 Thank you Simone and it's a real pleasure to be here with you today and I should say it was very fun to hear about the examples in Thailand I was an exchange student in Thailand many years ago so it's wonderful to see the the traction taking place. I'm going to talk about more biodiversity cities and I add a question mark there because I think this is kind of an elusive concept in terms of what do we really mean by more biodiversity cities and how does that link to the wonderful presentations we just heard about more inclusive cities which might I add talked a lot about biodiversity as well and certainly urban forestry. So working for WWF that you can't not start with an image of a panda or a tiger or you know some important iconic species. I will also use this as a disclaimer to say I am not a biodiversity expert I am a city's expert. But I think the more this concept is becoming increasingly integrated so whether we talk about inclusivity whether we talk about biodiversity or climate action. They really meet in the middle in the urban area. But before going into the city space particularly and I'd like to kind of compliment the previous speakers by kind of zooming out a little bit. So this is the living planet index, which is a big report that WWF produces every two years the living planet report. So here is some staggering data. We have seen since 1970 that the population sizes of mammals, birds, fish, amphibians reptiles have seen an alarming drop in average population size to 68%. That is almost 70% that we have lost in a period that you know some for some of us is our lifetime, or less than our lifetime. So this is a really scary number and we need to reverse this trend in some parts of the world. For example, Latin America where I just moved back to Sweden from. This is up to 90%. So this is a huge problem and something that we need to resolve. What WWF has been pushing for and I mentioned this because this is really a global push. We are calling for something called a new deal for nature and people because we can't just talk about nature anymore we have to see nature and people together. A big part of this is something that we are calling the leaders pledge for nature, and I'm very proud to say that last year at the UN Biodiversity Summit in September of 2020. We had I think originally 80 heads of state and now the number is up to 92 heads of state, as well as the European Union signed on to this idea of a leaders pledge for nature. And what this really is is a united symbol to scale up global ambition and encourage others to to jump on board. And we want to see that we reverse biodiversity loss by 2030 and start to move in a more positive direction. Now, I know this event is about cities and about urban forestry but you know cities aren't nations, and yet cities are also of course home to more than half of the global population and growing by the day. They're also home to huge amounts of our our economy and GDP, but I really want to focus on two numbers here in context to this presentation. So cities are responsible for 75% of natural resource consumption. If we don't get natural resource consumption, correct. We can't get biodiversity correct cities are also you know I'm going to Glasgow on Friday for the UN Climate Summit so I could not not talk about climate change in in connection to this to cities are hugely important if we're going to get a hold of the climate crisis. And so here I just want to point out very briefly how WWF has sort of entered the city space why is a nature conservation organization working on cities. Well we know that if we want to turn those staggering statistics around we have to work in the urban space. So 10 years ago we started something called the one planet city challenge. And this year we had over 275 cities join us. And actually Simone I we've just redone the statistics so we've actually had 700 cities join us on this journey now not 600 so that was new to us as of yesterday. So these numbers are kind of moving in the right direction. So what we're trying to do here, particularly, and I'm going to quote Frank on this, the role of data. We need to set a baseline to know where cities are in order to help them to move on the right trajectory. This is primarily focused on climate data, but there's a lot of linkages between climate and nature data. So now what we do is we work with the CDP and equally and we get cities to do their climate data reporting and then we assess that data to see how closely they align to the Paris agreement and the 1.5 degree target. We also work in partnership so whether it's the organizations you just saw on the screen there, or something called the science based targets network, which has approved our assessment framework as one of the endorse methods to see how closely cities are aligned to this Paris agreement at the local level. Interesting to note that the science based targets network has also been talking a lot about how to better assess and measure nature's data in cities so this is something that is high on the agenda and in discussion will probably come to the surface that in the next year or so so stay tuned on that as Now, I know this is about biodiversity but I can't not talk about climate change because they are so inherently interlinked. And this is a graph that we came out with a few years ago just to show the importance of meeting this 1.5 degree target. Now it's not just about an uncomfortable temperature range, it's about a huge difference in terms of species loss, extreme weather events, access to water, especially in urban areas how many people will be impacted by this. I'm not going to go through this slide we don't really have the time but I'm happy to share it with you later, but just to remind us as we move towards Glasgow next week, every degree matters. Especially in our cities. A city like Beijing has already warmed by more than 1.5 1.7 and under a business as usual scenario it is expected to rise by 6.1 or more. So we need to think about how cities are connected and I know that the previous speakers also talked a little bit about urban heat island but it needs bearing an attention again. And of course urban nature and urban forestry are a huge part of this they're not the only solution, but they're a key part of kind of keeping our cities cool, think about natural cooling solutions, as opposed to mechanical cooling solutions which of course are growing quite rapidly in Asia. And I also wanted to just take the moment to point out that the cool coalition which has a fantastic name. And quite a lot of organizations behind it is coming out with a sustainable urban cooling handbook, which will be formally launched next week at the UN climate summit. And I want to just kind of flag that there is a chapter in there on nature based solutions for cooling and we will be hosting a webinar on the 2nd of December so if you want to know more. I'm happy to share the details with that to you so just kind of you know all of these things are so connected. I don't want to talk too much about inclusivity since we already had a great presentation on that, but I do want to share a little bit about WWF. We Love Cities campaign. And this is something that we connect to our one planet city challenge which is really focused on engaging local leaders and I love what Frank said about, you know, public opinion sways political opinion. And this is what we try to do with we love cities. It is a public engagement campaign to get citizens to love where they live. If they don't love where they live. They want to envision how it could be better they don't want to see you know pick up trash or plant trees, but we see this as a place to kind of a level playing field that happens in particular cities that are part of our one planet city challenge, but they also create a collective network of ambition and learning so you have local leaders, like a mayor in a Filipino city over on the on the right, working with local citizens to plant trees. It can be done it is being done and this is what's really exciting and we've had a lot of traction both in social media but also in the physical space of our cities. So, this is, I wanted to talk just in the the enders are the lower second half of my presentation, just to kind of share with you some examples are not WWF but kind of showing where the trends are going. I'm sure many of you have heard about this Milwaukee concept of forestry where it's dense forests that grow quite fast in a very biodiverse rich area. I know there are some questions about this method. But it is a, it is being practiced in a lot of cities and creates a lot of biodiversity and connection, especially for urban residents. I also wanted to talk a little bit about planning because you know both with what I showed us in the idea of pocket parks, but you know how do we design our cities today. This is so important if we're going to talk about biodiversity or we're going to talk about inclusivity in many cities at 40 to 60% of public space 40 to 60% is dedicated to cars in the forms of roads, parking highways. So this is something that we need to really rethink if we're going to successfully accomplish a lot of what's been set forth in the sole action plan. And of course, we have all been facing COVID, which has had many, many, many negative consequences. The cities have been most affected by COVID with over 90% of reported cases, many very severe lockdowns and quarantines I myself was not allowed out of my apartment for more than six months in Chile without two police passes per week and did almost get arrested for walking my dog. So it's very personal, but that's just the quarantine it's not talking about the loss of life the loss of jobs or all of the negative consequences that we have all faced. With every negative consequence and every challenge comes an opportunity to rethink and reenvision. And in the city of Santiago where I was just living in Chile, we saw as as the regulation started to ease streets closing down to allow for local economic recovery and social distancing. But why stop there. You know it was cities as they as the roads closed and cars got off off the streets we've seen around the world, air pollution improving, seeing the Andes clearly for the first time in decades. And then you know we've started thinking at WWF and and many others I know, but why do we create cities surrounded by cars, why can we not create cities that are greener, more inclusive, more biodiverse. So these are some of the things that you know, if we put planning at the center of this discussion, we can really see a change and certainly as Frank said mentioned and work with people. So this is what WWF would like to see we would like to see the restoration of socio ecological corridors in cities to both connect cities and ecosystems for urban resilience. And why is this important because cities have always been close to nature spots when humans started settling down, we started settling down and the most biodiverse rich areas places close to water sources whether it's the sea for fish or rivers for transportation and food. So cities and and biodiversity have always been interlinked and they will continue to be interlinked. Now these quotes I want to say just give a shout out to our friends at the nature conservancy who put a wonderful report together that I do recommend called nature in the urban century. And here are a few statistics here and I mean again I will share this with you this is straight from their report. But you know by 2030 40% of strictly protected areas will be within 50 kilometers of urban spaces. So we need to get planning right urban growth can also destroy natural habitat. And it's a storage of carbon by 4.35 billion metric tons. Now what does that huge number actually mean. Well that's about the equivalency of carbon dioxide emissions from 931 million cars. So in planning right understanding it's that the way cities are linked to biodiversity is hugely important. I just wanted to also say that this is a global trend. And in fact in many senses WWF is joining on the bandwagon under the leadership of so many wonderful organizations really talking about the concept of cities and nature cities and biodiversity. I have not not mentioned equally is wonderful work with IUCN with TNC and growing list of partners including WWF now their cities with nature platform and here they're working with cities to do their data reporting on on their nature targets but while also creating a community of cities to learn from each other. We're going to hear from forest we're going to hear from them in our session so I won't steal their thunder but I just love this idea of both focusing on inner forests, kind of surrounding forest and also forest further field and linking the consumption linking the SDGs and so much more. And finally another big city network just recently launched an urban nature declaration, which was signed by 32 leading cities in order to protect communities for health and well being, reducing climate risk and vulnerability and certainly for creating more green biodiversity rich cities. And the wonderful naturevation project, which was really about cities nature and innovation it just concluded it was a European Union sponsored project, looking at creating, you know, so many different things when we talk about nature so making space for nature but look at all of these kind of key research findings, a lot of is about inclusivities, equity, investment, collaboration so when we talk about biodiversity we're also talking about how it connects to everything else. So I want to just finish here, just plugging a new report that we put together and share with you a few examples you can find it on panda.org slash urban nature and it's called urban nature based solutions. And we just flag a few very successful cases what we find and there are so many more but this is a short report. We're also coming up with a new policy paper so stay tuned for that. And that will be launched next week at the climate club, so we will hopefully you know provide some guidance for cities when they're talking about this. A lot of new publications coming out. But just a few cities now the city of Malmö which I used to work at had a great project on preserving integrity and also restoring degraded ecosystems now the cool thing about this project is it happened in one of the lowest urban areas, and it is now one of the pride of the city as an eco city Augustin boy. So that went from having an area surrounded by flooding and crime and abandonment to now being this test bed of successful ingenuity, bringing back biodiversity what we saw as a 50% increase in biodiversity, 20% drop in carbon emissions, as well as a reduction on unemployment. The city of Medellin in Colombia another fantastic example really bringing this green quarters project to life how to do restore degraded ecosystems and creating a greener Medellin for you to integrate people from the beginning of the project so they really feel ownership. 36 green quarters were created, I think almost 9000 trees were planted and drop in average temperature which is extremely important for climate, but also for livability and 75 local people hired. The city of Singapore the city of Singapore and they're also going to be talking in our presentation so I'm not going to go into too much detail, but just to say that you know what they have done in terms of naturalizing drainage, and you know working here has been so so important and learning that investing in nature can actually be cheaper than concrete gray infrastructure, especially in the long run, and this project has led to over 100 species of birds coming back three kilometers of a meandering river and it's become a local tourist spot. And finally, these, I'm sure many of you know this project, but the stream restoration project in Seoul, digging up a highway and bringing back biodiversity and what this project has done and showed after at least 10 years or more. 100 species of birds can be found there three kilometers of another meandering river also very popular for visitors. So I'm going to stop there. And just to say you know thank you and just to share with you WWS motto which is together possible this is a complex topic but we can definitely get there if we work together.