 Hello everyone, welcome to this HLPF side event titled Paris minus the STGs, a formula for inequality, insights on effective policy coherence in Kenya. My name is Zoha Shao and I'm a researcher at the Stockholm Environment Institute and very happy to have you all here on board. We have several panelists and speakers joining us today and I'll just introduce them all to you now. We have Ambassador Magnus Lennartson, who is a Deputy Permanent Representative with the Permanent Mission of Sweden to the United Nations. We have Gabriela Iacobuta, who is a researcher with the German Development Institute, DIE. We have with us Phillip Osano, who is the Acting Center Director for SEI's Africa Center. We've got Stephen Ottiambo, who is a Chief Economist with the National Treasury and Planning in Kenya. And finally we've got Ken Olu, who is the Technical Lead for STGs with the Council of Governors in Kenya. So great to have you all on board. We have a pretty packed agenda for today. I will start with this welcome and introduction and afterwards hand over to Ambassador Lennartson to give some opening remarks. I will then present some of our key findings from this project and then hand over to Gabriela, who will present some insights on just transitions from three of our case studies in Germany, South Africa and the Philippines. The rest of the event will then be a deep dive into Kenya, given that Kenya is due to submit its VNR at the series HLPF. So we'll start with Phillip Osano presenting some of our key findings from the Kenya case study. And then we'll have interventions from Stephen and Ken to give a Kenyan government perspective on some of these findings as well. And finally we'll have the last 30 minutes saved for discussion in Q&A. So I do encourage you to publish and add any of your questions directly in the chat box and hopefully we'll be able to get to all of them. So I will now hand over to the Ambassador for his opening remarks. Thank you. Sorry, I can't be on video image during this through my telephone. So let me just start by thanking the Stockholm Environment Institute for the invitation to this interesting and timely event. The topics for discussion are very relevant to this year's high level political forum and they resonate with Sweden's key messages for HLPF this year. We are deeply concerned about the climate, but we also worry about growing inequality and exclusion. I would like to highlight just two key issues from a Swedish perspective that are brought out also I think by the research presented by SEI. And the first is that the NDCs and the SDGs need to be part of the same package, translating the 2030 agenda into policy at the national level should always go hand in hand with implementing the Paris Agreement. These two historical multilateral framework agreements are interconnected and interdependent. The 2030 agenda and the Paris Agreement were negotiated in parallel and adopted in 2015 within a few months of each other. The former is a voluntary agreement endorsed by world leaders. The latter is an agreement reached by the parties of the UNFCCC and the legally binding international treaty. The SDG 13 on tackling climate change and its impacts make reference to the lead role of UNFCCC, but it also embeds action to tackle climate change firmly in the 2030 agenda itself. Likewise, there are multiple targets elsewhere in the SDGs which bear upon climate change mitigation adaptation and resilience building. It reflects the recognition by UN negotiators at the time that many global goals from poverty eradication and ending hunger to conserving biodiversity and protecting our oceans will be unattainable if climate change is left unchecked. And also the recognition that going forward actions to achieve social and economic objectives need to be aligned with climate change objectives. One of the biggest challenges facing governments in coming years is to reconcile policy agendas aimed at achieving and sustaining high standards of well-being of their people with the need to move swiftly and decisively to decarbonize their economies. At the same time, they will need to factor the necessity of climate change adaptation into future development plans. This is not easy, nor is it obvious. The pandemic has highlighted the need for policy coherence and when we speak about building back better, we should be clear about the complementarity between the two agendas. Last month, the Swedish government presented a bill to parliament to accelerate action and delivery of the SDGs. We have set an overarching goal to achieve the 2030 agenda with an emphasis on policy coherence for sustainable development which spans across different policy areas. We are weaving the SDGs into our national fabric. Sweden also aims to become the world's first fossil-free welfare state reaching net zero emissions by 2045 at the latest. My second point, we cannot lose sight of the goal of leaving no one behind. Leaving no one behind is both an overarching objective of the 2030 agenda and a prerequisite for achieving the 17 SDGs. Staying focused on this important objective will help reduce inequalities. We need smart and sensitive policies. While some climate policies could, if not properly designed, adversely impact the poor, climate policies can also be explicitly designed and targeted with a view to benefit the disadvantaged. So the importance of leaving no one behind, of course, has come under sharp light by the pandemic, which clearly disproportionately affects people in vulnerable situations. As we stand on the cusp of the final decade of action to achieve the SDGs and as we mobilize for a urgently needed, more ambitious climate action, we need to continue to pay close attention to a number of key issues. How would unmitigated climate change impact the prospects for achieving various sustainable development goals? How can actions to achieve one or more of the SDGs be designed to attain climate benefits simultaneously and cost effectively? How can actions to address climate change, whether mitigation or adaptation, advance progress towards other SDGs? How can the 2030 agenda provide a framework also for climate policies and actions, which ensures that no one is left behind? And what lessons are we learning about the benefits and challenges of more closely aligning the implementation of these two agendas? How can we mitigate potential conflicts and create positive synergies? I hope and expect that the discussion today will bring us a little closer to the answers. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ambassador, for those very insightful comments. I think you very rightly highlighted how the pandemic really reinforces the need to see climate changes in a more holistic manner as being more than just climate change, but related to inequality, development, health, education, jobs, and all of these different goals in a very crosscutting way. So thank you very much. Really appreciate those comments. I will now dive straight into our opening presentation, which will highlight some of the key findings from this project on policy coherence that SEI and DIE and other organizations have been collaborating on. So if you could go to the next slide, please. Thank you. I just wanted to start by highlighting some of the other work that is already being done on SEI, which looks at synergies and conflicts between climate and development goals, as well as policy coherence more broadly. For example, we have an initiative on integrated climate and development planning, which takes a quantitative perspective for assessing policy coherence. We have NDC-SDG connections, which is an online tool that was jointly developed by SEI and DIE and essentially visualizes the content of the NDCs from an SDG perspective. And we have SDG synergies, which again is an online interactive tool which is used to score how the extent of progress on one SDG target affects progress on the other SDG target to come up with this matrix. And they've just recently launched this website, which provides further information about the tool. So I do encourage you to please look into that as well. Next slide, please. So diving straight into this project, which essentially aimed to assess policy coherence and take all of these different tools and things further to look at policy coherence between Agenda 2030 and the Paris Agreement specifically at the national level and have a more national perspective. And the rationale for this really was that the goals of the Paris Agreement interact both positively and negatively with the SDGs and progress on the NDCs and climate goals can either help or hinder progress on the SDGs. So we theorize that policy coherence efforts through which countries jointly implement these two agendas would help promote synergies and mitigate or address conflicts on the ground nationally. So in terms of methodology, we had six country case studies, Germany, Kenya, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Sweden and the Philippines, and they were chosen along the matrix of level of income and domestic dependence on fossil fuels. And essentially as part of this project, we reviewed their policies and documents relating to climate change and the SDGs, for example, their national adaptation plans, their climate change policies, their NDCs and their VNRs. And we also conducted a literature review of other academic papers relating to these countries that already looked at synergies and conflicts between climate and development goals. And we also conducted a number of semi-structured interviews with different stakeholders in each of these countries. And next slide please. So our key finding here really is that inequality trade-offs are prominent in cases of incoherence. So in cases where policy incoherence is present, we find that inequality is an SPG that is particularly compromised. And this figure is quite complex and difficult to understand, so I'm not going to talk you through the whole thing, but really it's meant to demonstrate the complexity of interactions between SDGs and the climate agenda in these different countries and show how cross-cutting these goals really are when we're talking about synergies and conflicts. And what we've tried to do here in the second half of the figure is come up with these key issue areas within which these goals interact in the form of synergies or conflicts. So for example, we have the food, energy, water, land nexus, which I'm sure all of you are familiar with, but basically talks about how water availability for hydropower, for example, might conflict with water usage for other sources such as drinking water or food security. And similarly, there might be land competition between land for growing food versus land for biofuels, for example, so climate policies can therefore conflict with these overarching development agendas as well. But most importantly, the remaining three issue areas around economic growth paradigm, the urban world divide and just energy transitions really show how inequality itself appears in different guises or in different forms in the different countries that we considered. So for example, in Sri Lanka and Kenya, we found that policies to promote economic growth were at the heart of the country's development strategies. But often was conflicting with climate change agendas due to fossil fuel based development as well as exacerbating inequalities and poverty on the ground because the strickel down economics affected didn't necessarily always work. In Sweden, we had this issue of urban rural divide where climate policies that imposed fuel taxes disproportionately affected rural populations that were more car dependent and were also had lower income. And in Germany, South Africa and the Philippines, we saw this idea of just energy transitions because certain climate policies would disproportionately affect coal dependent regions which were also employed more marginalized proportions of the population as well. And my colleague Gabriela will kind of talk about that a little bit more later on. So this really showed how inequalities at the heart of a lot of these conflicts between climate policies and development policies more broadly. We go to the next slide. Another key finding that we came across out of these country case studies is that barriers to policy coherence are essentially political in nature. For example, we do have some institutional barriers related to institutional fragmentation in Sri Lanka, for example, or development plans not being aligned with climate agendas in some countries or a lack of broader stakeholder involvement in the implementation of these two agendas. But then you also have some barriers relating to the ideas that different actors hold in terms of their values and worldviews and how they perceive these two agendas. So in Sri Lanka, as I already mentioned, we had this overarching economic growth paradigm leading to inequality conflicts on the ground. In Germany, we found that employment in coal producing regions was really seen as a source of identity and social cohesion for the sector, for the population that was employed in that sector. So mitigating these conflicts made it more challenging. And in South Africa, we had this issue of vested interests where a disproportionate power was held by fossil fuel corporations, which again led to conflicts on the ground. So all of this really demonstrates the inherently political nature of policy coherence and going back to inequality raises these questions of for whom are we implementing policy coherence measures? Who does it benefit? Who wins and who loses from these efforts? And how do we consider and take into account inequality when we're really implementing these two agendas on the ground as well? Next slide, please. As part of this work, we also try to identify some strategies, very preliminary strategies or recommendations for facilitating increased policy coherence going forward. And some of the kind of somewhat obvious recommendations that come out of it is that we need to take a whole of government approach where all different levels and departments within government need to share the responsibility of implementing the 23rd agenda and the Paris Agreement as well to overcome accountability concerns. We need to have kind of greater coordination and interaction between different governmental bodies and non-governmental bodies when implementing goals. And this idea of mainstreaming climate and development goals into overarching development plans and climate plans as well as budgeting of the country overall. Furthermore, this idea of tracking progress on the alignment of climate and SDGs through monitoring, reporting and evaluation. And we can discuss how the VNRs might be a useful tool to do that. However, we do need further research on how to navigate some of these political barriers to coherence since a lot of these recommendations really relate more to the institutional factors. And there hasn't really been much work done yet on how these political factors can really be overcome. And that also raises the question on about whether they really need to be overcome. So whether we can achieve climate and development goals without policy coherence, for example, especially in countries where incoherence might be a natural state. And again raises this question of for whom are we implementing these goals? Who do they benefit? And in whose favor are we mitigating conflicts to begin with at all? Yeah, so I guess I will leave it there. You can go to the next slide. Yeah, so thank you. There's a link there, which is to our policy brief, which kind of elaborates and summarizes these findings a bit more as well. So I encourage you to read that further. And I will now hand over to Gabriella, who will present on just transitions in three of our country case studies. Good afternoon, everyone, and thank you very much, Zoha, for the earlier introduction and for the invitation. My name is Gabriella Jakobutza. I'm a researcher at the German Development Institute, and I will present to you the findings of the three case studies that were under the responsibility of the German Development Institute in the upcoming incoherence joint project with SEI and Link Shopping University. The three countries are Germany, South Africa and the Philippines. The research team at the IE was formed by myself, Ramona Hegel and Sandra Chan. And as we were looking at how these three countries are addressing the gender 2030 and the Paris Agreement, we found the theme of just transition as a common topic as a energy solution seen by all of these countries. Next, please. So we chose these three countries due to their very different socioeconomic, political and environmental backgrounds. And as we look into how the two agendas are addressed, the context of the country is quite important. So for the three countries, the economic groups were different. So Germany is a high income country, South Africa upper middle income countries and the Philippines low middle income countries. Also, they have different GDP growth rates from a very low growth rate of South Africa to the Philippines, which has the highest growth rate in the region at the moment. So high has mentioned inequality is extremely important in that sense. And here also, for instance, we have South Africa, which is one of the countries with the highest inequality at the moment and also still a high poverty head count ratio, although it has made a great progress there. The capacity, of course, is very important when it comes to the implementation of the two agendas. And here, based of a World Bank governance indicator, we see that there's also a high difference between the countries on a scale from minus 2.5 to 2.5. The countries are also addressing climate change at the moment to a different extent. Unfortunately, Germany and South Africa are both actually having highly insufficient climate action and they are not meeting the two degree temperature increase of the Paris Agreement only the Philippines does. In terms of the SDG index, Germany is a front runner in implementing the SDGs, while the other two countries still have quite some work to do next, please. So I will jump straight into Germany. The issue that was perhaps most important in Germany was the coal phase out. I said that earlier that Germany is a front runner in terms of SDG implementation, but it is still struggling on its environmental SDGs. And one of them is the climate SDG. It has the highest levels of greenhouse gas emissions in Europe and also is one of the top countries in the world. However, it has around 80,000 coal related jobs condensed in a few regions and the electricity sector is one of the key sectors for addressing greenhouse gas emissions. So it really has to tackle this part. What Germany has done recently is that it has formed a coal commission, which is a very inclusive body of around 28 actors from academia, civil society, businesses, the different states, municipalities, the regions and the communities that will be affected. And this coal commission was tasked with coming up with a strategy to phase out coal and they have put this strategy forward for facing out coal by 2038 to be reviewed later on. This involves compensation, training and support for workers, also compensation for private and industrial energy users if prices will increase, as well as putting forward very concrete projects and strategies for the regions that will be affected. In order to undergo structural transformation, and this also involves renewable expansion, for instance. So for this project, they wanted to ensure environmental compatibility, security of supply, economic efficiency, energy infrastructure, planning and legal certainty. However, 2038 is a bit late. Germany should phase out coal already by 2030 according to literature in order to be in line with the Paris Agreement is also a long time, so it has to ensure very clear responsible people and also have legal frameworks in place to ensure that political changes will not lead to blockage of the plan. Next please. And South Africa has a similar situation. It also has to phase out coal. It also has around 80,000 coal jobs concentrated in a few regions, more over 30% of its calls go to exports, which actually also pose some insecurity to the economy due to volatility in demand and prices. However, South Africa is also dealing with high poverty and inequality still and also especially a very high unemployment rates of up to 80%, especially among youth in some of the regions. One of the things that South Africa has done was to introduce a carbon tax. This has been a very long process, but it's sending a very clear signal, however, to protect some of the energy producers and consumers around 95% of the emissions are now under exemption from the tax until 2022 and the tax is rather low. To ensure that the communities are benefiting it also enacted renewable energy independent power procurement program. Which has investments in renewables and tries to ensure benefits to the community so this projects have to ensure that some of the jobs are offered to people in the community that some of the revenue goes to the community and that the community can also be shareholder. It also has done some spatial planning in order to identify areas of high economic potential and social needs where it could start investing in renewable manufacturing again supporting these communities. It also has now an inclusive dialogue on pathways for just transition where it includes actors from the trade unions, the businesses and civil society and policy makers to design better policies. It's not yet clear exactly how this will be taken into account. However, the communities are not fully involved. One of the challenges in South Africa is that there's still quite strong lobby. Scom is the biggest power producer and is mostly invested in fossil fuels and together with Cecil they cover around 50% of total emissions in South Africa. So just two producers basically. There are limited community benefits. There's poor infrastructure and quite importantly there's a lack of policy coherence between the different governance levels, but also across the sectors, but also between the state and municipalities and so on. Next slide please. In the Philippines, basically we looked at green jobs as a part of the just energy transition. The Philippines is a quite different country in that sense. It's currently struggling with energy access due to a very high, a very large number of islands, which also leads to spatial inequalities. The islands cannot always be reached by infrastructure and there's at the same time a huge increase in energy demand. It also wants to ensure inclusive growth and to address the infrastructure need. However, there has been a decrease in the share of renewables since 1990 in particular because coal and gas have come strongly in there. And still the electricity sector is a key sector for greenhouse gas emission reductions. What the Philippines has done has been to enact the Green Jobs Act, which also aims to provide training programs, but also incentives such as tax deductions and others for businesses who create green jobs. Or who bring in equipment and also social protection for lost jobs. There's also a tax reform for acceleration and inclusion. Sorry if there's a background noise. There's also a tax reform for acceleration and inclusion, which basically puts a tax on coal and they're also feeding tariffs for renewables in addition to support renewables further. It also has a national spatial strategy where it identifies infrastructure gaps and ensures more resilience to climate change in that sense. It has already produced around 200,000 decent jobs in the renewable energy sector. So in that sense, one could say that the process is working, but still there are huge issues in implementation. And it's really limited at the moment in part due to lack of political support and the current regime has made it quite clear that climate and the SDGs, especially on the environmental side are not really priority. Also, as a conflicting policy, it has a core roadmap, which implies an additional 10 gigawatts of coal capacity by 2025. It also has infrastructure and technical knowledge issues. So next and last slide. Thank you. So, yeah, to conclude, there are challenges and opportunities in implementing the two agendas. An incoherent implementation of the two agendas can pose huge problems such as job losses, regional and social and economic impacts as well. On the other hand, just transition can bring about multiple benefits to agenda 2030, such as environmental protection, green growth and green jobs, health, air and water quality, clean and reliable energy, inequalities and poverty reduction, as well as greener human settlements. So addressing a really large number of SDGs. However, the country context is very important and the extent to which the synergic solutions can be applied really depends on that. So implementation is an issue and political and public support, legal enforcement and state capacity are key there. They do need to clearly define coordinating implementation responsibility bodies, then ensuring policy coherence both vertically and horizontally. So both sectorally and across different governance levels and different actors and inclusive policy design and implementation approaches is very important to understand where the problems can occur and how to address them to limit the impact on inequality. Thank you. Thank you. I really enjoyed that presentation and I think the pandemic now especially highlights the need for a just energy transition as we see the repercussions occurring as people lose their jobs. So I think it's a very timely discussion to have right now. I will now hand over to Phillip Osano from SEI's Africa office who will present on the Kenya case study. Are you with us Phillip? We cannot hear you. Can you hear me now? Yes, perfect. Go ahead. Sorry about that. I was just saying what I'm presenting is a part of this wider study what we did for the case of Kenya, also looking at policy coherence for Kenya. Next slide please. So just by background just in terms of the introduction that was presented. So the methodology that we follow in this study actually involves sort of three steps. One was to look at the national policy across the board. The policies that speaks to development more broadly and across the relevant sectors. And the other is to do mapping of the institutions that have different responsibilities for both climate change, action implementation, and the different SDG goals. And also to look at what we touched on before from the plenary literature but also with great literature. And that critical component was actually to conduct key informal interviews. And the table that you see in the slide shows the different categories of stakeholders that we interviewed. Kenya has a devolved system of governance. So we have a national government. And then we have 47 sub national governments. We also did conduct interviews with civil society groups and the national development partners, particularly the next slide please. So just to give you an institutional framework for how climate change is dealt with in Kenya, we do have a national climate change act which was enacted in 2016. And it specifies clearly how climate change is institutionalized within the government. So at the highest level, there's a climate change council, which is actually chaired by the president. And under the climate change council, there's a climate change secretariat which coordinates the implementation of different climate change action. And we did the climate change. We did the government, all the government departments across the different ministries and departments have a climate change unit that are responsible for climate change. The national parliament is responsible for issues of legislation, including developing subsidiary legislation for different components of climate change. And then you have a monitoring and compliance unit within the national environment management authority. And within the devolved system of governance and our colleague Kenny present that we have a council of governors, which coordinate all the sub national governments in terms of a climate action. And at the same time, all the sub national governments also have climate change actions within the respective program of implementation. Because we are looking at synergies and trade off between STG, please just go to the next slide. Yeah, so we are looking at synergies and trade off between STG. So institutionally, just to help you understand how the climate change is mainstream in development planning. The sustainable development goals is implemented is domesticated in Kenya. And now what is called vision vision 2030, which is a national action plan program for development. And that action plan is kind of being a green economy strategy, which is a strategy that helps to provide a roadmap for the country to have a no carbon development pathway. And the action is climate change actions are therefore integrated within the development planning framework at the national level. The vision 2030 is implemented in five year cycles. So at the moment we are in what we call media medium time three medium time planning three and two to three twenty eighteen years to two. And that is corresponding with a national climate change action plan for twenty eighteen years to two. So you would see that that's how climate change is integrated into the development planning framework. And then of course that then also happens at the county level at the sub national level where where the vision 20 party is implemented by the county government under what is called CMP comprehensive international. And also include climate change action for each of them. Next slide please. So, in terms of what we looked at how the government has tried to localize and visualize SDGs. The government of course does reports. One of the key report that helped set up the SDG localization or the end of the end of the report. And then in 2016 the government. We submitted the State Department of Planning, which Mr. To be the coordinating agency of SDG in the country and the department developed a roadmap to guide how SDG should be implemented. Now one of the things that I need to highlight here is that. Kenya participated in the first international report in 2017. And every two years the country developed a progress report of SDGs. And for this year twenty twenty pennies participating in the second presentation of international report. I think one of the issues that we found out that is a major challenge is availability of data. And of course we go to discuss with but that's one of the issues that is really coming out of the body. In terms of the scenario and trade off we looked at what is presented in the vision twenty thirty medium time plan for the period twenty to twenty thirty two. And what are the emissions reduction targets as presented in the end of the season. And I would only concentrate on the trade off because the synergies if you look at the table that is presented. You see that the green boxes highlighted in green speaks to where we have positive interactions which means that we have synergies in actions on the SDG side and the climate mitigation side. But the boxes the two boxes which have orange are where we actually have conflict. So one area where we have conflict of course sorry just go back. The previous slide. Thank you. So energy security. The efforts to increase energy security. Partly also depends on continued use of coal and oil. So that is problematic. And the other area is the focus on industry because industries of course are still using some technologies. So that's leading to pollution and pollution of course means that it's also creating. Increasing emissions. When we looked at a cluster of what is presented in terms of the food, water, energy, land and economic growth in terms of inequality. I think two areas that come out with challenges are the needs to increase agricultural productivity. Because that is creating conflict with deforestation as communities are moving into marginal areas and deforested land. And the other area is actually also the challenge of balancing water use to be able to not put water for irrigation. But at the same time have water to use other priorities including hydro power generation as well as industrial and domestic consumption. Next. So in terms of the government challenges, we identified quite a few. I'm just going to highlight two here. One is capacity. There's quite a big challenge with capacities. And I note in the current political reports that the government has presented that that's now being addressed through a training program under the school of governments. But the other thing which speaks to the issues of ideas that are presented is the challenge of using GDP as an indicator for economic growth and human welfare. Because in instances where, for example, we have deforestation. Being done by communities because they depend on clearly, for example, or because of timber production. That actually does not is a process that contributes to economic economic development, but actually slowing down on natural capital. So we find many of these areas where the use of GDP as a means to prevent a challenge because it has a project with the issues around natural capital. Next slide please. In terms of strategies for increased coherence, one of the issues we talked about is capacity, but there's also need for additional coordination. I think the position of framework is quite robust enough in terms of creating mechanism for coordination that in practice is still a challenge because of budgeting, as well as other questions around capacity. And of course, recital knowledge generations to understand much more better. So that's the current interaction that we still need the next slide. Yeah, so that's the question of what's the response from the team in question. And I look forward to the discussions on the grounds. Thank you very much, Philip. I think, yeah, especially the challenges that you highlighted relating to capacity and GDP as an indicator are particularly prominent and something that we should think about further. And I think once again, the pandemic has really shown has shown a light on this idea of GDP as an indicator of well-being as we shut down our economies and try to prioritize human life over economic growth. Will we continue along that trend or will we go back to kind of endless economic growth and consumption? So thanks for raising those issues. We'll now get into some interventions from the Kenyan government to explore some of these issues further. And if you go to the next slide, we'll see that we had posed these four questions that we wanted interventions on to discuss a bit further. The first was around how these synergies and conflicts that have been presented are actually being taken into consideration in terms of SDG implementation on the ground in Kenya. Secondly, we were talking about the latest BNR and how we see progress on the SDGs define and relate to these synergies and conflicts. And then thirdly around this issue of inequality and how we think it can be mitigated in relation to SDG implementation. And finally, what strategies going forward are most important in promoting policy coherence between these two agendas for Kenya on the ground and really goes back to these barriers and challenges. How can we mitigate some of them and what is really needed to mitigate them? So I will now hand over to Steven for his intervention and thoughts on some of these questions. Thank you ladies and gentlemen as you can see my photo is there. And the reason why I put my photo is that my computer always asks me whether my robot. So every time I present something I put my photo there to confirm that I'm not a robot. First and foremost, thank you for inviting us. I think this is almost the third or fourth time the Stockholm Environmental Institute is working with me. So I'm really blessed. And I want just to thank Ion. I want to thank Zoha. And I wanted to thank also my host here, Philip Van Casaldi. We have worked very well. We have looked at those four questions and I will not respond to them. The reason is that if you listen to Philip very carefully. When he was presenting for Kenya, he has answered all the four questions. So from where I am, I'll just go into my brief insight into what we wanted to do. Some kind of reaction on what Philip was raised, but looking at it from the national policy perspective. Next slide please. Now ladies and gentlemen, what I've done is that I changed the heading of this discussion. I was very perturbed to see Paris minus the SDGs. So in my very final document that I'll share with you, I've said. The ending should be Paris plus the SDGs agenda, a formula for ending inequality. And the reason why I'm saying this is that if you move, remove SDGs from Paris agreement, then we collapse. And the reason why I'm saying this is that in Kenya we recognize the importance of their environmental sector. That's a key to the realization of both the Kenya Vision 2030 and the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. That one we recognize very highly. And the reason why we are saying this is that in Kenya, we also appreciate and acknowledge. Climate change issues can lead to what we call material crisis, which are very likely to compromise our Kenya's development aspirations and the overall national development agenda. And therefore moving forward, we have to treat the Paris agreement and the SDGs. Together, because these two are together and the ambassador raised that issue very well. We cannot afford to treat Paris agreement and the SDGs separately. These are two ideas that are mutually beneficial and they rely on each other to guide the socioeconomic and environmental development of this country. So that is very important. Just move to the next slide. Now we are also saying that in Kenya is very important to note that for very many years, this country has been doing something. We have specific policies, legislations, key interventions and policy measures that the government of Kenya has been putting in place. And that the government has deployed to guide on the environmental development agenda. And what is important is that for Kenya these integrate the SDGs. If you looked at what Philip was doing, that if you look at our national environmental development agenda, it incorporates or aligns to the NDCs. NDCs are part of our national environmental development agenda. So it is very important that the government has been doing something. But moving forward, I think we are just thinking about how can we improve what we have been doing? How can we go around some of these policy and coherences that Philip raised? And how can we make sure that as we implement the SDGs, we take into account the issues that were raised in the Paris agreement? Next slide please. So ladies and gentlemen, moving forward, what we are saying is that from the macroeconomic policy analysis and management, it is very clear in Kenya that there are clear policy imperatives that need to be addressed in order to facilitate the implementation of the SDGs. And from where I sit as the chief economist, the most important and urgent thing to do is that we need to overcome what we call the policy coherence challenges for sustainable development. Those issues that Philip was raising, we need to overcome those. We are aware that because of the politics and other inherent issues for development, naturally, there would be those challenges. But what we are saying ladies and gentlemen, is that we need to adopt policies that co-create what we call the co-benefit of sustainable development in the context of climate change. In order to overcome the challenges we are facing or the policy and coherences, we need to create co-benefits of sustainable development in the context of climate change. We need also to carefully understand and maneuver and have proper navigation of SDG implementation during the issues of climate change. That moving forward, we must do that, that as we implement other issues to achieve the SDGs, we must take into account how we maneuver around the whole issues of climate change. Just next slide again. So I was saying that we need to try and ask a few questions. But the most important question is how do we promote socioeconomic elevation? Or how do we build poverty free egalitarian societies and communities? While at the same time adopting effective sustainable development approaches or measures to contribute to positive climate actions? I think these are what I'm calling the pedagogical questions of development. If we address the issue of Paris minus the SDGs, I think to be able to turn around these and make sure that we move the both agendas together, this is what we need to do. But we must promote socioeconomic elevation and that is by trying to create what you call poverty free egalitarian societies and remember what the ambassador said. That we cannot afford to delink the issues of environment and also inequalities. But moving forward, I think what we need to do is then we need measures that contribute to positive climate actions. We need to reduce adversities of climate change and help build capacities of communities and societies to be climate resilient. And that's what we are trying to do in Kenya. That is to address issues of development. We also try to address issues of climate resilience, particularly among the arid and arid areas where we are prone to major issues of climate change. But moving forward, the second question then we are saying in Kenya is how do we reduce socioeconomic disparities? And I think when the high level political forum started on Monday, the issue of building back better was raised. Then how can we contextualize what we are doing by creating policy balances and addressing the policy coherence issues with the intention of minimizing the trade-offs and maximizing synergies between climate energy and poverty food security nexus. This is a major issue. And if you look at what Philip, the table that he presented there to show the trade-offs and you could see that, that while you try to achieve some SDGs, you also sometimes get some trade-offs which interfere. So finally, ladies and gentlemen, then move to the next slide, Iron. These are three important issues that I wanted us to think about. And as I finished my contribution, I think for us in Kenya and I would advise that for the rest of the world, if you have to address this topic properly, there are few intellectual summary issues. There's nothing intellectual about what I'm going to say. But these are my considerations that moving forward, we need to have climate adaptation strategies that help build strong communities and climate resilience. But what is most important is that they must also promote inclusive socioeconomic growth and development while at the same time taking care of the adverse effects of the climate change. That's very important. Secondly, that as we think about these issues, then we need to put together, we need to have more emphasis on co-benefit approaches. In Kenya, what we are saying is that Kenya's policy agenda must seek to recognize the comprehensive co-benefit approaches where we intersect the vulnerabilities of climate change and the requirement for sustainable development. I think moving forward, that must be emphasized. And finally, we are also saying that we need to prioritize socioeconomic development strategies to be able to yield greater climatic benefits without compromising on national and county development imperatives. And so ladies and gentlemen, I think this is my reaction. Everything that could have been said was summarized by Philip and I just thought of the chief economies, these who are the issues, the kind of interventions that I wanted just to improve on what has been done. Thank you and may God bless each one of you. Thank you, Steven. Really, really interesting remarks. And I think this idea of co-benefits, I think is a critical and the heart of a lot of these issues that we're talking about. I think especially because we often talk about climate mitigation as a threat to development, but it can be an opportunity at the same time and we can talk about climate adaptation, especially as an opportunity to promote development as well. So thank you for raising that. I will now hand over to Ken Olo from the Council of Governors for his intervention. Thank you. Good afternoon or good morning. Hello, participants. Thank you for giving me this opportunity just to also share my submission. Kenya is a devolved system of government which comprises of the national and the 47 county governments. And this devolved system of government is currently seven years old. And the county governments have a key delivery role in implementing SDGs and as well as delivery of climate change and of course the nationally determined contribution. This is because the devolved governments have jurisdiction over sectors relevant for climate change such as agriculture, soil, water conservation, forestry, water and sanitation, county transport and health. So those are very, I mean climate sensitive sectors. The principle of sustainable development are virtually the same as those that Kenya has adopted as mentioned in earlier presentation. Kenya is a long term blueprint, we call the Vision 2030, which we implement through a five year midterm plans at the national government. And this is as well done at the county governments through a five year rolling plan called the county integrated development plans. The Vision 2030, for example, recognizes that the Kenya economy is based on sectors which are highly susceptible to the impact of climate change. For example, the agriculture sector, which is almost 98% reinfed in Kenya. So right from the Kenya, the highest planning blueprint, Kenya already recognizes the need for paying special attention to climate change. The county government, on the other hand, have our responsibility of mainstreaming or cascading down the national planning blueprint. And already the county governments have been able to mainstream the sustainable development goals as well as the climate change in the county integrated development plans. Effectively rolling out the implementation process through the departmental strategies, annual development plans and budgets. So much of this was well captured in the presentation from Philip. But of course, for climate change in Kenya, the key legislation that is guiding both the national and the county government is the Climate Change Act 2016, which sets the legal basis for mainstreaming climate change considerations and actions into sector functions and providing legal foundation for the national climate change action plan. So currently we are implementing the second national climate change action plan, which is aligned to our planning. So it's running for 2018-2022 and as a way of engaging county governments, we are currently, the county governments are now developing county level climate change action plans. This is to ensure that counties take responsibility also at the lower level. And in doing this, county governments have developed coordination frameworks by designating county minister responsible for climate change. This has been done as well for SDGs. So each county government has what you are calling the county SDGs champion to support mainstreaming of SDGs. But at the same time, we also have county designated CEC, what you are calling county executive committee member for climate change. So these two structures at the county level ensure that the synergy between both in implementation of both climate change and SDGs. And we've been trying to cascade the national policies. We have the national climate change fund regulation and already seven counties have developed county level climate change fund regulation requiring a location of up to 3% of their annual budgets to address climate change. And this has only been possible because Kenya has an array of national legal and policy frameworks for climate change that is anchoring the implementation of NDCs at the national level. And at the county level, this is now being brought down to the county level so that counties can develop what you're calling county determined contributions so that they feed into the national commitments in broad base so that all the counties take a bit of the responsibility and then feeding into the national commitment. So climate change has been mainstreamed in planning at both level and just to highlight some of the key issues that have risen in the past regarding synergies and cross across the priorities of various sectors. There is a study that was done by Ministry of Environmental Forestry looking at the impacts of the assessment assessing the impact of the national climate change action plan 2018-2022 mitigation and adaptation actions on SDGs and the big four agenda, which is currently the government four priorities of development, that is food security, trade and manufacturing, affordable housing, as well as health. And this study yielded quite interesting results because it brought out the needs and emphasized the need for building synergies between the SDGs and the Parry agreement because the assessment looked at the impact of all climate actions on SDG1, that is on poverty eradication, SDG5 on gender equality and SDG10 on reducing inequality. And the analysis actually reveals that the implementation of the national climate action plan can provide an instrument for contribution to the attainment of the big four agenda and contributes to the achievement of food security and nutrition for all Kenyans by the year 22. It also identified the fact that climate actions are essential for reducing the vulnerability of manufacturing, housing, health, as well as agriculture sector. And also that the climate action plan will generate large opportunities for boosting the productivity and development of priority sectors and support achievement of universal health coverage for all Kenyans. Another key outcome or rather result that came from this interesting assessment was that climate change adaptation and mitigation action directly address or provide likely benefits for all the SDGs. So you can see that if you address climate change, the impact or rather the results will be felt across all the 17 SDGs. Finally, looking at ecosystem based solutions such as climate smart agriculture, rangeland restoration and agroforestry and the development of clean public transport yielded showed a win-win benefit for boosting employment and manufacturing capacity, as well as protecting environment and narrowing inequalities. So from this study and this is an assessment by the Ministry of Environment and Forestry and of course it was multi-stakeholder involving including the Council of Governors. It's evident that you cannot separate the Paris agreement from the SDGs. To summarize, maybe I'll just look at some of the challenges. Of course, all these nice stories have not just come without some challenges. Some of the challenges that we've experienced and some of which have been mentioned by earlier presenters. One is the striking a balance, striking the balance between economic development and environmental sustainability has been in the face of poverty in Kenya. It's one of the challenges that we are experiencing because people advance economic development in some instance at the expense of the environment. And this aggravates or results into climate change and some other negative impacts. And then, of course, in Kenya we've been emphasizing on looking at the SDGs all-assembly and not cherry picking. And Mr Diambou will agree with me because we note that all the SDGs are interrelated. So our approach has been to emphasize the need for implementing, I mean, laying emphasis on all the goals. Final challenge, of course, has been the aspect of cascading the national structures and policies to the county level. As I mentioned earlier, the counties are just seven years old and these national policies and frameworks are supposed to be cascaded to the county level because some of those sectors are devolved and counties have the responsibilities of delivering those sectors. So with those remarks, I thank you and welcome any further questions. Thank you. Thank you Ken. Yeah, very interesting to have this county level perspective as well of how how devolution really impacts policy coherence and how you have these county climate change funds and county level and DCs and it's almost served as a pilot project for other countries who want to have a more decentralized approach. So I think, yes, as time passes, I think we'll have more learnings from that as well. We'll now go straight into the Q&A session. We still have just over 20 minutes, 25 minutes for Q&A. So I encourage you all to submit your questions. One question that we have from Nicholas Watts is, have you come to any initial conclusions about which instruments and approaches work best to achieve policy integration both vertically across levels of governance and horizontally across sectors. So specifically about the instruments for policy integration. And I will ask maybe Gabriella to reflect on that first. We cannot hear you, Gabriella. You might be on mute. Yeah, sorry. I was saying that different countries have different approaches and of course it also depends on, as I was saying earlier, state capacity, which is very important and to what extent countries can address this issue. I would say it is very important since this topics as we have seen today are so overarching and have such huge impacts. It is important to have leadership at the very high level, but then ensuring, of course, that there are discussions with the state levels, the regions, and then that all actors are involved. And we've seen the case of Germany, for instance, where they have on the one hand, this advisory councils where all sorts of stakeholders, relevant stakeholders are involved, but they also have a parliamentary level body. And there they can also do some further assessments and also ensuring coherence and, of course, having all the ministries involved. That's important and the states. But I guess it would also be different for different countries and their own structure and state capacity in that sense. Sure. Thank you, Gabriella. I don't see any further questions at the moment. So I suppose I will kick off a discussion myself and hope that you all could also ask each other questions and promote to the discussion. I think my first one would be for for Ken and Steven who both, you know, emphasize this idea that climate does have benefits for other STDs through mitigation and adaptation and this idea of generating co benefits. And I would say that if on theory and in paper these benefits exist, then why isn't it being implemented on the ground? So what are really the challenges to actually realize some of these co benefits on the ground? Yeah, Steven, if you would like to start with some thoughts on that. This is a very technical question and I think Gabriella was trying to help us. That some of these things I think from the conception or level, yes, climate does have benefits for the SDGs and from our SDGs integration. This is what we have been telling people, but in terms of the practical aspects of this. And as Gabriella raised some of these challenges start when now it comes to implementation, the actual implementation. And what Ken also said that the problem is that we have very good ideas, but sometimes it's very difficult also to have the capacities within even the government themselves to implement. This is what we have been preaching under our SDGs development agenda, but it is very difficult to pinpoint. But in reality, if you look at the SDGs, if we don't address these issues of the particularly the tradeoffs, then it will be a challenge. Oh yeah, what Ken raised was how do you achieve all these nice things in the context of poverty. And of course, what Gabriella was saying is that if you don't have appropriate tools and instruments to be able to translate this into reality, then at the end of the day, we don't see them. And for us, one of the advisory bodies that helps us on the SDGs agenda is the UNDP and they were trying to work with us. But I don't think we have finalized on this and Ken can pick from what I have said. Ken, can you say something? Thank you very much, Steve. I agree with Steve, but of course, I must say that we have to start somewhere. And that's why FAST is very important to build local coordination structures and strong institutions at the local level for government so that some of these good ideas can be rolled out. And that's why in Kenya, we have strengthened the county coordination mechanism through having designated county climate change units. So these county climate change units are there for to roll out initiatives that will build community resilience to climate change. So for example, now we are having an initiative on building locally led climate actions by strengthening community capacities and building some of these initiatives from the local level. And we believe this is what will help in the long run when the actions of the local communities and the communities are empowered to act responsibly and also to hold government accountable for their actions. Thank you. Thank you very much, Ken and Steven. We have a question from Henry Gandhi to Gabriella, which is that are there any strategies to deal with stranded assets, especially in South Africa? Yeah, that's a very important question. That's often an issue. I am not sure exactly in South Africa, but I know there's literature on different approaches of how to deal with stranded assets. And yeah, some of the countries, and again, this is also about affordability. So some of the countries may afford to simply pay the power producers, co power producers to the commission, the power plants. It can be also that countries might decide to buy coal if they're not state owned, so and then they don't burn it anymore. But I think most importantly what should be done about stranded assets is that states would very early on signal that this is a risk. And in that sense, to on the one hand, if possible, completely interdict, building such high risk new infrastructure like power plants, co power plants. But also another thing that they could do would be to make it compulsory to include that into financial risks. So again, sending this very clear signals. Thanks Gabriella. We have a question which is how is Kenya arbitrating trade offs related to SDG implementation? I can ask Philip maybe to reflect a little bit on that. I did not get the question clearly. I think the question is essentially on how Kenya is really dealing with these trade offs related to SDG implementation going forward. Can you try that? Well, I organize myself. Philip, you go first. I had your name. Yes, yes. I mean, I'll just give an example that I talked about, which is on energy security. And of course, when I get the presentation and can emphasize that Kenya in the current development planning cycle, which is 2018-2022, there's a big four agenda. And one of the big four agenda is on manufacturing. Now, manufacturing has also relation, strong relation with industrial development. I mean, to meet industrial development, we need a certain level of energy availability to be able to run the industry. And this is one of the areas where we are seeing a potential conflict because on the one hand, if you don't have enough energy to be able to run your industry, to run your infrastructure and so on, you can't, you can't industrialize. But on the other hand, we have said that Kenya, the country has set a target to reduce by 30% emissions to 20% as part of the NDCs. So clearly what is happening is that you've seen, in order to deal with this tradeoff is that the country is still relying on fuel-based electricity generation. But you're seeing over time a shift to investment in renewable energy. And at the moment Kenya is actually one of the Africa Stop Living producer of geothermal energy. And the share of renewable energy in the total national grid at the moment is actually above 50%. And this has just happened in the last 15 years. So we see a very big shift from using fuel-based energy power generation into a kind of more green-based power generation. So that is one way of dealing with the tradeoff. Of course, it is not overnight. And of course, it has also to be at a level which can be able to meet the energy requirements. And I think one of the things that's not being discussed, which came out from our study, the fact that if you depend on wind, for example, or solar, these are very unstable sources of power. You cannot continuously rely on them because you need a stable base load to be able to maintain your energy level. So you can invest a lot on wind power generation, a lot on solar power generation, but you still have to maintain a stable base power, which of course has to come from either high-to-power or in this case also, you do have some independent power producers who sort of still use diesel-based generators. So in periods of drought, because a big share of Kenya's energy mix is high-to-power, every time there's a drought, that energy generation is affected. And so Kenya still has to rely on atmospheric energy security by depending on this independent power producers who still of course rely on diesel generation of power. So I guess that's probably answers that question that maybe Ken can add from his perspective as well. Yes, I think I agree with Philip. That is one of the approaches that have been employed by the government to deal with the trade-offs. But of course we've seen also areas where there's been conflicts or rather possible trade-offs between energy and agriculture. But largely most of it has been dealt through building incentives and legislation, but legislation has not proved to be very sustainable. And I think alternative building, alternative livelihoods for communities has been one of the approaches that have been adopted and as well as in adopting favorable tax regimes. Yes, thank you. Yeah, I just wanted to call me. Yeah, just briefly, and Ken rested that for productive sectors like agriculture, of course, which if you look at that synergy and trade-offs, there are problems there. But now under the climate smart agriculture, we're incorporating the issues of climate change together with the agricultural practices so that we minimize issues of trade-offs. And so in such a productive sector, I think this is how we are trying to do it. But going forward, I think we, as we said at the beginning, we must look at the issues of climate change together with the rest of the other sectors for what I called the co-benefit. Because if we don't do that, then at the end of the day, if we look at the synergies and the trade-offs and do nothing, then we shall be integrating poverty. And so for Kenya, I think we are trying to do that. But I also wrote a point to say that some of the things that are holding us back is that we have a clear transition framework. But the trying to actualize that framework to be able to work takes time. So there's always time lag and these things affect major benefit, realization of benefits. The ideas are very good as Zoha said on paper, but the next time on the government, we always the take too long to implement the important things. We are the ones to blame. Thank you. In line with that, I think another question here is that it was mentioned that barriers to policy coherence are political in nature. So how is the Kenyan government working to implement policies regarding the Paris Agreement and the SDGs given this political nature and political barriers existing? Maybe if I could go first. In Kenya, particularly regarding the SDGs, we have not heard a major challenge in terms of implementation at the political level. Because you note that the Kenya Vision 2030 clearly aligns to SDGs. And so when we mapped it against the SDGs, we found that it maps out because the Kenyan Vision 2030 has three pillars looking at economic, political and environment. So this clearly aligned to the SDGs and the Vision 2030 implementation started in 2007. So by the time the SDGs were coming into 2016, 15, 16, already we had made some strides and because the pillars upon which SDGs are mapped out and the Vision 2030 were well aligned. And then there is the buy-in at the highest level. That is the president. However, of course there are some challenges in terms of coordination, as Mr Diambard alluded, but not really regarding the political buy-in. So the buy-in is there politically and not withstanding other challenges, coordination. Thank you. Can I just come in briefly? Just to help Ken, I think in Kenya we embrace what we call sector-wide approaches to development. Whereby these sectors that are closely linked, we try to do interministerial kind of committees to advise on how issues should be handled. And normally that helps us to deal with the issues of political buy-in. But naturally, politicians do not have a lot of data and information, and at the end of the day rely on us, the technocrats. Politics is about interest, but for us we are talking about the hard issues of economic development. So at the end of the day, I think they come back to us again and we listen. But the politicians normally they want short-lived, quick wins. But some of these things, when you give them the hard cost staff about these issues, and if you adopt what we call the sector-wide approach to development, they tend to listen. Thank you. I appreciate your honesty on the topic as well. A final question here from Carol Lungo, which is, has the global pandemic presented opportunities for reviewing means of curbing inequalities related to SDGs and Paris Agreement goals? I will try to reflect a little bit on this just by saying that the pandemic definitely has shed light on a lot of these structural inequalities and shown how they're very systemic in nature. While certain proportions of the population are much more vulnerable, and these vulnerabilities and inequalities will be repeated in the climate crisis as well. And those very same people are more vulnerable to the climate crisis at the same time. And I think that definitely highlights the need for having solutions that aren't just focused on climate once again, right? So the existence of socialized healthcare, for example, can be a solution that relates to climate change as well, because it would help reduce those root causes of vulnerability to begin with. But I will give an opportunity for anyone else who wants to reflect on that. Please go ahead. I could say maybe very quickly, Soha, you also brought it to our attention. In my presentation, I talked more about climate mitigation, which is also my topic, but I also wanted to emphasize that climate adaptation brings a lot of value to the SDGs. And in that sense, part of climate adaptation is also making our health systems more resilient. And making our health systems more resilient than would also support us in situations like pandemics, the coronavirus pandemic. It's the same also because the pandemic also emphasizes this link between countries and also making our supply, food supply chains and just supplies in general more resilient could help. Yeah, absolutely agree. I think another issue that has been quite interesting for me is this idea of debt relief being offered to developing countries from developed countries in light of the pandemic and those suffering from the pandemic. And I think very similar strategies can be offered within the climate crisis. For example, debt relief to address loss and damage when an extreme weather event occurs, which again is a means of curbing inequalities in a lot of these countries. So, yeah, I think I think there's been a whole host of articles and webinars talking about the parallels between these two crises, but I think the key here is that these inequalities are not there by mistake, right? They're designed and structured and man made, which means that solutions to them do exist and tackling the climate crisis therefore also needs to consider these inequalities as well. So, I will leave it there. Does anyone have any final remarks they would like to make? Yeah, I just wanted to react to the question that you are discussing. And one of the benefits of this COVID-19 is that first of all, it is exposed what I always call the disjointed economic spaces that we have. So it has also alerted us that we had forgotten some of the important sectors like health, like in the developing countries. And one of the benefits is that moving forward post COVID then we shall need to address the key sectors like agriculture, like health, and give them the prominence they require. So moving forward some of the shortfalls we have seen out of the COVID pandemic, I think it will help us to prioritize the issues that we need to move forward as countries. Although it has been a major problem, but it has also helped us to see how naked we are in the face of a global pandemic in terms of economic development. Thank you, Steve. Maybe I could also come in. I think it goes without saying that the pandemic has heightened inequality and really affected economic development activities. If I will speak for county governments in Kenya, for example, because we've seen counties reallocate the budgets initially allocated for economic development to address the pandemic. But then again, it has also given us an opportunity to realize some of the potential. Like in Kenya we've seen the re-emergence of the private sector producing some of the required PPEs and some of the medical commodities. So that will be an opportunity that we've now mentioned. But then also there is need to build back better from the pandemic. And that's why the county governments of Kenya coordinated by the Council of Governors is currently developing the county socio-economic re-engineering and recovery strategy that will take us beyond the COVID. And I think it's an opportunity that even as we develop finalized strategy, then we take cognizance of the fact of the other aspects of climate change that might be forgotten even as we want to recover the losses that we've achieved during this period. So I think we should not keep our eyes off the ball that building back better might be also impact on climate change as we seek to recover quickly from the impacts of the pandemic. Thank you. Thank you. I think we have reached the end of our time allotted for this session. So thank you very much to all of our presenters. Thank you for everyone who attended and asked such interesting and insightful questions as well. I hope you guys benefited and enjoyed the discussion. This webinar will be recorded and published online and we can also share the slides afterwards. So feel free to follow up with any of us if you have any further questions and thank you very much again. How do we get out? Bye bye.