 OK, thank you, everybody, for joining us this afternoon. We're really thrilled to see familiar faces and new ones. My name's Mary Ruckelshaus, and I'm the managing director of the Natural Capital Project. So I'll be our moderator for a little bit of discussion with our panelists. But we also would really encourage engagement with all of you. So my background is I fell in love with nature and science scuba diving in the cold Pacific Northwest of the United States. And I worked for an academic institution for a long time doing research. But I think my formative years and my career so far were when I worked with the US government. I was with the Commerce Department in NOAA. And that's where I really fell in love with having science-informed decisions and thinking about what were the actors out in the world in the public and private sector really thinking about what was their framing for how they would take up the ecosystem and science things I cared a lot about. So when I joined NATCAP almost 12 years ago, I was thrilled because this is what NATCAP does. So what we are is a really wonderful partnership working with lots of really smart young people and decision makers around the world. And our whole aim is to help people take the values of nature into their decisions. So I imagine everyone in this room has, since we've been little, a really good intuitive feel for how nature benefits people. It feeds us. It gives us clean water. It fills our souls spiritually so many different ways. So we kind of know that. And people around the world that we know this very instinctually. But if you want to try to take that sort of intuitive knowledge and make it change decisions, you need more than just a feeling. So what the Natural Capital Project does, and we've been doing this for 12 years now, is take those values of nature and work with the people who want to take them up into their decisions and help them quantify them and spatially represent them in metrics that move decisions. And that's really done with and for the decision makers who are going to take it up. So it's a really great way to do our three pillars of our approach and its science, technology, and partnership. So that's how we work. And we're training people in universities and research institutions to do cutting-edge science but really with and for the end users of that science. So get this latest, greatest information on how to value nature out into practice and test it much more readily than might happen in a conventional academic setting where you publish a paper and hope somebody reads it and takes it up. So that's our real approach. And we really do a lot of science, as I mentioned. And then through technology, this open source platform with our data and model software models, so that we're developing a language that's standard language that people can use anywhere in the world that's repeatable and transparent. And people in a network of about 300 institutions now that are part of our partnership are taking that information and improving it and incorporating lessons they're learning into it. And then we share it through our software platform itself, but also through lots of convenings and trainings around the world to build capacity. And in places like this where we meet with smart people and have discussions, so we're really looking forward to this. So thanks again for coming. And I'd like to introduce the three panel members. And then we'll go through a few rounds of questions here. And then we'll open it up for discussion with you. So to my immediate right is Gretchen Daley. And Gretchen is a professor in biology at Stanford and also the co-founder of the Natural Capital Project. So she is the intellectual driver and heart and soul of Nat Cap. And you'll hear more from her. And then next to her is Alvaro Umania, who is a senior research fellow at Katye, which is a tropical research and higher education center in Costa Rica. He's the former environment and energy minister in Costa Rica and will tell us much more about his policy experience, which is extensive both in Costa Rica and around the world. And he's a dear friend to Nat Cap from the beginning. And then on my far right is Lisa Mandel, who is a lead scientist of Nat Cap and a quantitative ecologist and who's really been spearheading a lot of our infrastructure work. So with that, I will turn it over to Lisa, who will give us a little brief praisey on this book that she's just edited. Thanks, Mary. Yeah, so as Mary said, I'm Lisa Mandel. I'm a lead scientist with the Natural Capital Project and have been with Nat Cap for more than seven years, which is hard to believe. And I had a long interest in the connection between people and nature and the environment. And this was really especially deep in during my time as a graduate student in Hawaii and working in rural South India. And then when I went on to join Nat Cap, where I've been doing a lot of work around infrastructure planning and development and accounting for the values of nature in that. And then also with the focus on making sure that in our work, we capture the inclusive part of inclusive green growth. So understanding who benefits and how these approaches can provide more inclusive benefits to people. I thought I'd start maybe with a little bit of a story about how the book came to be and then tell you a little bit more about what's in it. So at the National Capital Project, we often give workshops and trainings around the world about how to use our approaches and tools to understand and map and quantify the different benefits from nature. And one of the questions that I had been hearing a lot at our workshops was, OK, now that we have a better understanding and a better ability to represent these values of nature, how do we turn that information and that knowledge into action in the many places people were working around the world? And Nat Cap has some great success stories that we were able to share, but there wasn't really one resource that I felt like I could point people to, to show the breadth of ways around the world that these approaches really have been implemented. And so a few years later, we were working with the support of the Paulson Institute, who I can't thank enough for making this book happen. And I realized that the different policy and finance mechanisms that we were putting together in that work really, I think, had a wider audience and would be really beneficial. It was information I wish I had earlier on and really wanted to be able to share. So with the work of over 70 contributors, some of whom are in this room right now, we put together this book, which is called Green Growth That Works, Natural Capital Policy and Finance Mechanisms Around the World. And it has three main parts. The first part describes where we are now. And then I think I can say this because I didn't write any of these chapters. It has a series of really inspiring chapters about how different pathways to scale these approaches beyond the individual pilots or spoke approaches that have been developed in so many creative ways. And then the second section focuses on a set of six different mechanisms that have been really commonly used in different ways and provides practical case studies from many different contexts, diving into some of the details, but in a very practical way of how these approaches were implemented and how the different pieces come together to lead to change on the ground. And then the final section is a series of place-based examples. So everywhere from Costa Rica to China to the coastal US of how different mechanisms have been combined into broader systems to secure and enhance the benefits from nature. And so, yeah, a natural capital project, we really focus on science for decision-making. And I think this book shows how that science can come together with governance and legal systems and economics to lead to practical approaches for changing actions. So thanks, Lisa. So Alvaro, can you tell us the arc of the story about how Costa Rica, which is really one of the sort of sources of all of this innovation in natural capital getting taken up in decisions? Can you tell us a little bit about that story? Yes, well, I was trained at Stanford in environmental engineering and economics, basically a water guy. And when I went back to Costa Rica, I had a hard realization that the real problem at the moment was deforestation. And that was what people were focused on. So I told President Adiess when he was in his campaign that we should try to have a ministry of energy and environment. Because in Costa Rica, most of our energy comes from our forest in the form of hydropower and water. And the problem that we had, it was that the forest had no value. Standing trees, living trees, have zero value. Only dead trees had value. And this is a very important realization to have, is how do we provide value for a living tree so that people will not cut it? We had at the time a program of reforestation. And it was a big mistake because people could deduct from their taxes the hectares that were planted. But the middlemen kept the land and the wood. All you bought was the right to deduct. So once people deducted the taxes, they didn't care if the forest grew or not. So we decided that we needed to completely change the system and focus on small landholders and provide them with resources so that, first, they could replant. And second, primarily and most important, take care of the existing forest. And with that swaps, some for conservation, like in the case of Sweden and others for forestry, like in the case of the Netherlands, we started to change the system of incentives that eventually led for the payment for ecosystem services. This has worked for about 12% of Costa Rica. Another 12% is in national parks. So from a low of below 30% forest cover, now we have made the turnaround. And we are at about 54% forest cover and gaining. Of course, we'll not be able to reach more than 60%, 65% because there are many other uses, agricultural cities, et cetera. And although we have made a great stride with the payment for ecosystem services that originally uncovered four services, carbon sequestration, water production, biodiversity, and scenic beauty. And we've been able to implement carbon sequestration, water production, and biodiversity. But the problem is that this program is paid primarily by a fuel tax of 3.5% that goes directly to forest investments. And for every 10 people who apply to this program, only three can make it. And the reason is that there's not enough funds to go around for everybody. But what Costa Rica has proven is that it's possible to reverse deforestation, to change the system of incentives. And people don't get paid very much. It's on the order of $20 to $30 an acre per year to preserve the forest. But this is sufficient to cost many people to go for conservation. Our main problems now don't deal so much with loss of forest, but forest fires. And we have done a lot of strides in forest fires. And also reducing the footprint of agriculture, which is very heavy. We have a lot of coffee, now pineapple, palm oil. And these are eating into the forest and have a very heavy footprint. So by no means have we solved the problem, but we have shown the way. And many countries, about 80 or 90 countries, have come to Costa Rica, including China. A long time ago, they sent a delegation of the People's Congress to look at this program. And I think that we may have had some success in trying to spread it to other areas. Thank you very much. That was fantastic, Avra. Thank you. So picking up on his last point, Gretchen, can you talk about what you're seeing in terms of how we're moving from this single cases to many places around the world? Yeah, it's great. Everybody's introducing themselves a bit. I'll do so, too. I grew up with my dad in the US military. And we were based in West Germany through the end of my high school. And then I came to Stanford. And I'd say in West Germany, I saw mainly the problems. Acid rain became a massive issue. And there was a lot of forest dieback, which was really dramatic in economic political, because the pollution's being transported all over. And also cultural terms. Just a lot of people in Central Europe go out walking in the forest each weekend. And you really don't feel like walking through one of these completely dead regions. So coming to the US and to Stanford and then eventually as a grad student getting to Costa Rica, I'd say I came to this field falling in love with Alvaro. And with Costa Rica, I was really lucky to arrive. This was 1991 when I was super young. And it was incredible to hear, first of all, about the dramatic problems. Costa Rica was the poster child for planetary destruction, a little country that it is. But the forest being wiped out at the highest rate at a national scale of anywhere in the world. And then to see it turn around, it was incredible. And to actually meet people like Alvaro in the ministry and even President Arias back then. And to see them share in the Nobel Peace Prize for so many good things that they brought peace among people and between people and nature. And so ever since then, I've been really keen to help advance, as Alvaro said, the possibility of replicating in some sense. Adapting and replicating models of success with Costa Rica, my main inspiration then. And I'm going to jump now to the case Alvaro just touched on, a country that couldn't be more different from Costa Rica in just about every respect, China. Though it was amazing. At the time, it was 97 roughly when Costa Rica implemented the world's first ever nationwide payment system to value and give credit to people protecting and restoring trees, living trees. And China started the same type of program at an incredible scale a couple years later. In 1998, they had the worst flooding in human history. And it was determined that it was upstream deforestation on the Yangtze River that really exacerbated the flood risk. That is innate in a monsoonal rain system, like they experienced. But it was heavy deforestation that led to the worst flooding ever. Billions of dollars in damages. Swiss Ray estimated the damages in the 35 billion range. Tens of millions of people affected. And that led China to implement the largest system overnight. Guess how many people enrolled in this payment for ecosystem services program? It was like in Costa Rica, focused on the small holders of land and incentivizing basically deforestation in most places. Sometimes reversion to grassland, but anything but the annual cropping, which is so subject to erosion and can't hold heavy rains when they come. So 120 million households enrolled basically overnight. And China now has the highest rate of deforestation anywhere. It's not without problems, but it's really inspiring to see and just taking another minute. I'll scroll ahead. There are many initiatives in China now since roughly 2000 when this program got launched that aim now in a pretty high profile and incredibly systematic and comprehensive set of policies that aim to achieve an ecological civilization for the 21st century. It might sound like madness knowing, and for anybody who's been in China, having tasted the extremes of environmental degradation and poisoning of the air and water and land, the soil, and so many other environment related problems taken to an extreme. Yet the government now is going kind of beyond any other country in trying to address them. And one of the things that really stands out is an effort to transform the financial system, like Alvaro saying, Lisa, everybody, to be green and inclusive. And one dimension of this is they're developing to go alongside GDP, a new metric where GDP reports on economic performance. GEP, growth ecosystem product, has been designed. We're working closely with them and providing much of the science and the software to calculate GEP, the total value of the goods and services produced by ecosystems in an area over, say, a year. And it can be applied at any scale. It's being applied in China at the national scale, but importantly for implementation at the provincial, the municipality, and the county scales. So just like economies are really complex, we've got tons of goods and services coming out. This is a complex thing they're trying to do, and we're just at the earliest stages of making it meaningful and robust and effective. But the idea is to, using our software to, well, first, just go out using satellites and a lot of other approaches on the ground, measure and constantly report the condition of ecosystem assets in the country. Any country could do this. And China and road testing, all of this technology, is paving the way for the world to adopt similar approaches. And then with the software that's universally available, quantifying the stream of benefits that comes from the ecological assets in a country. And then this is being used to basically three things. One is to reveal to people the value of ecosystems to society. And the second is to inform financial compensation so that especially what the people that typically are more poor, more vulnerable, yet that hold the assets, that are stewards of these assets, that they are compensated for this stewardship and incentivized and enabled to do a better job and restore ecosystems. So right now, 200 million people as part of their day-to-day livelihood are being paid to restore ecosystems across the country. And the software helps pinpoint where to make those investments for the highest return, for water security, for cities, for carbon storage and sequestration, climate security, coastal climate resilience, for flood control and other things. Biodiversity is a huge part of it. And then finally, this is being reported very visibly. And many governments at the provincial, municipal, and county levels are being held only to GEP, not to GDP anymore, in terms of their performance. So that's one case of many where, partly through Costa Rica's inspiration, we're seeing much wider adoption at scale of these kinds of advances and innovations. Great. Thanks, Gretchen. And the really nice thing about these cases that have been building over the years around the world is that they're now really, we're starting to see them scale. So we spent yesterday with the World Bank. And they're taking essentially the GEP type approach that Gretchen just mentioned. And we're developing with them a natural capital index that will be reported for every country in the world as a way to start to get these good ideas to spread. And there will be continuing innovation with countries and how they apply it. They'll watch China closely, but they'll innovate on their own, learning from Costa Rica and other places. But one great thing, Lisa, I'd love you to chat a little bit about working with development banks. And in most countries, the people side and the connecting nature to people is really at the heart of where people enter this discussion with us. It's not just from biodiversity conservation, but it's really on how can we lift people out of poverty or provide better health. Can you talk about, we talk a lot in this book about inclusive green growth. Can you talk about what that means to you? Yeah, sure. So I guess to think about inclusive green growth, I'll start with the idea of green growth, which to me is the idea that we can improve, and indeed it's an essential part of improving human well-being, is securing and enhancing the natural capital on which are individuals' livelihoods and economies and personal well-being depends. So everything from protecting coastlines from storms to clean water to places to go out and be in nature and recharge and get the many mental and physical health benefits that we're just starting to understand. But it's not just enough to think about the total amount of benefits that are produced, the total amount of carbon stored, or the total amount of mangroves protected, but really understanding the people part and to me the inclusive part is being deliberate about thinking about how to make sure that there is shared prosperity and that the benefits of development and of nature are shared widely across society. And I think in NACAP's history, one of the first key challenges that we faced was how can we map and quantify the values of nature? And that's with our software tools and our approaches, we've come a long way in being able to do that for a number of benefits. And then more recent innovation, I think for us, has been being deliberate about tracking who those streams of benefits flow to and who is providing and who are the stewards of those benefits in different situations. And I think we're starting to see too that that's a key piece of designing these policy and finance mechanisms as well as we learned from Costa Rica and many other places. I guess just to give a couple of quick examples one of the places where we worked, where I worked, was in the Peruvian Amazon. And there's like in many places, there's a proposed road that would go through what is now mostly intact forest and a lot of potential benefits that could come from this road in terms of connecting people to markets and schools and health care and other services. But we've also seen in many places the Amazon is a classic example of fishbone patterns of deforestation that when a road gets built, it's not only the forest under the land, under the road that's affected, but that the effect spread outward from there. And there could be large amounts of deforestation as areas are logged or converted to agriculture. So one of the key questions in the case of this road is what are the, I think typically some of the benefits like the economic benefits are accounted for, but less the environmental impacts and how those impacts link to people and the ecosystem service benefits in the area. So using our software tools, we were able to look at the impacts of the road and of likely patterns of deforestation to understand what that road might mean for communities in the area in terms of climate regulation services for actually global and then in terms of water quality for communities there, many of whom rely on surface water for their drinking water. And we could specifically look, given that we knew where different communities were, how the impacts differed between indigenous and non-indigenous communities as well. And having those maps and having that quantification understand what mitigation options were and even whether that information became part of the discussion about whether that road even made sense or was a good sort of deal in that area by being able to parse that out. And this is also an issue even closer to home for me at least in the San Francisco Bay area where we're dealing with sea level rise and trying to build coastal resilience. And the different agencies and counties there want to invest in green infrastructure along the coast to protect not just the high property value homes and high value infrastructure but the many, there are poor and vulnerable communities who are often actually the most vulnerable to the impacts of sea level rise. And so it turns out in this case that green infrastructure approaches are really cost effective approaches in this case and making sure that they're implemented in a way that again provides those inclusive living in the area. Let's just a few examples but. Yeah, please, Alvaro. I'm sure you have. Maybe one example of how the banks have changed. In 1989, I was in a meeting in Tokyo with the president of the World Bank in the same panel and I criticized the bank because they had financed a hydroelectric project in Costa Rica and they had invested absolutely zero on the natural infrastructure. That is, they financed the dam and the turbines but not the watershed. And he said to me, well, we made a study and with five million dollars more we could have bought most of the watershed but it was the Costa Rican government that said, no, and the Costa Rican government kept saying, well, the World Bank wouldn't give us the money. The reality is that today the watershed is considered a critical part of any hydroelectric project. I've also, as part of the inspection panel in Brazil, worked in Rondonia where you see this problem of the road penetration and this is happening today. And because there's lack of certainty about land tenure people immediately deforest and now plant soybeans. So the role of indigenous people and local people who want to maintain the forest is critical. And I think that being able to provide them with some income is also critical because they have very little income and even a small amount may make a big difference. And for example, there are many opportunities for women to breed seedlings for trees because you can do that near the home and it provides an additional cash income. So if you create a market for seedlings that can be supplied by the local households, that's a way to get to inclusive green growth. Yeah, great, thank you. And Gretchen, how about you? How would you answer this one? Well, I'll round out with one more thing. I, picking up off of your comments, we spent yesterday at the World Bank and certainly growing up and going through grad school and everything. I heard that that bank was the source of all problems but then I got to meet Carter Brandon over there and could see the many forces of good inside it. And yeah, we have an opportunity right now in the evolution of this movement to drive into the, I don't know, pretty deep parts of the practice of major, at least these public development banks working more on the public good. We're gonna need at some point to get into the private sector much more deeply than I'd say the movement is now. But in the World Bank, it's pretty inspiring. There's high level support for development of this natural capital index that Mary referenced that would potentially really change the conversation as the bank meets with country governments and looks at options for achieving development. So the index itself will use sort of the same universal language and science methodology for quantifying values associated with nature. Look at each country's endowment of natural assets and the stream of benefits or value that flow from those assets depending on how they're managed. And it'll look for the economists in the room sort of at a production possibility front here basically how well a country is deploying its endowment to achieve human development objectives. And it'll also open up a view to pathways to doing better, given wherever a country is today in its development path and however well or poorly it's stewarded natural assets the analysis will reveal pathways for improving human well-being and condition at the same time as securing and improving the well-being, the condition of nature. So that's the idea. And we're hoping, like as we open up in conversation there are a lot of directions in which we could head but a key one is where to kind of head next. How do we transform rapidly? We don't have a lot of time here. How can we drive and accelerate the transformation especially of financial institutions and systems to account for nature in all we're doing? Yeah, okay, great. That was a really nice wrap up. So we're gonna now transition to hearing from you. So we'd love to hear any questions or comments that you have and I think there're gonna be a couple of mics passed around. So just raise your hand. Oh, here's one here. Great, and we'll just keep moving around. Hello everyone, my name is Mary Melnick. I work for USAID in the Asia Bureau. Thank you so much. And I too was a student in the early 90s, 1989. I started my PhD and worked on the economic and nutritional value of forest foods in the Venezuelan, southern Venezuela. So I followed all of you quite closely. Thank you. I just had a question, essentially it is perhaps a question of integration and or scale ability on the work that Stanford has been doing with the government of China. Are you seeing them picking up any of the principles and taking them forth on their Belt Road initiative which is now not just in Asia but around the world? And similarly with the World Bank, kudos to the World Bank for the extraordinary analytical capabilities and analyses that it has done over the years and the news is great if they can promote the GEP and the Natural Capital Index. Yet to what extent do you see that they have a process in place to integrate those analytical work into their day to day business of banking and does that make them less competitive when they have like the Asia infrastructure investment bank out there? So I think that's gonna be very interesting. So I appreciate your thoughts, thank you. Yeah, a lot of interesting times. I'll start an answer, Alvaro, you should continue. And then maybe Carter next to you might answer more fully on the World Bank given that he's much more deeply connected there. You should explain Carter. But yeah, your point on the China's Belt and Road initiative is crucial. There's, as everybody I bet is aware, major plans for financing infrastructure and other development across the world and just about any country at this point that are being quite visibly announced by Xi Jinping and others in China whereas other countries are busily doing similar things but not making such strong geopolitical statements through it so visibly. So there's tremendous opportunity for China on the one hand to help elevate standards for infrastructure investment for evaluating which investments would achieve a green inclusive growth for example, pathway or not. And whether they really follow that is completely open I would say. We've engaged in capacity building within Belt and Road initiative receiving countries to enable the kinds of both assessments that China has done of ecosystem condition and values and also policies like China deploys like zoning land to protect. They've got 49% of the land zoned in priority areas for securing natural capital and a lot of policies like I mentioned incentivizing and enabling economically and otherwise restoration of ecosystems but whether any of this helps depends crucially on leadership in China to agree to and help negotiate this elevation of standards and I know the Hank Paulson and the Paulson Institute are quite heavily involved in trying to advance principles for doing so but all of this is to be seen and guidance if you have special connection here would be really appreciated, Alvaro. Yes, well no countries are without contradictions and big countries have big contradictions. But China was able to implement this hillside payment system very quickly because they have a major problem with migration from the countryside to the cities. So this was a simple idea that you could get economic and ecological benefits out of it. Now the other issue is that China is also in the process of a huge global expansion. China dwarves the World Bank and the amount of projects that they're financing all over the world and the standards for these projects are not what one would expect. I speak from Costa Rican experience where for example they are financing a road but when they finance a project they already choose the company that is going to do it and in our system of government we have a public bidding process that we have to go through. So in order to build this project they had to pass a special law allowing this company to build the project and they are a company that has been sanctioned by the World Bank for not having such a great record. Now how China controls all this overseas effort that it's in the hundreds of billions of dollars per year it's very complicated but I think it's something that they have to tackle because otherwise the standards will not be met and there will be many, many ecological disasters down the road. Carter did you want to elaborate on the World Bank? My name's Carter Brandon I left the World Bank last January now Senior Fellow at World Resources Institute but thanks for your question and also thanks very much for acknowledging the analytical work which we obviously take very seriously but let me just start the World Bank has 25 years of do no harm policies we call safeguards and they're not bad they don't use economics they don't use valuation or nat cap but they were basically do no harm. So we upgraded that to the environment social framework about a year ago and we don't want to compete with the Asia Infrastructure Bank but what the philosophy is of this new framework is not only and not even most importantly to apply it to World Bank projects but to mainstream it in government so that they adopt this international standard of what good environmental and social compliance might be so this framework rollout is a massive 150 country capacity building effort so that Tanzania or Bangladesh would adopt sort of international standard environmental due diligence China by the way has actually pretty good environmental due diligence so I don't think there are focus of this kind of work but on the analytical side just to step up from the project level to the country level World Bank has a periodic process every three, four years with the new governments essentially four or five years to do a diagnostic of the main problems which are what are the problems with poverty alleviation and then what are the problems with sustainability and we can come up with very good reasons and we increasingly use natural capital we do a lot of benchmarking and we compare I can tell you comparing Columbia with Mexico made Columbia very embarrassed and they borrowed over a billion dollars for green growth comparing Laos with Vietnam made Laos very embarrassed about forestry and they borrowed a hundred million dollars for green growth so it really works to do that kind of analysis but ultimately it depends on what the countries want to borrow for the World Bank cannot tell a highly degraded country that they should borrow for something it has it's demand driven so and then the last thing I just want to say I think the World Bank's using climate change doing pretty well at looking across countries and convening and I was very happy to go go to a meeting three days ago now on Saturday during the annual meetings a new coalition called the Coalition of Finance Ministers for climate action and when I say it was a serious event the president of the World Bank was there the new managing director of the IMF was there the secretary general of the UN was there the head of OECD was there and 50 finance ministers and not only is it to take climate change seriously in the financial world it's to they also recognize that the fundamentals of resilience is nature so this was an opportunity to take this discussion to finance ministers in a way that Frank I hadn't seen before and this is all in the last six months so that's promising as well thanks your question others in the way back hey thank you thank you all for your time so I'm really interested in the notion of G E P that you that you all mentioned about because I think right now my biggest sort of existential question is like how do we reconcile our major index for success right this thing that's predicated GDP which is predicated on consumption so you know for all of our retirement monies like to to keep growing like we want people to be consuming more and more and so I think when I step back I struggle to reconcile with the fact that like we live in a finite planet and so I'm wondering how you all think about reconciling that and is it through G E P like perhaps putting trying to get governments to have G E P as an index of success alongside GDP is it something else entirely I'm just curious how you all think about that paradox if it's a paradox I'll give a quick response and we can have everybody chime in here I would say number one all countries need something like G E P this kind of tracking of performance of ecosystems no question about that in order to achieve anything we might call sustainability and G E P is a tremendous innovation and step in that direction at the same time I'd say it's not the only thing we need in order to achieve the transformation we can fantasize about there are many other realms in which we need deep change culturally and otherwise but by taking this step I feel we could go pretty far in moving along a pathway that at least allows people to recognize that it's not the economy versus the environment which is where we still are tragically in so many places so this is a crucial moment and opportunity and I feel very inspired while at the same time being tremendously worried about where we are overall yes G D P was one of the things that made me study economics and I came across a guy named Kenneth Boulding who was a very smart guy and the president of the American society for the advancement of science at some point and he he used to point out to all the inherent contradictions in G D P because in G D P everything adds up okay and he said well no there should be something called defensive expenditures which has nothing to do with the fence in the sense we use it normally but it's pollution okay uh... if the economy pollutes uh... the pollution control should be you know should be subtracted from G D P not added to G D P so in G D P everything adds up even all the bad things uh... and we we need therefore a better measure uh... so many countries have tried to measure the value of natural capital you know water and and uh... uh... forest carbon etcetera uh... but but there are all the other even more fundamental flaws which is like the you know how much is the value of household work in G D P zero okay and all of us now do household work and we know it's not worth zero you know so uh... there there are and there's a beautiful passage by Robert Kennedy of you know about G D P and it measures all the wrong things and it doesn't measure any of the right things uh... like the strength of the families and the strength of the country and the state of the environment and uh... so we do need to to develop uh... alternatives but you know if you ask the economist they will tell you well yeah we we agree with all the criticism but we need G D P for co for comparison purposes uh... well maybe you know we also need to compare G E P uh... and have all the countries be calculating this because this is the sad thing you can extinguish your fisheries destroy your forest mine all the gold and oil and your G D P will rise tremendously but what it doesn't measure is that the future is absolutely worthless so it's it's a measure it's a measure that we need to improve a lot and and really know what it does and what it doesn't do their comment or question here and then there's one here in the front too after hi thank you uh... i'm Helen Santiago Fink i'm a climate urbanist and a researcher here in the DC area i was curious to follow up on your initial uh... example did that road get built in Peru or not because this is the challenge that we have is we've been talking about green infrastructure for a long time uh... since the clean water act here in so many cities in the u.s. have adopted it but it's still far from being mainstream and what's needed when we're looking at at a local level at a county level at a state level the capital improvement projects in the investment uh... infrastructure investments we need that value in terms of what are those ecosystem services they're going to be lost or they're going to be added and my question is how do we move natural capital and things like nature based solutions to become mainstream how do we get that quantification into planning budget and into uh... cip budgets and you spoke about softwares that softwares are available for everybody and what can be done to actually really moved to scale thank you for that question in the case of the calpura proposed calpura road it has not been built you know i can't i can't say that it's like our analysis was the the soul thing that changed the decision but i think it was yeah the environmental impacts of that proposed road were definitely part of the conversation around whether to move forward with that to get the question about the software the national capital project software it's called invest and it is uh... it's free and open source uh... and you can go to the website uh... and download it involve you require some gis expertise although we're always working to make it even easier uh... to use and working with uh... the network of people to build capacity in different places so that even uh... you know if there's information that somebody wants from the software but they're not the one to run it themselves that we can help make those connections uh... in terms of how to how to mainstream i think that's a that's a great question uh... and we've done some work with with a number of development banks to to provide information that can be integrated into cost benefit analyses for green infrastructure based approaches and and other approaches yeah i think this is an excellent question and it's partly what we would love you're good thinking on what our approach has been to do demonstrations because you need not only that easy to use tools but also the poll the demand from people in agencies at all levels to say i want this i need this and and they're even thinking about it and so this capacity building in training uh... program that we have this is geared in part to do that we've worked a lot with u.s. uh... government leaders at all levels but we we are really still trying to figure out how can we get beyond the demonstration scale and helps spread the good ideas we have the tools but it's really that creating the demand in the public sector and private sector it is growing as our panel members have said and one place i see lots of bright spots is in coastal climate resilience uh... just because as many of you know we're we're all feeling that increase frequency and intensity of hurricanes and we're feeling sea level rise it's bubbling up through sewage systems in in downtown miami so it's an it's becoming a non-partisan issue people see it and feel it much more everyday from fires to sea level rise so we're we're feeling that that is starting to become a louder drumbeat and we're actually hearing a lot more demand from both the private sector businesses whose physical plants are being threatened by flooding or sea salt water intrusion into their water systems insurance industry sees it and feels it everyday as well as government so uh... it's starting in some sectors and in some arenas but i think you're pointing to a really big next big challenge is how do we do this scaling and mainstreaming and fast enough in order to get in front of some of these issues the big one so maybe one more here and then we'll uh... here yeah thank you for being here my name is Matthew Julesic I'm the senior infrastructure policy advisor at USAID hi mary my question is throughout some numbers uh... three billion people will live in slums by twenty fifty that'll be a third of the population of the planet human population and more people living in slums globally than will live on the entire continent of africa it's a lot of people living in slums how do we get them access to ecosystems how do we integrate what is typically a very rural or wild idea into the densest most awful places on the planet we're all looking at each other I think we're going to you guys should take this Gretchen and Lisa have the answer okay I could say we know of like inspiring nascent efforts but they're really at an early stage one of them is led by a consortium most of these things require teamwork across the planet to be effective so it's led in the Stanford arena by a professor named Steve Luby who made much of his career in Bangladesh and recently moved to Stanford and he spent his life working on uh... issues of water quality and diarrheal disease in developing countries especially in these types of slum conditions and the project is designed to uh... give the kind of evidence in a suite of slums across southeast Asia primarily that would be needed to inform replicated kind of investments across such situations uh... so it's meant to provide much improved hygiene and access to water through investments in nature and part in in these places and uh... would then motivate ideally if it all plays out and it's going to take some years they're just now making me they've designed the investments with a lot of involvement all of this work to be effective requires deep involvement with the communities you know who are meant to be benefited so there's there's a long process there of at least often two years and just engaging in really understanding what the problems are from a individual and household and community level and then and kind of bringing in the latest and greatest uh... thinking and practice on addressing such problems and lisa you might remember all of the elements better there's a suite of elements in it a range of things including uh... not only kind of intestinal uh... patented pathogens and water quality but also other types of uh... disease risk in those areas and so there's with the package of green infrastructure investment would presumably come a lot of different benefits and the idea is to maximize sort of the co-benefits that would come along under the umbrella of trying to improve water quality and sanitation but did i miss anything major there that's just so i think that's emblematic of the stage of this work long way to go maybe yeah i i think that there is no no slum no matter how poor it is where you cannot improve conditions and it it's all based on water uh... because water is is is the main vector of disease you know uh... throughout the world so uh... you do have to to provide some portable water to these communities but but more important you also have to work on on the sewage system and and you know separating the waste the urine does not problem post any sanitary problem is the feces so you have to get people organized you know so that they you can have latrines uh... uh... and and you can remove the you know that the compost from the latrines but you do have a work you need a working system that is two-fold one focuses on providing clean water so people don't get sick and all the one on taking away the way so that they don't get sick with the waste because one of the main problems as you know is handwashing and you know when people don't have a lot of water don't have soap uh... it's easy to do that but even in in in the worst slums you you can figure out a system of providing portable water uh... mostly by trucks in in in many cases or uh... you know by wells uh... in in all the cases uh... i'm also working on the solid waste so that you know that that you take it away and you don't get rat infestation and cockroaches and all that the the sewage uh... it's not pretty uh... but but it can make a huge improvement uh... you know just having channels for the sewage flows open the using wet lands for some to get some degree of treatment uh... so that there are there are a lot of things that that can be done on the ground to improve people's condition they require organization and they require a little bit of money yes uh-huh here's another right next to him yeah thank you i'm bob hershey i'm a consultant uh... what is being done to try and get some transparency to the situation by having meetings and presenting the material online so people can see it they're trying to we we need to do more certainly but uh... we designed the software to be usable in all countries so number one that the science that we're developing is tuned to inclusive sort of uptake worldwide the purpose of the software it sounds at one level maybe like a silicon valley kind of thing but it's actually uh... the whole idea is to open access to science that otherwise is basically unavailable to no one in my family would know how to read any of these papers just like none of us can read ninety nine point nine percent of what comes out in the scientific literature so all of it has been designed to be relevant and accessible in all parts of the world whatever the data limitations in those places uh... planet-wide and then yeah the uh... leesa do you want to say more on on the book and distribution and training that we do and for other ways in which we're engaging now to expand but a key is for sure that we need to go a lot further i could mention something on stanford's role in that if it makes sense but i guess i can give it a few more examples of how we're we're trying to get information in these approaches out in an open way uh... we have a free uh... online short course uh... that's also you can access through the website uh... there'll be a new version of that as well i think shortly uh... yeah we do as i mentioned before uh... lead trainings and workshops around the world and also host uh... and the national capital symposium annually uh... at stanford in march uh... i don't remember the exact dates but it's on it's on our website week okay and then uh... yeah also on our website we have databases of examples of well of uh... natural capital project publications which includes everything from peer reviewed literature to uh... two pages and reports aimed at different audiences and then also uh... a database of other people who have used these tools if you're looking for examples in particular places yeah and then uh... a week ago stanford announced uh... the intention to actually create a new school the university hasn't had a new school in many decades uh... so you know we've got medicine law business and so on there will now be a school and we don't know the name yet but uh... on sustainability and on this kind of stuff and uh... i'm hoping that that will obviously enable the acceleration in the research innovation needed to support answers to the question on slums for example and also uh... enable kind of a whole new model a new way of deploying the assets in research universities so that we are much more impactful around the world and drive research uh... together with people who know the problems deeply that we need to be solving scale that we've never managed before in in history so it's it's a pretty momentous time not just at stanford there are many other schools recognizing the importance of sort of centers of excellence in research and places of training future leaders and wide array of arenas and uh... trying to rethink how the university you know today designed on a model created in germany a couple hundred years ago how universities need to evolve meet the challenges of the twenty first century in time last comments or questions yes here uh... in doing my graduate work i became an expert in the invest and so uh... my question to you is i found talking with a lot of my colleagues that much of the data that would be important to use in a particular project is either not available at all or in the hands of private companies and for a price they would probably sell it to you lease it to you uh... but he even here in this country uh... i think it's interior is talking about starting to charge for uh... data is otherwise or has been available publicly are you involved or is net cap involved at all in trying to alleviate some of these problems since your software is so heavily uh... dependent on data yeah do you want to start on that one yeah it's great that you're that you're an invest user yeah we have any others in the room but yeah the the point about so the way invest was designed was that the models can be run anywhere in the world because they are globally available data but as you probably discovered depending on the question you want to ask with it sometimes you want more locally precise data and sometimes that's not easy to get so uh... that's a common uh... experience i think and what we have often done in our collaborations is get the best available data with the collaborators with whom we're working so they're often very willing to share and find data either in file cabinets that they will digitize or the private sector or proprietary data sources that they will either let us use for analysis or they will do the analyses when we train them so there are workarounds for trying to get the uptake in decisions and then your last question about the data and how available are they i i agree i've seen that that's a real problem is that some of them were public and they're not or they were more accessible and they're less accessible now as people learn the value of that information and they try to hold on to it so we're developing as gretchen mentioned many more approaches to getting data that are public so this remote sensing techniques and other sources where we aren't relying on agencies for example in the u s to provide us with that so i think it's going to be an ongoing both opportunity as new data sources come online and you know the drones and low elevation aircraft and low elevation satellites and regular satellites there's an explosion of new information but keeping abreast of it and able to use it is something that we're working on everyday so yeah thank you for that question yeah but it's a it's a really important issue because as you said we need information to then be able to try to make sense of it and synthesize it but the information we have is good enough to give at least this rudimentary kind of assessment through the natural capital index of all countries where so we're hoping as demand increases uh... for this kind of analysis that investment will you know or or just the demand will through various pathways open up greater access one last question from anybody or comment otherwise we'll we have this one over here great thank you my name is janet larson i'm a researcher and writer and uh... stanford earth systems graduate uh... thank you all for your presentations and when you are mentioning wanting to gain more traction in the private sector i was thinking a little bit about how in the absence of uh... carbon tax or a carbon limit uh... many of the world's major corporations have at least an internal shadow carbon price that they take used to take into account in their uh... decision-making and i'm wondering if you've discussed or written about in your book if there's any kind of parallel that could work with uh... ecosystem services well i mean our program was we have a few tax but we don't have any coal in costa rica so the the the fuel taxes the equivalent of a carbon tax uh... and we've had that since nineteen nineties five uh... and three and a half percent out of that tax which is like fifteen fifteen percent on fuels to pay for ecosystem services uh... so that that's a very very direct link uh... that that taxes represented more than half of the total revenue of the program the other parts have come from grants from the gf from kf w from we have now a sustainable biodiversity fund people uh... pay with credit cards uh... that uh... are for reforestation and it's the most popular credit card in costa rica so we get some income from from that you know that there is uh... a number of of ways to put a price on carbon uh... putting a price of carbon is critical uh... you know the companies that put a shadow price uh... that is the price they should be paying but they're not doing it because there is no compelling overall agreement you know and that's why it's so important that the u s stays within the paris accord because unless the u s which is the largest economy in the world says no to to to a carbon tax to carbon pricing uh... then there's an excuse for everybody else not to do it of course we know that many states many companies many towns are are doing it on their own but we do need the you know the the big economies to to support this pricing of carbon that will allow for a market to create you know for carbon reductions uh... in agriculture in forestry in in energy efficiency etc so we very much need that okay well great this has been really with you all and if you can i want to thank you all for coming and for your interest but also join me in really great