 Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, Director General of the Universal Postal Union, my fellow panelists. Let me begin by thanking you for this opportunity to join this panel and also the discussion in the context of the UPU Sustainable Development Working Group and in particular the reflections upon how the Universal Postal Union's global community can be part of a response to climate change both in terms of managing the risks but also in realizing the opportunities that these responses offer to us and above all to make the universal postal community part of the capacity to respond to what is ultimately a sustainable development challenge. I want to begin by commending the partnership that we have enjoyed between the United Nations Environment Program and the Universal Postal Union for quite a number of years now. And I'm grateful for the Director General for having continuously provided both direction and momentum to build on both the successes that we have had in the past in working together but more importantly in guiding our collaboration for the future. I'm fully conscious of the fact that for many of you who work in the postal services across the world, the question of whether sustainable development and indeed the challenge of climate change belong into the mainstream of your work. I would begin by saying that first of all, if not you and if not me, then who else? If not us and only them, would we indeed be able to respond both to the basic tenets of sustainable development, also hopefully out of the September Summit, a new set of sustainable development goals and ultimately also our collective capacity to address the challenge of climate change. It is everyone's responsibility and therefore I would appeal to you that in the way that you have already framed both your work on sustainable development but also the steps you have taken in addressing the issue of greenhouse gases and also the opportunities for both reducing carbon emissions and then examining the options of mitigation and offsets really do belong into the mainstream of the business strategy of any postal service. But let me also try and bring perhaps a few encouraging aspects that make this not an effort that would detract you from essentially delivering an effective and efficient postal service across the globe but to make the response and also the objectives of sustainable development and addressing climate change an opportunity for an even more effective, efficient and responsible universal post-union community. The beginnings of this really are first of all to establish what is our footprint and I think many of you will have been surprised that indeed postal service across the world are not an insignificant contributor alongside many other sectors to our collective emissions of CO2 and greenhouse gases. Therefore we are all part of both the problem but more importantly we will become part of the solution. You have already taken a number of steps in terms of getting postal service at the national level to establish their greenhouse gas footprint and I want to commend you for this because without measuring and establishing and positioning your individual entities along the scale of whether you are a low emitter or a high emitter it is very difficult to even begin to talk about measures that could be taken. We are continuously evolving the greenhouse gas inventory and the methodologies and I'm very grateful and also commend UPU for having been part of this effort. I also want to congratulate many of your postal services, the members of UPU have already begun to undertake this work. It continues to build our capacity to respond both based on science and empirical evidence rather than speculation or aspiration only. A second step clearly is how we can mitigate and ultimately also manage down our emissions footprint. And here what has emerged in recent years first of all through the experience of many pioneering actors in our economies and societies north and south, large economies and small economies is actually quite encouraging. Equally within the United Nations system we now have a number of entities amongst them I proudly would mention also the United Nations Environment Program who are climate neutral entities. Far from actually making us poorer or imposing on us undue costs we have found that we have achieved significant efficiency gains. In contrary to expectations we have actually found that in many of the measures that we have since undertaken we have not incurred additional costs we have actually made savings. We have become a more efficient and also more transparently managed organization whether it is in the context of our travel policy whether it is in the encouragement of videoconferencing whether it is also in the context of managing our infrastructure, our buildings, offices, vehicle fleets and electricity supplies across the world. The net impact of trying to make UNEP a climate neutral organization has been that we have managed to between the year 2013 and 2015 to manage down our emissions footprint by a remarkable 17%. Even with the offsets that we have had to pay for those emissions that we could not avoid we have found ourselves in a position where we have actually saved money. The potential for efficiency gains is quite remarkable and I think particularly in a logistics and infrastructure-based service such as the Postal Service and particularly in your global network of postal organizations I think you would be surprised if you have already indeed discovered this to be the case that there is a significant potential for repeating this experience. But let me also be clear the idea is not to be politically correct, the idea is to do what we can responsibly and within the context of the budgets and means by which we can act. The bottom line is that for the foreseeable future many of our organizations will still have a carbon footprint that we cannot eliminate and therefore the next step is to offset these emissions through the kinds of offset schemes that exist today. It is part of taking a responsible role but also to signal to others that we lead by example. We cannot always ask other institutions, other countries, other individuals to do the things that we are not prepared to act on. In that sense I hope I can convey to you today the message that in measuring greenhouse gas emissions, in actually exploring the potentials for reducing emissions and thereby achieving enormous efficiency gains and ultimately also taking responsibility for offsetting those emissions which we cannot avoid, we become part of a global fraternity and network of countries, institutions, individuals and enterprises that are indeed becoming part of the solution. Our partnership between UNEP and UPU is one expression of this confidence in our ability to make a difference. We stand ready to work with you and also with your individual members wherever it is possible, feasible and wanted to try and explore the opportunities and also the boundaries within which we can act. But ultimately let me conclude my remarks by simply emphasizing again how critical it is to interpret our response to climate change not only as a constraint or indeed as a cost factor but as an intelligent contribution to the broader sustainable development agenda and indeed to the realization of the goals including the principle of universality and integration that will form part of the framework within which all of us will have to act in the years to come. Thank you and I wish you a very successful meeting.