 Welcome to Engineering for Change or E4C for short. Today, we're pleased to bring you a new installment of E4C's Development Engineering Career Insights, focusing on sustainable infrastructure as a driver to achieve the 2030 agenda. My name is Mariela Machado and I'm Program Manager here at Engineering for Change. I'll be the moderator for today's webinar. The webinar you're participating in today will be archived in our webinar's page and our YouTube channel. Both of those URLs are listed on this slide. Information on upcoming webinars is available on our webinar's page. E4C members will receive invitations to upcoming webinars directly. If you have any questions, comments, and recommendations for future topics and speakers, please contact the E4C webinar series team at webinarsatengineerforchange.org. If you're following us on Twitter today, please join the conversation with our hashtag E4C webinars. 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So be sure to sign up. For more, please visit our website, engineeringforchange.org, to learn more, and sign up. A few housekeeping items before we get started. Let's practice using the WebEx platform by telling us where you are in the world. In the chat window, which is located at the bottom right of your screen, please type your location. Let's do that right now as a practice. Tell us where you're joining us from. Columbus, Sri Lanka, welcome. Where else are you joining us from? Just use the chat in the bubble below on your screen to tell us where you're joining us from. New Delhi, welcome Singapore. Colorado, I'm seeing. Thank you, everyone. Welcome to this webinar. So you can use this window to share remarks during the webinar. And if you have any technical questions, just send us a private chat to engineerforchangeadmin. And if you're having any trouble connecting to during the webinar, please use the Q&A window located below the chat to type in your questions for the presenter. If you don't see it, click the Q&A icon at the bottom of the screen in the middle of the slides. If you're listening to the audio broadcast and you encounter any trouble at any point, try hitting stop and then start. You may also want to try opening WebEx in a different browser. E4C webinars qualify engineers for one professional development hour. To request your PDH, please follow the instructions on the top of E4C professional development page after the presentation. I would like to take a moment now to tell you a bit about our presenter. Christina Contreras is a research associate at SOFNAS Program for Sustainable Infrastructure at Harvard University. Her research focuses on promoting sustainable practices and infrastructure projects on a global scale and examining the challenges and opportunities that sustainability can provide to countries and companies. During the last six years at Harvard, she has worked in research projects ranging from the coordination and supervision of the infrastructure 360 degrees awards to identification of the economic implications of sustainability practice in infrastructure projects. As part of the infrastructure 360 awards team and initiative sponsored by the Inter-American Development Bank, Christina has worked in quantifying infrastructure sustainability in more than 40 projects, water and sanitation, transportation and energy in 12 countries. She also works as an independent consultant for international financial institutions to help define a common framework to sustainability infrastructures. Before working with Harvard, Ms. Contreras served as technical architect practitioner in the construction of large-scale projects with the Spanish Construction Company and as a freelance quantity server. Without further to say, and Christina, I hope I made you, I said everything right here. I want to welcome and thank you for joining us, everyone. Over to you, Christina. Thank you so much, Mariela. You said it perfectly. So I would have the chance to add a little bit more information as we go through the presentation. Okay, so let's dive right in. So here I would like to cover today, as Mariela mentioned, I have been working for the last seven years doing research on the topic of sustainable infrastructure. And as a result of that, I would like to cover also some information about the similarities and differences and the alignment between sustainable infrastructure and how through infrastructure we can also achieve the 2030 agenda. So before we proceed, I would like to get a better understanding in how many of you from the people that are participating today on the webinar have actually used these, have, I don't know, you are a student, have looked into them or some of your clients, you are a practitioner, have requested you to look into them when you are developing infrastructure projects. And as I know that you are already familiar with the chat, you can add your experiences or even just say, I have done or not. Let's take like maybe 30 seconds for people to answer. And Mariela, I will be very grateful you can help me with the answers in case I don't see them. Okay, so I'm going to say not yet, I still haven't. I have used, okay, it's good to know some people have experience, so maybe at the end some people with experience can also share it with the group. I have done it, it was recycling and plastic, waste recycling. Okay, yes. Okay, so it seems like half and half. That's good to know. That gave me some idea of what people know or what people want to get out of this webinar. Okay, so in the past experience as I mentioned, so for the last couple of years we have been internally in our research program, the similarities between the work that we have done and how this can apply to the new 2030 agenda. And this has given us the opportunity to be seated at the table of some of these meetings that have occurred in the last couple of years, like the interagency group of the SDG that was placed in Ottawa last year, the high-level political forum for the last couple of years, in which I had the opportunity to present last year in a panel that was explaining how academia can help with also gathered knowledge towards this agenda. So still not many people know how to approach this. I have shared just a couple of examples of the work that we are starting doing, but there is way more to be done. And the presentation today I would like to frame it in four main ideas. First, I would like to discuss what is driving the demand of infrastructure. We know that globally the infrastructure is increasing. The need of infrastructure is increasing. We know that the investment going towards infrastructure is still not enough to satisfy that demand. We're going to talk a little bit what we are regarding the 2030 agenda. If we are in the right track or not, or how to integrate sustainable development goals into practice in the work that all of us do on a regular basis. So it will start with the first idea, what is driving the need of infrastructure globally? And there are many different factors. I would like to highlight just some of the main ones. If we look at the increased demographic growth, we know and probably all of us have listened that the world is exploding regarding population. Right now we have 3.7 billion people in the planet, but in 2050 we are expecting to have 9.7 billion and in 2100 we expect to have 11.2 billion people if we continue in the same track. So as more people live in our planet, we will certainly need more infrastructure to satisfy the demand. On the other side, it's not just about how many people actually exist in the planet, that is where are these people located. And we know that urbanization patterns are also changing. More people than ever are moving from rural areas to urban areas and this might be for different reasons. This might be because they are looking for better opportunities. It might be because they are displaced for climate change. It might be maybe they are fleeing their country because of war and violence. So regardless of the reason, we know that these patterns are changing and therefore we need to plan for more infrastructure in the places where these people are arriving. It might also be a strategy to mitigate climate change. At this point, it is well understood that, for example, green infrastructure solutions are a good way to reduce the risk of flooding and I have listed here just four of these solutions. Green roofs, street planters, water hazards seen, permeable surfaces, but there might be many others that are going to help us reduce runoff, for example, in urban environments. We know that buffer areas are also very effective specifically in coastal cities or we are just trying to develop new technologies that are going to help us create energy in a lower carbon environment that is where we are going at the moment. It might also be that we need to respond to new needs. We know that we live in a world that is scarce in resources. We know that the land is also not very available, especially in certain areas, certainly in Manhattan, certainly in many urban areas where we are expecting all these people moving in. And it might be that the requirements or the regulations are also changing, therefore we need to plan and build infrastructure that respond to those changes. Here on the right side of the slide we see a couple of images and this is from a design competition from an architect in Italy. I'm not sure if it's very clear, but you see that that is a bridge. It's a bridge that connects two sides of a hill, of a valley as you will see there, and it's a very tall bridge. So why are we wasting all this space underneath? We need to do something that is going to help us increase the efficiency of that infrastructure project. In that case, those are wind turbines. So the proposal was like, okay, we need to build all these big pillars that are going to hold the road. Can we use that same structure to include wind turbines? Or maybe why not we can add a solar pavement that is going to generate energy as cars go by, or maybe green spaces are going to help us capture the emissions of those cars. So as we move in and we are, as I mentioned before, in a really scarce world, we need to create solutions thinking in how we build those synergies and how those synergies are going to really help us increase the efficiency of the projects that we develop. If we move, okay, we already know that infrastructure demand is increasing, but when we look at the infrastructure gap, it's like are we actually building projects that have satisfied the demand, or where are we at the moment? So we know that right now we have $2.5 trillion investment worldwide in infrastructure. According to the last report published by McKinsey, they indicated that the need for infrastructure is $3.3 trillion. So we are moving, we have a huge gap. And not just that, 60% of all the infrastructure need is going to be in emerging economies. So we need to make sure not just that they have the money that is required for them or for all of us to build the infrastructure that we need, but also that we have the capacity, we have the knowledge, we have the governance structure in place that are going to make that possible. So that gap that I just highlighted is around an 11% of under-investment every year, which equals to $350 billion a year. And this is just talking about, okay, what is the infrastructure that we need following the business-as-usual scenario? We are not talking here about making it more sustainable or including more sophisticated technologies that can solve some problems like reduced greenhouse gas emissions. At the moment it's just the infrastructure gap that we have. But if we add, for example, the additional investment that it would be required to achieve the U.N. sustainable development goals, that gap triples. So we need to be very aware of how we are feeding the gap of what are the kind of projects that we are building when we say that we are or we are not achieving that target. Okay, so as I mentioned, we need more infrastructure. The gap for financing infrastructure is increasing. And it's expected to increase in the coming years if we follow the same path that we are right now. But then we add this extra layer of sustainable development. And I would like to cover very briefly where we are at the moment. Probably all of you now, they are very familiar or they have here about the 2030 agenda. And that's precisely why you are in this webinar because probably you want to learn a little bit more about it. It has been defined as an agenda of unprecedented scope and significance. And it has been framed around five main pillars. This agenda takes into consideration the people. It takes into consideration the planet. And all of these do it in a prosper, like taking into consideration prosperity and peace and certainly including partnership. This agenda has gone through a process of consultation that has never seen before in the United Nations. They are like a bigger group of stakeholders involved in defining these indicators more than ever. So it's really important that we, that last P&E partnership, not just to build the agenda, but also in the interconnections that we are going to observe between the different indicators that are part of this agenda. So we were reminded in 2015 by the Secretary General of the United Nations, Ban Ki-moon, that we are the first generation that can end poverty and we are the last generation that can end climate change. So we have a huge, huge challenge ahead of us. And now the answer is like, okay, we take the challenge. How are we doing? And this is the first slide that I use for the presentation in the front page. And I would like to go back to it because I think that it's extremely relevant. I don't think we can deliver on the 2030 agenda. We don't consider that we need the infrastructure that is going to help us deliver those services. And here we'll see that sustainable infrastructure is at the center and there are three main groups with the different sustainable development goals have been grouped. I will go in each of those three groups in detail. The first one, makes its services. We cannot have good health or well-being. We cannot have education or we cannot have sanitation if we don't have hospitals or we don't have schools or we don't have water treatment facilities. So infrastructure is very much the enabler of all of these services, of all of these targets to be accomplished. If we move for basic services to the next one to growth, it's very much the same thing. Some of these targets are going to be more or less related to infrastructure, but certainly they're going to be a piece of it that cannot be accomplished if we don't have the right infrastructure in place to make that happen. In this case, support inclusive growth. We have, for example, the AGG-9 that talks precisely about this, industry, innovation, and infrastructure. We have targets related to economic growth that certainly infrastructure allows or how to reduce inequalities. And in this last packet, environmental sustainability, we have elements as climate change or climate action that we have already talked very briefly. We have elements like sustainable cities and communities that are at the core of the work that we do here at Harvard in the School of Design that is pretty much the School of Architecture. So on and on, many of the things that we have discussed in are connected. So I was interested, for the last couple of months, I have been looking at information, saying, like, okay, we know that if sustainable development is connected to infrastructure, what is the engineering community doing to be able to help on this? And this is a publication from last year in which they did a survey and they published this report in which, in this specific magazine, they say, engineers are apathetic about sustainability goals. It really got me very interested. So I was like, okay, I want to learn more about this. And this is from that specific report. Apathy and the lack of knowledge of the UN Sustainable Development Goals are holding engineers back from working towards them. And then it was a wait a second. So we are saying that we, for the first time, can finish poverty. And we, for the last time, can really study climate change before it's too late. But the sense of the engineering community hasn't filled this sense of urgency left. And when they were asking the people that took the survey, the engineers that took the survey, why you think that that's the case, these are most of the most, these are the common responses. Lack of awareness of the SDGs, heavy focus on financial gains, lack of willingness from the clients that they work for, lack of interest, apathy, or inertia. And probably this sounds very familiar to you because unfortunately it sounds very familiar to me as well. Having worked in the field of sustainability for so long, this is very much the answers that you get every single day why people don't build more sustainable projects. And I would like to add here that probably as you already know, infrastructure projects require a lot of inertia. We know that it might take up to two, three, four, worst-case scenario, 10 or 20 years to design, to procure, to build, or to operate a project. So if we don't start changing the project that we're doing right now, it's very likely that in 10 years down the road we will be building the same project that we were building 20 years ago. So I would like to ask you another question. Some people in the previous question, they say like, yeah, they have been working, no, they are interested, but not yet. So have you ever been asked professionally in your professional practice to integrate the ACGs? Have your clients, except in being interested about how this might impact your business? And same thing that we did before, you can add on the chat, nope, nope, more people say no, no, no. Okay, so I guess that it should be on reverse. It should be us taking a more proactive role and say like, I think that we should maybe start considering this. Okay, let me see, yes, because I work on the development and humanitarian sector. Thank you so much, Asanga. That's good news. The only reason clients do this is to satisfy regulation and requirements. I mean, that is fair. If they are doing it at the end of the day, that might mean that the regulations need to change and that is not fast enough in many countries, unfortunately. I work on infrastructure projects before ACGs were announced. Yes, in India, okay. So we will have a chance to discuss a little bit about this by the end of the webinar. And I guess that this is good news. And knowing that the engineering community is not doing enough in this regard, the World Federation of Engineering Organizations last October, they hosted this Global Engineering Congress that it was three days talking about how we can develop a plan to achieve the ACGs through engineering. So all of us, regardless of our discipline, we have a role to play here. Okay. Sorry. Here we get to the more, I would say, practical part of this presentation. And these are just some ideas that I have seen in the last month that I thought that it could be useful for you. Okay. The first idea, when trying to approach the 2030 agenda, it would be to identify what we already know. More people think, like, okay, ACGs, I don't know what it means. I don't want to touch it. This is going to be a ton of work for me. I don't know very well. But I think that is really important. We look at the content of the agenda, and we talk about, like, water and sanitation, and we talk about education, and we talk about poverty. This is nothing new. We have been talking about this for decades, unfortunately. It's not solved yet, but we need to keep working at it. That image that you see there that is an open door, it very much represents a quote that I learned several months ago in an entrepreneurial conference that I attended here in Boston. They say, you need to walk people through the path of the known for them to be willing to open the door to the unknown. So we need to be able to establish those connections between, like, maybe corporate social responsibility practices that many companies have in place already and try to identify what are the pieces that are still missing to try to connect with this new agenda. And precisely for this reason, I would like to introduce some of the work that our program, our research lab, the softness program for sustainable infrastructure. You have the name there. We have been doing for the last decade very much. The mission of our program is to develop and to promote methods that are going to help us create tools to, first, get to understand, and second, get to quantify what is a sustainable infrastructure. As a research institution, we don't build projects. We don't invest on projects. The only thing we can do is to create the knowledge and to spread that knowledge to the people that actually invest and build those infrastructure projects. And that is the reason why, for the last decade, we have engaged very closely with private industry, with financiers, with development banks, with nonprofits to ask them what exactly what you need and how we can help you. And all the logos, probably you are familiar with, many of them are some of the companies that are currently in our sustainable infrastructure advisory board. So, during the last decade, we have developed two main tools. The first one is on the left. And it's called Envisioned Meeting System. It's focused in infrastructure projects, in a single project, let's say. It can be like a bridge. It can be like a port. It can be an airport. It can be a whatever you want. Any kind of sustainable infrastructure project, but just a single project. And this toolkit or this tool that we have created can apply to planning, to design, to construction phase of the project. One, and just to add to that, now this is used very much as a standard in the U.S. and it has been used in many other countries around the world, around like 15 countries around the world. Once that was published, that is 2012, then we kept thinking, like, okay, it's fine to go one project at a time, but when we look at urban environments, that is not a reality. That is not how it happened. When we build a city, we need to integrate the water system with the sewer, with the transportation system, and all of these are interrelated. So, the next tool that we developed that is on the right in red is called the Softness Planning Guidelines, and it has a focus on urban sustainability. And we have identified the synergies between all those systems because if we have a very efficient transportation system, but we don't have a very efficient energy system, or it's still produced by fossil fuels, it's very hard to have a sustainable city, for example. So here is how both of them look like. The first line, it would be the different systems that we have identified at the urban level, like landscape, transportation, water, energy, solid waste, information, and food. Those are the different systems that we analyze the interconnection among each other. And the second line is Envision Rating System, which I'm going to talk a little bit more about. Those are the five main categories that we look at when we analyze how sustainable a given project is. So we have the tools and we have the goals, how we establish these connections. So we don't need to start from scratch anytime that we want to see to look at a project through the EDG lenses. So very briefly about Envision Rating System, which is at the core of our program and the research that we use. We look at quality of life, how a given infrastructure project is affecting the well-being, is affecting the community where the project is located, is affecting the livelihood of the people living there, the productivity, the economics of the area. We look at leadership and leadership encompasses how well has this project been planned? Is economics taken into consideration? How are the stakeholder groups engaged? Do they have a voice? Do they also have the opportunity to provide comments to the project? The third element of this rating system will be resource allocation. Because if we don't use the limited resources in a very efficient way, it's very unlikely that the project is going to be sustainable at the end. So we look at materials, we look at energy, we look at water. The fourth pillar of this methodology look at national and natural world and what are the environmental impacts that the project might be creating on the area. On the location, on the ecology, on the flora and the fauna and many other things. And the last one is climate and resilience. Looking at two main elements, emissions and resilience. And now we take this model that we have been using very much for the last eight years and we kind of bring the new agenda in place. We see that many of these things already sound familiar. So again, if we look at resource allocation, we have an ECG specifically in water. We have an ECG specifically in energy and we have one specifically in consumption and production. And how to do it in a more sustainable manner. So this is just a reflection of one of the strategies in how to include the agenda, the 2030 agenda in a more efficient way by identifying what we already know. From that, we move to the second point that is challenge or assumptions. Many people when we talk about 2030 agenda, they are like, oh, I get it. I know what it's this about. I have worked with something like this or I don't need to read in detail and that's a very dangerous thing because if you assume what you don't know, it might happen that you never find out. And from here, I would like just to give you two examples of how we can challenge our assumptions. Here, as you see in the left corner, the top left corner, we have like ECG-5, gender equality, and we have the ECG-9, the one that is industry innovation and infrastructure. Most people don't think about gender equality when we talk about infrastructure. In this case, this specific picture is from Burkina Faso. In Burkina Faso, for example, when a guy and a woman are dating and their relationship is going well, it's very likely that the man will buy a bike for the woman and give it as a gift. If we don't think it is cultural elements and we are planning the transportation system, it's very likely that we will leave some people behind or that we will not integrate or we will not foster gender equality in the transportation system in that specific city. So it's extremely important that you look, not just on the indicators that you think that apply to your project, just by the typology, but it's more important that you look at the goals that don't necessarily look specifically at the project that you believe are related to gender equality. Other ways to challenge your assumptions, people will tell you, oh, yeah, the 2030 agenda, that applies to developing economies, right? And that's totally incorrect. This is a picture of New York City, and on the left side, you have the last estimates in poverty in New York City. We see that they are declining, but still 43% of the people live near poverty line and almost 20% of the people live in poverty in New York City. And certainly, I'm not trying to suggest that poverty in New York City is similar, that poverty in any city in Congo or in Burkina Faso or in many other countries. But according to the agenda, this is precisely what it says. It's applicable to all countries, and we need to take into consideration the realities and the capacities of the different locations. Therefore, the capacity of New York City certainly is very different to the capacity of a township in Burkina Faso. The third one is avoid SDG washing, and I don't know that you have here this term. Probably you have here the term greenwashing, but we are trying to make something that is not sustainable to make it seem sustainable. So we take the paint and we paint it green, and we say, okay, now it's sustainable. So we are seeing that the same thing is happening with the SDG. So you will go to many companies, and on their website they have the different logos or the different goals just because they are nice and they want to send the message that they are aligned with these goals, although they are working towards them. So not necessarily. We need to make sure that we are relevant. We need to make sure that anytime that we are saying, like, our project has considered the gender equality that's true, and we have evaluated the different alternatives that are going to allow us to make that true, to integrate gender equality into their project. So here are just a couple of articles that I have found, but there are many, many of them already talking about this. And there is a quote on the bottom of the slide saying, the SDGs are too important to be watered down for marketing claims. And I would like to just remind you this in case you have seen this. So probably you can pick up and say, like, okay, I don't think that this is appropriate, or if you attempted to do this, to say, like, okay, let's put the logos of the SDG regardless if we have invested the time. So we keep them relevant. The four ideas that I would like to share with you in order to how to integrate the 2030 agenda into our daily lives very much, system thinking. And we already talked about this specific project, and I have taken the same picture, and I added the images of the different SDGs that might potentially apply, even though, as I said before, we will need to look in detail on this, but it could potentially apply at saving water. It would potentially apply or saving energy, or even creating energy to climate risks to cities, to better infrastructure, to more innovative infrastructure. So I think that the world is becoming such a complex system that it's not a solution to a problem anymore. We need to make sure that we can find a problem or a solution that can very much solve several problems. And this is key, and this is very much related to the last P that I mentioned, partnership. We need to make sure that we put ourselves in other people's shoes, and that we understand where are they coming from, we understand who they are reporting to, and we understand why they are seated at the table. Because traditionally, and this is unfortunate, as an engineer, as we have been told, you are the ones, the problem solvers. If it's an engineering solution, you will find what it needs to be done, but this is not true anymore. We need engineers as well as we need lawyers, as well as we need social scientists, and many other people that we can come together and really exercise that last P, that partnership piece of the agenda that is extremely important to deliver in a very successful manner. So to conclude, I would just like to wrap up by stressing a couple of ideas, and I would like to have around 15 minutes for questions. So keep in mind that the infrastructure demand is increasing. We need to be very critical in getting to understand why this is happening, and also we need to really start thinking, so we really need to build more roads. If the answer is yes, the next question would be how those roads are going to be built, but maybe instead of building roads, we might need to build something else that is more sustainable, or we might need to use the roads that we already assist, or we might need to limit the amount of cars that people can drive. So we need to understand the infrastructure gap and to know why it's increasing and to know where the drivers are preventing more money to be invested into very much delivering those infrastructures. When thinking about the agenda, it's important to understand where are we? We are starting having the discussion, but as I said before, infrastructure projects require a lot of energy. We need to start today, and maybe even if we start today we will see results in five years from now. If we want to start, very likely that it's not going to happen. And the last piece of this puzzle, I present you with five different strategies that can help us deliver in the 2030 agenda. First, identify what we already know. Second, avoid greenwashing. Third, challenge your assumptions. Fourth, system thinking. And the last one, to think, to put yourself in other people's shoes. So we understand the whole picture and where everyone is coming from. And from here this is my contact info in case you want to send me an email or any question after this webinar or even for people that are going to watch the webinar afterwards and they didn't have the chance to connect today. So the floor is open for questions. Thank you so much. Thank you so much, Christina. That was wonderful. I really enjoyed this presentation and I'm sure the attendees did as well. We have so many questions, but I will try to make a few of them, the ones that I think were more relevant and hopefully we'll have time to cover some of them. So the first question is from Mac Lander. He is following up on your conclusion to put yourself in other people's shoes and this is the client side. The next question is, how would we overcome client resistance? Well, that's a formula, but I don't think it has been invented yet. I think that there is a business case for more sustainable projects. I think that clients need to understand that now reputation is a really important thing that is really hard to quantify specifically in economic terms, but it's something real. There's more people than ever, like young generations, that they are willing to go and work for companies that are more sustainability cautious. They are like investors that now they are saying, like, okay, we don't want to be involved with certain business. So we want to make sure that we are putting the money in projects that are more sustainable, not just because they believe on the cost, to say, like, we need to save the world, but also because we are proving that the risks of these projects in many cases is lower because you have a bridge and you haven't done a thorough assessment of what is going to happen, how the weather patterns are going to look like in the next 40 years. The chances that that bridge, that road, or anything, any project is going to be wiped out by a storm or by any other climate event are much higher, that you have spent a good amount of time understanding what are the risks. So I think that it's a real case for sustainability, a business case for sustainability that can be very appealing for clients. Great, that's a great question. With the next one, we have, how does the Envision Ration System differ from other green building rating systems such as LEED, L-E-E-D? Mm-hmm. So we tend to say that LEED, well, even though LEED now had been expanding, not just to buildings, that is what traditionally they had been focused on, not just in the neighborhood and some other different urban elements. But traditionally what we will say is that if we take a city and we remove all the buildings that can be certified under LEED, whatever it remains is infrastructure. And infrastructure, look at parks, look at transportation systems, look at information, look at many other elements that traditionally have not been evaluated by LEED. So I will say that they are complementary. Okay. The next question, and this is, I think, a tough one, Kristina. I think they're asking tough questions. Do you think the politicization of the 2030 Agenda is a problem or does it actually help in achieving these goals? Kristina, are you there? Can you hear me? Yes, now we can. We lost you for a second there. Yeah, I touched it. Okay. Do you hear the question though? Yeah, I would like a bit of clarification of what politicization of the 2030 Agenda means. But if we talk about the US specifically, and they have the heavy politicization of the term climate change, that certainly affects the way in which we approach things. And it's not that we are going to change what we believe is the right thing. But in many cases, we need to change the terminology that we use. And if that's going to help us to get this through, it's okay. So many people say, like, okay, it's not about sustainable cities that are smart cities. In smart cities, we include many of these elements that we just talked to. To me, it's okay. So if there is a follow-up question to that, that would be okay. I'm happy to answer. Okay, I think that's for Ibeen. So Ibeen, if you want to follow up on that question and we have a couple of minutes, then she will be happy to answer and I will be happy to ask her. So the next question is, what are the new technologies used in the construction industry to produce sustainable infrastructure? Well, sustainable infrastructure is not necessarily about just material. That is also looking at the context. That that's something that is a little bit more complicated. But even if we use the more sophisticated materials and we are saving water or we are saving energy, we also need to look at what is the environmental footprint that we are having? What is the social footprint that we are having? What are we creating opportunities in the long-term for the people that we are affecting? Because something that is a core element of sustainability is to have a long-term view. Traditionally, when we do a project, we can be wearing different hats. We can be the designer, the constructor, the operator, whoever we are. But usually we look at our face and we look at our contract and what is included in our contract and sometimes it's hard for us to have a long-term view. But it's key because even if we design a very sustainable project, then all of a sudden, once the construction is finished, nobody checks again what's the water consumption or the energy consumption or in the social programs that we had in place when the project was built, nobody follows up anymore. There is no such a thing as short-term sustainability projects. It's either sustainable on the long-term or it's not sustainable at all. So I don't think that there is a single technology that can guarantee how sustainable but is to have a much broader view of the whole life cycle of the project. Got it. And following up on that, one person here, Sanga, has mentioned that he visited the UN city in Copenhagen and he thought it was a good example of sustainable building. Do you think that's the case? Well, actually, I was living in Copenhagen for some time. So I know a little bit of the reality of Denmark. I think that buildings are just a piece of the puzzle. I think that buildings are heavy consumers of electricity. But when we talk about the agenda and when we talk about infrastructure, we need to also look at everything. I don't know specifically that building, but I'm sure that it would be like a good example of green buildings. So I would like to, all of you, think a little bit more beyond one project or beyond what that policy of project is to how we understand interconnections between multiple projects in different realities, which is extremely challenging. That's a great insight. And it's true. Sometimes we think that sustainable infrastructure is buildings, but it's larger than that. So that's a great insight. We have another question here. How can we apply the SDGs to all pre-existing infrastructure projects in addition to retrofitting solutions? Do you mind to repeat the question, sorry? Yeah, how can we apply the SDGs to the old pre-existing infrastructure projects? In addition to retrofitting solutions? Yeah, I think that that's actually, especially in developed countries, that's precisely what we should be doing. There is nothing more sustainable that takes something that already exists and tries to fix it. So we take away the new one that is going to have a much higher footprint than the one we already have. So I think that any of these elements might be applied, and it's not that we need to check all the boxes, right? It's not that we need to go one-by-one, okay, reduction poverty check, water check, it's like, there might be some goals that apply directly to our project, and there might be another goal that might not apply directly, but indirectly as the one gender equality that I mentioned, and might be some others that don't apply. And I think that when we are talking about how to upgrade a project, in many cases we are constrained by the reality of what we have. And usually those projects are more sustainable because they save materials, they save energy. It doesn't have a huge impact on the communities or on the environment because that areas have already been impacted. So that's a positive thing, but we cannot in some cases change things radically to have a bigger impact. So I think that realistically, yeah, they can affect, but I don't think we need to go pretty and say, okay, I need to check all the boxes. Got it, okay. We had a clarification for the politicization of the 2030 agenda, and he says that should politicians use the word climate change for the political gains? So I guess what he says is that the politicization of the 2030 agenda is the politicians trying to use this for the political, you know, agendas as well. Do you think that will be helpful in achieving all these goals in infrastructure? I think that we need to call things for their name. Yeah, I think that it's like climate change is a real thing. And I don't know if many people are using climate change to advance on their agenda. I think that in many cases it's the opposite. They avoid the same climate change at least in the US. But I think that this is real and that it's not a lot of line to lose anymore to say to discuss if it's real or if it's not real or who's responsible for it because we are seeing that the consequences are here already. So I know that it's happening. Some people might be using it for maybe political gain or to throw it at the other party to say that you said this, you said that. I think that we should move on past that. And if we think about engineers I think that we also have a responsibility in this problem. Great, Christine. I think we have reached the time limit and I think that's a great thought to finish the webinar. I think we as engineers have a role to play in improving and achieving the SDGs or trying to get there and doing our part. So thank you so much everyone for attending the webinar. Thank you, Christina. This was great. This webinar will be located in our webinars page. It's recorded in case you miss parts or you want to share. Thank you everyone. Thank you, Christina. Thank you, Mariela. And thanks to Engineering for Change for the invitation. Thank you. Bye.