 Anika Markovic, can you please join us as well? Sweden, we have a system of extraordinary ambassadors who really try to push certain issues on the international agenda and support of the government. Anika Markovic, environment ambassador. We have also Anna Linsett actually here today who is the ambassador for climate change, you know, climate ambassador. We have an Arctic ambassador. We have an oceans ambassador. We have four very, very dedicated people for this. Anika, you have a very broad agenda as well, trying to cover everything that is happening in the world. I should mention, which is unfortunate in a way, that you will leave this post as an environment ambassador mid-February and become the ambassador to OECD and UNESCO, also very important. But your perspectives as an environment ambassador, the science policy interface would be really interesting to hear more about. Thank you, Johan, and I'm very pleased to be here this morning. I'm very happy to be able to talk to such an eminent group of people. Yes, I will leave this position as environment ambassador very soon, but I will bring with me whole network of contacts. I'm looking forward to continue working with you and with all your colleagues here. I actually started working in this building when I finished with university almost 30 years ago, and I shouldn't say how many years it's been, but I started working as a researcher in the National Defense Research Establishment, who then had an office in this building very much locked in, but we tried to really do also the research to policy bridging. And then I moved pretty fast into policy, and I've been staying with policy ever since, but always trying to keep a link to the researchers, because I think it's so important that when you try to influence policy, you need to base that on science, because otherwise it's not gonna work in the end, so you really need to have this collaboration. Otherwise I should start to talk about 1972, because as you know, that's when it's all started, the relationship between human development and the environment when we had the first UN conference here in Stockholm. But I won't start there. I will jump to Rio plus 20, the follow-up Rio conference that was held in Rio de Janeiro two years ago, and where we took as policymakers an extremely important and challenging decision, because we said that when we are now going to replace and build on the millennium development goals and actually do something for the next 15, 20, 30 years, we have to do that and make sure it's sustainable. So we have to develop a new agenda for the world, not only for developing countries, but also for us here in Sweden and many of our collaborators in the Western world, so to say, sustainable development goals that will integrate all the three dimensions of sustainable development and to do that in a way that it's applicable to each and every country in the world. And that's a major challenge, but it's also a wonderful opportunity, because if we succeed, that can really be a game changer. So why am I mentioning this? Well, we decided that in order to develop these new SDGs, we have to work in different groups, but the most important group is a working group in the United Nations in New York. And this working group has now been meeting seven times over the past year or a little bit more than a year, and in the first week of February will be the eighth and the last meeting of this group. This group has, during this past year, really been trying to do this, what we've been telling the UN, you need to do much more, to bring in the science and to make sure that what you develop to replace the Millennium Development Goals and to make sure that we have a good new development agenda for the world, you need to base that on science. So I've been following these working group meetings over the past year and it's been so interesting because it's been completely different from any other UN working group that I've been involved in over the past 20, 25 years because the UN and the co-chairs of this working group has really brought in science. They have also brought in practitioners and representatives of the business community and so on, but they have really brought in a lot of people from the outside and used this first year of the working group to build a common understanding on what are the challenges if we are really going to develop something that will be sustainable, a new agenda that will be sustainable for the world. And this is just an example how also SEI has been very important because when you are negotiating such a difficult and challenging agenda as a new development agenda, you cannot just do that by sitting in working groups in the United Nations and looking at the screen like this where you have a text and then do drafting line by line and as you know change words and change commas and maybe sometimes even agree on a sentence or a paragraph, but it takes a very, very long time. So in order to really bring the collective negotiating community together with science and to start talking about the difficult issues like what does it mean universality? What does it mean that we have common but differentiated responsibilities and capabilities? What does this really mean when we talk about water or energy or any other matter that we need to deal with in this new development agenda? And then SEI has been part of a small organizing committee through Mons Nilsson who has been organizing one workshop and now a second one is coming up in February bringing out a small group of negotiators but the key people and putting them in another place, a place outside of the UN and bringing in also people that understands the science and put them together over a period of two, three days and make them work and then you know understand and listen and not just talk because that's what we are used to do in the UN, we talk but here we really needed to listen and this has been a crucial contribution of SEI and WRI and those who've been part of organizing this because what you have done is make us understand better why we need science to make sure that the new development agenda is sustainable and so that is one issue I think where science and policy comes together and where policy really needs science in order to be successful. The other example I want to give is what I normally call my baby is the Climate and Clean Air Coalition and this is a coalition that we launched in Washington DC about two years ago now in February it will be two years and at that time we were six countries and UNEP, United Nations Environment Program and those six countries were Canada, US, Mexico, Sweden, Bangladesh and Ghana and the six of us got together because of science. We, we knew since several years that the scientists working in the area of climate had been focusing more also on the short lived climate pollutants like black carbon and methane and troposperic ozone and even HFCs and we knew that they were saying that you need not only to focus on CO2s that will still continue to be the most important part to tackle climate change but you can also work on the short lived climate pollutants and make a difference especially in the short term and if you do that we will give you the support and identify the key measures that you need to take as policy makers and there again SEI and through Yuan Shilin China who is sitting here were very, very crucial because you worked with UNEP and other organizations to put together a report that identified 16 concrete measures that needed to be taken in order to reduce the emissions of these short lived climate pollutants and you gave us the reason why we should do that so we brought a group of six countries that decided yes let's go for this, let's do something that is really helping the climate also in the short term so we decided to launch this coalition two years ago six countries in UNEP now we are counting 80 partners in this coalition in just two years and it's been quite a success story I must say and you as a science policy interface you have been holding our hand ever since the very beginning and we also realized that we need to be working together with you because otherwise we won't do the right thing so we established early on a scientific advisory panel and we have in this panel the best researchers in the world that meet in order to give us advice on how to target the policy and this has been extremely important in this work so that is two examples that I wanted to give that where you and your work has really been helpful to us and where we will need your support in the next two, three, five, ten years also to continue to develop these important issues and the third thing I just wanted to mention which is a very new exciting project that we have and that we launched in September of last year and that project is called the new climate economy and that project is really it's a project about transformation because what we want to do is to change the discourse when we talk about climate very often when you talk to people about climate and my colleague Anna knows this very well it's all very negative it's just about the burden of climate change the cost sharing, how are we going to share the costs of mitigating and adapting it's only discussed in a way that this is such a heavy matter it's such a complex matter we won't be able to resolve it but we know that there are many measures that you can take that are really win-win measures especially when you talk about policy and we wanted to bring researchers together and make sure that we have a sound basis for actually talking about these win-win-win situations and that's why we created the new climate economy project which is an international project led by WRI in a consortium with SEI and the two other organizations and we have a project team based in London and the idea is then that when the report of this project comes out it will give us the arguments and the discussion points for why measures to counter climate change is actually a win-win situation so this is a very exciting new project connecting again science and policy and of course very important that you continue to work in that area as well so thank you very much