 Så vi är i Sverige, vi är en organisation believing in precisness and it's nine o'clock sharp, which means that we will start this third SCI science forum. So I would like to welcome you very much here this morning. My name is Johan Skilansjöna, I'm the executive director of SCI, the global organisation. I'm so enormously pleased to be able to welcome almost 80 colleagues from around the world of this organisation. We have colleagues here and when I state the centre, if you can just raise your hand so you can see Stockholm I assume a few. Yes, good, of course. And we have our neighbouring country Estonia from Tallinn. They're all collected there. And then we have a centre in York. We have a few people there, our second biggest centre. Welcome, great Oxford. Yes, there you go. We have Boston, we have the US first of all. We can start with the entire US spread out. Good, because the centre there is spread out. Boston, primarily Davis and Seattle. Wow. And then we have a centre in Bangkok as well. That's fantastic and we have our centre in Nairobi. Excellent. To tell you, that's the entire centre in Nairobi. It's not bad at all. So it's really great to have you all here. And actually, I'm a bit sad in a way. We were supposed to have this third forum in Bangkok this year. Because we would like every second year to be somewhere out in the SCI world and connect really with people, organisations in the regions where we operate. We decided in December that the political situation in Bangkok was somewhat uncertain. And maybe not the right place for forums such as this one. On the other hand, I think being a bit sad, this is also the strength of SCI. It means that we have centres, we have colleagues, we have people really working around the world where things are not as easy as they are here in Stockholm. We tend sometimes to complain quite a lot in this country about many things. But when you compare it to most parts of the world, we are extremely well off of course. And I think from that perspective, handling that direct relationship with other offices and other centres is actually a strength for us. And if you just look back in the last year, a couple of things did happen. We had Bangkok and everything that happened around there. We had Nairobi and the terrible terror, act of terror there, even in Boston. We had a lot of uproar when we had problems with shootings and so on. So things are happening around the world. We have the science forum as I said once a year now, this is the third time when we gather SCI colleagues to discuss internally what we are doing, how we can work better, how we can be more relevant, how we can address the issues that really confront us in this world. The first day we always open up and invite partners, friends who are interested in our research, first of all of course. And we are so glad to see so many of you here. I hope you also join us tonight for the housewarming in our new office here just next door. But because we also need the influence of your perspective. What is it that we are doing that is relevant? What is things we are not addressing that we should address? And that is also key for us. We want to have this dialogue with you. But just to still stress, we see this as our internal forum. And it did sprung out from the fact that we realize, and I'm ragging now, of course I can brag, I'm head of this organization. It sprung out from the fact that SCI is so diverse in its competence and its experience from different parts of the world that we can organize our own conference. And things get so much easier. You may think, but we also realize that even within our own organization we have a lot of different perspectives and ideas and so on. We have people promoting GMOs. We have people who are not liking GMOs very much. We have people promoting biofuels. We have people who argue that biofuels are maybe not so good from food security perspectives and so on. That's the way it should be. That gives us a dynamic backdrop. I have only five minutes. I'm not going to give this grand exposition of sustainability that you may expect from someone heading this organization. But the grand exposition is what's happening in the next couple of days actually. Not one person can give a grand exposition. It's a big mistake if you try. So the only thing I would like to do is also to thank a few people. We have some of the board members here already. Where are you board? Can you raise your hand? I saw at least one. Andreas, where are you? Did you disappear? I saw Andreas. We have a fantastic board. And they are dropping in. I saw a few of them here. I don't know. They are nervous when I'm speaking maybe. We have a few new board members coming in this year also. The vice chancellor of the Stockholm University. Linking up to academics very strongly here in Sweden. And also the head of the director general of Formas. And we have another person. We cannot still say who because it's not 100% cleared yet by the government. I also like to thank all the partners out there. Those that we are working with and those funding us. And we have more than 100 different organizations and funding SCI every year. But two or one if you say that the Swedish government. But I would say not just the government. I mean the whole Swedish system, the taxpayers of this country. Are the major contributors to SCI. Give us the base, about 40% of our funding today from the Swedish government. Annika, you are the representative here today of the Swedish government. Feel the pressure. Angela Petigonitska, the director general of SIDA. SIDA support has also been extraordinarily important for us. Not just because of the money but also because of the trust you give us. In planning and using these resources in a way that we believe is the best. For what we are doing. No micro management there I must say. From neither the government or SIDA. So that's really highly appreciated. We are moving forward a lot. One thing we did last year was to have a link with one of the science things with art. And we are discussing more and more the need to link science and art to really touch people. Not just the brains of people but also the heart of people to promote change. And to end up I would like to read a passage because I have to read it. My memory is not good enough this early in the morning. But it's a passage from art not science. It could really be applied to the science we are doing I think. One challenge really is today that we are quite often pushed to try to take a stance. Either or black or white. Your climate skeptics or your 100% climate change promoter. I mean always taking stance, polarization. Science is not about that and I think this passage from literature can actually give us some guidance. So change artist to scientist if you want to. As an artist the nuance is your task. Your task is not to simplify. Even should you choose to write in the simplest way, a la Hemingway. The task remains to impart the nuance to elucidate the complication. To imply the contradiction. Not to erase the contradiction. Not to deny the contradiction. But to see where within the contradiction lies the tormented human being. To allow for chaos to let it in. You must let it in otherwise you produce propaganda. If not for a political party, a political movement. Then stupid propaganda for life itself. For life as it is might itself prefer to be publicized. Was Philip Roth in his book I Married a Communist. So it's something to think about when we produce our science. So welcome everyone. I'd like to introduce Erik Kempen, the center director for SCI Asia. Who will actually formally welcome you to Bangkok but in a slightly different position. So please. Thank you very much. Thank you very much Johan for that very nice introduction for everyone. To this forum. And what I would like to talk about. Cheers. What I would like to talk about is I am going to welcome you. Not just to Bangkok but to Asia and not just the Asia center. I want to talk about SCI in Asia. Because in fact if you look at ongoing projects. I mean projects we have going on right now. There are five centers active in Asia. The Asia center yes but also Stockholm, York, Oxford and Oxford and the US centers. And at the Asia center we are actively talking with the Africa center about doing some combined work. And we continue to talk about the possibility of using the talent center's expertise in environmental economics. Which could be quite relevant for work going on in Asia. And you can see we've got work in China, South Asia and Southeast Asia. And we cover all themes. This is true across SCI as well as within the Asia center. This is a small selection of past and present projects, publications and so on. Showing the wide range of policy relevant activities. Stakeholder workshops, peer reviewed publications. A number of different activities. So then we have SCI's Asia center. In Bangkok officially established in 2004. But it was an office before then. Our host is Chulalongkorn University. Excuse me. Actually including myself we have 13 researchers. One postdoc and a fluctuating number of interns. We've got a dedicated communications coordinator. Five admin and support people. And three research staff on long term study leave. We're based in Thailand. So the most numerous of the nationalities we have is Thai. But we've got eight nationalities in the office. Mostly from Asia. China, Philippines, India, Indonesia, Thailand and Vietnam. Also people from Germany and the US. And I must say that as you pointed out this is an opportunity for SCI researchers to share their work with each other. So I apologize for the rest of you of the possible inward looking focus of some of this presentation. But so you'll see a little bit of just the Asia center sharing with the rest of our colleagues what we're doing. In particular our vision statement. We came up with this at a retreat. We don't normally share it externally. It's more our statement of what we want to do. But I wanted to emphasize something. So we say SCI Asia will be one of Southeast Asia's most compelling and influential catalysts of change. We like to work collaboratively and be useful. And I think that our mission statement captures that. We've got two established research groups. Political ecology of disaster risk resilience in Southeast Asia or Pedra. And managing resources for sustainable development or MR for SD. That align well with SCI's themes. And nearly all of our projects fall under those. And our largest projects fall in the middle. They include staff from both sides. But we've got some emerging research themes as well. We've got gender and climate being led by resurrection. Sustainable agricultural systems being led by Charles Rogers and sustainability macroeconomics being led by myself. The faces that you see up here are people who are actually in the Stockholm right now in the room. And if you're interested in any of these topics please feel free to talk to us. Other than that I just wanted to say something about our most important program. This has been going on since 2005 with generous support from CEDA. One year after the center was officially formed. It has had its ups and downs but recently they've just been ups really. And the program is very strong and it just received a third phase of funding. The goal has always been to achieve sustainable development through strengthening knowledge based policy processes. The objectives to build capacity for policy relevant research. Focusing on cross border collaborations within the Mekong region. Something new this time supporting regional assessments. And we're really looking forward to working on this. You can see the phase three themes. So that's what I wanted to share and now I would like to turn over to Frank Tamala who is the chair for the science forum. Thank you very much.