 Okay. Hello, everyone. Welcome. Thank you for joining us today for the 2021 Europe Sustainable Development Report Launch Event hosted by the co-authors of this report, the Sustainable Development Solutions Network, SDSN, and the Institute for European Environmental Policy, IEP. My name is Mayel Voil, and in addition to being your moderator today, I'm the communications manager for the index and monitoring team at SDSN. This event will be structured in four parts, starting with the opening remarks, then the presentation of key results, followed by a panel discussion and a short Q&A session if time permits. We very much encourage you to ask your questions in the Q&A box at the bottom of your screen. We'll do our best to respond to some of them if time permits after the panel discussion. The webinar will end with closing remarks from State Secretary for the Republic of Slovenia's Government Office for Development and European Cohesion Policy, Monika Kirvis Rojic. Now, let us start by introducing our guests for the opening remarks. We are delighted to have with us two highly distinguished speakers, Professor Jeffrey Sachs, President of the UN SDSN and Director of the Center for Sustainable Development at Columbia University, and Ms. Katrin Shabo, Member of the European Parliament. Professor Sachs, the floor is yours. Mayel, thank you very much, and greetings to all of the participants. And a really warm congratulations to the entire team and partners that prepared the European Sustainable Development Report 2021. It's a great read, filled with fascinating ideas as well as data. So this is not only a report on where Europe stands on the Sustainable Development Goals, but it is an analysis that goes quite innovatively into the nature of Europe's situation with regard to the SQGs, not only within Europe, but also the effects of Europe on the rest of the world, the spillover effects, and very crucially, the variations across the European countries and within the European countries on the SQGs around the theme of leave no one behind. The Sustainable Development Agenda is an agenda of prosperity, social inclusion, and environmental sustainability, and leave no one behind is that pillar of inclusion. So this year's report very innovatively looks at those indicators of who is being left behind by country. And there are some very telling findings from the report. Let me in my brief introductory remarks identify three points that I found especially interesting in the analysis. First is the emphasis on Europe's three pillars of the SDGs, achieving them internally, helping other parts of the world to achieve the SDGs through development assistance and the spillover effects, largely the adverse spillover effects from Europe to the rest of the world. This three pillar framework for thinking about the SDGs, I think is extremely helpful because we tend to focus mainly on achievements within our countries without paying sufficient attention to our effects on the rest of the world, both positive through development assistance, which is a responsibility, and through our adverse effects on the rest of the world through various kinds of spillovers. That's another kind of responsibility to not make damage in the rest of the world or not to hide our own mess by essentially exporting it to other countries where it's not counted in our own accounts. So this three pillars I think is very important and very innovative framework for this year's report. The second is what I've mentioned about leave no one behind. I would draw our attention to a very interesting figure which now needs a further analysis. That's a figure 1.13 in the report, which shows something quite striking, which is that countries where a substantial proportion of the population is left behind in effect, are also the countries with the very high cumulative death rates from COVID-19 on a per person basis. The finding is quite strong statistically. Of course, now it needs to be unpacked. But it suggests that countries in Europe that have achieved a high level of social inclusion are also the countries that have secured fewer deaths from COVID during the pandemic. We should understand this relationship. It's an important one. Why are more deaths associated with more left behind? Is it because of lack of access to adequate health care? Is it because poor people have prior health conditions? Is it because poor people are on the front lines unable to protect themselves adequately from infection? Is it because of the management of information not being adequate? Is it because of other background factors, for example, in the countries with a lot of people left behind? These are countries in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Balkans region. That's also a region of a lot of pulmonary disease, air pollution. There may be many factors going on, but the relationship is quite strong. It is a very interesting finding that I think can generate a lot more insight. The third point that I want to mention, finally, is the really high quality analytics on the spillovers. The rich world has a huge effect on the whole world. The rich world dominates the world in consumption. It dominates the world in resource use. It dominates the world in spillover effects. We're often not aware of that. Our own societies, our own cities, may look clean and green, but what we're importing, of course, can reflect a lot of embedded pollution that occurred during the process of production of those consumer goods. It could include a lot of environmental degradation from deforestation, from greenhouse emissions, from overuse of water. The spillover phenomena we can expect to be very important, but this report I think goes beyond even that important point by identifying four areas of spillover, environmental and social spillovers through trade, direct spillovers through transboundary air pollution or other kinds of pollution, economic and financial spillovers that come from tax havens, tax secrecy, money laundering and the violence spillovers that come from exports of weapons or criminal activity. I want to congratulate the team not only for clearly identifying all of these spillovers, but finding innovative ways to measure the spillovers and to point out that Europe's superb performance internally also has this downside, which is that there is a lot of imported adverse spillover effects from Europe. I think European countries and the European Commission know this because there's a lot of thoughtful effort to introduce new standards, new legislation on supply chains, on the global value chains to stop this kind of adverse spillover. So let me end there except to offer my great thanks and congratulations again to the team that has produced the European Sustainable Development Report and pass the microphone back to you, Myle. Thank you. Thank you, Professor. Thank you. I now invite Madame Catherine Chabot to take the floor. Many thanks to all of you and good afternoon from the Leopold Parliament in Strasbourg. We have plenary this week and I would like to only thank the Sustainable Development Solutions Network for this invitation and stress my happiness to be reignited with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, whom I had the chance to meet in New York with the delegation from the European Parliament in September 2019. I'm also delighted to see Guillaume Lafortune again and the SDSN team in Paris as well as Thomas Le Sueur and of course all the other experts that I will be pleased to listen to. Today we are reunited for the launch of the 2021 European Sustainable Development Report, which does an extremely useful job of shedding light on SDGs' priorities in the EU and I was very interested, Mr. Sachs, to have your overview, your comments on this report. While the report is coming out in the past pandemic area and COVID-19 has been a major setback for SDGs, we are now facing a renewed opportunity as the implementation of the European Green Deal is one of the most crucial challenges facing the EU for the years to come. The von der Leyen Commission has indeed made the 17 SDGs for 2030 an integral part of the EU's political priorities. It is a key time to increase cooperation and financial support in favor of SDGs and today I'm honored to say some introductory words after you, Professor Sachs, a renewed expert. Many thanks for your strong leadership on this so important issue. Your inspiring speech in New York reinforced my conviction that you are one of those who truly believe in the transformational capacity of the SDGs. It's also the case I am convinced for everyone in this webinar we all have a story with SDGs. I strongly believe that SDGs are a universal framework that can be applied by all stakeholders, government, local authorities, private sector, as such I am a great believer in the integrated reading of the SDGs which is all the more relevant if integrated into a transversal vision of our public policies. This can be illustrated throughout two of my key missions at the European Parliament pushing for better ocean governance and making the great green role initiative more visible. At the core of the EU international ocean governance there is SDG 14, life under water, which is about conserving and sustainably using the oceans but in reality to cover all aspects of ocean governance, SDG 14 has to be put in tolerance and tackled together with many other SDGs, notably SDG 6, clean water and sanitation, SDG 12, responsible conception and prediction, SDG 13, climate action but also SDG 2, no poverty and 3, good health for example. About the the great green wall and you were speaking about the help we have to to have in Europe with the third countries and you were speaking about the spillover effects on the SDGs. So launched in 2007 by the African Union the great green wall project spans 11 African countries from Dakar to Djibouti and aims to restore 100 million extras of degraded land in the Sahel. It goes in the sense of a more balanced EU-Africa partnership and can transform one of the world's poorest region by creating a mosaic of green ecosystems through a systemic approach combating certification desertification and draft developing sustainable infrastructure, creating jobs, improving food security while also preventing climate-induced migration. In this sense this highly ambitious project perfectly embodied the integrated implementation of the SDGs and covers every single one of them. Now I would like to speak as a member of the SDG alliance, a brand new alliance in the parliament. The SDG alliance is an informal group of 25 like-minded MEPs from different committees and political groups who believe that the SDGs should be at the centre of policy making in the European Parliament and the EU more broadly. The chair is my dear Irish colleague Barry Andrews and we work together to mainstream and strongly advocate on the SDGs. The alliance was publicly launched in September and was enthusiastically endorsed by both commissioners Mr Paolo Gentolini and Mrs Yuta Yopilainen. Our legislative texts systematically say that we must be aligned with the SDGs, yet the alliance thinks that the EU must go further with three objectives. First one, an annual debate and report on the SDGs. We have just obtained to have an annual report in 2022, it's a victory, between the NVV and development committees, and we want this report to be systematic. Secondly, external support in terms of expertise and the expertise of SDSN is essential for us, especially in terms of research, joint organization of events, meetings, extent of expertise, a memorandum of understanding with SDSN should be considered. And third, make this alliance an intergroup at the European Parliament. In the perspective of the future EP European Parliament mandate 2024, we want to make this alliance a real intergroup with means, etc. Before that in 2022, we will be involved in key debates, including high level forums of SDGs in July and New York at the AG UN in September. To finish this introduction, I would like to, I would say that the link between health crisis, climate crisis, biodiversity loss has never been so clear. In order to anticipate future crisis, we need a more translational and integrated approach to our public policies in Europe, and in the implementation of the Green Deal. Let's work together for their concrete implementation. Thank you, and I will be very happy to listen to everybody. Thank you. Thank you, Madame Chabot. Our next speaker is my colleague, Guillaume La Fortune, who is Vice President of the SDSN and lead author of the report, who will present some key findings and recommendation for the 2021 edition. Thank you so much, Maëlle. Thank you also, Professor Sacks, MEP Chabot. I am Guillaume La Fortune. I'm the Vice President of the Paris Office at the SDSN, and I'll be walking you through today some of the key results. And actually what I'm going to do is also to highlight some of the points that have been made by both Professor Sacks and Catherine Chabot on some of the SDG challenges that Europe is facing, but also on the issue of international spillovers. But let me just start by highlighting and emphasizing the fact that this is really the fruit of a collective work with inputs from a wide range of researchers and a consortium of organizations and partners. It will be too long to list all of the people that contribute to this report. But let me first of all thank the SDSN Europe team and the co-chairs, and we're delighted to have one of the co-chairs with us today, Angelo Riccaboni, who will contribute to the panel discussions right after. But also all of the SDSN networks that collaborate and contribute to this report, the national networks in Europe, the Institute for European Environmental Policy. Let me also thank our friends at the European Economic and Social Committee who have been working with us since the very beginning on this journey and we're very happy to have Peter Schmidt with us today. The Slovenian EU Council Presidency Team with who we've been working closely over the past six months on this assessment, the Enrige-Bolle-Stiftung, and we have Lisa Tostado also with us today, the European Network of Political Foundation and the Minister of Ecological Transition du gouvernement français, and we will have Thomas LeSueur with us in a few minutes. So let me start with, and we can move to the second slide, just to give a bit of background on this assessment. So this is part of a broader range of tools and instruments that we've been developing over the years to track the performance of countries on the Sustainable Development Goals. So we've been doing this since 2015 at the global level, but then obviously we have major constraints at the global level in terms of datasets, and we're also not able to contextualize necessarily the indicator selection to the challenges faced by different regions. So that's why we're doing also regional assessments, we've done some for Africa, Arab region, and also for Europe, where we are able to tap into the phenomenal work of the technical parts of the Commission, including Eurostat, the Joint Research Centre, but also the European Environmental Agency, for instance, that produce a wealth of data and statistics that we can use to track the performance of European countries on the SDGs, and we also do subnational assessments. This year's edition has four major new features compared to the previous one, we include this year the candidate countries in addition to the EU as a whole, the 27 individual member states, EFTA countries, the United Kingdom, we've added the candidate countries this year, we've strengthened the indicator set on spillovers, leave no one behind, and the coupling, we have two thematic chapters on the European Green Deal, the Recovery and Resilience Facility and SDGs, and on the Food and Land Transformation. And finally, we're also hoping to do more activities and dissemination at the EU level in Brussels, but also at member states level, because obviously member states are absolutely key to implement this agenda. And this is, of course, a flagship which has been referenced already over the past couple of years in voluntary national reviews, but also by the European Commission, the Parliament, the European Parliament, but also in mainstream media as well. Next slide please. So I won't, you know, I will go primarily through the results. Next slide. And so I won't spend too much time on methodologies just to say that the methods and the data, the way they are presented, it has been edited statistically by the European Commission. It's been peer reviewed also by Nature Geoscience and Cambridge University Press. Next slide please. And next slide please. It's always hard every year to summarize the wealth of information provided in this report, but I've given it a try and I think we could summarize the results in five key major findings. The first one might seem obvious, but I think it's always good to remember that ending the COVID-19 pandemic everywhere is a prerequisite for restoring and accelerating SDG progress in Europe and globally. It's difficult to make or to advance on the SDGs in the midst of a pandemic and it has also lowered, let's say, the overall international attention on the SDGs. And as emphasized under SDG 17 partnerships of the goals, we need greater access globally to vaccination, which seems to be our way out and there's still major gaps in access to vaccination globally and moving forward in addressing the pandemic is a prerequisite for SDG progress. The second key finding is that the pandemic is a setback for sustainable development in Europe and globally. So for the first time this year, the SDG index overall, the average for the EU has declined compared to the previous year. Now, what's interesting to note is that the decline seems to be slightly lower than the decline we've observed at the global level, which could suggest that some of the social policies, the automatic stabilizers in many European countries, but also the dedicated and targeted social economic policies in Europe have helped mitigate some of the impacts on the SDGs from the pandemic. And we argue obviously in the report that the SDGs should remain the guidepost in the recovery phase. I think COP26 highlighted the need to have systemic approaches to tackling the climate, but also the issues around deforestation and biodiversity threats, but also to connect progress on achieving Paris by 2050 with the need to advance also the social policies, including the social goals and major breakthroughs by 2030. Finland tops the 2021 Europe SDG index, but Finland and other northern European countries still have major challenges in achieving the SDGs from a global standpoint because what we try to do in SDSN is to obviously look at the EU itself, but also to look at the EU compared with the rest of the world. And the EU, European countries do top the SDG, the global SDG index, also the world happiness report that we do every year. But they do generate negative international spillovers. And I'll be walking you through some of the slides in a second. And we also make some recommendations in terms of priority actions ahead of the 2023 UN SDG summit to strengthen the EU's SDG leadership domestically, but also to send a strong message internationally in terms of the commitment of the EU to achieve the SDGs. Next slide please. So I'll be going quite quickly because we already have some delays on the agenda, but from now on I will just be showing key charts and figures from the reports. All of this, I'll remind everyone here that it is accessible since this morning online. So all of this is accessible on our website. But so the first key finding that I mentioned is that for the first time this year since we've been doing this, the SDG index has declined in Europe. So you see here that there was progress happening since 2015. In 2020, there is a slight decline on the EU on average. As I mentioned, the decline is slightly lower than what we observe in the rest of the world for certain key metrics, including those related to poverty or unemployment. And what you see on the left-hand side is also some of the spread or the difference in performance that can exist across European subregions. At the bottom you have here the candidate countries, and at the top you have the northern European countries that are with a score of 80 percent out of 100. Next slide please. So the three, there's three major indicators that explain this decline. So one is the drop in life expectancy in 2020 compared with 2019 under SDG 3. SDG 1, no poverty, and SDG 8 unemployment. Next slide please. In terms of the overall SDG index results, so as for last year, Finland is at the top of the index and in general northern European countries are at the score of 80 percent or close to 80 percent. In general, central and eastern Europe and candidate countries have somewhat lower scores between 55 and 60 percent. And then what you can notice here also is the fact that we do face some data gaps, and this is why some of the candidate countries couldn't be included in the index, so we do have country profiles but not in the index this year because of the data gaps, the missing data bias that was problematic for some of the candidate countries. Next slide please. In terms of SDG challenges in Europe, so obviously this dashboard here is by subregions because it's easier to present in a slide, but those results are also accessible country by country. But if I summarize, I would say we highlight five major SDG challenges. One is obviously very immediate is the impact of COVID-19 on some of the leave no one behind metrics and the fact that vulnerable groups have been particularly impacted. The second one, and you can see it here, the dashboard on SDG 2 but also from SDG 12 to 15 looks rather red and orange. Those are the goals related to responsible consumption, sustainable agriculture, sustainable production, but also the climate action and biodiversity. The third challenge is on international spillovers, and I will be going back to this, but that also explains part of the poor results on SDG 12 to 15 because Europe does outsource some of the environmental impacts to the rest of the world. The fourth challenge is related to the convergence in living standards and productivity within Europe. One interesting finding is that on SDG 9, as you can see here, there's a lot of greens but also a lot of red and oranges, and this is related to productivity, industry, innovation, infrastructure. And this is SDG 9 is one of the goals where we have among the largest spread in performance across countries with some countries performing extremely well, but also some countries performing much lower. And then a message across the board is that we do see progress happening in Europe. Now, the pace of that progress tends to be too slow compared with the actual transformative actions that we need. Next slide, please. So next slide. On the leave no one behind, so Professor Sacks mentioned this correlation that we've done between the leave no one behind index and COVID-19 mortality rates. There's also a good correlation between the leave no one behind index rank and the SDG index as a whole, which seems to indicate that moving forward on the social aspects of the agenda can also help on overall moving forward on sustainable development. For memory, the leave no one behind index tracks issues like poverty, income inequalities, gender inequalities, and issues around access and quality of services across various population groups. Next slide, please. Another area where there is a good correlation is actually between sustainable development and happiness. So we see here two major flagship reports produced by the SDSN, the Sustainable Development Report, the Global Edition, and the World Happiness Report. And we see a good synergy between the top 10 countries here. Now, having said that, and that is the next slide, the performance of the European Union on one specific area, which is related to the spillovers, is much poorer. So you have here on the left hand side the SDG index and the European Union from a global perspective perform better. And a lot of this is related to greater scores or better scores on social economic goals as the G1 to 10, and then also on SDG 16, compared with the rest of the world. But then on international spillovers, there are still major issues to be to be addressed. And what we mean by international spillovers are essentially three things. First is those impacts that we outsource through international supply chains, right? So we externalizing key sectors like cement and steel to another country and then importing the production. So the emissions are generated abroad, but we don't, we haven't changed our consumption. So through consumption, we generate emissions, deforestation, and other impacts abroad, which can be also social like accidents at work embodied into our consumption of textile. The second aspect is financial flows. So financial secrecy tax havens profit shifting that undermine other country's ability to leverage resources to achieve the goals. And then the third part is security spillovers like the export of major conventional weapons that can disrupt other regions around the world. And we see here that compared with other regions, the EU performs lower than other world regions. Next slide, please. One thing that we've been documenting this year is over time, whether we were seeing some progress on those spillover aspects. And it does seem if we take here just this is the lines for CO2, the two blue lines are CO2. The darker blue line are the growth rates, the annual growth rates in terms of production based CO2, so domestic CO2 emissions. And the lighter blue line are the imported CO2 emissions. These are three years moving averages compared with GDP. And I think here what we can see is that, you know, the EU has been successful at decoupling sustainable, at decoupling GDP growth from increase in CO2 emissions on the domestic side. Now we could always argue that it varies across countries and that the pace of this decoupling might not be sufficient. But on the imported side, actually the growth of imported CO2 emission exceeds the growth of GDP. And to a large extent, this is related to an increase of the volume of imports would generate increase CO2 emissions abroad. And obviously that connects with some of the debates going on in Europe around the carbon border adjustment mechanism, the mirror closes, but also what Professor Sacks was mentioning in his introductory remarks, the need for technical cooperation, green deal diplomacy to support the transitions in partner countries. Next slide, please. So I'll be going quickly through this, but just to say that NSDSN and working with partners, we've been documenting these impacts across regions, but also across specific supply chains that are responsible for those impacts. So that's what you have here and that is part of a report that we released two weeks ago, the global common stewardship index. Next slide, please. And then we've also looked specifically at the food supply chains and the impact embodied into specifically the food supply chain of Europe on the rest of the world and the specific commodities associated with this that was released last week. Next slide, please. And also on the social side, we've highlighted that through consumption of textile, we generate 375 fatal accidents that work in the rest of the world and more than 20,000 non-fatal accidents at work. Next slide, please. So I've emphasized today a lot of the outcome part in the SDG index results. There are many policy also sections in the report this year. There has been some work done in partnership with some of the speakers today to look at the integration of the SDGs within national recovery and resilience plans. So the SDGs were not explicitly mentioned in the guidelines submitted to Member State, but we still looked at some of the national recovery and resilience plans that were available to track whether the SDGs were somewhat integrated. And so despite the fact that there was no explicit mentions in the guidelines, we do see that in most NRRPs, the SDGs were mentioned. Now in very few of them, the SDGs are actually the cornerstone for the national recovery and resilience plans. And then we did a deep dive into Italy and Spanish NRRPs. And what you can see here is that all of the SDGs are covered somehow, albeit to relatively different degrees. And sometimes there's a difference between some of the major challenges that we identify in the European SDR and the amount of budget and the amount of reforms dedicated to the various SDGs. Next slide, please. So this year, again, we used this framework that was published in Nature Sustainability on Six Transformations for the SDGs. We've adapted it for the EU specifically. And we do a deep dive into the Sustainable Food Production Healthy Diets and Biodiversity Protection transformation so you can access those results online. And I will just conclude by highlighting sort of the four priority actions. That's the next slide where we underlined four actions that the EU could undertake to accelerate or strengthen its leadership domestically, but also send strong messages internationally. That's the next slide. One is to publish a joint political statement from the three pillars of the EU governance, the European Council, European Parliament and European Commission to reaffirm the strong commitment to the 2030 agenda. The second one is, despite the fact that there's obviously a lot going on in terms of policies, strategies, there's a plethora of instruments that connect with the SDGs. There's still not a document that shows how the European Commission plans to achieve the SDGs. And we think this would be very beneficial to have a document that highlights the targets, the timelines, the roadmaps to achieve the SDGs for the EU. The third recommendation is to set up a mechanism to engage formally with civil society and scientists on SDG policies. And the fourth one is to work on an EU-wide voluntary national reviews that would cover domestic priorities, but also the two other aspects that we mentioned related to diplomacy and how the EU plans to address the international spillovers. I'll stop here. I know it's been a very rich presentation. All of this material is accessible online. We have the next slide show the country profiles that we have for each country's in the report. And then just to show that we have also a data platform available online. And to thank my colleagues, Grayson Fuller, Maria Cortes-Pouche, Saline Monnier, and Filmworm, and Max Gruber, who have worked very hard those past couple of days to finalize the report from the secretariat. Thank you so much. And back to you, Mayel, for the panel discussion. Thank you, Guillaume. Thank you. If you haven't looked at the report and the interactive data platform, my colleagues, one of my colleagues, Cheyenne or Andrea, can send around the link so you could have a look. Moving on to the third part of the event, I'm now happy to introduce the panelists who will discuss the key priorities and transformation to achieve the SDGs inside and outside the EU and how to get it done. Before handing to our first panelist speaker, we are honored to welcome Thomas LeSueur, General Commissioner for Sustainable Development at the French Ministry of Ecological Transition, Manuel de la Rocha Vasquez, Secretary General for Economic Affairs and G20 at the Office of the Prime Minister of Spain, Peter Schmidt, President of the Agriculture, Rural Development and the Environment, NAT Section at the European Economic and Social Committee, EESC, Angelori Caboni, Professor at the University of Silyana and Co-Chair of the SDSN Europe Network, and Lisa Tostado, Head of International Climate, Energy and Agriculture Policy Programme, Henrich Boll, Stiffen European Union. Before we start, I would like to ask our panelists to keep within the seven-minute limit so that we stay on time. Now, let's begin with our first panelist, Thomas LeSueur, General Commissioner for Sustainable Development at the French Ministry of Ecological Transition. Monsieur LeSueur, c'est à vous. Thank you, Manuel. Hi to all the panelists and everyone. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to say some words about SDG and give some first pieces of answer to the question, which was key priorities and transformation to achieve the SDGs inside and outside the EU and how to get it down. Well, as everybody knows, this moment is very, very unique, very, very particular. Unique because the COVID crisis has stopped our progress on the way to achieve the goals by 2030. As your work, and it's amazing, the presentation of Guillaume LeFortune, as your work shows, 2020 is a step back and it's the first time. This moment is also particular because France is going to take the presidency of the EU. And as President Macron has just presented the French priorities of the next six months, and as you may know, the first priority is recovery. Recovery because Europe has to be strong to achieve the SDGs. Strong in all the field, in the economical field with recovery plan, huge amounts of public money injected into economy to save jobs, to save companies, to save purchasing power, more than 50 billion euros in the react plan, and a total of more than 2 trillion euros within the next years. It's the largest stimulus plan package ever financed in Europe. Strong in the economical field, I said, but also strong in the field of ecological transition with, as a priority, the establishment of carbon pricing mechanisms at the euro borders for imported products. We have to give its true price to carbon in our everyday shopping. In the products we sell in our countries to give the consumers the real knowledge of what is really costless and what is really expensive for our future. Strong also on social issues with, for example, regulations on minimum wages to prevent social dumping throughout member states. Europe has to be strong on all these fields, and so as you can see, the French presidency will continue to this work, this work for a more inclusive, sovereign, and also democratic Europe. We'll keep on moving forward to achieve the goals, but in the same time, in the same time, we all see how much European citizens have to think to their own common future and to get involved in the decision-making process. We must discuss together on Europe's strengths and weakness. We have to share conclusions on what is lacking in Europe and agree on what it should do. In this perspective, as it was proposed by France, the president of the European Parliament, the president of the Council, and the president of the European Commission have launched the conference on the future of Europe, as in last May. This conference is an opportunity for European citizens to debate so that they can contribute to defining Europe's future policy for the years and decades to come. Citizens can express their wishes and expectations on the future EU.europa.eu platform, sorry for advertising, in transnational panels and at numerous events organized in the member states. In France, the government has put in place two mechanisms in this conference on the future of Europe. First, 18 conferences with participating citizens chosen at random have been held in all French mainland and overseas regions, and a broad-on-line consultation has been conducted with 50,000 young French people. These two mechanisms will give a final contribution to these national debates. We have the same in all other member countries. And the final contribution was submitted to the government in late November 2020, and all these recommendations made by citizens in France and in Europe have already been taken into account. They have helped to determine the priorities of the French presidency of the Council of the European Union. And you can find on the platform interim reports and contributions to our member states. But this process, sorry, this process is not over. During the next month, hundreds of events, conferences, artistic workshops, debates, and so on, collective activities will be organized all over the country so that each of us can express his will and ideas. The work of the conference on the future of Europe will conclude in spring 2022 under the French presidency. And of course, citizens will be informed and of a consequent action taken. The final outcome of the conference will be presented in a report to the to the joint presidency. And the three institutions will examine swiftly how to follow up effectively to this report, each of them, of course, within their own sphere of competencies. So this is my modest contribution to answer the the white question you're you are asking in this in this panel. Thank you again for this very, very interesting report that spots the efforts and themes to focus on to achieve the agenda 2030. And thank you for your attention. I hope I wasn't too long. Perfect. Thank you, Monsieur Le Sveur. Our next speaker is Manuel de la Rocha Vasquez, Secretary General for Economic Affairs and G20 at the Office of the Prime Minister of Spain. Thank you very much to everyone. And I'm really delighted to be here. And congratulations for a great report, which I have seen with great interest and found it extremely insightful with a lot of issues and aspects to discuss. Let me give you vividly a perspective on how from the Spanish government we see the SDGs, you know, a few messages here from the start, when the current socialist government took office in 2018, we put the SDGs as one of the top guiding principles in all of our economic priorities, you know, it was sort of the compass that should permeate throughout all policy areas, both domestically and but also externally, you know. So on the external front, we have, you know, taken measures to help advance in third countries, the SDGs through an enhanced ODA. I mean, we were, we have faced difficult budgetary situation, yet, you know, for next year's budget, we are increasing substantially ODA, always with with a view in mind of advancing the SDGs in the least developed countries. We have also made important contributions to the UN SDG Global Fund and have advocated always, you know, that the SDGs should be the guiding principle for all of us, you know. Our support from top of the government, our Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez always supporting multilateral coordinated action and the strengthening of all multilateral system, you know, I think, reflects this idea that the SDGs as the global goals decided by the multilateral community should be the guiding principles behind all of our actions supporting multilateral action, you know. So this is one thing on the on the external action. On the domestic action, you know, we put SDGs always at the forefront of all our policies and, you know, in 2020 last year when the crisis from the pandemic, when this huge pandemic hit, the Spanish government fought very hard to ensure that the response, the economic and social response to the pandemic was very different from the previous one, you know, which we all remember very well from the 2008 2011 financial crisis. So we fought very hard to get a very different type of crisis, you know, which in many ways should be inspired by the SDGs, at least with three elements, should be based on solidarity, should be, which means, which meant, you know, helping more those countries most hit should have social cohesion and social goals at its heart and should be forward-looking, you know, in the sense that thinking how are we going to invest for the future for new generations and obviously the green component, the fight against climate change and preservation of environmental goals should be embedded at the core of the European response. I believe the result of that is a great answer, a great response I think has been mentioned by the previous speaker, which was the European recovery fund next generation, which in our view has the SDGs embedded at its core, you know. So with that in mind, then let me just reflect how we prepared our recovery plan, which I've seen in the report that has been assessed and with some very interesting and insightful comments that, you know, I see we have some work in progress, progress to be made, but overall I feel that the SDGs are firmly, strongly and robustly reflected in our recovery plan. For a start, you know, we decided to step up the green component of the plan from 30%, which is what the European Union was requesting as the minimum to 40%. So out of the 70 billion Spanish recovery and resilience plan 40%, around 30 billion will be devoted to green. And there, you know, within this green component, there are several aspects that really go to the core of some of the SDGs, you know. For example, we are devoting 2 billion people to component 5 for water management, which is directly linked to SDG 6. We are putting education at the center of education and skills, you know, at the center of the plan with around 10% of the plan or 13 billion euros, you know, which goes directly to SDG 4. The four cross-cutting issues of the Spanish plan, you know, which is green, digital, social and territorial cohesion and gender equality, we believe that, you know, cut across and in particular are very well reflected in the SDGs. You see, for us, the green component wasn't very difficult to introduce in our plan. Spain is one of the countries hardest hit by climate change through desertification, through climate, extreme climate events that we are suffering even these days. Now the prime minister is currently visiting some flooding areas due to, you know, this climate disaster. So it wasn't that difficult for us to put that at the center. So very much reflecting our SDGs commitment, education. And then one problem I want to reflect is also that we have in Spain is child poverty, you see. So we are putting a lot of effort into a number of the components in the Spanish recovery plan, address directly problems with child poverty, the problems of vulnerable families through a number of reforms and resources that we are going to devote. In that sense, I would like to highlight one important milestone that is not in the plan. It was a reform that we approved last year, which is the minimum income, minimum living income, which is a subsidy of around, it varies depending on the family from 450 to up to 900 euros approximately to ensure that no family in Spain lives below a certain level at threshold of poverty. So, you know, and this is something that in many countries had been discussed and there were very few experiments here and there in Canada, in Finland and others in Spain. This is already a reality which is fully in line with SDG1, which is, you know, remove poverty and absolute poverty out of Spain. So overall, and I am finishing, you know, I want to first thank you and congratulate you for the report. I think it's a great report. Second, you can count on Spain to be very vocal at the international and European level pushing for the SDGs. And third, you know, the Spanish recovery plan reflects and is fully inspired by most of the SDGs, which are our guiding principle and the compacts, the compacts that has, you know, inspired and guide the way we have designed and now executing the Spanish recovery plan. Thank you very much. Thank you, Mr. Dolarosa Vasquez. I now call upon Peter Schmidt, President of the Agriculture Rural Development and the Environment NAT section at the European Economic and Social Committee. Thank you very much, Mayel. Thanks for this invitation. And let me start with the congrats to this report. We follow this, this, the preparation of this report now for years, and we see the development of this report and it's getting more and more comprehensive. And it is absolutely helpful for our debate. Being aware of the time, I try to pick up some points and some issues I would like to highlight and go perhaps in the next years and rounds deeper, which is necessary, I think, to discuss. I think these two chapters are well chosen this year. Having and highlighting this problematic, the one is really on the Green Deal and the European Green Deal and going deeper into the debate on the transforming food and land systems. And this is in my heart, since I'm President of the NAT section, we worked for years now on different papers, what we call for a comprehensive sustainable food system, which covers all the aspects in the supply chain. And I think this is now necessary to get also the data that we see what is the problematic point. And Jeffrey Sachs mentioned the spillover effects, which we have quite a lot in the food supply chain as well. And we see that there's a debate, an upcoming debate, less on the targets of the farm-to-fork strategy, for instance, in Europe, but more on the means, more on the question, how to get there. And that's the big problem which we are facing now, that we must have a debate. The one are the targets. And the other things are how we can encourage farmers, food processing, the food processing sector to get an alignment with the SDGs. So for that, we produce some opinions which are, let me say, going along with the report. The one was, we saw in your presentation, Jom, that we are not really on the path to decouple the GDP with the growth. I think this is an issue which we have to really see that it doesn't work. We adopted recently an opinion on the beyond GDP that we say, we have to decouple that and we must have a prosperity for well-being. But here also there are challenges because we have some groups, they don't like the wording of well-being. Perhaps they see a risk on the current neoliberal model, which is true. And that's why we have to foster this. And the other point is indeed the question on the food system. So we have to go deeper into the food system. I think if we can manage the food system differently, then we do a lot in order to reduce the greenhouse gas emissions. And we do a lot for the health system. So there is the link on the SDG-3 to a lot of other and in that specific case on the food system. I don't want to go too much into details what we prepared already because we find a lot in this report. I would like to highlight finally a point which was already mentioned, but I think this has to be discussed and deliberated much more in the future. During the COP, we got this Oxford report, which highlights the problematic on the differences between really the rich, the really rich people and the poor people. And I think this is a question which we must discuss much more deeper because if we go along and just tell the people we have to change our habits, we have to change our behavior and we exclude the biggest polluter in the world, then I'm a bit scared that we get more and more, let me say, pushbacks from so-called Yellow West movements. If people feel that they do not participate in the high extent to the pollution and they do perhaps already in their possibilities a lot, but at the same time, we have people, they do it just for fun, making some flights to the atmosphere, they test, I don't know how many rockets in order to see how they can bring tourists into the atmosphere and this we have to address. If we do not address that also in the policy-making process, then we will fail. The people won't follow us in the implementation of the SDGs and for that I would wish that we push this discussion and happy to hear from Manuel de la Rocha Vazquez that in Spain you start forced poorest people in the society because that must be one of our main targets, leaving no one behind. I think is that what it is about in the end and this report helps us very much to clarify and to bring facts into the debate. Thank you very much and happy to listen to the debate. Thank you. Thank you, Mr. Schmidt. I now invite Angelo Riccaboni, professor at the University of Siena and co-chair of the SDSN Europe Network to take the floor. Thank you, Mariel, and I would like to thank GEM for coordinating this report. We are very pleased with the outcome. So I would say only a few words about the main numbers and outcomes related to food systems. In particular, we all know that ugly food systems influence all SDGs and they are affected by climate change. So what we see in the report is that for all European countries we see only orange and red. Orange means that the significant challenges remain and red major challenges remain. This really is scary and on top of it you should add also the spillover effect. So I think that the situation as Peter said, this is not that nice, taking into consideration the influence on the other SDGs. So what to do? So we need regulation and we know that in Europe we have a very advanced regulation and it is being implemented around the world. Everybody looks at the farm to fork as a clear example and for instance now we are in the period of implementation of many parts of the regulation, in particular the cut of conduct for businesses. Yeah, because the private sector has a key role in this conversation and also in our report because we know that the private sector was and still is part of the problem but the private sector needs to be also part of the solution and can be part of the solution. So companies need to be more in line with the SDGs. Unfortunately the situation is not that good. For instance, a recent study by SDSM, Columbia University and Santa Clara Lab of the University of Siena shows that only 10% of 100 biggest food companies set a corporate goal for portfolios able to contribute to healthy and sustainable diets. Also companies, large companies tend to do cherry picking when they focus on SDGs and also tend to give few information on supply chain and few information about how they behave in their context. So this is the situation for large companies. Well for small company it is even more problematic because too often small companies in the food system see sustainability and they need to be in line with SDGs as a problem, as a threat, as a burden, not as an opportunity. So this is the context. What to do for a private sector? Here we'll mention only two points to line of action. One, we need to promote healthy and sustainable diets and we need to ask companies to do it. This means also not to impose universalistic diets because we know that food systems are strongly related to local cultures. Regional cultures. So we cannot impose top down diets and we need to give consumers the responsibility to choose. We need to be sure that they are finding the right solutions in line with sustainable diets and we cannot impose from the top. And this is one of the outcomes for instance of the food system summit where it was clearly stated that there is not one size fit all solution. So this is the first line of action in my opinion. No universalistic diet, no top down solutions for defining which are the good or the bad products but how they contribute to a sustainable diet. The second line of action which is outlined in the report is that we need to teach to small business enterprises the grammar of sustainability. We need to show to them that they can make it. We need to do basically four things to better define the meaning of sustainability. And in this purpose, to this purpose as the SN, we introduce the four pillar framework which sees four pillars of alignment to be able as a company to contribute to sustainable diets. Secondly, to have internal processes which are sustainable. Third, to care about the value chain. And fourth, to be a good citizen in your context. So first to be to better define the meaning of sustainability. Second, to measure the degree of sustainability. In my opinion, this is the key issue for the future also for small, medium size enterprises. Why? Because banks now in recent month are under pressure, under pressure to give money to fund only sustainable companies. So this is completely new phenomenon. The so-called green asset rate is something that is pushing banks to give money to those who are sustainable. But if our small, medium size enterprises do not measure sustainability, are not in line with this new conversation, these new thoughts, it will be difficult for them to show that they are sustainable. So we need to promote self-assessments by small, medium-sized enterprises to start the journey towards a more structured answer to the need of measurements. Third, we need that companies introduce sustainability within our planning system. Fourth, they need to communicate better about sustainability. So they need to learn what we call the grammar of sustainability. So we shouldn't give marks or rank companies. We need to support small, medium-sized enterprises because they, as Peter said, they are part of the society. I mean, many people, many youngsters, many communities live out of the food and we need to support them. Otherwise, only large companies will be sustainable. At the end of the story, we will lose also a lot of our culture because our culture is connected to local production. So I'm going to end, otherwise, Myel is calling me. So I would like to finish just saying that the role of education is also important, educating general population, youngsters, businesses, and policymakers. So for education in this field, let me only mention the SDG Academy, which is doing a wonderful work in order to promote the sustainability education, but also the International School of Sustainable Development that will start in March 2022, that SDSN is organizing and among the areas that we will consider there's also food systems. So we invite all of you to look at the website of SDSN Europe for participating to this very large educational program. So just to conclude, there is a lot of things to do, but with the support of everybody and SDSN, our friend from EEC, we can make it. Thank you, Myel. Back to you now. Thank you, Mr. Riccaboni. Moving on to our last panel speaker, Ms. Lisa Tostado, Head of International Climate, Energy, and Agriculture Policy Program at Henrich Bolstifen, European Union. Hello, good afternoon, everyone. Thank you so much for this great debate so far and great report once again. The Henrich Bolstifen Foundation is very happy to support the report again, and I invite really all of our participants to read it in more detail because that first presentation here doesn't even do it justice. So please go ahead and look into further details. We as a foundation, well, a very important reason for which we support that report is because it is an independent quantitative analysis of these significant international, environmental, but also social spillovers that are associated with imports into the EU market, but also exports when we think about waste or pesticides, and I will come back to that. And as such, the work really shows that the European Green Deal can only deliver when it is conceived as not only a domestic endeavor, but an international effort, and I think that's one key message that really comes out of the report. And of course, international internal priorities are just as crucial because we need to fulfill our SDGs here domestically and only then can we also be, as European Union, be an incredible voice on the international scene. And once again, this year's report shows that Europe continues to face great challenges when it comes to the areas of sustainable diets and agriculture, climate and biodiversity. And we are very happy that this year there was a deep dive to use Guillaume's wording into the area of land use and food systems, mainly for three reasons, money, time and environment. So when it comes to money, the EU budget still dedicates over one third to the common agricultural policy. And therefore, it is also a very important lever to really accelerate the transition. However, the last reform doesn't really live up to that expectation, but the EU does have a policy tool at its disposal to really act on that. So that is one reason for which it is very important to talk about agriculture, especially on the European Union level. Second, when it comes to the environment, and I focus on climate, but biodiversity is just as crucial. When we look at the greenhouse gas emissions that are associated with the agricultural sector in the EU, we see that between 1990 and 2013, emissions have decreased, but ever since they have slightly picked up again. And that also shows that the profound changes that are actually needed to get to net zero in that sector are still ahead of us and actually need some deeper changes. And that is also one of the number one concerns that we have with regards to the front fork strategy, but also the common agricultural policy, which does not even contain a reference to the front fork strategy, that even though it is a holistic strategy, it does lack some quantitative targets when it comes to the processing and consumption side. And the elephant in the room is meat consumption and production. If the world is to hit the Paris Agreement, but also the SDGs, a lot of studies show that we need to reduce the amount of meat we produce and consume in industrialized countries. It also has health benefits. If you look at the recommendations of the World Health Organization, we largely exceed the meat consumption, the meat intake per capita per year. And some potential measures that one can consider to act on that include stricter animal welfare and environmental regulations for the upstream side, targeted subsidies for more agroecological forms of production, support for plant-based options, but also restrictions on the number of animals that are kept per hectare. And the German, the new German government has shown some tendency to move towards that, for example. On the demand side, you could also think about possible tax incentives, labels, et cetera, and the farm-to-fork strategy does mention that, but we will see whether the European Union actually acts on it. It has remained very vague so far. We dedicated an entire atlas to the question of meat production and consumption, how to make it more sustainable and European Green Deal compatible. I invite all of you to have a look at the meat atlas 2021. Lastly, why I think that the land use chapter is very important is the timing, because we are just entering a new phase of the common agricultural policy for the next seven years. And member states are right now elaborating national strategic plans, because for the first time after many decades, there is more competency shifted back again onto a member state's shoulders, which obviously has some opportunities, but also bears the risk of a raise to the bottom, especially because there is no clear guidance and clear requirements when it comes to environmental objectives. And therefore, we also have a project with ARC 2020, the Agriculture and Rural Convention, where we try to foster debate on the elaboration of these national strategic plans and how to use them to implement the SDGs. And one key demand has, for example, been the rewetting of peat lands and immediately stopping the expansion of agricultural practices on such wet lands. And that's where the European Union also needs to be more honest, because it demands that in other countries outside the EU. That brings me to some comments on the spillover effects. A lot of things have already been said, so I'll try to be brief. What I thought was particularly telling is that graphic you showed, while domestic CO2 emissions in the European Union have been decreasing for many, many years, CO2 emissions emitted abroad to satisfy our consumption in the EU has actually increased in most of the years in that graph, and most recently even faster than the GDP. And that is really concerning and shows that the European Green Deal can really only deliver if we think about the entire supply chain upstream emissions, etc. And what we need is to really rethink different trade policy tools, not only trade agreements, because they are quite difficult to change, but also other tools and the European Union does have some tools in that toolbox. The European Union is the world's biggest market and granting access or not to that big market has been to some degree underused, I would say, as a tool of power, as a soft power. Monsieur Le Jueur mentioned briefly the C-Bam, so the carbon border adjustment mechanism, which we highly welcome. But I think we also need to think about different border adjustment mechanisms in the future, not only with regards to carbon, but maybe also with regards to methane, for example, or mirror clauses was also another keyword that was dropped earlier in the discussion. There's also the deforestation free value chain legislation, which needs to be implemented fast and without loopholes. And we are still awaiting the regulation on sustainable corporate governance, the due diligence proposal, now to be expected probably in March, and it should not be delayed even further. Another thing that I would like to briefly mention is the end of double standards. The report this year includes for the first time an indicator on the expert of EU banned pesticides, which I think exemplifies that the European Union needs an honest discourse about the double standards that we have. But talking about all these different trade policy tools, it is important to keep in mind that these measures must always be accompanied by an increase in technical cooperation and financial support. The ongoing debates about sebum and how to use revenues and how to not leave anyone behind are a good example of that. Before I come to an end, and I know I'm looking at the time, I'd like to make some comments about the gender dimension because that has not been discussed very extensively. And I saw that there was a comment in the chat on that as well, that it is oftentimes linked to a good performance on other SDGs. If we look at the dashboard of the European Union, we see that for some indicators for gender inequality, there has even been a downward trend. And only one out of the six indicators has the famous green dot for SDG achieved, and for the other's challenges remain. And that is important to keep in mind, especially against the background of the pandemic, which has hit women and other marginalized groups hardest because there were oftentimes at the front line in the healthcare sector in the social care work, they had to bear the additional burden of lockdown measures and additional care responsibilities. They oftentimes work in service jobs, which were most heavily impacted by lockdown measures as well in part-time work, etc. And yet, if we look at the recovery and resilience facility, which is also the focus of one chapter in the report this year, women have not been at the heart of the recovery. The European Green Deal itself does not contain a single reference to gender. After some pressure, the recovery and resilience facility does do that. It asks for gender impact assessments to be performed by the different member states to access the funds. We do welcome the big priorities, which is climate spending and digitalization. However, if they are pursued in a gender-blind manner, they bear the risk that they perpetrate existing gender inequalities. Because if we think about climate jobs, it's often an energy in transport and digitalization is also quite male dominated. So we need to think the social ecological transition together with a gender-just transition. Otherwise, we won't have everybody in to also support some more ambitious and difficult transition. So these were my 50 cents that I wanted to chip in into the debate. Thanks again for having me and thank you for the great report. I will definitely use it in my work and hope that a lot of other people will do so as well. Thank you, Mr. Stado. Thank you to all our panelists. We have time for one question, maybe for SDSN. The European Commission via Eurostat publishes every year an assessment of the EU's progress towards the SDGs. What are the main differences between SDSNs and Eurostat's assessments? Yeah, thank you. Thank you very much, Viad. And I guess this is mainly for me here. So, you know, first of all, I think we need to congratulate the Commission because since the adoption of the SDGs, the Commission via Eurostat has been publishing a comprehensive report tracking progress every year on the SDGs. And so from the very beginning, there's been this monitoring aspect integrated into the overall Commission's strategy and emphasis on the SDGs. And I have to say that in our assessment, so in the report that we published earlier today, we use about two thirds of official statistics, one third of what we call alternative data sources, which often come from civil society organizations, NGOs, and our networks of researchers and so on. But there's still two thirds that comes from official statistics. And a lot of them actually come from the Eurostat data sets and the great work from other agencies in the European Commission, the Joint Research Center, the European Environmental Agencies, and so on. But we, you know, so if I have to sort of summarize the differences between, you know, the way we approach SDG monitoring versus the way it's being approached in Eurostat, I would say there's three major differences that can explain some of the differences in the results obtained. And just to say, because I'm going quickly through this, but there's an entire article that was published in the peer review literature last year that is summarizing a bit of differences between the results obtained by SDSN, Eurostat, OECD, and other organizations on SDG monitoring. The first one is that we use more alternative data sources, right? So as I mentioned, data outside of official statistics, for instance, to track international spillovers, but also on some of the metrics related to biodiversity threats, land use, sustainable diets, and so on. Those come quite often from outside of official statistics. The second point is that we have a methodology where for each indicator, progress is assessed vis-à-vis a technical optimum or a target, right? Even if there's no politically agreed targets at the EU level, we still evaluate distance to predefined targets. And the trajectories are based on whether countries are on track or off track to achieve predefined values. And then the third point, and I think it's been mentioned several times today, is the spillover aspects. We cover not only the implementation of the SDGs within the EU, but also these consumption-based metrics and impacts. And just to close on this, just to say that Eurostat is also more and more integrating this aspect in its annual report, which is again, excellent, but slightly different than what we do at the SDSN. Thank you, Guillaume. That's the time we have for questions today. But remember that if you would like to discuss further questions with the SDSN team or partners, please feel free to contact us via email at info at SDGindex.org. One of my colleagues will share the address in the chat box. And now for closing remarks, it is with great pleasure and honor that I welcome the State Secretary for the Republic of Slovenia's Government Office for Development and European Cohesion Policy, Mesmonika Kirbis-Rojš. Then, dear distinguished speakers, dear participants, good afternoon from Slovenia, from Ljubljana. I'm honored to be here with you today and to have a final award at this event that has gathered so many participants in order to build partnership and dialogue to reach our common goal, to find ways for transforming the European Union to achieve the sustainable development goals. I'm particularly enthusiastic to speak since the efforts were made to extend partnership and include in the presented report also for the first time EU candidate countries. This shows that we are striving towards cooperation that will lead us towards achieving sustainable development goals. The principle of sustainable development lies also in the heart of the EU policies, objectives, mechanisms and programs. But that is not enough. This mindset has to be embedded also in the national policies, regional and local levels. The current multi-annual financial framework, the next generation EU, the recovery and the re-silence programs, the European Green Deal and all the national strategies. These are all legislative and financial means not only to address the sustainable development goals but also to implement them. Now it is the high time to transform words into results. EU member states and partner countries must form an alliance that works by working together. There should be no difference in the size or geographical position of the country because we have one thing in common that is our planet. And here I would like to refer to my country Slovenia. Slovenia is small but very much committed to implement the sustainable development goals. We have transformed these policies into our national Slovenian development strategy 2030 where the main guidance is quality of life. Therefore, I'm happy to see that Slovenia is scoring high on the 2021 SDG index. We have also committed to implement strategic goals through the financially supported domestic and EU programs. We can agree that the pandemic has slowed us down and has shown our weaknesses by raising unemployment, poverty, needed improvements in the healthcare system, education system. It also mental health issues, quality of life issues and issues that are still going to appear in the future. The principle leave no one behind should maybe now more than ever be in our mindsets that policies. The pandemic has also opened our eyes that we need reforms. We need transformation not only in being green but also to be re-silenced to changes especially in the digital transformation. Digital transformation should not be perceived as one priority but should be perceived as a horizontal issue that will give people opportunity to progress within education system, skills, innovation and business competitiveness. I'm really happy that the presented report has been discussed still with the Slovene presidency to the Council of the European Union. I would like to thank the Sustainable Development Solutions Network and the Institute for European Environmental Policy for their efforts and also for recognizing the efforts of our team. Let me conclude that we all live in uncertain times. The pandemic has taught us important lessons. If we did not recognize enough in the past how fragile our planet is, we have recognized now how fragile we as humans are. Therefore, only joint actions and efforts bleed to a better quality of life and our happiness. Thank you all for your attention. Thank you State Secretary. Thank you to all our speakers and our audience across Europe and the world. We will have this recording available on the SDSN YouTube channel. I encourage everyone to subscribe to the SDSN newsletter or follow us on Twitter at UNSDSN and at SDSN underscore EU for updates on the next report and consultation. Have a great rest of your day.