 Hi everybody and welcome to today's event. Thank you for joining. My name is Juliet Tunstow. I'm the external events officer here at the International Institute for Environment and Development. Really delighted to be here with you all today and really looking forward to today's discussion on COVID-19, debt relief and the climate and biodiversity crisis, which will start in a few moments. I can see a few of you are joining us now, the number is going up. So today's event is part of the IID debates webinar series, which aims to create a space for conversation and debate on key and current sustainable development issues. If you're interested in signing up for regular updates on the events, we have a newsletter and I will share the link towards the end of the session. I think that's it from me now. With that I'll hand over to Andrew Norton, IID director, who is going to be moderating our panel today, introducing the topic and the speakers. Thank you very much. Thank you very much indeed, Juliet. Many thanks for all your work setting this up. So today's event will explore how we can tackle the triple crises of debt, climate change and biodiversity loss using debt for climate and nature swaps. We're introducing a recently released IID report, tackling the triple crisis using debt swaps to address debt, climate and nature loss post COVID-19. Paul Steele, one of the authors of that report will present the work and I should also acknowledge Sejal Patel from IID, who's the co-author. So even before the pandemic hit, fears were growing over developing country debt which had surpassed eight trillion US dollars by the end of 2019 and the pandemic has made the situation worse in many ways. The economic impacts of the crisis are pushing millions more women, children and men in lower and middle income countries into poverty. They're also of course the health impacts are extremely difficult challenging for those countries to deal with. And the countries are also facing macro problems, hits to exports and tax revenues. All in all, we can expect to see debt in low income countries rise pretty rapidly and it's doing so from a basis that was already highly problematic and unsustainable and indeed impinging on the capacity of lower and middle income countries to deliver basic services to their populations. So as part of pandemic economic rescue packages, we're exploring the proposition that governments have an opportunity to address simultaneously the crises of debt, climate and biodiversity loss through the use of a new system of debt for climate and nature program swaps for the benefit of lender and debtor governments as well as private creditors. So the basic idea is that we can use these to support a recovery that builds forward to a more sustainable future with better outcomes in terms of both the climate crisis and the global crisis of biodiversity loss. So to discuss this today, I'm delighted to welcome our excellent panel of speakers. Paul Steele will present this work first and then we have two excellent discussants, Sonia Gibbs and Dr. Shamshad Akhtar. So Paul, I'll introduce the speakers now. Paul Steele is chief economist in IIED's shaping sustainable markets research group and an author of the report tacking the triple crisis. He specializes on the linkages between environment, climate and poverty reduction and Paul has more than 20 years experience with international organizations including UNDP, the European Union, the World Bank and IUCN as well as UK and Sri Lankan governments. Sonia Gibbs is the managing director and head of sustainable finance at the Institute of International Finance. Her work covers global debt and sovereign debt policy issues, financial stability risks, sustainable finance and capital markets, development in emerging and frontier markets. Sonia leads IIF's policy work on sustainable finance and infrastructure investments including liaison efforts vis-a-vis the G20, the multilaterals and the international regulatory community. And last but not least Dr. Shamshad Akhtar served as governor of the state bank of Pakistan and finance minister in the last caretaker government. She's worked for several multilateral institutions including the United Nations where she served as the under secretary general of the economic and social commission of the Asia and Pacific UNS cap and senior special advisor on economics and finance of the UN secretary general and can currently serve for five years as UNG20 Sherpa for development and finance tracks. So it's an excellent panel really looking forward to the discussion and I will start now by handing over to Paul for a short presentation on using debt swaps to address debt, climate and nature loss post COVID-19. Right well thanks very much Andy so I'm going to as Andy indicated present the report that I co-authored with my colleague Sergio Patel from my ID. So this is the title of the report which I think you've all received already the link from Juliette in the event bright instructions but this will be a short presentation to illustrate the report for those of you who've not had time to go through it. So it's as Andy indicated tackling the triple crisis and you have using debt swaps to address debt, climate and nature in a post COVID-19 world. So the three crises first of all there's a debt crisis as you see from the graph there's both rising public and private debt for the last few decades. The blue coloring indicates that private debt has been going up slightly more than the orange public debt but both have been rising quite rapidly. The second and third crisis are the climate crisis you see here a picture of a flooded house from my thinking Kenya and then in terms of the nature or biodiversity crisis there's an example of deforestation with a photo taken of logs being cut down in Mozambique. So that's the triple crisis. So what are these debt for climate and nature program swaps which we're proposing in this paper? Debt for climate and nature program swaps or where a creditor allows the debt to be reduced in one of three possible forms. First of all conversion to a local currency, secondly possibly paid back at a lower interest rate or thirdly some form of debt right off. So all of these approaches would in some way reduce the debt and then the answer is how can this money be used? The money can be saved in terms of poverty reducing and growth enhancing climate resilience for example planting climate resilient crops, climate emissions mitigation for example investing in renewable energy or biodiversity protection such as investing in reducing human wildlife conflict which plagues many protected areas. So these are the three ways that the debt reduction could be used in terms of the swap. So how do we get these debts large scale and this is what we set out is necessary in terms of the post-COVID challenge when the debt was already significant but has now really become very large. So far nature or climate swaps have been focused on smaller projects where the money is managed in trust funds by international non-governmental organizations. We propose instead that these swaps should shift from smaller projects to larger programs through the use of what we call budget support and this is where funds are paid into a debtor government's own budget. This has three main advantages. First of all budget support allows for larger amount of funds to be swapped and as I indicated that's vital given the circumstances of the post-COVID debt crisis. Secondly budget support increases debtor government ownership so that instead of the links of the swap being to an international NGO it's through a government's own budget and thirdly a budget support approach allows accountability to national citizens through the budget so instead of again being accountable to an international NGO the budget process allows the normal budgetary system to be linked to national citizens. This approach has already been used by small island developing states or SIDS and least developed countries to give two examples. In the Caribbean the small island development states have a climate and nature swap proposal which they tabled at the recent UN Secretary-General's climate summit and secondly the least developed country initiative for effective adaptation and resilience or life AR has a similar approach where local government systems are used. In the paper we set out what are the priority countries for climate and nature program swaps. These we identify by ranking countries according to four criteria as indicated in the slide first of all according to debt distress how much debt are they facing secondly according to climate vulnerability thirdly according to biodiversity richness how much valuable biodiversity do they have and how to what extent it's being lost and threatened and fourthly how credit worthy are they for how well will the money be used if they were given debt relief and you see from the table the different priority of countries so the highest priority for this kind of approach is a birthday in Vietnam second priority are the countries of Honduras, Kenya, Nicaragua and Papua New Guinea and the third priority are Cambodia, Kyrgyz Republic, Madagascar, Mozambique, Senegal, Sri Lanka, Uganda and Banuatu so all of these countries are high priority they all have debt distress they all have they're all climate vulnerable they all are rich in biodiversity and they all have quite strong credit worthiness what are the benefits of climate and nature program debt swaps and I've identified the benefits against various different stakeholders so first of all for ministries of finance and central banks and debtor governments and hopefully we'll hear more about this from Shamshad when she talks about the example of her country Pakistan there are hopefully these debt swaps will lead to increased growth by reinvesting in climate resilience which is needed to increase growth in many of these vulnerable countries there's also increased ownership of debt swaps as I've already indicated in terms of climate negotiators who attend the UN framework convention on climate change this approach will identify new sources of climate finance that will dwarf the green climate fund so while there's a lot of attention on the green climate fund the potential of a climate for nature global swap initiative would dwarf the money in the green climate fund thirdly in terms of China which is the largest holder of bilateral debt they are hosting next year the UN biodiversity convention and one of the aims of that convention is to finance biodiversity so by initiating or being involved in initiating such a debt for nature and climate scheme they could contribute to the aims of the biodiversity convention fourthly in terms of private creditors and here we'll hopefully be hearing more from Sonia from her organization with rep which represents many private creditors there are a number of advantages first of all increased debt sustainability so they won't have to hopefully provide more debt to countries in the future many of these large global asset managers have themselves climate commitments such as commitments to reduce emissions of greenhouse gases and also there's a possible scheme we propose in the paper that if the EU was involved in such an approach they could use existing emission credits from the EU credit scheme to pay off creditors in terms of the the next stakeholder the Paris club that's the OECD countries who are creditors they could have a new source of finance for climate which many of them have already committed to but is being challenged in the in the austerity that will be faced post COVID and finally I just wanted to identify the UK which is host of next year's UN climate change convention COP will also have a new source of climate finance which they could champion in terms of this approach so here we come to the final slide with a forward look we propose in the paper and a number of other groups are working alongside us the call for similar things for an international initiative on climate and debt program swaps so we call on the international community to work with debtor governments to establish a technical working group under the guidance of an international body such as the World Bank to develop a comprehensive and coordinated climate and nature program swap initiative over the next three years to address the triple crisis of debt climate and biodiversity loss and it's hopefully an opportunity it's an opportune time for this kind of process to take off with the World Bank and IMF and your meetings coming up next month so this kind of technical working group could get going there thank you very much. Thanks very much indeed Paul can I just ask you quickly before moving to the online poll then the next element you indicate that the majority of experience in terms of debt for nature and climate swaps has been project based rather than program based would that be true? Correct yeah yeah um just quickly what are the key advantages of the program approach? Well as I set out in the presentation it can allow the swaps to be larger scale it can be allowed them to have greater government ownership and greater accountability to national citizens. Great thanks very much Paul okay we've now got a quick online poll which the question in it Juliet will be putting this up is do you think debt for climate and nature program swaps are a useful approach and yes no possibly are the options for response. Right so yeah mixed responses very very few knows though so that's generally a very positive response 58% yes and 39% possibly so it's great to see that there's basically an appetite for exploring this approach among today's participants and now we're going to dig a little more into some of the opportunities that this approach debt for climate nature swaps presents as well as explore some of the challenges so now if I could go to our first discussant Shamshad Akhtar Shamshad general responses please to the concepts that Paul has outlined and the approach that he's outlined but it would also be great to hear from you what you think the government perspective on this in terms of the opportunities and challenges in indebted developing countries is likely to be Shamshad please go ahead thanks for presenting the findings of the report the beauty is in the simplicity that has been offered I think we have to recognize that we are in a heterogeneous world so no one solution will fit all is something that I do feel country ownership has to be a fundamental element but for debt swaps to work we have to go with a big bank we need a global deal we need common understanding of its objectives and we need a proper architecture for it we have to respect sovereignty of the details and value of creditors obligations we have to recognize that key priorities that countries face may be different from the others the others that are being floating lastly let me mention that right now since we haven't gotten out of covid it's still unfolding and there is a huge degree of uncertainty as to where we land up countries are still in a rescue mode and I can tell you from my country standpoint that the highest degree of attention is being paid to still firefight to ensure that the businesses are restarting effectively people are getting relief so any funding that is coming forward be it through the IMF the World Bank quick dispersing operations it is all being devoted essentially for the by and large non-development expenditure with social safety nets revival of businesses so as yet there hasn't been much thinking on the debt swap but I do think this are this is a very good instrument and it is very much wanted given that we have to go to the next stage of building back better and it has a potential to do so thank you very much indeed that was as for anyone who missed the introduction that was dr. shanshed actor formerly minister of finance and governor of the central bank in pakistan and many other things as well many thanks for those perspectives and particularly for reminding us that this remains a crisis situation that we're not in any sense coming out of the other end of this so this sense of what's the segue between when countries essentially need relief assistance and when that moves to a build building forward to a better reality if you like and the green recovery questions is a really key element so thank you very much indeed shanshed I'd now like to move to our next discussant sonia gibb from the IIF sonia it would be great to hear a bit from you about the opportunities of this approach from a private sector perspective and perhaps reflection on the challenges but also any just broad observations on the material that we're discussing today thank you very much thank you very much and our thanks to the IED for including us in this very timely event um just to to say a note about the Institute of international finance we represent a wide variety of creditors in international debt markets and that's something that paul highlighted that I think is very important the creditor base for these countries is so different now so not just on the commercial side not just banks but also institutional investors bond holders pension funds sovereign wealth funds so you have three distinct buckets of creditors commercial multilaterals and official bilateral and that's important to remember when you're thinking about the design of solutions like debt for nature swaps I wanted to add a little perspective here on our work in channeling private sector support for the G20 debt service suspension initiative and I suspect most listeners will be familiar with this but it calls for a short term suspension of of debt payments for the world's poorest and most vulnerable countries and both official and private creditors asked to participate on on comparable terms so the latest data from the G20 shows that 42 countries have applied for debt service relief allowing them to delay a total of about 5.3 billion in repayments due this year and that's about half of the total that's owed to official bilateral creditors. Countries have by and large not asked private creditors for relief and this is largely due to concerns about market access and I'll get to that in a minute. Many would argue many have that this is by no means enough so World Bank President David Malpass has noted that the risk of relapse to debt distress is very high and that a more systemic approach to debt relief could include reduction in the stock of debt and I think we're going to be hearing quite a lot about considerations like this reducing the actual stock of debt that's been built up which is where solutions like debt for for nature swaps can play an important role but the bottom line and something I want to emphasize is that the debt problems we're facing can't be dealt with by public or private sector alone so debt for nature swaps are a great example of the kind of collaboration on the toolkit for addressing these urgent problems. Just returning to this market access question and also to the kind of borrower perspectives that I think are often lost in some of these discussions unless we're taking the view that low income and developing countries should only have access to concessional finance private finance is absolutely needed to maintain liquidity and avoid future solvency problems so our discussions with borrowing countries suggest that many concur with this view believing that development finance can't be met fully just by official creditors and donors so whatever solutions we look toward they need to preserve countries ability to access market finance. You know we have a lot of discussions we have an investor group representing over a hundred of the largest global investors something like 45 trillion in assets under management and so our goal has been trying to build consensus around ways the private sector can help and I just wanted to share some of the the things we've been thinking about in our in our discussions and first of all the this COVID crisis is probably the first where sustainable finance and responsible investment tools and mechanisms can make a real difference and this is particularly true against the backdrop of rapidly growing investor demand for ESG assets and that's very well documented so it's kind of bringing these two things together in an interesting nexus debt and sustainability so we've been thinking about the use of innovative sustainable finance instruments to help in in a specific context of emerging market sovereign debt crises so to to to sum up I'll just share a few ideas from these discussions and these have included SDG bond funds guarantees and swaps so for example SDG aligned bond funds as Paul had mentioned earlier can be significantly scaled up building on the experience of the planet emerging green one fund developed with the IFC so another example of where you have multilateral and private sector collaboration this could really be expanded to funds investing in emerging market SDG linked debt so that's an area a niche of the asset class that has potential for tremendous expansion so as this is structured you could have for example of a first loss absorbing junior tranche of equity leveraging an IFI balance sheet giving credit uplift and that would attract not only existing investors in in this type of debt but new investors so tapping into to a new part of the creditor base and you know this this this first loss equity tranche could be substantially leveraged as much as sort of five to one on on some estimates another example is a partially guaranteed SDG bonds you could have new issuance that replaced existing emerging market sovereign issuance designed to avoid economic loss for investors holding the debt and they could have a strong SDG component so that could enable a partial G20 or official guarantee without principal or interest repayments for the first year and importantly you know and getting back to the question of liquidity right I mean when you have a relatively small market we calculate that the universe of SDG linked debt so that's green bonds green loans SDG linked bonds and so on is only about one and a half trillion in total which is a tiny fraction of the total level bond universe which is over 110 trillion so SDG part with bonds with partial guarantees could be eligible for for index inclusion and that's really important in attracting more investor demand and finally another thing that we've discussed in our investor groups is a debt for sustainability swaps and that's a kind of a you know debt for nature swaps are a subset of these clearly and these can help connect sovereign restructuring or even sort of debt suspension to commitments to invest in environmental goals and so the idea here is to scale up and broaden to to service the whole SDG range so when you enter a debt restructuring when a country goes into debt restructuring they can engage directly with their private creditors that want to support this transition and an increasing number of investors do see this as within their mandate so not just a question of sort of immediate quarterly short-term returns but having more of a mandate to focus on longer-term sustainability goals so just linking it to the G20 debt service suspension initiative this temporary moratorium in debt service payments could free up fiscal space which could then be committed to invest in a country's sustainable development goals so and I think there's we there were there was a an interesting paper out from the LSE that did some calculations in the case of Argentina if you took 200 billion in bonds with a seven and a half percent coupon and swapped that out for six percent you could free up you know an additional three billion a year an additional cash flow and that could be kind of set aside for SDG investments so just to to to to finish up here there are a few considerations when we think about these instruments to to make this concept work and scale it up across emerging and developing economies you need you've got to have good disclosure and reporting and accountability ownership and accountability as was just mentioned is it is critical from the emerging and developing economies themselves leadership from the IFIs and and above all you need to generate that demand from from private investors and commitments are are growing by the day so these debt for nature swaps have tremendous potential I'll stop there thanks it's really really helpful Sonia thanks on this question of market access is this predominantly around the ratings agencies moodies and so on is that what drives that concern that if debt so if debt is written off that it might somehow affect a country's rating and therefore that access to capital I think that's an important part of it because it's how private markets work in order to to scale you need standardization to have standardization you need consistent ratings ratings have a process ratings see in particularly in the case of moody's they've they've ascertained that debt service suspension is a potential economic loss and therefore it affects the the rating it's it's not an easy thing to get around because it's part and parcel of the functioning of markets thanks very much Paul do you have any anything any quick reactions to Sonia or Shector's comments anything that you want to pick up quickly before we go out to the the audience for Q&A well just from some shot I would agree with her that the focus now is on the immediate recovery so these things need to follow up on that well obviously countries are focusing on the short term now but but hopefully they're moving to the medium term at the same time and then on from what Sonia was saying she was talking very much about SDG approaches so SDGs obviously are broad and sustainability are a broad term I mean we were zeroing in on the nature and climate dimension of that so but I think much of what she says is relevant to the specific focus on nature and climate okay that was great I mean many thanks to all three of you those were really really excellent contributions so I'm now going to move to the Q&A and we've got a bracing system for our questions so I'm going to use that initially to prioritize so the first question is from Mark Burnett what is your sense of the appetite from countries that hold debt for the program swap concept I'd like to go to all three of you on that but Paul do you want to start yeah I mean it's a it's obviously a key question I mean you need to look at both the creditors and the debtors but but you don't want this to be a top down thing pushed by the creditors we need demand from the the debtor governments as well and as Shamshad said there are issues of sovereignty at stake I mean I think there are countries who would be keen on this approach we've had some interesting discussions with the UNDP who were going out to their member countries to see who who in who in the membership is interested in taking up such an approach as I mentioned I think some of the small island developments developing states have already had a proposal which was presented at the UN Secretary General's summit at the end of last year to do such an climate swaps so I think the appetite is there particularly as I say amongst the small island development states which have a lot of debt and are particularly climate vulnerable but as we've also identified in our priority list there are some countries which may not be immediately obvious such as Vietnam which which has quite a lot of debt particularly to China which may or Sri Lanka for that matter which also is quite indebted to China which might also want to experiment with such an approach thanks thanks Paul um Shamshad uh what would be your sense of the appetite from countries holding debt for the programs I think the appetite will be first a function right the appetite will be first a function of how the debt stock relief evolves of course we have G20's first reaction to it the debt stands service stands still that as we know is only until December it is the repayments after a few years and there is a grace period but that doesn't take care it doesn't create the needed fiscal space as yet to venture out to experimenting the difference so that's one element of the appetite but also as was pointed out there is a private and a public sector mix and with the private sector position being that we'd like to be in a voluntary mode I'm not sure countries are going to be having that great an appetite because they are looking for more certain solutions to the to the debt problem and the debt search is at different level depending on small island economies yes but the low income countries and middle income countries that have huge uh outstanding and unsustainable debt in different and are facing very difficult so that environment complexity has to be kept in mind it remains to be established what balance between debt relief and debt for climates so it will be appropriate in different heterogeneous situations obviously what would be helpful and there has been a lot of discussion and the UN financing for development platform is how do you really pan out an adequate debt relief for these different countries given the magnitude I personally think an outright cancellation combined with of course an IMF World Bank framework which has a policy component as well as a management component with very much defined elements for it would be very helpful now it is important to recognize that we really what we really need is sustainable emphasis on sustainable recovery and green recovery so as we design the swaps we have to recognize that we would have to put in elements I mean of course it's it's great to have biodiversity and different elements of climate but of immediate need is sustainable development sustained compliance with sustainable development course building back better so it's these elements which need to be packaged with a debt swap not just you know and of course it'll vary some countries will go for debt for nature swap others would go for more focused recovery and green recovery and sustainable recovery basis which is rich in job generation because that's what matters today is job generation so that the debt sustainability is also assured if you have assured sustainable growth you have jobs there then so my own feeling is that countries will stumble they will do specific preferred choice debt swaps but what would be preferable is if we came out with a proper framework which has a policy elements IMF conditionalities if one uses that word although I would hate to use that word because nobody wants to listen to a conditionality in such a crisis mode but what I really meant is that if you direct the countries in a right to the right direction for promoting for rejuvenating growth which will help bring down the debt GDP ratios thank you very much shamshad um sonja i think you spoke to that um quite a bit in your comments in fact to that area so i'm going to move to another question for you um do you think that giving ownership in national budgets for the swaps may put off creditors including obviously private sector creditors that you've spoken about a fair bit who may fear whether justifiably or not possible defaults or financial difficulties in the future for such governments um so hang on a minute i've just lost that as it moved this is one of the hazards of using this thing is that the questions move up and down but anyway i think you got the basic point there sonja so it's a difficult question i i think you know the the phrase accountability and and conditionality are are very important and shamshad mentioned the imf um framework in this context and and imf conditionality and this is clearly very important when considering particularly longer term arrangements of the type that we're talking about with with debt for for for nature swaps so i think there there there is certainly going to be an element of anytime you get something that's relatively novel or that hasn't been done at scale you're going to get concerns around the the terms and conditions on which it's executed that being said i mean one thing that this dssi experience has has clearly demonstrated is that private creditors believe that borrowers need to be engaged involved and you know accountable themselves right because we all know of the debt problems we all know of the ways in which they can be resolved and the need for resolution but how it's done is important and borrower voices shouldn't be lost in this in this equation thank you very much that question was from matt collis um shamshad do you have anything that um any thoughts on that whether difficulties could arise because um creditors may fear that money may be repurposed in later budgets away from the original purpose of the debt swap yeah well it's uh highly likely that it would be particularly in a program budgeting context having worked on these budgets in different countries i would much rather uh choose between uh project program approach versus um what i would call a more defined framework however retailer it and in that context i would much rather prefer that when we are talking about uh an institutional framework to coordinate uh given that it takes so long to do these things and given that you want to give the countries the choice to pick and choose that it would be better if the international community agreed on a climate or whatever um preference we have of the objective or the focus of this i mean uh we could have an climate investment trust fund placed at the world bank uh and it has predefined uh conditions uses um and then any country that wishes to tap goes with this debt settlement and draws on on that the other is to actually look at a recovery fund where you could have a resilience and recovery fund again you define it and you give option to the country to come and tap because you won't know uh time is too limited and you can't have you know it takes a long time it takes two three years to prepare a climate debt swap or a debt nature swap you look at the past historical experience that to prepare the projects it takes time to coordinate countries it takes time so give it to the countries you just set up the institute the funding mechanism institutional mechanism these are my own personal views i speak in my personal capacity so i personally think that if you give the choice you gave a window and you define so that as sonia was saying account monitoring accountability oversight by the umbrella of the of the credit creditors if if need be whatever we want to safeguard the interest of the creditors interest of different stakeholders define what it should be put to use but give them a choice to pick and choose the windows that they need to because i have to tell you money is fungible you allocate money being a budget fiscal person you turn around and the money will go somewhere else so it's better you have a defined thing and then you have a monitoring and accountability mechanism thank you very much i'm shud um paul there's a related question i'd like to put to you before going to the final one this is from stefanie griffith jones i'm sure many of you know um poor budget support mechanisms are great but will the creditors be willing to do this without requiring conditionality if you involve the world bank for example they will certainly expect to put some conditions so um what's your initial thought on that yeah it's a very good question um i mean um we explicitly refer in the paper to the experience of the world bank in terms of their developing development policy lending what is known as dpl's within the bank whereas where the bank um works out a set of criteria or results by which they provide lending to a country and in fact a lot of the environment programming of the bank has been using these environmental development policy lending where you agree environmental results and then lend money against that so i think uh by using such a results-based approach where you make payments after countries adhere to certain criteria you can hopefully reach a compromise between where sony is coming from on the creditors side and where shum shuds coming from on the uh on the government side in terms of uh everyone seeing some accountability and transparency thanks very much paul um i'm going to move to the final question now because we're running short on time this is from alfonso um and it's about the role of local communities is there any role for the grassroots to play um can they become policy actors within this process within programs um program approaches that are in theory set up to for citizen accountability um what is the space for bottom up accountability if you like um and is there any way in which this could be made material and tangible for people in terms of perceiving that there is any direct impact on their lives um i'll go around all three of you on that one i know it's not an easy question um but uh sunya would you like to have the first go at that so i think i'll address this from the point of view of the investor community and i will say without aging myself too much i've been around the block uh gosh must be 30 35 years now and i think this this moment in history is is is kind of unique in that regard if you look back for example to the business roundtable here in the us their statement last year about the need to shift from kind of shareholder capitalism to stakeholder capitalism that was truly remarkable and i think we're seeing the repercussions of that kind of thinking throughout the the investor community so if there were ever a time when sort of grassroots movements indigenous peoples you know the the needs of the broader stakeholder community are being taken into consideration as part of investment mandates you know now it now is that time thank you very much indeed sonia pulled you want to go next on that how uh local communities and bottom up action bit within program swaps for um that swaps for nature and climate yeah great question um and maybe something to be honest we could have addressed more in the paper but we can do that in the in future publications um i mean basically what the main way to do it is to make sure that the climate and biodiversity investments are pro-poor so that they actually benefit uh women children and men who are living in poverty uh so just to give some concrete examples in terms of climate change looking at making households more resistant to floods looking at saline crops looking at post disaster recovery after cyclones and floods and and and slow onset climate related disasters in terms of biodiversity looking at ways to make sure that forestry investments involve indigenous and local communities looking at ways that watershed management can involve uh local people so all those ways are ways that when you i put in place the kind of conditions that i alluded to the uh the criterion results you make sure that those are pro-poor and benefit local communities thank you very much paul shamshad are you any thoughts on grassroots involvement i think uh it is essential to have grassroots involvement uh local governments have to be involved um and people have to be involved but the reality is that the government's external debt is uh in a number of countries a responsibility of the federal government and servicing and settlement of the liabilities also is that of the of the federal governments now a lot of federal governments have allowed the flexibility to the state governments uh to go ahead and borrow but they need clearances for everything and there are terms and conditions for that now in this situation we are talking about uh using this uh space that is being created from the suspension uh or for that matter uh buyback or or cancellation to then result in local currency resource generation and in that context it would be helpful if there was a systematic process to actually engage in the areas of biodiversity nature and all that so that the local currency that is generated is deployed which is much more flexible there is more flexibility in that rather than the direct foreign exchange settlement issue so that's one point the second point is that you really need to develop the capabilities uh and develop the projects in a fast at a fast pace and i do think that the uh the concerned platforms should have project feasibility facilities to allow for quick development of um projects that could be just ready uh to because as i said it takes one or two years for all these things to be realized the last point is with what we are being hit just now the revenue um uh in our case rupee but local currency revenue generation from the tax resources is at its low end and you ultimately also need local currency for these kinds of transactions thank you thank you very much indeed um we'll go now um for a second poll um which juliet will put up and while we're getting the answers in on that i will ask each of our speakers for a final contribution so this poll is who what actors do you think should take the lead in coordinating a debt for climate and nature swap initiative um you can tag more than one you don't have to only choose one so while we're doing that let me go back to the panel for a final question um for our speakers in terms of the next steps and reflecting on what we have um you know heard from the audience and the questions that have come in what do you think should happen now to implement a debt for climate and nature swap initiative um what should be the next steps in this space basically um so if you could each try to answer that fairly quickly a minute each because we're not far away from the end that would be brilliant uh paul can i ask you to go first sure um so willy i mean i'm just going to essentially repeat what we've already put in the paper but uh but anyway for what it's worth uh given the fact that we uh we have the high mf and world bank annual meetings coming up we think it's opportune now to set up a technical working group possibly led by the world bank to take forward an initiative working with the creditors and the debtor governments to set in place a kind of overall initial umbrella initiative a bit like the hippock process that was was used in the the late 80s for um the debt relief um in low income countries and uh and that would work over the next three years or so as as we've heard each country is different so that would provide an umbrella under which individual countries would negotiate with their creditors to take forward this kind of climate for nature program swaps thank you very much paul uh sonja what would be your your quick take on what needs to happen now so i think paul's the the technical working group is a is a fantastic idea and absolutely needed for execution but what you also need i think is a steer from global governance bodies and here i'd point to the g20 in particular as as a body that has the power to get something like this moving you know it is it's a global problem it it's not going to be resolved at the national level their cross border issues so a body like the g20 needs to to address this fantastic thank you very much uh shamshad what would be your your thoughts on the immediate next steps i think uh what paul and sonja said is together right i think what we definitely need out here is strong leadership so when we talk about g20 we should also talk about other international platforms like g24 which has a different mindset on this so we should definitely look at these global platforms and engage almost have a have a summit of the leaders now you know we have had this ffd financing for development dialogue there a lot of experts sonja was there i was listening to it and contributing so there have been a lot of people involved in this uh there is there should be a summit on financing for development which has an element of debt swaps out there so now that an innovative instrument is going to be scaled we have had this instrument in the past but we have learned from experience that there are difficult implementation issues that we face so drawing from those lessons we should get the political leadership to first agree on this and i think it's must that we have the world bank imf in partnership but also technical bodies that understand climate issues biodiversity and some of the un bodies are are really great into this and ultimately it also involves the conventions and the likes of it because some of this is cross-border so it's not that simple but we should keep it simple but we should involve people who understand cross-border issues also here fantastic really great contributions many thanks so um juliet can i ask you to put up the results of the second poll um so yeah lots of um people who think everyone should lead i think but that's in this context actually okay um so yeah and the um the general sense is that here that um probably the bank would be the best coordinator within this but um it's by no means a clear result i would say there's also um 51 percent for environmental NGOs and 49 percent for OECD governments within that so huge thanks um to everyone to all the participants apologies to anyone whose question i wasn't able to get to um but above all thanks to our excellent panel of speakers uh to paul to shamshad and sonia they were really great contributions and it was nice to see the way that you built on what each other said and uh moved us forward through this which was um fantastic also huge thanks paul to sejal your co-author on the paper which is was great to have um and just a final note i think as paul mentioned uh the well bank and i am at annual meetings are happening in october so we will be looking for ways of feeding this discussion into those meetings but i just finally like to thank everyone participants and speakers for joining very much indeed we will share a link to the paper as well as the recorded session and the presentation slides um with those that registered for the event and all of that will also be available on our website and if you do have a minute please do share your feedback by clicking on the link in the chat box which will take you to a very simple survey and with that i would like to close the webinar and say huge thanks to everyone particularly shamshad sonia and paul thank you very much indeed thank you wish you best thank you