future from the experience i'm now having uh... people's pension fund and uh... and talking to uh... not really the retail investors who are who are investing long term in their various projects uh... just uh... i come to the you know perhaps is a not inappropriate the comparison but uh... uh... defining green bond you know probably it's complicated but on the other hand uh... it's like with this uh... u.s. judge who uh... was you know was looking at the definition of porn and says that you know i know when i see it so like and uh... i think for most people when they see something which is a green bond they will recognize it you know definition or or not and uh... for them you know perhaps you know again i'm speculating here a bond uh... issued by for example a stone and energy company you know with the pictures of these ash mountains in uh... in the region where i come from uh... you know maybe doesn't quite you know even if it fits the definition in my not not in their portfolio it wouldn't qualify as a as a green bond but also you know it's it's just a hypothesis but i somehow uh... i got the feeling that if the people have a choice you know personally okay they see two bonds you know perhaps even with an equal interest rate or maybe not not not a big difference they would just prefer something which they would presume is green and uh... and if uh... if that choice is made to people if actually they have a real possibility to choose then uh... then maybe we would have uh... more green finance you know maybe people actually actually if if if you ask them what kind of return you want from your pension fund and they you know type into this calculator and it needs to be five percent uh... if they have a choice again like uh... so where you know where do you want me to put your pension money now like is it kind of truly like a green project or is it the this kind of uh... you know burning ash mountain so then they would say oh yeah fine put it in the green project so and uh... they would adjust their return expectations uh... accordingly maybe it's not that simple how it works but uh... i somehow uh... i think the people uh... they would be content with uh... lower yield on uh... on something which they kind of uh... feel it's truly green we've talked a lot about bonds here and uh... multinational uh... banks and so on but you know we have companies offering green products we have consumers wanting organic something something whatever it is uh... if it's organic they want it but for example why don't we see commercial banks offering green loans dedicated products this i mean in your work have you have you seen that there is discussion there is the trend of dedicated you know green or energy efficiency credit lines coming out though it's it's not an issue no yeah yeah i can try at least to answer it i mean the uh... there are different players in the market you basically have the private sector with commercial banks and and and you have savings funds and and and some pension life companies are also private and you have what the public is doing so if it's of course that's a more governmental priority if you look at the banks the banks are under new regulation now which is very tough which is called basal basal rules and the basal rules they require that if you do a long-term loan to someone who has not got a top rating at the rating agency then it cost you a lot of capital to give that money out you have to put that capital equity capital aside and then in order to pay that equity capital the return on that the rate on the loan will be ridiculously high so that market doesn't exist just because they don't want but it simply becomes too expensive then it makes much more sense to ask the the long-term savers which are investment funds it's pension companies and life insurance companies can you provide some long-term financing for these renewable projects and and the answer as we talked about is becoming yes they they will so so banks can organize alone but they can't open their treasuries and start to to give you money or only if that would be a some sort of public guarantee on these issues yeah i mean that's a that's a different story then if there's a guarantee it costs less on the on the capital but then you miss a bit the point if if if you you have to use the situation where that's the difference with where i call a commitment which is is more is better done on the price we commit the price of energy etc and because that doesn't have to go to the balance sheet of the government one of the things you really see in this is part of what this g-20 process has been so profoundly focused on is there's a finite amount of public money which is going to be put up uh... whether it's being administered by the green climate fund uh... whether it's being administered by the multilateral banks bilateral donors it's still public funds and they're using those to leverage uh... lending or to leverage grants and then you're also getting the case the multilateral banks guarantees from the government for repayment as it as it occurs whether you're an estonian or whether you're an american whether you're danish there's just a finite amount of money taxpayers can put up for international types of programs and so what people are saying is how do we get the private sector involuntarily and how do we also get these funding groups like uh... was just being discussed the pension funds these type of parties to play a bigger role in this so you've got a bigger financial base in order to undertake these uh... and that's why it's an exciting development but it's also one that's going to go on for four or five years at least before it totally stabilizes and it's clear so there's great innovation which is fabulous but also it's something which will be continuously redefined i think as we go forward in the next few years but i can bring the example from uh... again from our discussions and uh... within an estonian environmental uh... investment agency uh... so we discovered that there's uh... on the micro level again on kind of just a small you know small medium enterprises there's actually plenty of energy efficiency investment that's such an energy saving that can be done uh... but uh... you know companies have plenty of other stuff to do as well and uh... it's still even you know for most of the company is not there is not the top priority for for people so you need kind of some incentive to bring it at the same times you know the banks would be you know in many cases willing also to you know perhaps to fund such projects you know if uh... if company has just overall acceptable credit uh... but again we're talking about companies here which actually never reached a rating agency so therefore from the basal perspective they're all the same you know same type of uh... companies uh... uh... same capital charge and uh... we thought about this uh... you know perhaps uh... you know even uh... just a sticker would help you know if we would kind of set up the terms which kind of qualify a loan a green loan for example and uh... which you know banks you know in preliminary discussions looked interested that uh... it's very good to say that you know okay we are giving out green loans and uh... so you know if you define a list so uh... of of activities that can be can be funded with that you know perhaps give in uh... you know some small price as well in terms of like some kind of voucher for uh... for uh... doing that kind of project uh... uh... you know voucher again i mean some money some a grant uh... then uh... you could avoid this uh... you know that there wouldn't be any excess charge uh... so the banks would be still doing the same thing what they do but the companies would be presented with uh... two options one is doing the old way and the other one is doing the kind of green way and uh... you know maybe wouldn't wouldn't cost extra you know perhaps the small government voucher which would uh... which would be added to this project it would make the project a little bit more expensive you know maybe because it's done in a green way uh... but the companies would be willing to do it so i mean would be interesting to see if this uh... if this thing gets implemented and uh... at the external investment uh... environmental agencies as we are getting closer to five o'clock which means we would have to end then i just wanted uh... your kind of concluding view or your personal take we've seen global estonian regional in all of countries that are very high ambitious plans uh... what's your view uh... will be run out uh... of money or projects uh... financial projects which are we lacking at the moment or actually or will be deliver smoothly all all of it uh... that is being in those plans i would say people here have a tremendous uh... imagination they're able to innovate they're able to adapt so for country like estonia i think you're going to do very well uh... for countries that have less flexibility and less vision and less pragmatism uh... that's going to be a bigger challenge because here you know you've already heard their small projects can be done we heard about the housing i've seen that housing a number of times there are a lot of things you can do in estonia you've got policy interventions and investment actions that are manageable within the context of the country so in many ways uh... if you take the oil shale challenge off the table most of the other things here are doable through a sustained commitment and through a willingness and ability to continuously adjust how you're dealing with this that's my view uh... yeah looking at the printing press and the money certainly doesn't seem to seem to be uh... doesn't seem to end uh... yes but yeah obviously the question is uh... you know if the willingness uh... at some point runs out uh... you know i hope uh... i hope not and uh... in that sense i agree with steven that uh... estonia is in a in a great place because it is not that many middle layers between you know the actual people and uh... who are going to benefit from a better environment and uh... and the decision makers so uh... i i do really hope that's and also it takes a very little you know just uh... you know if we just change the decision not to invest into next uh... oilshale power plant and we already turned this balance i don't know hundred percent yeah i i i think they you'll have what i call them micro level and micro level now micro level i totally agree a lot of interesting things has been done and will be done because this is a very creative country now at macro level i think i think you have to look at some of the other countries around estonia because you could say in let's say the country where i come from danmark and the u k we we we the sun is not shiny hoes yeah and the high hydra energy we don't have because we are flat like like estonia is flat so what do we do and uh... they have there has been a long-term commitment to renewables and to these huge transitions so now for instance in danmark we will most likely this year pass that fifty percent of energy of what will be come from renewables that's a pretty high number uh... so the with these long-term commitments things can be done the most advanced country in europe and this is the u k they have actually done quite a lot first the first projects cost the government a lot of money too much but now they have actually found an equilibrium in how much actually to commit and i think it it it's it's about getting out on the dirt and curve do some projects learn from it and then you do another one okay thank you uh... it's a pity that we have to end here but uh... at least we had forty very good minutes and and we will also have uh... actually the buffet as i said to continue with this discussion so uh... as a uh... thank you i will have also a small back for you thank you very much thank you so uh... and now we are really getting close and closer to this magical buffet yes you are you are but uh... i'm pretty sure you will be very short and very on the point as always so it's pleasure to welcome here joan uh... who is our executive director of s c i uh... and also as i said in the beginning of the day we will have pre-students joining us it will be your sub-handling uh... who actually uh... got a third place in student uh... competition nega what which was competition for the ideas of of how to uh... save resources and energy and now you are in uh... european final of uh... of uh... green business ideas kick climate yes the final exactly just yet more like in the estonian final or or or i'm sure you will be in the final but you're on the right track so uh... good luck in this competition and then we have uh... on the court of from academy of arts joining us and green congo from telling the university of technology i will now step aside leave room for you joan okay thank you very much can you hear me it's okay so it is not right now it's so lorry to really uh... introduce us as the barrier between you know the the audience and the buffet and it's a typical level and now when we have the young panel they give us ten conclusions and so on and lorry was quite new uh... in his position as the center director of tally and so he asked me can you draw some conclusion yeah i like to do that and then he met me in stock when he came over and after spending a week with me he said i will invite three students to draw some conclusions and maybe you can moderate instead i don't know how to interpret this but i want to say if i can't if i may that i think it's been an extraordinary afternoon really a lot of interesting discussions a lot of focus on estonia although we had a broader outlook in this final panel and i must say that you know listening to the challenges here in estonia i think we should recognize and this is the nice nice thing with agenda twenty thirty and sdgs they are universal they are interconnected we all have our transition challenges even in sweden we have some risks sometimes because we end up at number one in all these rankings we have huge challenges still we all have our lock ins we all have our policy incongherences and challenges really so i think a lot of what you do here in estonia is also something that we can learn from and that is actually key to remember that's my conclusion was short okay three sentences so let's let's move to this uh... eminent panel they have been asked to listening to you know today to the presentation so on different parts uh... of the seminar i guess you are like good academics you don't care about uh... instructions so basically you can comment basic on anything that you find interesting let me to start with you train uh... electric power engineering at tally university so i think that the transport sector is one of your key areas transport has been one of the areas we discussed today what are your some take away things that you take to the seminar where do you see challenges well i think uh... estonia uh... there's uh... so many challenges and it's uh... it's uh... really hard uh... but uh... uh... right now uh... as uh... they will mention this uh... road pricing i think uh... right now in estonia it's it's not maybe it's not working because uh... first of all we should have this uh... uh... high quality roads and uh... this uh... we can uh... apply this prices if uh... if uh... traveling is uh... more convenient to people uh... they can travel faster from point a to point b then i think then that they are ready to to pay some taxes but uh... right now i think uh... this uh... road taxing policy is maybe making uh... this uh... regular people more more angry and i think uh... first of all we should uh... put our money into improving our roads and uh... improving the connections uh... not only in estonia but with neighboring countries also so what what do you think is uh... key for the government in terms of making sure that you do uh... have uh... have the people with you in terms of a transition to a more sustainable transport system in that sense what are the key things there in order to move that forward you think and not have people upset about things have paying high taxes uh... i think uh... first of all uh... government should uh... maybe ask uh... regular people opinion and uh... to see what kind of ideas come out and uh... maybe do some more uh... some research work uh... what can we do about it and uh... how to present it to people more ownership there uh... anne you work uh... you are a student in interior architect architecture at the estonian academy of art so uh... we quite often talk about the fact that we are building ourselves into unsustainability to a certain extent we are locking ourselves into regardless if you talk about energy system or houses actually so architecture is it's really important here i mean how we are planning the next generation of infrastructure moving forward and also re retrofitting the existing one what are your your perspectives uh... in terms of the discussions we've had here for instance on energy efficient housing twenty twenty and so on yes you're absolutely true architecture is really important uh... in the environmental issue regarding the fact that it's using uh... a huge amount of energy electricity water and all different kinds of materials and if we look at the natural resources uh... in fact we shouldn't be building at all we should just stop architecture but the fact is that urbanization is uh... uh... growing and uh... also the population is growing so we need to continue to build and as mentioned in the housing uh... lecture uh... what is important uh... particularly in estonia and also other european countries is renovation so uh... the question how to uh... use buildings that are already built and how to make them either uh... save energy or even produce energy so i think um... a solution would be to uh... really concentrate on uh... innovations and also the fact that um... estonia as a center of uh... technological innovations i think um... we should also concentrate on finding new ways to build of course also finding ways to uh... find all the money and uh... findings but also um... i think there like there is a gap on uh... on just the question how and i think we really have the possibilities to do it because uh... there are a lot of uh... yes creative people and the boundaries are quite open um... so i think this is really uh... one of the things to concentrate on and uh... we should sort of rethink architecture uh... and uh... yes use the fact that uh... we are uh... technologically really improved and just uh... yes work on that and concentrate on uh... those issues um... yes rethink architecture i think that's a good tweet uh... you know it can cause some uh... up people i guess if we find the right channels there just to to ask also i mean what i find fascinating when you're looking at many of the graphs uh... from estonia is of course you have all the graph starting nineteen ninety ninety one and then you have a big dip in in a transition to uh... independence and then you see a lot of graphs going up again in terms of how you you know use resources and so on i mean there are aspirations of people in terms of the housing and we are looking quite often at cities you know there are different challenges there environmental social how do you deal with that as a student looking at social dimensions environmental dimensions do you see conflict sometimes between aspirations of people what they would like to have in terms of housing and uh... in a city vis-a-vis you know being resource efficient and environmentally friendly and so on yeah i think this is something also to work on because well people know what they want but i think our environment is not always included in it so they sort of um... put it aside or uh... as mentioned within the different conferences all the people are not aware of that so i think this is something to still work on um... regarding architecture and or interior architecture so um... yes i think this is something to to work on to look further into yes okay uh... joseph you have you are a student in something that obviously must be very exciting because i'm not sure exactly what it is uh... cyber physical system engineering my god that sounds modern in my ears uh... and obviously also in a competition that i think uh... you have been behind partly uh... as well uh... lauri the negawatts uh... so you look at it uh... energy uh... and what what is what is your take i mean energy is obviously an issue that seems to cause sometimes some tension in this country energy issues i could feel that what is your perspective of the discussions my perspective well it's it's it's actually all this whole seminar with it it had many different takes on on on energy and then low carbon energy uh... so it's it's really hard to uh... to uh... concluded all in a few sentences but really might take on energy is that uh... that how how we could better the world in the future is that many many of the government in the world is especially in the in the uh... in europe uh... have have made it really really easy for uh... especially on people to come up with ideas and then gather some kind of funding or or whatever and then take their ideas to the next level and usually those ideas well if you look at them on a small scale then they have a really really small impact on the environment and uh... and and and making the world a little pace but if you escalate them uh... to the whole world then they really can have a a significant impact impact there so so that that is really what one of my key motivations why why well i am i i'm doing what i'm doing right now and then trying to trying to cut some kind of uh... energy consumption aspects of of of of people's everyday lives you you are obviously an inventor also in a way because you have this smart vent uh... idea that is about energy efficiency in schools if i understand correctly uh... when when you when you're looking at policies then uh... to really take this into scale and and really you know managed to to penetrate in society with these kind of inventions what are the policy barriers that you meet as a young inventors start-up company you get some financial support obviously but that's not the same thing as having the right policies in place and what is what do you see there they're definitely our our policies that that might become an obstacle when when when trying to take it to a larger scale but but really the the problem is trying to uh... make and a regular person understand that that they need to take some actions to uh... to improve their energy efficiency and and as well as their their living conditions uh... but that's a that's a a long talk i'm not going to do that so i'm just going to bring a a a short example uh... the picture you saw earlier about the the large regions we have in estonia in larger cities with huge block of flats built in when we weren't independent just yet uh... the uh... so i live in one of those as well in tar two and uh... something like last year we uh... we applied for a a critics loan that a nice young lady talked about earlier i i i unfortunately can't remember your name and uh... and then we had a uh... the whole building come together and and talk about what we should do with the money and uh... what i definitely said that maybe make the house more energy efficient or or put some solar panels on the roof or something but uh... i know we we renovate the staircases so so so so it's sometimes a bit tricky there anyway we are we are not really the barriers between the buffet and the wine and and all that but uh... i would i was still you know because lauri didn't give us more than ten minutes if you should stick to time so still and this is a very nasty question to you but i don't care if you really had a chance to give your prime minister a piece of advice in your respective areas that would uh... make you know many of these curves we are looking at moving to twenty thirty move a bit faster i think there are some of the prime minister office here also is you know it's not only for death that fair here what would be an example of an advice what would you like to see from your respective areas an advice to the government to make the transition it can be big it can be small but just give an example what about in the transport well i think uh... that first of all we should uh... include more scientists uh... i like that and uh... we should consider this uh... lot of opportunities that we have uh... based on uh... new right now developing technologies that we should uh... look into this and uh... yeah i think we are really missing the missing the real science and uh... and new developing technologies okay we're missing opportunities there so really just get that on board in the political process so how about in architecture how do you get the shifts move faster i think if i would say uh... i would go uh... sort of in the same direction which means uh... i think we should also uh... um... put energy into innovation and science because this is really the uh... the start of new uh... new possibilities and uh... new ways of uh... thinking and doing architecture and so it means uh... evolving universities for example where often the very good and innovative ideas come from and uh... then have the government just to as a backup to support them but really to focus on them because i i believe this is the future and there are a lot of people willing to do and uh... so the possibilities are there excellent thank you very much i'm as all gonna come out of my field and agree with tina and any and then say that uh... that maybe the government should uh... encourage entrepreneurs to uh... to join with universities and then scientists to try and make the the ideas and research is they do to make them a a real thing not just an article in in nature or or or whatever that's good thank you very much i think that is really a good uh... conclusion from the three younger panellists and they have given us a couple of very sharp recommendations as well i'm sure do we have any government people in here yeah there are no no no they're still there and it's not just just anyone i know that that's a good channel i know that i already learned that that's really good very strong recommendations you have a chance to discuss this even more we are coming to an end we will soon applaud this eminent panel what i think it's nice coming from this panel coming from the panel before also about mindsets that you said even it's a lot about people in transitions we tend sometimes to become a bit technical in our discussions we forget that it's actually we who should transfer somehow and that can feel a bit uncomfortable uh... and people are strange mall in falcon markets of famous uh... scientists actually in sweden she concluded after i mean she's now ninety two and still active but she's still concluded in her youth when she was around seventy five that uh... facts are facts but perception is reality and i think that is uh... you know very close to how it is so we have to work with people and i should say that an exciting area in s i not least you know besides all these other science that we are doing is actually an increased focus mindsets on people on behavioral and behavioral changes because that is also behind driving development new business ideas that that i was talking about if we don't have people behind ideas we will never have the green bonds so every sector must be innovative and that means really focusing on people and the future generations so in twenty thirty you will inherit the world now you will inherit the world still with some challenges i'm sure but hopefully uh... by then we have also taken some of the steps that you have outlined here today and we are in a better shape than maybe so these graphs are pointing at so thank you first to the panel uh... second thank you to the uh... audience i'm i'm fascinated in sweden we would have lost half the audience uh... by this time but i realized that this idea about the buffet and drinks afterwards tend to keep people we should learn from that that's a good thing so a big applaud to the audience for staying along with us here uh... third thank you then this is the third one to lauri and the center for really organizing this seminar today i think it's been extraordinary and i hope that we will have these kind of interactions between scei centers and the broader communities actually in the countries where we have centers also in the future so big thank you to you lauri and the team around you but then the final one also because there is always as always you know there is someone really working very hard behind quite often it's a center of the register and yes it's mine i've done all this but you know that it's not true you know i i know that it's always someone behind there really doing the work in this case it's helen start it come on stand up so thank you very much for that helen working really hard now it is a buffet there is some wine and you need to continue to think work and be innovative that's the only requirement we have so thank you thank you very much for this contribution you've earned your back johan as well yes thank you and i actually i wanted to say that you were not a barrier but i wanted people to have the best possible first course entree so you were just really get us into the mood for thank you