 I'm really pleased to welcome you to the third session, which is called Climate Advocates. The final session of this conference, which is co-hosted by the Institute of International and European Affairs and the French Embassy. And I know many of you will have been listening in all morning and it's really been a terrific morning. I think a morning that has really brought out some of the close collaboration and potential for further collaboration between France and Ireland on climate issues. Minister Ryan and others have talked about the Celtic Interconnector and other plans that we have together. But also I think as far as our session now is concerned, the other sessions have been a really good entry point because they have time and time again gone back to the fact that this is all about people. And I think what we'll do in this session is we will deepen that a bit and we will also broaden it out to a very global perspective. And so I'll say a little bit about our running order. We're gonna hear from three speakers, Mary Robinson, former president of Ireland, Ina Moja, musician, activist and land ambassador for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification and Orla Murphy, who is a university student and a representative of the winning climate on team. So Mary Robinson will open the session with a keynote address on the importance of community-led initiatives for climate justice. Following her remarks, we will have a brief Q&A with Mrs. Robinson. And then we'll go on to Ina Moja's presentation about the Great Green Wall Initiative. Many people will be familiar with this project to combat desertification and land degradation in the Sahel region of Africa enormously ambitious and important program. And then Orla Murphy will deliver the final presentation where she will outline what her team used to win the Clematon, which is an initiative that addresses environmental transparency in the fast fashion industry. And then we'll have a Q&A with Ina and with Orla after that. And so just a little bit of housekeeping. You will be able to join the discussion with the Q&A function on Zoom, which you'll see on your screen. And I really encourage you to send in questions throughout the session, because as I said, we'll have two sets of Q&A. So it's never too early to ask your question. And please, when you do so, just identify your name. And also if you have an affiliation, please add that as well. And just a reminder that the whole conference, including the Q&A is on the record today. We'd also really love if you could join the discussion on Twitter and the hashtag is climate community. Now it is my great honor to introduce our first speaker, definitely someone who needs no introduction, but because talking about her accomplishments gives me great pride and joy as an Irish woman. I'm going to do it anyway. So Mary Robinson is adjunct professor for climate justice in Trinity College Dublin and chair of the Elders. She served as president of Ireland from 1990 to 1997 and UN High Commissioner for Human Rights from 1997 to 2002. She's a member of the Club of Madrid and the recipient of numerous honors and awards, including the Presidential Medal of Freedom from then president Barack Obama. And between 2013 and 2016, Mary Robinson served as special envoy to the UN Secretary General for three roles. Firstly, the three quite interconnected roles, I should say. Firstly, the Great Lakes region of Africa, then on climate change, leading up to the Paris Agreement. And in 2016, the special envoy for El Nino and also climate. And Mrs. Robinson was chancellor of the University of Dublin from 1998 to 2019. She serves as a patron of the International Science Council, patron of the board of the Institute of Human Rights and Business, and a board member of several organizations, including the Moe Ibrahim Foundation and the Aurora Foundation. And recently, she became honorary president with the Africa Europe Foundation. Mary Robinson, an inspiration to me and to so many of us, the floor is yours. Thank you very much, Shanae, if I'd known I'd have said the shorter version please, but I'm very happy to join and to take part in Climate and Community, Le Climat Tous Ensemble, because it's a very climate justice theme. And I'd like to thank the French ambassador and the IIEA for the invitation and also to congratulate them on the quality of the conference as a whole. Why is climate justice linked to community? It's very obvious. It's because it deals with the layers of injustice that require a climate justice approach. And I'll just run very briefly through those layers because I think it's important that we ground climate justice in the reality of the many injustices. And the first is, of course, the injustice that the climate crisis impacts much more severely and earlier on the poorest countries, the poorest communities, the small island states, the indigenous peoples who are least responsible. And also it's worth noting these are the black and brown and indigenous peoples in our world. So there's a racial injustice there. And then secondly, the gender injustice, the different social roles, the different power, the different rights even in some cases, such as land rights of women. So the gender inequalities that are captured by the climate crisis. And also women being agents in their communities trying to build more resilience despite the difficulties. The third injustice is, of course, the one that the young climate activists have been reminding of us over and over the intergenerational injustice. And I'm so pleased that they are direct and unequivocal and they're not happy and they don't think we're getting there and they're saying we have to do more. The fourth injustice is the more subtle one of the injustice of the different pathways to development of different regions. Industrialized countries like Ireland, Europe, the United States is that we built our economies on fossil fuel. Now our responsibility is to wean ourselves off and do it with just transition like we're doing for peat workers in Ireland at the moment who used to rely so much on board the Mona. And we have to make sure that they and their communities feel part of the future, that they have the retraining, reskilling for the new jobs and the digital economy, the green economy and that's coming. The fifth injustice is the, I'm sorry, before I go on the different pathways but of course developing countries also want to go green but we haven't been showing the solidarity of sharing the investment, the technology, the skills, the training. And it's a really acute issue now for developing countries especially with COVID having increased their debt and caused huge health problems and the lack of equitable access to vaccines, all of that. So we have to really understand the need for much more solidarity. And the fifth injustice of course is the injustice of nature herself. The loss of biodiversity, the extinction of species. And I'm glad that we have two big conferences this year, COP 15 in Kunming in China where we want to protect 30% of the land, 30% of the oceans and have a whole new approach to protecting biodiversity. And I'm glad there is a gender plan now in that COP. And then of course we're more familiar with COP 26 in Glasgow and I want to pose another question. Why is it so important that communities and frontline voices are heard in COPs? I saw that myself. I witnessed how important it was before Paris when I was, as Shanid has mentioned, the special envoy of the Secretary General. I watched in the months before the French presidency organized additional ministerial, informal ministerial meetings. They were actually quite boring because the ministers tended to repeat their lines. But what we heard over and over again was Tony de Bruyne, the foreign minister of the Marshall Islands saying, why don't you understand? Do you want my people to have no future? Do you want my islands to go under? And do you want us just to be a displaced population in another country and lose the right to be a sovereign nature over and over again? And then we came to Paris and you saw in the street the 1.5 to stay alive, we were all marching with indigenous civil society, et cetera. And then there was the High Ambition Coalition formed. Who was leading that? Tony de Bruyne. Even though it included the United States and the European Union. And what was the main focus to get 1.5 degrees into the text? And we got the new goal of staying well below two degrees, working for 1.5. And the climate conference had to ask the scientists, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change to study this and explain. Because in a way, scientists had almost given up on 1.5 degrees. And when they studied, they saw that there is a very important difference between 1.5 and two degrees. But in that time, very bad things can happen, like the Arctic ice can melt, the coral reefs can disappear, and the permafrost will probably melt and throw up not just carbon, but methane, which in the shorter term is even more lethal. So the scientists told us in October, 2018, the whole world must stay at 1.5 degrees. And to do that, we must reduce by 45% our emissions. How important that was. And we wouldn't have had it if it hadn't been for the frontline urgency of those voices and how impactful it is now. We see that the G7 for the first time with its environmental ministers, and John Kerry was there, has aligned itself with 1.5. We see the importance of the International Energy Agency, which up to now has been pretty conservative, although it has a great executive director, Fatih Ibiral. But now, in its recent report, it too has aligned itself with 1.5. We see Shell being told in court, you have to reduce. Things are really shifting, and the investment world is shifting. But what needs to happen is we need communities to somehow embrace the whole approach to climate, bottom-up, owner. And I'm glad that at the European Union level, we have the European climate pact, which is seeking to stimulate throughout the EU, community-based approaches. So what we actually need is in every county in Ireland, in every community in Ireland, a sense of ownership, a sense of driving this, and it will help to bridge what I believe is a false divide between environmentalists and farmers. Farmers are being asked to do a lot. We have a new approach to the common agricultural policy. It's going to mean change. But farmers have always embraced biodiversity. They've always, because they know the importance of it, tried to value the importance of biodiversity. And we mustn't have any kind of false rift as we make a really important transition. And we can learn lessons from COVID. COVID drove us all out of our comfort zone, but it didn't do it equally. It actually exacerbated all of the inequalities, like a mirror, and it brought out the intersectionality between those inequalities. Intersectionality is a long word. It's a very feminist word. It really means the linkages. And so now we're seeing more of a link, and it's an important link in building momentum towards COP26 for urgency. We're seeing a link between Black Lives Matter, MeToo, the gender equality campaigns, and climate action, climate justice. And there are links because of the layers of injustice that I began with. So COVID has taught us that, that we mustn't have these inequalities in our world. And I often say, I don't want to build back better. I actually want us to build forward with equality, justice, and sustainability. And the positive lessons we can learn is that collective human behavior actually makes a difference. It's what's protecting us after all from the virus. While we wait for vaccines to be rolled out, collective community behavior will matter. We need in this part of the world, the industrialized world, we need to take seriously the sustainable development goal on production and consumption. We need to realize that we have to be more careful. We need to waste less. We need to recycle more carefully. We probably need to change our diet more than we're doing. And all of these are better if they're collective behavior. The second lesson from COVID is that government matters. We've seen the, you know, the visible impact of bad government on the lives, on the health, and on the economy of countries. It's stark. It's very evident now, and historians when they look at it will really see how evident it is. We also know that science matters. Something that the children, the climate activists striking from school have said to us, listen to the science. As we come out of COVID, we must be listening to the climate scientists and taking very seriously. And the final point I wanted to make, Sinead, is that compassion matters. You know, we've seen it here in Ireland. We've seen a willingness to reach out and help those who are more affected. We've seen the concern about those in abuse of households, those who lose their jobs. And we haven't seen enough international solidarity with vaccines, as I mentioned earlier. We need, but it is moving in the right direction. So I often say, and I want this to be more a community-based three steps now, we can all take three steps. And the first step is to make it personal in your life. So make it personal in your community. The second step is to get annoyed about those who aren't doing enough. And that's governments, but it's also business, investment, cities, and put more pressure on them. And the third, and this is the most important that I want to end on. Communities have to imagine this future that we need to be hurrying towards. It's going to be much healthier. It's going to have different kinds of jobs, but it's also going to be more nature-based. There's going to be an understanding that, you know, look at Ireland. We have such incredible nature in Ireland. That can also help us in our future. And in future jobs, in future visitors, et cetera. So I get very excited when I talk about the potential of that future. And I'll end on that note, because that's where communities can really help. Thank you so much, Mary. That was really wonderful. And I think, you know, I think what you're telling us is that climate justice has to be the lens, you know, that there's many of us listening in today who are climate activists in different ways. Some of us are in business, some of us are in government and civil society, but climate justice has to be the lens for all of our work. Not only because it's the right thing to do, as you tell us so powerfully, but also it's the only thing that's going to work. And I think it was quite extraordinary last week. You were also involved in the Dublin Climate Dialogues when Fatih Biral, you know, was launching the report and the IEA of all organizations, you know, it's a hard-headed, you know, sort of energy organization. And they basically call time, as you said, on the fossil fuel industry. So it's what we need, you know, to save this planet as opposed to fundamentally being just the right thing to do. So, I mean, as far as, in my experience, you know, if you didn't invent that term, climate justice, I think you certainly popularized it beyond anybody else. And I think as Ireland's climate envoy, we certainly use it as our lands in government and domestically as well as internationally. By the way, and Amy and Ryan spoke a lot about that this morning. And so I think it's, yeah, it's just wonderful to, you know, to have you elaborate on that this morning. I see we have already questions coming in. One of them is very topical, which is, I think it was yesterday that the Dutch court decision came out. And this actually came up in the last session as well, the business session. And I partly, I partly mentioned it because there's quite a few questions here I can choose from because I know it's something you have been very involved in obviously with your legal background and you've talked about it in your Mothers of Invention podcast as I remember. And I suppose that the question here from Ross Fitzpatrick is how important is the role of climate litigation in driving climate justice and should fossil fuel executives be held accountable for crimes against humanity as one of the world's leading climate scientists, James Hansen has called for. So maybe I'll let you answer that. And then I've come back to the next question. Okay, yeah, I remember, you know, saying over a number of years, I do believe climate litigation is going to be more important. And then we got the first Dutch case and that seemed to be almost an isolated case. It wasn't quite, but, you know, there was only the one. Now we're seeing so many important cases. We had the Irish constitutional case and we had a really very important case in Germany just recently where the German constitutional court has made it quite clear that Germany was not doing enough to protect its people. And the German constitutional court referenced specifically the Paris climate agreement, which was, you know, as a treaty that was relevant to their decision. And that has electrified, I understand, Germany, which is very welcome. The French have had the case. And now this Dutch case that you mentioned with the grandmother and young people, I'm sorry, the nun and young people, I think we're going to see an intensification of litigation because we're able to measure more precisely what the impacts are. And so we know that there are only about, what is it about 80 heavy emitters in the world. They better watch out because I think they're going to be picked off. We had the Shell case that I already mentioned. And that's, you know, a portend of, I think it may be more likely that there will be specific litigation against the worst emitters. And also shareholder action is really becoming very important in Exxon and others. You know, and the more of this, the better, obviously. And also there's a movement for a right to a healthy environment, which is a lot of countries supporting it. And I'm going to be speaking about that later today, actually with the business community and with the B team of business leaders. So I think, you know, a rights approach and litigation, all of that is helping. Absolutely. And as you say, linking the personal to the institutional, you know, a lot of us are, we're all voters, many of us. And, you know, many people are also shareholders and we're all consumers. So it is about making that link. The next question is from Oran Reed from Trinity and also from IEA. So delighted to see you speaking again at the IEA. We all talk about a just transition and this encompasses all of your five injustices. So why are we so slow in the West at learning that climate action is now the biggest issue we all face and that returning back from COVID disruption and recessions does not mean recommencing unsustainable development? You know, it's an interesting question and I've thought about it quite a bit and I've thought about it in terms of my own experience. You know, when I was president of Ireland, I didn't make any speech about climate change because we didn't experience it. I went on to be high commissioner and was another part of the UN dealing with it. It was when I started working in African countries for my small NGO called Realising Rights and I heard the direct voice. We don't know what's happening. Is God punishing us? This is outside our experience. How come we don't have rainy seasons like we used to have? How come we have long periods of drought followed by flash flooding, et cetera, et cetera? We are beginning to feel the impacts where we know we're going to get more precipitation as the scientists call it, which means heavy rain. We're going to get more rain. We're going to get more flooding in Ireland. We need to be more alert to dealing with that. Our summers may get hotter, but the rain and flooding will be the main problem and maybe the odd hurricane, which we didn't have in the past. But, you know, I think we do need to actually be more in touch, which is why it's very important that you have on this panel a discussion about the green wall and that, you know, Ina will bring home the existential life she is living because she's living where that's the way it is. But we're seeing fires in California, fires in Australia, you know, huge flooding in Texas and so on. It's beginning, but, you know, we need to be ahead of waiting for it to get so bad that we feel we have to act. We have to be intelligent enough. But that is why we need the frontline voices at the COP. And I do worry, I meant to make this point and I don't think I did. I worry about COP 26 because of the lack of equitable access to vaccines. How are we going to have participation of the right voices in numbers that really matter if they can't travel because of the health situation at home? Absolutely, that's a huge concern of ours and actually something that we'll come back to a little bit later. You have to dash for all of your other commitments today, but you've, I think, given us a wonderful opportunity to pass the baton to Inamodja. So just to really thank you so much, Mayor Robinson, for, as always, an inspirational and hopeful message. And, you know, I know we'll have a great follow-ups from Inna and from Orla. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sinead. I wish I could stay, but I'm afraid I'm booked. We understand. But I'll follow online. Okay, later. Thank you so much. Okay. Wonderful. And as I said, a great segue to Inamodja. Inna is a Malian singer-songwriter, actress, advocate for women and girls' rights and climate activist. She is a land ambassador for the UN Convention to Combat Desertification. She has also taken a leadership role in the Great Green Wall Initiative, which is a project to combat desertification by planting a wall of trees, stretching horizontally across the entire Sahel region. Inna has been a strong supporter of efforts to combat female genital mutilation as a personal survivor of this ordeal. Her energy and her humanity reverberate throughout her music and her artistic expression. And today, she'll speak to us about the topic of land degradation across the Sahel in Africa. Inna, it's so wonderful to have the opportunity to talk to you, and I know you're putting into practice some of what Mary Robinson has spoken about. So over to you, Inna. Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's really an honour for me to speak on this panel this morning and to tell you more about the Great Green Wall. The Great Green Wall is actually an African-led movement. It's an initiative that started in 2007, and the idea is to build a wall from west to east, all along Africa, 8,000 kilometres of green, and in the region of the Sahel. And the Sahel is south of the Sahara, and as the desert is growing and the land are getting drier, this initiative can really help restore degraded lands and help communities combat the many, many issues that are tied to our change in climate. So for me, starting on this project, I started working on this five years ago, and it was very important to go on the ground to meet the rural communities who are the first to face the negative impact of climate change and also the ones who are doing the work to make this Great Green Wall happen. So it's been a past a decade, and we've roughly achieved 15% of the Great Green Wall, but from now to 2030, the goal is to complete this Great Green Wall. And also on the ground, having women being the leaders of these projects in every community that I've been. Women are really, really present and doing the work. And so for me, it was really important to, as a feminist and as a women and girls right activist and also climate activists, to witness what they are doing and also to share their voices, share the work that they have been doing and how important the Great Green Wall will be once it will be achieved, because it's something that is going to help the continent of Africa, but it's also going to benefit the whole world because with millions of actors growing, it's going in the end to be a lung for the planet also, like the Amazon is in different forests. So also to mention that the Great Green Wall is not just about planting trees, it's also about helping communities, learning new skills and also bringing job opportunities and also working on food security that is really important. And hopefully the Great Green Wall will be able to answer different issues that are tied to it like forced migration, like famine, like conflict, drought that we see in the region of the Sahel, that we have seen a lot of people coming from this region trying to come to what we think is the El Dorado, which is Europe, and the fact that they are not able to make a living in the areas where they were born is a huge factor. And having also all these conflicts that are happening in the region of the Sahel, as when we look at the lecture that in 50 years has receded 90%. And when we see that the Lakshad is actually around four countries, Cameroon, Niger, Nigeria and Chad, and all around the region where the lake is, there is this armed group called Boko Haram who are terrorizing communities there, that the communities have become very vulnerable because 80% of them live in some form or another of agriculture. And they're not able to make a living anymore. So they've become very, very vulnerable. So the aim of this Great Green Wall is really to answer all the different issues that we are facing today. And for me, it's truly an honor to be part of such an epic and ambitious project because I was born and raised in Mali. And as a daughter of the Sahel, I really want my continent to thrive. I want the new generation to have opportunities and a future because a lot of people say that Africa is the future. Africa is going to double its population very soon. So we want to give hope to young people. We want them, it's actually something that can be really bad if we don't do anything. We're going straight into a wall that we are seeing right now. Or it's something that we can work on right now and in 20 years be able to have a community that is really thriving instead of surviving. So for me, as a woman, as a mother, as an African, it's really important but also to bring the stories to the stage of the world so people can understand more why Africa is dealing and how Africa is dealing with climate change and the solutions that we are trying to bring and have people from all around the world be part of this movement because the Great Green Wall, if it becomes a movement, it will actually give hope to other people on other continents to replicate what we are doing right now in their communities. And it's really, it's about the people and the climate and communities. It's not just about the drought, it's about the impact that it's having on people. So I think communities are the one who are going to really save the planet because they are going to change the world by doing what they are doing right now. Ina, thank you so much. You're just reminding me. I saw something on Twitter recently. I think Elon Musk or one of the billionaires launched a competition and asked, there was some multimillion dollar prize for the best technology for carbon mitigation and somebody on Twitter posted a picture of a tree and he said, did I win? I think there's a huge amount in that and I think that's one of the reasons why the Great Green Wall initiative is so compelling because it is very much about mitigation. But as you said, which is of course a global priority for all of us, but it's also, as you say, very much about the community and the individual level as we keep coming back to today. So thank you so much for that and I know there's already some questions for you coming in so we'll come back to that in a second. But we'll go to our final speaker first and then we'll come back to questions for both of you. Our final speaker of this session and indeed of this conference is Orla Murphy. Orla is a representative of the winning team of the Interversity Klimathon competition, which as we know was organized by the French Embassy in Ireland. Orla is a university student and she'll talk about the project entitled Know Your Label, which aims to tackle transparency in the fast fashion industry based on SDG12, responsible consumption and production. And I think, Orla, you're going to have some slides to show us the app where consumers can get more information about the product. So again, coming back to what we keep saying over this whole morning, it's also linking to the very personal. So really looking forward to hearing from you, Orla. Yes, thanks very much, Sinead. Bonjour à tous et à toutes. Good morning, everyone. As Sinead mentioned, my name is Orla Murphy and I am the chairperson of Know Your Label, the winning team of the 2021 Inter-University Klimathon. And I'm delighted to have the opportunity today to share our project with you all. To give you some background, the Klimathon was organized by National University of Ireland Galway and the French Embassy in Ireland. We were assigned into a team of four and met twice per week throughout the month of March to first identify a problem related to climate change and then provide a solution. At the end of the month, we presented our project to a panel of judges alongside six other teams and we were chosen as the winners. My team are based in three different universities in two countries and having never worked together before, we dove headfirst into the project alongside our studies. So now I'd like to show you a presentation to give you a better insight into our project. Great, so today I'll talk about some background, the problem we identified and our solution to this problem called Know Your Label. And before we go any further, let's meet the team. So Liz Hunt is our marketing officer, Liz is a third year social science student at National University of Ireland Galway and co-founder and editor of the university's Sustainable Fashion Magazine. Then there's myself, Orla Murphy. I'm the chairperson as I mentioned and I'm a third year global business and French student at Dublin City University. I'm currently completing two years of study abroad at Neoma Business School in France. Harry King is our secretary and Harry's a third year global commerce student at NUIG and he wrote to the student newspaper. Finally, Evan Manny is our technology officer and Evan is a third year actuarial science student at UCD currently completing an internship. So moving on to give you guys some background. Our project Know Your Label focuses primarily on UN Sustainable Development Goal number 12 which is responsible consumption and production. Specifically, we decided to focus on the fast fashion industry which can be defined as the mass production and consumption of cheap clothes in response to consumer trends. So why should this industry change anyways? The negative environmental impacts of the fashion industry are well documented. Currently it produces 10% of all humanities carbon emissions. On top of this clothing production has roughly doubled since the year 2000. In recent years, however, there has been a growth of online platforms selling and exchanging used clothing such as Depop Vintage and New Wardrobe. This demonstrates the growing will amongst consumers to put their money towards more sustainable practices. Next slide. Thank you. However, there is still a gap in transparency. One organization that tries to combat this gap is Fashion Revolution. They publish an annual report on the top 250 fashion retailers called the Fashion Transparency Index. The index is a tool to incentivize brands to be more transparent and to disclose more information about their policies, practices and supply chain. Now, while transparency does not necessarily equal sustainability, initiatives such as the index help to push accountability among retailers. The average transparency score in 2020 was 23%. With some businesses scoring a shocking 0%. This shows that there is a lot of room for improvement. An anomaly with this transparency index is that it focuses only on transparency of communications from a company and not the sustainability of their practices. The fashion revolution also run social media campaigns such as hashtag Watson Micros as you can see on the bottom right, which is a publicity campaign to motivate industry and government to pay attention to the veracity of labeling. There's a common misconception that fast fashion is only relevant to cheap clothes. However, it encompasses both high street and high fashion. So moving on to the problem. Our team identified the following problem. The lack of easily accessible information for consumers contributes to the lack of transparency across the fashion industry. Tools such as the transparency index are great, but it takes much research to find out this information and so it's not necessarily accessible. Now lack of transparency is something we look at from three different perspectives. Firstly, from a consumer perspective, the average consumer is purchasing more in part due to the influence of social media and influencer culture. Most of the time these consumers are unaware of the negative impact that their purchases can have because it's not disclosed to them in a meaningful way. Transparency is also an issue when dealing with fast fashion companies. Metrics for measuring sustainability often differ from company to company, which makes it all the more difficult for consumers who are motivated to make conscious choices. Finally, policies across the world vary considerably and are often not legally binding. So while there are indeed steps being taken, the fast fashion industry remains difficult to navigate. So that's where our solution comes in. Know Your Label is a labeling system and app designed to create awareness for consumers about where their clothes come from. The label is designed with three metrics in mind. Kilometers traveled, water consumed and energy used. Take for example, a pair of jeans. The label would tell the consumer how far the jeans traveled, how much water was used to make them and how much energy was used to produce them. The percentages relate to the industry average. A high percentage in red indicates that the metric is above the industry average while a low percentage in green indicates being below the industry average. Accompanying the label would be a small QR code leading to an app with further and more detailed information. Moving on to our inspiration for the project. We took inspiration from the food packaging industry. People know everything about what goes into their food, so why don't we know the same for our clothes? The widely adopted BER system for classifying the energy rating of houses also uses a similar traffic light approach. So now I'll show you some screenshots from our prototype app. The home screen of the app, as you can see here, shows... Sorry, on this screen, you'll see a mock-up of the label. When scanning an item of clothing in the store, the user will be brought to this screen that you can see here. And moving on to the home screen of the app, on the left-hand side here, shows you friends' activities and featured outfits. We wanted to bring a social aspect to the app with this, especially for younger users. Now on the right-hand side, you can see the information for the item of clothing that you've scanned. In this case, for example, a pair of H&M jeans. You have the option to add this to your wardrobe. And at the bottom of the screen, you can compare the jeans with other similar products to see if they are more or less sustainable based on our metrics. Please note that the figures are for demonstration purposes only. And moving on to the next screen. On the left-hand side, you can see your own personal profile. It's possible to follow your friends on the app and compare profiles. Each user also gets a personal wardrobe rating. This could bring out the competitive side of people in a good way and encourage them to be more sustainable. Finally, on the right-hand side, there is more information about the metrics used in the app for people who want to learn more about it. Thanks very much for listening and I hope you guys enjoyed listening. If you'd like to get in contact, there's our project email address. Orla, thank you so much. I have to say I am dying to get this on my phone. I think it's, you know, I don't know if I get the expression right, but that notion of transparency is the best disinfectant and that often just giving the power to individuals to make decisions can really force the whole chain to make adjustments. So I think this is wonderful. I would certainly be emailing you to find out how we can download it. And I'm sure you will have heard the Cathalon speak in the last session. And I think they would be open ears for this because they had some wonderful examples of making fleeces out of plastic bottles and so on. So I think they would be very keen to talk to you, I'm sure. But yeah, I think just wonderful, practical, tangible, you know, technology. And yeah, really, really look forward to this being scaled up. Lots of questions coming in. So I'll start maybe with some of the questions for Ina. We have about 15 minutes, I think 10 to 15 minutes, so we'll hopefully squeeze in a few of the questions. Ina, maybe a first question for you. You highlighted that the Great Green Wall not only provides a lung for the planet, but will also lead to job creation for communities. You also mentioned political instability in the region. In what way has this instability impacted the cross-continental wall and how might it inform the work over the next 10 years? And this is a question from Pauline Conway who is a student of the MSc in Climate Change at DCU. Thank you very much. That's a very interesting question. Actually, each country is working on the Great Green Wall and what I could see from traveling from Senegal to Ethiopia all along the wall, what I saw is that all the countries are not on the same level of achievement on the wall. And it's also tied to the fact that some countries like Mali, where I come from, are very instable politically and we have since 2011, we have a lot of terrorism in the region of the North where the Great Green Wall was supposed to start. And so it wasn't until recently that it was an urgency. So we can see from a country to another that there are some inequalities on that side. But I think that what we are trying to do is to have everybody on the same level of engagement and all the leading parties really involved in the project and making it their priority. And to have something that is more homogen than, because in Senegal and in Ethiopia, what I saw with my own eyes are really tremendous. How do you say? I'm thinking in French right now are tremendous efforts that have real results. And in Mali, nothing has grown from the project. So this is something that is a priority for us on the Great Green Wall project to bring everybody together. But there are other issues like COVID that really took us a step back and we're working on it right now. But now that we have more funding to achieve the project, this is something, questions that are on the table and are being dealt with. Thank you so much, Ina. Loads of questions. So I'll try to go quickly. One question from Viv Malone for you, Orla. She's wondering whether the project looked at the issue of plastic microfibers in clothes. Yeah, so when we were going through the project, we wanted to pick metrics that were most relevant to people that kind of made the most sense when you would see them on a piece of clothing. So for that reason, we went for the energy used, the kilometers traveled and the water consumption. Now that said, if we were to continue with the label, we're still in the preliminary stages, looking at the composition of clothes would definitely be something that we would consider because microfibers are definitely becoming more and more common, unfortunately. And it's becoming known that they are big pollutants in terms of fashion also. So we haven't looked at it, but it's definitely something that we would consider for the future. Thanks, Orla. And I know there's a question that, there's a question from each of you about water. So I might ask each of you, of course it has slightly different connotations. So Ina, the question for you on water from Pauline Conway from DCU is given the increased presence of drought in the region as you highlighted, how do you manage water supply issues necessary for the Great Green Wall? And then for you, Orla, after that, Andrew Gilmore from IEA asks a question. I noticed that you were measuring the water consumption in the application. Of course, the fashion industry is the second most water intensive industry. Did you find when working on the project that this was widely understood? So I might start, you know, with your water question and then move on to you, Orla. Water in the region of the Sahel is one of the biggest problems, the lack of water. And to have women and children walking kilometers to go and get water instead of being in school or working to make a living. And for the Great Green Wall, that is also one of the skills that they are working to develop community-based solutions and local solutions to keep the rainwaters. And I saw in Ethiopia, in the region of Tigray where they had the biggest famine in Ethiopia, how they conserve the water, the rainwater and reuse it. They created a whole way based on local techniques. And it's really the most difficult thing. That's the reason why working on restoring degraded lands and regaining this region to help prevent the drought. It is very difficult. It's something that we will be working on for a long time. And me, as a musician and an activist, I don't really have an answer for that. But what I know is that it's a priority for the Great Green Wall project. No, thanks, Sina. Orla, could we come to you on the question of whether the water intensiveness of the fashion industry is widely understood? Yeah, I think it's something that people definitely need more understanding of. For example, to produce one cotton t-shirt can take up to 2,700 liters of water. And really, I think that people, the average consumer when going into the high street shops, we pick up a t-shirt and we buy it and it doesn't really cross our minds for another second. So I guess that's kind of what we're trying to achieve with the label is to make people stop at the point of sale and say, oh, actually, can I do better than this? Is this something that I really need? And really we hope that we're trying to encourage people to purchase less and to look more at the actual impact of what they're purchasing, including the water consumption. Thanks, Orla. I noticed as well, as you will have even more so that during COVID there was quite, there's been quite maybe publicization of a lot of the upcycling initiatives and really avoiding this just throwing out of the clothes. And I think the way in which you're making it clear how much indeed energy is going into our clothes, I mean, it's absolutely, I mean, that's a stunning and that's a stunning statistic. So I think your initiative will have implications beyond, and of course, you know this very well, but it will have implications beyond its immediate use because people will just be generally getting more aware and then maybe saying, well, do I really need to throw this out or can I make an effort to, you know, change it into something else or give it to someone else or give it to a charity shop and so on. So yeah, it's just so powerful. A question for both of you, a little bit broader from Dervila Cook, who's a lecturer in DCU. Dervila asks, is there sometimes a need for another term other than climate change to talk about the ecological chaos in the world? For example, COVID, a zoonotic disease is more caused by destruction of habitat fueled by consumerism than by climate change. This destruction of habitat and of buffer zones between wilderness and human habitations and factories can then exacerbate climate change but the link is not immediately apparent to the person on the street. So in public discourse, it would be more helpful to make the link between consumerism, materialism and COVID more apparent if more specific terms were being used and just to say, I suppose from my own personal experience, I spent about two and a half years working on the Ebola crisis in West Africa, which we know was very directly linked to the destruction of habitat and the forests in coming back to your presentation, you know, the destruction of the forest. So this question is quite close to my heart. So maybe I could hear from maybe Ina first and then Orla as to whether or not our terminology needs to shift sometimes to make it more, you know, to make it more accurate and more useful when we're trying to communicate about these issues. I absolutely agree 100%. I think it's really important to, because climate change is a big umbrella, but if we really use specific terms, that will help us really focus on the problem and find real solution for every problem. And I think that it is something that is going to happen more and more as people get more educated about it, because now, because of the media and everything that's been happening in the aid of the media, the public knows more about climate change in general, but it's really important that we make a step forward in really pointing out everything specifically to be able to tackle it as precisely as possible. So this is something that I myself try to do on the Great Greenwald Project or other project that we're working on. As we've been doing for feminism and women and girls' rights, it's really important to be really precise because every experience is difficult and every problem has to have a clear solution for that problem and not just put everything under the same big umbrella. No, I think that's very valid. It reminds me of all the surveys that have been done where if you talk about one individual being affected by a disaster or three individuals versus if you start talking about thousands and so on, generally, on average, we kind of switch off at a certain point when things become too generalized. So I think that's very valid. Orla, would you like to add in on that? Yeah, I completely agree with what yourself and Inna have said. I think sometimes the term climate change, it's become so used that we just kind of disconnect from what it actually means and the consequences which are so devastating that are already being experienced. And I think that definitely talking to people and encouraging solutions is the best way to overcome that kind of disconnect and to try and make sure that the conversation stays relevant to people and that they fully understand what's coming down the tracks. Thank you. Thanks, Orla. And we could easily stay here all day and questions keep flowing in, but I'm going to make this the last question and it's for Inna. And it's from Dara Moriarty. So Dara asks, you heard Mary Robinson discuss vaccine access and the impact that this will have on African small island presence at COP. Do you believe the West is in danger of not listening to those most impacted on the frontline of climate devastation? Inna? I think that it's very important that we have equality into getting the vaccines because we are living on the same planet. We are on the same boat. And if we don't manage to have everybody have easy access to the vaccine, the virus will stay here because with globalization, people travel and it's something that is really important. And it shows how things have been going for decades and the continent of Africa and the poorest countries need to have the same access as the West has right now because otherwise it's going to just, we will keep on going in circles and we won't be able to tackle the problem of COVID. And hopefully this is something that will happen, but for now it's the number of people who have been vaccinated on the continent, it's so low that it's scary. No, absolutely. And I think as I mentioned earlier, I wanted to touch on that because it's such an important priority for Ireland when it comes to COP26, as I'm sure also for France in Ireland and not least because of the activism of Mary Robinson, we've really put small island development states and least developed countries, right at the heart of what we do internationally on climate action. And part of that is precisely this issue of voice and whose voices are listened to in international negotiations and we're really concerned about a possible disadvantage at COP if we don't have the people who are the most affected by climate change actually in the room. And Stefan, in the first session, elaborated a little bit on the priorities for COP. I think what I would add to that from an Irish perspective, we absolutely, as Stefan said, we need to reach that financing goal, that 100 billion, but there's also another goal on specifically on adaptation and the kind of work that is going on in countries like Mali and the Sahel and so on, helping people to adapt to the existing impacts of climate change, which is so incredibly real for so many people. So the global goal on adaptation is another really important area where we need to see progress in COP. The other issue that I just wanted to mention is around the oceans. The oceans doesn't really tend to come up in the climate COP so much. And it came up, I think, in the first session as well. That's obviously a big deal for Ireland, but it's something that I think we'd like to see more formally at COP, not least because of these coastal communities that needed to be supported for adaptation. And so for us, those are a couple of the key issues. And as I said earlier, also just infused by this climate justice lens, which I think our speakers this morning have spoken about so powerfully. We're out of time. It's been a wonderful session. I really want to thank Orla and Inna for incredibly powerful and practical and tangible presentations that are solutions, that are solution-based, which I think is exactly what we need. So this, Le Climat, tu s'en sommes la final session, I think has really reinforced to us the importance of getting to that community level and community engagement in this crisis. So, merci beaucoup à tous pour tout la recherche qu'on a vu aujourd'hui. And I'd like to just invite Michael Collins, Director General of the IEA to close the conference. Thank you so much. Thank you, Sinead. And congratulations on your appointment as a climate ambassador. And good luck with your work in that respect. And may I thank all the speakers who participated in this morning's conference for their insightful contributions. And I'd like to also extend a particular word of gratitude to our friends here at the French Embassy in Ireland for their fantastic collaboration in organizing today's events. Indeed, this is the second conference on climate and sustainability, which the IEA and the Embassy have co-convened. Today's conference is thought to highlight the important contribution that various communities can make in pursuit of a more sustainable and decarbonized future. And we heard from the policy community, the business community, UN representatives, hot leaders, and voices from a younger generation, all of whom recognized that addressing the climate and environmental crisis requires cross-community engagement. These perspectives in their totality are most timely and inspirational, given the major UN COP26, which as you all know takes place in Glasgow in November. And they also have to highlight our partnership and shared Franco-Irish climate ambition at both the EU level, as France prepares to assume the presidency of the Council of the European Union next year. And at the UN level, where in 2022, France and Ireland will be the only EU member states on the UN Security Council. So with that again, I'd like to thank the French Embassy for co-organizing this conference with us, the IEA, our speakers and moderators from all three sessions, and indeed, you, our audience, for your sustained interest and engagement throughout, and the questions that you've asked our many panelists. In these weeks, we at the IEA, the Institute of International and European Affairs are celebrating our 30th anniversary. And it's all the more gratifying that have co-hosted this event, focusing on sustaining our future. And when we mark the next milestone at the IEA's history, I hope that we can look back with some pride at the contribution that for its part, the Institute has made in addressing this most vital issue of our times. And as I close this conference, I do so looking forward to future Franco-Irish engagement on the role for all communities in the transition to a climate resilient and sustainable future. And also it would be very remiss of me not to just extend a warm thank you to the team who made today's event possible. Indeed, the teams that made today's event possible, both in the Institute and in the French Embassy who developed this initiative and made it all happen today. So with that, to all of you, to on my screen, Ina and Orla and to you, Sinead, but to everybody participating throughout this morning's session, it was truly a timely event and also more importantly an inspirational one. Thank you all very much indeed and good day.