 good morning colleagues and friends promises promises so on this screen you can see some of the sustainable goals and targets that countries of the world will come into achieving by 2030 as we now leave the era of the millennium development goals and enter the post 2015 sustainable development era I say welcome me to because it's not quite yet a done deal the decision will be taken in September as we heard and some countries and actors have been insisting that we need to cut this current set of 17 goals and 169 targets make some big changes but others have been insisting that they should be left just as they are so sustainable development Johan called it the whole bloody thing I would suggest it's a really love and hate word for many of us I think some of us love it because it gives us hope vision and it's a glue in world politics in a way some of us hate it because it's just too broad too vague and doesn't provide a clear roadmap for making tough tradeoffs and choices likewise some of us sees that a technical quite harmless concept that safe in the hands of bureaucrats corporate divisions but others see it as a really contested idea very politically charged idea that can have significant implications in terms of the distribution of costs and benefit across societies nevertheless it has stuck around now for some decades and this latest manifestation of sustainable development is what we're gonna talk about now so whether these goals come from a group and was made in Rio in 2012 to develop these goals as part of the post 2015 agenda which also includes this negotiation track on finance for development that we heard about the conference coming up in July and also dialogue on technology facilitation so an open working group was established consisting of 30 countries to develop a proposal which they presented in August last year and that has now been negotiated among all the member states a zero draft was actually presented just two days ago which will continue to be negotiated until September so there has been intense debate not just among the member states but the whole bigger community over the past couple of years around the definition of these goals and there is currently a lot of hype around 2015 as this decision making year decisive opportunity but in the next hour we really like to look what will happen and what needs to happen when the rubber hits the road so we want to turn this from a post 2015 discussion agenda to a pre 2030 action agenda so we'll start this conversation with three short talks by SEI colleagues most of them will first give a little background and some of the principles and thinking that went into the process then we have Nina writes who will share some findings from looking at implementation prospects on the ground from two different countries and finally we'll have Chris West who will talk about the role of business so the millennium development goals were sometimes criticized for excluding the business sector not realizing the huge impact it has on development so what could the business community do this time and then the second part of this session will be a panel discussion where we will have some different perspectives on implementation and ask this central question what could the SEGs actually change so with this introduction I'd like to invite Mons to the stage he's research director of SEI and has been leading SEI's involvement in the independent research forum excuse me the IRF which has been organizing seven retreats for negotiators in New York over the past two years which has given them an informal space for dialogue and also provided knowledge inputs and he also contributed to a major scientific assessment of the goals and targets coordinated by the International Council for Science thank you also so just two days ago the UN machine