 Thank you, Navrose, for that introduction. I doubt whether I am the right speaker to kick off the session right after lunch, because an ideal speaker in the post-lunch session is one who can tell jokes and keep an audience in good humor and awake. I'm afraid this organizers chose the wrong keynote speaker, because this is a heavy subject, a subject in which there isn't much good news and very little good humor. What I intend to do in the 25 minutes that I have is to give you the big picture, the big picture on the issues and challenges relating to environmental health in the context of the growing human impacts on the natural environment. The natural environment is critical to our health, not just physical health, but also social and psychological health. WHO defines health as not merely the absence of disease or infirmity, but as a state of complete well-being, physical, social, and psychological. Environment health is so closely tied to the natural environment that, for example, as you know, contaminant water can cause cholera. Air pollution can cause respiratory diseases. And heavy metals can cause neurotoxicity. While climate change threatens to introduce new pests and new pathogens, a sound natural environment on the other hand can significantly contribute to public health. For example, the concept that plants and flowers have a role in mental health is beyond dispute. There was a study published way back in 1984 in the journal Science that found that post-operative patients in hospitals with rooms overlooking trees needed less pain medication and less hospitalization than post-operative patients that looked out at brick walls. The fact that many pharmaceuticals derived from plants and animals underscores the imperative for preserving biodiversity and safeguarding our natural ecosystems. Unfortunately, unprecedented pressure is being placed on natural resources and ecosystems to meet the fast-going demands of our economies and populations. This is resulting in soil, air, and water pollution, growth of greenhouse gas emissions, deforestation, introduction of non-native species, and other unsustainable practices. That, in turn, carries major impacts, direct or indirect, on our climate, ecosystems, biodiversity, and public health. For the sake of illustration, let's consider just one resource, water, because it's the most critical of all resources. Persons can live without love, but not without water, right? Can there be public health without access to clean water? Water-related diseases alone cause about 3.4 million deaths a year. Water is a renewable resource, but it's a finite resource. If you wonder how a renewable resource can be a finite resource, the answer lies in the fact that nature has a fixed replenishment capacity to renew water. That capacity of nature has remained the same since the dawn of human civilization. Every year, nature can renew up to 43,000 billion cubic meters of water. Today, water is the world's most underappreciated, undervalued, and underpriced resource, whose reckless exploitation and growing shortages carry major long-term implications for public health. The larger reality is this. Humanity is changing the Earth's ecosystems more rapidly than its own scientific understanding of the implications of change. Human impacts on the environment are threatening human health and human security. The overuse of water, land, energy, minerals, and biological resources is also contributing to climate change. Climate change is more than just about greenhouse gas emissions. After the remarkable improvements in infant mortality and life expectancy in the last 100 years, the continuing human alterations of ecosystems are threatening to raise morbidity and mortality rates. The spread of antibiotic-resistant bacteria is one example of the human impacts on the natural environment. I was looking at the gender, and in the morning, sessions here, we were discussing critical issues like the continued rise of antimicrobial resistance and the rise of drug-resistant TB. These are some of the issues that underscore the already grave public health challenges. A few weeks ago, US intelligence released a public report on global security threats. That report identifies avian flu and Middle East respiratory syndrome, COV, as carrying global pandemic potential. The point is this. The future of human civilization hinges on sustainable development. Today, the growing gap between near-term development objectives and long-term human aspirations means that the costs of development are being passed on to future generations. It's important to note that although human civilization is thousands of years old, for example, the Indian and Chinese civilizations are almost 5,000 years old, the greatest damage to ecosystems, much of the damage, has been caused just in the last 100 years. The 20th century brought the most rapid progress, but also the most rapid damage to the Earth and its ecosystems. In the 20th century alone, humans altered or degraded up to 50% of the Earth's land, modified 2 thirds, the natural flows of 2 thirds of all rivers, and made extinct. One quarter of all bird species and many large mammal species. All that happened in the 20th century. According to the human agency, human water, we have lost at least half of our wetlands. And since the mid-1970s, that is in the last four decades alone, aquatic ecosystems have lost more than 50% of their biodiversity. The world is still losing species almost daily, with serious implications for our search for new biologically active compounds for medicine. Even large herbivores like hippos, rhinos, and elephants are beginning to vanish from our world at a startling rate. Even though as vegetarians, they mean no harm to other species. In fact, they are crucial to our ecosystems. Many of you know about a class of drugs known as ACE, inhibitors. That class of drugs emerged from research on a Brazilian wiper, a snake, a pit wiper, whose venom was such that the victim's blood pressure would drop to zero. Years of research on this wiper helped unlock the secret of how to regulate blood pressure. That in turn led to the development of this blood pressure group of drugs known as ACE inhibitors. Today, that wiper has become extinct. What factors are contributing to the growing human impacts on the natural environment? Since 1960, the human population has more than doubled, but the global economy has expanded 11-fold. This would suggest that economic growth, more than demographic growth, is driving environmental stresses. In reality, the number one culprit is consumption growth. The average human being is consuming more natural resources in the form of industrial and agricultural products. Yesterday's luxuries are becoming today's necessities. Even as the vast majority of nations have significantly reduced their birth rates, they've become more consumptive. In fact, declining fertility rates usually correspond with greater prosperity and greater consumption. Add to the picture the increasing BMI, body mass index, of humans. The average BMI of humans has been increasing sharply in the period since the end of World War II. With the result, as a study in the journal Lancet shows, 30% of the people in the world today are obese or overweight. 30%. The rapid spread of obesity, even as hunger persists, typifies the extremes in our world, doesn't it? Let's consider the environmental impacts of the increasing BMI. Heavier citizens as a rule have heavier demands on natural resources. They also cause much greater greenhouse gas emissions because of their greater transport and food needs. An interesting study was published in the British Journal, BMC Public Health. The study has found that if the rest of the world had the same average BMI as the United States, it would be equivalent to adding almost an extra billion people to the world's population, an extra billion people. So the issue is not just about how many mouths they are to feed. The issue is also about how much excess body fat there is on a planet. I don't have a global figure, but according to AMA, the American Medical Association, the yearly cost of feeding obesity-related illnesses in the United States has crossed $200 billion. Against this grim background, global warming injects more ominous implications for our future, especially for public health. Climate science is a young science. It's a science still maturing. Not surprisingly, there are some gaps in our scientific understanding of the phenomenon of global warming. Still, whatever is well-established scientifically on global warming suggests that the implications for public health in particular are going to be grave. Even in the most conservative of scenarios, the effects of global warming will create major new health care stresses. The health impacts will be greater on the poor, the elderly, children, and those with already underlying health conditions. In the panel discussion that follows, I'm sure you're going to hear some discussion on climate change mitigation and how, through adaptation, some of the impacts on public health could potentially be mitigated. But let me wrap up my presentation. The correlation between a healthy environment and a healthy body underscores the critical importance of environmental protection. It's often said, health is wealth. Health is wealth. Wealth in a financial sense. In truth, health is inextricably linked with nature's wealth. I was looking at the agenda and the session just before lunch. You were discussing infectious diseases. That's a critical issue, because many of the new and emerging infectious diseases affecting humans are originating in animals. This is leading scientists to investigate what is known as the ecology of disease. The ecology of disease arising from human impacts on the natural environment. One critical but overlooked factor behind the ecology of disease is the changing human diet. Humans have changed not only their diet, but they've also changed the diet of animals that they raise for their own food. Firstly, rising incomes in the last six decades have led to a major shift in eating habits, fostering increasingly meaty diets. If you look at the European diet today, compared with the European diet 100 years ago, you will notice a fundamental shift in eating habits. If you look at Asian diets, they have changed almost in one generation. The Chinese diet today, which is heavy and animal protein content, bears no resemblance to the Chinese diet of the early 1980s. So in a matter of few decades, diets have changed fundamentally. Why is this important for our environment? Livestock require much more food, energy, water, land to raise and transport than plants. So the fast-increasing international demand for meat depletes natural resources, damages ecosystems, and fuels climate change. This is the single biggest driver of environmental stress. Because meat production is an indirect way of generating food, it takes up to 30 crop calories to produce just one meat calorie. The livestock industry is also responsible for nearly one fifth of the global greenhouse gas emissions. Secondly, the diet of industrially raised cattle has been deliberately changed so that livestock speedily gain weight through grain feed rather than through the natural grass feed. This development coupled with the routine administration of growth promoting hormones and antibiotics to healthy animals carries major environmental animal health and human health impacts. Unfortunately, the administration of antibiotics to livestock prophylactically also raises the risk of microbes evolving resistance and spreading eventually to humans. I mentioned this US intelligence report released a few weeks ago. It says one of the greatest threats the world faces is potentially from a novel or reemerging microbe that is easily transmissible between humans and can kill millions. In this light, one question that we need to ask ourselves is whether governments and civil society groups ought to play a role in encouraging citizens to eat a healthy balanced diet for the sake of their health and for the sake of a planet. After all, don't governments use laws and regulations to discourage smoking on public health grounds? The WHO's classification a year and a half ago of processed meat as carcinogenic to humans and red meat as probably carcinogenic should serve as a wake-up call. The changing human diet is just one illustration. The world needs sustainability on all fronts, including energy, economic development, and resource consumption. And this is my last point. This demands defining development more broadly than just GDP growth. Right now, we are focused on GDP growth as the principal index of development. The benchmarks of true development ought to include protection of the physical and biological environments, resource conservation, public health, social equity, narrow income disparity, and environmental sustainability. The world, unfortunately, has made the mistake of over-emphasizing GDP growth, which entails more and more consumption. Moreover, environmental impact assessments, environmental impact assessments of proposed projects often do not examine potential impacts on public health. Why? Because the term environmental impact is defined a bit too narrowly. We need to correct that by redefining even that term. The key point is this. There can be no sustainability in our world without a more integrated and holistic approach to development. Let me stop here. Thank you. Thank you very much, Professor Chalani. May I ask you if you would stay up here for a minute or two, maybe, to take a couple of questions? I know your time is scarce, but maybe I'll just speak loudly. Thank you very much, all to brief 20, 25 minutes. But let me open the floor to questions if there are any, either clarification questions or if somebody wants to explore some points in depth. Thanks. Well, maybe if there isn't anybody right off the bat, let me maybe pose you a question if I could. I thought you very nicely sort of took us through the arc of sustainable development as a civilizational issue to the kind of stresses that we currently face, including species extinction through to an emphasis on consumption, climate change as a forcer, and then to metrics, which is actually a nice bridge to the next part of the session. What I wanted to ask you, though, is you didn't really have time to get into this, but what do you see as the drivers of these changes? Is the driver really a lack of knowledge of the sorts of pernicious effects you talked about, which would then suggest that it's really about propagating knowledge? Or do we know that we are in this mess? And therefore, it's about, despite knowing, there are forces that are constraining us and keeping us locked into these patterns. So to sort of pose it a little starkly as a choice, but perhaps you could take it whichever direction you think makes most sense. Well, that's a good question. But if I answer that, it will take me a little bit. Just give us an indication. That's a presentation by itself, actually. It is. I'll just be telegraphic. First, humans are driven by near-term objectives, unfortunately. We have seen that in all spheres. And unless a real crisis looms or a real crisis hits a community, a society, a nation, we don't wake up to the damage that we're inflicting on an ecosystem or a particular river or mountain or whatever it is. For example, in Europe, in the late 1980s, there was this famous chemical spill by a farmer company in Switzerland. It led to the Rhine River turning red. That served as a wake-up call for Europe to focus on water quality. Until then, water issues in Europe related to navigation. Historically, from the 19th century, navigation was the real issue, how to make rivers navigable, how to promote trade on the rivers. But water quality was not an issue until the chemical spill happened in Basel. So right now, people think that we still have time and that the crisis is not really before us. Unfortunately, this kind of a short-sighted approach leads to continuing damage to the environment. And we should not forget that humans are a rapacious species. I spoke about how we have made so many species extinct. I don't think any species in the world is responsible for driving so many other species to extinction as humans. So we are an unusual species. And we think short-term. Thank you. Thank you very much.