 What does sustainable development mean in this context? It means three things, promoting economic improvement, including ending poverty. It means social justice, and it means environmental sustainability. So that's the agenda, that when we manage the economy, whether from government, or business, or civil society, universities, professional experts, we're aiming for an economy that is prosperous, that is fair, and that is environmentally sustainable. This is the agenda that Pope Francis calls on us to achieve in Lodato Si, his great encyclical, where he notes that we need a holistic framework if we are to honor human dignity and if we are to protect creation. And indeed in Lodato Si, Pope Francis says we need a common plan for our common home. And he said this to world leaders in September 2015, the moments before they adopted the sustainable development goals as our common framework. Now when you look at the sustainable development goals, especially looking at them as water experts, of course you're led first to sustainable development goal number six, which says as a goal for the world that every person in this world should have access to safe water and sanitation. That is a basic human right agreed by the United Nations, and it is SDG6. And when you look at the targets for SDG number six, they call for safe drinking water and sanitation and hygiene for every person on the planet. They call for a high level of water quality, for waste treatment and for recycling of water. They call for efficiency in water use. They call for integrated water management. And they call for protecting our ecosystems, including the hydrologic cycle, including the aquifers that we depend on for growing food and for our water use. You know better than I. This is a massive, practical, compelling challenge. We can't live more than a couple of days without water. And as the world's leading water specialist, it is your challenge, not by yourselves, but as leaders to get safe water to 7.5 billion people every day. Not once in a while, not next year, not when the drought is over, not when the storms are over, but every day for seven and a half billion people. I don't envy you, the professional challenge. It's not something that can wait. It's every day. But one could say something even more. If you look at every one of the 17 sustainable development goals, they cannot be met unless the water challenge is met. We can't overcome poverty unless people have access reliably to safe water and sanitation. We certainly cannot overcome hunger, SDG number two, unless the water challenge is met. We cannot grow enough food on the planet unless there is accessible water for growing the crops to keep us alive. We certainly cannot meet SDG number three on health unless the challenge of waterborne disease is met every day, day in and day out. Because how many millions die every year? More than a million, certainly by some estimates, two to three million every year because of waterborne disease. And this is SDG three, a fundamental challenge. I can go through every one of the 17 sustainable development goals. Even SDG 16 on peaceful societies, we know that when the rains fail, when the droughts come the chances of war are definitely increased. It's shocking how close we always are to war. This is something wrong with our mentality, of course. But we know that water crisis can trigger conflict and does. SDG 16, SDG 17 on global cooperation, every major watershed in the world, every major river in the world or virtually everyone passes through national boundaries. We draw lines on a map, but the water does not. The hydrologic cycle does not. And so we need cooperation in watersheds and riversheds if we're to succeed. SDG 17 is about these global partnerships. Well you know all of this and you also know the main point that the challenge is getting harder in many ways. The water stress, the depletion of aquifers, the crises of climate change are making all of this challenge even harder than in the past. All over the world, virtually now as a daily occurrence, we are seeing challenges of water in security, water stress, and growing crises. Some of them not really recognized locally, but as water experts you know it, because the water cables are falling, the aquifers are being depleted, and there are not evident plans in many places for how to handle this. Even look at the crisis we're facing in the United States and Puerto Rico right now. Trying to overcome the hurricane itself probably made much worse by the global warming and hardly succeeding in getting safe water to the public after this storm. But this is the kind of extreme event that's occurring with more and more frequency. The pressures that are being put on the water are coming from many directions. You know them better than I. Population growth, now 7.5 billion. It will be 8 billion by 2022 or 2023. Of course, the pervasive effects of climate change on the water supply, the intensification of the hydrologic cycle, of the convective cycle, more droughts, more floods, more extreme precipitation, more evapotranspiration because of warming, more dry places becoming desperately dry, more wet places experiencing more frequent floods. This is just to make your life a little more challenging in managing water. But this is now pervasive reality. reuse changes, deforestation, loss of soil, compacting the land surface so the infiltration of water to recharge aquifers goes down. I didn't realize it until I read it last week how the first Gulf War in 1990-91 and then the second Gulf War, both of them disasters. By having so many tanks running over the land surface, changed the hydrologic cycle, changed the land runoff, caused massive drying of river surfaces and natural wetland areas until today are causing a profound crisis of dust storms and sand storms and a loss of access to surface waters. And of course, chemical pollutants, whether it's the 100 million tons of nitrogen and phosphorus fertilizers that are put on the soils and that aerosolize or get into the water stream, volatilize and create pollution downwind and downstream, or the pesticides or other chemicals, for instance, when Houston was flooded by Hurricane Harvey, how much poison was put into the waters because that's a petrochemical industry site. And now the water supplies are poisoned. How many children will develop terrible illnesses as a result? We won't even know it unless careful studies are done, but we can be sure that this is one of the consequences. And as Bishop Sanchez Cerondo said when we looked last week in a meeting at the Pontifical Academy of Sciences, how many diseases, how many premature deaths are coming from all of the pollutants in the water supply and in the air. And in the United States, you know very well, we're a rich country, supposedly, but we're pretty nasty also, unfortunately, nasty to poor people, nasty to minorities. And so all of a sudden we're discovering, in quotation marks, lead in the water supply dangerous water in cities all over the country because rich people don't want to pay taxes. I don't know what they think. They think they don't live on the same planet we do because their children are affected the same way, but our infrastructure is falling apart because they want tax cuts rather than investing in the common good, all of this leading to water crises. So I am not going to give you the solution, you're going to give me the solution. My job as special advisor to the Secretary General of the United Nations is to listen to the International Water Association, to the experts. But I do want to ask you this. We don't want a solution to water on average in the world. We need a solution for water every place in the world. And every day in the world, the tolerance limits are very, very, very narrow because water is life on a daily basis. Water is life on a crop season basis. It's no good to say we had a good rainfall this season except for that 10-day drought that killed all the crops. We need water security everywhere, and you leading engineers have to tell us what is needed to achieve that and what kinds of systems can deliver that and what kinds of technologies can be developed to promote that. I know that one of the slogans here, a good one, is to reduce, recycle and reuse. Very good. Three hours we can remember. I also want to suggest three T's and three F's, if I might. The three T's are to trade, transform, and traits of crops. One way that we can overcome the water scarcity is, of course, in virtual trade of water. We need to keep the trading system open because there are drylands that need to import food from places with plentiful water, Argentina being one of them, fortunately. We need to transform dangerous water to safe water, desalination in some places, and changing the uses of water, renewable energy, other technologies that will enable us to use water in a better and safer way. And I mentioned traits of crops. We do need the agronomists. Water is brackish, but also crops can be grown in brackish water, properly selected. If we use advanced agronomic technologies, we also increase effectively the amount of water that is available for us. And I also want us to think about three F's at least, finance, fairness, and funding. Finance is the business model to make the water available. It used to be, of course, true that water was plentiful enough that it was effectively viewed as a free good from nature. With seven and a half billion people, it's no longer a free good. It's becoming quite an expensive good. It still is a good, often though, that has a zero price to it. And therefore, it is a good that is hard to supply. It's a good that is misused because it's often available for free. And therefore, it's a good that's hard to finance when we need utilities to be able to provide safe, timely water for households, for industry, for farms. There needs to be a financial model for that. At the same time, there is a second F that I mentioned, fairness. And with fairness with water, that's life and death. You can't charge poor people for water that they can't afford. It can kill them. And so we need pricing models that allow cost recovery, but also ensure that there is a lifeline for the poorest people that they can stay alive. And so we need pricing structures that ensure viability. And sometimes this hasn't been respected. Water is privatized or water is put on a cash basis. And there are riots right away. But understandably, if people live desperately on the need for access and they can't afford it in the new business model. So the business model has to reflect reality, both on financing and on social justice. And there are many ways to do this. One is the famous lifeline tariff. That everybody gets the first number of leaders for free per month. But then beyond that, especially for industrial use or larger use, you pay on the margin. And that kind of two-part tariff or lifeline tariff is much easier to implement now than in the past because we can have remote sensing, metering, many different options that were not available even a few years ago. And the third I mentioned is funding. We need global funding from the rich countries to the poor countries, as the sub-secretary said. This is a matter of basic social justice and solidarity, especially its justice taking into account that the rich world caused so many of the harms of the poor world. And whenever there are heat waves now or hurricanes or rising sea levels, there is a real chance that that is anthropogenic, that that came from the actions of rich countries but are visited upon the poor. So it's a matter of basic justice, not just fairness but compensation for damages. And the rich world owes it to the poor world. Now I'm coming from a country, not from a government, I'm coming from a country whose government is trying to deny all of this right now. And understand this is because the United States is caught in a web of corruption. Our politicians are not as stupid as they sound. They are more corrupt than you realize. They are on the pay of big oil companies. They're on the pay of coal companies. And so they say things that no grownup should say. And no child would say because children are already properly educated compared to what these congressmen and senators and a president say. But understand it for what it is. It is political corruption. Therefore, it can be fought. And we are fighting it every day. And we are calling out people like David and Charles Koch of Koch Industries, who own refineries and pipelines. So they just want the old economy to continue. And they pay the money to the Congress. So the congressmen say these ridiculous, not ridiculous, these dangerous lies. But we will fight this. And I want to predict today the US will not leave the Paris climate agreement. That's Trump talking to his financial backers. But he can't leave till 2020, and we're going to fight it every day between now and 2020 so it doesn't happen. And the other 192 countries in the world have said, we're staying in this agreement. And so count on us, even the United States, to be back in solidarity with the rest of the world. Because that's how the American people feel, even if a few billionaires are trying to do something different. Finally, let me say, please identify for us solutions in the difficult crisis zones of the world. North Africa, and the Middle East, and the Sahel. All dry zones that are drying. What is their water solution? What should be done? What is the best engineering? How much should be done through trade, of food? How much through desalination? How much through improved water practices? What should be done in the Indo-Gangetic Plains, where the water table is dropping precipitously in the Punjab and Haryana in Delhi? There aren't many more years before you reach the brackish levels of water, before it's over with this rate of depletion. What should be done? This is a bread basket, or it supports the lives of hundreds of millions of people. But there's no clear answer available right now. What about North China, which is drying, again, with hundreds of millions of people? What are the best approaches? And I'll ask for South America, for Argentina and the rest of this region. The world will depend on this region as a real bread basket. We heard how Argentina helps to feed more than 400 million people around the world. How to ensure that Argentina's great agricultural productivity is sustainable, that the food production is being carried out in a way for the long term. And that we can look to Argentina as absolutely a bulwark and a reliable supplier of food stuffs for the world, so that we can have that reliability and dependability of international trade. These are challenges that you are the experts to solve. This is the purpose of Lodato Si and the sustainable development goals to give the call to action, to give you the moral support, to give the financing for the solutions when the technical solutions are identified. Let me end as I began thanking Argentina for hosting this meeting, and also to thank Argentina for being president of the G20 in the coming year. This is a very, very important opportunity and responsibility. It's a great opportunity to showcase this wonderful country. It's a great responsibility. The G20 has around three quarters of the world's population and more than 80 percent of the world's economic output, and the vast amount of the world's greenhouse gas emissions as well. This is a tremendous responsibility. It comes once every 20 years that Argentina has the presidency. The world leaders will be coming to this country next year. Leading think tanks will be coming to this country. Finance ministers, foreign ministers, business leaders from around the world will be coming to this country. I know, especially with the inspiration of Pope Francis, that the government will lead. It will lead on the sustainable development goals, and it will lead by example. Thank you very much.