 Hello, everyone. Welcome to the second low-emission solutions conference. My name is Alayna Greed and I'm with the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. So we have five dynamic panels planned for you over the next day and a half. We have some leaders here from industry, government, and academics who have all been working towards implementing the Paris Climate Agreement. So we're really looking forward to some rich discussion. We also have planned a special theater viewing of a not yet released documentary called The New Spider, which is about the next generation of nuclear technology and engineers. And that will be tomorrow afternoon at 12.45 in an actual theater on campus. So we welcome you to join us there as well. So, and during that we will also have David Schumacher, who's the filmmaker, and he'll be doing a live Q&A session directly afterwards. So without further ado, I'm going to just introduce my, or our master of ceremonies for the next day and a half, Michael Shea. Michael is the head of communications for SBSM. He's also an adjunct professor at NYU and has been a climate correspondent from around the world. So, first and foremost, help me thank Alayna Greed for organizing this conference. From the very beginning, she's been such an incredible leader. Keeping positive energy and positive attitude amidst the work, which isn't always easy. So we're such incredible organizing. So two quick, not announcements, but thoughts to think about before I introduce the three partners for their talk. Two things. One, if you do capture an interest between quote or comment in any of the panels, please share it on social media. When you do share it on social media, you see up here, hashtag LESC, and if you can't see this, it is at, the Twitter handle is at low to no, L-O-W-2-N-O, low to no. So if you share, please include those. That's helpful for us today. And secondly, just a reminder that this is a very action-oriented practical conversation. It's intended to be about a couple of things. One, strengthening technical capacities. So those of you who may not think of yourselves as technical, including myself, hopefully today and tomorrow will be informative for you in that way and strengthen your own technical capacities around low-emissions pathways and decarbonization, etc. So if you leave with new information, new ideas, and then charting key technology pathways. So hopefully you'll emerge today, tomorrow, with some new thoughts about pathways that you can pursue in your professional life or personal life, and your own low-emission, pathway, carbon footprint in your lifestyle. That's not going to be a part of the process. I just add that. So let me introduce the partners. We're thrilled to have their support. We'll start with Angie Pfeife with ICLEI, and then Guido Schmidt-Traub with SDSN, followed by Erasmus Polanco with WPCSD. We're thankful so much for your support. Angie, floor is yours. Thank you very much, Michael. Good morning, everyone. So if you get a little low on energy later today, I have a tip for you. There's a big set of stairs across Morningside Park. I don't know if any of you hiked up those this morning to get to the conference. It'll get your heart pumping. Get your head back in the game today. So please stay with us. We will have lots of very exciting panelists today to talk about all of the great things that are going on from a technology perspective. ICLEI is very, very honored to be a part of this collaborative, many organizations pulling together this conference today. This is our second time doing a low-emissions solutions conference. The inaugural conference was last year at COP22 in Marrakesh. Was anyone with us last time? All right. We've got some returning folks. Thank you so much for coming back. I look forward to having you share with each other your perspectives on what you hear today, what you hear then, what you think is changing. And so on. We're here at Climate Week. There's a lot going on. We really appreciate you being here. ICLEI is very involved in the local government space, obviously. And here in the United States where I work, I can tell you that the action has never been bolder. Local governments really have that fire lit underneath them to take action now, especially after the 2016 election results at the national level. We see that businesses are stepping up, universities, states, and local government. So we're very excited about the work that's being done. Today we're going to hear from a number of technology providers, technology experts, researchers. And we're going to try to then link that to the political will that needs to be built in order to transition to deep decarbonization. How can we inform our policy makers and decision makers with all of the great experts that we will hear from today? So thank you very much for being here. And I would like to hand it over to Guilla. Well, thank you. Thank you on behalf of the Sustainable Development Solutions Network. It's a great pleasure and honor to welcome you here for the second low-emission solutions conference. We're meeting, of course, at a critical juncture who will hear shortly from the architect of the Paris Climate Agreement to ask about where the world stands in terms of implementing the bold pledges that were taken. We know it's not easy. But wherever we travel around the world, we're hearing from governments, businesses, so there's really been a shift towards focusing on implementation and now some of the really hard questions surface. In the earlier seat of the low-emission solutions conference, this is establishing itself as a critical forum for sharing those lessons for connecting in an informal way business leaders, local authority leaders, practitioners, policy makers to really engage in this conversation because what we're seeing is that the opportunities are huge but nobody really knows exactly how to do this, how to decarbonize the energy system, how to decarbonize the transport system. And this fits into a broader context of discussions with our wonderful new leadership at the United Nations, the Secretary General, the Deputy Secretary General, the head of UNDP, there's a broad recognition of the international system is also going to shift its focus towards facilitating these kinds of dialogue, these kinds of partnerships, and that's where the low-emission solutions conference fits in. So I look forward to a day and a half of packed discussions before to learning a lot, look forward to seeing some of you at the upcoming conference and then Russell I think is also going to be speaking about plans for the near future. So without further ado let me hand over to our friends and partners of the World Business Council for Student Development. Thank you. Thank you and welcome from the WBCSD's perspective as well. I want to reflect on a trend that we've been seeing in the business community and in my career. So in the last 10 years we've seen shift of companies taking bold action on their own towards moving more into collaborating within their sectors. We've seen that trend shift slightly now to working more on supply chains, to the whole supply chain coming together to look at what are the barriers to scaling up some of these low-emission solutions. More than ever now also we're looking at the full value chain and that is the spirit that I want to talk about right now. The point of the Low Emission Solutions Conference is really to get different stakeholders together. So we have the cities, we have the academics, we have business coming together to look at what are the barriers to scaling up the deployments of these solutions and really where are we going to be going with the Low Emission Solutions Conference. We just had a meeting a couple of weeks ago with all our members talking about climate policy and a clear message from our members and that's 200 of some of the biggest companies in the world was that the Low Emission Solutions Conference is critical. It was the best thing that anybody attended at COP 22 last year and they wanted to continue and the reason they wanted to continue is that not only do we have a dialogue between the companies also the academics and the cities but it's critical to have this dialogue with the policy makers and the bright policy makers who are in the room at COP 23 and COP 24 next year are those people who are setting the decarbonisation pathways for their countries. So where we want to take the less after COP 23 into COP 24 is really into this dialogue and it's not just one-off dialogue in terms of aiming for COP 24 but we realise especially now when we're talking about the implementation of the Paris Agreement it's about a continuous dialogue that will be taking place across the full year in 2018. Some of you may have heard of something called a facilitated dialogue which is something that the governments are doing in terms of getting the Paris people ready for that implementation and we need to be part of that conversation. So I'm really happy to see many of you here today and across these two days we're going to be looking at some exciting technologies and also looking at some of the issues, the problems, the obstacles that we need to tackle together and those are the messages we need to bring to the policy makers. We have a great opportunity to do that this week here in New York but it's going to be even better next year as we're looking towards making more work with governments on this joint pathway for a low-carbon future. Thank you. Thanks to all three of you. I think this is now the transition where you exit the stage. Yeah, okay, good. I just want to make sure. How's the audio for those in back? It comes up. Good. You're hearing everyone well. Great. Excellent. So I'm very honoured to be able to introduce the architect that Vita was talking about but once to Vianna, all of you know. As you know, she's the CEO of the European Climate Foundation. As you know, she was the key architect of the Paris Climate Agreement. She's also on her leadership council at SDSN, which...