 Thank you very, very much. Patti for setting out ESB's framework for net zero and it's that theme, a resilient framework for net zero, which is the theme of our second session, taking advantage of all the technologies. This session will be entirely virtual and this is where you get to take part in the conversation because after each of our speakers speaks, we will have a Q&A session so if you actually go into your mobile phone and go on to slido.com we'll be able to facilitate you. Your questions through the app you can go on to the slido app and use the accelerate password to get into it so please do that now if you can. If you're really old school and you can't cope with using your phone we have provided you with a little pen and notebook there and if you want to just write your questions down we'll have colleagues throughout the hall who will be able to take your question in written format and we'll put it up on to slido for you. So our first speaker in this, the second session is travelling at the moment so he's provided us with a pre-recorded address. Professor Sir Peter Dieter Helm is a Professor of Economic Policy and at the University of Oxford he's also fellow in economics at New College in Oxford. He's written many books, he's preparing a second one at the moment. Most recently he wrote net zero in which he addresses the action that we all need to take to tackle the climate emergency. His new book is the Sustainable Economy and in his address to the conference Professor Helm is going to give us an overview of what is needed to devise an energy policy framework for a climate resilient world. He's also going to share his vision of a system-wide plan to accelerate the energy transformation so let's hear from Professor Helm now. The pathway to net zero certainly needs accelerating. The backdrop and one has to be very realistic when it comes to climate change after all much of life on this planet is at stake is not particularly a good one. Every single year since 1990, that's over 30 years, we've added two parts per million to the concentration of carbon in the atmosphere. There isn't a single blip, not even for the financial crisis in 20728 and no blip for the coronavirus. Indeed, in the great lockdowns, including China, whilst emissions fell, we carried on adding at the rate of two parts per million. Why? Well, because climate change is not just about emissions. It's about the net of emissions and secretation. Whilst we've been making very limited progress, once we've properly measured emissions, on that side, when we come to the secretation side, one of the most devastating recent facts is that the Amazon is gradually moving to be a net emitter of carbon, one of the greatest carbon sinks in on the planet, and even that started to dry out, burn and emit carbon. So urgency is the order of the day, and business as usual, carrying on on the current programme from the cops, et cetera, is not going to be enough. We need to do more. What we're doing at the moment is living beyond our carbon means. It's not sustainable, and therefore it will not be sustained. So when it comes to thinking about energy policy and how to do net zero, we need to go back to some basics. The basics are pretty straightforward. Energy policy is not rocket science. It's about security of supply. It's about affordability, and it's about climate change. You need to achieve all three simultaneously, otherwise you won't carry the population with you because they can't pay. If you haven't got security supply, economic activity is hugely compromised. Remember, in our modern digital world, with broadband, fibre, voice over internet, electrical devices, digitalised everywhere, robotics and so on, security supply is much, much more important now for electricity than it's ever been. So we need to do all three, and right now we have an affordability crisis, a security supply crisis, and in terms of the global picture, we're not making much progress on dealing with our targets of limiting warming to two degrees, et cetera. So in a way it's hard to do worse, and that's the opportunity. We can do so much better. And in doing better, what we have to have in mind, what matters is we understand that the underlying fundamentals of the market have changed and are changing. And what worked in the 20th century, wholesale markets and so on, isn't going to work in the 21st century and isn't going to work for the net zero transition. Why? Well, because the features of our new world are that the emerging technologies, the renewables technologies, almost all at zero marginal cost. There is no marginal cost for any wholesale market to sort out. Wholesale markets are yesterday's solution to yesterday's problem. Secondly, and for a long time to come, intermittency is a big, big issue. It won't go away. In fact, it will get worse as renewables are built out. It's not so soon to build the renewables, it's simply to say it's no good doing renewables without at the same time coming up with an answer to the question, well, how exactly are you going to deal with the intermittency? What exactly are you going to do when the wind doesn't blow, when the sun doesn't shine and it's February? Or, now as we're learning, it's a heat wave in July or August. And the important thing to remember about intermittency is that it's not just the wind that's intermittent. It renders absolutely everything else on the system intermittent too as the renewable build out accelerates. So you have to have an answer to that. And then you have to bear in mind that the renewables technologies are low density, disaggregated, decentralised technologies. You need a lot of them to make up the megawatts and gigawatts that a system total demand requires. So we have to do all of that stuff in a context in which it's no good saying, well, you know, intermittency, so power will become more unreliable. No, not in a digital economy. We need more security while intermittency becomes more of a problem. So we have to reconfigure energy markets. And fortunately, almost everyone in Europe is finally getting around to market reform and to understanding that this is a capacity issue, not an energy issue. It's a utility type problem, fixed sunk capital costs. It's not a wholesale market issue as it was with fossil fuels. And we have to do all this recognising the sheer scale of the energy transition, which is all about electricity. So it's not just that we have to replace that coal power stations and God forbid stop burning peat for generating electricity and stop using peat in households. It's much more than that. We have to bear in mind that the economies of the world are 80 per cent dependent on fossil fuels. And I don't know what precise number is for Ireland, but for the UK and Germany, it's about 80 per cent too. It's the same number as it was in 1970. It's not just about getting out of coal power stations, peat, et cetera. It's about transforming agriculture. It's about electrifying transport. It's about dealing with heating and doing all that stuff within a world which is overwhelmingly digital and electric. So this is an enormous challenge and to repeat myself, business as usual, what we're doing so far is not going to get us there. And indeed, without a border adjustment, simply deindustrialising and importing the stuff from China and elsewhere doesn't solve climate change either. That's one of the reasons why in Europe emissions have been going down, but actually it's had virtually no effect on the two parts per million per annum. So what should we do to accelerate? Well, if we move away from more of the same and the COP framework and so on, all of those things are quite useful, but we move on to something serious. We need a system plan and it's no good saying if you've got 27 years to get to the net zero target in 250 or earlier, that you're simply going to say, well, we'll allow the liberalisation competition model to get us there as each entrepreneur makes and each business makes their own decision. No, you need a network to make this add up. You need an integrated system. You need to be able to decentralise to handle the fact that these are decentralised technology. You need to integrate the demand side into this, integrate the households, the local administrations, the combined heat and power, all the new stuff out there. You need to integrate the cars. You need to integrate the batteries. You need to think about other forms of storage. You need to work out what happens to the intermittent excess power. You need to think about hydrogen. This is a system plan and it needs system regulation, not offices of economic regulation that we've had for our late 20th century systems. And that transformation of systems can be done. It's not rocket science. After all, after the Second World War, almost all of Europe in its great period of growth rebuilt energy industries at scale. So this isn't unprecedented that we can do this, but it does require that coordination, that planning, an old-fashioned word but very important. And of course, ultimately what it comes down to is making us the polluters, you and me, the people for whom all this energy is produced, pay for the pollution we cause. That means a carbon tax applied across the economy and that means a carbon border adjustment. And it's all very well said, oh that's politically very difficult. Well, if you're not prepared to face up to the costs of climate change, then you must admit you're not really going to make any progress, as indeed the world has not done for the last 30 years. The fact is we're living beyond our means, we're living beyond our environmental means, we're living beyond our biodiversity means, we're living beyond our carbon means. And it's not rocket science to say that if you go on doing that, you won't crack the problem. So system planning, system regulation, coordination, dealing with the intermittency, dealing with the decentralisation of the systems and doing that where polluters pay and recognising the unpleasant fact that you and me are the polluters. And that's why I'm not flying to see you today, that's why I'm doing this virtually and that reflects an innovation and technical example of what we can do if we want to start addressing climate change. But if we don't, if we don't do these things, it won't be sustained. And that's the important point, you don't escape the consequence of climate change by not doing anything about it. So, as they say, let's get on with it at the last hour before it really is too late. Thank you very much. Once more, we are told we are living beyond our means. It has a particular resonance in an Irish context, but superb to hear from Dieter, you know, just talking about that it is a system plan and that urgency is the order today. And we, business as usual, will not be enough. I think what he offered us is really an overview of what is needed to strengthen the economy-wide framework to meet net zero. Well, as we've heard all morning, the war in Ukraine has exposed the important role that geopolitics plays in the energy sector, not just as the transition to net zero continues, but also as it accelerates those security dimensions of the framework deserve closer consideration. And our next speaker is going to address this topic and she will also examine some of the blind spots of the energy transition. Olivia Lazard is a fellow at Carnegie Europe. Her research focuses on the geopolitics of climate, the transition ushered by climate change and the risks of conflict and fragility associated to climate change and environmental collapse. She's an environmental peacemaking and mediation practitioner as well as a researcher. And prior to joining Carnegie, she had set up her own consultancy firm, Peace and Design Consulting, which remains exclusively active in conflict and fragile zones. So Olivia, the virtual floor is yours. Thank you so much. It's really a great honour to be speaking here and I must say that the previous presentation really set a wonderful scene for me to be speaking. The previous presentation looked at systems change from an economic, industrial and supply security perspective. I'm going to try and provide a back job story to what needs to happen in order to essentially catalyze the transformations that are needed in Ireland in Europe and really in the rest of the world to make that happen. The first thing that I want to pick up upon is what was mentioned before, which is essentially that in order to make the actual transition to net zero happen, we need to have a security of supply. And we need to think of that security of supply in terms of a larger context of how to make it happen and how to think of security in much more diverse and multi dimensional ways than we've done before, including in ways that include ecological security, geopolitical and geo economic security, as well as climate security. The very first thing to understand is that we, as the previous speaker mentioned, have an issue around power density. In order to create the same type of power generation that we've been accustomed to in Ireland in Europe or generally in energy intensive economies, we need essentially to dig deeper into the environment. We need to have much more material density in order to move towards, you know, energy generation in the same with the same rate. This means essentially that we need to have a lot more materials which are deemed to be critical. We're talking about materials such as lithium, copper, cobalt, tantalum, rare earths. Essentially, it's sort of, you know, different supply chains that need to come together to create the clean technologies that we need to rely upon such as solar farms or wind farms and battery development. This has enormous implications starting with ecological implications. This picture shows you very quickly the type of mind that we need to rely upon shifting from a fossil economy means shifting from a fossil economy means shifting to a mineral economy. And each and every mind that we construct or that we rely upon has tremendous material and ecological footprint. This picture shows you that in order to extract about 10 grams of copper, we need on average to move one ton of soil. Trying to extrapolate that to the type of material intensity that we will need in order to create the clean technologies, not just for Ireland, Europe and but also for the rest of the world. And you get essentially a picture where our move towards a clean energy transition needs to navigate the reality that the clean component is actually not so green. It has a lot of material footprint. It has a lot of ecological footprints around the world. And this is important because we need to look not just at active mining assets today to try and understand where we're headed in terms of the energy transition and to try to sort of tap into supply security today. We need to look at where the future of supply chain is going to be located. And the latest number that I find quite interesting is that we know that by 2035, we will need to open up at least 300 and 36 new mines in order to feed into the supply chain security. And this is only for battery related supply chain security for rare earths for lithium for cobalt for copper graphite tantalum and other such materials. Now it begs the question, where are the minerals going to come from? Where are the mines going to be located? And if you look at this map, this map essentially highlights or correlates three different types of information. The green dots tell you all about all the different materials that we need, the deposit side and their location in the world and where therefore investments will need to go to. The second layer is the brown and red elements which sort of correlate with country specificities. These brown and red shades indicate the level of fragility and the level of corruption levels that investment environment or governance levels are characterized by. What you should notice and draw as a preliminary conclusion out of this map is essentially that a lot of the investments within the next two decades will need to go into countries that generally have an environment or governance environment which is correlated with what we call elite predation, which tends to correlate with concentration of wealth in the hands of a few elites within the public and the private sector, which tend to correlate with fiscal evasion, and which tend to correlate with a business model where corruption, fragility, violence under development are actually used to try and make sure that there is a control of governance systems over populations and over communities. The implication of that map is that with the uptake in investment within the mineral sector, we may actually see an uptake in various levels of conflicts, various levels of violence going forward, which is already complicated enough because we're seeing essentially an uptake. We've seen it for the last 10 years in terms of various forms of conflict and difficulty to tackle governance issues which are key to ensure that economic redistribution at national and global levels goes to effective results in terms of tackling conflict, making sure that we are on the path towards global development and we are on the path towards reduction of violence and reduction of poverty. Now, there is another element which is also quite concerning, which is essentially that if you look at this map and look at the next one, which represents the global regeneration priority areas, meaning where all of our efforts regarding the protection and regeneration of critical ecosystems that are essential to regulate the global climate regime, to regulate the global hydrological cycle, to sequester carbon, and to ensure that ecological services, which are at the basis of any type of functioning economy and civilization, remain. Well, you will see essentially that all of the red and orange areas are located in exactly the same areas where you see the concentration of a lot of deposits for the future of investment and supply chain security. So the implication here is that if we are not careful about where we place investments to secure supply chains that are necessary for the clean tech transition, we will actually undermine ecological security, and we will actually accelerate climate vulnerability, which is extremely dangerous. Because if you look at the next map in the bottom layer, you will see that a lot of the deposits, a lot of the critical ecosystems necessary to protect and regenerate are also located in some of the most climate vulnerable countries. And these entire maps show you a picture that has gone unnoticed in the conversation essentially towards the net transition, the net zero transition, whereby we are likely, if we're not careful, since we need to decarbonize fast to decarbonize in a way that may actually increase conflict potential, increase under development potential, increase the risks and impacts of climate vulnerability, and therefore over time, widen global disparities at a moment of human history and governance history, where we actually need to come together and create more collective security, more governance systems that are essentially going to be solid enough to handle from a collective perspective the impacts of climate change and ecological disruption. Now I'm moving on to another part of the global transition, which is related to this first story that I'm telling you about and likely to accelerate it. And this has to do with geo strategy and with power competition. We have to remember that in the history of the world, in the history of humanity, there's never been one single energy transition that hasn't resulted in fundamental shifts in power dynamics and in the global balance of power. And usually this is accompanied by a level of global conflictuality, which is obviously quite dangerous in the first place, but it's even more dangerous when it plays within planetary boundaries which are currently getting very close to overshoot. This is a map of Ukraine. This is a map of the rare earth deposits of Ukraine. If you look intently, you will see that the majority of the deposits are actually located in the eastern part of the country. Very specifically, the places and the regions which Russia is intent on annexing and which Russia has tried for years to gain control over through very different tactics. It is very important to understand that at the moment the war which is going on in Ukraine is not just about Ukrainian identity and the integrity of this identity as well as the integrity of territorial contiguity within Ukraine. It is also about the future. It is about the future of the energy transition and the future of power dynamics. In July 2021, Ukraine became the second country to strike a strategic partnership with the European Union to diversify and develop supply chain security for the future of clean tech in Europe. Through this partnership, the tacit understanding was that Ukraine would be brought closer to the European Union from an economic and from an energy perspective, as well as from an industrial one. Exactly at the time when the European Union essentially is in the midst of rethinking its industrial strategy to accelerate and catalyze the type of changes that the previous speaker was talking about before. And this would be concerning enough if it was only about Ukraine, but I also want you to look at the next slide. This is a Central African Republic, a country that I know very well for having worked in it between 2018 to 2022. In 2018, I saw Wagner groups, Wagner mercenaries arrive in Bangui and then go away in various parts of the Central African Republic, a country which is about 80% controlled by various armed groups. Wagner operatives deployed to places where you can see a lot of the great dots on the map. The great dots represent a lot of the minerals that are so-called non-identified. They're not gold, they're not diamond, which are usually the mineral economies that are associated to the Central African Republic. They're actually related to rare earths and other types of materials that we need also to transition toward net zero. And if you look at the right hand map, you will see that the deployment of Wagner groups are actually also correlated with high civilian casualties and deaths. What this picture tells you and what the previous map of Ukraine tells you is essentially that Russia is one of the actors deploying a lot of different tactics and strategies to gain access to assets that will be extremely important for the future of transition within the European Union, within the US, within the OECD space and more largely for the rest of the world. This is a matter for Russia to become a geoeconomic power broker in the new energy landscape starting today and extending within the next decades. And by becoming and trying to gain access to all of those materials through means that undermine the international governance system and the rules-based order, that use violence as a way to gain access to different assets, the risks associated to the first part of the story that I told you about is essentially that fragility, corruption, climate vulnerability and underdevelopment may well become negotiating chips and fundamental chips within the business model towards transitioning towards a global energy transition. And what we have to look at are indeed the type of geoeconomic arches or relationships that will define how this geoeconomic transition will play out. This is why it's also particularly important to look at the relationship between Russia and China, a country which at the moment is extremely important for the transition towards a net zero future. Nomni is a European Union 98% dependent on China for the provision and refining of rare earths. It is also dependent on China for the processing of lithium, cobalt and all other types of materials necessary for the future of supply security. That tells us is essentially that there is a geoeconomic competition playing out at deposit sites at the very first level of extraction, but it is also playing out throughout the various elements of supply chains and value chains that are playing out at the moment. And what we're seeing is essentially a picture at the moment where China is using its processing capacity, its clean tech development capacity as a way to become the next hegemon of the new economic global order and use this in return as a way to essentially negotiate the way in which the international governance system, the rules based order and the international security order play out. This is particularly concerning when we've seen that China is able and intent when it suits their purpose to weaponize supply chains, which are necessary for the transition towards clean tech systems. All of this tells us something very important. The very first thing is that the European Union is not equipped, not just from a systems sort of perspective as the previous speaker was talking about, yet to catalyze the energy systems that are needed to transition towards net zero at home, let it be in a country like Ireland, but also collectively when the EU. But it has also missed out on a fundamental picture where the security apparatus of the European Union has not played in favor of understanding the stakes of climate related transitions of ecological related transitions and therefore of the future of security. What we need to develop today is not just full of government, full of society plans to try and shift systemically towards clean tech and the provision of energy systems that will respond to the climate emergency. What we need is a larger understanding of how security apparatus is, how intelligence services, how the very notion of security is extended to how will the geo economic transition play out. How do we ensure that it does not play out in the disfavor of the countries that are essentially at the heart of the climate transition and at the heart of climate disruptions. What we need is essentially today, especially at the European Union, a climate and ecological diplomacy that will recognize that in order to ensure the future of energy security and therefore economic security within the EU, as well as socio political security within the EU. We need to have a vastly different proposition towards countries in Latin America, in Africa, in the Indo Pacific, in Eastern Europe and in Central Asia. And we need indeed to move from having very rather fluffy sort of multilateral negotiations around cops, for example, to what I call the nuts and bolts diplomacy, which is about how do we invest in secure supply chains, secure in the sense of trying to make sure that they mitigate. And prevent as much ecological impact as possible to ensure that we do not undermine ecological services that are helping to regulate planetary security. But that we also essentially look at the type of extraction systems that are now being repeated from hundreds of years in our history, and that we try to change them. And this is why the role of the private sector, particularly in the mining sector in the clean tech sector are particularly important, because we need to look beyond just ESG systems, such as environmental, social and governance indicators that serve as market indicators to really understanding how we can anchor the climate adaptation agenda into co industrialization, co adaptation. And in the future of a European project, which is both political and economic and which goes beyond its borders to redistribute some of the fundamental tenets of what security is from an economic, social and political perspective. Thank you very much. Thank you so much, Olivia. What a sobering bigger picture Olivia delivered there. She's going to be joining us as well for the Q&A, so please do make sure you send in your questions for Olivia and for our next guest who is going to speak to us about the intersection between the green and digital transformations of our economy. An important part of the European Commission's green deal and digital strategy is destination earth, which may be new to some of you in the room. Destination earth aims to develop and on a global scale, highly accurate, I've had a chance to have a little look at it, digital model of the earth to monitor and predict the interaction between natural phenomena and human activities. Destination earth and its development of digital earth twins are key to predicting the effects and building resilience to climate change and we're delighted once again virtually to welcome Grazina Piesiewicz, head of the unit open space and digital modelling at DG Connect at the European Commission. He's going to tell us a little bit more about these digital twins and how destination earth will contribute to achieving the objectives of the twin transitions, green and digital. So we'll hand over to you. Hello, thank you very much for your kind words and for inviting me and giving me the opportunity to present destination earth. I don't know whether you can see my slides I get there they are right so perfect. Thank you. Thank you very much for giving me the opportunity to present destination earth to you indeed one of the many initiatives of the European Commission on behalf of the EU and we are a little bit changing scale with respect to the previous extremely engaging and extremely interesting but also very worrying presentation I have to say. We are moving a little bit into a smaller scale, even though I hope you will find it interesting and important indeed as the initiative. Among many of the initiatives that the European Commission is conducting on behalf of the European Union as the initiative addresses the twin challenge of indeed green and digital transitions as the speaker kindly explained in the invitation. And this is all in our common efforts to prepare for and tackle the impacts of climate change. And as you can see the objective of the initiative is really to build a highly accurate digital model of the earth. And that digital model is supposed to support decision making and generate insights tailored to the level of expertise of users ranging from policy makers through scientists. All different experts at different levels and in different domains. And their specific interests and all the way to ultimately perhaps even citizens. In doing that we are building on European investments in high performance computing in our massive space and socioeconomic data resources and also in the European excellence and data and artificial intelligence technology. With unique digital modeling capabilities that we have in Europe. We are building as you can see on the slide. The initiative is well implemented and the digital twin of the earth is being built in collaboration with three strategic partners. Each having a clearly defined role and responsibilities and are the guidance and leadership of DG connect of the European Commission. So we are doing this with the European Space Agency, the ECMWF, which is the European Center for Medium Range weather forecasting and EU met south, which is the European organization that manages meteorological satellites. We are doing this initiative in phases. The implementation is spread out throughout the entire decade. Practically, we started at the beginning of 2024 and the first phase is due to finish by and by mid 20. We started the sorry at the end of 2021 and we are due to finish the first phase by mid 2024 and then gradually complete the initiative by 2030. When destination earth is supposed to provide a common support infrastructure enhancing our ability to monitor and model environmental changes predict extreme events and adapt to all sorts of climate change challenges. I will move to the next slide just to present the three key components, the open core service platform, the data lake and the digital twin engine with the first two digital twins, which are all funded from the digital Europe programme in fact, which is a funding programme of the European Commission. These three elements are being implemented in the first phase spanning the 30 months until 2024, as I already said, with 150 million for the first implementation period and with additional money coming from horizon Europe, which provides about 55 million in additional investments in related research and innovation activities. So just to explain a little bit the three technical components. So the core platform, which is developed by the European Space Agency, will be a user friendly secure cloud based digital modelling and simulation platform. It will use advanced high performance computing capacities for the modelling and simulation needs, as well as artificial intelligence capacities and data analytics. All this to allow users to customize the services on the platform, eventually integrate their own data and develop their own applications in the creation of the so called what if scenarios. Now the data lake, let me move to the, sorry, that was one too quick, the data lake that you can see here will federate diverse data sources. In fact, in the first phase we will start from data from the world leading Copernicus Earth observation system that some of you may be familiar with. The data coming from Copernicus will be complemented by other sources of not only terrestrial environmental data, but also socio economic data, which really distinguishes this initiative from all the others. Ultimately, towards the end of the decade and towards the end of the implementation period, we are aiming to also include such sources of data as data from the Internet of Things or even user generated data. But some of you may be may be aware of what challenges such integration would bring. Now, for the third element, the platform and the data lake will link to the digital twins and the digital twin engine and the digital twins as many of you I'm sure are familiar with our digital replicas of very complex interconnected natural and socio economic systems. At least in as far as digital twins of the earth are concerned. These digital twins are being developed under a thematic affiliation and the first two digital twins that are being implemented in the first phase are a digital twin of the extreme natural disaster and the digital twin for climate change adaptation. At later stages in the latest stages of development, we will also integrate other thematic digital twins such as the digital twin of the ocean, biodiversity or hydrology digital twin. These digital twins will not only give users passive access to high quality information to services models, the what if scenarios that I mentioned forecasts and visualizations, but they will also enable users to actively interact with the system. And just as the core platform that I had mentioned before the digital twins will use also the high performance computing resources for the modeling and simulation needs. So as you can see, with destination earth, we are really, we are really going beyond earth observation so we essentially beyond the services that the Copernicus system offers. We are going beyond not only because of the diverse data sources that will be included in phase two onwards, for example, the date of the socio economic data and the data from internet of things that I have that I have already mentioned but also because destination earth is really built as part of the so called green deal space that you may have heard of. And the overall data spaces constellation that the European Commission is putting in place that will be connected through a standardized set of specifications that also the commission will procure and therefore will really tremendous cross virtualization among various domains. For example, agricultural energy data mobility urban, the European Open Science Cloud, sorry, the European Open Science Cloud, et cetera. In addition, this digital twin philosophy is really different to what is currently being done. In essence, digital twins will scale up by a lot the existing models and the fusion of simulation with observation. The digital twins will fully integrate impact sector applications and create an interactive system where users can play with almost all components to create and test the what if scenarios that I have already mentioned which will be particularly important for policy makers at different levels. So the two and the three that I mentioned, so the full integration of impact sector applications and this creation of an interactive system do not exist yet. And the first one, which is the scaling up by a lot of existing models, we are intending to do that in just a few years when otherwise it would have taken more than 10 years. So what is really in destination earth you may ask yourself for the energy sector, and I'm happy to report that there is in fact a lot that will be available for different users at different levels with different interests in the energy sector overall. As I already said, destination earth is aiming to produce relevant and trusted knowledge on the future development of the earth systems, physical and socio economic systems, and that is particularly in the context of adaptation to climate change and the concrete decision support applications are almost countless. We can think of such applications as dimensioning and operating future electricity networks, or achieving more sustainability of cities in their specific energy supply needs, etc. In this respect, we already see emerging use cases for assessing and continuously mapping the potential for example of weather driven renewables. Here, the high resolution of destination earth digital twin models together with the flexibility to move very smoothly from global to national, regional and even local levels will make a real difference to end users, for example to green investors and local communities. We can imagine future use cases as well in partnerships with local communities in Europe via the European Union's, the European Commission's climate mission that some of you may be aware of as the energy sector is a very important part of that mission, or globally with such strong partners as arena one. Now an additional application area that that you can imagine could be modeling the evolution of an entire national energy system in terms of well balanced and sustainable generation transmission and distribution. An exciting development effort, for example in this area is currently ongoing in France and destination earth will undoubtedly accelerate such efforts. Many other potentially interesting application areas that will come out of destination earth once it's operational could cover mapping of methane emissions, for example, which is a key issue for climate change mitigation, including the mapping of emissions from pipeline infrastructure and incidentally not limited to current events in the Baltic Sea. Or mapping of nuclear non proliferation obligations, for example, with respect to facilities and material transfers. So, in summary, really, or in an intermediate summary, there are many, many possibilities to provide real added value to society by developing destination earth. By developing digital twins energy digital twins at destination earth scales, and really I presented only only some examples, and I move on to my last slide, almost with a word of caution, but not really, because as you imagine much effort is really necessary before we arrive at provision of such relevant and trusted such a specific knowledge that would be readily available for real end users. Including both thematic specialists and non experts, and such efforts in terms of necessary technical developments of tools so I'm talking here about it resources modeling and data, and the necessary conditions for proper application of these tools. Now, the European Commission, of course, is business owner of the destination earth initiative is well aware that success of our initiative is conditional on the large number of crucial factors that really go beyond excellent digital resources, excellent modeling and excellent data. And that is namely proper risk management of user expectations and guidance when and how to handle destination earth tools, and at which level of complexity that is going to happen. So responsible and trusted quantification for policy support needs needs many more dimensions than purely technical ones which I have mentioned and we are aware of this, and we are building the necessary framework together with other partners, a framework that goes beyond the technical excellence that I have mentioned here. And I really invite you for feedback from yourself and the interested stakeholders that you may know of who would be interested in such an initiative as ours and also for further collaboration by simply contacting us at European Commission. And with this, I thank you for your attention. There we go, and hopefully Grzina and Olivia will be joining us virtually for the Q&A now, hopefully they'll be coming up on the screen. And if Grzina provided a little bit of hope, Olivia, you terrified the room, I think, if anything, by the questions that are coming in. I might go on to you first, and it is one of our observations. China can be forward looking in supply chain due to its political system, but how can western, shorter term politics and perhaps less disciplined forms of politics compete with that? So given Russian and Chinese aggression, does the EU another question or ask need a coherent military alliance or is diplomacy enough to secure access to Minerals? Olivia. Thank you very much for the question. I'm going to keep on going with this one term which I think needs to be understood properly which is essentially systemic responses. The very first thing is to understand essentially that because the future of security in Ireland and the European Union, but also globally, is now multidimensional, we need to start integrating essentially new analytical systems into the way in which we look at security. Security doesn't necessarily entail going directly to militarization. Security, however, does start with what type of information do we need to look at in order to understand how insecurity may play out in the future. And that includes essentially sort of looking at all the steps of supply and value chains that are necessary to usher us into the net zero future and into a net zero future, which doesn't respond to climate change only to other ecological crises at the same time. We need to review essentially security systems within the EU and within each national member state with a wide systemic length, length, sorry. To a certain extent, there may be seven things starting in the European Union around this. If you look at one, the Repair EU directive, which came out a few months ago, this was the very first time that we started developing an international strategy outlook on how the transition should, what it should look like. And this is very important because we keep on saying in the European Union that we want some type of energy security slash strategic autonomy in the future. We have to understand that the European Union is one of those actors composed of different member states that essentially tend to outsource their energy system in various parts of the world. And the energy transition will not, you know, undercut this rule as well. Again, it essentially demands of us to look at international partnerships, bilateral as well as multilateral, and to try and sort of reconcile a number of different priorities that we need to deliver upon. One, being energy security, not just for us, but the partners that we work with. Two, climate adaptation. What does climate adaptation look like at different levels of warming? We still don't know. There is a lot of discussion, for example, about investments into infrastructure, into mobility systems, into energy systems. But the type of climate disruptions that we're talking about are so pervasive that we also need to look at various types of socio-economic resilience systems. That part is very much ignored at the moment when we start looking into what are the investments and financial flows that go into the climate adaptation agenda, which the European Union rallies behind. The discussion is still stuck at the level of financial volumes, not the granularity of how investment should be, what they should be invested into in terms of what is resilience for a climate-destructed future, a climate-destructed world, and how does it bring back this notion of how we learn together, how we invest together, how we adapt together. There needs to be investment short in infrastructure, but also in governance systems, in new types of development systems, in new types of humanitarian and disaster risk prevention and reduction systems. This is a very wide array, essentially, of policies that we need to be talking about, as well as budget investments and budget lining, as well as decision-making within Europe in terms of the multi-annual financial system. It requires also changing fundamentally some outlook in terms of flexibility, reactivity and responsiveness within the way that we do investments in Europe. This is both in terms of how we do diplomacy and, as I was saying, development, but also how we essentially start reacting and even questioning some fundamental assumptions from a public and private perspective about how investments should go about. At the moment, what I'm seeing, by still working in a lot of conflict and fragile zones, is that there is a lot of investment on the part of Chinese companies, let them be state-owned or private companies serving the interests of the Chinese Communist Party. I'm seeing a lot of Russian oligarchs investing into various types of techniques, tactics and strategies to gain access to assets, but I'm not seeing a lot of investments on the part of European companies or wider companies associated to the OECD space going into where do we secure the supply chains, both for active mining assets and for the prospective mining assets that we need to rely upon, and how do we make sure that we actually have a value proposition in terms of what are those private actors going to propose to local communities in terms of contributing to climate adaptation and to development rather than just serving market indicators and market signalling. What this actually goes back to is what the first presentation hinted at, which is that the market systems upon which we rely at the moment are simply inadequate. They are irrelevant for the net zero transition. We need to have a sense of how do we rethink public and private partnerships, including de-risking of investment, but asking very, very high standards of delivery in terms of contribution to development, climate adaptation and climate mitigation on the part of private actors, which tend to stand back from behind markets and not look at the wider issues that they're an active participant to. Just on that, Rosini, there must be a lot of interest from countries outside of the European Union in this new digital earth technology and the digital twins. Will it be, I know obviously the ownership lies with the EU, but will it be shared, the data lake and all of the various things be shared with countries outside of the European Union? How open will it be and have other countries show much interest? Many, many things for this question. Yes, indeed. So of course the European Commission will be, or the European Union as a whole will be the owner of the system, but in fact it is meant as a global tool. So users from anywhere in the world will have access. We will also federate data sources from outside Europe. Copernicus, obviously, earth observation data that are generated by Copernicus are global data, but we will also federate already in phase one data that are already available via EU MetSat sources, which are for example NASA generated data. There is going to be reciprocity in terms of data usage that will fuel destination earth. But not only that, we are actually, as we are really at the beginning of our implementation road, we are also at the beginning of our international outreach. So we have started discussions with our American counterparts, with our Canadian counterparts, with our Indian counterparts, we have heard and we have received interest from other parties. So we will also try to harmonise the way in which we develop digital twins, future digital twins, for example, to make sure that we can integrate them together. But as I said, most importantly, the tool as such, so destination earth as such, and the tools that it will offer experts or scientists or policy makers, it will be an open tool for use by anybody. And what about for citizens? Indeed as well. However, it will not all be open. The whole system will not be open for use to everyone, to all sorts of users immediately. So it will be an incremental development. Also, you can imagine the needs in terms of resources, for example, in terms of high performance computing resources that it needs, that are required to run such simulations and modelling, et cetera. So we will need to think also, and we are actually thinking already of a user access policy that will give a privileged access, for example, to policy makers to whom this tool is intentioned. In the first place. And then, you know, citizens may be given access, will be given access, commensurate with the resources that will be made available. And of course, the resources that we will have, and while we launch the first phase in mid 2024 will be different than when we reach, let's say, the final stage of development by 2030. So possibilities for use then will be much wider than they will be at the first phase. So as you see, it is incremental and the intention is to be as open as possible within the limits of possibilities. Olivia, and your descriptions of the Wagner-Mersenries and Central African Republic is something, scientific something out of a Clifai horror movie rather than what a saddler reality. And we're going to be discussing after our coffee break shortly about the just transition. But given that energy shifts often involve violence as there's a bid to secure those resources and often in countries where they're going to be most badly affected by climate change, how are we going to protect human rights and particularly those the most vulnerable in some of the territories that you visited and worked in? Again, it requires a sort of 360 degree view because the Wagner group or for that matter various operatives in very fragile or conflict affected countries use different tactics, right? One of the things, one of the patterns, some of the patterns that I noticed is the use of disinformation. It is very extensive in the Central African Republic, but I'm seeing it play out as well in Madagascar, in Mozambique, in Mali, in Burkina Faso. So having a view essentially of how to counter disinformation, which is partly some of the things that the European Union is already working on but has never sort of seen the link with access to certain assets. And essentially understanding how that relates having a really intelligent understanding of how and what disinformation is used for is really important. The second aspect is obviously that we need to invest into better understanding the patterns and metabolisms of corruption and predatory behaviors in each of the countries that we decide to invest in that we want to support on their pathway towards development, stabilisation and peace. The inconvenient truth in that is that there is an aspect which is related to national elites, but very often the national elites connect back to global financial systems, which also means that we need to look back into how Europe organises itself in terms of asset acquisition, fiscal evasion and that kind of thing. And some of the key aspects when we talk about global security is really looking at financial flows and how those financial flows today need to be harnessed for the purpose of transitioning towards an ecological transition which is indeed fair for all. And the third aspect is essentially trying to take part into conversations as much as possible indeed about the reform of international governance institutions. And this is a conversation which is currently sort of you know gelling in much more pragmatic ways as a result of the Ukraine invasion. Because obviously one of the security, one of the permanent members of the security council is still on the security council and breaking all international rules. But it's a much wider sort of reflection also in terms of how do we then rethink debt structuring for example? How do we rethink the Bretton Woods Institution? How do we rethink the way in which you know various types of financial sort of collective security mechanisms are put into place to try and serve the purpose of climate adaptation, but also make sure that climate adaptation is, especially in terms of financial volumes, is invested to good intent. Because we cannot invest in massive amounts of financial volumes into systems that are not serving the public good at national, regional and global levels. Because otherwise the bank will break, there will be more and more geopolitical fragmentation that will take place. And this is the last part. I think that we need to also recognize very truthfully that there is the transition and this competition towards certain key assets is taking place at a moment when history is being instrumentalized and rewritten. To try and sort of create more and more breaks from a geopolitical perspective. And there is a work of history, there is a work of reconciliation and there is a work essentially of political dialogue that needs to happen. This is happening to a certain extent between European delegations and national counterparts, but there needs to be a much wider engagement in terms of what the transition looks like in a way that is fair for all, but also accurate in terms of what the stakes are from a past perspective and from a future perspective. This is where the complexity comes in. I think to bring Dieter back into the room, the way we are going to change that is both urgently and business as usual will not do. On your behalf, please just give a warm thanks to Grzeina, Olivia and Dieter who have all given us plenty of food for thought as we move into our first coffee break. If you could be back here for 11.50, we would appreciate that. Thank you.